Edgeworth, RICHARD LOVELL, Miss Edgeworth's father, was born at Bath, 31st May 1744. He came of a family that for 160 years had been settled in Ireland, at Edgeworthstown, County Longford. After nine years' schooling at Warwick, Drogheda, and Longford, then five months of dissipation at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1761 he was removed to Oxford, where, as a gentleman-commoner of Corpus, he passed two 'delightful, profitable' years. At Blackbourton, 14 miles distant, lived a friend of his father's, Paul Elers, a squire whose quiver was fuller than his purse: with one of his daughters Edgeworth eloped to Scotland (1763). The young couple spent a twelvemonth at Edgeworthstown, and finally settled at Hare Hatch, near Reading, Edgeworth meanwhile keeping terms in the Temple, till his father's death (1769) allowed him to give up all thought of the bar. As a boy of seven he had become 'irrecoverably a mechanic' through the sight of an electrical machine; and his whole life long he was always inventing something—a semaphore, a velocipede, a pedometer, and so forth. One of his inventions brought him across Dr Darwin; and at Lichfield, the Christmas-tide of 1770, he conceived a passion for lovely Honora Sneyd. His wife was away in Berkshire ('she was not of a cheerful temper'); but Thomas Day (q.v.) was with him, and urged him to flight. So with Day and his eldest boy, whom he was educating on Rousseau's system, he did fly to France, and at Lyons diverted himself and the course of the Rhone. Then his wife died, and four months afterwards he wedded Honora (July 1773), to lose her in 1780, and the same year marry her sister Elizabeth. She too died of consumption (1797); but the next wife, Miss Beaufort (1798), survived him by many years. In all he had nineteen children. 'I am not,' he observed, 'a man of prejudices. I have had four wives. The second and third were sisters, and I was in love with the second in the lifetime of the first.' Of his life besides not much more need be told. He advocated parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation; his house was spared by the rebels (1798); and in the last Irish parliament (1798-99) he spoke for the Union, but voted against it, as a measure 'forced down the throats of the Irish, though five-sixths of the nation were against it.' He died 13th June 1817. Masterful, versatile, brilliant, enlightened, he stands as a type of the Superior Being; 'cocksureness' his principal foible. He was the idol of his own womankind, the friend too of Watt and Wedgwood and many more better and greater than himself.
MARIA EDGEWORTH, novelist, was born at Blackbourton, on New-year's Day 1767, and in 1775 was sent to a school at Derby, in 1780 to a fashionable establishment in London. As quite a child she was famed for her story-telling powers, and at thirteen wrote a tale on Generosity. 'Excellent,' said her father, 'and extremely well written; but where's the generosity?' She accompanied him to Ireland in 1782, and thenceforth till his death the two were never separate. For his sake and that of her other dear friends and her country she sacrificed her one romance—refused the Swedish count, M. Edelcrantz, not without much suffering then and long afterwards. This was in 1802 at Paris, where, as again in 1820, and during frequent visits to London, she was greatly lionised. She was at Bowood (Lord Lansdowne's) in 1818, and at Abbotsford in 1823, Scott two years later returning the visit at Edgeworthstown. For the rest, her home life was busy and beneficent, if uneventful. Her eyesight often troubled her; but at seventy she began to learn Spanish, at eighty-two could thoroughly enjoy Macaulay's History, and even mount a ladder to take the top off the clock. She died in her stepmother's arms, 22d May 1849.
To the literary partnership between Mr and Miss Edgeworth we are directly indebted for Practical Education (2 vols. 1798), and the Essay on Irish Bulls (1802). But most of her other works, though they do not bear the joint names, were inspired by her father, and gained or (it may be) lost by his revision. Published between 1795 and 1847, they filled upwards of 20 volumes. Besides the Tales from Fashionable Life and Harrington (an apology for the Jews), there are her three Irish masterpieces, Castle Rackrent (1800), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1817). These, Scott says, 'have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of Ireland, that she may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up. Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable taste which pervade the works of my accomplished friend, I felt that something might be attempted for my own country of the same kind with that which she has so fortunately achieved for Ireland.' The praise from Scott is extravagant; but Turgeneff, too, has recorded how he 'was an unconscious disciple of Miss Edgeworth in setting out on his literary career. . . . It is possible, nay probable, that if Maria Edgeworth had not written about the poor Irish of County Longford and the squires and squireens that it would not have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the classes parallel to them in Russia.' Yes, her novels are too didactic; the plots may be poor, the dramatis persona sometimes wooden; the whole may have too much the tone of a moral Lord Chesterfield; but for wit and pathos, for lively dialogue and simple directness, for bright vivacity and healthy realism, as a mirror, moreover, of the age when they were written, and of that 'most distressful country' in which their best scenes are laid, they still deserve to be read, by subscribers even to Mudie's. And her children's stories—'Lazy Laurence,' and 'Simple Susan,' and the other delightful old friends—are worth all the unchildish books about children which a mawkish sentimentality has brought into recent vogue.
The Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1820; 3d ed. 1844) are autobiographical up to 1782; the completion, less interesting, is by Miss Edgeworth. Of herself there is a Memoir (privately printed, 3 vols. 1867; edited by Aug. J. C. Hare, 2 vols. 1894), on which are founded the Life by Helen Zimmermann ('Eminent Women' series, 1883) and the exquisite sketch by Miss Thackeray [Mrs Richmond Ritchie] in her Book of Sibyls (1883). See, too, the introduction by the latter to Castle Rackrent.