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Edgeworthstown House

Black and white ink illustration of Edgeworthstown House

Contributor: Yuri Yoshino

Location: The Taylor Institution Library, the University of Oxford

Description: This house, Edgeworthstown House in Co. Longford, Ireland, was an important intellectual powerhouse in Europe during the Romantic period. This engraving, published on the front cover of the 42nd issue of Le Magasin Pittoresque (1833-1938) in October 1850, testifies to the continuing influence of works by Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) and her family in France and beyond, years after the publication of her final major novel, Helen (1834) and its translation into French by Louise Swanton-Belloc in the same year. The object of Le Magasin was popular education; it had been launched as the earliest imitation of Charles Knight’s Penny Magazine (1832-46), which aimed to enlighten popular readers with the aid of wood-engraved images without provoking radical ideas. Le Magasin was, however, more progressive than its British counterpart, promoting the institutionalization of general education in France during the period (Mainardi 86), and this may account for its interest in the Edgeworths.

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The petition for Richard Lovell Edgeworth to be permitted to stay in Paris, 1803

Image of the petition and signatories. Ink on paper.

Contributor: Anne-Claire Michoux

Location: National Library of Ireland (Dublin)

Description: On the 21st of January 1803, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, who had been residing in Paris for a few months with his daughter Maria and other family members, was ordered by the police to leave the capital within twenty-four hours. This document is a copy of the petition addressed to the ‘Citoyen Grand Juge’, Claude Ambroise Régnier (nominated in 1802), signed by eighteen leading French and Genevese literary, scientific, and political authorities appealing against the order on the family’s behalf. Many of the signatories were members of the Institut national des sciences et des arts, founded in 1795, of which Napoleon was also a member, and were in high office as members of the Tribunat, one of the main legal institutions under Napoleon. The petition captures the still-operative Enlightenment belief in a republic of letters which privileges intercultural intellectual exchanges. It reflects the dream of a European intellectual community that endures beyond or despite political and military conflict.

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Thomas Moore’s Harp

 

Contributor: Francesca Benatti

Location: Royal Irish Academy, Dawson Street, Dublin, Ireland

Description: Thomas Moore’s harp is held in Dublin in the Library of the Royal Irish Academy, which also houses Moore’s personal library. It was donated to Moore in 1823 by Dublin harp maker John Egan to further publicise his recent line of Portable Irish Harps, for which he had obtained royal patronage by King George IV in 1821. Moore’s Portable Irish Harp features in the anonymous portrait of Thomas Moore in his Study at Sloperton (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), next to his cabinet piano. We know that, despite Egan’s success at expanding the sale of Irish harps in Ireland and Britain, Moore himself preferred the piano as an instrument.

During the eighteenth century, the Irish harp had become powerfully charged with nationalist symbolism through the publications of the Volunteers and the United Irishmen, who chose it as the emblem of their revolutionary movement. Continue reading “Thomas Moore’s Harp”