ABSTRACT
In his 1790 piece, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke celebrates a rather dubious merit: the English people's 'resistance to innovation', and 'cold sluggishness'. Maria Edgeworth may have had a few prejudices, but they did not prevent her from feeling skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Throughout her life Edgeworth stated her opposition to discussing politics, at the same time that she frequently engaged in political debates in her letters, her essays, and her fiction. Edgeworth draws an analogy between the Greeks and the Irish Catholics in her own nation, moving from there to an informed discussion of the progress of the industrial revolution in Ireland. Anne K. Mellor classifies Edgeworth as a 'feminine Romantic', opposing the radical social views of her masculine counterparts such as William Blake, William Godwin, and the young William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. The character of Juba richly illustrates Edgeworth‘s attraction to social paternalism.
