Life
1744-1817; b. Bath, ed. TCD and Oxford (Corpus Christi); friend of Thomas
Day, Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, and Josiah Wedgewood, members of midlands
Lunar Society; m. Anna Elers of Black Burton, Oxfordshire; dg. Maria,
b. 1767, and son Richard (d. South Carolina, 1789); visited Rousseau,
and adopted his educational principles in educating the children of his
first marriage; m. Honora Sneyd of Lichfield; two further wives and twenty-two
children; settled in Ireland, 1782; aide-de-camp to Lord Charlemont, 1783,
and MP; constructed Dublin-Galway ‘heliograph’ line, with Dr.
Beaufort, 1804, whose dg. Fanny he took as his fourth wife (1769-1865),
with whom he had six children incl. Michael Pakenham Edgeworth (b.1812);
also invented antecedent of tar Macadam, self-laying track vehicles, moving
wooden horses, and other appliances; initiated reforms on his estate including
recognition of tenant rights in improvements; MP for Johnstown, Co. Longford,
1798-1800; raised a corp against rebels, 1798, including Catholic peasants,
whom the Govt. would not supply with arms; ill-used by the Orangemen of
Longford; voted twice against the Union because he disliked the methods
used to pass it; shocked by the brutal executions in the aftermath of
the 1798 Rebellion; supported Union as promising prosperity to compare
with Yorkshire, but voted against it in protest at government bribery,
leaving the house before the bill was passed, taking with him a group
of anti-unionist MPs incl. Henry Grattan; there is a portrait by Hugh
Douglas Hamilton in the National Portrait Collection, and another by R.
L. Edgeworth by John Henning the Elder. DNB JMC DIB DIW DIH OCIL FDA
[ top ]
Works
Maria Edgeworth, ed., Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq.,
2 vols. (London: R. Hunter, Baldwin, Cradock & Joy 1820); Desmond Clarke,
ed. [i.e., intro.], Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth Begun by Himself
and Concluded by his Daughter Maria Edgeworth, 2 vols. [rep. edn.]
(Shannon: IUP 1969). Also, The substance of three speeches delivered
in the House of Commons of Ireland upn the subject of an Union with Great
Britain (London 1800)
[ top ]
Criticism
Desmond Clarke, The Ingenious Mr. Edgeworth (1965).
W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; 1984).
Rolf Loeber & Magda Stouthamer-Loebber, ‘Fiction available to and written for cottages and their children’, in Bernadette Cunningham and Máire Kennedy, eds., The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives, Dublin: Rare Books Group 1999).
Willa Murphy, ‘A Queen of hearts or an Old Maid?: Maria Edgeworth’s Fictions of Union’, in Dáire Keogh & Kevin Whelan, eds., Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union, Dublin: Four Courts Press 2001).
[ top ]
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington 1904), selects ‘My Boyhood’, an extract from Memoirs; biog. note holds him to have been born at Edgeworthstown and calls him a patriot who opposed the Union [both errors].
The attribution of Essay on Irish Bulls (1801) in part or whole to Richard Lovell Edgeworth remains contentious; see Memoirs, ed. Maria Edgworth (1820) and remarks by Seamus Deane, A. Norman Jeffares, and others (supra). [See also under Maria Edgeworth, Notes.]
As a member of Parliament, R. L Edgeworth voted against the Union twice, not because he disagreed with it but because he detested the methods used to pass it.
Lord Byron called R. L. Edgeworth an energetic bore when he met in him in London after the Union.
[ top ]
The Princess Grace Irish Library of Monaco: EIRData 2000