After chapters of broad social comedy centering on Lady Clonbrony's extravagant bid for acceptance by London high society, Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812) takes a remarkable turn. Lord Colambre, Lady Clonbrony's son, both a native of Ireland and a stranger to it (hence the novel's title), arrives in Dublin, and immediately each detail of the setting is etched with representative significance as Lord Colambre begins to test his mother's contempt for the country that supplies the family's precarious means of support. Within pages the novel offers a conspectus of the transformations the Irish capital has undergone since the Act of Union – always the decisive historical marker in Edgeworth's fiction. The nobility had retreated to their country houses or gone abroad, and “commerce rose into the vacated seats of rank; wealth rose into the place of birth.” Within a few years, however, the “want of manners [and] knowledge, in the nouveaux riches” leads to ridicule and bankruptcy (83–84). Worst of all, the Irish peasantry become outrageously exploited by agents of the absentee landlords; and the absentees in turn become victims of their own efforts to match the expenditure and the snobbery of the English. For the Irish the result is an international network of well-nigh insoluble debts. The debts are exacerbated by the geographical and historical distance between England and Ireland.