The Absentee: Rediscovering Maria Edgeworth. . .

I recently read another 19^th century novel in my life-long, completely unreasonable, endeavor to read all the novels of the first half of the century. There is something interesting, I suppose, about having an unattainable goal. This novel was The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth. The Absentee was written in the first decade of the 1800s and was first published in Edgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life in 1809. Though she is little known today outside of those with a particular interest in 19^th century literature, Edgeworth wrote around 15 novels throughout her career, as well as interesting educational and political works.

Maria Edgeworth was a remarkable woman from a remarkable family. Maria’s father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was a brilliant inventor who worked with some of the great scientific minds of the era including James Watt and Erasmus Darwin. Maria was sister in law to the famous physician Dr. Thomas Beddoes, and her brothers included engineer William Edgeworth and Michael Pakenham Edgeworth the botanist. One of her nephews became a well-known economist, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, and one of her nieces married the astronomer Thomas Romney Robinson. All in all, not bad family credentials.

One of the difficulties in reading or studying Maria Edgeworth’s work is the fact that her father was actively involved in most of her literary efforts and it is therefore difficult to tell where his work ends and hers begins. And since this authorial problem is more or less intractable, as far as I can tell, when you look at Maria’s entire oeuvre you have to assume to some degree that many of the ideas expressed there are joint efforts.

Edgeworth was, arguably, the most successful woman writer in England up until that time, and her works are indicative of the transition from pre-modern to modern novels. Though she wrote a number of stories before the 19^th century began, her first novel was published in the year 1800 and she is therefore, in a sense, the first important British woman novelist of the century. When you read Edgeworth’s works you can distinctly see the modern novel evolving. Maria’s predecessors in Briton, like Oliver Goldsmith, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe, for example, were inheritors of traditional story-telling, and as such their novels are often narratives – that is to say a story distinctly told by a narrator. Large parts of most early novels are told directly through narration; the writer describes events and actions, sometimes over long periods, and then breaks in with dramatic scenes. Through the efforts of novelists like Fanny Burney and Samuel Richardson, this tradition began to change and dramatic scenes began to play a bigger role. Over time, more of the novel’s actions were understood through the interactions between the characters. One of the problems with novels that were predominantly narration is the tendency for them to become didactic or moral tales. On the other hand, dramatic novels allow the reader to decide for herself what the characters are thinking or what actions might be good or bad. Now, Maria Edgeworth’s novel exist squarely between these two traditions, she used dramatic scenes very effectively but still fell back on and relied on narration a great deal. It was in the generation after Edgeworth, with writers like Jane Austin, that we really see the full formation of the modern novel.

Edgeworth’s novel The Absentee is an excellent example of this problem. The dramatic scenes are very effective and quite modern, but Edgeworth regresses into narration for long periods of the story’s action and during these periods she overstates the clear political motivation of her story.

The Absentee is essentially about a family of the Irish landed gentry that has left their homeland to take up fashionable residence in the English capital. As absentee landlords they have put their estates in the hands of an unscrupulous agent whose greed has left the estates and their tenants in decline and poverty. As a result of being so distant from the source of their income, the family has become unaware of how neglected their properties have become, and they have overspent, and gone heavily into debt. Through the efforts of their son who is also inheriting a large estate and title, they see the error of their ways and eventually return to their lands and commit once again to be responsible landlords working in the interest of their own property, the lives of their tenants, as well as for the nation of Ireland. Through this moral/political tale Edgeworth weaves a love story between the son and a cousin, and the story climaxes in typical 19^th century fashion when it is discovered that the cousin is not, in fact, a blood relation and is heir to her own great fortune, thus leaving the path free for the lovers to wed.

The historical ground of this story was a subject with which Edgeworth had personal knowledge. Maria was born in England and for the first sixteen years of her life, her father was an absentee landlord from their family estates in Edgeworthtown in County Longford. Around the time that Maria finished with her formal education, her father took his large family back to Ireland and, with the help of Maria, who was a very capable and resourceful young woman, he returned the estates to prosperity, improving the estate-house, reclaiming marsh land with the aid his own moveable railroad (one of the very first functioning railways ever built), and returning the arable land to appropriate usage. Besides being an ingenious inventor, Richard Edgeworth was also a very liberally minded man who, for the era in which he lived, went to great lengths to improve the lives of his tenants, improving their homes and supporting the education of their children. Richard Edgeworth was also an avid supporter of religious freedom, gaining a great deal of loyalty from his various catholic tenants who were still suffering under the yolk of English prosecution. And though it was still be over a hundred years until Ireland gained its independence from England, Edgeworth took an active part in the first steps toward the struggle for Irish freedom.

Again, it is unclear the extent to which the political/social message of Maria Edgeworth’s novel was the result of her own work or the result of her father’s support and, some might say, interference in the literary process. Either way, at times The Absentee is sometimes heavy-handed with overt statements about the evils of absenteeism, such as when Lord Colambre, the liberal and inquisitive son of the story, observes upon his visit to the family estates “what I have just seen is the picture only of that to which an Irish estate and Irish tenantry may be degraded in the absence of those whose duty and interest it is to reside in Ireland, to uphold justice by example and authority; but who, neglecting this duty, commit power to bad hands and bad hearts – abandon their tenantry to oppression and their property to ruin.”

This didacticism by no means ruined the novel for me, and when I read Maria Edgeworth I am continually amazed that while Jane Austin is nearly a household name, the name Edgeworth languishes even among highly literate, novel-reading people. It is, in part, the political messaging of Edgeworth’s novels that has subjected them to relative obscurity. Besides the fact that modern readers have, across the board, eschewed any form of overt didacticism in ‘literature,’ they are not generally fond of too much political messaging in the books they read. It is by no means surprising that writers like Austin and the Bronte sisters continue to be so popular while writers like Edgeworth, Gaskell, Martineau, Eliot, and others languish. Even with the contemporary feminist effort to reestablish the work and reputations of women writers, the vast majority of readers continue to gravitate toward writers who are overtly romantic and commercial in the most tedious sense that those words convey. However, though Edgeworth’s novels are not as ‘modern-sounding’ as Austin’s, they are expertly written, intensely interesting, and not without their own Romantic charm.

My Promise to Read Pickwick Papers. . . .

During my father’s last year of life we discussed many things. Of course, art and literature were always high on the list of our favorite topics, and we returned again and again to the issues of paintings and books. Roy (my father) was perhaps the most widely read person I ever knew. He read every genre of fiction and non-fiction and relished in every kind of literature. Among Roy’s favourite authors was, not surprisingly, Charles Dickens. I believe that he felt a kinship to Dickens because of that writer’s early experiences of English poverty and his honest portrayal of working-class characters. Roy was particularly fond of David Copperfield because he identified with the autobiographical story in which Copperfield was gradually raised out of poverty to relative comfort but never lost his sense of identity and his connection to ‘regular’ people.

The one Dickens novel that Roy could never seem to get on with was Pickwick Papers. This was Dickens first novel and though it is still masterful in many ways, it certainly lacks some of the polish of his most renowned works. Many modern readers don’t realize that Dickens’ major novels, from Pickwick Papers onward, appeared first in the form of serials, chapters being regularly published in a magazine. The serial form of the novel has advantages and disadvantages for the author. On the one hand, the author of a serial novel is able to adapt his or her story and characters as s/he goes according to feedback received from readers. On the other hand, the author is unable to go back to an earlier chapter and change events or characters in order to create a better story. Thus for most serial authors in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, planning was essential, one had to have the basic story worked out ahead of time so that there was no chance of writing yourself into a corner, so to speak. It is fairly clear when you read Pickwick Papers and compare it to one of Dickens’ later and more effective novels, he didn’t work out a complex storyline in advance. Instead, Pickwick Papers reads a bit like Don Quixote, a series of events connected by character but not by a plot per se. And Pickwick Papers also lacks the kind of unifying theme and remarkable humor that a great novel like Don Quixote has. However, the prose of Dickens’ first novel cannot, generally speaking, be faulted. Even in his twenties, Dickens had already perfected his skills as a constructor of effective syntax and flowing prose. And one can, in Pickwick Papers, already observe the skill of characterization that would become the hallmark of Dickens novels. However, in terms of plot and depth of character interest, Pickwick Papers is a youthful work when we compare it to Dickens’ later novels. I am sure like many artists, in his later years Dickens probably looked back on his early work and was struck by how many things he could have done differently and more effectively.

But despite these kinds of criticisms (and they are by no means controversial), Pickwick Papers is still an enjoyable read, and even though it was Dickens’ first major work, it still stands above many of his contemporaries in its light-hearted, humorous style and endearing humanity of its characterizations. If you take a list of Dickens contemporaries who are still widely read and well-known like Austin, Gaskell, Eliot, Ainsworth, the Bronte sisters, Thackeray, etc, Dickens stands out as unique because of his cast of colorful characters and the humorous ways in which they seem to come alive.

Before Roy passed away we spoke of Pickwick Papers while I was reading to him from David Copperfield. He regretted never having read Dickens’ first novel and I idly promised him that I would read it at some point. Having now fulfilled that promise, I think I know why Roy was never able to get through Pickwick Papers. I believe now that it was the rather stuffy, formal, slightly righteous attitude of the primary character that put Roy off. Many of Dickens’ title characters or primary characters, from Nicholas Nickleby to Barnaby Rudge to Pip in Great Expectations, are working-class or, at the very least, flawed and human in their nature. Samuel Pickwick, on the other hand is a wealthy and rather stuffy character who also lacks the dynamic narrative nature of most of Dickens’ other main characters. Pickwick is more of a caricature than a character and it was, I think, this aspect of the novel that prevented my father from reading and enjoying the novel.

But to be honest, my dad had something of a chip on his shoulder about being working-class and he despised the middle and upper-classes of British society. Though I understand my father’s feelings in this regard, I was not raised in England and was not forced to endure derision from people who thought that they were, simply by luck of birth, superior to me. Due to my own politics and experience, I still find many of the sensibilities of the English middle and upper-classes nauseating and offensive, but it was never a personal thing for me like it was for my dad. So I think I know where Roy was coming from when he failed to enjoy Pickwick Papers, but I could look past Samuel Pickwick’s formality in a way that he probably couldn’t.

Because it was his first novel, Pickwick Papers will always enjoy a unique status in the Dickens oeuvre. And it is obviously an important 19^th century work of English literature. More importantly, the flaws of the novel only really come to light when you compare it to Dickens’ later novels. Regardless of the literary issues (or in my father’s case personal issues) I encourage people to take some time to read it, for it still offers hours of enjoyment.