Castle Rackrent
Castle Rackrent is a mercilessly funny portrait of Irish gentry collapse, told through the voice of Thady Quirk, a steward whose devotion to the Rackrent family borders on the pathological. Thady means to celebrate his masters, but his breathless accounts of Sir Patrick's drunken generosity, Sir Murtagh's petty cruelties, and the final desperate heirs reveal a household devouring itself. The tragedy hides in the telling: Thady never notices he's documenting the destruction of everything he loves, nor that his own sons might finally profit from the ruin. Published in 1800, just as the Act of Union erased Ireland's legislative independence, Edgeworth's masterpiece operates on two levels, a wickedly funny domestic satire and a quietly devastating commentary on colonial dispossession. It was radical in its time and still stings now: one of the first novels in English to center an Irish voice, and certainly the first to let a servant tell the story of his betters' downfall.
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“We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters.””
— Maria Edgeworth
“When a man's over head and shoulders in debt, he may live the faster for it, and the better if he goes the right way about it, or else how is it so many live so well, as we see every day after they are ruined?””
— Maria Edgeworth
“The prevailing taste of the public for anecdote has been censured and ridiculed by critics, who aspire to the character of superior wisdom: but if we consider it in a proper point of view, this taste is an incontestible proof of the good sense and profoundly philosophic temper of the present times. Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labors!””
— Maria Edgeworth
“[He] was very ill-used by the Government about a place that was promised him and never given, after his supporting them against his conscience very honourably, and being greatly abused for it, which hurt him greatly, he having the name of a great patriot in the country before.””
— Maria Edgeworth
“Thady begins his memoirs of the Rackrent Family by dating MONDAY MORNING, because no great undertaking can be auspiciously commenced in Ireland on any morning but MONDAY MORNING. 'Oh, please God we live till Monday morning, we'll set the slater to mend the roof of the house. On Monday morning we'll fall to, and cut the turf. On Monday morning we'll see and begin mowing. On Monday morning, please your honour, we'll begin and dig the potatoes,' etc.All the intermediate days, between the making of such speeches and the ensuing Monday, are wasted: and when Monday morning comes, it is ten to one that the business is deferred to THE NEXT Monday morning. The Editor knew a gentleman, who, to counteract this prejudice, made his workmen and labourers begin all new pieces of work upon a Saturday.””
— Maria Edgeworth
