Practical Education.
Edgeworth, Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Practical Education. New York: Self, Brown, & Stansbury, 1801.
2 vols.; pages stiff from dampening throughout; closed vertical tear to three quarters of page 222 in vol. 1; lightly foxed, especially at edges; endpapers offset; bookseller’s label to front pastedown of vol. 1; full leather; wear to extremities. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First American edition of Edgeworth’s third book, exceedingly scarce; a collaborative effort with her father “presenting in a number of discursive essays on modification of the theories started by Rosseau’s Émile, and adopted by Edgeworth and [Thomas] Day.” It was preceded by the first edition of 1798, and was translated into French soon after publication in the States by M. Pictet for his “Bibliothèque Britannique.” (DNB, pp. 380-82)
Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) spent most of her life shuttling between her family’s estate in Ireland and various spots in England, where she was apparently the apple of literary London’s eye, and enjoyed occasional excursions on the continent. In her youth, her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817), entrusted to her the education of several of her younger half-siblings—Maria was the product of Richard’s union with the first of his four wives, all of whom bore him children. She thus derived “a practical knowledge of education” (DNB, p. 380), based on Richard’s theories which were largely derived from Rousseau, and which permeated Maria’s children’s books. Through her care for the financial stability of the family and the general well-being of the Irish tenants, she “acquired the familiarity with fashionable people and with the Irish peasantry which was to be of use in her novels” (ibid.), and became imbued with a humanitarian spirit put to the test during the famine of 1846, when 150 barrels of flour arrived from Boston addressed to “Miss Edgeworth for her poor” (DNB, p. 382).
Like other female writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, notably Emily Dickinson, Edgeworth “wrote in the common sitting-room, amidst all manner of domestic distractions.” Most of her pre-1817 works passed through her father’s hands and under his pencil. Most notably, Ormond, the last of Maria’s books to come out before her father’s death, contained a few scenes he had added. As was his request, Maria completed and published his memoir in 1820, which was panned in the Quarterly Review but which sold well. A second edition was warranted in 1828 and a third, with Maria’s revisions to her portion of the text, in 1844.
Sir Walter Scott wrote at the close of Waverley and in his preface to the collected novels that Edgeworth’s descriptions of Irish character, especially in Castle Rackrent, “encouraged him to make a similar experiment upon Scottish character in the Waverley novels” (DNB, p. 381). That his contribution to literature outlasted hers can be attributed to the decidedly inferior style of her novels and stories. “But the brightness of her style, her keen observation of character, and her shrewd sense and vigour make her novels still readable, in spite of obvious artistic defects. Though her puppets are apt to be wooden, they act their parts with spirit enough to make us forgive the perpetual moral lectures” (DNB, p. 382). Her first book was Letters to Literary Ladies (1795). Her more straightforwardly instruction texts include Parent’s Assistant (first part, 1896; six volumes, 1800); Early Lessons (1801, with sequels in the early 1820s); and Moral Tales (1801).
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