From Private Happiness to Public Virtue: Contextualizing Worldliness in Maria Edgeworth's Fiction

This thesis explores what the “world” or “what is called the world” in the sense of a social sphere refers to in Maria Edgeworth’s fiction and why it is viewed in a negative light: characters engaging with it in her fiction are judged within her novels’ story worlds or are represented as miserable. Although scholars such as Marilyn Butler, April Kendra, and Matthew Reznicek have recognized Edgeworth’s prejudices towards fashionable society, which was one meaning of the “world” at the time, the root causes of such prejudice remain unknown. My method of literary interpretation, drawing on Quentin Skinner's theory of interpretation in intellectual history, combines historical contextualisation and close reading, and I seek to draw on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century meanings of the “world” instead of borrowing a definition from ontological or phenomenological philosophy. In Edgeworth’s works, the “world” as a social sphere indeed denotes fashionable society, which is, however, connected to the court, and is associated with an ambition for high rank and wealth.
The first section of this thesis, titled “Entering the world”, comprising the first three chapters, focuses on contextualising the “world” and understanding why it is negatively valued. I argue that this critical stance arises from a Stoic philosophy of happiness and a Country ideology emphasis on public virtue as opposed to self-interest in political life, which are philosophies contrary to the values of the “world” as represented in Edgeworth's fiction and aspects of Edgeworth’s thinking that previous research has not fully acknowledged. This contributes to a view of Edgeworth as a thinker deeply influenced by the classical heritage and suggests that what previous researchers have understood as a wholesale rejection of the public, especially in readings of the tale Patronage (1814), is instead a defence of classical republicanism. Thirdly, the “world” is represented in a negative light because it is a sphere where people aspire to improve their social status, which bespeaks an attachment to a hierarchical society. Thus the values of privacy and domesticity that scholars have associated with middle-class ideology in Edgeworth’s fiction, might in fact be traced to the values of a society of estates.
The second section of this thesis, “Knowing the world”, delves into the more positive connotations of worldliness as “knowledge of the world”, that is knowledge of politeness and human nature. In Chapter 5, I discover that Edgeworth promotes philosophical worldliness in Lawrence Klein’s terms, that is the integration of philosophy in public life and the tempering of an excessively serious learnedness through politeness and the bringing together of people of the world and people of letters, or leaders in society and scholars. In Chapter 6, I argue that worldliness is associated with an external politeness that is thought to disguise inner human depravity as opposed to an internal politeness where our outer expressions reflect our inner sentiments. Internal politeness is preferred in Edgeworth's tale Ormond, while the tale Helen veers towards external politeness. The final chapter examines the representation of the gendered acquisition of “knowledge of the world” and its relationship to books, experience, and morality in Edgeworth’s fiction, and I suggest for example that instead of a moral, the tale Belinda focuses on communicating “knowledge of the world” and manners. Altogether, this thesis allows a more accurate understanding of Edgeworth’s moral and political philosophy and proves that, while previous accounts have highlighted the “world” as a concept in religious discourse and the culture of sensibility, the term also has links to the discourse of political philosophy.