FullReads

[Note:

2: Cf. “Attorney Case” in the story of “Simple Susan.”]

Of the first issue of the Parent’s Assistant in 1796, a sufficient account has already been given. In the “Preface” the practical intention of several of the stories is explicitly set forth. “Lazy Lawrence,” we are told, illustrates the advantages of industry, and demonstrates that people feel cheerful and happy whilst they are employed; while “Tarleton” represents “the danger and the folly of that weakness of mind, and that easiness to be led, which too often pass for good nature”; “The False Key” points out some of the evils to which a well-educated boy, on first going to service, is exposed from the profligacy of his fellow-servants; “The Mimic,” the drawback of vulgar acquaintances; “Barring Out,” the errors to which a high spirit and the love of party are apt to lead, and so forth. In the final paragraph stress is laid upon what every fresh reader must at once recognise as the supreme merit of the stories, namely, their dramatic faculty, or (in the actual words of the “Preface”), their art of “keeping alive hope and fear and curiosity, by some degree of intricacy.”[24] The plausibility of invention, the amount of ingenious contrivance and of clever expedient in these professedly nursery stories, is indeed extraordinary; and nothing can exceed the dexterity with which–to use Dr. Johnson’s words concerning She Stoops to Conquer –“the incidents are so prepared as not to seem improbable.” There is no better example of this than the admirable tale of “The Mimic,” in which the most unlooked-for occurrences succeed each other in the most natural way, while the disappearance at the end of the little sweep, who has levanted up the chimney in Frederick’s new blue coat and buff waistcoat, is a master-stroke. Everybody has forgotten everything about him until the precise moment when he is needed to supply the fitting surprise of the finish,–a surprise which is only to be compared to that other revelation in The Rose and the Ring of Thackeray, where the long-lost and obnoxious porter at Valoroso’s palace, having been turned by the Fairy Blackstick into a door knocker for his insolence, is restored to the sorrowing Servants’ Hall exactly when his services are again required in the capacity of Mrs. Gruffanuffs husband. But in Miss Edgeworth’s little fable there is no fairy agency. “Fairies were not much in her line,” says Lady Ritchie, Thackeray’s daughter, “but philanthropic manufacturers, liberal noblemen, and benevolent ladies in travelling carriages, do as well and appear in the nick of time to distribute rewards or to point a moral.”

[Note:

3: The “Preface to Parents”–Miss Emily Lawless suggests to me–was probably by Mr. Edgeworth.]

Although, by their sub-title, these stories are avowedly composed for children, they are almost as attractive to grown-up readers. This is partly owing to their narrative skill, partly also to the clear characterisation, which already betrays the coming author of Castle Rackrent and Belinda and Patronage –the last, under its first name of The Freeman Family, being already partly written, although many years were still to pass before it saw the light in 1814. Readers, wise after the event, might fairly claim to have foreseen from some of the personages in the Parent’s Assistant that the author, however sedulous to describe “such situations only … as children can easily imagine,” was not able entirely to resist tempting specimens of human nature like the bibulous Mr. Corkscrew, the burglar butler in “The False Key,” or Mrs. Pomfret, the housekeeper of the same story, whose prejudices against the Villaintropic Society, and its unholy dealing with the ” drugs and refuges ” of humanity, are quite in the style of the Mrs. Slipslop of a great artist whose works one would scarcely have expected to encounter among the paper-backed and grey-boarded volumes which lined the shelves at Edgeworthstown. Mrs. Theresa Tattle, again, in “The Mimic,” is a type which requires but little to fit it for a subordinate part in a novel, as is also Lady Diana Sweepstakes in “Waste not, Want not.” In more than one case, we seem to detect an actual portrait. Mr. Somerville of Somerville (“The White Pigeon”), to whom that “little town” belonged,–who had done so much “to inspire his tenantry with a taste for order and domestic happiness, and took every means in his power to encourage industrious, well-behaved people to settle in his neighbourhood,”–can certainly be none other than the father of the writer of the Parent’s Assistant, the busy and beneficent, but surely eccentric, Mr. Edgeworth of Edgeworthstown.