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Irish Astr. J., 23(1), 49­54, (1996) M. T. BR ¨
UCK
MARIA EDGEWORTH; SCIENTIFIC `LITERARY LADY'
M. T. BR ¨
UCK
Craigower, Penicuik, EH26 9LA, Scotland
1. INTRODUCTION
Maria Edgeworth (1768­1849) was the most highly acclaimed
novelist of the early decades of the 19th century, author of
the instantly successful Castle Rackrent (1801), Belinda (1802),
The Absentee (1812) and many other works. Less remembered
today are her children's books of instruction which incorporate
some elementary science lessons. With her taste for science she
enjoyed the friendship of a wide circle of scientists including
many astronomers. This paper recalls some of these friends,
and looks at Maria Edgeworth's views on the place of science
in the education of women.
2. THE EDGEWORTHS
The Edgeworths were an Anglo­Irish family with an estate
at Edgeworthstown, County Longford. Though Maria 1 was
born in England and spent much of her childhood there, her
home throughout her long working life was at Edgeworth­
stown. Her friends and relatives included several scientists: her
stepmother was a sister of Francis (later Admiral Sir Francis)
Beaufort, a native of Navan, Co Meath, later Hydrographer of
the Royal Navy and originator of the Beaufort scale of wind
force. One of the daughters of that marriage became the sec­
ond wife of the astronomer Thomas Romney Robinson, Direc­
tor of Armagh Observatory, while Beaufort himself married,
as his second wife, another halfsister, a child of a different
mother 2 . Maria's full sister Anna married Thomas Beddoes,
a physician and chemist under whom Humphrey Davy began
his illustrous career. When Maria became famous and was li­
onised on visits to London and the continent, she gravitated
towards the company of scientists of whom some, like the Her­
schels, she counted among her dearest friends. ``Maria was more
readily responsive to scientific than to literary imagination'',
states Cristina Colvin, editor of two volumes of Maria's corre­
spondence. ``The strongest common interest among the Edge­
worths...was in science'' 3 . This taste for science was inherited
from and assiduously cultivated by the remarkable father of the
family, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, landowner, agriculturalist,
educationalist and inventor.
3. R. L. EDGEWORTH
Richard (1744­1817), ``the ingenious Mr Edgeworth'' 4 , was
originally intended for the English Bar but abandoned that
career for his favourite occupation, the study of mechanics and
the design of mechanical contrivances. In London he became
acquainted with a scientific circle that included Sir Joseph
Banks, President of the Royal Society, Captain Cook the ex­
plorer, and Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal. More im­
portantly for him, he got to know Erasmus Darwin (physician
and poet, and grandfather of the biologist Charles Darwin)
who introduced him to an influential group of like­minded
enthusiasts. This group, the Lunar Society of Birmingham 5 ,
so­called from the fact that their meetings took place on the
Monday evenings nearest fullmoon, included pioneers of the in­
dustrial revolution, notably the engineers Matthew Boulton of
the massive Soho Works in Birmingham and his partner James
Watt, inventor of the steam­engine; the potter and artist Josiah
Wedgewood, founder of the Etruria china factory in Stafford­
shire; and the chemist Joseph Priestley. Edgeworth, who came
to live in nearby Lichfield, was in his element in this inspiring
and exclusive club whose total membership over a period of 20
or 30 years numbered no more than 14. He returned to Ireland
with his family in 1782. With a reputation already as a scien­
tist he was a founder­member of the Royal Irish Academy in
1785 6 .
Edgeworth never lost his fervour for technological innova­
tion. A favourite field of his was the improvement of road trans­
port. He designed and built vehicles equipped with springs,
and evolved a method of road surfacing which anticipated
Macadam's. He invented and set up a telegraph system that
could send signals over large distances ­ including the jump
across the sea from Ireland to Scotland. Another of his ideas,
as early as 1783, was the cup anemometer, a set of hollow hemi­
spheres on the spokes of a horizontal wheel which revolve ir­
respective of the wind direction 7 . The first operational version
(which still survives) of this widely­used device was constructed
in 1843, long after Edgeworth's death, by Romney Robinson
of Armagh Observatory and is generally known by Robinson's
name 8 . Edgeworth had his own meteorological station at Edge­
worthstown from which his son Henry supplied the Royal Irish
Academy with meteorological data 9 . There was also an obser­
vatory, under the care of another son, William. William acted
as observer at Armagh Observatory in the late 1820s ­ his name
appears in the Armagh Catalogue published by Robinson in
1859 10 . He was also something of an inventor 11 .
It is evident from all this that the Edgeworth home was
a hive of scientific activity. Furthermore, science featured con­
spicuously in an educational scheme devised by Edgeworth for
his family. Maria herself, the second child of Edgeworth's first
marriage, had been brought up more conventionally in Eng­
land, but she collaborated actively in her father's system in
respect of her numerous younger half brothers and sisters.
Richard Edgeworth was married four times and had chil­
dren by all his wives. Maria was 30 when he married his last
wife, Frances Beaufort, in 1798 ­ the same age as her new
stepmother with whom she was ever on terms of the closest af­
fection. The youngest of the six children of that marriage was
more than forty years Maria's junior. Altogether there were for
many years nine or ten children at any one time in the house­
hold. There were also two elderly aunts who belonged to this
unusual community.
c
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Irish Astr. J., 23(1), 49­54, (1996) MARIA EDGEWORTH M. T. BR ¨
UCK
4. SCIENCE, A FAMILY PURSUIT
The Edgeworth ideas on how to educate young children, based
on twenty years' experiment and observation, were recorded
by Maria and her father in a treatise, Practical Education 12 ,
published in 1798. A novel component was the introduction of
science to even quite young children by means of examples from
everyday life. ``We have found by experience'', wrote Maria in
the Introduction, ``that an early knowledge of the first princi­
ples of science may be given in conversation, and may be insen­
sibly acquired from the usual incidents of life: if this knowledge
be carefully associated with the technical terms which common
use may preserve in the memory, much of the difficulty of sub­
sequent instruction may be avoided''. There should also be no
distinction between girls and boys as regards what and how
they are taught, a principle already expressed by Maria in her
first published work, Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) 13 . In
that well­known book, written when she was 27 in response
to a critic of her father's plans for her literary career, she had
stated her views on the female intellect and argued the case
for women's education.
An interesting tenet of Richard Edgeworth's pedagogical
doctrine was that elder children as well as adults should take
part in the education of its younger members. In one instance,
brother Henry, a student home from Edinburgh University,
would each morning after breakfast read to the family from
the lectures he had taken with the chemist Joseph Black. The
reading was followed by a discussion, when the children were
encouraged to contribute their own ideas: one of the girls, aged
13, according to her father, in this way discovered for herself
the secret of Watt's steam­engine 14 . This cooperative method
practised in the family was witnessed by visitors to Edgeworth­
stown ­ such as the continental scholar who wished to show
Edgeworth his new sextant. His host explained its workings
to the assembled company, whereupon the precious object was
passed around from hand to hand so that each child, down to
the baby, could examine it. The instrument, duly studied by
all, came to no harm 15 .
For Maria, as for her father, the attraction of science went
beyond its educational uses. When Sir Humphrey Davy came
to Dublin to deliver a series of lectures in 1808, Maria ­ already
a successful author ­ attended, with her father and stepmother
Frances. Writing home, Frances reported: ``Davy's lectures not
only opened up a new world of knowledge to ourselves but were
especially gratifying to Mr E. and Maria'' 16 . Davy, a personal
friend, was one of many visitors to Edgeworthstown: later (in
1825) he sent Maria a complete set of his discourses to the
Royal Society. In 1812 when the balloonist James Sadler, one
of the earliest British aeronauts, ascended from Dublin in an
attempt to cross the Irish Sea, the Edgeworth party including
Maria were naturally among the spectators. Edgeworth himself
at one time experimented with hot­air balloons, having in his
Lunar Society days known the pioneering Montgolfier.
It might be suggested that in all this Maria was moti­
vated merely by a wish to please her father. However, as her
biography and published correspondence show, her fascina­
tion with science and scientists remained undiminished after
R.L.Edgeworth's death in 1817; indeed her most cherished sci­
entific friendships belong to her later years.
Best­known of these friendships is that with Sir William
Rowan Hamilton which began while he was a young prodigy at
Trinity College Dublin and she was in her late fifties 17 . Its basis
was mainly social and literary, with Hamilton enjoying Maria's
Fig. 1. Maria Edgeworth at the age of 73, from a daguerrotypetaken
in 1841 (from Maria Edgeworth, Letters from England 1813­1844,
edited by Christina Colvin, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971; by per­
mission of Oxford University Press).
brilliant conversation and her gift as a raconteur 18 . There were
other friendships, however, in which her enthusiasm for science
appears to have been a significant and congenial element.
5. SCIENTIFIC LADIES
Among the books approved of by the Edgeworths for the chil­
dren's scientific education was Mrs Jane Marcet's Conversa­
tions in Chemistry 19 , one of the most successful books of its
kind ever written. Mrs Marcet 20 was the wife of a Swiss chemist
and physician in London. Her little book was first published
in 1806 and went into several editions during the remaining
almost 50 years of its author's life. It explained the principles
of chemistry in a clear and simple manner; Michael Faraday
owed his introduction to science as a teenaged boy largely to
this book. Marcet's similar, equally successful, Conversations
in Natural Philosophy, published in 1819 performed the same
function for Physics.
Maria first met Mrs Marcet when she visited London
with her father in 1813. She got to know her intimately in
1821­22 when on a prolonged visit to London with two of
her four youngest halfsisters. Mrs Marcet ­ ``our own dear
friend'' ­ then in her fifties, just about the same age as Maria,
was at the centre of ``the most agreeable as well as scien­
tific society in London'' 21 which included ``the famous learned
Mrs Somerville''. Mary Somerville 22 , the brilliant self­taught
Scottish mathematician, had arrived in London in 1818. She
was in her early thirties, well known for her mathematical
prowess, though she had not yet published her famous ren­
dition of Laplace's M'ecanique Celeste, The Mechanism of the
Heavens 23 , an achievement which was to make her one of the
wonders of the feminine intellect. ``Mrs Somerville is the lady
who, Laplace says, is the only women who understands his
works'', wrote Maria, ``... while her head is among the stars
her feet are on the ground'' 24 . ``We love her more and more!'',
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Irish Astr. J., 23(1), 49­54, (1996) MARIA EDGEWORTH M. T. BR ¨
UCK
she declared towards the end of their visit 25 . Mary Somerville's
account in her memoirs accords completely with Maria Edge­
worth's of the perfect rapport between them. ``Maria Edge­
worth... was one of my most intimate friends'', she wrote,
``warm­hearted and kind, a charming companion, with all the
liveliness and originality of an Irishwoman. For seventeen years
I was in constant correspondence with her. The cleverness and
animation as well as affection of her letters I cannot express;
certainly women are superior to men in letter­writing'' 26 .
The Marcets and the Somervilles welcomed Maria Edge­
worth to their own social set in London. Leading figures were
Henry Hyde Wollaston, best known to astronomers as the dis­
coverer of dark lines in the solar spectrum in 1802, and Edward
Kater, the geodesist and inventor of the reversible pendulum
for determining the constant of gravity g. These scientists took
the Edgeworth sisters to Greenwich to see the Royal Observa­
tory where John Pond, whom Maria had met on an earlier
occasion with her father and stepmother, was the Astronomer
Royal. ``Dr Wollaston and Mr Kater went in the carriage with
us and we had their delightful conversation all the way there
and back again. You remember Mr and Mrs Pond? ...I liked
him much for the candour and modesty with which he spoke
of the parallax dispute between him and Dr Brinkley ­ of whom
he and all the scientific men here speak with the highest rever­
ence. Pond only holds to the negative ­ that he has never been
able to see what Brinkley has seen but he does not pretend to
deny that Brinkley may be right'' 27 .
Maria Edgeworth is referring here to the famous contro­
versy between John Brinkley of Dunsink Observatory who be­
lieved (mistakenly) that he had detected stellar parallax in
some bright stars using the great Ramsden Circle, and Pond
who disputed this. The exchange between the two astronomers
published between 1814­1825, is recorded in the history of Dun­
sink Observatory as having been ``carried out for the most part
in a most restrained fashion'' 28 , a point corroborated by Maria
Edgeworth's account.
Mary Somerville's Mechanism of the Heavens came out
in 1831. As it was far too mathematical for ordinary readers,
apart from its preface, Mary Somerville had some copies of
this Preliminary Dissertation printed separately to give away
to her friends. Maria Edgeworth was among the recipients.
Her response was a wonderfully expressed letter. ``There is one
satisfaction at least in giving knowledge to the ignorant, to
those who know their ignorance at least, that they are grateful
and humble''. She described herself after reading the booklet
as having been ``long in the state of a boa­constrictor after a
full meal ­ and I am but just recovering the powers of motion.
My mind was so distended by the magnitude, the immensity, of
what you put into it! I am afraid that if you had been aware how
ignorant I was you would not have sent me this dissertation,
because you would have felt that you were throwing away much
that I could not understand, and that could be better bestowed
on scientific friends capable of judging what they admire. I can
only assure you that you have given me a great deal of pleasure;
that you have enlarged my conception of the sublimity of the
universe beyond any ideas I had ever before been enabled to
form.'' Some passages had ``amused my imagination'' such as
``the moderate­sized man who would weigh two tons at the
surface of the sun but only a few pounds at the surface of
one of the four new planets [i.e. the asteroids] ...I think a very
entertaining dream might be made of a man's visit to the sun
and planets ­ these ideas are all like dreamy feelings when one
is feverish'' 29 .
Mary Somerville's later book The Connexion of the Physi­
cal Sciences (1834) 30 was a huge success and remained in print
for fifty years. Rowan Hamilton, a great admirer, proposed her
admission ``without the form of ordinary ballot'' to the Royal
Irish Academy. She was unanimously elected its first woman
honorary member in 1834 31 . Maria Edgeworth received the
same accolade for her literary work in 1842.
6. THE HERSCHELS
Maria Edgeworth's 1821­22 season in London also marked the
beginning of a much valued friendship with John Herschel. At
only 30 years of age Herschel was already preeminent as a
mathematician, astronomer and experimental scientist. It was
not Maria's first meeting with the Herschel family. More than
20 years earlier, on a tour of Britain, her father, stepmother
and herself had visited the great Sir William Herschel at Slough
and had been shown the famous 40­foot reflector, then in use.
On this occasion the 84 year old Sir William was too ill to
receive visitors, but John devoted a whole day to Maria and
her companions, showing them the various instruments and
conversing about astronomy 32 . ``The great telescope which we
saw you remember [Maria is writing to her stepmother] is there
but the supports are decaying, as Lady Herschel observed with
tears in her eyes. It is never used now. Mrs Kater and Mr
Herschel walked through its forty foot long tube and we saw
the machinery by which it had formerly been moved''. At night,
they did some star­gazing and were shown a double star and ``a
kind of shadowy blob with a circle of light round it''. ``Nobody
knows what it is ­ a star or no star ­ much to be said about
it by those who know about it, but I do not 33 . But I know
that Mr Herschel appears to me one of the cleverest and most
amiable young men I ever saw ­ most amiable in his behaviour
to his father and mother.'' The visit took place in early June,
1822. William Herschel died on August 25 of that year, so the
Edgeworths were among the last visitors at Slough in that great
astronomer's lifetime. Unfortunately, Maria does not appear to
have met Caroline Herschel, William's sister and assistant, on
either of these visits.
All who knew John Herschel shared Maria Edgeworth's
view of his remarkably attractive personality. She was delighted
to entertain him and the mathematician Charles Babbage at
Edgeworthstown some years later when they dropped in unex­
pectedly. ``He is not only a man of the first scientific genius'',
Maria reported, ``but his conversation is full of information on
all subjects, and he has a sense of humour and playful nonsense,
though with a melancholy exterior'' 34 . She had, of course, an­
other link with Herschel through Francis Beaufort, a close as­
sociate, and remained his friend for the rest of her life.
When Maria Edgeworth visited Slough again in 1831, it
was the first time she had met John Herschel's wife (the Her­
schels married in 1829 when he was 37 and she only 18) and
was charmed by her. ``Of all the people I have seen and of
all the society I think the Herschels are the best worth culti­
vating....in their ways of living, too, so comfortable and well
regulated...'', she wrote to her halfsister 35 . She stayed some
days at the Observatory House as the Herschels' guest. The
pleasure of the visit ``surpassed all my expectations, raised as
they were from the fresh enthusiasm kindled by his last work''.
That work was his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Nat­
ural Philosophy 36 , a rather daunting treatise which she had
3

Irish Astr. J., 23(1), 49­54, (1996) MARIA EDGEWORTH M. T. BR ¨
UCK
Fig. 2. Edgeworthstown House in Maria Edgeworth's lifetime (from Ireland, its Scenery, Character etc., by Mr and Mrs S. C. Hall, vol.
3, London, 1843). The house is now the Manor Nursing Home.
just read and recommended to her family (``price 6 shillings,
worth any money, I first borrowed then bought it'' 37 ). She had
made notes in her copy of the book to ask for explanations ``es­
pecially on the polarisation of light and the difference between
prismatic and periodical colours'' 38 . Herschel enlightened her,
and next day brought out his apparatus and demonstrated var­
ious optical phenomena. He ``then explained all that is known
and all that has been imagined about them ­ alternating the­
ory and experiment most beautifully and accurately ­ and so
patient and kind and clear! How my father would have admired
him.'' The points which puzzled Maria Edgeworth concerned
Newton's hypothesis on the colours of thin films, discussed in
the section on Light in the Preliminary Discourse. Herschel's
demonstrations probably involved the use of a prism to produce
a spectrum, and demonstrations of Newton's rings and of po­
larised light through birefringent crystals. This extraordinary
lesson in optics proves Maria Edgeworth's genuine interest ­ all
the more remarkable at 63 years of age ­ in science.
In the evening Herschel showed her the moon and Saturn,
its rings and satellites, through the telescope. Maria wrote an
account of what she observed for her family at home, complete
with a drawing of a lunar crater. The telescope was the one
which she remembered from her previous visit ­ the 20 foot
reflector in the corner of the garden. ``I must remark to you
that all the time we were seeing we were 18 feet aloft on a
little stage of about 8 feet by 3 with a slight iron rod rail on
three sides but quite open to fall in front...Herschel runs up
and down the ladder like a cat (because I would not say a
monkey)''. The great instrument was of course not in use, but
the 4 foot mirror was there in a good state of preservation.
Herschel spent the years 1834­38 observing the southern
skies from the Cape, South Africa, after which he set up home
at Collingwood, Kent. There, in 1843, Maria Edgeworth, aged
75, was the hospitable Herschels' house guest. She found Her­
schel (now Sir John) hard at work on his Cape observations.
He showed her drawings of sunspots ``and their changes un­
nacountable from day to day'' and a large number of his da­
guerrotypes including one of the great telescope at Slough be­
fore it was dismantled. ``He reproaches himself very much'', she
wrote, ``for having been led away by the Daguerrotype enchant­
ing pursuit too long from his duty'' 39 . Maria undoubtedly had
a particular interest in the photographs as it was her relative
Francis Beaufort who had first drawn Herschel's attention to
Daguerre's process in 1839 40 . Maria Edgeworth had another
little holiday at Collingwood again the following year; it be­
longed to her last ever journey out of Ireland.
7. DAVID BREWSTER
In 1823 ­ one year after her hectic sojourn in London ­ Maria
Edgeworth paid her celebrated visit to her fellow writer Sir
Walter Scott at Abbotsford, his romantic mansion on the river
Tweed in the Scottish borders. It was one of the highlights of
both their lives. At Abbotsford she met Scott's friend, the ex­
perimental physicist David (later Sir David) Brewster, noted
for many important discoveries in optics, including the law on
polarisation of light by which his name is remembered. His in­
vention of the kaleidoscope in 1819, a hugely popular scientific
toy, made him famous in the wider world. Maria Edgeworth
and Brewster ``commenced a most cordial friendship'' 41 and
carried on a lively correspondence for many years on a va­
riety of topics. One subject discussed between them was ``a
philosophical tale upon the dangers, tragic and comic, of Tak­
ing for Granted'' which Maria was writing. As an example of
what she had in mind she mentioned the question of mete­
orites which people at first ``took for granted'' could not pos­
sibly have fallen from the sky. She asked Brewster to supply
``a few good instances either in science or common life''; his
somewhat convoluted example involved Newton's failure to in­
vent the achromatic telescope. The proposed book, Taking for
Granted, never materialised; Maria Edgeworth returned to it
from time to time but eventually destroyed the manuscript 42 .
However, Brewster's help was not wasted on another project
4

Irish Astr. J., 23(1), 49­54, (1996) MARIA EDGEWORTH M. T. BR ¨
UCK
­ Maria's last and most ambitious book of science lessons for
children (discussed below) on which he was her principal ad­
viser.
In the summer of 1827, shortly after Herschel and Bab­
bage's visit, Brewster also made the journey to Edgeworth­
stown. ``A more extraordinary family for talents, mutual af­
fection, and everything that can interest, I could not have
conceived'', he wrote to his wife. ``You must come to Ireland
to see what will never be seen again. We sit down to dinner,
a family party of sixteen, and a merrier one you have never
seen.'' He mentioned, too, the meteorological observations be­
ing made ``principally by Miss Fanny [Maria's 27 year­old half­
sister], a most elegant and accomplished person''. Clearly, the
Edgeworth lifestyle had not changed over the decades.
8. TECHNOLOGY FOR HARRY AND LUCY
Maria Edgeworth's last work for children, Harry and Lucy
Concluded 43 , was published in 1825. The strange title is easily
explained. It was the third and last in a series instituted by
R.L.Edgeworth about two fictitious children who are happily
learning science by the Edgeworth method. The first, Harry
and Lucy (1801), was written (as was the second in 1813)
jointly by himself and Maria. That little book, said Maria, was
``the very first attempt to give any correct elementary knowl­
edge or taste for science in a narrative suited to the compre­
hension of children, and calculated to amuse and interest, as
well as to instruct'' 44 . As the series progresses the children get
older and the material gets more advanced; in the final number
Harry is 14 and Lucy somewhat younger. Maria wrote many
other children's tales, but the Harry and Lucy books are unique
in being devoted principally to science.
Maria did not enjoy writing Harry and Lucy Concluded,
but felt she owed it in piety to her father to complete his plan.
His purpose, she explained, was ``to exercise the powers of at­
tention, observation, reasoning, and invention, rather than to
teach any one science or to make any advance beyond first
principles.'' The book (in 4 small volumes) tells a story about
Harry and Lucy's activities at home and on holiday. The fam­
ily is English, so their holiday conveniently takes them through
industrial England and allows the children to learn about the
achievements of the great inventors ­ mostly of the Lunar So­
ciety era. The book therefore is basically about technology.
The story begins with Lucy expressing a wish to catch
up with her brother's superior knowledge of science. Harry, an
earnest boy whose ambition is to be an inventor, agrees to teach
her. She learns about the barometer and thermometer; is shown
his home­made hygrometer, airpump and other devices, and is
introduced to the principle of the steam­engine from observing
the lid of the boiling tea­kettle. In the background are the
perfect parents ­ father infallibly knowledgable on all practical
matters, mother a fountain of information with encyclopaedias
and journals always at hand.
Father now promises to show them a real steam engine, and
so begins their trip. They visit a cotton mill, a foundry, a coal
mine, a pottery and a printing press. They see a collection of
Wedgewood ware, visit a canal where they observe the working
of the locks and take a trip in a steam boat. A highlight is a
visit to the home of a scientific gentleman who has a laboratory
where he performs electrical experiments and fills a balloon
with hydrogen gas. Further snippets of information are adroitly
introduced in the course of the children's adventures.
Mamma and Papa's (or rather Maria Edgeworth's) expo­
sition of basic science, as far as it goes, is very clear; she was
undoubtedly a good teacher. But it contained little material
more recent than that inherited from her father and experi­
enced by herself on a tour with him back in 1799. There was
only one contemporary item ­ about the colours of mother of
pearl studied by Brewster ­ and minor references to only a few
living scientists. She was, she admitted, apprehensive of ven­
turing into new fields without her father 45 . She appealed to
Brewster, the ``Scottish gentleman­philosopher'' as she called
him, to read over the entire manuscript, sent in relays to Edin­
burgh. Brewster made some suggestions which appear to have
been accepted, and tested the book on his own four boys. ``The
intense interest it excited was a true presage of the popular­
ity which it continued to meet from all intelligent youthful
readers'', wrote Brewster's daughter 46 . It also presumably met
the approval of the Herschels, who ordered Maria Edgeworth's
books for their own children 47 .
9. THE IDEAL LITERARY­SCIENTIFIC LADY
Maria Edgeworth's mature opinion on the scientific education
of women emerges clearly from Harry and Lucy Concluded,
written when she was in her late fifties with a successful career
and much experience of life behind her. There, in the character
of Lucy's mother, is the ideal scientific­literary lady, while Lucy
herself is that same lady in the making. ``By acquiring knowl­
edge'', the mother tells Lucy, ``women not only increase their
power of being agreeable companions to their fathers, broth­
ers, husbands or friends, if they are so happy as to be con­
nected with sensible men, but they increase their own pleasure
in reading and hearing of scientific discoveries; they acquire
a greater variety of means of employing themselves indepen­
dently, and at home'' 48 . Maria's admired friends Mrs Marcet
and Mrs Somerville were examples of dutiful wives and mothers
who pursued successful independent careers from home.
In Maria Edgeworth's social world, the cultivation of the
mind ­ at least for women ­ was seen as the preserve of the up­
per classes. For women in those ranks to have careers outside
the home was unthinkable, and for them to take an interest in
science was regarded in some quarters as unfeminine. Lucy in
the story is upset by a gentleman who ``laughed scornfully'' on
hearing that she was learning science. ``He said that I should
be a much more agreeable woman without it; that ladies have
nothing to do with science, or ought to have nothing to do
with it. He said that scientific ladies were his abhorrence.'' The
mother reassures her that as long as she is genuinely knowl­
edgeable and without affectation, there is nothing to worry
about.
In countering this prejudice, Maria Edgeworth takes a
firmer stand than Mrs Marcet who describes her Conversa­
tions in Chemistry on the title page as ``intended especially for
the female sex'', implying that women are somehow less able
than men to understand science. Even Mary Somerville, who
had no doubts about her own ability and whose work was of
the highest calibre, felt it prudent to describe her Connexion
of the Physical Sciences in a dedication to the Queen as ``my
endeavour to make the laws by which the material world is
governed more familiar to my countrywomen''.
Maria Edgeworth's precept of fostering science as well as
literature was maintained within the Edgeworth family with
good results. The youngest halfsisters grew up with a keen
5

Irish Astr. J., 23(1), 49­54, (1996) MARIA EDGEWORTH M. T. BR ¨
UCK
interest in science and practised it as far as circumstances al­
lowed. One of them, Fanny, as already mentioned, made mete­
orological observations at Edgeworthstown. Her sister Harriet
(Mrs Butler) when widowed, went to live with a third sister
Lucy (Mrs Robinson) at Armagh Observatory, and helped with
the meteorological work there 49 .
10. CONCLUSION ­ MARIA, WOMEN AND SCIENCE
Maria Edgeworth is of course principally a literary figure. But
she deserves to be remembered also for her enlightened educa­
tional ideas, maintaining girls to be of equal mental aptitude
with boys, and placing science on a par with literature as a
branch of culture. As her father's disciple she was very much
ahead of her time in stressing the importance of applied sci­
ence in a young person's curriculum. Given the social class and
period to which she belonged, there are inevitably sentiments
in her work that jar on the modern reader, and her views on
the advancement of women have their limitations. Neverthe­
less, Maria Edgeworth made a good start in advocating higher
aims for women's education, including quite particularly the
study of the sciences.
Notes
1. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth, a literary biography,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972. This is the standard mod­
ern biography. Details of Maria Edgeworth's life have been
taken from this book.
2. In a further family ramification another halfsister married
a brother of Beaufort's first wife.
3. Christina Colvin (editor), Maria Edgeworth, Letters from
England 1813­1844, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971.
4. Desmond Clarke, The Ingenious Mr Edgeworth, Old­
bourne, London, 1965.
5. Robert E. Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham,
Oxford University Press, 1963.
6. R. B. McDowell in The Royal Irish Academy, a bicentennial
history 1785­1985, (general editor T.O'Raiftearaigh), 11,
The Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, 1985.
7. C. P. Smyth, Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinburgh, 2, 180, 1848.
Edgeworth's part in the history of this instrument is also
mentioned under the entry Anemometer in Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 9th edition, 1875.
8. J. A. Bennett, Church, State and Astronomy in Ireland,
200 years of Armagh Observatory, 114, Armagh Observa­
tory in association with Queen's University Belfast, 1990.
9. Gordon L. Herries Davies, in The Royal Irish Academy,
(see note 6), 248.
10. Bennett, (see note 8), 123.
11. A pump he made to fill a watercistern was equipped with a
device that automatically paid out a penny to the operator
each time a certain number of strokes was reached. (An­
thony Hyman, Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer,
174. Princeton University Press, 1982).
12. Maria and R. L. Edgeworth, Practical Education, (3 vols),
London, 1898; second revised edition 1801.
13. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, London,
1795.
14. These examples are given in Practical Education (see note
12).
15. The anecdote is told by Clarke (see note 4).
16. Augustus Hare, Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, vol
1, 75, London, 1894.
17. P. A. Wayman, Dunsink Observatory 1785­1985, 55, Dublin
Institute for Advanced Studies and Royal Dublin Society,
Dublin, 1987.
18. Colvin (see note 3), xxvii. Maria Edgeworth's letters to
Hamilton (in the National Library of Ireland) have not been
published.
19. Mrs Jane Marcet, Conversations in Chemistry, London,
1806.
20. Dictionary of National Biography, reprinted Oxford Uni­
versity Press, 1975.
21. Colvin (see note 3), 383.
22. Mary T. Brck, Mary Somerville, mathematician and as­
tronomer of underused talents, J. Brit. Astron. Assoc., 1996
(in press).
23. Mary Somerville, The Mechanism of the Heavens, London,
1831.
24. Quoted in Somerville's Personal Recollections (see note 26),
156.
25. Colvin (see note 3), 388.
26. Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections, with selec­
tions from her correspondence by her daughter Martha
Somerville, 155, London, 1874.
27. Colvin (see note 3), 383.
28. Wayman (see note 17), 44.
29. Somerville (see note 26), Letter dated May 31, 1832, 203.
30. Mary Somerville, Connexion of the Physical Sciences, Lon­
don, 1834.
31. Royal Irish Academy minutes, vol 2, 64­65.
32. Colvin (see note 3), 411.
33. The object was probably the Ring (planetary) nebula.
34. Hare (see note 16), 155.
35. Colvin (see note 3), 499.
36. J. F. W. Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study
of Natural Philosophy, London, 1830. This was a volume of
Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia.
37. Colvin (see note 3), 471.
38. Periodical colours were those produced by diffraction.
39. Colvin (see note 3), 594.
40. G¨unther Buttmann, The Shadow of the Telescope, a biog­
raphy of John Herschel (tr. B. Pagel), Lutterworth Press,
Guildford and London, 1974. The daguerrotype mentioned
by Maria Edgeworth is reproduced in this book.
41. Margaret Maria Gordon, The Home Life of David Brew­
ster, Chapter 8, Edinburgh, 1879.
42. Butler (see note 1), 438.
43. Maria Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded, (4 volumes),
London, 1825.
44. Introduction to Harry and Lucy Concluded, (see note 43).
45. ``The toil, difficulty and mortification I have gone through
in finishing these last volumes without him are not to be
described'', letter to Sir Walter Scott, April, 1825, quoted
in Butler (see note 1), 167.
46. Gordon (see note 41).
47. D. S. Evans, T. J. Deeming, Betty Hall Evans, S. Goldfarb,
Herschel at the Cape, Diaries and Correspondence of Sir
John Herschel 1834­1838, 126, A. A. Balkema, Cape Town,
1989.
48. Harry and Lucy Concluded, (see note 43), vol 1, 10.
49. Bennett (see note 8), 141.
6