1. Edgeworth today has no novels that could be called well known, despite having been the most revered novelist of her day. In an overview of Edgeworth’s work in relation to canonicity, Mitzi Myers discusses Edgeworth’s continued marginalization in literary studies, including her absence from recent anthologies of early women’s writing, and argues persuasively that this reception stems from Edgeworth’s lack of self-effacement as a novelist and her insistence on the moral and philosophical significance of her fiction. See Mitzi Myers, “Shot from Canons; or, Maria Edgeworth and the Cultural Production and Consumption of the Late-Eighteenth-Century Woman Writer,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (New York: Routledge, 1995), 193–214. I am grateful to Myers for letting me see a manuscript copy of this article. [BACK]

2. The writer of the letter, Rachel Mordecai, subsequently held a lifelong correspondence with Edgeworth. Rachel Mordecai to Maria Edgeworth, 7 August 1815, in Edgar E. MacDonald, ed., The Education of the Heart: The Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 3–7. [BACK]

3. This is Nancy Fowler, the maid’s daughter, who looks more like Harrington’s childhood maid than the older Fowler herself at this age. [BACK]

4. In addition to reading widely, Edgeworth was sister-in-law to Thomas Beddoes, one of the leading writers on nervous disorders in the period and a physician trained in the same school as Thomas Trotter. See Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 109–11. On Beddoes’s career, see Porter, Doctor of Society. [BACK]

5. Maria Edgeworth, Harrington, a Tale; And Ormond, a Tale, 3 vols. (London: R. Hunter, 1817), 1:520. I am grateful to the Special Collections at Emory University for permission to work with this volume. [BACK]

6. For a historical medical explanation of the perceptual mechanism described in this passage, see Crichton, Inquiry, 1:254–90 and passim. [BACK]

7. This evaluative comment on Simon’s face is added in the revised edition. In the first edition, Simon’s face is a “dark visage,” and his voice has a “mysterious tone.” Though both of these references remain in the revision, their suggestion of gothic terror is outweighed by the explicit comment on his “good natured countenance.” Without that comment, Harrington’s fear seems perfectly justified, and Fowler’s narrative becomes almost superfluous. The problem here is that Edgeworth is repeating, in earnest, an anti-Semitic stereotype by representing Simon as dark and mysteriously threatening even as she opens her novelistic attempt to eliminate and expose anti-Semitism. The addition responds to this problem, and it suggests that Edgeworth recognized the implication and made a second attempt to eliminate the vestiges of anti-Semitic representation that continue to litter her tale. [BACK]

8. A history of narratives in England accusing Jews of murdering Christian children is included in Montagu Frank Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England to the End of the Nineteenth Century (1939; New York: Meridian Books, 1960), 1–30. A well-known version is told by the Prioress in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. [BACK]

9. Michael Ragussis analyzes Harrington as an exploration of the social power of representations; see “Writing English Comedy: ‘Patronizing Shylock,’ ” chapter 2 in Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 57–88. [BACK]

10. Gustave LeBon, The Crowd (1879). The most reliable historical account of LeBon is by Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave LeBon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London: Sage Publications, 1975). Serge Moscovici, a social psychologist, describes in detail the theory of crowd mind and the crowd leader in LeBon’s work and relates it to the theory of hypnosis; see his The Age of the Crowd: A Historical Treatise on Mass Psychology, trans. J. C. Whitehouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Susanna Barrows, in Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) offers an important response to scholars who accept LeBon’s ideas at face value by researching the nineteenth-century European writers whose theories LeBon appropriated and explaining the cultural function those ideas served. See also Vrettos’s discussion of this literature in chapter 3 of Somatic Fictions. [BACK]

11. Emphasis original. [BACK]

12. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that “concert” and “consort” were “confounded…down to the Restoration, and often later” (2nd ed., s.v. “concert”). However, given Edgeworth’s dual thematic focus on individual and group action in the novel, the use of “concert” is slightly more appropriate than “consort.” [BACK]

13. Despite the use of quotation marks, the phrase appears to be a paraphrase from memory and not a direct quote. Similar statements appear in Sylva Sylvarum, but not in this exact form. [BACK]

14. A Late Discourse…Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Power of Sympathy (1658); quoted in Hunter and Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 127. [BACK]

15. Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises (Paris, 1644), 335. [BACK]

16. See Hunter and Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 124. [BACK]

17. The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longmans, 1870; Garrett, 1968), 2:660. [BACK]

18. The explanation of monsters was a problem for the dominant creationist account of origins, which presumed a fixity of all living forms. “Monsters” by definition violated this principle. [BACK]

19. Catherine Gallagher takes up this issue in “The Changeling’s Debt: Maria Edgeworth’s Productive Fictions,” chapter 2 in Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 257–327. I am grateful to her for her comments on this chapter and for allowing me to see the manuscript of her chapter on Edgeworth. [BACK]

20. Dora B. Weiner has situated Crichton’s ideas in the history of psychiatric concepts and included an exceedingly useful bibliographical essay; “Mind and Body in the Clinic: Philippe Pinel, Alexander Crichton, Dominique Esquirol, and the Birth of Psychiatry,” in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. G. S. Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 331–402. [BACK]

21. On the fear of novels in the eighteenth-century, see Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel, and Altick, The English Common Reader. On the dangers of “transport” for the female reader, see Peter de Bolla, “Of the Transport of the Reader: The Reading Subject,” chapter 8 in The Discourse of the Sublime: History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 230–78. On Maria Edgeworth specifically and her theory of fiction in relation to these fears, see Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, 273–88. [BACK]

22. Crichton is unique, at this time, in his sympathy for suicides, and he argued against the punitive treatment of their bodies. [BACK]

23. Michael Ragussis has a compelling discussion of this issue and Edgeworth’s redefinition of “natural” feelings as products of representation; see chapter 2 in Figures of Conversion. Catherine Gallagher is more concerned with how Harrington “becomes a creature of representations,” as he loses any sense of difference between himself and these descriptions (Nobody’s Story, 315). [BACK]

24. See Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 197–98. [BACK]

25. Edgeworth to Mrs. Ruxton, Edinburgh, 30 March 1803, in Mrs. [Frances] Edgeworth, A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth with a Selection from Her Letters (London: privately printed, 1867), 1:171–73. [BACK]

26. For Stewart’s theory, see his “Of the Principle or Law of Sympathetic Imitation,” part 2, chapter 2 in Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. 3 (London: Murray, 1827). All quotations are from The Works of Dugald Stewart, 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Hilliard, 1829), vol. 3. [BACK]

28. Harrington’s relationship with his father is contained in their names. The father is called William Harrington, the son William Harrington Harrington (TN, 9:193). The son’s name is a double repetition of the name of the father. [BACK]

29. Edgeworth refers the reader to John Drinkwater’s A History of the Siege of Gibraltar, from which she borrowed some of her particulars. Drinkwater’s account differs from hers significantly; he blames the “mercenary conduct of the hucksters and liquor-dealers” for raising “a spirit of revenge” among the troops (A History of the Siege of Gibraltar, 1779–1783, new ed. [London: John Murray, 1905], 152). This and the later Gordon Riots scene echo the 1798 experience of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, who was nearly lynched in Longford, Ireland, by an anti-Catholic crowd that was convinced he was a French sympathizer; see Butler’s account of the incident (Maria Edgeworth, 138). [BACK]

30. A similar example is mentioned by Bacon as an illustration of “the force of the imagination upon other bodies,” one form of which is “as if one should imagine such a man to be in the vestments of a Pope, or to have wings” (Sylva Sylvarum, 2:653–54). [BACK]

31. Thomas Holcroft’s A Plain and Succinct Narrative of the Gordon Riots, London, 1780, ed. Garland Garvey Smith (Atlanta: The Library, Emory University, 1944), 30. [BACK]

32. The concept of a “crowd mind” is a vexed one. Whether or not such a phenomenon exists, and whether it were individual psychology writ large or something qualitatively different, are fundamental questions defining the disciplinary boundary lines between social psychology and sociology. Historians date the concept itself as a mid- to late-Victorian invention. For a provocative discussion of these issues, see Nye, Origins of Crowd Psychology, and Barrows, Distorting Mirrors. [BACK]

33. Catherine Gallagher discusses the significance of filial love in Harrington and relates it to Maria Edgeworth’s complex literary relationship with her father; see Nobody’s Story, 310–11. [BACK]

34. On the cultural conventions that make up the Man of Feeling, see Todd, Sensibility, 88–109. [BACK]

35. This is the second time that Harrington adopts this position; in the first instance he apologizes for the prejudice in the works of fiction, including Edgeworth’s Moral Tales (9:13). [BACK]

36. Crichton viewed arrested attention as significant because it was caused either by an extremely strong external impression, such as a sudden noise, or by a predisposition in the subject to something in the sensations, such as a sympathy or antipathy. In Ormond’s case, that prior condition is his sympathy with the character, and in Harrington’s case it is his antipathy. [BACK]

37. For more on this pattern in the tale, see Ragussis’s argument that “the Jew as representation, displaces the real Jew,” so that Jewish identity exists “only in a performance” (Figures of Conversion, 59, 60). [BACK]

38. Rachel Mordecai called it the one disappointment in the novel (Letter to Maria Edgeworth, 28 October 1817, Education of the Heart, 16). Ragussis views it as “a sign of Edgeworth’s submission to the ruling ideology” (Figures of Conversion, 79); his discussion of it within the context of Jewish conversion figures is sustained and insightful. [BACK]

39. See Gallagher’s discussion, where she notes how Montenero’s “obsessive policing of the borderland between realities and representations” ultimately collapses the distinction between them (Nobody’s Story, 317, 320). [BACK]