Time of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood

That This Here Box Be in the Natur of a Trap: Maria Edgeworth’s Pedagogical Gardens, Ireland, and the Education of the Poor

andrew j. smyth • That This Here Box Be in the Natur of a Trap Maria Edgeworth’s Pedagogical Gardens, Ireland, and the Education of the Poor “Aye,” said Rosamond; “and would it not be very unjust indeed, that we should work for them all day.” “And, perhaps, at last,” continued Orlando, “if we did not eat animals, they might eat us.” (Maria Edgeworth, “The Rabbit” 158) The breakfast conversation of young Rosamond and her two brothers, Orlando and Godfrey, in this typically Edgeworthian educational setting— where the whole house is a site of learning through experience and inquiry (Narain 58)—sounds like either an animal rights debate gone awry, a grisly B-grade sci-fi movie, or, given that the prompt for this discourse is a rabbit that has been chomping on Rosamond’s laburnum saplings, a Monty Python sketch. Within the tale, “The Rabbit,” in Maria Edgeworth’s Early Lessons (1801), the conversation is indeed about animal rights and the ethics of eating meat; particularly, whether the children should kill the rabbit that has invaded Rosamond’s garden or give up meat and allow rabbits and all kinds of animals to feed on the human-cultivated gardens. Edgeworth simultaneously expands and complicates the debate with embedded metadiscourses on practical education (following the success of her and her father’s pedagogical tract of the same name) and the education of the poor, the subject of an unfinished essay she drafted around 1800. The That This Here Box Be in the Natur of a Trap 41 rabbit—both a signifier of contrived naturalistic innocence and an agricultural pest that invades and disrupts pleasurable production, in this case, Rosamond’s personal pedagogical garden—evokes the questions of how best to care for and educate the poor and what dangers to the status quo come with educating the working class. In Practical Education as well as in a number of her children’s stories, Maria Edgeworth promotes gardening for children, just as her father had set aside separate plots in Edgeworthstown for his children and tenants to cultivate (Colvin and Nelson 58–59; Butler, “Irish” 162). The distribution of land for familial educational purposes , though, raises troubling questions about the situation of the Edgeworths in Ireland after the Act of Union. The discourse on the rabbits in the children’s personal gardens reveals the uneasiness of landowners like the Edgeworths in Co. Longford, Ireland , and others like them throughout the newly United Kingdom, about the implications of educating the poor and dispossessed and allowing them to share in the carefully cultivated gardens of their privilege. Meredith Cary highlights this anxiety in Edgeworth’s later Anglo-Irish texts—The Absentee, Ennui, and Ormond—which attempt to lay out a case for both conciliation and continued rule by families such as the Edgeworths (36–37). By numerous accounts, though, the Edgeworths were some of the most benevolent and empowering landlords in Ireland at the turn of the 19th century. As Mitzi Myers notes, during the 1798 rebellion, the Edgeworths and their property were spared twice, thanks to their good relations with their Irish tenants (“Child’s Play” 29). Following the end of the rebellion and the subsequent Act of Union, Richard Lovell Edgeworth was deeply involved in education reform in Ireland, both at the local level, setting up a school for the poor in Edgeworthstown in 1816, and at the national level with his service on the Select Committee on the Education of the Poor and the Commission of Inquiry on Irish Education in 1806 (Taylor 44–48). Still, the character of Rosamond, who is based upon Maria herself (Butler, Maria 160, 248) and who undergoes a “female bildungsroman” in a range of stories Edgeworth published between 1796 and 1821 (Myers, “Socializing ” 52), reveals in “The Rabbit” an anxiety about the distinction between human and animal that mirrors the divide between the formerly ascendant class of Anglo-Irish to which the Edgeworths belong and the Irish who are now legally copartners in the Union. 42 Andrew J. Smyth Competition between humans and animals stirs strong feelings in children and adults. Harriet Ritvo describes how children’s natural history books in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries frequently included man-eating animals, far more so than was justified by the habits of the animals themselves. Since study of zoology was also meant to reinforce human social structures, “then man-eating offered . . . a graphic...