Thady’s Grey Goose Quill: Historiography and Literacy in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent

Most postcolonial scholarship on Castle Rackrent (1800) has addressed the question of Thady Quirk as colonial subject and as an unreliable narrator. However, an intriguing conundrum regarding Thady presents itself to the reader in the opening pages of Edgeworth’s novel. The narrator introduced to the reader is described as an “illiterate old steward”¹ of Irish stock, who “tells the history of the Rackrent family” (CR 4). In the course of his narrative, the “illiterate old steward” will engage in numerous acts of reading and writing, while offering a history that recounts the overthrow of his Anglo-Irish masters, not through armed rebellion, but through skills of literacy that his son Jason exercised as accountant, being “as good a clerk as any in the county” (CR 22).

What imperial prejudice was Edgeworth ironically foregrounding in this stigmatizing of the native historian and his “history” by insinuating that both were products of an oral culture? And what, as a consequence, are its implications for the workings of plot and reader relations in Castle Rackrent? In her Preface, Edgeworth assumes the persona of an editor laboring over Thady’s manuscript. By configuring her Irish steward narrator as illiterate, while representing his story as “written,” she initiates a drama of illegibility in regard to Irishness. As a result, the text enacts contemporary, vexatious Anglo-Irish reader relations with Irish history. Castle Rackrent may be read as a narrative that explores the ironies incumbent upon what, as Joseph Lennon notes in Irish Orientalism, was a developing perception that “Irish historiography and pseudo-history had been pegged in England as an unreliable quagmire of dubious books.”² What readerly discomposure, then, does Edgeworth “plot” through a narrative that proceeds to undermine naive constructions of a colonized people “written off” by official Imperial history as culturally backward and pre-literate?

Azade Seyhan has noted in Representation and Its Discontents (1992) that the French Revolution, with its dramatic ruptures between past and present, made questions of “totality,” “continuity,” and “representation,” deeply uncertain for the historian. In this sense, historiography was already in crisis after 1795.³ Edgeworth, masquerading as Editor, alerts the reader to a similar suspicion of the historical enterprise, but chooses to situate it in the context of prejudices incipient to an oral-literate binary that associated orality with the primitive, the fanciful, and the naive, and simultaneously privileged literacy as aligned with rationality and scientific objectivity. The “editorial” Preface directly problematizes this binary:

Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labours! The heroes of history are so decked out by the fine fancy of the professed historian; they talk in such measured prose. . . . Besides there is much uncertainty even in authenticated ancient or modern histories . . .

(CR 1)

By constructing themselves as representatives of a literate culture, colonizers could author so-called definitive histories in order to discredit extant native histories as unreliable narratives of unlettered colonized subjects, devoid of intellectual sophistication. However, if the production of history as factual narrative is contingent upon literacy skills, then such skills, for the Rackrent Editor, are antithetically associated with artifice and embellishment. Edgeworth’s editor offers this caveat: “those who are used to literary manufacture know how much is often sacrificed to the rounding of a period or the pointing of an antithesis” (CR 3). This logic leads inevitably to the editorial verdict that the “plain unvarnished tale” is “preferable to the most highly ornamented narrative” (CR 2).

If the editorial preface, from the outset, places the relationship between literariness and veracity under pressure, it also generates anxiety and disequilibrium for what Wolfgang Iser terms the implied reader.⁴ Edgeworth’s implied literate English or Anglo-Irish reader is cheated out of the classic historical text he believed he was promised. Furthermore, Edgeworth chooses to represent Thady’s text as “untranslatable”:

For the information of the ignorant English reader a few notes have been subjoined by the editor, and he had it once in contemplation to translate the language of Thady into plain...