Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee and the Politics of Irish Identity

April 14, 2026

Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee and the Politics of Irish Identity

Racism is a matter not simply of individual psychology or pathology, but of patterns of cultural representation deeply ingrained within the practices, discourses and subjectivities of Western societies. (Barker 2008: 266)

Some feared the Act of Union would lead to an Anglo-Irish assimilation and ultimately the annihilation of Irish culture and identity. Others hailed it as a blessing, freeing Ireland from its colonial yoke. Maria Edgeworth belonged to the latter group. Her didactic Irish writings theorise, recognising English hegemony, that an Anglo-Irish hybrid state could be reached through education, thus battling the evils of raising capitalism, absenteeism, and the biased, somewhat racist, Irish misrepresentation throughout Britain. As such, Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee is a quasi-utopian literary counter proposal in favour of a true union of English and Irish culture. By establishing a hero with a hyphenated identity and a mission civilatrice as the paragon of Anglo-Irish virtue, the sometimes satirical novel criticises, through a series of textual mirror scenes, the cultural practice of Absenteeism, advocating a policy of no return to the old ways.

Political-Didactic Plot: A Landlord-centred utopia

Edgeworth’s no-return-to-the-old-ways policy

Ireland was a class-conscious country. Laurie O’Higgins, in her essay (In)-Felix Paupertas: Scholarship of the Eighteenth-Century Irish Poor, proposes classical learning in Greek and Latin literature as a means for the Irish to battle their low standing in the British social hierarchy. Studying the ancients was a staple in every gentleman’s education. With their supposedly superior minds, only they could value the lessons of a classical education. Edgeworth, by alluding to classical literature, not only puts contemporary writing about the Irish question in a literary context and criticises a negative essentialist view on her chosen home country, but she also makes a didactic statement of purpose; her Cambridge-educated “gentlemanlike looking young” (Edgeworth 2008: 3) and hyphenated hero is to be taken as a worthy role model.

Her Count Halloran greets his guests with a quote from Herodotus Historíai, referring to the barbarous Scythians sending the appropriate gifts to their “conqueror” (Edgeworth 1999: 11), the Persian King Darius. Clara Tuite’s essay Maria Edgeworth’s Déjà-Voodoo: Interior Decoration, Retroactivity and Colonial Allegory sees that fabled Count as “the self-styled Scythian” (Tuite 2008: 406), “an antiquarian and bearer of a foreign title, named after the Catholic antiquarian Sylvester O’Halloran (1728-1807) […] [who proposes] Troy as an origin for the Gaels” (Tuite 2008: 407). Yet, does Count O’Halloran really identify himself with the Scythians? He opens up “an authentic, well-educated and well-travelled” (Fegan 2004: 42) Irish perspective for lord Colombre contrasting with the English take on Ireland of his acquaintances Lady Dasford, “who wants to denigrate the Irish” (Fegan 2004: 42) and Sir James Brook “whose long acquaintance with Ireland makes him want to save Colambre (Fagan 2004: 42) ‘from the common error of travellers – the deducing general conclusions form a few particular cases, or arguing from exceptions, as if they were rules’”(Edgeworth 2008: 78). While clearly siding with the conquered, Halloren appears to be a mediator, powerful enough to “adjust these things with admirable facility; and, with a master’s hand and master’s eye, compelled each favourite to retreat into the back settlements”. (Edgeworth 2008: 111) Halloren addresses his mostly English guests with a piece of advice, in order to appease their attackers, his pets, “tributes form earth, air, and water” (Edgeworth 2008: 111) should be offered, repeating the Scythian offerings to Daraius. Lord Colambre, good-naturedly rejects that notion of being associated with barbarians or even with the conquered, proving himself to be a “person worthy of […] attention” (Edgeworth 2008: 111)

‘I see I have no need to apologise; he [Irish greyhound] is where he ought to be. Poor fellow! He has never lost his taste for the good company to which he was early accustomed. As to the rest [the eagle and the Angora goat]’, said he, turning to Lady Dashford, ‘a mouse, a bird, and a fish, are, you know, tribute from earth, air, and water, to a conqueror –

‘But from no barbarous Scythian!’ said lord Colambre, smiling.

The eagle “quick of eye but quiet of demeanour” (Edgeworth 2008:110) and the Angora goat “beautiful and (a) remarkably little creature […] walking about the room” (Edgeworth 2008:110) are heraldic animals demeaned by the insult, “live lumber” (Edgeworth 2008: 110), the intruder Col. Heathcock has on his lips when encroaching on their territory. They react only to him as a perceived threat. Goat and eagle attack the colonel, but the “favourite […] a tall Irish greyhound – one of the few of that fine race, which is now almost extinct” (Edgeworth 2008: 110) remains calm throughout the attack “quiet at lady Dashford’s feet” (Edgeworth 2008: 111). The following thinly veiled allegory of a king ruling over his “loving subjects” shows Halloren to be a masterful in setting the conflict between old and new, settler and intruder. “He represents the retroactivity of history as ‘life lumber’” (Tuite 2008: 407), or does at the very least preside over the musealized cabinet of curiosities where peaceful cohabitation is possible. As the “allusion to Herodotus is recognised and cancelled” (McCormack 1985: 136), the different groups (guests and settlers) can reconcile and co-exist while everybody is in their corner. McCormack identified Halloran’s philosophy as part “Jacobite with the antiquarian with the latter-day continental soldier […] [drawing] together Jacobite and anti-Union feeling” (McCormack 1985: 139). Clara Tuite goes even beyond that and interprets the significance of the animal presence as “living entities that communicate and transmit something of the living relationship between past and present” (Tuite 2008: 408) However, Halloren’s view of the past is a romanticised and aestheticized image of the glory of Old Ireland “informed by dislocation, exile, and […] a transformative mode of allegorical practice […] [that] also involves a kind of distance from the original” (Tuite 2008: 410). Both movements are synthesised and personified as one quite positive character, Count Halloren, were mocked and satirised by Edgeworth, rejecting the notion of returning to the old ways, i.e. the separation of the United Kingdom into different nations and thus the inadvertent re-establishment of Irish sovereignty. The Absentee was written in the wake of the 1798 uprising and was published a decade after the Union was passed in 1800. Edgeworth herself was in favour of the Union as it presented “the hallmark of modernity […]” (Moore 2000:115), a “solution […] that would, at least technically, end Ireland’s status as a colony and thus remove the temptation for landlords to leave their lands to seek power in the metropole” (Moore 2000: 136). Moore remarks, in the new Post-Union Ireland, both Maria and her father, as members of the Protestant Ascendancy, favoured the establishment of a Protestant power base, “registering anxiety about the disappearance of the […] traditional buffer between the Protestant planter landlord and the potentially mutinous Catholic peasantry” (Moore 2000: 137). Despite their upper-class authority mainly in the administration, the influence of the landed gentry was already on the decline in the early 19^th century and “feudalism in Ireland […] was dying” (Brown 1953: 410). Their power rested with manor-based courts, due to which the Protestant gentry “developed […] an arrogance” (Brown 1953: 409) that portrayed the Catholic peasants as inferior beings. Edgeworth’s readers are supposedly “enlightened political observers” (Moore 2000: 115), who, presented with the unionist and the separatist side of the argument, are educated enough to make an informed decision, whether to take the novel’s criticism seriously.

Education - a key element for a new hybrid state

Throughout the novel, Maria Edgeworth, mediated by her omniscient narrator with Colambre’s idiom (Altieri 1968.278), insists on Greek and Latin literary tradition. Consequently, she, as the author, places herself into that continuity of classical learning, suggesting that she, despite her gender, had the opportunity and the good fortune to receive a gentleman’s education, while at the same time expecting her necessarily educated and rather select group of probably mostly English readers to fully understand the various allusions to Roman and Greek myths. Yet, theoretically every Irish peasant, so O’Higgins noted, could learn Greek and Latin, as Gaelic was forced to yield to the planted language of the coloniser. In a time when English, the language of the enemy, was on the rise, the Irish fashioned their identity from Greek traditions, very much aware of the English stereotypical representations of the Gaels. Their own language, steeped in centuries of poetic, i.e. bardic tradition, became a stigma of the poor, rural and uneducated masses in the countryside. Soaked in over 200 years of stereotype and prejudice, the post-Union Irish tale “suffered an identity crisis […] agonizing about the best way to represent the Irish people to improve their standing with the English” (Fegan 2004: 38). Taking up Halloren’s quip about possible offerings to the conqueror, form a Greek point of view, both Daraius and the Scythians were bárbaroi (stuttering, stammering), because of their less than adequate grasp of the Greek language. The association between the barbarian Scythians in Herodotus historiography and the Irish was made on numerous accounts by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History (8^th century A.D.) and Edmund Spencer’s View of the Present State of Ireland. Education, both for the reader and the characters, becomes a key element bringing about Edgeworth’s hybrid state. Concerned with the correction of the predominant image of the Irish as barbarous, she broaches the problem of language as an indicator of education and social standing as a prominent issue in The Absentee, already in the incipit, introducing the main characters through the gossiping English ton. The incipit’s criticism is twofold: At the opera, a place of high culture, it sheds a critical light on the cruelty of English colonialist attitudes. Clara Tuite identifies the stereotyping gossipers “in all their imperial disdain” (Tuite 2008: 397) as the “real targets […] whom the arch-mimic Edgeworth offers up for satirical inspection” (Tuite 2008: 397). Most of The Absentee’s purely English characters are represented in an unfavourable satirical manner. The gossiping fashionista, as well as the Dashfords, with their insistence on a perfect genealogical purity, are important structural elements that propel the political-didactic as well as romance-marriage storyline forward. The disdain for Absenteeism, expressed by the English, triggers lord Colambres meditation on his family and his relationship with his home country, thus initiating the political and educational plot of The Absentee. Most of the novel's structure works through binaries. They invite the educated reader to compare and contrast, insisting that he is responsible for the judgement of what is socially, morally, politically and economically good or wrong according to the predominant values of an enlightened, pre-Victorian age, thus fulfilling the novel’s didactic goal. Englishness is opposed by Irishness, city life with rural country life, good with evil and peasants/ tenants with their lords/ agents. Furthermore, the incipit opens up various discourses about cultural identity and civilisation. The English ladies mock lady Clonbrony for her hard work “to look, speak, move, breathe, like an Englishwoman” (Edgeworth 2008: 2), yet all is for nought, her “cockney” (Edgeworth 2008:2) constantly breaks through. Lady Clonbrony becomes the ultimate example of Homi Bhabha’s colonial mimicry, not only in her language but also in her behaviour, her violent and constant rejection of Ireland. Joanne Altieri traced the speech patterns in Edgeworth’s The Absentee back to Renaissance drama and more specifically “to the […] separation of high and low characters by their forms of speech” (Altieri 1968: 276) which “throughout the eighteenth century […] becomes more and more a means of moral judgement as well as social identification” (Altieri 1968: 276). Similar to the stage Irishman butchering English speech patterns, lady Clonbrony becomes a source of mockery, “a vastly amusing personage” (Edgeworth 2008: 2). This is contrasted with the artificial language of fashion. With the Act of Union and the consequent dissolution of the Irish parliament, many Irish landlords left Ireland and settled in the fashionable capital, London, where the fashion-conscious upper class ruled with its own lingo exemplified by fashion guru Soho. His language is an artificial construct, a mixture of sounds and words in different languages expressing various concepts difficult to understand, especially those not inducted into these fashionable circles. Similar to his artificial creation of a new fashion language, where French “en flute” and “en suite” (Edgeworth 2008: 12) mixes with Persian and Turkish names, the cacophony of sounds is mirrored by his obsession to remodel lady Clonbrony’s interior with everything “new” (Edgeworth 2008: 11). The allusion to A Midsummer Night’s Dream supports the idea, that Soho, like the poet, creates an illusion of a theatrical reality on paper, Soho provides the stereotypical representation of Irish stage persona with a dramatic and decadent stage setting for her ultimate down fall. Lady Clonbrony who is “new” to the English society, an outsider forever doomed to look in on the object of her desire, is just as “new” (Edgeworth 2008: 26) and inexperienced with a “little naiveté” (Edgeworth 2008: 26) as the young lady who “expressed her astonishment […] audibly” (Edgeworth 2008: 26) at the night of the gala. In the end lady Clonbrony, like the allusion to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, promises, is betrayed by the English upper class, stabbed in the back; she is not welcomed in their midst; she was branded a stranger from Ireland. Lady Clonbrony is bound by her Londonomania as a colonial subject who entered the space of the colonizer and is rejected and ridiculed for her “faults and foibles” (Edgeworth 2008: 5) While trying to mask her “strong Hibernia accent” (Edgeworth 2008: 4), she “caricatured the English pronunciation” (Edgeworth 2008: 5). Thus, her faulty language becomes an outward sign of a faulty character who “conducted herself ill” (Edgeworth 2008: 107). Not only is she unable to imitate English pronunciation, but she also fails to speak fashionably, always trailing behind the English fashionista. She is the very embodiment of the woman Colambre so desperately tries to avoid. (Edgeworth 2008: 108).

Education as a basis for a hybrid identity

In one of his insightful moments, he analyses his mother’s character and finds his mother greatly “altered” (Edgeworth 2008: 18); despite her pretence, her pronunciation is an identifying feature, that marks her as different form her cruel “fashionable friends” (Edgeworth 2008: 4) she tries to emulate; similar to “a man who strove to pass for an Athenian [who] was detected by his Attic dialect” (Edgeworth 2008: 5), like someone, who desperately wants to belong to the upper echelons of society mimicking their culture, only to fall short, because her “Irish manner had been schooled [too] late in life” (Edgeworth 2008: 4) (Edgeworth 2008: 108). Thus, his simile ties lady Clonbrony’s language and mimicry problem back to Greek civilisation. Athenians (here synonymous with Londoners) praised for their language and culture, especially during the 5^th and 4^th centuries B.C., are contrasted with the Attic rural hinterland. Lady Clonbrony’s imitation necessarily fails; yet, a hybrid state, in-between colonialism and post-colonialism (McClintock 1992: 84) could be possible through schooling. For Edgeworth, “education is the key to both individual and national improvement” (Wohlgemut 1999: 647). Where lady Clonbrony struggles with “natural and unnatural manner” (Edgeworth 2008: 4), her son lord Colombre seems to have been successful. Early in life he was taken from his “father’s castle in Ireland, where, from the lowest servant to the well-dressed dependant of the family every body had conspired to wait upon, to fondle, to flatter, to worship, this darling of their lord” (Edgeworth 2008: 5). In his “new world” (Edgeworth 2008: 6) he came into contact with the “sobriety of English good sense” (Edgeworth 2008: 6) the young heir became interested in literature and “his ambition for intellectual superiority was raised, his views were enlarged, his tastes and his manners formed” and “mixed most advantageously with Irish vivacity” (Edgeworth 2008: 6). Even while travelling through Ireland, incognito, under the assumed identity of Mr Evans and hidden beneath an old coat like Ulysses, the gentleman in Colambre still recognizable through his language. English characteristics intertwined with Irish traits, “English and Irish had not been invidiously contrasted in his mind” (Edgeworth 2008: 6); he became a true hybrid, whose cultural spheres can “coexist within his mind” (Wohlgemut 1999: 650). In his educated and refined state, both national identities “retain a certain autonomy, […] contained in a larger unity” (Wohlgemut 1999: 650). For Edgeworth, national identity is a learned concept and not inherent; national differences are “anchored in education (culture rather than nature)” (Wohlgemut 1999, 647). Lord Colambre is stylised as the perfect mixture of two originally separate and seemingly homogeneous cultures, an Anglo-Irish hero,

sensible of the superior comforts, refinement, and information, of English society; but his own country was endeared to him by early association, and a sense of duty and patriotism attached him to Ireland (Edgeworth 2008: 6).

Through his education, lord Colombre easily accepts the superiority of English culture, London, and Englishness become cultural yardsticks for him, even over his indigenous country. However, an early Victorian “sense of duty” and “patriotism” make him hold on to his Irish home. This amalgamation of English and Irish traits makes him break out of his family’s tendencies towards mimicry and imitation and become a focal point for a “ rooted yet cosmopolitan or transnational” (Wohlgemut 1999: 647) identity tied to two places, England and Ireland. Thus, Maria Edgeworth’s hero is tied “to earlier cosmopolitan constructions of universal human subjects” (Wohlgemut 1999: 647). Nonetheless, Colambre’s analysis of his Anglo-Irish identity is not unproblematic. His idea of an English society appears to be a rather homogenous cultural sphere. His contact situations with English civilisation are rather limited, mostly to members of his own class, the upper echelons of a patriarchal, educated, class-conscious and prejudiced English ton, and the beginnings of a negatively connotated bourgeoisie, represented by Mordicai. His cultural reality ignores the fact that even English society is divided by class, gender, religion and so on, that all cultures are zones of shifting boundaries and hybridisation. His hybrid concept of identity is an idealised and rather selective, elitist view of society promoting English hegemony, “supporting English colonial interest at the expense of an independent Irish nation. Yet […] [he becomes an] advocate for an English re-evaluation of Ireland” (Moore 2000: 116). Both character studies of mother and son are juxtaposed, urging the reader to draw a comparison between the mother’s failure to adapt and the son’s success through travelling as a form of learning and “a slow process of education [that] instils transnational understanding in the Irish people while retaining the bonds of local attachment” (Wohlgmut 1999: 647).

Mirroring Absentee identity

From a structural point of view, equally important is the series of textual mirrors that establish parallel experiences from which Colambre draws his conclusions. The first mirror, Colambre himself identifies, is the precarious state of Sir Berryl’s family, and he is forced to draw parallels to his family’s situation. Both Sir John Berryl and lord Clonbrony are indebted to coach maker Mordicai, who is unlike his biblical namesake (Book of Esther), is a rather negative Shylock-like character. The Berryl family is in financial ruin after Sir John Berryl’s death. Mr Berryl, the heir without income and Colambre’s friend, can no longer uphold the lavish London lifestyle his mother and sisters enjoyed. “Lady Berryl’s passion for living in London and at watering places” (Edgeworth 2008: 51) is to blame for “all the evil [that] had arisen” (Edgeworth 2008: 51) because “she had made her husband and Absentee […] from his home, his affairs, his duties and his estate” (Edgeworth 2008:51) Colambre’s family finds itself in similar troubles, as lady Clonbrony who is more interested in the current fashion, always scheming to “get herself invited” (Edgeworth 2008: 53) fancies herself an English lady, yet nobody “could take [her] for and Englishwoman” (Edgeworth 2008: 33), she remains “a stranger; and from Ireland” (Edgeworth 2008: 33) in England spending money on extravagant galas. His own father, lord Clonbrony, is according to Mrs. Dareville “nothing, nobody” (Edgeworth 2008: 2). As rootless absentees they have lost their identity, leaving behind their Irishness or in the case of lady Clonbrony, “denying it [Ireland] to be her country and […] depreciate and abuse every thing Irish; to declare that there was no possibility of living in Ireland” (Edgeworth 2008: 56). In London the Clonbronys “enter into the limbo of absentee culture” (Wohlgemuth 1999: 651). This first parallel construction, additionally, functions to establish Colambre, not only as the protagonist, but also as the hero of the novel, which will later on in Ireland be cemented as he protects his father’s tenants from the cruelty of the Garraghty brothers. Modicai, the coach maker and creditor, “impatient to obtain payment whilst Sir John yet lived” (Edgeworth 2008: 48) is represented as the repulsive villain “livid with malice” (Edgeworth 2008: 49) and hell-bent to obtain his money without a sense of propriety. Channelling the Shakespeare character Shylock, who, too, was obsessed with the law and bonds, Modicai is depicted as a “monster […] grinning a horrible smile” (Edgeworth 2008: 49), that rose from the capitalist bourgeoisie needs to be defeated. Colambre, the self-proclaimed gentleman who has “nothing to fear” (Edgeworth 2008:51), heroically steps in and prevents the “illegal […] [and] inhuman” (Edgeworth 2008: 51) arrest of his friends, showing nothing but “ineffable contempt” (Edgeworth 2008: 51) for the merchant. Similar is the scene in Ireland, as it opposes, the titled hero, lord Colambre, with the class of the tradespeople “pro tempore” (Edgeworth 2008: 81) who live off borrowed money and take “every short cut to fortune” (Edgeworth 2008: 81) like Mrs Rafferty and her brother Nicholas Garraghty, “agent for more than one property” (Edgeworth 2008: 83) with “a handsome house in a fashionable part of Dublin” (Edgeworth 2008: 83). As lord Colambre personally witnessed the agent’s “instance of roguery or oppression “(Edgeworth 2008: 163) his authority once again prevents a faulty signature, obtained under pressure. A coup de theatre, as he throws off the coat, establishes Colambre's identity as morally superior to the greedy Garraghtys, whose attempt at blackmail fails. Still, Colambre must race to London, convince his father of his agent's treachery, and save the day. Thus, he becomes the match for “a Jew and old Nick” (Edgeworth 2008: 178), unlike his father’s trusted companion and Falstaff character, Terence O’Fay is not, saving the tenants from eviction and ultimately his family from financial ruin. The reader is confronted with an ideal hero whose existence “had been justified long before by Steele, who argued that the stage must supply perfect heroes since its examples are imitated” (Alitieri 1968: 277) Colambre’s English life is very much linked to the theatre, as the English plot sets in at the opera house and London seems to be inhabited with Shakespearean characters. While this paragon of virtue originates on an English stage, he evolves through his travels and becomes a well-rounded person in Ireland.

Marriage Plot – Romantic Union

A family’s problem with attachment and social order

Lord Colambre identifies the family and its apparent decline at the core of socio-political problems. The father is absent, as he “seldom dines at home” (Edgeworth 2008: 14), thus his authority within the family structure is lessened. While lord Clonbrony is “embarrassed” (Edgeworth 2008:18) about his debts, he does nothing to curb his wife’s spending spree, “because [he] might talk her deaf before she would understand or listen […]” (Edgeworth 2008: 18). He does not “care a rush if London was sunk” (Edgeworth 2008: 18). In his opinion people “ought, stay in their own country, live on their own estates, and kill their own mutton, money need never be wanting” (Edgeworth 2008: 19) Still, he bowed to his wife’s Londonmania and furthermore, blames he “nonsense” (Edgeworth 2008: 19) for his financial situation. Similar to the Rackrents in Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, the Clonbrony’s are no longer attached to their land, their tenants and consequently their identity. The father is too weak to withstand the mother’s demands and shrinks in his responsibilities; the family structure is broken, with the wife in charge, and as the family is the smallest unit, it is unhealthy. Consequently, the entire country is in an unhealthy, desolate and almost lawless state. Clonbrony needs a steward or an agent to replace him. Nicolas Garraghty and his brother Dennis, who work as upper and under-agent, are also referred to as “sinners” (Edgeworth 2008: 136) or St. Dennis and Old Nick, i.e. a Frenchman and Satan himself, who are “cheating the country” (Edgeworth 2008: 137). Especially at a time where the threat of Napoleon was still looming large form across the Channel, and “food prices ballooned upward” (Brown 1953: 412) being associated with a French martyr and or Satan makes the animosity between the agents who exploit the country and the tenants more expressed, stylizing them as the enemy figure and the ultimate symbol of evil, Lucifer. Lord Colambre’s sensible Irish driver, Larry, asserts that “these under-agents, as here, they do as they please” (Edgeworth 2008: 136); they “have no conscience at all” (Edgeworth 2008: 136). Thomas Brown’s essay is more drastic; the absence of the landlords gave rise to “a parasitic class of middleman who sucked the blood” (Brown 1953: 412) from the land. While many landlords criticized the Act of Union, it “now helped to preserve their prestige” (Brown 1953:408) Edgeworth falls into that very same trap, blaming the “miseries of tenant and cottier […] upon the hated middleman [...] [cherishing] the illusion […] [knowing] that all would be well were the noble absentee to return” (Brown 1953: 408) Yet again, Edgeworth installed another important binary construction, drawing a comparison between Clonbronytown and Colambretown. The latter being under the care of his idealized agent with the telling name, borrowed form philosopher and politician Edmund Burke, who “encourages the improving tenant; and shows no favour or affection, but justice, which comes even to all, and does best for all at the long run […] residing always in the country, […] understanding country business (Edgeworth 2008: 127) Lord Clonbrony’s lands have fallen into ruin; the almost hostile country-dwellers are full of mistrust towards the stranger, who could very well be a poor-law inspector. “So foreign has the territory become that Larry […] must function as interpreter, deciphering the strange, anomalous hieroglyphics of Irish life to the uncomprehending Colambre” (Stugeon 2006: 435). Even though Maria Edgeworth lived in Ireland for most of her life, her little bubble of Edgeworthtown provided her with a rather limited perspective and very little contact with the harsh realities of Irish life, due to which, she was often criticised for being naïve or too optimistic. In the pre-Famine years, most British newspapers were filled with tales of travellers drawn to Ireland partly because of the war on the continent, partly because travelling was facilitated by an ever-expanding infrastructure. These articles, “a vehicle for the expression of British anxiety about Ireland” (Fagan 2004: 34) painted a vivid picture of “Irish distress and unrest” (Fagan 2004: 33). Here, Edgeworth seems to allude to that stereotype of the Irish as “a nation of liars” (Fegan 2004:34). Their “desire to fool the outsider”, (Fegan 2004: 35) is exemplified as Colambre, travelling incognito, draws closer to his father’s estate, and 24 “men and boys […] armed with hammers, […] began to pound [the stones on the side of the road] with great diligence and noise as soon as they saw the carriage” (Edgeworth 2008: 134) Only Larry’s assurance that his passenger Mr Evans i.e. Lord Colambre is “a very honest man […] form North Wales, an innocent jantleman, that’s sent over to travel up and down the country, to find is there any copper mines in it” (Edgeworth 2008: 135) prevents a confrontation, similar to what happened to James Mahony, “the Illustrated London News artist [who] was almost lynched by a group of women angry that he would not promise to get their husbands […] jobs on the relief works” (Fegan 2004: 35) These peasants, are stereotypical representations of the Irish rural population who, unlike the tale’s hero, “are universally allowed to have undisciplined minds” (Altieri 1968: 271) Again, language functions as a marker of difference rather than authenticity, while “their dialect is […] accurately transcribed” (Alfieri 1968: 275), this transcription is a mere copy of an original” (Alfieri 1968: 275), placing Colambre among the Irish. These, by their landlord abandoned, peasants seem to have regressed to an uncivilised earlier state, where a gentleman needs an interpreter to understand the idiosyncrasies of peasant life. Combined with the earlier assumption of lady Clonbrony’s language as a marker for a low character, there are linguistic similarities between the comportment and the pronunciation of the peasants and Colambre’s mother. Not only do the tenants suffer linguistically from the landlord’s absence, but also the family of the landlord. While amongst the English lady Clonbrony’s unrefined language marked her as the outsider, the stranger from Ireland, similar to a stage persona acting to amuse the English ton. Due to the detachment from the Irish home, she suffers from a similar affliction, putting her at least linguistically on equal footing with the peasantry. In London lady Clonbrony is a mere caricature of an Irish citizen; in Ireland is cured from the “feverish joys of fashion” (Edgeworth 2008: 252) because of the “pleasures of domestic life” (Edgeworth 2008: 252). With the return of the lord Colambre, his bride-to-be and the Clonbronys to Ireland, the narrator expresses his hope for a better future for Ireland, that the hero will “upon farther acquaintance […] long diffuse happiness through the wide circle, which is peculiarly subject to the influence and example of a great resident Irish proprietor” (Egdeworth 2008: 252). Only the reattachment of the absentees can start a period of convalescence for Ireland, where “charitable designs” (Edgeworth 2008: 104) of fashionable people like the Killpatricks were no longer necessary. Edgeworth’s cure for all the evils the Union generated is a landlord-centred Anglo-Irish utopia that completely ignores the “deep scars of bitterness” (Brown 1953: 407) the Union in 1800, the Repression of the Revolution of 1798 and the Penal laws left. In reality, these landlords, “impressed by the dogmas of utilitarian economics” (Brown 1953: 414), remained largely indifferent to the plight of their tenants and left them “at the mercy of a ruthless English market” (Brown 1953: 412). Hence, Edgeworth’s literary counter proposal of an idealised political union “can only hold up a satiric mirror to the present, not offer a productive version of the future”. (Moore 2000: 137).

Paradoxically, Edgeworth was often hailed for her realistic multi-layered approach and her “enlightenment preferences for sceptical critique and rational irony” (Moore 2000: 117). The roots of all evil to Edgeworth were the practise of rack-renting and absentee landlords “living in London on rents extracted form an increasingly penurious Irish peasantry is complicated […] by the capitalist rationalization of agriculture” (Lloyd 2005: 154) The Irish clachan system, of communal landholding, that allowed tenants access to different types of land thus encouraging a high degree of subdivision and clustering of small cabins, was considered unproductive and replaced with a system of improved and capitalist larger landholdings modelled after English farms. With the English enforced consolidation even more small farmers were evicted and became landless tenants who “placed further pressure on the dwindling areas of cultivable land” (Lloyd 2005: 154) Larry explains “because he [lord Clonbrony] is absent” (Edgeworth 2008: 139) form his land, shrinking in his responsibilities towards his tenants, the land lays in ruins and has fallen in despair at the hands of corrupt agents, like Nicolas Garraghty who fashioned himself “viceroy” (Edgeworth 2008: 162) in the eyes of the tenants but is recognised as a “petty tyrant in office” (Edgeworth 2008: 163) by lord Colambre. Nicolas Garraghty, as well as the Killpatricks, is part of those nouveau riche, who are criticised and ridiculed for their behaviour towards ‘their’ tenants. While Garraghty is the tyrannical ruler, exploiting the Irish, the Killpatricks, “who had lived always for the fashionable world” (Edgeworth 2008: 104), represent another evil altogether: fashionable charity. With the flight of many landlords to London, the plight of the poor seems to have increased, and to ease their suffering, the Killpatricks “had taken little pains to improve the condition of their tenants” (Edgeworth 2008: 104). As lady Dashford shows Colambre around various “ornamented, picturesque cottages, within view of their [lord and lady Kilpatrick] park” (Edgeworth 2008: 104), her attempts to discourage Colambre’s interest in Ireland ultimately fail. Furthermore, lady Dashford’s representation of Ireland does not only take up lady Clonbrony’s criticism but also contemporary stereotypical representations of the Irish as “people with half a century’s habit of indolence and dirt” (Edgeworth 2008: 104) who let “every thing to go to ruin for the want of a moment’s care, or pulled to pieces for the sake of the most surreptitious profit” (Edgeworth 2008: 104), an “old uneducated race whom no one can help, because they will never help themselves” (Edgeworth 2008: 104). A logical conclusion to lady Dashford’s rant would be to leave the Irish to fend for themselves and move, like so many others, to London. The satirical irony lies in the hyperbolic excess of things. The cottages are described as “picturesque” (Edgeworth 2008: 104) and “ornamented” (Edgeworth 2008: 104) and people form a lower class were “promoted to these fine dwellings” (Edgeworth 2008: 104) but in lady Dashford’s presentation this beauty is lost to the “lower class of Irish people” (Edgeworth 2008: 105). The landlord’s charitable creation of beautifully crafted cabins clashes with the “broken pipe” (Edgeworth 2008: 104), the “despairing” (Edgeworth 2008: 104) characters and the “history of their complaints and grievances”(Edgeworth 2008: 105). Though Edgeworth insists that under the tutelage of a responsible landlord who takes his duties seriously, the Irish could be reformed. Through lady Dashford’s sardonic critique rings Edgeworth's disdain for “charitable designs” (Edgeworth 2008: 104) that only improve the landlord’s standing and not the general living conditions of the tenants.

The educational comparison between Clonbronytown with its illicit distillery, that Sinéad Sturgeon branded as the symbol of all that is wrong, a sign of incompetence and of the troubled relations between landlord and tenant, and Colambretown urges the reader to come to the conclusion only the return of the landlord can “refit” (Edgeworth 2008: 80) the country driving out “the barbarians” (Edgeworth 2008: 81) i.e. the nouveau riche who like Garraghty profit form the absence of the landlords. The juxtaposition of both scenes seems to urge the reader to agree, while under the care of a good enlightened agent or even landlord the country as well as the people flourish, but with a negligent landlord and an oppressive agent the estate becomes “a wasteland inhabited only […] by an intoxicated, inarticulate waiter, […] with several public houses […] none of which have a licence for the poitín they are selling” (Sturgeon 2006: 436). According to Colambre’s epiphany, after having witnessed the corruption of his Irish home, it is a landlord’s moral obligation to reattach oneself to Ireland and live on their land. Edgeworth advocates a cultural exchange symbolically substituting whiskey with beer, substituting “recklessness and rebelliousness among the Irish” (Sturgeon 2006: 432) with English sobriety and order. Sinéad Sturgeon quoted Seamus Deane’s analysis of the significance of “alcohol in the English perception of Irish in the wake of the French Revolution. Both the French and the Irish […] became criminalized races in their radical divergence form an English, Protestant, ideal of law and liberty” (Sturgeon 2006: 433). Burke, managed the property of his lord according to English law and customs promoting beer instead of whisky, the village “which bore the name of Colambre […] [had an] air of neatness and finish in the houses and in the street, which had a nicely swept paved footway […] [with a] small but excellent inn [...] [where] nothing out of repair” (Edgeworth 2008: 125). The whiskey stench in Clonbronytown, so Sturgeon, is “the stench of Absenteeism” (Sturgeon 2006: 436). Thus, Colambre’s mission is twofold. First, he needs to bring his family back to Ireland, restraining his mother’s obsession with London fashion, by reinstating a patriarchal order and thus remodelling society according to an ordered English ideal. And second, end the Garraghtys’ reign of terror, re-establish order in his lands, and convert the Irish to a whiskey-abstinent lifestyle, starting with his driver, Larry. Hence, Colambre can be seen as the prototype of an enlightened Protestant landlord promoting specifically Protestant and thus British ideals. His focus lies on the improvement and “reformation of a disorderly society” (Corbett 1994: 883) as well as the revival of a gentry hegemony.

Colambre’s reattachment through travelling from the stage to the Irish reality

With the rise of the British Empire and the industrial revolution in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, at the onset of a global circulation of cultural discourses, is it valid to solely link cultural identities to constructed concepts of nations? James Clifford conceived cultural identity in terms of travel, including “sites of criss-crossing travellers” (Barker 2008: 255). From very early on in the novel, lord Colombre’s identity is established as Anglo-Irish, only through the travels he comes to truly understand Irish reality and part of his cultural heritage. Melissa Fegan remarked that the ordinary English traveller, like Sir John Carr in his Stranger in Ireland (mocked in a review by Edgeworth), would land at “Pigeon-house” (Edgeworth 2008: 77) and

bring their experience of foreign parts to bear on this exotic place […] Ireland, for the English traveller, is uncanny […] something secretly familiar which has undergone repression and returned from it […] Ireland is both familiar and exotic (Fagan 2004:31)

Contrary to other travellers lord Colambre is not here to “scrutinise Irish poverty” (Fegan 2004: 33) for the British government, nor does he report “from a disaster zone” (Fegan 2004: 34). He is travelling to reattach himself to Ireland. Like Herodotus, he needs to experience Ireland for himself, especially since he grew up between two extremes: a father who tends to romanticise the Old Ireland, and his mother, who despises everything Irish. Colambre cannot trust his parents to “truthfully represent the state of Ireland” (Fegan 2004: 35). He disguises himself “wrapped […] in a shabby great-coat” (Edgeworth 2008: 124) under the name of Evens, Colambre takes on the role of the British stranger, the outsider, the other. Yet, under this coat, the hero’s language still marks him as a gentleman. As if to establish the truthfulness of his observations, Colambre creates an illusion of himself by altering the way others, including the readers, perceive him. While temporarily adopting an “Englishman’s” (Edgeworth: 2008: 136) identity, he can experience Irish realities from an objective gentleman’s perspective, neither truly English nor Irish, “to see and judge how [his] father’s estates were managed” (Edgeworth 2008: 167). Lord Colambre’s first experience with his native country is rather emotional as his “heart swelled, it swelled no more with pleasurable sensations” (Edgeworth 2008: 77). However, Wohlgemut proposes that Colambre’s emotional reattachment with Ireland is “not the spontaneous and emotive national sympathy suggested by the Burkean rhetoric of national affection: rather, it is a critical concern that positions its bearer as […] a ’friend’ to Ireland” (Wohlgemut 1999: 651) The Irish plot opens at the harbour, not a place of high culture, lord Colambre “found himself surrounded and attacked by a swarm of by baggers and harpies” (Edgeworth 2008: 77). His initial euphoria is quelled and replaced by worry and “disgust on closer view” (Wohlgemut 1999: 651). Colambre’s meeting with the self-styled friend of Ireland, Sir James Brook, who “had at different periods been quartered in various parts of the country – had resided long enough in each to become familiar with the people” (Edgeworth 2008: 78) opens up the perspective of a well-acquainted traveller who wishes to “save him [Colambre] from the common error of travellers” (Edgeworth 2008: 78) providing him with a rather analytical “idea of the state of manners in Ireland” (Edgeworth 2008: 78) Still, Wohlgemut suggests Brooks marriage with an Irish heiress, is a definite “orientation to Ireland” (Wohlgemut 1999: 652). This underlines Edgeworth’s idea of an emotional attachment to Ireland that is filtered through a critical and analytical lens. As such, a harbour has no distinct cultural identity or is linked to specifically one class. It is marked by arrivals and departures, a space whose identity is constantly shifting. People from various social standings intermingle. The Dubliners are a rather heterogeneous group, where Colambre has “found several officers, English, Irish, and Scotch” (Edgeworth 2008: 77), the nouveau riche try to blend in with the old returning nobility from London, and those who return from their country estates. According to Sir James Brook, commerce rose and took over the place nobility had vacated after the Union. Colambre realises Dublin society, particularly the upstart nouveau riche like Mrs Rafferty, is mirroring London society. Tusculum was linked to two important names in the last days of the Roman Republic, the Satirist Horace and the politician and orator Cicero, who were both in agreement that the Republic was brought down by moral decay and decadence. Mrs Rafferty’s little bit of everything antithetically exhibits the “genius and blunder” (Edgeworth 2008: 84), the “contrast between the finery and vulgarity” (Edgeworth 2008: 84) of her estate. This scene is on a narrative level the parallel construction to lady Clonbrony’s gala, taking its criticism one step further, not only by exposing Mrs Rafferty as decadently vulgar but also by becoming more explicitly satirical in her comic depiction of the bourgeoisie who strive to move upwards on the social ladder by imitating the London ton. Mrs Rafferty is an utterly comic character; her obsession with everything little, from the conservatory to a ruin full of looking-glasses, breaks out of societal norms. According to Dupréel and Bergoson, this repetition is perceived as unnatural and comic. The polysynsetic enumeration of the little buildings on her estate affords the reader a sense of uniformity that is broken by Mrs Rafferty’s insistence on “irregularity and deformity” (Edgeworth 2008: 85), both negatively connoted terms, that she recognises as eclectic. Her fashionable eclecticism is satirised for its lack of culture and its vulgarity of imitation, which she does not understand. Her house is filled with trinkets and “vile daube” (Edgeworth 2008: 84) that someone else deems art, distorting beauty for fashion.

Similar to Mrs Rafferty’s fashion statement, Lady Clonbrony’s oriental gala mixes Turkish, Chinese, Egyptian, and Spanish-Moorish elements interchangeably with each other. Absentee identity seems to be a curious accumulation of various cultures, “a borderless economy of international trade” (Wohlgemut 1999: 651). On the night of the gala, Lord Colambre looks at the “festive scene, the blazing lights, the ‘universal hubbub’” (Edgeworth 2008: 26) and recognises himself standing at the Miltonian gates of hell. This allusion refers to Milton’s Paradise Lost, as Satan opens up a debate about the future of the fallen in Pandemonium, he urges for a union, a democratic government in hell. Heaven is not yet lost to them; they decide to corrupt mankind. As Satan flies off towards the surface to tempt mortals, he encounters the guards of hell, his children Sin and Death, who open the gates to help him enter a dark abyss; they hear a great noise and meet Chaos, the ruler of the abyss, with his consort Night and his children, confusion and discord. Edgeworth’s allusion to Paradise Lost, here through the voice of lord Colambre, has two functions: firstly, she takes up Milton’s criticism of political manipulation, evil things are done in the name of the union, and secondly lady Clonbrony’s fashionable life in London allows chaos to rule freely in, denouncing her and her fashionable friends as vain sinners. This world in between, with Soho as lady Clonbrony’s stage designer, is populated by characters taken from famous mostly Shakespearean plays from the Brutus-like lady Chatterton, Mordicai, who shares more than the Jewish name with is dramatic foil Shylock and the Falstaffian Terrence O’Fay. The novel already starts at the opera, a place that creates a different illusory reality of pretence and play acting. Wohlgemut’s “limbo of absentee culture” (Wohlgemuth 1999: 651) is this like this illusory world of fashion, where language, style and culture are interchangeably mixed with various allusions to Shakespeare plays. They help set the scene for a theatrical illusion of reality that is the fashionable London. Detached from their home country, the absentee culture and identity have lost their roots in Ireland and try to substitute it with a pandemonium of various other cultural identities from Turkey to China to create a seemingly homogenous new but unnatural identity. This mixture of exotic features may seem like an “eastern magnificence” (Edgeworth 2008: 26) but underneath there is the chaotic and cacophonous creation of the “first architectural upholsterer of the age” (Egdeworth 2008: 11). Only when lord Colambre sets out to reattach himself with his Irish home he overcomes the theatrical illusion of the stage and enters Irish reality. As he quite literally throws off his coat, he leaves behind the mask of the English traveller; thus exposed, he ends his playacting to become a true person and “a great resident Irish proprietor” (Edgeworth 2008: 252). Lady Clonbrony’s London home is littered with stage props. The chimaeras in the corners and the sphinx candelabras evoke the Greek myth of a female with a lion’s body that was seen as a bad omen, demons of bad luck, which could be seen as symbols, foreshadowing the disastrous outcome of the gala. Lady Clonbrony’s multilingual, multicultural and multi-coloured yet “disproportioned” (Edgeworth 2008: 33) “fool’s paradise” (Edgeworth 2008: 34) cannot withstand reality. It always breaks through the illusion, the chalked Alhambra mosaic “was, in a few minutes, effaced by the dancers’ feet” (Edgeworth 2008: 31), the “comfortable English fireplace” (Edgeworth 2008: 35) in the “porcelain Elysium” (Edgeworth 2008: 34) of the Chinese pagoda or the sullied “snow-white swan down couch” (Edgeworth 2008: 32). Similar to Mrs. Rafferty’s Chinese fisherman statue that gets pulled into the stream by a real fish, the illusion is ruined. The illusion is, like the pillars Sir Horace Grant comments on, disproportioned. In a sea of different mostly spectral colours, the apricot tone as well as crimson and scarlet shade of the Turkish tent, the gold rays of Apollo and blue silk with silver fringes, one opponent pair of achromatic colours, black and white, stands out. The snow white of the couch received black stains. This contrast stands as a synecdoche for the opposition between England and Ireland. Col. Heathcock’s black stains are the absentees swarming London, pretending to be “swans” (Edgeworth 2008: 32) while really being geese, and as such they will always be visibly different as black stains, the foreign element, the unassimilated other, on a snow white couch. However, for Edgeworth, there is a whole palette of colours, where the Anglo-Irish could position themselves. They are not locked in one distinctive binary; “the Anglo Irish position is not a static deadlock or incongruity, but rather an active and ongoing reconciliation of contradiction” (Wohlgemut 1999: 655).

From Hell to Heaven – the politics of a family union

There are only two references to Paradise Lost in Edgeworth’s novel, which set the frame for both the political plot and the marriage plot, tying them together. The beginning in hell is opposed by the ending in paradise with the union of Adam and Eve. After Grace Nugent’s identity was clarified and her genealogical descent was established, the shadow of her birth lifted, and Grace can be seen as the redeemed Eve whose heart “should be wooded, and not unsought be won” (Edgeworth 2008:241) with a complicated tail of various nationalist associations to her name. She is “Penelope” to (Edgeworth 2008: 30) his Ulysses, Eve to Adam, who provides a home for her traveller. Similar to the Miltonian Eve, Colambre feels instantaneously attracted to his cousin’s “propriety and delicacy” (Edgeworth 2008: 13) as well as her charms and her grace. Furthermore, she is established as the submissive partner in a possible relationship with Colambre, his “ardent thirst for knowledge” (Edgeworth 2008: 43) correlates with Adams questions to Raphael, while “Miss Nugent had seldom […] had the advantage of hearing much conversation” (Edgeworth 2008: 44) nor did she enjoy a gentleman’s education like Colambre. Her strong morals, however, “never for one moment allowed herself to think of Colambre as a lover” (Edgeworth 2008: 41). Till the very end Colambre fears, his bride-to-be “has been in the habit of considering a union with me [him] impossible […] duty forbad her to think of me [him]” (Edgeworth 2008: 241) Even Colambre had his biblical moments of doubt about the purity of Grace’s mother, so much that “his hopes, his plans for future happiness” (Edgeworth 2008: 107) are darkened by a rumour “heard […] form a stranger” (Edgeworth 2008: 107) that his bride to be was not a woman “sans reproche” so much that he briefly despairs an contemplates joining the military. A very lucky coincidence, Count Halloren happened to know Grace’s parents had, in fact, been married, and her paternal grandfather is still alive. The romance plotline seems to clash with the political-didactic agenda of the novel. Michael Gamer raised a valid point, arguing that Edgeworth’s fiction should not be classified as realist “neither in its technique nor in its aims” (Gamer 2001: 235). He realises the pedagogical aim intermixed with facts and romance fits a different popular genre, which he calls romances of real life. Mary Jean Corbett read The Absentee in terms of contemporary familial politics. As already established, Edgeworth borrowed heavily from Burke’s notion of the family’s importance in a grander political scheme. Dashford’s rendition of Grace Nugent’s family history and her supposed illicit genealogy prompts the next step in the marriage plot line. While Edgeworth herself was deemed the Romantic nationalism of her contemporaries a simplification of political affairs, The Absentee uses romance, the union of two lovers with complicated hybrid identities, as a narrative means to support her Unionist political plotline. This marriage reinstates the old patriarchal order that was endangered by unflattering female characters. The extravagant lady Clonbrony destroyed domestic order by usurping her husband’s position of authority, and the avaricious, deceitful Dashfords are almost demonised in their representation as “fiend[ish]” and “evil spirit[ed]” (Edgeworth 2008: 126). Thus, matrimony becomes a societal sanction on desire.

Marriage here is the idealised state of a union between two people who fit perfectly together. After having rejected the notion of marrying for money or to seal a business deal on multiple occasions, first with his mother, Terence O’Fay and the Dashfords, the virtuous happy couple “provides the basis for socio-political order” (Corbett 1994: 882), contrary to the failed marriage of Colambre’s parents, reinforcing the idea of hybridity on a more personal level. McCormack, as well as Butler, tried to identify the source of Grace Nugent’s Irish identity. Butler links her to a popular song “paying tribute to beauty” (Butler 2001: 284) of a woman who symbolically stands for Ireland but accepts McCormack’s interpretation of a link between the last name, Nugent, and the “real-life leading Catholics, Jacobites and ‘Wild Geese’” (Butler 2001: 285). Thus, Grace’s Irish identity is linked to Catholic campaigns while her newly discovered grandfather, Reynolds, suggests an English descent, probably borrowed from another “real-life Irishman, George Nugent Reynolds” (Butler 2001: 285) whose songs were used by the United Irishmen. She returns to Ireland already a perfect hybrid between English and Irish cultural aspects whose “homecoming has an equivalent or greater historical depth” (Butler 2001: 286) event though the narrative closure may seem unrealistic and borrowed from Renaissance comedy. The courtship plot affects national politics through family as the basis of order, and additionally, the conjugal union functions as a narrative closure of both plotlines in London and in Ireland.

Conclusion

Edgeworth establishes the union as an ideal state, both on a political and on a personal scale, exemplified by the hyphenated hero and his bride, who both share features of a complex and complicated Anglo-Irish identity. On a political level, the Union makes Ireland part of the United Kingdom; theoretically, it thus loses its status as a colony to become fully immersed in a newly constructed state, which is idealised as a quasi-utopian Anglo-Irish hybrid state. Politics intermingles with the personal or familial levels in terms of identity and marriage. Edgeworth follows Burkean rhetoric and sets the healthy family up as the smallest unit that carries a healthy nation. By sending the designated hero Colombre on a quest to restore his father’s, he inadvertently reinstates the lost patriarchal authority. The romance plotline supports the political-didactic goals of Edgeworth’s novel. Working with binary and mirror structures, allusions to Greek and Roman learning, Edgeworth constantly pushes the reader to side with the benign, enlightened hero to combat Absenteeism and the predominantly negative, racist image of Ireland. Edgeworth exposes the fashionista in London as well as the corrupt agents and the nouveau riche in Dublin as corrupters, vain sinners and pretenders. Her play on theatrical conventions of low and high characters, the fashion world as a theatrical illusion and concrete illusions to Shakespearean dramas and personae are embedded in a Miltonian frame of hell and heaven. Yet, she completely ignores that her perfect hybrid state favours a class-conscious, strongly elitist, mainly Protestant society that accepts English hegemony at the detriment of an Irish identity in all areas of society: religion, class, and gender.

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