This review of Lord Dudley's must have come out after a visit from the
Edgeworth family to London in 1813, which seems to have been a most
brilliant and amusing campaign. 'I know the homage that was paid you,'
wrote Mrs. Barbauld, speaking of the event, 'and I exulted in it for
your sake and for my sex's sake.' Miss Edgeworth was at the height of
her popularity, in good spirits and good health. Mr. Edgeworth was
seventy, but he looked years younger, and was still in undiminished
health and vigour. The party was welcomed, fêted, sought after
everywhere. Except that they miss seeing Madame d'Arblay and leave
London before the arrival of Madame de Staël, they seem to have come in
for everything that was brilliant, fashionable, and entertaining. They
breakfast with poets, they sup with marquises, they call upon duchesses
and scientific men. Maria's old friend the Duchess of Wellington is not
less her friend than she was in County Longford. Every one likes them
and comes knocking at their lodging-house door, while Maria upstairs is
writing a letter, standing at a chest of drawers. 'Miss Edgeworth is
delightful,' says Tom Moore, 'not from display, but from repose and
unaffectedness, the least pretending person.' Even Lord Byron writes
warmly of the authoress whose company is so grateful, and who goes her
simple, pleasant way cheerful and bringing kind cheer, and making
friends with the children as well as with the elders. Many of these
children in their lives fully justified her interest, children whom we
in turn have known and looked up to as distinguished greyheaded men.
Some one asked Miss Edgeworth how she came to understand children as she
did, what charm she used to win them. 'I don't know,' she said kindly;
'I lie down and let them crawl over me.' She was greatly pleased on one
occasion when at a crowded party a little girl suddenly started forth,
looked at her hard, and said, 'I like simple Susan best,' and rushed
away overwhelmed at her own audacity. The same lady who was present on
this occasion asked her a question which we must all be grateful to have
solved for us--how it happened that the respective places of Laura and
Rosamond came to be transposed in 'Patronage,' Laura having been the
wiser elder sister in the 'Purple Jar,' and appearing suddenly as the
younger in the novel. Miss Edgeworth laughed and said that Laura had
been so preternaturally wise and thoughtful as a child, she could never
have kept her up to the mark, and so she thought it best to change the
character altogether.
During one of her visits to London Miss Edgeworth went to dine at the
house of Mr. Marshall; and his daughter, Lady Monteagle, tells a little
story which gives an impression, and a kind one, of the celebrated
guest. Everything had been prepared in her honour, the lights lighted,
the viands were cooked. Dinner was announced, and some important person
was brought forward to hand Miss Edgeworth down, when it was discovered
that she had vanished. For a moment the company and the dinner were all
at a standstill. She was a small person, but diligent search was made.
Miss Edgeworth had last been seen with the children of the house, and
she was eventually found in the back kitchen, escorted by the said
children, who, having confided their private affairs to her sympathetic
ear, had finally invited her to come with them and see some rabbits
which they were rearing down below. A lady who used to live at Clifton
as a little girl, and to be sometimes prescribed for by Dr. King, was
once brought up as a child to Miss Edgeworth, and she told me how very
much puzzled she felt when the bright old lady, taking her by the
hand, said, 'Well, my dear, how do you do, and how is my excellent
brother-in-law?' One can imagine what a vague sort of being an
'excellent brother-in-law' would seem to a very young child.
We read in Miss Edgeworth's memoir of her father that Mr. Edgeworth
recovered from his serious illness in 1814 to enjoy a few more years of
life among his friends, his children, and his experiments. His good
humour and good spirits were undiminished, and he used to quote an old
friend's praise of 'the privileges and convenience of old age.' He was
past seventy, but he seems to have continued his own education to the
end of life. 'Without affecting to be young, he exerted himself to
prevent any of his faculties from sinking into the indolent state which
portends their decay,' and his daughter says that he went on learning to
the last, correcting his faults and practising his memory by various
devices, so that it even improved with age.
In one of his last letters to Mrs. Beaufort, his wife's mother, he
speaks with no little paternal pleasure of his home and his children:
'Such excellent principles, such just views of human life and manners,
such cultivated understandings, such charming tempers make a little
Paradise about me;' while with regard to his daughter's works he adds
concerning the book which was about to appear, 'If Maria's tales fail
with the public, you will hear of my hanging myself.'
Mr. Edgeworth died in the summer of 1817, at home, surrounded by his
family, grateful, as he says, to Providence for allowing his body to
perish before his mind.
During the melancholy months which succeeded her father's death
Maria hardly wrote any letters; her sight was in a most alarming
state. The tears, she said, felt in her eyes like the cutting of a
knife. She had overworked them all the previous winter, sitting up
at night and struggling with her grief as she wrote 'Ormond.' She
was now unable to use them without pain.... Edgeworthtown now
belonged to Lovell, the eldest surviving brother, but he wished it
to continue the home of the family. Maria set to work to complete
her father's memoirs and to fulfil his last wish.
It was not without great hesitation and anxiety that she determined to
finish writing her father's Life. There is a touching appeal in a letter
to her aunt Ruxton. 'I felt the happiness of my life was at stake.
Even if all the rest of the world had praised it and you had been
dissatisfied, how miserable should I have been!' And there is another
sentence written at Bowood, very sad and full of remembrance: 'I feel as
if I had lived a hundred years and was left alive after everybody else.'
The book came out, and many things were said about it, not all praise.
The 'Quarterly' was so spiteful and intolerant that it seemed almost
personal in its violence. It certainly would have been a great loss to
the world had this curious and interesting memoir never been published,
but at the time the absence of certain phrases and expressions of
opinions which Mr. Edgeworth had never specially professed seemed
greatly to offend the reviewers.
The worst of these attacks Miss Edgeworth never read, and the task
finished, the sad months over, the poor eyes recovered, she crossed to
England.