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Maria Edgeworth’s satire An Essay on Irish Bulls (1802) examines the socially constructed, discriminatory idea of “Irish Bull” to disseminate a fairer understanding of the Irish and thus to seek a true conciliation between England and Ireland after the 1800 Union. This article claims that Edgeworth, who considers prejudice against the Irish a major social ill at the time of the Union, presents her political satire as a means to correct this vice, whereby the imperial defense mechanism against the imagined Irish “contagion” is turned on its head. That is, Edgeworth’s political satire—which on the surface makes fun of the Irish linguistic idiosyncrasy manifest in so-called Irish Bull—makes clear that it is the contagious spread of the prejudice against the Irish, not the increased Irish presence within England, that harms the united English nation. Her satirical portrayal of the English keen to detect, isolate, and expel the Irish “intruders”—unless they prove to be productive members of the English empire—suggests that the prejudiced English are the ones who need to be corrected of their “bull,” and also conjures a link between such discriminatory treatment of the Irish and the antagonizing mechanism that characterizes Victorian narratives of contagion. Edgeworth emphasizes that the English anxiety against the Union and the consequent Irish influx has economic foundations. Accordingly, this article elucidates the essentially economic nature of the imperialist and racist defense mechanism, one that develops into systemic national control over troubles such as contagious diseases and poverty, increasingly associated with the Irish later in the mid-nineteenth century. As this article demonstrates, Edgeworth creatively adopts the 18th-century tradition of satire as medicine to anticipate and criticize the emerging imperial culture of defense, establishing herself as an author who connects the past and the future of the English imagination regarding contagion and Empire in the context of the Irish Union.
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Maria Edgeworth, An Essay on Irish Bulls, Irish Union, Satire, Empire, Contagion Narrative, Literary History
