The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in 19th-Century Britain and Ireland (review)

Sara L. Maurer's examination of how Victorians perceived property, how their perceptions shifted during the nineteenth century, and how they came to clarify their thoughts about property through Ireland's colonization, unfolds in a complex series of investigations into the works of such Anglo-Irish and British writers as Maria Edgeworth, George Moore, Anthony Trollope, and John Stuart Mill. In the book's five chapters, Maurer focuses on the way these authors used the experience of dispossession from property—specifically, Irish dispossession from land--to reevaluate their own views on the role of the state with regard to individual property. Furthermore, Maurer reveals how these authors employ the emotions surrounding dispossession to create a unifying force for British sentiments on property. For British subjects sympathetic to the landed Anglo-Irish, many of whom lost their representative rights through the Act of Union, Irish dispossession provided a model where they could analyze, for better or worse, state interference in private property. Maurer's introduction builds on the work of previous writers in colonial studies, particularly Edward Said and Uday Singh Mehta, with the notion of "native attachment" to land; however, Maurer breaks new ground by considering the manner in which Anglo-Irish and British authors utilized the backdrop of Irish claims of native attachment to land as a model for how the British themselves hoped to continue honoring individual property rights. As a result, their writing on Irish dispossession ultimately comes across as more narcissistic than altruistic.

The first chapter explores the work of Maria Edgeworth, an author whose notions of property seem at first clouded by a complicated relationship with her father—to whom she gave credit for all her literary success. Maurer's evidence, which digresses from Edgeworth to further explain Edmund Burke's interpretation of property rights, reveals that Edgeworth held views similar to Burke, understanding property as a "tradition evolved from immemorial time." Yet Maurer's inquiry primarily reflects Edgeworth's "sympathy" with the "colonizer" as she deploys dispossession as a narrative device to illustrate how both the Irish and Anglo-Irish experience dispossession from their property in Ireland and, thus, are more united on the issue than divided. In fact, Maurer convincingly argues that, for Edgeworth, "native attachment" becomes so tangled between Irish Catholics and Anglo-Irish Protestants that there is no definitive way to untangle any true strand of ownership in Ireland. Edgeworth, who repeatedly views property through the lens of inheritance, considers tension only in the fact that the property is inherited to more than one ancestral line.

Although the answer to this inheritance conundrum—as predictable as plum pudding in Victorian fiction—occurs in a marriage plot, Edgeworth shies away from intracultural union in her fiction as the answer to a conflicting property claim. Instead, Maurer's study of Ennui (1809) effectively demonstrates how Edgeworth jumbles the notion of original ownership through a sensational plot where Irish and Anglo-Irish infants are switched at birth. After the characters mature, both men alternate in ownership of the inherited property, proving to be at times incompetent landowners, suffering simultaneous disasters, and hopelessly confusing the issue of inheritance until it becomes totally irrelevant. In her analysis of Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1801) and Ormond (1817), Maurer goes on to discuss Edgeworth's view that property has no "absolute" owner, thus making it more secure in that it cannot be given up. For Edgeworth, the issue of dispossession can only be resolved by a shared sense of dispossession between Anglo-Irish and Irish, a collective feeling of loss that unites and consequently disintegrates the notion that any single party has the advantage on property claims. Edgeworth's views obviously became harder to maintain as British involvement in Ireland intensified in the nineteenth century, and Maurer illustrates how Edgeworth's twisted knots of property ownership too frequently become nooses for political reality.

In her study of John Stuart Mill...