MARIA EDGEWORTH
By KATHARINE WEST
ON May 22nd, 1849, Maria Edgeworth died at the age of eighty-two in the arms of her third stepmother, who was a year younger and lived to write her life. Not that Miss Edgeworth's life was especially, eventful. It is true that she travelled and met many of her distinguished contemporaries. But the greater part of her life was spent immersed in a family, and filled with work In the house and at her desk. Though she had no children of her own, her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, married four times and had twenty children. Maria, as the eldest, had to act as mother during the brief marital interregnums, and- provide continuity and cohesion for the several families. Above all, she had to educate them according to her father's theories.
Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1814) was a remarkable man— an inventor whose mind teemed with telegraphs and one-wheeled chaises, the disciple of Rousseau, the friend of Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin and Thomas Day, the benevolent despot of his Irish estate at Edgeworthstown, a tyrannical yet lively paterfamilias. From Rousseau and Day (the author of Sandford and Merton) he Imbibed educational doctrines which he ruthlessly carried out on his children. And if some of these children went to the bad or died, the supply was kept up by his marriages with four beautiful, intelli- gent and submissive young women. His earliest attempts were not successful. The eldest son, who was actually introduced to Rousseau in Switzerland, afterwards ran away to sea. Maria herself suffered more from physical than psychological experiments. She was sent as a child to a London school, where they 'tried to increase her diminutive stature by hanging her by her neck from a beam ; and when she had trouble with her eyes she was dosed at dawn with nauseous tar-water by the great Thomas Day in person.
By the time the children of Mr. Edgeworth's second and third wives (Honors and Elizabeth Sneyd) were growing up, Maria was a young woman. Fortunately, she was a child-lover, who would lie on the floor and let babies crawl all over her. In the constantly replenished nursery she inculcated right principles (i.e., her father's) by means of stories, which were first written on a slate, and ran the gauntlet of schoolroom criticism. Only when they had passed this test were they set down on paper (amid the hubbub of the Living-room) and published for the benefit of other children. Thus Frank, Rosamond, The Parent's Assistant and the rest came into the world. These stories gave delight in nurseries and schoolrooms throughout the nineteenth century, and are still eminently readable today. One cannot help wondering, however, if -they might not have been even better but for the influence of Mr. Edgeworth. For he was a Utilitarian and a Rationalist, who believed that reason is the master of the universe, usefulness the sole criterion of value, and man (exemplified in Richard Lovell Edgeworth) the measure of all things.
Had he confined these theories to the admirable and curiously modern treatise on Practicab Education (1798) which he wrote in collaboration with Maria, all would have been well. Unhappily he regarded the stories, too, as propaganda pamphlets. Thanks to his influence they are uncompromisingly practical. Only social virtues are extolled ; the moral is always secular, and rewards are earned in this world, not the next. Indeed, the unfailing regularity with which such rewards were forthcoming must have caused disillu- sionment in many young readers when they found them less to be counted on in real life.
Like Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens' Hard. Times, Edgeworth idolised facts and deplored the faculty of wonder. He therefore naturally disapproved of fairy stories. Yet the fairy-story element was not entirely eliminated by his daughter. Her tales typically contrasted a good boy with a bad: The good one, by working hard or by inventing such pretty novelties as heather mats, excites the interest of a fairy-godmother in the shape of some benevolent spin- ster or rich old gentleman. His fortune is made, and he lives happily ever after. Whereas the bad boy idles, cheats or gambles his way to a disagreeable end. It must be understood, however, that the children were not born good or. bad ; they had merely been brought up well or foolishly. For it was an axiom with the Edge- worths that nature counted for little, while nurture was all- important.
Although Miss Edgeworth's contrasts of sense and sensibility may have bred complacency and starved the imagination, her children's stories compare favourably with those of her contemporaries in many ways. Her secular view of life, for instance, saved her from the cloying morass of piety. She was, moreover, cheerful. Death- beds are rare in her stories; and when parents had to die to provide a full complement of self-reliant orphans, they died briskly and astringently. She was also an early exponent of kindness to animals—a creed which she shared with Thomas Day and the Misses Anne and Jane Taylor.
Towards children, too, Maria Edgeworth was unusually merciful. In the stories of that time small nursery faults were normally followed by appalling retribution. Little girls who lighted matches were burned to death, and the theft of a penny led inevitably to the gallows. Every children's tale was a cautionary tale. It may be claimed, of course, that such horrors gave the average child exactly what he wanted, and there is some truth in this. But even so is it moral to pander to-childish lust for blood ? Moreover, many children, even the most bloodthirsty, must have been shaken by the bland assumption that these disasters might any day befall themselves. After so many dreadful warnings it must have been reassuring to learn from kind Mrs. Edgeworth that disobedience was sometimes punished only by a thorn in the finger or a drop of sealing-wax on the hand.
The Parent's Assistant (ifloo) contained, despite its forbidding title, the mellowest of Miss Edgeworth's children's stories. Poetry is forever peeping out between the precepts. In Simple Susan, for instance, the gathering of children to weave their May Day garlands has the idyllic quality of Blake's Echoing Green. Sir Walter Scott confessed that he could not put the story down without a tear. But Miss Edgeworth did not only write for children, nor were tears the only tribute paid her by Scott. He stated that his own stories were influenced by Castle Rackrent and her other tales of Irish life, and he was not the only author to admit as much. It is strange to think that we owe Fathers and Children and A House of Gentle- folk to the inspiration of Maria Edgeworth. Yet Ivan Turgenieff heard them read aloud as a boy, and wrote years later : "It is possible, nay probable, that if Maria Edgeworth had not written about the poor Irish and the squire and squiress, it would not have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the classes parallel to them in Russia."
She also wrote some novels of high society, of which Belinda (18m) is at once the best and the best known. Jane Austen thought highly of this exuberant, witty, absurd conglomeration of fashionable life and rational principles. Yet Maria Edgeworth and her father no doubt saw it as just a moral tale for adults—a post-graduate course in Practical Education. Thus Maria Edgeworth found an outlet for her affections in a crowded home, and for her intellectual energy in three separate streams of writing. She exercised a steady, lively influence during her life and for years afterwards. Even today. she can teach us much about letting children bring themselves up sensibly. It is fitting, therefore, that we should remember her this year, a century after her life and vigour simultaneously ended.
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