Moral Tales: A Selection, ed. Robin Runia

Abstract

This rich, densely packed collection is an excellent introduction to the range of styles and reception of three of the foremost women writers of the moral tale. As well as sketching career reviews for Hannah More, Amelia Opie, and Maria Edgeworth, editor Runia supplies a precise and contextualized introduction to the moral tale as “a semantic work-around” for these authors, who were all aware of the charges of “romantic escape, sentimental excess, and a risk of moral lassitude” associated with novels. Although all were or became novel writers, their realistic, quotidian, shorter narratives not only enjoyed wide popularity but, as Runia claims, were also “a key component . . . in shaping the nineteenth-century novel.”Like the tales themselves, succinctness and diversity are the hallmarks of this tidy volume. Through an adroit selection of helpfully annotated stories for adults and children the reader hears the distinctive voice of each narrator. While in “Tawney Rachel” More presents the author as acutely attentive to village life and vernacular, a persona promoted throughout the Cheap Repository Tracts, as the reader’s “true friend” she points directly to the moral failing of “tempting Providence.” Pitying Sally Evans, “as harmless a girl as ever churned a pound of butter,” who was duped of a marriage partner by such “a hag” as the title fortune-teller, More clarifies her “duty to print this little history” as a warning against the folly of being “fated . . . to do a foolish thing.” Rejecting the schoolmistress tone, Opie’s narrative voice in “The Black Velvet Pelisse” offers psychological interiors, taking readers inside appearances. The “purse-proud” father, a successful merchant whose opulence “seemed to squeeze out its indulgences from the griping fingers of habitual economy,” aims to have his daughter brilliantly dressed to impress a visiting baronet. Although, “like most women,” Julia “derived great advantages from dress” and “knew the value of external decoration,” she forgoes the luxury of adornment and instead gives the money to a conscripted man to save him from military service and his family from the workhouse. But Opie does not make Julia unbelievably good; even when she has opted for benevolence, she still “felt like a woman . . . (with) an expression of vexation.”The volume includes two tales each by More and Opie. Edgeworth’s single tale, “The Dun,” is the true prize item. Skillfully interlacing scenes of a man of fashion’s obliviousness to his sartorial debts with a now-destitute weaver, the narrator challenges the delicate reader “whose fine feelings can be moved only by romantic elegant scenes of distress.” Instead, she offers “nothing to charm the imagination—everything to disgust the senses” by focusing on the bare interior of the weaver’s room. Neither chiding nor sentimental, this narrator subtly exposes the social injustice of the “political arithmetician” for whom “the happiness of individuals is nothing compared to the general mass.” In this nicely layered tale interventions are not altruistic. When an entrepreneurial, benign-seeming madam, “a woman hardened in guilt,” befriends the weaver’s daughter until the young woman almost consents to a liaison to free her father from jail, the tipping point is the daughter’s declaration to her would-be lover that she “never could be happy with a bad conscience.” As in every choice in this tale, true uprightness emerges in the downtrodden.In addition to contemporary reviews, this volume also includes tales for children from Edgeworth and Opie in which misjudged but generous and honest boys are at last rewarded. The final section, excerpts from Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Practical Education and More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, grounds the fiction in arduous didactic principles. Selecting these passages must have been particularly difficult for Runia in light of the vast possibilities for illustrative theorizing. To exercise “all the powers of the mind,” the Edgeworths denigrate the “moral picturesque” produced by “immoderate novel reading” and “descriptive poetry.” With a related emphasis on lifting “the reader from sensation to intellect,” More calls for “close reasoning” as opposed to frivolous chitchat. Though not included, equally forceful and axiomatic pronouncements occur throughout Strictures in chapters on the practical use of female knowledge, the danger of ill-directed sensibility, and the modern habits of fashionable life.The value of this collection resides in its informed introduction, careful selection of tales, and clarification of sources, all of which highlight pathways for additional investigation.