Prejudice and Domestic Upbringing in Harrington

Maria Edgeworth's 1817 novel Harrington provides us with a surprisingly modern look at how racial and religious prejudices are passed down through the generations.  This text is somewhat different from what we have read previously this semester, as instead of being told from the perspective of the radical or the minority, the novel is told from the perspective of the privileged and prejudiced white Englishman Harrington who must learn to overcome his deep-seated preconceptions.  While Harrington does display racial biases towards Jewish people and participate in their ridicule, the novel invites us to sympathize with Harrington and view his prejudices as the consequences of being raised by problematic and equally ignorant caregivers.  Harrington's childhood story reveals not only the racial dilemmas of England in the 18th and 19th centuries but also its more nuclear issues as well.  By being divvied up between his maid Fowler, his mother, and his father throughout the early years of his life, Harrington has no proper sense of family or unity, naturally seeming to lead to his unfavorable attitude towards Jews.  Thus while the novel is primarily concerned with overcoming racial animosities, it makes clear that these issues arise from the wrongful upbringing of the nation's children.

We see quite early on how Harrington is both made to believe that Jewish people are subhuman and largely ignored by the adults in his life.  The first paragraph shows Harrington standing on a balcony with his maid-servant while looking down at a man on the street.  Fascinated, and being disregarded by his maid, Harrington concludes that the man has "a good natured countenance" (1).  This feeling quickly turns to fear and terror as his maid threatens to call Simon the Jew up should he not go to bed.  Realizing that her tactic has worked, the desperate maid continues to tell stories of Jews who steal and sacrifice small children.  Harrington notes that "the less [he] understood, the more [he] believed" (2).  What is particularly interesting about this is the relationship between Fowler and Harrington and the power she has over him.  Being from a rather wealthy family, Harrington is often in the hands of his maid and seems to be around her more often than his actual parents.  Her power over him is seemingly absolute, and yet she is still under the authority of the boy's mother, forcing Harrington to keep her tales a secret.  He describes this as the "moment [he] became her slave, and her victim," (3) as he develops extreme anxiety and fear if she is not by his side.  It becomes clear that Fowler is overwhelmed by her responsibilities to the boy, asking permission to transfer over to nursery-maid for a much younger child of a different family.  While Fowler uses her stories to keep Harrington in line, they ultimately produce deep psychological traumas and the inability to ever reveal the source of his fear.

Harrington's mother, who is always concerned about his health but never about his well-being, instills in him feminine values that are later denounced by his father.  Most of Harrington's issues seem to have been kept from his mother, as she only finds out about his fear of Jews when his nightly screaming wakes her up.  She confirms what Fowler had led Harrington to believe, getting upset that she should let him see "such a sort of a person," (4) and finally paying Simon the Jew and the other 'Jewish' beggars to leave Harrington alone, a plan that fails disastrously and terrifies the boy all the more.  The novel seems to want to compare Harrington with his mother, "a woman of weak health, delicate nerves, and a kind of morbid sensibility" (5).  His fears and her coddling impart in him a type of feminine anxiety that is observed and gawked at by his mother's acquaintances.  When he meets Simon the Jew again Harrington's laugh is "hysterical," and this fear is soon perceived to be a "positively natural antipathy to the sight or bare idea of a Jew" (6).  While Harrington is around "grown-up wise people" for the first time, public interest soon wears down and his mother, under advise from her physician, keeps away from the house and begins to attend parties each night.  Once surrounded by the genteel for his feminine nerves, even his house staff ignore him now and find him "vapoursome-ish and tiresome," leaving him confused, "unpitied and alone" (7).

Harrington's father, who previously had very little involvement with his son, soon believes he "should be taken out of the hands of the women," and laughs "at the whole female doctrine...of sympathies and antipathies" (10).  Worried that the women are making a "Miss Molly of his boy," and commenting that "the Jews were all rascals," (10) his father assembles a team to uproot the Jews in the area, forcing them to either flee the parish or be locked up in roundhouses, asylums, workhouses, or penitentiaries.  This violent action taken by his father leads to Harrington obtaining some 'manly ideas,' and he recalls how his "father made [him] ashamed of that nervous sensibility of which [he] had before been vain" (11).  For Harrington, each stage of his life undermines the stage before, and the only piece of continuity seems to be his feelings toward the Jews, whom he begins to view with pain, embarrassment, and eventually contempt.  By separating his upbringing into these piecemeal stages, Harrington grows up with a conflicting sense of identity and a distaste for community and integration. 

As evident by our own country's racial issues as of late, preconceived biases and violence are unfortunately still a problem among the seemingly civilized parts of the world.  Here are the results of a poll recently reported by The Guardian, which found that almost half of Britons still hold antisemitic views.

Discussion Questions:

1) How do Maria Edgeworth's characterizations of Harrington's parents and division of parental responsibilities affect Harrington's fear and contempt for Jewish people?

2) While Edgeworth creates ineffectual parents, it is clear she does not condone their parental style herself.  How do you think Edgeworth's ideas about gender and parenting would line up with those of Mary Wollstonecraft?