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Thady’s Grey Goose Quill: Historiography and Literacy in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent

Most postcolonial scholarship on Castle Rackrent (1800) has addressed the question of Thady Quirk as colonial subject and as an unreliable narrator. However, an intriguing conundrum regarding Thady presents itself to the reader in the opening pages of Edgeworth’s novel. The narrator introduced to the reader is described as an “illiterate old steward”1 of Irish stock, who “tells the history of the Rackrent family” (CR 4). In the course of his narrative, the “illiterate old steward” will engage in numerous acts of reading and writing, while offering a history that recounts the overthrow of his Anglo-Irish masters, not through armed rebellion, but through skills of literacy that his son Jason exercised as accountant, being “as good a clerk as any in the county” (CR 22). What imperial prejudice was Edgeworth ironically foregrounding in this stigmatizing of the native historian and his “history” by insinuating that both were products of an oral culture? And what, as a consequence, are its implications for the workings of plot and reader relations in Castle Rackrent? In her Preface, Edgeworth assumes the persona of an editor laboring over Thady’s manuscript. By configuring her Irish steward narrator as illiterate, while representing his story as “written,” she initiates a drama of illegibility in regard to Irishness. As a result, the text enacts contemporary, vexatious Anglo-Irish reader relations with Irish history. Castle Rackrent may be read as a narrative that explores the ironies incumbent upon what, as Joseph Lennon notes in Irish Orientalism, was a developing perception that “Irish historiography and pseudohistory had been pegged in England as an unreliable quagmire of dubious books.”2 What readerly discomposure, then, does Edgeworth “plot” through a