By Jessica Richard
[NB: this post was originally written for the blog of the Manuscripts & Archives Research Collections at The Library of Trinity College, the University of Dublin]
Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), an Anglo-Irish contemporary of Jane Austen, was probably the most famous and most prolific woman novelist writing in English in her time. She was also renowned for her educational stories and pedagogical publications produced with her father; she worked closely with him and a succession of stepmothers to educate her 21 half-siblings. As a famous writer and member of a large and eventually far-flung family, Edgeworth produced a massive quantity of correspondence over her lifetime, much of it with important writers, thinkers, and politicians of her day. There are at least 10,000 extant sheets of Edgeworth’s correspondence held in archives and private collections around the world.
Not only do Edgeworth’s letters contain important contexts for her novels and educational texts, they also provide key narratives of literary and historical figures (among them Sir Walter Scott, Madame de Staël, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Frances Burney), places (including Ireland, London, and Paris), and events (such as the French invasion of Ireland, the aftermath of the Act of Union, and the great Irish famine) around the turn of the nineteenth century. The letters also reveal Edgeworth’s own engagement in nineteenth-century scientific discourse and in questions of anti-semitism.
Only selections of Edgeworth’s vast correspondence have been published. The Maria Edgeworth Letters Project (https://melp.dh.tamu.edu/) seeks to remedy this gap in scholarship by creating a digital space where Edgeworth’s full correspondence is made available, searchable, and annotated through a collaborative open-access project. Jessica Richard (Wake Forest University), Robin Runia (Xavier University), Susan Egenolf (Texas A&M University), Meredith Hale, and Hilary Havens, (University of Tennessee) are the co-editors; Carrie Johnston (Southern Methodist University is the project manager. The project receives digital support from CoDHR at TAMU, especially from Bryan Tarpley. Site design has been provided by Kayley Hart (TAMU) and KWALL. We are grateful to the many graduate and undergraduate research assistants who have worked on this project over the years. In 2022 and in 2025 the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project was awarded significant grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund its continued development.
The vast quantity of Edgeworth letters and the length of many of the individual letters (she sometimes wrote 30-page letters!) make the digital environment ideal for this project, which includes photographic images of the letters and transcriptions that are TEI-encoded to make them fully tagged and searchable. Visitors to the site https://melp.dh.tamu.edu/ will be able to search the letters by sender or recipient, subject, locations, date, etc. We will be able to add to the digital collection over time as we receive, transcribe, and code more letters. As the archive of letters on the site grows, it will host digital projects produced by scholars from the text data, including maps, data visualizations, word clouds, etc.
More than 30 archives and institutions have already given us photographs of their letters, including Trinity College Dublin, King’s College Cambridge, Bibliotheque de Geneve, the University of Birmingham, the University of Reading, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, Boston College, Harvard University, Duke University, the National Library of Scotland, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, University College London, Dartmouth, Vassar, Claremont, Yale, the Bodleian, the National Library of Ireland, the British Library, and many others. We’re excited to have the participation of so many institutions in several countries.
We loaded over 700 letters onto the crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse where over 1000 volunteers quickly transcribed them. 250 of those letters have been corrected, encoded, and can be viewed and searched in this digital archive.
As an example of what Edgeworth’s letters can reveal, I’ve transcribed one of the letters that Trinity College Dublin photographed for us. I chose this letter at random from the files sent to us. Edgeworth writes in 1840 to Lord Lansdowne, a prominent and long-serving British Whig politician who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, among other positions; the Lansdowne family of Bowood House, Wiltshire, had long been friends and correspondents of the Edgeworths. In this letter, Edgeworth writes to compliment Lansdowne on the public approbation he bestowed (and which she read of in a newspaper or other publication) on “Father Matthews,” as she calls him. Theobald Mathew, known as “Father Mathew,” was an Irish Catholic priest and a temperance campaigner. He and his Catholic Total Abstinence Society enrolled hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland, England, and eventually the United States, many of them poor laborers, in a pledge to abstain from alcohol. In this letter, Edgeworth calls Mathew’s movement “the greatest and most wonderful enterprize & achievement since the time of The Crusades.” After praising Father Mathew’s sermons and admiring the impact of temperance on the poor, Edgeworth concludes her letter by recommending to Lansdowne that since “coffee is so much in demand among the vast numbers in Ireland who have given up whiskey it would be a great encouragement to morality” to lower duties on coffee, making it more affordable. She mentions that this idea was suggested to her by Captain Beaufort, a friend and Rear Admiral of the Royal Navy and that it might also be beneficial to “the West Indian possessions” and a stimulus to “European labor in those colonies.”
There are some tantalizing threads to untangle in this letter. Lord Lansdowne, though a Protestant, was a champion of Catholic emancipation in Britain. He also supported, though less vigorously, the abolition of slavery. Father Mathew was hosted in the United States after this letter was written by prominent Catholics in the American North, including Archbishop of New York John Hughes; although Mathew had expressed opposition to slavery previously, his anti-abolitionist American hosts discouraged his involvement in abolition discourse in the US and Mathew complied, refusing to condemn slavery. This refusal was in turn condemned by Frederick Douglass, one-time signer of Mathew’s temperance pledge. In this context, Edgeworth’s vague allusion to “European labor” on coffee plantations is especially fascinating. I don’t have an answer yet to exactly what she might mean by this, whether there was an effort to replace the labor of enslaved people with that of free Europeans as abolition loomed and if so whether she was aware of such. What we see in this letter is a nexus among people and movements: politicians, military men, Catholics, Protestants, temperance, and abolition – with Maria Edgeworth at the center of it all. As the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project grows we will follow many such threads and connections.
Edgeworths Town
Sept. 28th 1840
My dear Lord
You may, and I trust that
will and do believe that I
never see your name in
any publication even in
the common newspaper
without eagerly looking to
see how it is mentioned
and if joined to anything
spoken or written by yourself
I am much more deeply in-
terested. Permit me (pray do
not think me impertinent)
Permit me to say that I was
highly gratified by reading
your Lordships letter to Father
Matthews and by the public
noble mark of your approba-
tion. It struck me as so becom-
ing, so suitable to your private
and to your public character
[p 2]
and station – to all that I know
of a private friend and all
that I have seen or heard of
the statesman and the minister.
Let one pour these feelings
out to you – you cannot
think this flattery because
you have never known me
flatter and you are too
kind and have always been
too indulgent to me to consider
this as an intrusion – a breach
of etiquette I am sensible it
is – and a proof of my vanity
in flattering myself that my
extrem [sic] and sincere attachment
may be something even to
Lord Lansdowne.
We were particularly
struck with your letter to
the Revd Mr. Matthews as our
minds had been for some
time intent upon this subject
–and upon collecting all
the facts and evidence we
[p3]
could relating to it. I consi
der that Father Matthews crusade
against Intemperance in Ire
land is the greatest and the
most wonderful enterprize &
achievement since the time
of The Crusades. And father
Matthers himself is the greatest
benefactor Ireland has had
since the days of St. Patrick
–His honestly disdaining all
miraculous power is like all
honesty most wise. And it
leaves his power the more won-
derful and the more likely
to be permanent. Its having
lasted 2 years is morally mi
raculous. Such a conquest
over vice – and habitual vice
–and habitual vice weakening
the powers of body & mind to
resist the daily hourly tempta
tion would be incredible if
the facts were not attested by
millions – In our own neigh
borhood we see the proofs
[p4]
–His published sermons and
the little addresses or speeches
to the people who have taken
the pledge from him appeared
to me excellent in their simplicity
and their being adapted
like all true eloquence to the
people and the occasion.
Your Lordship may see how
full my mind was upon
this subject by its having over
flowed so in writing on it to
you. Even with the fear of
tiring you before my eyes.
You may judge how very
much gratified I was by seeing
under your own hand the
expression of your own opinion
of this man & his deeds & character.
While I have been writing this
note a friend & a gentleman (Captain Beaufort)
who has some means of information
has suggested to me that at
this moment when coffee is so
much in demand among[?] the
vast numbers in Ireland
who have given up whiskey
it would be a great encourage
-ment to morality & an advan
[p5]
tage to West Indian possessions
to lower the duty on coffee
–and it would also be a
good stimulus & encourage
ment to European labor in
those colonies.
I beg my most sincere and
affectionate respects to Lady
Lansdown & I am
My dear Lord
Your Lordship’s
obliged & faithful
Maria Edgeworth
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