2023 read #142: Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth.

Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale, Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires Before the Year 1782 by Maria Edgeworth

90 pages

Published 1800

Read from November 30 to December 1

Rating: 2 out of 5

I read this for one reason: I hadn’t yet read anything from the decade of the 1800s, and this sounded like the least uninteresting book I could find from those years. Plus, it’s short. Maybe someday I’ll take the time to read Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the years 1799–1804, but not today.

Rackrent is, for the most part, a delightfully snarky little satire of English colonialism in Ireland, ironically chronicling four heirs of the Rackrent estate, all of them some flavor of predatory English lord on occupied soil: “the drunken Sir Patrick, the litigious Sir Murtagh, the fighting Sir Kit, and the slovenly Sir Condy….” The satire is in a vein that should be familiar to anyone who’s read Early Modern literature:

However, my lady was very charitable in her own way. She had a charity school for poor children, where they were taught to read and write gratis, and where they were kept well to spinning gratis for my lady in return….

Beneath the slyly ingratiating surface, it’s all deliciously pointed.

Someone in the publishing process, however — quite possibly Maria Edgeworth’s father — took it upon themselves to bootlick tender English feelings in an introduction, insisting that English abuses of Ireland spontaneously ceased sometime around 1782, and that everybody is happy and congenial now and that the Irish simply adore their English overlords:

The Editor hopes his readers will observe that these are “tales of other times”: that the manners depicted in the following pages are not those of the present age: the race of the Rackrents has long since been extinct in Ireland; and… are characters which could no more be met with at present in Ireland, than Squire Western or Parson Trulliber in England. There is a time, when individuals can bear to be rallied for their past follies and absurdities, after they have acquired new habits, and a new consciousness. Nations as well as individuals gradually lose attachment to their identity, and the present generation is amused rather than offended by the ridicule that is thrown upon its ancestors.

Endnotes, also appended by this editor, made every effort to satirize the Irish at large for their “laziness,” their funereal lamentations, their litigiousness, drunkenness, not paying their rent on time, and so on. Unsurprising, given the overwhelming fragility of the colonialist ego, which we can observe for ourselves in our own era.

And, sadly, this editor wasn’t Rackrent’s sole letdown. There’s a plotline in which the wastrel Sir Kit marries Jessica, a Jewish heiress, which detours the narrative into some shitty of-the-era antisemitism.