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the bog of Allyballycarricko'shaughlin
May. 18th, 2024 09:35 pmFor some reason I had been under the impression that Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent was a big sprawling Gothic novel, but it is, in fact, a satirical little novella, which is also a great type of book to be. Written shortly before the Union was enacted in 1800, it chronicles four generations of the fictional house of Rackrent, a Protestant Ascendancy landowning family as ill-governed and exploitative as the rental practice they are named after. (“Rack-renting” in British Ireland was a practice by which lazy absentee landlords would rent out all their land at once to a land agent at a reasonable price, and the land agent was charged with finding tenants for the individual lots, which he could sublet out at whatever extortionate rent he could get for them.) The story is told from the point of view of the aged house steward, Thady Quirk, whose son Jason becomes a lawyer and eventually manages to scoop the entire Rackrent estate and title from its profligate fourth heir, Sir Condy.
The novella features a lot of gently humorous digs at the culture and folkways of the indigenous Irish tenantry, alongside a lot of absolutely savage humorous digs at the uselessness and destructive tendencies (self- and otherwise) of the Anglo-Irish landowning class, of which Edgeworth was a member. The book is safely set just a generation or so back so that Edgeworth’s contemporaries could laugh at their predecessors’ folly and not be insulted themselves, and if they did see themselves at all in the terrible behavior of the four generations of Rackrent lords chronicled, well, they were clearly behind the times and should get with the progressive paternalistic program that Edgeworth’s father was an advocate and practitioner of (mainly, that the Anglo-Irish lords should live on and manage their own estates and live within their means and not engage in rack-renting).
The four generations of Rackrent upper-class twits chronicled are thus:
Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin, who changes his name and presumably his religion to become Sir Patrick Rackrent and be a lord under the English regime. Sir Patrick was much beloved in the countryside for adhering to old Irish norms of lordly hospitality, which did not actually pair real well with the newfangled English laws and customs around keeping a property solvent.
Sir Murtagh, an extremely litigious man with a very pick-and-choose attitude around older Irish customs. Spent so much money litigating around keeping bits of the estate that he ended up selling bits of it off to pay the legal fees anyway.
Sir Kit Stopgap, a classic absentee landlord, who gambled away all the estate’s money in Bath, married a rich Jewish woman and locked her up for seven years when she wouldn’t hand over a particular diamond necklace, and was generally terrible.
Sir Condy Rackrent, who was educated in the law but very bad at it. He wasn’t absentee but continued his forebears’ traditions of running up huge bills and not paying them. He eventually runs out of people to sponge money off of, especially since he pissed off his wife’s family by marrying her so they won’t help, and runs for Parliament to avoid being put in jail, but Parliament has its own set of expenses he can’t pay. He ends up selling first one property and eventually the whole shebang over to Jason Quirk, who he had gone to school with and who had been his land agent for many years. The tale of Sir Condy takes up the biggest part of the page count, being about as long as the tales of the other three guys put together.
The story is told in first-person style that we are assured is the unvarnished, unembellished verbal account of Sir Condy’s old steward, and it is quite a feat of colorful Irish storytelling. Footnotes, a glossary, and other commentary for the benefit of the “English reader” are provided in a voice known only as the Editor, who can be hilariously judgmental about the Irish. The place-names are a mix of cartoonishly on-the-nose English terms (such as Rackrent and Stopgap) and cartoonishly long stereotypes of Anglicized Irish place names, such as “the bog of Allyballycarricko’shaughlin,” which Thady cannot for the life of him figure out what the third Lady Rackrent finds funny about.
While there is a lot of stuff about English property law and Irish country customs that may not be immediately familiar to a modern reader unless they already read a lot about those sorts of thing, it’s still overall a very fast and funny read, and a well-deserved takedown of one of the most useless and exploitative groups of dimwits to walk the earth (not necessarily to walk Ireland, though, as half of them never set foot there).
The novella features a lot of gently humorous digs at the culture and folkways of the indigenous Irish tenantry, alongside a lot of absolutely savage humorous digs at the uselessness and destructive tendencies (self- and otherwise) of the Anglo-Irish landowning class, of which Edgeworth was a member. The book is safely set just a generation or so back so that Edgeworth’s contemporaries could laugh at their predecessors’ folly and not be insulted themselves, and if they did see themselves at all in the terrible behavior of the four generations of Rackrent lords chronicled, well, they were clearly behind the times and should get with the progressive paternalistic program that Edgeworth’s father was an advocate and practitioner of (mainly, that the Anglo-Irish lords should live on and manage their own estates and live within their means and not engage in rack-renting).
The four generations of Rackrent upper-class twits chronicled are thus:
Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin, who changes his name and presumably his religion to become Sir Patrick Rackrent and be a lord under the English regime. Sir Patrick was much beloved in the countryside for adhering to old Irish norms of lordly hospitality, which did not actually pair real well with the newfangled English laws and customs around keeping a property solvent.
Sir Murtagh, an extremely litigious man with a very pick-and-choose attitude around older Irish customs. Spent so much money litigating around keeping bits of the estate that he ended up selling bits of it off to pay the legal fees anyway.
Sir Kit Stopgap, a classic absentee landlord, who gambled away all the estate’s money in Bath, married a rich Jewish woman and locked her up for seven years when she wouldn’t hand over a particular diamond necklace, and was generally terrible.
Sir Condy Rackrent, who was educated in the law but very bad at it. He wasn’t absentee but continued his forebears’ traditions of running up huge bills and not paying them. He eventually runs out of people to sponge money off of, especially since he pissed off his wife’s family by marrying her so they won’t help, and runs for Parliament to avoid being put in jail, but Parliament has its own set of expenses he can’t pay. He ends up selling first one property and eventually the whole shebang over to Jason Quirk, who he had gone to school with and who had been his land agent for many years. The tale of Sir Condy takes up the biggest part of the page count, being about as long as the tales of the other three guys put together.
The story is told in first-person style that we are assured is the unvarnished, unembellished verbal account of Sir Condy’s old steward, and it is quite a feat of colorful Irish storytelling. Footnotes, a glossary, and other commentary for the benefit of the “English reader” are provided in a voice known only as the Editor, who can be hilariously judgmental about the Irish. The place-names are a mix of cartoonishly on-the-nose English terms (such as Rackrent and Stopgap) and cartoonishly long stereotypes of Anglicized Irish place names, such as “the bog of Allyballycarricko’shaughlin,” which Thady cannot for the life of him figure out what the third Lady Rackrent finds funny about.
While there is a lot of stuff about English property law and Irish country customs that may not be immediately familiar to a modern reader unless they already read a lot about those sorts of thing, it’s still overall a very fast and funny read, and a well-deserved takedown of one of the most useless and exploitative groups of dimwits to walk the earth (not necessarily to walk Ireland, though, as half of them never set foot there).