Classics of the 19th Century: Rereading Maria Edgeworth's "The Bracelets"

Maria Edgeworth wrote novels, short stories and essays from her home in Ireland into the first decade of the Victorian Age. Her father, who influenced her work and wrote prefaces for her publications, was a clergyman. She lived through the historical caesura of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; she and her family travelled to Belgium and France during an early pause in the Wars, but she also knew personally the wife of the Duke of Wellington. In her books, she also published observations on rural poverty — she died during the Irish Potato Famine era — and the differences between English and Irish life. I've left out a lot in this mini-biography, but a wealth of secondary literature does supply the juicier gossip; The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth also fills in much detail.

Edgeworth's novel Belinda (1801) was popular enough in her day that Jane Austen mentioned it in Northanger Abbey. Over 70 years later, the American writer Louisa May Alcott referred to Edgeworth's children's story, "The Purple Jar" (1796), in her own book Eight Cousins. Sir Walter Scott, too, admired her work.

But since the Victorian Age — and in their emphasis on domesticity, virtue and morality, Edgeworth's pre-Victorian stories also feel anachronistically Victorian — Edgeworth's writings have become more obscure. She was never mentioned in any English class that I took in Canadian school or college. That said, Penguin Classics and Oxford World's Classics have reprinted Belinda, Castle Rackrent, Ennui, and The Absentee since 2000; and I stumbled across a secondhand paperback edition of Patronage in a Canadian bookshop in 2018.

In my late teens and early twenties I read Maria Edgeworth's books and stories often, mostly because they were mentioned in the Victorian works that I'd read earlier. Some of her moral dilemmas and precepts I thought were worth thinking over. But now I am skimming through her works in the e-book collection at Project Gutenberg again, over a decade later, and feel ready to give my take with a fresh perspective.

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Her Children's Stories: "The Bracelets: or, Amiability and Industry Rewarded"

The Bracelets (ca. 1820?) is set in a private, rural English school, where a teacher named Mrs. Villars raises twenty girls. To reward the pupil who has done the best work, she offers a bracelet. The pupil Cecilia wins it, and then the problems begin: Cecilia begins to treat her schoolmates rudely, and — for example — laughs at a schoolmate who accidentally broke one of her toys after Cecilia barged into her. After soul-searching, the school decides to award another bracelet to the kindest schoolmate. Needless to say, the resulting competition amongst the girls to see who is kindest (Cecilia and her friend Leonora are the frontrunners) leads to even more friction.

*

As soon as Mrs. Villars had given her the bracelet, all Cecilia's little companions crowded round her, and they all left the hall in an instant. She was full of spirits and vanity—she ran on, running down the flight of steps which led to the garden. In her violent haste, Cecilia threw down the little Louisa. Louisa had a china mandarin in her hand, which her mother had sent her that very morning; it was all broke to pieces by the fall.

"Oh! my mandarin!" cried Louisa, bursting into tears. The crowd behind Cecilia suddenly stopped. Louisa sat on the lowest step, fixing her eyes upon the broken pieces; then turning round, she hid her face in her hands upon the step above her. In turning, Louisa threw down the remains of the mandarin; the head, which she had placed in the socket, fell from the shoulders, and rolled bounding along the gravel-walk. Cecilia pointed to the head and to the socket, and burst out laughing; the crowd behind laughed too. At any other time they would have been more inclined to cry with Louisa; but Cecilia had just been successful, and sympathy with the victorious often makes us forget justice. Leonora, however, preserved her usual consistency. "Poor Louisa!" said she, looking first at her, and then reproachfully at Cecilia. Cecilia turned sharply round, colouring, half with shame and half with vexation.

*

I'd start by questioning the whole pedagogical premise of the story, and asking if the adult narrator and adult teacher are behaving properly themselves. Can classmates voting for a prize be reliable, absolute moral arbiters? Do prizes really encourage children to adopt kind behaviour and feel a sense of achievement? or do they encourage children to be ostentatious about kindness, and that the purpose of kindness is to look better than others? Are prizes just a popularity contest where kindness is a secondary criterion? That said, given my own school experience, I don't think that pedagogy has developed past these ambiguous incentives.

The second premise I'd question is Maria Edgeworth's view on gender difference. [General note: anyone who strongly believes in 'show, don't tell' writing might want to avoid reading Edgeworth for the sake of their blood pressure.] For example, this passage about how Cecilia's widower father has raised her to be more masculine than properly feminine will likely be read very differently in 2026 compared to, say, 1826:

All small objects and small errors she [Cecilia] had been taught to disregard as trifles; and her impatient disposition was perpetually leading her into more material faults; yet her candour in confessing these, she had been suffered to believe, was sufficient reparation and atonement.

Leonora, on the contrary, who had been educated by her mother in a manner more suited to her sex, had a character and virtues more peculiar to a female; her judgment had been early cultivated, and her good sense employed in the regulation of her conduct; she had been habituated to that restraint, which, as a woman, she was to expect in life, and early accustomed to yield; compliance in her seemed natural and graceful.

In other words, Edgeworth tells us that Cecilia prefers to act first and apologize later. For example, when Cecilia sells a present that Leonora had given her, she only confesses the truth and acknowledges her wrongdoing much later, hoping that this will cancel out her misdeed. But the harm is already done: Leonora finds out what happened to the present early, and assumes that Cecilia despises her.

But, beyond this particular plot point, where did Edgeworth's ideal of womanhood come from, did she genuinely think it through, which groups or individuals shared that ideal, and whom does this ideal serve?

Illustration from The Bracelets
1850 edition
(Project Gutenberg)

Thirdly, I'd nitpick that it is distracting that Edgeworth's plot, characterization, and scene-setting (although I could still picture the scenes in my mind's eye), are often smothered under a moralizing schematic.

For example, this passage is easy to read

The moment it [the bracelet] was completed, every body begged to try it on. It fastened with little silver clasps, and as it was made large enough for the eldest girls, it was too large for the youngest; of this they bitterly complained, and unanimously entreated that it might be cut to fit them.

"How foolish!" exclaimed Cecilia. "Don't you perceive that, if you win it, you have nothing to do but to put the clasps a little further from the edge? but if we get it, we can't make it larger."

"Very true," said they, "but you need not to have called us foolish, Cecilia!"

However, this sentence feels like a sledgehammer:

Let those who are tempted to do wrong by the hopes of future gratification, or the prospect of certain concealment and impunity, remember that, unless they are totally depraved, they bear in their own hearts a monitor who will prevent their enjoying what they have ill obtained.

Edgeworth's psychology is undoubtedly Manichean (figuratively speaking). It's rare that we can separate the sheep from the goats in our world as clearly as she does in her fiction. And a child who reads "The Bracelets" and then looks around at the adults in their lives will probably question if any evidence supports the author's thesis: that growing up is at times a process of perfecting one's self into ethically consistent sainthood.

"The Bracelets"' dialogue is admittedly also not very contemporary — perhaps at times even by Regency standards was written more as one would write and not as one would speak. For example, if a child in 2026 ever thinks in an internal monologue like Leonora's, I'll eat my hat:

And how pleasing Cecilia can be when she wishes to please! how candid she is! how much she can improve herself!—let me be just, though she has offended me—she is wonderfully improved within this last month; for one fault, and that against myself, should I forget all her merits?

In short, re-exploring The Bracelets in 2026, I still enjoy the plot, characters, and scenery, as well as Edgeworth's observations on the details of everyday life, just as I enjoyed reading Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess as a girl. I tend to skip past the unsubtle morals and ignore the implausibility of the dialogue. But I suppose the story's other main lasting value is its insights into how the upper classes who would have read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile (note: I haven't read this myself, so I'm relying on synopses) envisioned childhood education in the British Isles, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

***

Maria Edgeworth [Wikipedia]
The Bracelets; or, Amiability and Industry Rewarded [ebook in Project Gutenberg]

A 17th Century German Hymn to Summer

Paul Gerhardt was already a familiar name before I went for a walk around the Nikolaiviertel (St. Nicholas Quarter) here in Berlin, around 2023. But as I was treading setts, rounding the medieval stone church that lent the quarter its name, and looking up at the half-timbered houses cuddled around the house of worship,* I was surprised to find a plaque to Gerhardt. — *That said, the church and houses were in fact rebuilt here from post-World War II ruins by the former German Democratic Republic when Berlin celebrated its 750th anniversary in the 1980s. They are not the originals that a visitor would have seen in the Baroque period. — In a way he was a Berliner; he moved here after studying at the University of Wittenberg, in 1643. Starting in 1657, he was employed as the pastor of the Nikolaikirche.

He was a Lutheran theologian and hymn writer whose oeuvre is still known today. A few of his verses — written in the clear and peculiarly grounded style of his generation — are standard modern Christmas repertoire, with fittingly beautiful musical settings, in Germany. "Wie soll ich dich empfangen" and "Ich steh' an deiner Krippen hier"** are perhaps the most famous.

Perhaps they are also especially poignant because of the difficult times in which Paul Gerhardt lived. To quote from Wikipedia:

Wie viele andere Familien in Kursachsen hatten auch die Gerhardts unter den Folgen des Dreißigjährigen Krieges – Hungersnot, Seuchen und den Übergriffen der Soldaten – zu leiden. 1619 starb sein Vater, 1621 seine Mutter.

In other words: the Gerhardts had settled in Saxony-Anhalt during the Thirty Years' War. His family suffered from famine, pestilence, and marauding soldiers, to the point that his parents both died by the time he was 15 years old. Paul had an older brother and two younger sisters at the time, the article adds. The rest of his biography, a litany of personal tragedy, also has overtones of Voltaire's Candide.

Even decades later, when Gerhardt arrived in Berlin in 1643, the Thirty Years' War was still being fought, and the fighting as well as dysentery, a plague, and smallpox had reduced the city's population by more than half. So, although of course interpreting authors' works through their biographies is rather more of a 19th-century approach than an approach that 21st-century literary theoreticians would support, I will venture to say it is for this reason that there is always a chiaroscuro, in the sense of blended effects of light and darkness, in Gerhardt's works.

** "Wie soll ich dich empfangen" was scored by Johann Sebastian Bach in his Christmas Oratorio as well as by Johann Crüger; I like both settings, and recordings of both are easily discoverable on YouTube. "Ich steh' an deiner Krippen hier" has also been 'done' by Bach, as well as by Georg Christian Schemelli.

Labors of the Months: June, from a Flemish Book of Hours (Bruges)
Painted in early 16th century by Simon Bening
via Wikimedia Commons

*

Rather than dwell on Paul Gerhardt's well-known Advent songs, I want to write about a summer poem, "Geh aus, mein Herz, und suche Freud." — In German one would call its subject matter a Kontrastprogramm ('programme of contrast') to the drab weather of a north German November.

For brevity's sake, I'm only offering rough translations of the first seven verses of the original fifteen. For indolence's sake, I've not even attempted to keep the AABCCB rhyme scheme.

Geh aus, mein Herz, und suche Freud
in dieser lieben Sommerzeit
an deines Gottes Gaben;
Schau an der schönen Gärten Zier,
und siehe, wie sie mir und dir
sich ausgeschmücket haben.

Go forth, my heart, and search for joy / in this dear summer time / from your God's gifts; / Look on the pretty gardens' ornaments, / and see how they, for me and you, / have decorated themselves.

Die Bäume stehen voller Laub,
das Erdreich decket seinen Staub
mit einem grünen Kleide;
Narzissus und die Tulipan,
die ziehen sich viel schöner an
als Salomonis Seide.

The trees stand full of foliage, / the realm of earth has decked its dust / with a green dress; / daffodil and tulip, / these wear their clothes more beautifully / than Solomon his silk.

Die Lerche schwingt sich in die Luft,
das Täublein fliegt aus seiner Kluft
und macht sich in die Wälder;
die hochbegabte Nachtigall
ergötzt und füllt mit ihrem Schall
Berg, Hügel, Tal und Felder.

The lark wings itself into the air, / the little dove flies from its rocky hiding-place / and makes its way to the woods; / the highly talented nightingale / pleases and fills with her sound / mountain, hill, valley and fields.

Die Glucke führt ihr Völklein aus,
der Storch baut und bewohnt sein Haus,
das Schwälblein speist die Jungen,
der schnelle Hirsch, das leichte Reh
ist froh und kommt aus seiner Höh
ins tiefe Gras gesprungen.

The mother hen leads out her folk, / the stork builds and tenants his house, / the swallow feeds her young, / the speedy stag, the light deer / is joyous and comes from its height / leaping into the deep grass.

Die Bächlein rauschen in dem Sand
und malen sich an ihrem Rand
mit schattenreichen Myrten;
die Wiesen liegen hart dabei
und klingen ganz vom Lustgeschrei
der Schaf und ihrer Hirten.

The little brooks rush in the sand / and paint for themselves upon their banks / myrtles full of shadows; / the meadows lie fast by / and fairly ring from the happy cries / of sheep and their shepherds.

Die unverdrossne Bienenschar
fliegt hin und her, sucht hier und da
ihr edle Honigspeise;
des süßen Weinstocks starker Saft
bringt täglich neue Stärk und Kraft
in seinem schwachen Reise.

The tireless swarm of bees / flies to and fro, seeks here and there / its refined meal of honey; / the strong juice of the sweet grapevine / daily brings new strength and force / in its weakly shoot.

Der Weizen wächset mit Gewalt;
darüber jauchzet jung und alt
und rühmt die große Güte
des, der so überfließend labt,
und mit so manchem Gut begabt
das menschliche Gemüte.

The wheat grows with might; / thereat rejoice young and old / and praise the great goodness / of him, who refreshes so abundantly, / and many a good thing bestows / upon the human soul.

August 2025 in Books: What I've Been Reading

In the quest to find books from the Democratic Republic of the Congo for my reading journey around the world, I stumbled across The Laughing Cry by Henri Lopes, translated into English by Gerald Moore. The author was born in Kinshasa but ended up living in the Republic of the Congo, so the book might not count for my project.

It's a relevant, skeptical look – written in a post-modern, self-reflexive style narrated by a fictional maitre-d'-turned-butler at the dictator's palace ... but the butler's narrative is interrupted by the dictator's musings, as well as a former high-level government secretary's feedback on the butlers fictional script – at postcolonial African government leaders.

The archvillain of the novel is perhaps the dictator, Bwakamabé Na Sakkadé. He deposes the last leader, Polépolé. Afterward he wallows in the luxuries of an (arguably unearned) leadership role in a manner like that of the current US president, although it's clear that in comparison to the rich history of authoritarianism the Trump administration is still leaving unexplored a time-honoured spectrum of possible gruesome excesses.

I say that 'perhaps the dictator' is the arch villain, because the self-aggrandizing Sakkadé seems a foolish figure as much as a villainous one. Besides it is not clear that there is a hero. The whole cast of characters, including the philandering narrator, French diplomats, and the young intellectual dissidents who are clear-eyed about the regime but less clear-eyed about the alternatives, is morally ambiguous.

Front cover of The Laughing Cry (1982)
From the English edition's publisher: Readers International

As Lopes was writing in the early 1980s, the diplomatic challenges of heads of state are those of the late Cold War: the dictator and his opposition appeal alternately to their former Western colonizers (the "Uncles"), or to the Soviet Union. Flashbacks scattered amongst the plot and character intrigues recall French colonial history, in particular. For example, Algeria's war of independence is not long past. The dictator is of the generation that fought for France in World War II, and the war in then-French Indochina.

Lopes himself was Prime Minister of then-Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s. So the milieu he is picking apart in The Laughing Cry (in the original French: Le Pleurer-Rire) is, surprisingly, the milieu in which he once played the leading role.

The Laughing Cry is thematically similar to NoViolet Bulawayo's Glory – which is still on my currently-reading list.

A Thoreau Thought for Easter

It may be a passage from the end of an essay by Henry David Thoreau that I have not fully read ("Walking," from the 1850s). It may be describing a scene that Thoreau saw in November. It may also be a bit of a mishmash between ancient Greek and 19th-century American Christian religion.

Springtime (early 1920s), by Ugo Flamiani
via Wikimedia Commons

But I think that this sprig of nature philosophy still feels timely, as I enter the Easter weekend:

We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.

The essay — although Thoreau had read it aloud in lecture halls before — was first printed shortly after his death, in 1862.

***

Source: Essays and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Will H. Dircks, ed.
     London: Walter Scott Press

April 2025 In Books: What I'm Reading

It was on National Public Radio's list of the best books of 2024, so I've just finished reading The Antique Hunter's Guide to Murder by C L Miller and found it a pleasant distraction from a busy week at university. The British author draws on family knowledge of the antiques trade to set up a murder mystery where Freya Lockwood, an ex-antiques expert turned housewife and mother, reluctantly attempts to resolve the death of her former mentor. It was so soothing and likable, despite being literarily a little wobbly on its legs like a baby deer, that I have immediately begun listening to the audiobook of its 2025 sequel, The Antique Hunter's: Death on the Red Sea.

Cover of The Antique Hunter's Guide to Murder
via Goodreads

Also on my list:

Kelly Bishop: The Third Gilmore Girl (audiobook memoir, read by the author)

Hampton Sides: The Wide Wide Sea (Captain James Cook biography, hardcover, gift from godfather)

Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility

Muhammad Abdul Bari: The Rohingya Crisis

March 2025 in Books: What I've Been Reading

In March, I finished the books All Our Ordinary Stories by Teresa Wong and Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer, and felt satisfied with the progress through my to-be-read list. In Leipzig, the book fair took place as well, but this year it took place without me due to my lingering cold and other personal factors.

All Our Ordinary Stories (cover)
Arsenal Pulp Press

I also 'binged' the 2025 Canada Reads competition on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation channel (YouTube). The friendly and attentive circle of panellists who were drawn from the books, sports, cooking, and television worlds was — as online commentators noted — less bloodthirsty (for lack of a better word) than in previous years.

Teresa Wong's book is from the Canada Reads longlist.

Besides I've read A Two-Spirit Journey — co-authored by Ma-Nee Chacaby and Mary Louisa Plummer, it's a memoir of the extremely difficult life of an Indigenous woman born in the province Ontario — which made it onto the shortlist.

Next up on my Canadian, independently published reading list is another shortlisted book: Dandelion, by Jamie Chai Yun Liew.

Dandelion (cover)
Arsenal Pulp Press

A Two-Spirit Journey was not literarily written, some commentators said. But I thought it did have a style. Listening to it in the audiobook version, I did not find it dry either: I pictured scenes, people and times in my mind, and the spiritual world of Ma-Nee Chacaby's grandmother. On the other hand, I too found that reading about the abuse that the author suffered as a child was very heavy. (All I'll say is that I'd never considered the ethical pros and cons of castration in depth before; but this book led me into that train of thought.) But in the end I'm not sure it's a sound literary criterion to tell somebody that their life is so difficult that one doesn't want to read about it.

A Two-Spirit Journey (cover)
University of Manitoba Press

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a lengthy look at United States immigration policy since the early 1900s. The journalist author (New Yorker) interweaves life stories of individual Latin American asylum seekers as case studies, convincingly arguing that US foreign policy missteps exacerbate problems in Latin American countries, resulting then in larger quantities of Latin Americans who flee to the southern US border.

It's stylistically a cross between an Amnesty International report and long-form magazine journalism. It's also a close portrait, in its final chapters, of a Trump administration's modus operandi when there are no 'adults in the room.' 

Where do we go from here, if there is not enough public support for making sure that every asylum seeker is well cared for?
— The Hippocratic Oath probably applies as well to immigration and foreign policy matters as to medicine: First do no harm.
And I think that part of 'doing no harm' means not making refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants scapegoats for socio-economic problems that already would have existed without them.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (cover)
Penguin Press

A Memoir of Two Presidential Offices, and More

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s was published this year by the American presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was already a familiar name, and nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award in the Memoir genre.

Doris Kearns Goodwin at a BooksExpo in 2018
Photograph attributed to Rhododendrites
via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

It is a memoir of a kind I've never read before:

In the house where the Goodwins — now in their 70s and 80s — are living in Concord, Massachusetts, they were storing boxes of documents from Richard Goodwin's (the husband's) career in the 1960s. (Doris Kearns Goodwin explored documents of her own life as well, explained during the earlier chapters of the book.)

The Goodwins open the boxes and explore these, often reading documents out loud to each other, as a special book project.

The historian interweaves, into the history, their affectionate banter, reminiscences, and years-long debates over the respective and competing virtues of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as the couple's nostalgia for the 1960s. (She does have a partial eye, and you can make up your own mind how many of her defenses of Johnson, for example, make sense.)

But Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard N. Goodwin have a far from ordinary perspective on federal politics in the 1960s:

Richard Goodwin was a junior speechwriter for John F. Kennedy under Ted Sorensen, later a self-appointed Latin America expert. Then, after Kennedy's assassination, he wrote speeches and led messaging amongst other projects for Johnson's Great Society.

Finally, he tried to help Robert F. Kennedy and, at other times, Eugene McCarthy, win the presidency — helping both of them for the sake of thwarting the Vietnam War, but also helping Robert F. Kennedy due to their personal friendship.

Doris Kearns Goodwin was a White House fellow during Johnson's presidency, and later helped write his autobiography; she also writes about experiencing the 60s as a socially conscious Ivy League college student.

Bryan Cranston reads letters her husband wrote in his young years, and the Kennedys and Johnson speak in historical excerpts, in the audio recording. Although the audiobook was over 14 hours long, it did not feel that way: Doris Kearns Goodwin's narration, as well as the special additions, were engrossing.

The ending is extremely touching.

*

Ideal accompaniment: videos from the LBJ Presidential Library's account on YouTube, e.g. archived live-streamed videos from the 2014 Civil Rights Summit.

***

Cover of Becoming,
via Wikipedia

Another recently finished memoir:

Becoming (2018), by former First Lady Michelle Obama, has been reviewed often elsewhere.

It's enough to say that the accolades for her memoir about her childhood, Ivy League education, professional career, marriage, and life as the First Lady are justified.

It is comforting, as President Joe Biden's presidency nears its close and the next administration approaches, to see life in the White House from the perspective of a human, idealistic, thoughtful tenant.

***

Lastly, I have begun Jonathan Blitzer's far-ranging book on the history and polemics of migration at the US-Mexico border: Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (2024). It was recommended by Barack Obama in summer, then nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award.

The American journalist's epic work is not always easy to read, because of its subject matter. It describes, for example, arbitrary killings and torture in El Salvador, from the 1930s to the present.