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Famous Women.
MARIA EDGEWORTH.
_The next volumes in the Famous Women Series will be_:
SARAH AND ANGELINA GRIMKE. By Mrs. Birney.
ANNE BRADSTREET. By Helen Campbell.
_Already published_:
GEORGE ELIOT. By Miss Blind.
EMILY BRONTE. By Miss Robinson.
GEORGE SAND. By Miss Thomas.
MARY LAMB. By Mrs. Gilchrist
MARGARET FULLER. By Julia Ward Howe.
MARIA EDGEWORTH. By Miss Zimmern.
[Illustration: FAMOUS WOMEN]
MARIA EDGEWORTH.
BY
HELEN ZIMMERN.
BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1884.
_Copyright, 1883_, BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.
UNIVERSITY PRESS: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.
PREFACE.
Though many notices of Miss Edgeworth have appeared from time to time,
nothing approaching to a Life of her has been published in this country.
As I have had the good fortune to have access to an unpublished memoir
of her, written by her stepmother, as well as to a large number of her
private letters, I am enabled to place what I hope is at least an
authentic biography before the reader. Besides much kindness received
from the members of Miss Edgeworth's family, I have also to acknowledge
my obligations for help afforded in the preparation of this little book
to Mrs. George Ticknor and Miss Ticknor of Boston, U. S. A., Mrs. Le
Breton, Sir Henry Holland, Bart., the Rev. Canon Holland, the Rev. Dr.
Sadler and Mr. F. Y. Edgeworth.
H. Z.
LONDON, August, 1883.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 9
CHAPTER II.
EARLY YEARS 17
CHAPTER III.
GIRLHOOD 28
CHAPTER IV.
WOMANHOOD 42
CHAPTER V.
"PRACTICAL EDUCATION"--CHILDREN'S BOOKS 52
CHAPTER VI.
IRISH AND MORAL TALES 73
CHAPTER VII.
IN FRANCE AND AT HOME 88
CHAPTER VIII.
FASHIONABLE AND POPULAR TALES 116
CHAPTER IX.
VISIT TO LONDON--MR. EDGEWORTH'S DEATH 144
CHAPTER X.
LATER NOVELS--GENERAL ESTIMATE 161
CHAPTER XI.
VISITS ABROAD AND AT HOME 193
CHAPTER XII.
MR. EDGEWORTH'S MEMOIRS PUBLISHED--1821
TO 1825 214
CHAPTER XIII.
1826 TO 1834 237
CHAPTER XIV.
LAST YEARS 269
MARIA EDGEWORTH.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
Too many memoirs begin with tradition; to trace a subject _ab ovo_ seems
to have a fatal attraction for the human mind. It is not needful to
retrace so far in speaking of Miss Edgeworth; but, for a right
understanding of her life and social position, it is necessary to say
some words about her ancestry. Of her family and descent she might well
be proud, if ancestry alone, apart from the question whether those
ancestors of themselves merit the admiration of their descendants, be a
legitimate source of pride. The Edgeworths, originally established, it
is believed, at Edgeworth, now Edgeware, in Middlesex, would appear to
have settled in Ireland in the sixteenth century. The earliest of whom
we have historical record is Roger Edgeworth, a monk, who followed in
the footsteps of his sovereign, Henry VIII., both by being a defender
of the faith and by succumbing to the bright eyes of beauty, for whose
sake he finally renounced Catholicism and married. His sons, Edward and
Francis; went to Ireland. The elder brother, Edward, became Bishop of
Down and Connor, and died without issue. It was the younger, Francis,
who founded the house of Edgeworth of Edgeworthstown; and ever since
Edgeworthstown, in the county of Longford, Ireland, has remained in the
possession of the family whence it derived its name. The Edgeworths soon
became one of the most powerful families in the district, and
experienced their full share of the perils and vicissitudes of the
stormy period that apparently ended with the victories of William III.
Most members of the family seem to have been gay and extravagant, living
in alternate affluence and distress, and several of Maria Edgeworth's
characters of Irish squires are derived from her ancestors. The family
continued Protestant--the famous Abbe Edgeworth was a convert--and Maria
Edgeworth's great-grandfather was so zealous in the reformed cause as to
earn for himself the sobriquet of "Protestant Frank." His son married a
Welsh lady, who became the mother of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, a man who
will always be remembered as the father of his daughter. He was,
however, something more than this; and as the lives of the father and
daughter were throughout so intimately interwoven, a brief account of
his career is needful for a comprehension of hers.
Richard Lovell Edgeworth was born at Bath in 1744, and spent his early
years partly in England, partly in Ireland, receiving a careful
education. In his youth he was known as "a gay philosopher," in the days
when the word philosopher was still used in its true sense of a lover of
wisdom. Light-hearted and gay, good-humored and self-complacent;
possessed of an active and cultivated mind, just and fearless, but
troubled with neither loftiness nor depth of feeling, Richard Lovell
Edgeworth was nevertheless a remarkable personage, when the time at
which he lived is taken into account. He foresaw much of the progress
our own century has made, clearly indicated some of its features, and
actually achieved for agriculture and industry a multitude of
inventions, modest as far as the glory of the world attaches to them,
but none the less useful for the services they render. Many of his
ideas, rejected as visionary and impracticable when he first promulgated
them, have now become the common property of mankind. He was no mere
theorist; when he had established a theory he loved to put it into
practice, and as his theories ranged over many and wide fields, so did
his experiments. Even in late life, when most persons care only to
cultivate repose, he threw himself, with all the ardor of youth, into
schemes of improvement for the good of Ireland; for he was sincerely
devoted to her true welfare, and held in contempt the mock patriotism
that looks only to popularity. In early life he sowed a certain quantity
of wild oats, the result of the super-abundant animal spirits that
distinguished him, and at the age of sixteen contracted a mock-marriage,
which his father found needful to have annulled by a process of law.
After this escapade he was entered at Corpus Christi, Oxford, as a
gentleman commoner. During his residence he became intimate with the
family of Mr. Elers, a gentleman of German descent, who resided at Black
Bourton, and was father to several pretty girls. Mr. Elers had
previously warned the elder Edgeworth against introducing into his home
circle the gay and gallant Richard, remarking that he could give his
daughters no fortunes that would make them suitable matches for this
young gentleman. Mr. Edgeworth, however, turned a deaf ear to the
warning, and the result was that the collegian became so intimate at the
house, and in time so entangled by the court he had paid to one of the
daughters, that, although he had meanwhile seen women he liked better,
he could not honorably extricate himself. In later life he playfully
said: "Nothing but a lady ever did turn me aside from my duty." He
certainly was all his days peculiarly susceptible to female charms, and,
had opportunity been afforded him, might have rivalled Henry VIII. in
the number of his wives. This second marriage gave as little
satisfaction to his father as the first, but the elder Edgeworth wisely
recognized the fact that he was himself not wholly blameless in the
matter. He, therefore, a few months after the ceremony had been
performed at Gretna Green, gave his consent to a formal re-marriage by
license. Thus, before he was twenty, Richard Lovell Edgeworth was a
husband and a father. The marriage entered upon so hastily proved
unfortunate; the pair were totally unsuited to one another; and though
Mrs. Edgeworth appears to have been a worthy woman, to judge from the
few and somewhat ungenerous allusions her husband makes to her in his
biography, they did not sympathize intellectually--a point he might have
discovered before marriage. The consequence was that he sought sympathy
and pleasure elsewhere. He divided his time between Ireland, London and
Lichfield. The latter city was the centre of a somewhat prim,
self-conscious, exclusive literary coterie, in which Dr. Darwin, the
singer of the _Botanic Garden_, Miss Anna Seward, the "Swan of
Lichfield," and the eccentric wife-trainer, Thomas Day, the author of
_Sanford and Merton_, were conspicuous figures. They were most of them
still in their youthful hey-day, unknown to fame, and, as yet, scarcely
aspiring towards it. Here, in this, to him, congenial circle of eager
and ardent young spirits, Richard Lovell Edgeworth loved to disport
himself; now finding a sympathetic observer of his mechanical inventions
in Mr. Watt, Dr. Darwin or Mr. Wedgwood; now flirting with the fair
Anna. He must have posed as a bachelor, for he relates how, on one
occasion, when paying compliments to Miss Seward, Mrs. Darwin took the
opportunity of drinking "Mrs. Edgeworth's health," a name that caused
manifest surprise to the object of his affections. Here, too, he became
imbued with the educational theories of Rousseau, which clung to him, in
a modified degree, throughout his life, and according to which, in their
most pronounced form, he educated his eldest son. Here, further, at the
age of twenty-six, he met the woman he was to love most deeply. From the
moment he saw Miss Honora Sneyd, Mr. Edgeworth became enamored, and in
his attentions to her he does not seem to have borne in mind the fact
that he was a married man.
"I am not a man of prejudices," he complacently wrote in later life; "I
have had four wives.[1] The second and third were sisters, and I was in
love with the second in the life-time of the first."
The man who could make this public statement, and who could, moreover,
leave to his daughter the task of publishing the record of his
ill-assorted union with the woman who was her mother, was certainly one
in whom good taste and good feeling were not preeminent. The birth of
this daughter, who was destined to be his companion and friend, is an
event he does not even note in his memoirs, which are more occupied with
his affection for Miss Sneyd, from whose fascinations he at last felt it
would be prudent to break away. He left England for a lengthened stay in
France, taking with him his son, whose Rousseau education was to be
continued, and accompanied by Mr. Day, who, to please Miss Elizabeth
Sneyd, was about to put himself through a course of dancing and
deportment, with a view to winning her consent to a marriage if he could
succeed in taming his savage limbs and ideas into proper social
decorum. The death of his wife recalled Mr. Edgeworth to England. With
all possible speed he hastened to Lichfield, proposed to Honora Sneyd,
was accepted, and married her within four months of his wife's demise.
Mr. Edgeworth, the elder, had died some time previously; the son was
now, therefore, master of Edgeworthstown. Immediately after his marriage
he set out for Ireland, taking with him his bride and four little
children. From that date forward a new era in his life commenced. It was
not to run any longer in a separate course from that of his family.