Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Naturally bad or dangerously good: Romantic-period mothers “on trial”
- 1 Revolutions in mothering: theory and practice
- 2 A love too thick: Gothic mothers and monstrous sympathies
- 3 The Irish wet nurse: Edgeworth's Ennui
- 4 Infanticide in an age of enlightenment: Scott's The Heart of Midlothian
- 5 The case of the Shelleys: maternal sympathy and The Cenci
- Postscript
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
4 - Infanticide in an age of enlightenment: Scott's The Heart of Midlothian
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Naturally bad or dangerously good: Romantic-period mothers “on trial”
- 1 Revolutions in mothering: theory and practice
- 2 A love too thick: Gothic mothers and monstrous sympathies
- 3 The Irish wet nurse: Edgeworth's Ennui
- 4 Infanticide in an age of enlightenment: Scott's The Heart of Midlothian
- 5 The case of the Shelleys: maternal sympathy and The Cenci
- Postscript
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
A leanbh, a leanbh, the shadow of shame
Has never yet fallen on one of your name
And oh! may the food that from my bosom you drew
In your veins turn to poison, if you are untrue.
Mrs. K. I. O'Doherty The Patriot Mother“[A] parent's heart's a queer thing!”
Walter Scott, The Heart of MidlothianIn the 1829 General Preface to Waverley (1814), Walter Scott acknowledges his debt to Maria Edgeworth, “whose Irish characters have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbors of Ireland, that she may truly be said to have done more toward completing the Union than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up.” Scott makes a distinction here between Edgeworth's literary politics of consensus and coercive methods of government policy (such as those enacted in the Scottish Highlands after the 1745 Rebellion), and admits to having been motivated to attempt with the composition of Waverley,
something for my own country of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland – something which might introduce her natives to those of her sister kingdom in a more favorable light than they had been placed hitherto, and tend to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles.
(523)- Type
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- Information
- Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic , pp. 122 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003