Notes on Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth

This short novel should be on the required reading list of every 18^th-19^th century British lit course; students of history would benefit as well. Where else can one learn so graphically about ruinous Irish land tenure practices, whereby (often absentee Anglo-Irish) landlords would let their land to middlemen who in turn let the land out to under-tenants at exorbitant rents. If the middleman wasn’t punctual with his rent—or if the landlord needed more ready cash to fund his high living (gambling, drinking)—he would send his driver around to seize cattle and crops from the under-tenants. Thus, the under-tenants sometimes ended up paying rent twice, and this was in addition to owing duty fowls, duty turkeys, duty geese, duty thread, even duty work—obligations that were often written into leases and could be claimed at the pleasure of the landlord.

Besides the actual story of four generations of the Rackrent family, a first-person narrative told by Thady Quirk, the illiterate steward of the family, who dictates his account to an English editor, there are copious footnotes, glossaries, and a preface and afterword provided by the editor. Some of the controversy surrounding the novel concerns the motivation behind this apparatus. The first edition of the novel appeared in 1800 on the eve of the Anglo-Irish Union, which the Edgeworth family supported. Was the apparatus designed to explain Irish customs and linguistic peculiarities to an English audience as well as to show that the Ireland of the present was a suitable partner for England? Indeed, the narrative is set in an earlier period—prior to 1782—and the editor frequently remarks that such and such a custom—e.g., Irish servants’ use of their wigs rather than brooms for sweeping—was a thing of the past.

More intriguing is the question of how we are to interpret the intentions behind Thady’s “unvarnished tale.” Is he the genuinely loyal steward of “the family” he serves as he purports to be, in which case much of the interest of the reading experience is the gap between what Thady says and what we piece together from his words and omissions? (In other words, Thady is what came to be called an unreliable narrator.) Or is Thady a cunning Irishman whose true loyalty belongs with his family and the novel “a menacing story of the revolt of the repressed, the return of the dispossessed”? (Haruko Takakuwa) After all it is Thady’s own son, the diligent and hard-working Jason, formerly agent of the estate, who bails out the last profligate Rackrent and ends up as owner. Thady, moreover, narrates his tale from inside Castle Rackrent, looking up at the portrait of Sir Patrick, the paterfamilias; the Rackrent family line has died out and the castle is now in the possession of the servants.