Castle Rackrent

Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick notes that Castle Rackrent, written in 1800, has “gathered a dazzling array of firsts—the first regional novel, the first Big House novel, the first saga novel” (vii). While the novel remains largely unread by modern readers, it has garnered praise from literary greats, such as the famous 20th-century Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, and the 19th-century Scottish writer, Walter Scott, who cited it is as inspiration for his 1814 novel, Waverley. In its day, Castle Rackrent even attracted the attention of the British monarch, George III, who at a time when the United Kingdom had colonized Ireland, said “‘I know something now of my Irish subjects’” (ix).

The novel’s title is satirical, as it combines the “castle” of feudal ownership with the name “Rackrent,” which refers to the practice of the profligate Anglo-Irish landlord who “‘took the land at a reasonable rent and sub-let at the highest price he could get, a procedure which caused untold misery’” (xiv). Other practices of English landlords, which are satirized in the novel, are absenteeism, defined as a practice of collecting Irish rents while being abroad and relying on brutal middlemen to extract rent from tenants; and general neglect of their estate, so that conditions of squalor prevailed. The landlord who practices this in Edgeworth’s novel is called Sir Kit Stopgap, a man who stopgaps on his estate only during hunting season. 

Cautious of procuring the ire of Anglo-Irish landlords, English-born Edgeworth, who was part of this class herself, set the novel “‘before 1782’” to put some distance between its narrative and present conditions (ix). However, the distinction was “lost on some, perhaps in part because the abuses she reported in her novel, rack-renting and absenteeism, still so afflicted and riled Irish Catholics that they struck back at the Anglo-Irish gentry through rural protest” (ix). Written at a time when Edgeworth was awaiting the outcome of the Anglo-Irish dispute over the right to land in Ireland, Castle Rackrent was begun in 1790s, as private entertainment. Given that Castle Rackrent presents “an Anglo-Irish nightmare […] perhaps Edgeworth felt all the more free to tell it since she wrote initially with no intention of being widely read” (xxvi).

The novel marked a new phase of independence in Edgeworth’s writing because it was the first book she wrote without the interference of her father, Richard Edgeworth; however, some critics consider that he wrote the Preface and Postscript to Thady’s narrative and that he recommended the addition of the glossary definition of terms. Castle Rackrent’s narrator, Thady Quirk, was inspired by the voice of John Langan, an Irish Catholic steward, who Edgeworth liked to imitate in speech. Kirkpatrick has written how Thady “divided loyalties and limited power,” which “parallels [Edgeworth’s] own ambiguous status as a woman of the Big House, similarly subordinate, without property or political franchise” (x). Therefore, both Edgeworth and Thady’s efforts to express themselves represent a struggle for self-definition. 

A key inspiration for the Rackrent family was a text on Edgeworth’s own Anglo-Irish ancestors’ in The Black Book of Edgeworthstown, a collection of narratives of struggle to secure their Irish estate as inspiration. While she found inspiration for the extravagance and profligacy of Castle Rackrent’s characters, the family’s connection to the Catholic community was atypical. The Edgeworths’ Catholic connections protected them from the most militant rebellions. For example, in a 1642 Catholic rebellion, the Edgeworth estate was spared being burned down to the ground because one of its residents, Jane Tuite, had been a practicing Catholic. Unlike the notorious absentees, the Edgeworths were closer to their Irish tenants, because they lived and worked on the land and, unusually for a woman, Edgeworth assisted her father with his estate management. Richard Edgeworth was an ambiguous figure, being supportive of both French and American republican revolutions while maintaining his position as a landlord, sanctioned by the British monarchy. He therefore became a target of both Protestant and Catholic wrath. Protestant landowning neighbors suspected him of being a traitor and a spy for French Revolutionaries when he gave Catholics relief. However, some Catholic servants rebels also plotted to take over the land themselves, leaving Maria Edgeworth fearing that she “‘should be at once cowardly and suspicious for the rest of [her] life’” (xxiv).

Edgeworth’s novel is emblematic of her divided loyalties. Kirkpatrick writes that the Preface has been considered by some critics to be “propaganda for the Union of 1800,” which was the parliamentary union of Great Britain and Ireland, an act that promised to reinforce the two countries’ ties but ended up disenfranchising Catholics (xxxiv). The extensive glossary that accompanies the text and frames Thady’s narrative with an introduction and conclusion by an editor in many ways undercuts the Irish Catholic’s authority, because “he is placed firmly within the hierarchical societal order as a laborer who must be policed by gentlemen” (xxvii). Here, Kirkpatrick suggests that Edgeworth sought to create some distance between herself and Thady, her object of study.

However, on the other hand, Kirkpatrick argues that Edgeworth’s inclusion of Jason Quirk prophetically looked forward to how “the rule of law Protestants brought to Ireland would help to produce […] the Irish Catholic middle class,” who would succeed the Anglo-Irish (xxxiii). This strain in the narrative therefore promotes the tendency towards Irish independence above a union with Great Britain.

Kirkpatrick concludes by saying how Edgeworth tried to cast the relationship between England and Ireland in more “sororal terms, describing Ireland […] as a ‘sister country’ and one which ought to be better known” (xxxvi). Edgeworth, then, sets up Irish identity as a dialogue that is “negotiated and constructed, not borne along in the blood” as the Catholic/Protestant divide would have it (xxxvi).