ABSTRACT
Since our sense of the greatness of Waverley requires us to see in it far more than what Scott gives as his avowed intention in the book, his acknowledgement to Miss Edgeworth might be taken as no more than a graceful compliment, were it not that in Castle Rackrent the Irish novelist too can be seen to have gone beyond her brief, and in a way very similar to Scott. For
if we compare Castle Rackrent with Waverley, we see that Miss Edgeworth’s pathetic hero, Sir Condy, is a historical as well as a national type; like the Baron Bradwardine in Scott’s novel, he is the man who lives by the barbaric standard of honour in a commercial society where that standard can no longer apply. In the perspective of history, it could be argued, the Act of Union signified for Ireland what the failure of the Jacobites fifty years earlier had signified for Scotland, the final extinction of the code of honour as a standard of social conduct. Scott of course is fully aware of this historical perspective and estab lishes it with masterly precision without once stating it explicitly. It is implicit in Castle Rackrent, but in an altogether more shadowy way. That Miss Edgeworth was half-aware of the historical implications is revealed, I think, by her casting the whole into the mouth of Thady, the old retainer; for this gives to the story the elegiac tone of one who regrets or at any rate acknowledges the death of an old order, the irrelevance of much of his past.
