DEPURACIÓN DE AGUAS RESIDUALES DE LA COMUNIDAD DE MADRID

Going back to the pre-Famine era, the ‘Big House’ William Butler Yeats referred to in the excerpt I have used at the beginning of this chapter, as a symbolic remnant of Cromwell’s atrocities in Ireland, was a defining but initially less contentious theme for the ‘Irish’ novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Maria Edgeworth was the first exponent of the genre

and was a significant influence on Lever. In W. B. Yeats’ assessment of Edgeworth’s work, he wrote: ‘When writing of people of her own class she saw everything about them as it really was. She constantly satirises their recklessness, their love for all things English, their oppression of and contempt for their own country.’42 Maria Edgeworth’s lampooning of her own class and her exposition of how the Ascendancy had failed Ireland was intended to explain the cause of Ireland’s ills to the English market amidst political debate on the Act of Union, and it found an avid audience in England as well as Ireland. George III remarked ‘I know something now of my Irish subjects.’43 _{What differentiated Maria Edgeworth’s}

representations of Ireland from others was that she did not poke fun at her Irish tenants. It was her own class, the Protestant Ascendancy that she caricatured and whose demise she predicted. The Rackrent examples of Ireland’s ruling class offer little hope of redemption in terms of political authority. Given the date mentioned in the novel’s title, and its publication in 1800, the tale was clearly a caution against imposition of the Act of Union, intended to arouse sympathy by explaining Ireland’s predicament to English readers. Publishing Castle

Rackrent during the contentious period anticipating the Act of Union, was a political act.

Given that Richard Lovell Edgeworth voted against the Act of Union,44 and the evidence suggesting that publication of Castle Rackrent was expedited,45 so that it came out before the legislation was passed in 1800, Edgeworth’s suggestion that this was a naïve ‘plain

unvarnished tale’,46 _{must be read as intentionally disingenuous.}

What little hope Maria Edgeworth did allow for Ireland under the Union was contingent upon the emergence of more ‘improving’, responsible men like her father and a

42 _{W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 322.} 43 _{Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta Publications, 2000), p. 243.}

44 _{See Brian Hollingworth, Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History, Politics (Basingstoke:}

Palgrave, 1997), p. 74.

45 _Ibid.

46 _{Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale, Taken from Facts, and from the Manner of the Irish}

more equitable political standing for Catholics. What purports to be a simple tale of the decline of a feckless landowning family has a serious political message. Edgeworth was clearly concerned about penal laws, sectarian tensions and the impact they had on political stability in Ireland especially given the lack of an adequate system of Government and rule in Ireland. An absence of responsible improving landlords had rendered Ireland unstable, but would also render the Union of England and Ireland problematic because those in power at the London government would not and could not understand Ireland and its particular problems. Imposition of the Act of Union in 1801 had done little to quell English fears of Irish rebellion. The largely Roman Catholic population were still subject to Penal restrictions. Catholic Emancipation in 1829 had little impact on the Irish electorate because the

landownership requirements had been increased, the Irish Reform Act in 1832 extended the Catholic franchise in Ireland to an extent but the issue of tithes imposed on Catholics to support the Protestant Church of Ireland, continued to antagonise the largely Catholic population in the early 1830s. The ‘Tithe War’ escalated violently between 1830 and 1833, when police and yeomen exacted brutal repercussions upon Catholics who refused to pay; lives were lost. Lever was working as a dispensary doctor in the rural south west of Ireland during this agrarian violence.

In the period between 1800 and 1845, there were in the broadest terms three social strata in Ireland; English Protestant Ascendancy who had displaced ancient Gaelic rulers, their tenant farmers, and landless labourers. But there were also smaller social groups such as declining impoverished Catholic landowners clinging on to their property, middle-class Protestants, and an emerging middle-class of Catholics. The dynamics between these social groups and relations between post-Union England and Ireland were often explored in novels through three popular themes, the Big House, the military adventurer and the marriage trope.

Many of Lever’s ‘Irish’ novels have more than one ‘Big House’ of some description. In later novels, he would juxtapose different types of Big House, for example in The

O’Donoghue (1845). In earlier novels, the peripatetic nature of his adventurers would

introduce various Big Houses, from castles, and mansions, both prosperous and faded. What Maxwell and then Lever both focussed on, was the development of the military tale as a sub- genre of the national and ‘Big House’ tale, and what predominated in Lever’s first four novels were the adventures of his military characters. James H. Murphy has identified four kinds of rollicking, ‘young Irish-based officers, with or without Irish family connections,’47

the ‘rollicking Irish peasant’48 _{in Mickey Free, a Falstaffian rollicking ‘English Major’,}49 _in

Charles O’Malley, and finally ‘Irish ruling and upper classes’.50