In Harrington, Edgeworth’s exploration of party spirit uses assumptions similar to those of Stewart, in particular the assumption of a direct relationship between crowd formation and a contagious imitation that overwhelms the rational autonomy of the subject. Numerous incidents in the tale—the dinner party organized by Harrington’s father, the schoolboy dispute, the riot of soldiers at Gibraltar, the later Gordon riots—are thematically related as explorations of the mechanism of party spirit. The first incident defines the basic terms that the rest will utilize. Harrington’s father, a Member of Parliament, hosts a dinner party to lobby the local gentry against the pending Jewish Naturalization Bill of 1753.^[27] Harrington notes that his father attempts “to convince them, that they were, or ought to be, of my father’s opinion, and that they had better all join him in the toast of ‘The Jews are down, and keep ’em down’ ” (TN, 9:15). The room divides into opposite parties. Because “[t]he feeling of party spirit…is caught by children as quickly as it is revealed by men” (TN, 9:15), young Harrington takes a side, but he is “incapable of comprehending their arguments” on the topic (TN, 9:15). His response is specifically divorced from a rational engagement with the issue, a fact made explicit when his interest, unusual for a child, is questioned by the adults.

“And what reasons did you hear?” said a gentleman in company.

“Reasons!” interrupted my father; “oh! sir, to call upon the boy for all the reasons he has heard—But you’ll not pose him: speak up, speak up, Harrington, my boy!”

“I’ve nothing to say about reasons, sir.”

“No! that was not a fair question,” said my father; “but, my boy, you know on which side you are, don’t you?”

“To be sure—on your side, father.”

“That’s right—bravo! To know on which side one is, is one great point in life.”

“And I can tell on which side every one here is.” Then going round the table, I touched the shoulder of each of the company, saying, “A Jew!—No Jew!” and bursts of applause ensued.

Because he does not comprehend the pros and cons of the naturalization bill, taking a side, regardless of content, is the only issue. His attention is solely focused on the signifier, “A Jew!—No Jew!” apart from its signified. Harrington’s act of labeling the guests is applauded because it so perfectly embodies the essence of party spirit: a perfect lack of comprehension of the signified combined with a perfect loyalty to the signifier.

Harrington’s father, the principal exemplar of party spirit in the tale, further illustrates this principle:^[28] “My father was a great stickler for parliamentary consistency, and moreover he was of an obstinate temper. Ten years could make no change in his opinions, as he was proud to declare” (TN, 9:14). In this inflexibility, Mr. Harrington offers a related example of action divorced from reason. He suspends autonomous judgment in favor of a rote “consistency,” and thus his definitive feature is an “adhesion to a preconceived notion or purpose” that reduces his actions to blind repetitions of earlier judgments (TN, 9:35). Such is the pattern for his most singular characteristic: “Now it was well known in our house, that a sentence of my father’s beginning and ending ‘by Jupiter Ammon’ admitted of no reply from any mortal—it was the stamp of fate; no hope of any reversion of the decree: it seemed to bind even him who uttered the oath beyond his own power of revocation” (TN, 9:17). His trademark oath transforms him into a prisoner of his own once-rational decisions, so that what begins as purposeful ends up as mindless repetition. The leading example is his oath that his son shall be disinherited if he marries a Jew. By the narrative’s end Mr. Harrington’s attitude toward Montenero and his daughter Berenice is completely altered, yet he finds himself unable to release himself from his prior decision.

Mr. Harrington’s oath operates in the same manner as the son’s nervous shudder. In their first use, the words “by Jupiter Ammon” refer to an explicit meaning; the signifier has a strong relationship to its signified. But subsequently that relationship becomes secondary in importance to the speaker’s consistency. One whose oaths bind him “beyond his own power of revocation” is one who is bound by a signifier that has been divorced from its signified, so that the power of the letter takes precedence over the thing for which it stands. Ultimately, the juvenile Harrington perfectly embodies party spirit precisely because he has “nothing to say about reasons.” This absence of reason raises the question of why Harrington, or anybody, chooses one party over another. At the dinner party, it appears his choice is an expression of loyalty to his father. But filial loyalty does not account for his basic fascination with the discussion itself, a fascination so unusual it attracts the notice of the adults (particularly after his boyhood friend, Lord Mowbray, grows fidgety and leaves). As he explains, “[a] subject apparently less liable to interest a child of my age could hardly be imagined; but from my peculiar associations it did attract my attention” (TN, 9:14). His fascination stems from that prior anti-Semitic condition whose social origin Edgeworth has carefully defined. The debate touches a chord in him; it moves him because of his disorder. He catches the spirit—whereas Mowbray does not—because he is predisposed to catch it. Within the mechanism of party spirit, then, the tale questions whether the choice of sides is freely made. In this opening example, Harrington’s choice is no more rational or autonomous a judgment than his nervous shudders because it is predicated on an extrarational, embodied response, one that resembles nothing so much as the man noted by Digby who, without knowing the joke, nonetheless feels moved to laugh.

The subsequent incident of the Gibraltar riot works in an identical fashion.^[29] The story is told to Harrington by Jacob, the son of Simon the Jew, who is employed by a Jewish merchant supplying provisions to the garrison during the siege. Jacob’s description of the initially peaceful and profitable enterprise is part of a pattern in the tale in which Jewish characters describe scenes of unprejudiced societies where Jews and Christians live in harmony. The most notable example of this utopian vision is Montenero and Berenice’s America, but this harmonious utopia is not limited to place, appearing as well in repeated references to the liberal-minded English upper class. The Gibraltar peace is destroyed by Lord Mowbray, who is posted to the garrison as an army officer and raises a party against Jacob and his employers. Just as Harrington “caught” party spirit, Mowbray’s subordinates catch his anti-Semitic labels for Jacob: “ ‘Lord Mowbray’s servants heard, and caught their lord’s witticism: the serjeants and soldiers repeated the colonel’s words, and the nicknames spread through the regiment, and through the garrison; wherever I turned, I heard them echoed: poor Jacob was called young Shylock by some, and by others the Wandering Jew. It was a bitter jest, and soon became bitter earnest’ ” (TN, 9:76). Jacob is already known to this community, and yet the repetition of these words, as they echo through the garrison, have the power to remake him, in their eyes, as rational social relations are transformed into extraordinary fear: “ ‘The common people felt a superstitious dread of me: the mothers charged their children to keep out of my way; and if I met them in the streets, they ran away and hid themselves’ ” (TN, 9:76). These mothers, in assuming that Jacob threatens their Christian children, are reenacting the same blood libel narrative with which the tale opens. Jacob is thus placed in the same position as his father, Simon, with his bag. This connection to the archetypal opening scene is an important part of the Gibraltar episode’s rhetorical force. Because Jacob is the one telling the story, structurally it is as if the tale returned to the archetypal scene and allowed Simon to speak about the injustice of it. The “common people” of the garrison similarly substitute for the young Harrington; his individual history is simply generalized to society as a body. Every body has previously been written on by the narrative of blood libel, and they respond with the same kind of extra-rational reflex as young Harrington at the dinner party.

Edgeworth’s most extreme representation of party spirit in action is the Gordon riots. They begin in a manner resembling Mowbray’s manipulation of the crowd at Gibraltar or Mr. Harrington’s lobbying efforts at the dinner party, but they make a qualitative leap to raise the spectre of a party spirit that has escaped the control of its leader. It begins, like the other incidents, with a group of loyal partisans ready to accept anything that fits within their prior assumptions, no matter how irrational: “[T]hey were ready to believe any thing against the ministry, and some who, for party purposes, desired to influence the minds of the people, circulated the most ridiculous reports, and excited the most absurd terrors” (TN, 9:148). The riot begins with an incident of anti-Catholicism rather than anti-Semitism, one taken directly from an example in Bacon:^[30] “It was confidently affirmed that the Pope would soon be in London, he having been seen in disguise in a gold-flowered nightgown on St. James’s parade at Bath. A poor gentleman, who appeared at his door in his nightgown, had been actually taken by the Bath mob for the Pope; and they had pursued him with shouts, and hunted him, till he was forced to scramble over a wall to escape from his pursuers” (TN, 9:148).

It is along equally implausible lines that Edgeworth builds a bridge between the historically anti-Catholic Gordon riots and the anti-Semitism of her tale. Thomas Holcroft’s widely read account of the riots, written at the time, includes only a single mention of Jews in London, but there is no crowd sentiment against Jews. Instead, Holcroft reports that Jewish families, along with all the other Londoners, were so terrified of the rioters that they wrote “this house is a true Protestant” on their shutters so that their homes would not be thought to belong to Catholics.^[31] Edgeworth, normally attentive to exactly this kind of historical detail, is unusually inventive in this case: “[W]ithout any conceivable reason, suddenly a cry was raised against the Jews: unfortunately, Jews rhymed to shoes: these words were hitched into a rhyme, and the cry was, ‘No Jews, no wooden shoes!’ Thus, without any natural, civil, religious, moral, or political connexion, the poor Jews came in remainder to the ancient anti-Gallican antipathy felt by English feet and English fancies against the French wooden shoes” (TN, 9:149). Edgeworth’s episode is remarkable in that, for all the detail provided on how and why the anti-Catholic cry could become anti-Semitic, the antagonism to Jews and the slogan itself serve no plot function in the narrative. The mob that descends on Montenero’s house is not after him because he is Jewish. In fact, they are not after him at all; they are pursuing Mowbray’s relations, Lady de Brantefield and Anne, whom they mistakenly identify as Catholics in the company of an imaginary priest. Thus, the entire assault on Montenero’s home leaves the question of his Jewishness and the crowd’s anti-Semitism beside the point. We are left to wonder why Edgeworth bothered to incorporate such an apparently unnecessary, convoluted, and implausible rationale into the narrative.

This anti-Jewish cry arises “without any conceivable reason,” a consistent element in the party spirit mechanism. But in the earlier incidents of party spirit, the crowd is always influenced by a named leader, who introduces ideas for his own purposes. Young Harrington follows his father; the soldiers follow Mowbray. Even the initial fears of the Gordon mob about the Pope are instigated by specific leaders who have something to gain. This new cry against Jews is qualitatively different. It comes into being “without any natural, civil, religious, moral, or political” rationale, independently of any leader. The distinction between this cry and the earlier ones is that, rather than being an echo of a leader, as at Gibraltar, it arises from within the crowd as a direct manifestation of the crowd’s enthusiasm, and in this the crowd takes on the quality of an independent mind.^[32] The cry, “No Jews, no wooden shoes,” signifies the point at which the crowd assumes a life of its own, with its own voice, its own rules, and its own slogans. This slogan, though marked by an absence of any association at the level of its content, works through the association at the level of its sound, by rhyming “Jews” with “shoes.” Thus, the defining characteristic of this crowd mind is that it generates its own truths through the materiality of language. For Edgeworth, the problem posed by the crowd mind is that, like Harrington’s shudder, it operates entirely through this logic of the signifier rather than the signified.

To the person within the crowd, however, such associations appear perfectly reasonable. Harrington, in recollecting his subjective experience of party spirit, explains that he was “carried away in the tide of popular enthusiasm” (TN, 9:20). Though in retrospect he wonders how he “could be so inhuman,” then he had no doubts:“ [A]t the time it all appeared to me quite natural and proper; a just and necessary war” (TN, 9:20). There is thus no clear dividing line for the subject between participation in the crowd and the stance outside of it. Although each member of the crowd, by definition, has surrendered the ability to exercise an independent judgment, the crowd’s members believe themselves to be freely engaged in making precisely those judgments. Harrington’s participation is predicated on his extra-rational antipathy to the sign “Jew,” but his experience of participation is accompanied by a sense of rationality, in which his actions are “proper,” “just,” and “necessary.” Although he responds to the signifier, he believes himself to be evaluating the signified. One final and inescapable element of party spirit thus is a collective delusion of rationality, one Harrington once participated in but has since overcome.