The Authority of the Imagination in an Age of Wonder

"Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labours!" lamented the Anglo Irish writer Maria Edgeworth in 1800. The reason was obvious. Historians did not cultivate sympathy or invite conversation among themselves, their subjects, and their readers. They did not understand morality as something negotiated and renegotiated by complicated human beings struggling to make sense of themselves and each other. Instead, the "heroes of history are so decked out by the fine fancy of the professed historian; they talk in such measured prose, and act from such sublime or such diabolical motives, that few have sufficient taste, wickedness, or heroism, to sympathize in their fate." Now in the year 1800, in conjunction with the momentous decision of King George III and the Parliament of Great Britain to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Edgeworth offered English-speaking readers everywhere a different approach. It took the form of her first novel, Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale, Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of Irish Squires, before the Year 1 782, which was published in 1800 in London and Dublin; in 1802 in New Bern, North Carolina; and in 1814 in Boston, Massachusetts.Castle Rackrent operated on several levels. Narrated by Thady Quirk, a loyal retainer of a doomed aristocratic family, the Rackrents, and edited with extensive footnotes by an omniscient English person, the book was a history of eighteenth-century Ireland informed by Scottish ideas. The plot is straightforward: The indulgent Rackrents lose their land to a new class of tough-minded entrepreneurs. Less straightforward are the erratic efforts of various people to make sense of this revolution in property and manners. Edgeworth structured Castle Rackrent as a narrative of competing perspectives on historical change revealed through personal relationships rather than public events. She would help her readers imagine individuals in medias res. "We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy, from their actions or their appearance in public," Edgeworth asserted. Rather, it "is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters."1The preface to Castle Rackrent announced a transformation of the ways in which some literate English-speaking men and women located themselves in time and space, a deliberate conflation of fact and fiction that scholars often associate with a Romantic sensibility. Keeping God and nation, not to mention empire, at a distance, Edgeworth asked readers to contemplate a disappearing past and an emerging future, to reflect on the nature of revolution, and to assess their own ability to participate in the process of change over time. To read Castle Rackrent, Edgeworth implied, was to engage in a social act. It was to see not a life but lives intersecting, not a static history but a dynamic narrative that was neither one thing nor another but all things in endless exchange with each other. It was to suggest that the key to progress lay as much in the management of personal relationships as in the development of republics and public culture.2Edgeworth was elaborating on ideas about human behavior and human understanding explained most fully by eighteenth-century Scottish writers. Adam Smith had argued that individuals make sense of the world by organizing phenomena into categories. The system works well until "something quite new and singular" appears. Then uncertainty reigns and reason falters. The resulting "fluctuation and vain recollection, together with the emotion or movement of the spirits that they excite," wrote Smith, "constitute the sentiment properly called Wonder." "[QJuite at a loss," agitated human beings ask, "What sort of thing can that be? What is that like?"3To resolve their dilemma, indeed to relieve anxiety, especially when dealing with one another, human beings deploy their imagination. …