"Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon
This Subject": West Indian Suitors
in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda
Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick
W
hen Maria Edgeworth published her second novel, Belinda
(1801). her heroine drew fire from critics. As writers at the
Monthly Review observed, Belinda "has not called forth in us a great
portion of interest on her behalf, nor entitled herself to our highest love
and admiration, as a perfect model of the female character."' What kept
Belinda from love, admiration, and perfection was her "admission of
a second attachment." Although her feelings for the English aristocrat.
Clarence Hervey, are never spoken, and Hervey himself makes plans to
many someone else, Belinda's subsequent romantic attachment to the
West Indian Mr Vincent did not meet with her critics' approbation.
In response to her critics' demands and advice from her father, Edgeworth made extensive revisions to the early edition of Belinda, and when
it reappeared in 1810 as part of Mrs Barbauld's British Novelists Series,
the novel was significantly altered. Taken as a whole, these revisions
reveal something more than the reformation of Belinda as "jilt." For
in the process of cooling Belinda's second attachment, Edgeworth effectively rewrote her representations of romantic relationships between
English women and West Indian men. In the 1801 edition Edgeworth had
not only brought her heroine to the brink of marriage with the Creole
1 Monthly Review 37 (1801), 369
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 4, July I993
332 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y F I C T I O N
gentlemen Mr Vincent, she had also married that gentleman's black servant Juba to an English farm girl. The lengthy cuts and revisions which
Edgeworth made in her 1810 edition censored both relationships.
Edgeworth's early edition of Belinda attacks established notions of
racial purity and patriarchal authority. Her own position as a colonial in
Ireland allowed her to challenge the endogamy of English society by extending its parameters to other English colonies such as those in the West
Indies. Just as the English had always viewed overly close contact with
the Gaelic people as likely to produce degenerating and uncivilizing effects, so they objected to the interracial sexual mixing which Edgeworth
portrayed in her novel. What was at work in this notion of "purity" was
the perpetuation of primogeniture.2 Interracial marriages not only failed
to produce white English heirs, they also, when the husband was "other,"
failed to consolidate colonial wealth in the hands of white English gentlemen. The early edition of Belinda thus illustrated the subversive potential
involved in an Englishwoman's choice of a West Indian husband.
Although the English had been trying to conquer Ireland since the twelfth
century, it was not until the late sixteenth century that English officials began to view Ireland as a colony whose English planters faced
the same perils as settlers among the North American Indians. According to Nicholas Canny, the word "colony" in the sixteenth century was
used interchangeably with "plantation" to mean "the introduction of nucleated settlements of Englishmen into an area that had not previously
been subject to English government control."%e English government's
2 1 am indebted to Fran~oiseLionnet's Autobiographicnl Voices: Roce. C e d e r . Self-Ponroifure
(Ithaca: Comell University Press. 1989) for this theoretical formulation. I have also found Laura
Donaldson's 'The Miranda Complex: Colonialism and the Question of Feminist Reading," Diacritics 18 (1988). 65-77, extremely useful for assessing Edgeworth's attempts to "see" the
indigenous other. My reading of Belindo is grounded on the assumption that Edgeworth's gender and colonial status cannot be separated. I differ from critics who evoke an exclusively
English context and focus on gender. See Gary Kelly, "Amelia Opie, Lady Carolina Lamb,
and Maria Edgewonh: Official and Unofficial Ideology," Ariel: A Review oflnfernationnl English Liferorwe 12 (1981), 3-24. While such an approach allows Edgeworth to be compared with
other English women writen, it gives little attention to the particularity of her Anglo-Irish background. Another tendency in Edgewonh criticism encourages analysis of her work as precisely
the pmduct of a colonial background, the Big House landed gentry of the Pmtestant Ascendancy. For example, see P.F. Sheeran, "Colonists and Colonized: Some Aspects of Anglo-Irish
Literature from Swift to Joyce," Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983). 97-1 15. This body of
criticism, however, ignores the dual consciousness which kept Edgewonh, as a woman writer,
from any easy and undivided loyalty to her Anglo-Irish class. To the extent that each approach
excludes the other, distortions result.
3 Nicolas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Allanfir World. 1560-18W (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univesity Pnss. 1988). p. 13.
W E S T I N D I A N S U I T O R S I N EDGEWORTH'S B E L I N D A 333
justification for colonial activities involved what was considered a fair
trade: in return for introducing the indigenous peoples to the "benefits
of English law" and civil society, the English would "produce an agricultural surplus that would be available for export to England to help
meet that country's requirements in food.'" Implicit in this arrangement
was a racist attitude toward the native population and economic consequences which conspired to keep that population bound to the colonizing
country. Economically, Ireland followed the colonial pattern of becoming dependent on England's manufactured goods as its own raw materials
went to England rather than to the development of internal industries.
Socially, the Gaelic culture was devalued and the structures of its society were eroded as the "benefits of English law" benefited only the
English.
The same dynamics were at work in England's colonial relationship
with the West Indies. As in Ireland, the effects on the islands of England's
demand for abundant raw materials to fuel its industry were specialization in export crops and a failure to develop internal industries. In
the early eighteenth century, significantly enough, Irish labourers were
imported as indentured servants to work tobacco crops. With the subsequent introduction of cotton and sugar, thousands of African slaves were
brought over to perfom the backbreaking work of harvesting the cotton
and crushing the cane.'
These systems of colonial oppression rested on the belief that the
English were superior to the peoples they colonized. The inferior value
and status assigned to colonized peoples is graphically illustrated by
Sir William Petty in The Political Anatomy of Ireland (1691) when he
discusses as lost property the number of Irish Catholics who died in the
1fX1 rebellion. They are counted as equal to "slaves and negroes" at
fifteen pounds each, compared with the seventy pounds which Petty puts
on an Englishman's head.6
Within this continuum of value the colonist occupied an ambiguous
place. His role in colonization (and I use the male pronoun advisedly) was
precisely to enact it, by settling in the colonized country and supporting
its occupation politically and militarily.7 The role could offer considerable
4 Canny, p. 14.
5 T.O. Lloyd, The British Empire, 1558-1983 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). p. 22.
6 Canny, p. 112.
(Denver: University of Colorado Press, 1974). p. 3
334 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
social and economic advantages, particularly in the West Indies, for those
who wished "to make a fortune quickly and then return, as part of an everexpanding gentry, preferably in the metropolis or, if not, as a member of
In Ireland, the practice took the form
the creole elite in the colonie~."~
of absentee landlordism, and the goal of increased economic and social
status, preferably in English society, was the same.
But the benefits of being a colonist came at the price of a significant
and perpetual displacement. As Albert Memmi describes the condition:
"The colonialist is unsure of his true nationality. He navigates between
a faraway society which he wants to make his own (but which becomes
to a certain degree mythical), and a present society which he rejects and
Even for those who returned to England,
thus keeps in the ab~tract."~
large fortunes did not ensure acceptance by the social blite. Proximity
to the "indigenous other" rendered the colonist "other" himself. He was
suspected of degeneracy from being so long in the company of "primitive" peoples. If he had had a family in the West Indies, his children were
considered "Creole," which classified them racially as Europeans even
as it stigmatized the influence of their island surroundings. West Indian
Creoles raised by African servants were despised and their accents and
manners were ridiculed. In his History of Jamaica (1774). Edward Long,
a planter himself, delivered his criticism of Creole women in distinctly
racial terms:
constant intercourse from their birth with n e w domestics whose drawling, dissonant gibberish they insensibly adopt, and with it no small tincture of their
awkward camage and vulgar manners ... we may see ... a very fine young
woman awkwardly dangling her arms with the air of a negro servant, lolling almost the whole day upon beds or settees, her head muffled up with two or three
handkerchiefs. ... When she is roused hom slumber, her speech is whining, languid and childish. ... Her ideas are narrowed to the ordinary subjects that pass
before her, the tittle tattle of the parish, the tricks, superstitions, diversions and
profligate discourses of black servants, equally illiterate and unpolished.1°
Here close association with black servants begins to give a white woman
colour, "no small tincture" obtained through "constant intercourse"; the
overlapping of communication and coitus in "intercourse" locates woman
as the penetration point for the "other" and threatens her status as conduit
8 Alan K a n a , "The World of Alexander Johnston: The Cnolieation of Ambition, 1762-1787,"
Historical Jourwl 30 (1987). 55.
9 The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boslon: Beacon Ress, 1965). p. 68.
I0 Derrick Knight Cenrlemcn @Fortune: The Men Who Mode Their Forlunes in Briloin's Slave
Colonies (London: Frederick Muller, 1978), p. 55.
WEST I N D I A N SUITORS I N
EDGEWORTH'S B E L I N D A
335
of the racially pure heir. The passage thus depicts women as particularly
susceptible to African slave culture, and the effects are clearly marked
as degenerating. When not actually asleep, the Creole woman is semiconscious and childlike, her status literally established as subhuman by
an apparent inability even to stand upright.
Similarly, the Gaelic Irish had long been portrayed by English authors as primitive, and close contact with them was thought to produce
degeneracy in colonists. Just as in the Middle Ages marriage alliances between the Anglo-Nomans and the Gaelic Irish had caused the former to
shift their allegiance from England to the Gaelic chiefs," so in the seventeenth century there were fears that Englishmen "were being drawn away
from a true civil life as a consequence of their trading with the Irish and
as a result of marriage, fosterage, and wet-nursing."12 By the eighteenth
century, marriage between Protestants and Roman Catholics was prohibited in Ireland, a situation which Edmund Burke described as "making the
people not only two distinct parties forever, but keeping them as two distinct species on the same land."'3 As in the West Indies, the surest means
of absorption by the "other" culture was through "intercourse," either
verbal or sexual.
We can see this complex of ideas at work in Richard Cumberland's
popular play, The West Indian. Produced in London in 1771, the play
opened with a prologue which offered apologies for its two colonial
characters. The first was a West Indian Creole:
Critics, hark foward! noble game and new;
A fine West Indian started full in view:
Hot as the soil, the clime which gave him birth,
You'll run him on a burning scent to earth,
Yet don't devour him in his hiding place;
Bag him; he'll serve you for another chase;
For sure that country has no feeble claim,
Which swells your commerce and supports your fame.
The second was an Irishman:
Another hero your excuse implores,
Sent by your sister kingdom to your shores,
Doomed by religion's too severe command
To fight for bread against his native land:
I I Schultl and Scott. p. 23.
12 Canny, p. 41.
13 Quoted in Thomas Flanagan, The Irish Novelists. 18W-1850 (New Y d r Columbia University
Press, 1959), p. I I.
336 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
A brave, unthinking, animated rogue,
With here and there a touch upon the brogue;
Laugh, but despise him not, for on his lip
His errors lie; his heart can never trip.I4
These were the standard depictions of Creoles and Gaels-the former hotblooded, handsome, and rich, the latter rashly courageous, good-hearted,
and comic. The play opens as it proceeds, by arguing for the usefulness
of these colonial characters to English society. Depicted as game, with
"strong animal spirits," the West Indian Belacour is tracked down for
his wealth. The preying Fulmer describes him as "fresh landed, and full
of cash, a gull to our heart's content, a hot-brained, headlong spark
that would run into our trap like a wheatear under a turf."15 Belacour's
passionate and intemperate nature is repeatedly attributed to the "hot
clime" in which he was born; both he and his island are clearly in need
of rational English government. Thus, by the end of the play, the West
Indian and his large fortune have been taken in hand by his English
merchant father and an English wife. Belacour agrees to be governed by
them in return for a place in English society: "whenever you perceive
me deviating into error or offense, bring only to my mind the providence
of this night, and I will turn to reason and obey."Ib
The West Indian was undoubtably successful because it provided a neat
resolution to the reintegration of West Indian wealth into English society. The resolution depended both on the depiction of Creoles as unable
to manage their own financial affairs and a clear delineation of legitimate parentage. In the first scene we discover that Belacour's father,
Stockwell, had secretly married a planter's daughter on a trip to Jamaica. After his mother's death, Belacour is raised by his grandfather,
who leaves him the Jamaican estate. Meanwhile, Stockwell has become a
successful London merchant and member of Parliament. The play's business, then, is to restore the sundered system of primogeniture by bringing
Belacour's wealth under the control of his English father. Financial control is supported and maintained on a social level by the "civilizing"
influence of Belacour's English wife, whose role is to curb her husband's intemperance, monetary and othenuise. Thus, though in this play
an English woman allies herself with an island "other," she does so in
the service of an English patriarch.
14 plays of the Restormion ond Eighteenth Cenrury, ed. Dougald MacMillan and Howsrd Mumbrd
Jones (New York: Henry Holt, 1931). p. 748.
15 Ploys of the Restoration, p. 765.
16 Plays of Ihc Rcstorotion, p. 786.
W E S T I N D I A N S U I T O R S IN
EDGEWORTH'S BELINDA
337
Similarly, the Irishman Major O'Flaherty is portrayed as firmly under
English control, so much so that, as a British soldier, he has become an
agent of that control. O'Flaherty's exile is made to seem almost inevitable
since Ireland is characterized as "doomed," too hopelessly bogged down
in religious conflict either to claim or to profit by his allegiance. He plays
a crucial role in the play by moving the plot along in the best interests
of the English characters. For example, when eavesdropping is required,
O'Flaherty performs the service, thereby helping to wrest an estate out
of the hands of a sour dowager and place it in the "rightful" hands of
an ailing patriarch and his son. Once his tasks are performed, however,
the English characters have no further use for him. His reward is to be
sent home rather than to have a place made for him in the society he has
served. Thus, in the end, O'Flaherty comes to prefer his own country,
however doomed: "'tis now thirty long years since I set foot in my native
country, and by the power of St. Patrick I swear I think it's worth all the
rest of the world put together." In these ways The West Indian presents
colonial characters as managed by the English in order to deliver colonial
wealth to English society."
&
The first edition of Belinda was published in three volumes in 1801.
Although Edgeworth made minor revisions to the second edition of 1802,
it was not until 1809 that she wrote to her cousin, Sophy Ruxton, about
her more extensive "corrections" to the novel. In 1802 the British Critic
had complained in general terms of the lack of "vivacity of description,
the successful delineation of living manners, the contrivance with respect
to plot, or the ingenuity with respect to the catastrophe, which the name
prefixed appeared to pr~mise."'~
The Monthly Review, as we have seen,
specifically objected to Belinda's "admission of a second attachment":
17 Some thirty years later. Maria Edgeworth, writing for an English audience in Essay on Irish
BUNS. vol. 1 of Tales ond Novels (London: Baldwin and Cradock. 1832). m n e d her book with
a parody uf the d e a of the uthl) of the lnrh to Engltrh roclcty Intended to comct the attttudcs
of tngllsh madrn prone to r~d~culc
the Insh. pan~cularlyInsh speech. Edgeworth'. book ~mrued
a resounding challenge to the assumptions that made colonialism possible. She positions henelf
in the text as an English observer, "neither born nor bred in Ireland," who without the passion
of national pride or "amor p a h a in its full force" has nonetheless "become athched to the
country only for its merits" (p. 278). Having thus identified herself, she becomes a rational and
mstworthy commentator for her English audience. But from this position Edgeworth does not
behave like a colonist. Rather she subjecu colonialist strategems to a debunking scrutiny. For
example, Edgeworth views the differences in Irish language and culture not as degenerate, but
as simply foreign and therefore deserving of the good manners extended by the English to other
foreignen.
18 Brirish Critic 18 (1802), 85.
338 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
We do not mean to deny the justice of the author's arguments against a belief in
the unextinguishable nature of a first flame; they may be occasionally introduced
into the pages of a novel, or form the subject in a moral essay, with great
propriety; we only object to the exemplification of them by the conduct of the
present heroine. According to our ideas, (we have pleaded guilty to a little
romance,) it lessens her amiability; and we should have been better pleased to
have seen her in the weeds of widowed affection, than in the gay attire of a
second courtship.19
Inconsistently, the passage approves in principle the moral lesson Edgeworth wished to convey, while objecting to the actual portrayal of that
lesson. A first passion might be allowed to die, Edgeworth's critics suggest, but a female character could only really be amiable if she mourned
like a widow. And this demand is made of a heroine who, when she
finds her own unspoken affection for one man apparently unreturned, sets
about redirecting her feelings towards another man who seems a more
reasonable choice. Edgeworth's object was precisely to show that passion might be controlled by reason. But more threatening to her critics
perhaps than ungovemed passion was the portrait of a woman controlling herself and making her own choices. If the lack of discrimination
that passion could produce was dangerous, at least it wuld be governed
and even punished within patriarchal norms. But rational love as Edgeworth presented it in Belinda was a process by which a young woman
made her own choice of husband, a choice informed but not controlled by
those whose advice she respected. Relying for affection on time and familiarity, a heroine might use her own judgment in choosing to marry
anyone, including the Creole Mr Vincent or the African Juba.
It was this matter of Belinda's rationality which Edgeworth seized
upon when she considered revision of her novel. Writing to her aunt
in 1809, she belittled her character for lack of feeling: "I really was
so provoked with the cold tameness of that stick or stone Belinda that
I could have tom the pages to piece-and
really have not heart or
patience to correct her-as the hackney coachman said 'Mend you! better
make a new one."'" As if to distance herself from Belinda, Edgeworth
demonstrates her own capacity for passion. But that passion is directed at
her own work, and manifests itself as the literal destruction of her novel.
It is a telling metaphor for the revisions she was about to undertake.
Many of these revisions took the form of long cuts in the dialogue between Belinda and MI Vincent. Edgeworth made two of these in chapter
19 Monthly Review, p. 369.
20 Marilyn Butler, Maria E d g e ~ o r t k :A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Ress, 1972), p.
494.
WEST I N D I A N SUITORS I N EDGEWORTH'S BELINDA
339
24 where Mr Vincent fears telling Belinda about the anonymous letter
he has received attacking her reputation:
"But come," said Belinda, "tell me, seriously, the real motive of your visit; for
I see, that something passes in your mind, which you have not told me."
"Nothing, dear Belinda, is so agreeable to me as perfect openness and sincerity. I admire it in you. and I am proud of it in myself; but may it not be carried
too far? Is it wise, to say what must give pain, when it is not absolutely necessary? For instance, if you heard anything injudicious to my character, would
you think it kind to repeat it, when you were not in the least inclined to believe
it?"
"Yes, I should think it not only kind; but, I should now consider it as absolutely
incumbent upon me. You may, therefore, without hesitation, mention what you
have heard of me."
After Mr Vincent has shown Belinda the infamous letter, the 1802 edition
of the novel continues:
As soon as Belinda had finished this curious production, she gave her hand to
Mr. Vincent with more kindness than she had ever before shown him.
"I thank you, Mr. Vincent, for showing me this attempt to injure my reputation.
It is not only handsome, but wise. If ever we are united, this will lay a sure
foundation for the confidence which supports domestic happiness. The mean
author of this falsehood could never have foreseen, that I should have told you
everything, which it concerns you to know, relative to my former life. It has,
indeed, mentioned Mr. Hervey's name, which I did not think myself at liberty
to reveal, because I might perhaps, have seemed to impute some blame to him. I
am, however, glad of this discovery, because I am sure he must appear to you a
man of worth and talents. His name excites no emotion in my mind, that could
give you pain."
Mr. Vincent's answer must be supposed: the enraptured acknowledgements
of a lover are scarcely interesting upon the stage, where action and the theater
support the sympathy of the audience. Narration feebly supports enthusiasm,
without these advantages.
It is sufficient to say, that Mr. Vincent thought himself at the summit of
felicity; with the utmost alacrity, he consented to show the anonymous letter
to Lady Delacour, though he had previously dreaded the effect, which it might
have upon her ladyship's feeling^."^'
In the 1810 edition of Belinda, Edgeworth cut the first passage entirely
and condensed the second to only a short paragraph:
21 Maria Edgeworth, Belindn (London: 1. Johnson, 1802), 3:26-27. References are to two editions
of Belindn: lhe second edition (1802), which differs from the first only in minor comctians,
including grammar and font, and the 1810 edition, reprinted by Pandora Press (Landon. 1986).
340 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
As soon as Belinda had finished this curious production, she thanked Mr. Vincent, with more kindness than she had ever before shown him, for the confidence
he placed in her, and for the openness with which he treated her. She begged
his permission to show this letter to Lady Delacour, though he had previously
dreaded the effect which it might have upon her ladyship's feelings. (p. 305)
With this revision Edgeworth reduced an intimate dialogue to a one sentence summary. While in the early passages of the 1802 edition Belinda
literally gives Mr Vincent her hand and figuratively alludes to giving her
hand in marriage, the later revision withdraws both the physical touch
and the possibility of a future union. The early passages effectively engage the reader in the relationship by unfolding the couple's knowledge
of and concern for one another. The revision erases the intensity of the
encounter and refocuses attention on Belinda's duties in the novel, the
reform and comfort of Lady Delacour.
In the 1802 edition of Belinda, Edgeworth's heroine had agreed to
marry her West Indian suitor. A series of small but significant revisions
censors such a marriage in the 1810 edition. Thus, in chapter 28, in Lord
Delacour's conversation with Mr Hervey, his reference to Belinda as "on
the very eve of marriage with her husband" (1802,3:221) is changed to
a more general reference to Mr Vincent as "not quite unlikely to be her
husband" (1810, p. 381). Similarly, in the same chapter, the 1802 edition
reads: "The very morning before that, which was fixed for their mamage,
Mr. Vincent went to Gray, the jeweller, for some trinkets, which he had
bespoke for Belinda" (1802, 3:279). In the 1810 edition the sentence is
altered: "A few days afterward, Mr. Vincent went to Gray, the jeweller,
for some trinkets, which he had bespoke" (1810, p. 401).
These revisions and others like them reduce the importance of Belinda's relationship with Mr Vincent by censoring the portrayal of its
interior life. Although the affair ends unhappily in both versions (and to
this I will return later), the 1802 edition registers a stronger sense of loss.
Here is one of the passages describing Belinda's feelings about her decision to part from Mr %ncent because of his inveterate gambling, which
Edgeworth omitted from the 1810 edition of the novel:
Reason and prudence then forbade her to trust the happiness of her life to a
vain promise. She trembled at the thoughts of having been so near forming
an indissoluble connection with one, who had such a dangerous, and as she
firmly believed, incurable taste. Even her sense of escape was attended with
many painful feelings: not that she had ever loved him with passion; but she
had been habituated to think of him with much kindness, esteem, and affection.
W E S T I N D I A N S U I T O R S I N EDGEWORTH'S B E L I N D A 341
Her thoughts had now for some months been fixed upon him, and she could not
suddenly change their course, or console herself for his loss. (1802, 3:292)
Even in the early version of the novel, in keeping with the novel's advocacy of marriage as a rational union, Edgeworth had not gone so far as to
allow her heroine to feel passionate about Mr Vincent. But she had portrayed the relationship as intimate and the loss of it as deeply felt by her
heroine. By the 1810 edition, Belinda experiences "strong emotion" and
"pain" at the parting, but her only direct comment is restrained: "What
a pity ... that with so many good and great qualities, I should be forced
to bid him adieu for ever!" (1810, p. 407). Sorrow over the loss of a future husband on the eve of marriage is thus replaced by a detached sense
of regret." Readers of the 1810 edition were assured that the alliance between the English lady and her West Indian suitor had never been very
probable.
But there was another marriage with a West Indian which was censored
in the revised version of Belinda. In the early editions of the novel,
Mr Vincent's black servant Juba marries the daughter of an English
tenant. This marriage is discussed in chapter 18 of the 1802 edition, when
Belinda and Lady Anne visit the bride's family at the Percival porter's
lodge. By the 1810 edition, however, all reference to Juba had been elided
from the passage and an anonymous though suitably English name had
been substituted for his. I have emphasized the excisions Edgeworth
made in her text and indicated the 1810 additions in brackets:
"Well, Lucy," said lady Anne "have you overcome your fear of poor Juba's
black face [dislike to James Jackson]?" The girl reddened, smiled, and looked
at her grandmother, who answered for her in an arch tone, "0yes, my lady.
We are not afraid of Juba's block face [Jackson] now; we are grown very great
friends. This pretty cane chair for my good man was his handiwork, and these
baskets he made for me. Indeed, he's a most industrious, ingenious, good natured
youth; and our Lucy takes no offense at his black face [courting her) now, my
lady, I can assure you. That necklace," added she in a hawwhisper, pointing to
a necklace of Angola pease which the girl wore-"that necklace is a present of
his which is never off her neck now, my lady. [That necklace, which is never off
her neck now, he turned for her, my lady; it is a present of his.] So I tell him
he need not be discouraged, though so be she did not take to him at the first,
for she's a good girl, I say it, though she's my own; and the eyes are used to a
face after a time, and then it's nothing." (1802, 2198-99; 1810, p. 222)
22 Mark D. Hawthorne draws different conclusions about these revisions in "Maria EdgeworIh's
Unpleasant Lesson: The Shaping of Character," Studies: An Irish Quonerly Review 64 (1975).
167-77.
342 EIOHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
The revisions erase Juba and his blackness from the text along with his
African gifts to his English wife. The change leaves a strange silence in
the 1810 edition of Belinda, for, although Juba obviously ceases to be Mr
Vincent's servant, his absence from the narrative is never explained. The
explanation comes, rather, in Edgeworth's letters. On 9 January 1810,
she wrote to her aunt: "My father has great delicacies and scruples of
conscience about encouraging such marriages.'" A week later she described the revision to Mrs Barbauld: "My father says that gentlemen
have horrors upon this subject, and would draw conclusions very unfavorable to a female writer who appeared to recommend such unions; as
I do not understand the subject, I trust to his better j ~ d g e m e n t . ' ~
But Edgeworth did understand something of the subject. She had been,
for instance, on a slave ship in London, and in a letter written in 1792
to her cousin Sophy she comments on the "a dreadfully small hole in
which the poor slaves are stowed together, so they cannot stir."x She
also knew English people who protested against slavery in the West
Indies by refusing to consume sugar which came from there?' Edgeworth
knew enough, that is, about the African slave trade to understand that
it supported the West Indian plantations, which supplied Britain with a
great deal of commercial wealth. In manying Juba to the English farm
girl, she thus drew overt social connections where economic ones already
existed. She made an African "visible" by assigning him a class in the
existing social hierarchy and then integrating him into English society
through marriage.
In fact, this kind of mixed-race marriage was far from unheard of
in late-eighteenth-century English society, where, from the beginning of
the slave trade, black slaves had been brought to England to be used as
unpaid servants. Samuel Johnson acquired a black servant as did Joshua
Reynolds and others." And, black servants did sometimes many lowerclass English women. What Edgeworth had done in Belinda was give
social sanction to such a marriage. It was a gesture to horrify "gentlemen"
and cast doubt on her own propriety as a "female writer," for it called up
those fears of degeneration that had long been associated with interracial
mixing. As Franqoise Lionnet explains:
23 Butler. p. 495".
24 Butler, p. 495.
25 The Life ond Letters of Maria Edgeworth, 4. AugusNs Hare (London: Edward Arnold, 1894),
p. 26.
WEST I N D I A N SUITORS I N
EDGEWORTH'S B E L I N D A 343
What is at stake in the conservative resistance to m6tissage is clearly a patriarchal
desire for self-reproduction, self-duplication, within a representational s p a c e
female bodies-uncontaminated by the presence of the other. Control of that
space is essential to its enduring "purity," to the continuation of the paternal
lineage, and to the safeguarding of patriarchal authorityJ8
By advocating marriage with men other than English patriarchs, Edgeworth challenged the endogamy considered essential to the colonial control which produced so much English wealth. At the same time, and
perhaps more significantly, her challenge to the dominant cultural values also advocated women's control of their own bodies and destinies
through the marriage choice. It was a clear case of the Anglo-European
daughter seeing and allying herself with the oppressed other. But in 1810
Edgeworth as daughter suffered the patriarchal consequences; she was
censored by her father and other English gentlemen.
I want to look now at a final revision in Belinda which helps to characterize the ideological shift in all the "corrections" to the novel I have
described so far. In this revision, Edgeworth moved a significant speech
from a dialogue between Lady Delacour and Belinda to one between
Lady Anne and Belinda. The original passage appears in the 1802 edition in chapter 24 where Lady Delacour challenges Belinda to defend MI
Vincent as her suitor, in preference to Lady Delacour's choice for Belinda, Clarence Hewey. The conversation involves Belinda's defence of
rational love and Lady Delacour's advocacy of passion and being in love:
"And is it possible that you are seriously attached to this man?" [asked Lady
Delacour]
"Where is the impossibility? You will see none, my friend, when you are as
thoroughly acquainted with his good qualities as I am."
"Good qualities! But we don't fall in love with good qualities, my dear."
"But we love them, and that is better. I must be allowed to repeat, that there
is a great deal of difference between loving and being in love."
"As you know from experience? Why, I protest, you do not change colour,
much, at the recollection of Clarence Hervey! You have at length convinced
me, that it is all over with him. We all know 'qu'un petit nez retroussd peut
renverser les loix d'un empire.' But what is un petit nez retroussC compared
with an aquiline nose?"
"It is a comparison that I never made," said Belinda.
"You confess, however, that you think Mr. Vincent handsome and I candidly
acknowledge, as I told you at first, that Mr. Vincent has much the advantage of
Clarence Hervey, in personal accomplishments."
28 Autobiogrophicol Voices, p. 12.
344 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
"Certainly. But were he an Adonis, he would not have made any impression
upon me, instantly. We gradually acquire knowledge of the good qualities of
those who endeavor to please us; and if they are really amiable, their persons
become agreeable to us by degrees, we become accustomed to their addresses,
and time-"
"Accustomed!" said Lady Delacour laughing. "You put me in mind of Mr.
Transfer, in Zeluco; the merchant who disliked his nephew, because he was not
accustomed to him; and afterward, when he became accustomed to him, if I
remember right, liked him vastly well. But you surpass Transfer: never before
did I hear a woman talk of liking a lover, because she was accustomed to him."
"And did you never hear of anybody's liking a husband better from bemg
accustomed to him?" said Belinda.
"One does grow accustomed to disagreeable things, certainly; and it is well
one does," said Lady Delacow, a little embarrassed. "But at this rate, my dear.
I do not doubt, but you might become accustomed to Caliban."
"My belief in the reconciling power of custom does not go quite so far," said
Belinda, laughing. "It does not extend to Caliban, or even to la belle et la Mte.
Though you have seen a French audience applaud with raptures, and an English
audience tolerate, Zemure and Azor." (1802, 3:36-37)
In the 1810 edition of Belinda, most of this passage is cut out. The
concluding lines on Caliban, however, reappear in the 1810 edition in
chapter 28 when Belinda and Lady Anne are discussing Mr Vhcent.
While in both versions of the novel Lady Anne encourages Belinda to
accept Mr Vincent's addresses, in the revised version of this passage it
is Belinda who introduces Caliban into the conversation and Lady Anne
who laughs at the comparison:
"We gradually acquire knowledge of the good qualities of those who endeavor
to please us; and it they are really suitable, their persons become agreeable to
us be degrees, when we become accustomed to them, [said Lady Anne]."
"Accustomed!" said Belinda, smiling. "One does grow accustomed even to
disagreeable things certainly; but at this rate, my dear Lady Anne, I do not doubt
but one might grow accustomed to Caliban."
"My belief in the reconciling power of custom does not go quite so far," said
Lady Anne. "It does not extend to Caliban, or even to the hero of La Belle el
La B&e; but I believe that, in a mind so well regulated as yours, esteem may
certainly in time be improved into love. I will tell Mr. Vmcent so, my dear."
(1810, p. 221)
The introduction of Caliban into both discussions of Mr Vincent's merits suggests how far even a West Indian gentleman might be identified
with Prospero's "poisonous slave, got by the devil himself / Upon thy
W E S T I N D I A N S U I T O R S I N EDOEWORTH'S B E L I N D A 345
wicked dam" (I.$. This concern with Caliban's hideous lineage is emphasized in The Tempest where Caliban's rebellion takes the f o m of a
challenge to Prospero's paternal line; by attempting to force himself on
Prospero's daughter, Miranda, he aims to people "this isle with Calibans"
(I.ii). Hence, colonial rage is displaced onto the body of the patriarch's
daughter. In the 1802 edition, where marriages with West Indians were
admitted, Belinda laughs at the Caliban allusion as a fanciful threat and
places it in the context of another decidedly fictional "beast." But with
such marriages censored in the later edition, Belinda now points out the
danger of Caliban. Thus, the man identified as "other" is to be feared
rather than loved. Significantly, at the same time that Mr V~ncentis censored as suitor, Belinda is censored as an advocate for rational love.
In the first dialogue it is she who argues the case for rational love before Lady Delacour. But this position of authority changes in the later
dialogue where Belinda receives instruction from Lady Anne on the merits of rational love. Thus, having encouraged the wrong suitor in the 1802
edition, Beliida loses her position as agent in the 1810 edition.
In neither edition of Belinda does the heroine actually marry her Creole
suitor. The revisions were concerned only with proximity to a marriage
union. And the failure of this courtship in the novel is closely related to
failure of another kind. Unlike Belacour in Cumberland's The West Indian, Mr Vincent fails to submit the control of his fortune to an English
patriarch. When Belinda meets Mr Vincent, he is by law "in full command of his fortune and his actions" (1810, p. 199), but he had previously
been the ward of the novel's ideal patriarch, Mr Percival:
Mr. Percival had been a guardian and a father to him. His own father, an
opulent merchant, on his death-bed requested that his son, who was then about
eighteen, might be immediately sent to England for the advantages of a European
education. Mr. Percival, who had a great regard for the father, arising from
circumstances which it is not here necessary to explain, accepted the charge of
young Vincent, and managed so well, that his ward when he amved at the age
of twenty-one did not feel relieved from any restraint. (1810, p. 199)
In the 1802 edition of Belinda, Mr Vincent's father is described as an
"opulent creole" rather than an "opulent merchant." The 1810 revision
distances Mr Percival from direct social contact with a Creole as peer.
Similarly, both editions obscure the possibility that this relationship might
also have been financial. But the connection between Mr Percival and
a West Indian income arises nonetheless in his taking charge of young
Vincent because of a recipocal obligation to the father. Thus, Mr Vincent
is not introduced in the novel as a West Indian Creole in need of control,
346 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
but rather as one on whom control has already been exerted through a
surrogate English father.
The loss of this control, however, provides the circumstances for Belinda's own rejection of Mr Vincent as husband in the 1802 edition and
as suitor in the 1810 edition. Mr Vincent is a gambler and his gambling is the fatal flaw he brings with him from the West Indies. This
proclivity marks the limits of Mr Percival's influence:
When Mr. Hewey asked himself how it was possible that the pupil of Mr.
Percival could become a gamester, he forgot that Mr. Vincent had not been
educated by his guardian; that he had lived in the West Indies till he was
eighteen; and that he had only been under the care of Mr. Percival for a few
years, after his habits and character were in a great measure formed. The taste
for gambling he had acquired whilst he was a child; but, as it was then confined
to trifles, it had been passed over, as a thing of no consequence, a boyish folly,
that would never grow up with him: his father used to see him, day after day,
playing with eagerness at games of chance, with his negroes, or with the sons of
neighboring planters; yet he was never alarmed: he was too intent upon making
a fortune for his family to consider how they would spend it; and he did not
foresee that this boyish fault might be the means of his son's losing, in a few
hours, the wealth which he had been years amassing. (1810, p. 384)
Here we find an active representation of the standard definition of "creole" since the late sixteenth century: "a person born and naturalized in
the country but of European ... or of African negro race." This definition was careful in its racial separation: "the name having no connotation
of colour, and in its reference to origin being distinguished on the one
hand from born in Europe (or Africa) and on the other had from aboriginal" (OED). But as Edgeworth's description suggests, however "pure"
the lineage, once in the aboriginal setting, racial boundaries began to
blur. To be "naturalized" in the West Indies clearly involved the negative tutelage of slaves and other Creoles. Thus, the men who amassed
wealth on their plantations in the West Indies had sons who could not
keep it. These sons needed to be controlled by English patriarchs."
We can see the formula working itself out in the terms of MI Vincent's
exposure in Belinda. Mt Percival approaches his ward to borrow money
29 According to D.H. Murdoch, "Land Policy in the Eighteenth-CenturyBritish Empire: The Sale of
C r o w Lands in the Ceded Islands, 1763-1783." it was precisely the speculator and gambler who
made Wcst Indian fortunes: "Plantation agriculture in the West lndies was a high-risk business;
it attracted adventurers. The terms of sale of land could not exclude speculators determined to
circumvent the letter of the law, nor the penalties have any effect on gamblers who had bet
everything and lost everything" (Historicnl Jourml27 [19841), 573.
W E S T I N D I A N SUITORS I N EDGEWORTH'S BELINDA 347
for a friend: "I know you have double the sum we want in ready moneyso I make no ceremony. Let me have the ten thousand this evening, if
you can, as I wish to leave town as soon as possible" (1810, p. 403).
There is a great deal of ceremony, however, when Mr Percival finds that
Mr Vincent has lost his "ready money" by gambling. When Belinda is
informed about the sort of man she is involved with, MI Percival stoutly
refuses to vouch for the good behaviour of his former ward. Belinda's
response is sure in the 1802 edition, though swifter in the 1810 edition:
"happiness I could never enjoy with one who has any propensity to the
love of play" (1810, p. 406). Mr Vincent is banished to the continent,
and Belinda marries a safer man-the aristocratic Mr Hewey, whose
income is "independent" and whose propensity for keeping it is sure. The
connections are clear: if Mr Vincent's income is not at the disposal of
the English patriarch, the Anglo-European daughter is not at the disposal
of the West Indian heir.
Thus, Edgeworth's narrative resembles Cumberland's The West Indian
in the ideological terms it sets up for English patriarchal control of West
Indian wealth. While Cumberland's play works to fulfil these terms, however, Edgeworth's novel confounds them. For although both editions of
Belinda represent Mr Vincent, in his intemperate squandering of his property, as the stereotype of the Creole planter, that property is nonetheless
withheld from the novel's ideal English patriarch. Rather than depicting the reintegration of colonial wealth into the English social system,
Edgeworth sunders the connection between Mr Percival and his Creole
ward.
At the time that Edgeworth wrote Belinda, West Indians were already a
part of the political as well as economic fabric of English society. As a
writer for the Gentleman's Magazine reported in 1766: "If I am not misinformed, there are now in Parliament upwards of forty Members who
are either West Indian planters themselves, descended from such, or have
These wealthy men
concerns there that entitle them to pre-eminen~e."~
returned from the West Indies to build grand houses and populate fashionable spas such as Bath. Though they formed a strong business lobby
in London, their money could not always buy them social acceptance,
and many West Indian heirs, such as William Beckford, existed as eccentrics on the margins of English society." They tended, therefore, to
30 Knight. p. 49.
31 Knight. p. 46.
348 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
form their own social groups and to resettle in England in their own communities. One of these was London's Portman Square, inherited by Henry
William Portman in 1761 and developed into lavish houses.
It is appropriate that Edgeworth's heroine, Belinda Portman, bears the
name of this famous West Indian community. It suggests the marginalized
status that she shares with her West Indian suitor. Just as Mr Vincent is
banished from the narrative for failing to provide "ready money" to an
English patriarch, so Belinda, in the revised version, is censored for her
discourse on rational love. Both characters are denied the use of reason
to control their own destinies. Indeed, Belinda's advocacy of rational
love in the first edition of the novel raised the spectre of an English
woman's autonomously allying herself with a West Indian Creole: such
an alliance, beyond the pale of English patriarchal control, effectively
challenged the system of primogeniture through which that control was
enacted. While Edgeworth herself stopped short of depicting such an
alliance, her representation in the early edition of the interracial marriage
between Juba and an English farm girl re-enacted its threatening terms
by ignoring the code of racial purity on which a white paternal lineage
depended.
Twice marginalized herself, as a colonial and as a woman, Edgeworth
was in a position to see the invisible others who supported English
industrial society. Neither plantation owner nor slave, she nonetheless
possessed a dual vision which saw both. But, with the pressure to revise, she too was censored. In her description of the linguistic devices
of the colonized we can find a description of this compromised voice in
her novel. Comparing the speech of the Irish peasant and the West Indian slave, Edgeworth wrote: "[it is] a defect arising necessarily from
their situation and the manner in which they have been treated, not from
peculiar national character. They developed these unfortunate linguistic skills 'from a necessity of defence' against those who had arbitrary
power over them."32 The revisions in Belinda form a study in the uses
of such arbitrary power.
Appalachian State University
32 Tom Dume, Mario Edgeworth and dhe Coloniol Mind (Cork: University College, 1984). p. 19.