Maria Edgeworth's Writing Classes

Maria Edgeworth's Writing Classes Aileen Douglas I further enjoyed some peculiar advantages:—he kindly wished to give me habits ofbusiness; and for this purpose, allowed me during many years to assist him in copying his letters ofbusiness, and in receiving his rents.1 When the Irish writer Maria Edgeworth wrote these words she was already a celebrated novelist, enjoying considerable financial success and esteemed by peers such as Walter Scott.2 Given these achievements, her obvious appreciation ofthe mundane scribal tasks allotted her by her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, seems incongruous . True, the famous novelist is recalling her "peculiar advantages " in a context that naturally excited expressions of piety: the continuation, after his death in 1817, of her father's Memoirs. Yet, even though Maria Edgeworth had an unusually intense relationship with her father—"the first object and motive of my mind"—and valued everything pertaining to him, her appreciation of the secretarial work Richard Lovell Edgeworth allowed her to do is not simply the result of filial infatuation.3 What advantage could a woman famous for her literary achievements derive from mechanical acts of transcription? In fact, the importance Edgeworth attached to her own role as copyist is entirely consistent with her fiction, which rejects the notion that 1 Memoirs ofRichard Lovell Edgeworth begun by himselfand concluded by his daughter Maria Edgeworth , 2 vols (1820; Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1968), 2:15. 2 In the "postscript, which should have been a preface" to Waverley (1815), Scott speaks of his desire to emulate "the admirable Irish portraits drawn by Miss Edgeworth." 3 Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs, 2:iv. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Numbers 3-4, April-July 2002 372EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION "the drudgery of business" is incompatible with literary pursuits, and which insists that "A man of genius ... can become a man of business."4 A notable achievement ofEdgeworth's long and productive career is its keen, inclusive account of a society held together increasingly by writing in its myriad forms: legal, commercial, personal , and literary. In the last decade or so, scholars have begun to perceive the evolution of certain literary genres, and even of literature itself, as troubled responses to the permeation of eighteenthcentury society by writing. Attempts to project the authority of an oral world, and to separate "literature" from writing generally, can alike be seen as contrasting counter-measures to the quickening of the "long revolution" whereby Britain became a literate society.5 Edgeworth, because ofher ideological commitment to a progressive, commercial, enlightened society, not only largely withstood the nostalgic allure ofan oral tradition, but she also resisted the notion that literary works were essentially different from other kinds ofwriting. Edgeworth felt privileged to be her father's copyist because for her the document was the kernel of identity, and access to her father's papers, even his business letters, was a form of intimacy and trust. To this explanation of Edgeworth's own activities as copyist we must add, ifwe are to understand the frequent and highly charged appearances of copyists in her fiction, a preoccupation she and her father shared: the growing literacy of the labouring classes. Not only are all writers, in the first instance, copyists, but it is with the copy that the proliferation ofwriting in society begins. Over the course offour decades, Edgeworth manifests, through the copyists in her fiction, an intelligent, evolving, and in some respects prescient fascination with the social implications of increased literacy. 4 The Novels and Selected Works ofMaria Edgeworth, vol. 6-7, Patronage, ed. Connor Carville and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), 7:91. References are to this edition. 5 The phrase "long revolution" is borrowed from the tide of Raymond Williams's groundbreaking study of cultural change in Britain; The Long Revolution (1961; London: Hogarth Press, 1992). Susan Stewart uses the phrase "distressed genres" to refer to genres such as epic, fable, fairy tale, and ballad which respond to the rapid and mechanical dissemination ofwriting in eighteenth-century society by projecting the authority of an oral world; Crimes of Writing (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 68. In a stimulating study, Clifford Siskin argues...