Page 150 - Gullivers

The neglect of Ireland’s people and economy and the decline in Ireland’s fortunes that so troubled Swist continued into the next century. Maria Edgeworth shared Swist’s distain for the English landlords who lived off the rents from their Irish estates while ignoring their civic responsibilities to their tenants and their communities. Although the Edgeworth family had been part of the Anglo-Irish ruling class since 1583, they were cultured and liberal-minded supporters of Enlightenment thinking and deplored the decline in Ireland they had witnessed over several generations. In 1800 Maria Edgeworth published Castle Rackrent, (set in 1782, written in the 1790s), a biting satirical work ostensibly lamenting the end of ‘a long tradition’, a phase of civilisation ending with the imminent Act of Union (1800). Edgeworth’s novel, in fact, denounces the class who presided over this decline as well as the political orthodoxies that allowed this to occur and Castle Rackrent offered English readers an important insight into the reality of the situation in Ireland.
Within the text the Castle Rackrent of the title is nothing more than a pretentious hovel and the ‘long tradition’ it purports to lament, it transpires,
is a mere eighteen years in duration. In true Swistian style Edgeworth’s novel ironically presents itself as a tribute, which effectively functions as an indictment of the ruling class in Ireland. Here she ostensibly offers the history of the Rackrent family narrated by their old retainer, a member of the native Irish, ‘honest Thady’ Quirk. He is both simple and gullible and displays no political allegiance or bitterness but is a form of stage-Irish fool whose comments are innocently delivered, but prove to be enormously revealing. He relates the hapless lives and untimely deaths of a series of masters he has served, all of whom he
has outlived; Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit and Sir Conty Rackrent. At the close of the novel he is awaiting the acquisition of the estate by his own son, Jason Thady, a representative figure for the emergent Irish middle class, feared by Edgeworth and, as history attests, not scheduled to improve matters much for the general population.
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