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    Castle Rackrent
    Castle Rackrent
    Castle Rackrent
    Ebook121 pages2 hours

    Castle Rackrent

    By Maria Edgeworth

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    Faithful family employee Thady Quirk recounts the decline, over four generations, of the Rackrent family. Through gambling, hapless litigation, and general extravagance the Rackrent’s ruin is accomplished, but Thady is steadfast in defence of his masters.

    With the short novel Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth is said to have originated a number of literary genres and subgenres, including the historical novel, the Anglo-Irish novel and the “Big House” novel, a uniquely Irish subject in which the big house, where the typically English landlord lived, is surrounded by peasants.

    HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 10, 2014
    ISBN9781443437745
    Author

    Maria Edgeworth

    Although born in England in 1768, Maria Edgeworth was raised in Ireland from a young age after the death of her mother. After nearly losing her sight at age fourteen, Edgeworth was tutored at home by her father, helping to run their estate and taking charge of her younger siblings. Over the course of her life she collaborated and published books with her father, and produced many more of her own adult and children’s works, including such classics as Castle Rackrent, Patronage, Belinda, Ormond and The Absentee. Edgeworth spent her entire life on the family estate, but kept up friendships and correspondences with her contemporaries Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, and her writing had a profound influence upon Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray. Edgeworth was outspoken on the issues of poverty, women’s rights, and racial inequalities. During the beginnings of famine in Ireland, Edgeworth worked in relief and support of the sick and destitute. She died in 1849 at the age of 81.

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    Reviews for Castle Rackrent

    3/5

    181 ratings16 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I was glad I read this because it has such a prominent place in literary history, but I did not find it as amusing as it is meant to be.
    • 4/5
      Published in 1800, Castle Rackrent is described in the introduction as one of the most famous unread novels in English. Also from the introduction, 'combining the subtle wit of the French tale, the Gaelic cadences of Irish oral tradition, and Gothic intrigue over property and inheritance, Castle Rackrent has gathered a dazzling array of firsts - the first regional novel, the first socio-historical novel, the first Irish novel, the first Big House novel, the first saga novel.'How all this could fit in 114 pages, which includes a preface and a glossary by the author, is pretty amazing. But on reflection I guess it does! I read this along with the glossary and explanatory notes - the glossary was so much more than a glossary, taking 3 pages to explain the Irish lamentation for the dead, a couple of pages on Fairy Mounts and explaining well and truly what a raking pot of tea is (raised eyebrows...). It's about four inhabitants of the Castle Rackrent, Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit and Sir Conolly and how the run their estate.I picked this up ostensibly to fit in a short 1001 book that also met the March RandomCAT and I'm so glad I did!
    • 3/5
      This was a novella of 89 pages about the Rackrents as told by Sir Condy's loyal servant, Thad or "Old Thady." This is hailed as the first British novel. I found the narrator to be unreliable and babbling. I found the the story boring and plotless.
    • 3/5
      Good book, if you want an introduction to Irish Studies and literature. However, I got bored with stereotypical 2-dimensional characters and social classes - the rich are too pompous, the poors too servile and silly - there are so many 'Your Honour's honour' (feel free to count them), that the whole thing becomes comical to the extreme. Truly, the loss of Irish catholic landowners is no laughing matter, and wasn't then either, but Edgeworth's book did not serve the cause. Instead, I think it contributed to a certain point of view of the Irish as poor, lowly beggars or thieves, well into the nineteenth or twentieth century. To be read, surel, but with a bit of distance and a big pinch of salt as to the narrative and authorial intention.
    • 3/5
      I skipped the lengthy introduction (~25% of this Kindle book!). I wonder whether Susanna Clarke (author of "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell") was a fan of this classic because Edgeworth's glossary and Clarke's footnotes were similar in style!I found many of the anecdotes amusing but the final story about Sir Condy struck me as rather sad.
    • 4/5
      Found the dynamics of interaction between the tenants, servants and gentry to be fascinating. A fast easy read.
    • 3/5
      Good book for identifying what the Big House lifestyle was like in Ireland around the end of the 19th century. The possibility for Honest Thady to be telling a slave narrative is very appealing although there are clear differences in some of the claims that it fits neatly in this category. Recommended read for anyone curious about Irish history.
    • 4/5
      Thady Quirk, aged retainer of the Rackrent family, recounts the family history in typically Irish style. The Quirk family's association began with Sir Patrick O'Shaughlin, who changed his name to Rackrent as a condition of inheritance from a childless cousin. The story concludes with the last of the Rackrents, Sir Conolly, and his loss of the estate. Edgeworth had an ear for dialect. Unfortunately, the flow of Thady's story is interrupted by footnotes and endnotes. Even the footnotes have footnotes.Edgeworth was a contemporary of Jane Austen. Austen referred to Edgeworth's novels in her own novels. Readers who have read their way through Austen's novels might enjoy branching out into works by an author that Austen herself read.
    • 3/5
      This was a novella of 89 pages about the Rackrents as told by Sir Condy's loyal servant, Thad or "Old Thady." This is hailed as the first British novel. I found the narrator to be unreliable and babbling. I found the the story boring and plotless.
    • 3/5
      I did not get on with this novel. It purports to be a series of accounts of the lives and fortunes of a number of heirs to an estate in late 18th century Ireland, narrated unreliably by an estate steward. Essentially this is a novella prefaced by an introduction and other surrounding material by a narrator who is describing the real life estate of Edgeworth's own father. While it's an interesting experiment and must have been well researched, I could not get into it.
    • 2/5
      I read this brief novel by Irish author Maria Edgeworth because it was on the 1001 books to read before you die list and I'm always interested in female authors on the list. This book was published in 1800 and seems to have been written about a "typical" Irish gentry family for the English public. She certainly didn't give Ireland the best representation! This book is narrated by Thady, a servant for the Rackrent family, who witnesses three generations squander away their money and land through poor management, gambling, drink, and unwise marriages. Their land ends up in the hands of Thady's son. This book is important historically because the English ate it up and took it as a real insight into the rise of the middle class in Ireland and the bad habits of the Irish landed gentry. But the writing, plot development, and character development are basically non-existent. Thady's voice gives some character and there are a few funny moments, but this is basically a long run-on sentence in 90 pages. Any book published in the early 1800s will be compared by me to Jane Austen and there is zero comparison here. I'm always impressed with Austen's tight plot and character development and coherence when compared to her contemporaries. This was interesting from a historical perspective, but not really a pleasurable reading experience.
    • 4/5
      Castle Rackrent is not, as its title might suggest, a gothic novel. Instead it is an affectionate satire of Irish life in the 18th Century. The occasion for its publication was the forthcoming union between Ireland and Great Britain. The author proposes to introduce the Irish to their neighbors, claiming that the English know less about Ireland than about many other nations.The novel is in the form of an oral memoir by Thady Quirk, a venerable servant of the Rackrent estate. He recounts four successive holders of the baronetcy, men varying from the genial, to the querulous, to the miserly, and the extravagant. His speech is sprinkled with regionalisms which the author explains in footnotes and an extensive glossary. Many of these notes contain anecdotes that are just as entertaining as the main narrative. Some of the descriptions of Irish customs, mannerisms and speech are no doubt still apt today.Castle Rackrent is a pleasant little story that has its own place in the development of the English novel and will surely amuse anyone who wants to pay a visit to the Ireland of two centuries ago.
    • 3/5
      Late 18th-century satire on British landlords in Ireland, supposedly written by a trusted longtime servant. Edgeworth paints an intriguing portrait fo corruption and its effects on both the haves and have-nots.
    • 3/5
      I'm going to start off this review by saying I was forced to read this book for a class, which is never the best way to find books you like.That said, Castle Rackrent wasn't too bad. It was more boring than anything else. The book is being told as if Thady, the Rackrent's butler (for lack of a better word) were narrating to you out loud the history of the family. You go through four generations of Rackrents and learn about their good points and their bad, how some were good people but weak-minded and how one locked up his wife for eight years because she wouldn't give him her diamond necklace.That's about it. An okay story, but it just seems there wasn't a point to it. I can appreciate what this did for literature as a whole, being the first Anglo-Irish novel and whatnot, and there were some very funny parts, especially the names of places (such as Crookaghnawaturgh, Gruneaghoolaghan, and Allballycarricko'shaughlin, to name a few) but I doubt I would have read it if it wasn't for a class and I doubt I'll read it ever again.
    • 3/5
      A funny little story, scarcely fifty pages, and oh so different to expectation. From the title and the period I think I'd mixed it up with something more nascent Gothic in style, like Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, but instead, this is the tale of four generations of the dissolute aristocratic family the Rackrents, originally the O'Shaughlins. (Speaking of names, there are a few townships at whose nomenclatures I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to laugh, but did anyway.) Similar to Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, the story is told from the point of view of a blindly faithful underling, Thady McQuirk (and that name made it difficult to work out, in the first half-page or so, whether the narrator was male or female). I'm not sure whether poor old Thady ever gains enlightenment to go with his disillusionment, but I enjoyed reading between the lines of his seemingly innocuous portraiture to dissect the characters within - particulary his self-designated favourite Rackrent, Sir Condy."That's the secret of Castle Rackrent!" is a line I remember vividly from The Great Gatsby, never knowing why. Now I too have been initiated into the secret, and it's not a terribly hidden one (it just *screams* Marxist reading!): the hollowness of wealth, its sham pretentions - it's all in the name of Castle Rackrent.
    • 3/5
      The story of a dissolute family and the faithful retainer, as told by the faithful retainer, was not as entertaining as it may sound. For the record, I read the digital.library,upenn download of this novel, but I liked this cover.

    Book preview

    Castle Rackrent - Maria Edgeworth

    castlerackrent_cover_resized.jpg

    CASTLE RACKRENT

    An Hibernian tale taken from facts

    and from the manners of the Irish squires before the year 1782

    Maria Edgeworth

    HarperPerennialClassicsLogo.jpg

    CONTENTS

    A Note on This Edition

    Preface

    Castle Rackrent

    Continuation of the Memoirs of the Rackrent Family

    About the Author

    About the Series

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    A Note on This Edition

    The glossary that accompanied the text with this explanatory note—

    Some friends, who have seen Thady’s history since it has been printed have suggested to the editor, that many of the terms and idiomatic phrases, with which it abounds, could not be intelligible to the English reader without further explanation. The editor has therefore furnished the following glossary.

    has been transcribed in this edition as footnotes. Original glossary items are in bold so as to distinguish them from the text’s original footnotes.

    Preface

    The prevailing taste of the public for anecdote has been censured and ridiculed by critics who aspire to the character of superior wisdom; but if we consider it in a proper point of view, this taste is an incontestable proof of the good sense and profoundly philosophic temper of the present times. Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labours! The heroes of history are so decked out by the fine fancy of the professed historian; they talk in such measured prose, and act from such sublime or such diabolical motives, that few have sufficient taste, wickedness, or heroism, to sympathise in their fate. Besides, there is much uncertainty even in the best authenticated ancient or modern histories; and that love of truth, which in some minds is innate and immutable, necessarily leads to a love of secret memoirs and private anecdotes. We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy, from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters. The life of a great or of a little man written by himself, the familiar letters, the diary of any individual published by his friends or by his enemies, after his decease, are esteemed important literary curiosities. We are surely justified, in this eager desire, to collect the most minute facts relative to the domestic lives, not only of the great and good, but even of the worthless and insignificant, since it is only by a comparison of their actual happiness or misery in the privacy of domestic life that we can form a just estimate of the real reward of virtue, or the real punishment of vice. That the great are not as happy as they seem, that the external circumstances of fortune and rank do not constitute felicity, is asserted by every moralist: the historian can seldom, consistently with his dignity, pause to illustrate this truth; it is therefore to the biographer we must have recourse. After we have beheld splendid characters playing their parts on the great theatre of the world, with all the advantages of stage effect and decoration, we anxiously beg to be admitted behind the scenes, that we may take a nearer view of the actors and actresses.

    Some may perhaps imagine that the value of biography depends upon the judgment and taste of the biographer; but on the contrary it may be maintained, that the merits of a biographer are inversely as the extent of his intellectual powers and of his literary talents. A plain unvarnished tale is preferable to the most highly ornamented narrative. Where we see that a man has the power, we may naturally suspect that he has the will to deceive us; and those who are used to literary manufacture know how much is often sacrificed to the rounding of a period, or the pointing of an antithesis.

    That the ignorant may have their prejudices as well as the learned cannot be disputed; but we see and despise vulgar errors: we never bow to the authority of him who has no great name to sanction his absurdities. The partiality which blinds a biographer to the defects of his hero, in proportion as it is gross, ceases to be dangerous; but if it be concealed by the appearance of candour, which men of great abilities best know how to assume, it endangers our judgment sometimes, and sometimes our morals. If her grace the Duchess of Newcastle, instead of penning her lord’s elaborate eulogium, had undertaken to write the life of Savage, we should not have been in any danger of mistaking an idle, ungrateful libertine for a man of genius and virtue. The talents of a biographer are often fatal to his reader. For these reasons the public often judiciously countenance those who, without sagacity to discriminate character, without elegance of style to relieve the tediousness of narrative, without enlargement of mind to draw any conclusions from the facts they relate, simply pour forth anecdotes, and retail conversations, with all the minute prolixity of a gossip in a country town.

    The author of the following memoirs has upon these grounds fair claims to the public favour and attention; he was an illiterate old steward, whose partiality to the family, in which he was bred and born, must be obvious to the reader. He tells the history of the Rackrent family in his vernacular idiom, and in the full confidence that Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condy Rackrent’s affairs will be as interesting to all the world as they were to himself. Those who were acquainted with the manners of a certain class of the gentry of Ireland some years ago, will want no evidence of the truth of honest Thady’s narrative; to those who are totally unacquainted with Ireland, the following memoirs will perhaps be scarcely intelligible, or probably they may appear perfectly incredible. For the information of the ignorant English reader, a few notes have been subjoined by the editor, and he had it once in contemplation to translate the language of Thady into plain English; but Thady’s idiom is incapable of translation, and, besides, the authenticity of his story would have been more exposed to doubt if it were not told in his own characteristic manner. Several years ago he related to the editor the history of the Rackrent family, and it was with some difficulty that he was persuaded to have it committed to writing; however, his feelings for ‘the honour of the family,’ as he expressed himself, prevailed over his habitual laziness, and he at length completed the narrative which is now laid before the public.

    The editor hopes his readers will observe that these are ‘tales of other times:’ that the manners depicted in the following pages are not those of the present age; the race of the Rackrents has long since been extinct in Ireland; and the drunken Sir Patrick, the litigious Sir Murtagh, the fighting Sir Kit, and the slovenly Sir Condy, are characters which could no more be met with at present in Ireland, than Squire Western or Parson Trulliber in England. There is a time when individuals can bear to be rallied for their past follies and absurdities, after they have acquired new habits and a new consciousness. Nations, as well as individuals, gradually lose attachment to their identity, and the present generation is amused, rather than offended, by the ridicule that is thrown upon its ancestors.

    Probably we shall soon have it in our power, in a hundred instances, to verify the truth of these observations.

    When Ireland loses her identity by an union with Great Britain, she will look back, with a smile of good-humoured complacency, on the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of her former existence.

    1800

    Castle Rackrent

    Monday Morning [1]

    Having, out of friendship for the family, upon whose estate, praised be Heaven! I and mine have lived rent-free time out of mind, voluntarily undertaken to publish the MEMOIRS OF THE RACKRENT FAMILY, I think it my duty to say a few words, in the first place, concerning myself. My real name is Thady Quirk, though in the family I have always been known by no other than ‘honest Thady,’ afterward, in the time of Sir Murtagh, deceased, I remember to hear them calling me ‘old Thady,’ and now I’ve come to ‘Poor Thady’; for I wear a long greatcoat [2] winter and summer, which is very handy, as I never put my arms into the sleeves; they are as good as new, though come Holantide next I’ve had it these seven years: it holds on by a single button round my neck, cloak fashion. To look at me, you would hardly think ‘poor Thady’ was the father of Attorney Quirk; he is a high gentleman, and never minds what poor Thady says, and having better than fifteen hundred a year, landed estate, looks down upon honest Thady; but I wash my hands of his doings, and as I have lived so will I die, true and loyal to the family. The family of the Rackrents is, I am proud to say, one of the most ancient in the kingdom. Everybody knows this is not the old family name, which was O’Shaughlin, related to the kings of Ireland—but that was before my time. My grandfather was driver to the great Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin, and I heard him, when I was a boy, telling how the Castle Rackrent estate came to Sir Patrick; Sir Tallyhoo Rackrent was cousin-german to him, and had a fine estate of his own, only never a gate upon it, it being his maxim that a car was the best gate. Poor gentleman! he lost a fine hunter and his life, at last, by it, all in one day’s hunt. But I ought to bless that day, for the estate came straight into the family, upon one condition, which Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin at the time took sadly to heart, they say, but thought better of it afterwards, seeing how large a stake depended upon it: that he should, by Act of Parliament, take and bear the surname and arms of Rackrent.

    Now it was that the world was to see what was in Sir Patrick. On coming into the estate he gave the finest entertainment ever was heard of in the country; not a man could stand after supper but Sir Patrick himself who could sit out the best man in Ireland, let alone the three kingdoms itself. [3] He had his house, from one year’s end to another, as full of company as ever it could hold, and fuller; for rather than be left out of the parties at

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