Abstract
In March 1822, while visiting David Ricardo at his estate, Gatcomb Park, Maria Edgeworth saw Oliver Cromwell’s head; ‘not his picture’, she wrote to her Aunt Margaret Ruxton, ‘- not his bust — nothing of stone or marble or plaister of Paris, but his real head, which is now in the possession of Mr. Ricardo’s brother in law (Mr. Wilkinson)’. With macabre relish, Edgeworth related that it
is the only head upon record which has after death been subject to the extremes of honor and infamy — It having been first embalmed and laid in satin state — Then dragged out of the coffin at the restoration — chopped from the body and stuck upon a pole before Westminster hall, where it stood twenty five years till one stormy night the pole broke and down fell the head at the centinel[’]s [sic] feet who stumbled over it in the dark twice thinking it a stone, then cursed and picked it up and found it was a head. Its travels and adventures from the centinel through several hands would be too long to tell. It came in short into the Russell family and to one who was poor and in debt and who yet loved the head so dearly that he never would sell it to Coxe of the Museum till Coxe got him deep in his debt arrested and threw him into jail. Then and not till the last extremity he gave it up for liberty.1
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Notes
Maria Edgeworth, Letters from England 1813–1844, ed. Christina Colvin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 364–5.
David Weatherall, the head was genuine, its provenance finally established in 1934. David Ricardo: A Biography (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 122 n4.
On Edgeworth and banking see Gallagher, Nobody’s Story and Mark Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Richard A. Austen-Leigh, Austen Papers, 1704–1856 (Spottiswode: Ballantyne, 1942), 211.
For a nuanced and complex reading of Austen’s relation to the national tale by way of their common ‘gothic’ form, see Miranda Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 150–85.
Marylin Butler, jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
For a reading of the Lydian myth and its relation to economic theory see Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 11–62.
Developed primarily in Ireland, largely in response to the catastrophe of the 1798 Rebellion, and latterly in Scotland, the national tale combined elements of domestic novels, romance, travel-writing, and antiquarianism to assert if not the compatibility of modem forms of value (represented by English landownership and contractual law) and archaic traditions (represented by Gaelic and Highland culture) then possibly their not-quite peaceful co-existence in cosmopolitan Britain. The tenuousness is important. What marks the national tale generically is the way it fails to convert Britain’s various cultural and regional identities into a comprehensive national unit. The novels of Sydney Owenson are usually thought to define the paradigm of the national tale; her marriage plots convey both the desirability of union and its inevitable tensions. See for instance, Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, ed. W. J. McCormack and Kim Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 135.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, ed. R. I. Moore (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 2.
Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5.
On the economic valences of it-narratives, see the essays collected in Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cranbury: Bucknell University Press, 2007).
Robert Miles, ‘What is a Romantic Novel?’ Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34 (2001): 180–201.
See texts cited above, note 14 on Irish context. For the novel’s relation to Scottish nationalism around and after the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, see Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)
Leith Davis, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation 1707–1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
My account of the Bank of Ireland and the Irish Pound Report comes from L. M. Cullen, ‘The Irish Economy in the Eighteenth Century’, in The Formation of the Bank of Ireland, ed. L. M. Cullen (Cork: Mercier, 1969), 9–21
Cormac O Grada, ‘Reassessing the Irish Pound Report of 1804’, Bulletin of Economic Research 43 (1991): 5–19
For the details of the establishment of the Bank of Ireland, see T K. Whitaker, ‘Origins and Consolidation, 1783–1826’, in Bicentenary Essays: Bank of Ireland 1783–1983, ed. F. S. L. Lyons (London: Gill and Macmillan, 1983), 11–29.
Susan Manning, ‘Antiquarianism, the Scottish Science and Man, and the Emergence of Modem Disciplinarity’, in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 57–76 (63).
See Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Yoon Sun Lee, ‘A Divided Inheritance: Scott’s Antiquarian Novel and the British Nation’, English Literary History 64 (1997): 537–67 (539).
Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 21.
On serialization in nationalist formation see Benedict Anderson, ‘Nationalism, Identity, and the World-in-Motion: On the Logics of Seriality’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 117–33.
Modem historians have agreed, though economic factors remain somewhat supplementary to broader arguments about national identity. For a review of the ongoing debates, see Christopher A. Whately Scottish Society, 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, Towards Industrialization (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 48–52
Edward Wakefield, Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political (London: Longman, 1811), vi.
Roger Rudings, Annals of the Coinage of Great Britain and Its Dependencies, 3rd edn. (London: Hearne, 1840), xiv.
Lee Erickson, ‘The Economy of Novel Reading: Jane Austen and the Circulating Library’, in The Economy of Literary Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 125–41.
For Austen’s comments on More see Jane Austen’s Letters to her Sister, 256, 410. See also Peter Garside and Elizabeth McDonald, ‘Evangelicalism and Mansfield Park’, Trivium 10 (1975): 34–50
David Monaghan, ‘Mansfield Park and Evangelicalism: A Reassessment’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 3 (1978): 215–30
Mary Waldron, ‘The Frailties of Fanny: Mansfield Park and the Evangelical Movement’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6 (1994): 259–81.
A. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1832 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 32–4.
T. Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility’, parts 1 and 2, in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. T. Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 107–60.
Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education with A View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune (London: Cadell, 1799)
Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife: Comprehending Observations of Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals (London: Cadell, 1809), 191–2.
Though hardly a Jacobin — on the contrary — More was nevertheless the object of some critical circumspection in the loyalist press, notably the Anti-Jacobin Review, which took her to task for promulgating charity on such a wide and abstract canvas. Charity was best administered within the confines of the estate where it could also form the basis for a respect for the benevolence of a hierarchical order. See Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 243.
For a comparison of Hannah More’s narrative strategies and Austen’s narrative persona see Emily Rena-Dozier, ‘Hannah More and the Invention of Nanative Authority’, English Literary History 71 (2004): 209–27.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. John Wiltshire, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 478.
On absenteeism in Mansfield Park in both its religious and economic connotations see Gabrielle D. V. White, Jane Austen in the Context of Abolition: ‘A fling at the slave trade’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 22–7.
See Colin Jager, ‘Mansfield Park and the End of Natural Theology’, Modern Language Quarterly 63 (2002): 31–63.
Thomas Clarkson, History of the Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: Parke, 1808).
George E. Boulukos, ‘The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 39 (2006): 361–83.
Richard Allen, ‘The British Nation and the Colonies: Mansfield Park’, in Literature and Nation: Britain and India, 1800–1900, ed. Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi (New York: Routledge, 2000), 43–54
Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
William Galperin, The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 161–6.
C. W. Pasley Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (London: Edmund Lloyd, 1811).
Claudius Buchanan, Christian Researches in Asia with Notices of the Translation of the Scriptures (New York, 1812). For context see Karen Chancey ‘The Star in the East: The Controversy over Christian Missions to India, 1805–1813’, Historian 60 (1998): 507–23.
Tim Fulford, ‘Sighing for a Solider: Austen and Military Pride and Prejudice’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 57 (2002): 153–78.
For the power of paper to produce its own standards and systems as well as the concomitant intersection between ‘bank-paper’ and ‘book-paper’ see Kevin McLaughlin, Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age (Philadelpia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
On political economy in Emma see Robert Miles, ‘A Fall in the Price of Bread: Speculation and the Real in Emma’, Novel 37 (2003–4): 66–85
Beth Foakes Tobin, ‘The Moral and Political Economy of Property in Austen’s Emma’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 (1990): 229–54.
For the economic valences of the Waverley Novels see Burgess, British Fiction; Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)
Katherine Sutherland, ‘Fictional Economies: Adam Smith, Walter Scott and the Nineteenth-Century Novel’, English Literary History 54 (1987): 97–127.
Silvana Colella, ‘Monetary Patriotism: The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther, The Antiquary, and the Currency Question’, Nineteenth Century Studies 17 (2003): 53–71
Walter Scott, Letters of Malachi Malagrowther on the Currency, in Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, ed. Robert Cadell (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1836), 373.
Daniel Dreadnaught, Familiar Epistles, Letter the First: Addressed to Malachi Malagrowther, Esq. (London: Griffiths, 1826), 11.
John Wilson Croker. The Croker Papers: The Writings and Correspondence of the Late John Wilson Croker, ed. Louis J. Jennings (London: Murray, 1884), 3: 318.
Walter Scott, Chronicles of the Canongate, ed. Claire Lamont (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 82.
Tara Ghoshal Wallace, ‘The Elephant’s Foot and the British Mouth: Walter Scott on Imperial Rhetoric’, European Romantic Review 13 (2002): 311–24 (322).
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Dick, A. (2013). Standard Novels. In: Romanticism and the Gold Standard. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292926_5
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