ABSTRACT
IT is curious to think that Miss Edgeworth, at the end of her long life, was in correspondence with Charles Lever, and reading one of his novels aloud to her family. For in a story such as ‘Rosanna’ from her Popular Tales, her stand point seems at the opposite extreme from his. In this story the secondary villain, Sir Hyacinth O’Brien, is the very spit of Charles O’Malley’s uncle; a type for which Miss Edgeworth feels as much contempt as Lever feels affection. In one particular, it is true, Sir Hyacinth differs from a Lever hero: he uses his position to try to seduce a country maiden. And this suffic iently betrays his parent, who is Goldsmith’s Squire Thorn hill. Indeed there is a great deal of The Vicar o f Wakefield in the whole structure of this story, and its moral is very similar to that advanced in Goldsmith’s Chapter X IX —that is, the happiness and the importance of ‘the middle station of life’ from which it is a mistake to try to rise. Indeed she had said herself, ‘Popular Tales are not designed for young peoplenor for the fashionable Fine people in society; but for the respectable and useful middling classes of merchants, manu facturers and farmers, for whose entertainment but few books have been professedly written-The language is necessarily plain and the incidents not such as would interest sentimental novel readers who must have Love, love, love and murder,
murder, murder-’1 As this suggests, and the comparison with Goldsmith enforces, Miss Edgeworth’s attitude is thoroughly of the eighteenth century. ‘Without self-approbation, all the luxuries of life are tasteless’—such a judgement reveals the typically Enlightenment compound of strong sense and satis fied complacency.
