Abstract
The figure of the absentee is historically linked to negligent landowners and to frustrations with an intransigent workforce. Opening a conversation with Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons, this piece steps away from Heller-Roazen’s use of Aristotelian conceptions of natural personhood, and turns to Hegel’s conception of juridical personhood, to consider the absentee as an implicit property-holder whose legal status depends upon ownership. If we take legal ownership as implicit in the figure of the absentee, then the history of colonial, capitalist development matters in its explication. This paper places special emphasis on the importance of the plantation to absenteeism. Reading two novels with neo-feudal overtones, Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentees (1812) alongside Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-53), I suggest that the opprobrium once directed to the abdication of property is redirected to workers, orphans, and the poor in the service of England’s internal capitalist development.
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