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When, in 1849, the first two volumes of Macaulay’s History were issued, Miss Edgeworth, then in her eighty-third winter, was greatly delighted to find her name, coupled with a compliment to one of her characters, enshrined in a note to chap. vi. But her gratification was qualified by the fact that she could discover no similar reference to her friend, Sir Walter Scott. The generous “twinge of pain,” to which she confesses, was intelligible. Scott had always admired her genius, and she admired his. In the “General Preface” to the Waverley Novels, twenty years before, he had gone so far as to say that, without hoping to emulate “the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact” of Miss Edgeworth, he had attempted to do for his own country what she had done for hers; and it is clear, from other sources, that this was no mere form of words. And he never wavered in his admiration. In his last years, not many months before his death, when he had almost forgotten her name, he was still talking kindly of her work. Speaking to Mrs. John Davy of Miss Austen and Miss Ferrier, he said: “And there’s that Irish lady, too–but I forget everybody’s name now” … “she’s very clever, and best in the little touches too. I’m sure in that children’s story, where the little girl parts with her lamb, and the little boy brings it back to her again, there’s nothing for it but just to put down the book and cry.”[25] The reference is to “Simple Susan,” the longest and prettiest tale in the Parent’s Assistant.

[Note:

4: Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott, ch. lxxxi. ad finem.]

Another anecdote pleasantly connects the same book with a popular work of a later writer. Readers of Cranford will recall the feud between the Johnson-loving Miss Jenkyns of that story and its Pickwick -loving Captain Brown. The Captain–as is well-known–met his death by a railway accident, just after he had been studying the last monthly “green covers” of Dickens. Years later, the assumed narrator of Cranford visits Miss Jenkyns, then faliing into senility. She still vaunts The Rambler; still maunders vaguely of the “strange old book, with the queer name, poor Captain Brown was killed for reading-that book by Mr. Boz, you know– Old Poz; when I was a girl–but that’s a long time ago–I acted Lucy in Old Poz.” There can be no mistake. Lucy is the justice’s daughter in Miss Edgeworth’s little chamber-drama.