Maria Edgeworth: Distinguishing the Irish Anglican Ascendancy from the English

Abstract

Maria Edgeworth:Distinguishing the Irish Anglican Ascendancy from the English David Clare (bio) In his 1922 novel Ulysses, James Joyce included a fictionalised depiction of the time he spent living in a Martello Tower in Sandycove, County Dublin, but he turned his real-life roommate –Samuel Chenevix Trench, a member of the Irish Anglican Ascendancy – into the Stage English character Haines. In 1983, when UTV, RTÉ, and Channel Four co-operated in creating the Irish R.M. television series, based on short stories by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, they elected to cast the English actor Peter Bowles as Major Yeates and to change the Major from an upper middle class Irish Anglican to an Englishman. (In the original stories, Yeates's Irish 'blood' and nationality are referenced repeatedly.)1 Likewise, in Irish theatre and film, there is a long history of getting English actors to play Irish Anglican parts, without getting them to adopt even a hint of Irishness in their embodying of the parts (e.g., adopting the 'Protestant accent', also known as the 'Trinity accent', long common among middle- and upper-class people from Church of Ireland backgrounds). Prominent examples include the performances by Dame Maggie Smith as Lady Naylor and Keeley Hawes as Lois Farquar in the 1999 film version of Elizabeth Bowen's 1929 novel The Last September and by Tom Courtenay as Christopher Gore in the Gate Theatre's 2005 premiere production of Brian Friel's The Home Place.2 On a related note, James S. Donnelly, Jr has noted the longstanding and lingering tendency among Irish nationalists of referring to the colonial landowners – even Irish-born ones – as 'English landlords'.3 And, over recent decades, populist historians, prominent commentators in the media, and even published academics have also routinely referred to Ireland as having been owned by 'English landlords' during the colonial era (that is, prior to the redistribution of land that accompanied the various Land Acts passed by the British parliament between 1870 and 1909).4 All of this suggests the widespread belief that an English person and a member of the Irish Anglican Ascendancy are essentially the same thing. This, however, flies in the face of the efforts of [End Page 333] talented women writers from the Ascendancy, who for centuries laboured to distinguish Irish Anglicans from the English in their fiction. This tradition goes back to Maria Edgeworth, who in all five of her Irish novels emphasises that members of the Ascendancy are much closer in character to Irish Gaelic Catholics than they are to the English. Castle Rackrent: The Irishness of the Irish Anglican Ascendancy In Edgeworth's first novel, Castle Rackrent, from 1800, the Irish Anglican landlords suffer from all the vices and virtues normally ascribed to the Irish Catholic tenantry in English literature. Sir Patrick is plagued by drink, Sir Murtagh by a love of lawsuits,5 Sir Kit by gambling, and Sir Condy by a love of politics. All four of Thady's masters are impetuous (a common description of the Irish in the English press at the time),6 and all four masters are commended for being 'monuments to old Irish hospitality'7 with the exception of Sir Murtagh. At the end of the book, the novel's fictional 'Editor' says that the 'inhabitants' of Ireland possess a 'mixture of quickness, simplicity, cunning, carelessness, dissipation, disinterestedness, shrewdness, and blunder' (121), and the Editor is quite clearly referring to both the Rackrent landlords and their tenants. In Castle Rackrent, Edgeworth not only stresses that the Irish gentry of the mid-eighteenth century were actually quite similar to the lower-class Irish; she also maintains that these Irish aristocrats differ markedly from the English. Much has been said about the Jewish religion of Sir Kit's wife, Jessica,8 but little has been said about her English nationality. She brings an English sensibility with her to the Rackrent estate, and, when Sir Kit explains Irish ways and terms to her, we see not only how English she is but just how Irish he is. In one humorous conversation, Jessica is horrified by the site of turf stacks and bog, scorns the Irish trees for being 'shrubs' (77...