37 pages • 1 hour read
Maria EdgeworthCastle Rackrent
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1800A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Preface-“An Hibernian Tale”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
Edgeworth begins by commenting that the current taste for “anecdote” about common people, as opposed to the history of heroes, is a positive phenomenon (1). She surmises that “the heroes of history are so decked out by the fine fancy of the professed historian […] that few have sufficient taste, wickedness or heroism, to sympathise with in their fate” (1).
She claims that through small incidents such as “careless conversations […] [and] half finished sentences […] we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover” the “real characters” of our subjects (1). She says that we are right to focus on the lives of even “the worthless and insignificant” because it is by comparing their happiness or misery in relation to their livelihoods that we can better estimate their virtue or vice (1).
In regard to style, the biographer ought to write a “plain unvarnished tale” so that his literariness does not mar the authenticity of his narrative or cause deception (2). She then goes on to describe how her work was taken from the mouth of “an illiterate old steward” who was partial and familiar with the Rackrent family (3). The tale is written in Thady’s idiom, which is “incapable of translation” and something that required him to set aside “his habitual laziness” long enough (4). She emphasizes again that these are tales “‘of other times,’” and that the manners in Castle Rackrent have “long since been extinct in Ireland” (4).
With this extinction of old landed gentry habits, nations and individuals will lose their attachment to identity and will look back on their ancestors and laugh. Edgeworth concludes by assuming that Ireland will soon lose her distinctive identity:“when Ireland loses her identity by an union with Great Britain, she will look back with a smile of good-humoured complacency on the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of her former existence” (5).
“An Hibernian Tale” Summary
The novel begins on a Monday morning, when the narrator, Thady Quirk, introduces himself and says that he has “voluntarily undertaken to publish the Memoirs of the Rackrent Family,” which his own family have served for generations (7). Thady wears a long great coat winter and summer, and remarks that he is scruffy, especially compared to his son, Jason, the “high gentleman” attorney (8). He is proud to serve the Rackrent Family, who are one of the most ancient in the land, their former name being O’Shaughlin, indicating that they were related to the old kings of Ireland. By an Act of Parliament, the O’Shaughlins had to take the name Rackrent in order to retain their privileges.
Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin, to whom Thady’s grandfather was driver, indulges in a lavish lifestyle, frequently entertaining guests, drinking everyone under the table, and even inventing raspberry whiskey. He dies in the middle of his favorite pastime, drinking, and his funeral is a lavish, well-attended affair, even if his body is seized for debt. His son and heir, Sir Murtagh Rackrent, refuses to pay a shilling of the debts, even though he is bound to do so.
Murtagh does not take after Patrick, never opening his house to guests and not even giving his tenants whiskey. Rather, he occupies himself with the business of litigation, boasting that he has a lawsuit for “every letter in the alphabet” (15). While he has lost only one lawsuit, even the ones in which he is victorious require him to part with copious amounts of money. His wife, a former widow and from the family of the Skinflints, is, as her name would suggest, frugal and austere, “a strict observer for self and servants of Lent, and all Fast days, but not holidays” (13). She opens a charity school for poor children, where they are taught to read and write “gratis,” but have to spin linen for her, equally gratis (13).
Against Thady’s advice, Murtagh digs up a fairy mound and as a result, the fairies take their vengeance and he wakes up coughing and spitting blood. When he dies, his wife leaves Rackrent, never having really loved him or the land in the first place. Murtagh has no children, so Rackrent is passed on to his younger brother, a dashing young officer called Sir Kit Stopgap. True enough to his name, Sir Kit grows tired of the estate when the sporting season is over and leaves for Bath, even as he has made plans with an architect for improving the place. His work on the estate is run through a middle man, of the kind who “grind[s] the face of the poor” by exploiting the tenants, especially when Kit requires extra money to pay off the gambling debts he has amassed in Bath (21). To squeeze out enough money of the land, the lease is advertised to the highest bidder and the poor tenants are turned out.
Thady’s son, Jason, who is a clerk, draws up proposals to bid for the land and with Kit “knowing no more of the land than the child unborn” accepts the £200 needed for it (22).
Kit, who has lost significant amounts of money at gambling, sends Thady over an announcement that he is going to marry a grand English heiress. Thady is horrified that on arrival, “the bride might well be a great fortune—she was a Jewish by all accounts” and goes on to make some Anti-Semitic remarks about how having such a “heretic Blackamore” as a mistress would bring misfortune on them all (25-26). When the new bride will not talk to Thady, he wonders whether she speaks English at all.
The honeymoon period is over very quickly as Kit is indignant that the lady will not hand over her diamonds, as she promised to in marriage. When she refuses, Kit, first of all, insists on serving pork at every meal and then looks her away in her room. As Kit brings her dinner himself, nobody sees her for seven years.
Once she is out of the way, Kit, “gay and gallant,” begins throwing galas (30). Nobody dares to ask about the details of his former wife’s banishment because Kit is a proficient and ruthless dueler, and they fear for their lives.
As the lady grows sicker, Kit thinks how to poach the diamond cross from her on her deathbed and exchanges letters with several women about which one may be his next wife. A scandal ensues and Kit duels against the men who would question his honor. However, in one of the duels, “after hitting the toothpick out of his adversary’s finger and thumb, he received a ball in a vital part, and was brought home, in little better than an hour after the affair, speechless, on a hand-barrow” (33). Kit is buried and given his wake the same day and there is mourning throughout the land; however, his wife is jubilant and kisses her diamond cross, looking up to heaven. Though some men come to release her from banishment and people lavish her with praise, she also leaves Ireland, in Thady’s words, “‘as rich as a Jew’” (36).
The next heir—Sir Conolly, or Condy Rackrent—is Thady’s “great favourite,” and his first action is to erect a handsome marble stone as a monument to Patrick, whom he considers a great patron of Irish hospitality (37).
Preface-“An Hibernian Tale” Analysis
Thady’s account of life under three Rackrent heirs is told in ways that exemplify the ideas set out in the Preface. First of all, the figure of Thady, dressed in his “long great coat,” one that the footnote refers to as being of “high antiquity” in Ireland, seems an authentic representative of the country (7). His observations are, therefore, what the Preface would call those “of a little man written by himself” (2). His use of vernacular, which Edgeworth claims to be an “idiom […] incapable of translation” and fears maybe unintelligible to the English reader, is in reality English with a peppering of Irish expressions and turns of phrase (4). Irishisms come in the form of individual words; for example, “childer” instead of children, or in Thady’s repetitive and circumlocutory manner of expression (18). For example, Thady says, “I had nobody to talk to and if it had not been for my pipe and tobacco should, I verily believe, have broke my heart for poor Sir Murtagh” (19). Thady’s sensory pleasure, whether in his comforting pipe or in lavish festivity, supports the Editor’s characterization of him as a simple “illiterate old steward” (3).
He, like the Rackrents, are part of the Ireland that Edgeworth considers moribund, with the potential to become extinct following the upcoming union with Great Britain. Therefore, the Rackrents’ corrupt ways are presented as a feature of Ireland’s “former existence,” meaning that current Anglo-Irish landlords may not need to be offended (5). The Rackrents’ immoderation—Sir Patrick’s in drinking, Sir Murtagh’s in litigating, and Sir Kit’s in gambling—are positioned as contrary to the rationality that Britain wants to associate itself with, and therefore as typically Irish. However, the landlords are also corrupt in their absenteeism, whether topographical, as in Sir Kit’s case, or in simply not looking out for the wellbeing of their land and tenants, as with Sir Murtagh and Sir Patrick. Their style of ruling through self-interest is less a result of their Irishness than it is due to the British-imposed feudal system that has allowed them to rule over lands that they have little knowledge of and manage badly.
Related Titles
By Maria Edgeworth
