“This Window Is All Racked and Tattered”: Maria Edgeworth and the Architectural and Literary Legacy of the Sash Window in Ireland Rachel Ramsey (bio) In 1809, the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar was celebrated in Ireland by the construction of a 134-foot pillar and statue of Lord Nelson on Sackville Street in Dublin, the “second city” of the British Empire. In 1966, an Irish Republican splinter group blew up the pillar on the renamed O’Connell Street. In a similar but much less violent vein, in the decades after the Anglo-Irish War, sectors of the Irish government would systematically repaint red postboxes green, rename its streets, discard statues of British monarchs (including sending an imposing statue of Queen Victoria to Australia), and line its thoroughfares with statues of Irish heroes from Daniel O’Connell to Jim Larkin. As Yvonne Whelan argues, these acts were attempts to wipe out “imperial iconography” and reestablish a narrative of Irish identity on the “cultural landscape” of Dublin and beyond.1 Such attempts to remove and re-create were conflicted, however, as the newly formed Irish government decided for both economic and ideological reasons to restore war-damaged but flagship imperial buildings, mainly those built in the late eighteenth century, such as the Custom House, Four Courts, and General Post Office. Undeniably, Ireland’s colonial history demonstrates that monuments and street names and architectural elements all work together to reinforce narratives of national identity and cultural dominance while simultaneously providing a focus for the forces of resistance and change. With the 2004 erection of “the spire” in Nelson’s empty spot on O’Connell Street, it may be tempting to see Ireland as no longer struggling with its “imperial iconography,” but such thinking would ignore recent debates over development, preservation, heritage, and tourism. Ireland continues to confront what it means to live in a built environment designed to establish the political, social, and economic dominance of another culture and country. In seeking out [End Page 94] answers to what animates the conflicting desire to replace and preserve much of what speaks to centuries of British or Anglo-Irish dominance, it’s important to understand how and by whom the built environment is interpreted and to unearth the often overlooked narratives associated with inherited architectural elements. An eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse may appear simultaneously as the legacy of imperialism or as a “work of art.”2 These radically different responses to the same object are rooted in a long history of interpretation and representation, a history often obscured but still felt. In this article, I unpack the early cultural and literary narratives attached to one of Ireland’s most common architectural elements: the eighteenth-century sash window. Widely adopted by the English in the late seventeenth century and imported into Ireland in the eighteenth century, the sash window graces many of Ireland’s civic and domestic buildings, but discussions of its place in Irish literature have been confined mainly to the practical rather than the ideological. The architectural dominance of the English-imported sash window in late eighteenth-century Ireland coincides with the rise of one of its most famous Anglo-Irish chroniclers, Maria Edgeworth, whose work is instrumental in establishing a descriptive history of the sash window in Ireland. In her life and fiction, I argue the sash window acts as an architectural marker of Anglo-Irish tastes, a sign of modern conveniences and civilized life, and ultimately, because of its English origins, a symbol of English technological, political, and cultural superiority. While the sash window clearly registers as a symbol, it is perhaps more useful to read it as what Bill Brown theorizes as a “thing.” In Other Things, Brown asserts “producing a thing—effecting thingness—depends . . . on a fetishistic overvaluation or misappropriation, on an irregular if not unreasonable objectification of the object that dislodges it from the circuits through which it is what it typically is.”3 The window as an object that has been removed from its typical circuits describes the status of the English sash window in Ireland. In particular, the sash windows in Edgeworth’s writings are invariably broken, stuck, unworkable—the very condition by which Brown...