Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- General introduction
- Presentation of Economy, Polity, and Society
- Part I
- Part II
- 5 Economy and polity in Bentham's science of legislation
- 6 ‘A gigantic manliness’: Paine's republicanism in the 1790s
- 7 Irish culture and Scottish enlightenment: Maria Edgeworth's histories of the future
- 8 Improving Ireland: Richard Whately, theology, and political economy
- Part III
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Index
7 - Irish culture and Scottish enlightenment: Maria Edgeworth's histories of the future
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- General introduction
- Presentation of Economy, Polity, and Society
- Part I
- Part II
- 5 Economy and polity in Bentham's science of legislation
- 6 ‘A gigantic manliness’: Paine's republicanism in the 1790s
- 7 Irish culture and Scottish enlightenment: Maria Edgeworth's histories of the future
- 8 Improving Ireland: Richard Whately, theology, and political economy
- Part III
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Summary
Maria Edgeworth, like other leading creative writers in English of the 1790s, was a populariser of the late Enlightenment. She so plainly excelled in this role that she seemed proof against the masculinist prejudice towards clever women. Reviewers were respectful, even the hostile ones. The article on ‘Intellectual Education’ in Chambers' Cyclopaedia (vol. XVII, 1812) was devoted to her innovative child-centred, psychological teaching method. Francis Jeffrey, along with Etienne Dumont, Bentham, and a cluster of leading serious reviewers, considered she made fiction more truthful and more important than before. Why then had her reputation come under such fire, even in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, that after the 1830s her books were rarely re-issued and as a whole went out of print? Ruskin could still claim she wrote the most rereadable books in existence. What makes such books no longer readable? This essay is about her serious successes, particularly her original and technically accomplished use of Scottish thinking in different types of writing. But it is also about the success of her opponents in destroying her popularity, largely through guilt by association: their remarkably enduring identification of her with unloved causes, such as irreligion, the popular Enlightenment, the plight of the poor, and Irish politics.
Within four years of her first major publication, Practical Education (1798), this Irishwoman had made her name on the continent as well as in Britain and America with knowledgeable and lively books in three different fields.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Economy, Polity, and SocietyBritish Intellectual History 1750–1950, pp. 158 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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