Byron: Aristocrat, Absentee, Cosmopolitan
By Raymond Moylan
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Act of Union, legislated simultaneously by the British and Irish Parliaments, joined the two countries to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.[1] In the complex and often violent history of Anglo-Irish relations which spans the time before Cromwell’s conquest until after World War II, this uniting of the two feuding countries represents an important moment. The Act of Union brought into Parliament’s legislative purview a host of issues concerning the most prominent members of English society, aristocrats and landowners. At the moment of Anglo-Irish union, a foremost concern was absenteeism. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the practice of residing away from one’s home, country, property, or place of work (esp. with reference to landowners or the clergy),” the practice of absenteeism emerged most virulently in Ireland with English landowners and clergymen who exerted ownership over tracts of Irish land during Cromwell’s conquest or afterword. (“Absenteeism” OED Online) Then, generations later, the descendants of the initial colonizers demanded rent, collected taxes, and otherwise extracted income from their property without living there for large portions if not the entire year. William Cobbett locates “absenteeship” as the source of many social problems in Ireland in his extensive description of Anglo-Irish conflict, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland. “The great cause of the miseries of Ireland is ‘absenteeship,’ that is to say, the absence of the landowners, who draw away the revenues of the country and expend them in other countries” (Cobbett 111). The issue at hand is not simply that landowners are English, though that certainly did not foster a spirit of unity; rather, it is also that they extract and export wealth from Ireland to spend in other countries, leaving the island properties and inhabitants destitute. This tenuous relationship between Irish tenants and absent English landlords is well-documented as an economic debate in several contemporary periodicals. Moreover, literary works of the period – such as The Wild Irish Girl (1806) by Sydney Owenson and the Irish TalesCastle Rackrent (1801), Ennui (1809), and The Absentee (1812) by Maria Edgeworth – attest to the prevalence of this issue in the minds of English and Irish thinkers.
Though this issue of absenteeism is most discussed in terms of its Anglo-Irish manifestation, the term expands during the early nineteenth century in an interesting manner. In this paper, I will represent various facets of the early nineteenth century debate around absenteeism in its original context of Anglo-Irish relations. Then, I will trace how the term evolved to be useful in understanding a new facet of cosmopolitanism in the Romantic period. To do so, I’ll apply the framework and features of an absentee landlord to Lord Byron’s biography and poetry as a cosmopolitan.
After the Act of Union, there followed a spirit of optimism among both the English and Irish polity about how the union could positively reshape the strained relationship between the two nations. In The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson creates a semi-autobiographical plot wherein the eponymous love interest Glorvina and the English inheritor Horatio fall in love. Owenson’s novel strives to present Ireland in a new light to a landowning, English readership and utilizes Glorvina and Horatio’s successful marriage to exemplify her vision of optimal Anglo-Irish relations. Within the novel, Owenson attempts to rework engrained English prejudices that envision Ireland as uneducated and barbaric. At the same time, she uses imagery of dereliction and decay in Irish properties and castles to elicit feelings of culpability among English absentees.
Upon arrival in Ireland, Horatio soon discovers that the management of his father’s estate by a Mr. Clendinning has become manipulative and unjust. Horatio describes the cruel practices and mindset of Clendenning: “He kept a tight hand over them, and he was justified in so doing, or his Lord would be the sufferer; for few of them would pay their rents till their cattle were driven, or some such measure was taken with them. And as for the labourers and workmen, a slave-driver was the only man fit to deal with them” (Owenson 31). Here, the rent is prioritized over human well-being and the Irish subjects are presupposed through an English viewpoint to be an idle workforce in need of strict, even severe overseeing. The cruelty imposed by Mr. Clendinning is only enabled by the absence of Horatio’s father, the Earl of M–. Owenson condemns absentee practices in this moment, but quickly offers a salve to this problem just a few lines later: “My father, however, by frequent visitations to his Irish estates (within these few years at least), must afford to his suffering tenantry an opportunity of redress; for who that ever approached him with a tear of suffering, left his presence with a tear of gratitude!” (31, emphasis hers). Owenson praises the potential for Earl of M–‘s periodic visits to his Irish estate to generate a positive impact on his tenantry. The Wild Irish Girl promotes an ideal of Anglo-Irish unity by striving to coax English landowners back to their estates with the allure of an appreciative tenantry, all the while condemning the injustices incited by their absence.
Carissa Pickens observes a similar sentimentalization of the relationship between English landowners and Irish tenants in a contemporary author’s oeuvre in her essay “Maria Edgeworth’s Poetics of Rent.” Like Owenson, Edgeworth’s body of work suggests that “the production of a national literature depends on repairing relations between a prodigal class of absentee landlords and an abused class of Irish tentants” (Pickens 182). It is important to note that both Owenson and Edgeworth come from a mixed Anglo-Irish lineage, and as such, they greatly desire a successful union of the two countries. Pickens argues that in Edgeworth’s aforementioned Irish Tales, the author optimistically envisions Anglo-Irish relations to be reparable through the benevolent return of absentees and gracious welcome of their tenants. Moreover, Edgeworth views this to be an essential step in liberal economic development in Ireland, and she frequently references contemporary economic theories. Her political vision requires the Irish tenantry to rely on a present and paternal English landlord to manage the estate in an Ireland not yet ready in its liberal development to sustain laissez-faire economics. However, Pickens argues that, in her early novels, Edgeworth produces a sentimentalized vision of absenteeism’s damaging economic system, and her failure to name absenteeism as such, is problematic. “Rather than overturning the contradictions she has laid bare in the geopolitical framework of absentee ownership, Edgeworth concludes her novel by sentimentalizing this framework” (197). In this manner, Edgeworth observes the ills created by absentee landlords but then insulates an economic system rife with corruption and manipulation from which English aristocrats profit as their Irish tenantry suffers and the estate decays.
Edgeworth’s sentimentalization of absenteeism in the Irish Tales is a feature of her overeager optimism for the success Anglo-Irish union which caused her to overlook deeply engrained conflicts between the Irish citizenry and English aristocracy. Pickens concludes, “We have seen how this desire to render an unlivable world livable took the shape of a sentimental rehabilitation of the political antagonisms latent in the structure of Irish colonial rent” (206). The unlivable world here is Ireland under a colonial rule. To manufacture a livable version of absenteeism, Edgeworth imposes an imagined paternalistic relationship between English aristocrats and their Irish tenants, wherein the colonized Irish subject is appreciative of the necessary rule exerted over them by an English aristocrat.
Edgeworth’s sentimentalized vision of paternalistic absenteeism masks the Irish colony’s role as a source of wealth for English colonizers. Edward Said traces this relationship between “colony and metropolis” in his discussion of the Antigua plantation in Austen’s Mansfield Park. The Bertram way of life is sustained through consistent extraction of wealth and goods from their colonial property, and only when this source of income is at risk do the landlords intervene. For a considerable portion of Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas Bertram must stabilize his family’s income at the plantation in the West Indies. Yet, Antigua is only mentioned peripherally. Said argues, “Sir Thomas, absent from Mansfield Park, is never seen as present in Antigua, which elicits at most a half dozen references in the novel” (Said 90). Though this argument does not directly map onto Anglo-Irish absenteeism, there are parallels as to the extraction of wealth to support an English aristocrat and his family. Moreover, since Austen neglects to describe Sir Thomas’s dealings in Antigua in terms of presence, he resembles an absentee landlord of the West Indies, one who only occasionally visits his property. Furthermore, for Austen, the goods of Antigua are “sent to England, not to be exchanged for things exported to the colony and consumed by its inhabitants, but to be sold in England for the benefit of the proprietors there” (John Stuart Mill, qtd. in Said 90). This constitutes a nonreciprocal relationship of colonialism where wealth is extracted from colonies without reinvestment. It is exactly that issue of extrapolated Irish wealth by absentee landlords to be spent in foreign countries that forms the cornerstone of the economic debate revolving around absenteeism in the early nineteenth century.
As discussed earlier, the novels by Owenson and Edgeworth represent attempts of Anglo-Irish thinkers to promulgate an optimistic vision for the new nation after the Act of Union in 1801. Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and Edgeworth’s Irish Tales (The Absentee, the last of them, was published in 1812) reside early on a timeline of Anglo-Irish union. As such, the works comment and speculate on how absenteeism may develop as a system now that the nations are one. Later in the nineteenth century, these speculations manifest in an economic debate brought before the House of Commons Select Committee on the State of Ireland in 1825. The growing discussion on absenteeism also materialized in periodicals such as the Westminster Review, Quarterly Review, and The Weekly True Sun, signifying this issue’s continued presence in the minds of the English and Irish population.[2]
Later, the concept of absenteeism expanded even further, beyond an immediate economic debate in periodicals. The term began to evolve into a more capacious form, encompassing definitions apart from its historical origin in Anglo-Irish relations. Certain features of Irish absenteeism which the tenantry, Cobbett, Owenson, and authors at the Weekly True Sun found objectionable could also be applied to members of the English aristocracy, more specifically cosmopolitan aristocrats. For example, in 1823, the Norfolk Yeoman’s Gazette and Eastern Advertiser, a provincial newspaper, records local rumors about the failings of a stand-in officer while a significant government figure has fallen ill. The news presented by the article amounts to little more than village gossip; however, the substitute is described as an “Illustrious Absentee,” thereby confirming the dissemination of the concept into public consciousness in England:
An Illustrious Absentee, it is said, quickly followed, and, if we may credit the on dits, he was not graciously received; indeed, we have a shrewd suspicion that, besides getting a severe lecture for want of dutiful inquiry, or attention, during the severe illness that has afflicted this Great Personage, he was reminded that, with a splendid income voted him by the nation, the country would be quite as well pleased if he should for the future condescend to spend it in England. (“An Illustrious Absentee,” emphasis theirs)
In this passage, the absentee is subjected to a scathing review of his performance as a replacement statesman, or rather lack thereof. The “Great Personage” also notably reminds him of the considerable salary paid to him for his services, gesturing that he should be present at his post. Both his absence and the “splendid income” he receives from his post harken to the Irish absentees; however, in this case, the subject’s duty lies in England. As a result, the subject’s propensity to spend time abroad rather than attending to the duties assigned by the sickly personage is objectionable. Moreover, it is unpatriotic. Rather than an issue of foreign trade or laissez-faire economic policy, absenteeism is construed as a national issue.
In Romantic Cosmopolitanism, Esther Wohlgemut explores the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism at the turn of the nineteenth century in light of the Anglo-Irish union. Wohlgemut explores the definition of a cosmopolitan as the “alter ego of national man” (Julia Kristeva qtd. in Wohlgemut 95). The cosmopolitan aristocrat’s decision to extensively travel abroad could be viewed either as a worldly enrichment of their knowledge or as a frivolous and even unpatriotic act. They were “considered either an ideal patriot or a traitor to the nation (depending on one’s political views)” (Wohlgemut 96). With his grand tour of the East in 1809-1811 and permanent exile from England after 1816, Byron biographically exudes the ethos of the global citizen and cosmopolitan. Moreover, he represents the figure poetically in his masterwork Don Juan where the titular protagonist spends the poem traversing different areas of the Mediterranean and beyond. Both in his life and work, Byron commits to the ideal of cosmopolitanism in the early nineteenth century.
In doing so, Byron unequivocally positions himself within a national debate as an international cosmopolitan, whose extensive travels abroad, he believes, serve to broaden his worldview and eliminate a close-mindedness which he observes in some of his contemporaries. In the Dedication to Don Juan, he explicitly takes aim at Robert Southey, among other Lake Poets, who Byron believes to be betraying a liberal cause in the Romantic movement for political advancement with the conservative Tory party: “Bob Southey! You’re a poet – Poet-laureate, / And representative of all the race; / Although ‘tis true that you turn’d out a Tory at / Last, – yours has lately been a common case” (Byron, Don Juan 635). Though evidently enraged by the alleged turncoat politics of the contemporary lake poets, Byron’s message gains an additional dimension beyond a Whig-Tory political dyad. He indicts the ‘Lakers’ for failing to adopt what Alan D. McKillop terms “altruistic cosmopolitanism,” which “involves an ultimate rejection of local attachment by the philosophic mind” in order to better understand a global humankind (McKillop 201-202). Wohlegemut reminds us that “for Byron being a cosmopolitan meant escaping the ‘narrow prejudices of an islander,’” and this is made explicitly clear in his address of Southey and the Lake Poets: “There is a narrowness in such a notion, / Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for ocean” (Byron, Don Juan 636). The remedy for evolving British nationalism, for Byron, is clearly found in travelling between nations, over oceans, and across borders. He writes home to his mother from Athens in 1811 during his Grand Tour of the East:
I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term…Here I see and have conversed with French, Italians, Germans, Danes, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, &c. &c. &c. and without losing sight of my own, I can judge of countries and manners of others. – Where I see the superiority of England … I am pleased, and where I find her inferior I am at least enlightened” (Byron, Letters 2: 34-35).
Byron appears to almost embody a proto-diversity advocate, endorsing the value of learning from people of different national and ethnic backgrounds. To better one’s understanding of England and English society, it is paramount for Byron, the altruistic cosmopolitan, that one travel abroad. However, at the same time Byron was engaging in his fruitful, worldview-expanding, altruistic international experience, his estates and finances in England were in disarray. It is true that Byron was almost chronically in debt, and that constant did not differ whether he resided in England or abroad. But, his propensity to travel internationally on the wealth (or lack thereof) generated by his estates and their tenants harkens to Irish absentees.
This altruistic-turned-absentee cosmopolitanism of Byron’s shines through best when considered against the complicated relationship with his ancestral estate Newstead Abbey. Biographer Fiona MacCarthy confirms as much: “As a practical landowner, the 6th Lord Byron was an unrepentant absentee. Had he [a] more dutiful temperament … no doubt he could have pulled the Newstead estate around” (MacCarthy 18). Under his (mis)management, the Newstead Abbey fell derelict and decayed, though MacCarthy suggests that this was, to a degree, Byron’s preference: “But there was something in his perverse nature that preferred the flawed inheritance, the ruined noble Abbey, a romantic liability outdoing his own mother’s abandoned Castle of Gight” (18). Whether it be because of Byron’s intriguing aesthetic sensibilities or porous financial oversight, the Newstead Abbey’s descent into dereliction resembles the castle at Connaught in Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl insofar as a distanced landowner’s absence permits structural decline in the physical spaces of their estate. Yet, absenteeism also entails an economic dimension where wealth generated by domestic estates is then spent in foreign areas, a practice which applies directly to Byron concerning both his initial grand tour in 1809-1811 and his permanent exile from England after 1816.
To finance his international endeavors, Bryon relied on the annuity revenue created by his English estates at Newstead, Rochdale, Norfolk, Lancashire, among others (MacCarthy 82). At the same time, he needed to stave off the sizable debts he already created, so Byron attempted to part with several of his properties, including Newstead Abbey. Throughout the early nineteenth century, he is entangled in several attempts to part with this estate through mortgage, auction, or straight sale that go awry.[3] As an absentee cosmopolitan, Byron views both the management and sale of his ancestral estate as hindrances to a larger goal of foreign travel. During a domestic interlude, in an 1814 letter, he frustratedly writes, “Nothing but this confounded delay of Newstead &c. could have prevented me from being long ago in my isles of the East. Why should I remain or care?” (Byron, Letters 4: 21). His exasperation at the foibles in the sale of Newstead communicate both Byron’s aversion to domestic management and evident desire to return to travel. Given his disinterest in the day-to-day oversight of his estates, Byron employed managers to supervise his properties and they revenue they produced, as was a common practice among landowning aristocrats.
Described as “Byron’s solicitor and business agent,” John Hanson manages the Newstead and Rochdale estates from 1798 onward along with the later oversight of Douglas Kinnaird, a banker friend of Byron’s. The work of these two men enabled Byron the liberty of an absentee Lord (see Letters 1: 275). Byron placed significant trust in Hanson and Kinnaird’s ability to manage his properties and resulting income.[4] “I presume you have between you full power to act for me…Pay examine closely into all accounts – annuities &c that they may not take advantage of my absence” (5: 278, emphasis Byron’s). Written from Venice in 1817, this letter carries Byron’s permission for the final sale of Newstead, enacted entirely remotely through the intermediaries, Hanson and Kinnaird. Admittedly, an aristocrat delegating financial management was not an uncommon practice among landed aristocrats in the nineteenth century, but in the case of Byron, he writes across borders to ensure that the sale goes through as that his absentee income through annuities will not lessen. Interestingly, Byron fears that his tenantry will exploit his absence without considering how his permanent departure from the country and interminable life abroad may exploit them. Deferring financial management to Hanson and Kinnaird, assuring a source of wealth through his estates’ annuities, and then spending that income abroad attest to Byron’s configuration as an absentee cosmopolitan landlord.
There exist distinct parallels between Byron’s cosmopolitan approach to landowning and the practices of Irish absentees in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Both rely on wealth generated by domestic estates to finance foreign expenditures, and neither Byron nor Irish absentees appear to involve themselves with the livelihood of the individuals laboring on those estates which finance their international experiences. To understand the oft-studied figure of Lord Byron, his celebrity appeal, canonized poetry, and literary impact, one must also gaze into the economic conditions which enabled this cosmopolitan Lord to loom so large in English consciousness. Byron’s influence in early nineteenth century Romanticism is undeniable, and even more remarkable is his national presence in England though he spent so much time abroad. However, criticism would be remiss to ignore the aristocratic privilege which permitted Byron to be a cosmopolitan poet and, in his own words, a “citizen of the world” (Letters 1: 248), and packaged within that privilege are the notable resemblances that Byron’s estate management bears to the objectionable practices of Irish absenteeism.
Works Cited
"An Illustrious Absentee." Norfolk Yeoman's Gazette and Eastern Advertiser; for the Counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridge and Herts, 1 Mar. 1823. Nineteenth Century Collections Online, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/8RFtN5. Accessed 25 Nov. 2018.
"Absenteeism, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/654. Accessed 27 November 2018.
"Absenteeism." Weekly True Sun, 20 Oct. 1833, p. [57]. Nineteenth Century Collections Online, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/8Qog30. Accessed 23 Nov. 2018.
“Absenteeism.” Westminster Review, Jan. 1829, p. [237-243]. HathiTrust Digital Library, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.319510024764081;view=1up;seq=259. Accessed 23 November 2018.
Byron, George Gordon. “Don Juan.” Byron Poetical Works, edited by Frederick Page, Oxford University Press, 1970, pp. 635-858.
---. Byron’s Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols, John Murray, 1973.
Cobbett, William. A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland. Benzinger Brothers, Inc., 1824.
MacCarthy, Fiona. Byron: Life and Legend. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
McKillop, Alan D. “Local Attachment and Cosmopolitanism: the Eighteenth-Century Pattern.” From Sensibility to Romanticism, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 191-219.
Owenson, Sydney. The Wild Irish Girl. Pickering & Chatto Limited, 2000.
Picken, Cassidy. “Maria Edgeworth’s Poetics of Rent.” ELH, vol. 83, 2016, pp. 181-209.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1994.
Wohlgemut, Esther. “Pilgrim, Exile, Vagabond: Byron and the Citizen of the World.” Romantic Cosmopolitanism, edited by Esther Wohlgemut, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 95-119.
Notes
[1] See Keogh, Dáire, and Kevin Whelan, eds. Acts of Union: The causes, contexts, and consequences of the Act of Union. Four Courts Press Ltd, 2001.
[2] In the above-mentioned periodicals, there exists an intriguing economic debate around absenteeism in relation to emerging laissez-faire praxis in the early nineteenth century. The 1829 piece by the Westminster Review listed in the works cited page below begins the discussion by citing two previous occurrences: an article written in the Quarterly Review and a transcript of a committee session in Parliament. The article goes on to insert itself in the debate. The 1833 piece in the Weekly True Sun then rebuts the commentary in the Westminster Review. Studying this back-and-forth gives an intriguing view into the practice of economic dialogue through print, but it also exceeds the scope of this paper. For further reading, reference both articles titled “Absenteeism” in the Works Cited page.
[3] The struggle to sell Newstead abbey was a quandary which plagued Byron for several years. Needing to satisfy his growing debts and his other properties not producing sufficient revenue, he had no choice but to part with his ancestral estate; however, the sale was fraught with complications. For example, an 1812 sale to Thomas Claughton failed when the buyer only supplied part of the promised down-payment (MacCarthy 193). The difficulties later involved mortgage, an auction, and final sale in 1817. For more detail, see MacCarthy’s biography in the works cited: Byron: Life and Legend.
[4] The work of Hanson and Kinnaird reminds one of the role of Clendenning in The Wild Irish Girl. There is little indication in the scholarship that either Hanson or Kinnaird participated in the nefarious practices iterated by Owenson concerning manipulative extortion of the tenantry at Newstead or Rochdale. However, editor Leslie A. Marchand alludes that Hanson may have taken slight advantage of his cosmopolitan Lord’s absence (see Letters, 1: 275).
By Raymond Moylan
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Act of Union, legislated simultaneously by the British and Irish Parliaments, joined the two countries to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.[1] In the complex and often violent history of Anglo-Irish relations which spans the time before Cromwell’s conquest until after World War II, this uniting of the two feuding countries represents an important moment. The Act of Union brought into Parliament’s legislative purview a host of issues concerning the most prominent members of English society, aristocrats and landowners. At the moment of Anglo-Irish union, a foremost concern was absenteeism. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the practice of residing away from one’s home, country, property, or place of work (esp. with reference to landowners or the clergy),” the practice of absenteeism emerged most virulently in Ireland with English landowners and clergymen who exerted ownership over tracts of Irish land during Cromwell’s conquest or afterword. (“Absenteeism” OED Online) Then, generations later, the descendants of the initial colonizers demanded rent, collected taxes, and otherwise extracted income from their property without living there for large portions if not the entire year. William Cobbett locates “absenteeship” as the source of many social problems in Ireland in his extensive description of Anglo-Irish conflict, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland. “The great cause of the miseries of Ireland is ‘absenteeship,’ that is to say, the absence of the landowners, who draw away the revenues of the country and expend them in other countries” (Cobbett 111). The issue at hand is not simply that landowners are English, though that certainly did not foster a spirit of unity; rather, it is also that they extract and export wealth from Ireland to spend in other countries, leaving the island properties and inhabitants destitute. This tenuous relationship between Irish tenants and absent English landlords is well-documented as an economic debate in several contemporary periodicals. Moreover, literary works of the period – such as The Wild Irish Girl (1806) by Sydney Owenson and the Irish TalesCastle Rackrent (1801), Ennui (1809), and The Absentee (1812) by Maria Edgeworth – attest to the prevalence of this issue in the minds of English and Irish thinkers.
Though this issue of absenteeism is most discussed in terms of its Anglo-Irish manifestation, the term expands during the early nineteenth century in an interesting manner. In this paper, I will represent various facets of the early nineteenth century debate around absenteeism in its original context of Anglo-Irish relations. Then, I will trace how the term evolved to be useful in understanding a new facet of cosmopolitanism in the Romantic period. To do so, I’ll apply the framework and features of an absentee landlord to Lord Byron’s biography and poetry as a cosmopolitan.
After the Act of Union, there followed a spirit of optimism among both the English and Irish polity about how the union could positively reshape the strained relationship between the two nations. In The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson creates a semi-autobiographical plot wherein the eponymous love interest Glorvina and the English inheritor Horatio fall in love. Owenson’s novel strives to present Ireland in a new light to a landowning, English readership and utilizes Glorvina and Horatio’s successful marriage to exemplify her vision of optimal Anglo-Irish relations. Within the novel, Owenson attempts to rework engrained English prejudices that envision Ireland as uneducated and barbaric. At the same time, she uses imagery of dereliction and decay in Irish properties and castles to elicit feelings of culpability among English absentees.
Upon arrival in Ireland, Horatio soon discovers that the management of his father’s estate by a Mr. Clendinning has become manipulative and unjust. Horatio describes the cruel practices and mindset of Clendenning: “He kept a tight hand over them, and he was justified in so doing, or his Lord would be the sufferer; for few of them would pay their rents till their cattle were driven, or some such measure was taken with them. And as for the labourers and workmen, a slave-driver was the only man fit to deal with them” (Owenson 31). Here, the rent is prioritized over human well-being and the Irish subjects are presupposed through an English viewpoint to be an idle workforce in need of strict, even severe overseeing. The cruelty imposed by Mr. Clendinning is only enabled by the absence of Horatio’s father, the Earl of M–. Owenson condemns absentee practices in this moment, but quickly offers a salve to this problem just a few lines later: “My father, however, by frequent visitations to his Irish estates (within these few years at least), must afford to his suffering tenantry an opportunity of redress; for who that ever approached him with a tear of suffering, left his presence with a tear of gratitude!” (31, emphasis hers). Owenson praises the potential for Earl of M–‘s periodic visits to his Irish estate to generate a positive impact on his tenantry. The Wild Irish Girl promotes an ideal of Anglo-Irish unity by striving to coax English landowners back to their estates with the allure of an appreciative tenantry, all the while condemning the injustices incited by their absence.
Carissa Pickens observes a similar sentimentalization of the relationship between English landowners and Irish tenants in a contemporary author’s oeuvre in her essay “Maria Edgeworth’s Poetics of Rent.” Like Owenson, Edgeworth’s body of work suggests that “the production of a national literature depends on repairing relations between a prodigal class of absentee landlords and an abused class of Irish tentants” (Pickens 182). It is important to note that both Owenson and Edgeworth come from a mixed Anglo-Irish lineage, and as such, they greatly desire a successful union of the two countries. Pickens argues that in Edgeworth’s aforementioned Irish Tales, the author optimistically envisions Anglo-Irish relations to be reparable through the benevolent return of absentees and gracious welcome of their tenants. Moreover, Edgeworth views this to be an essential step in liberal economic development in Ireland, and she frequently references contemporary economic theories. Her political vision requires the Irish tenantry to rely on a present and paternal English landlord to manage the estate in an Ireland not yet ready in its liberal development to sustain laissez-faire economics. However, Pickens argues that, in her early novels, Edgeworth produces a sentimentalized vision of absenteeism’s damaging economic system, and her failure to name absenteeism as such, is problematic. “Rather than overturning the contradictions she has laid bare in the geopolitical framework of absentee ownership, Edgeworth concludes her novel by sentimentalizing this framework” (197). In this manner, Edgeworth observes the ills created by absentee landlords but then insulates an economic system rife with corruption and manipulation from which English aristocrats profit as their Irish tenantry suffers and the estate decays.
Edgeworth’s sentimentalization of absenteeism in the Irish Tales is a feature of her overeager optimism for the success Anglo-Irish union which caused her to overlook deeply engrained conflicts between the Irish citizenry and English aristocracy. Pickens concludes, “We have seen how this desire to render an unlivable world livable took the shape of a sentimental rehabilitation of the political antagonisms latent in the structure of Irish colonial rent” (206). The unlivable world here is Ireland under a colonial rule. To manufacture a livable version of absenteeism, Edgeworth imposes an imagined paternalistic relationship between English aristocrats and their Irish tenants, wherein the colonized Irish subject is appreciative of the necessary rule exerted over them by an English aristocrat.
Edgeworth’s sentimentalized vision of paternalistic absenteeism masks the Irish colony’s role as a source of wealth for English colonizers. Edward Said traces this relationship between “colony and metropolis” in his discussion of the Antigua plantation in Austen’s Mansfield Park. The Bertram way of life is sustained through consistent extraction of wealth and goods from their colonial property, and only when this source of income is at risk do the landlords intervene. For a considerable portion of Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas Bertram must stabilize his family’s income at the plantation in the West Indies. Yet, Antigua is only mentioned peripherally. Said argues, “Sir Thomas, absent from Mansfield Park, is never seen as present in Antigua, which elicits at most a half dozen references in the novel” (Said 90). Though this argument does not directly map onto Anglo-Irish absenteeism, there are parallels as to the extraction of wealth to support an English aristocrat and his family. Moreover, since Austen neglects to describe Sir Thomas’s dealings in Antigua in terms of presence, he resembles an absentee landlord of the West Indies, one who only occasionally visits his property. Furthermore, for Austen, the goods of Antigua are “sent to England, not to be exchanged for things exported to the colony and consumed by its inhabitants, but to be sold in England for the benefit of the proprietors there” (John Stuart Mill, qtd. in Said 90). This constitutes a nonreciprocal relationship of colonialism where wealth is extracted from colonies without reinvestment. It is exactly that issue of extrapolated Irish wealth by absentee landlords to be spent in foreign countries that forms the cornerstone of the economic debate revolving around absenteeism in the early nineteenth century.
As discussed earlier, the novels by Owenson and Edgeworth represent attempts of Anglo-Irish thinkers to promulgate an optimistic vision for the new nation after the Act of Union in 1801. Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and Edgeworth’s Irish Tales (The Absentee, the last of them, was published in 1812) reside early on a timeline of Anglo-Irish union. As such, the works comment and speculate on how absenteeism may develop as a system now that the nations are one. Later in the nineteenth century, these speculations manifest in an economic debate brought before the House of Commons Select Committee on the State of Ireland in 1825. The growing discussion on absenteeism also materialized in periodicals such as the Westminster Review, Quarterly Review, and The Weekly True Sun, signifying this issue’s continued presence in the minds of the English and Irish population.[2]
Later, the concept of absenteeism expanded even further, beyond an immediate economic debate in periodicals. The term began to evolve into a more capacious form, encompassing definitions apart from its historical origin in Anglo-Irish relations. Certain features of Irish absenteeism which the tenantry, Cobbett, Owenson, and authors at the Weekly True Sun found objectionable could also be applied to members of the English aristocracy, more specifically cosmopolitan aristocrats. For example, in 1823, the Norfolk Yeoman’s Gazette and Eastern Advertiser, a provincial newspaper, records local rumors about the failings of a stand-in officer while a significant government figure has fallen ill. The news presented by the article amounts to little more than village gossip; however, the substitute is described as an “Illustrious Absentee,” thereby confirming the dissemination of the concept into public consciousness in England:
An Illustrious Absentee, it is said, quickly followed, and, if we may credit the on dits, he was not graciously received; indeed, we have a shrewd suspicion that, besides getting a severe lecture for want of dutiful inquiry, or attention, during the severe illness that has afflicted this Great Personage, he was reminded that, with a splendid income voted him by the nation, the country would be quite as well pleased if he should for the future condescend to spend it in England. (“An Illustrious Absentee,” emphasis theirs)
In this passage, the absentee is subjected to a scathing review of his performance as a replacement statesman, or rather lack thereof. The “Great Personage” also notably reminds him of the considerable salary paid to him for his services, gesturing that he should be present at his post. Both his absence and the “splendid income” he receives from his post harken to the Irish absentees; however, in this case, the subject’s duty lies in England. As a result, the subject’s propensity to spend time abroad rather than attending to the duties assigned by the sickly personage is objectionable. Moreover, it is unpatriotic. Rather than an issue of foreign trade or laissez-faire economic policy, absenteeism is construed as a national issue.
In Romantic Cosmopolitanism, Esther Wohlgemut explores the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism at the turn of the nineteenth century in light of the Anglo-Irish union. Wohlgemut explores the definition of a cosmopolitan as the “alter ego of national man” (Julia Kristeva qtd. in Wohlgemut 95). The cosmopolitan aristocrat’s decision to extensively travel abroad could be viewed either as a worldly enrichment of their knowledge or as a frivolous and even unpatriotic act. They were “considered either an ideal patriot or a traitor to the nation (depending on one’s political views)” (Wohlgemut 96). With his grand tour of the East in 1809-1811 and permanent exile from England after 1816, Byron biographically exudes the ethos of the global citizen and cosmopolitan. Moreover, he represents the figure poetically in his masterwork Don Juan where the titular protagonist spends the poem traversing different areas of the Mediterranean and beyond. Both in his life and work, Byron commits to the ideal of cosmopolitanism in the early nineteenth century.
In doing so, Byron unequivocally positions himself within a national debate as an international cosmopolitan, whose extensive travels abroad, he believes, serve to broaden his worldview and eliminate a close-mindedness which he observes in some of his contemporaries. In the Dedication to Don Juan, he explicitly takes aim at Robert Southey, among other Lake Poets, who Byron believes to be betraying a liberal cause in the Romantic movement for political advancement with the conservative Tory party: “Bob Southey! You’re a poet – Poet-laureate, / And representative of all the race; / Although ‘tis true that you turn’d out a Tory at / Last, – yours has lately been a common case” (Byron, Don Juan 635). Though evidently enraged by the alleged turncoat politics of the contemporary lake poets, Byron’s message gains an additional dimension beyond a Whig-Tory political dyad. He indicts the ‘Lakers’ for failing to adopt what Alan D. McKillop terms “altruistic cosmopolitanism,” which “involves an ultimate rejection of local attachment by the philosophic mind” in order to better understand a global humankind (McKillop 201-202). Wohlegemut reminds us that “for Byron being a cosmopolitan meant escaping the ‘narrow prejudices of an islander,’” and this is made explicitly clear in his address of Southey and the Lake Poets: “There is a narrowness in such a notion, / Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for ocean” (Byron, Don Juan 636). The remedy for evolving British nationalism, for Byron, is clearly found in travelling between nations, over oceans, and across borders. He writes home to his mother from Athens in 1811 during his Grand Tour of the East:
I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term…Here I see and have conversed with French, Italians, Germans, Danes, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, &c. &c. &c. and without losing sight of my own, I can judge of countries and manners of others. – Where I see the superiority of England … I am pleased, and where I find her inferior I am at least enlightened” (Byron, Letters 2: 34-35).
Byron appears to almost embody a proto-diversity advocate, endorsing the value of learning from people of different national and ethnic backgrounds. To better one’s understanding of England and English society, it is paramount for Byron, the altruistic cosmopolitan, that one travel abroad. However, at the same time Byron was engaging in his fruitful, worldview-expanding, altruistic international experience, his estates and finances in England were in disarray. It is true that Byron was almost chronically in debt, and that constant did not differ whether he resided in England or abroad. But, his propensity to travel internationally on the wealth (or lack thereof) generated by his estates and their tenants harkens to Irish absentees.
This altruistic-turned-absentee cosmopolitanism of Byron’s shines through best when considered against the complicated relationship with his ancestral estate Newstead Abbey. Biographer Fiona MacCarthy confirms as much: “As a practical landowner, the 6th Lord Byron was an unrepentant absentee. Had he [a] more dutiful temperament … no doubt he could have pulled the Newstead estate around” (MacCarthy 18). Under his (mis)management, the Newstead Abbey fell derelict and decayed, though MacCarthy suggests that this was, to a degree, Byron’s preference: “But there was something in his perverse nature that preferred the flawed inheritance, the ruined noble Abbey, a romantic liability outdoing his own mother’s abandoned Castle of Gight” (18). Whether it be because of Byron’s intriguing aesthetic sensibilities or porous financial oversight, the Newstead Abbey’s descent into dereliction resembles the castle at Connaught in Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl insofar as a distanced landowner’s absence permits structural decline in the physical spaces of their estate. Yet, absenteeism also entails an economic dimension where wealth generated by domestic estates is then spent in foreign areas, a practice which applies directly to Byron concerning both his initial grand tour in 1809-1811 and his permanent exile from England after 1816.
To finance his international endeavors, Bryon relied on the annuity revenue created by his English estates at Newstead, Rochdale, Norfolk, Lancashire, among others (MacCarthy 82). At the same time, he needed to stave off the sizable debts he already created, so Byron attempted to part with several of his properties, including Newstead Abbey. Throughout the early nineteenth century, he is entangled in several attempts to part with this estate through mortgage, auction, or straight sale that go awry.[3] As an absentee cosmopolitan, Byron views both the management and sale of his ancestral estate as hindrances to a larger goal of foreign travel. During a domestic interlude, in an 1814 letter, he frustratedly writes, “Nothing but this confounded delay of Newstead &c. could have prevented me from being long ago in my isles of the East. Why should I remain or care?” (Byron, Letters 4: 21). His exasperation at the foibles in the sale of Newstead communicate both Byron’s aversion to domestic management and evident desire to return to travel. Given his disinterest in the day-to-day oversight of his estates, Byron employed managers to supervise his properties and they revenue they produced, as was a common practice among landowning aristocrats.
Described as “Byron’s solicitor and business agent,” John Hanson manages the Newstead and Rochdale estates from 1798 onward along with the later oversight of Douglas Kinnaird, a banker friend of Byron’s. The work of these two men enabled Byron the liberty of an absentee Lord (see Letters 1: 275). Byron placed significant trust in Hanson and Kinnaird’s ability to manage his properties and resulting income.[4] “I presume you have between you full power to act for me…Pay examine closely into all accounts – annuities &c that they may not take advantage of my absence” (5: 278, emphasis Byron’s). Written from Venice in 1817, this letter carries Byron’s permission for the final sale of Newstead, enacted entirely remotely through the intermediaries, Hanson and Kinnaird. Admittedly, an aristocrat delegating financial management was not an uncommon practice among landed aristocrats in the nineteenth century, but in the case of Byron, he writes across borders to ensure that the sale goes through as that his absentee income through annuities will not lessen. Interestingly, Byron fears that his tenantry will exploit his absence without considering how his permanent departure from the country and interminable life abroad may exploit them. Deferring financial management to Hanson and Kinnaird, assuring a source of wealth through his estates’ annuities, and then spending that income abroad attest to Byron’s configuration as an absentee cosmopolitan landlord.
There exist distinct parallels between Byron’s cosmopolitan approach to landowning and the practices of Irish absentees in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Both rely on wealth generated by domestic estates to finance foreign expenditures, and neither Byron nor Irish absentees appear to involve themselves with the livelihood of the individuals laboring on those estates which finance their international experiences. To understand the oft-studied figure of Lord Byron, his celebrity appeal, canonized poetry, and literary impact, one must also gaze into the economic conditions which enabled this cosmopolitan Lord to loom so large in English consciousness. Byron’s influence in early nineteenth century Romanticism is undeniable, and even more remarkable is his national presence in England though he spent so much time abroad. However, criticism would be remiss to ignore the aristocratic privilege which permitted Byron to be a cosmopolitan poet and, in his own words, a “citizen of the world” (Letters 1: 248), and packaged within that privilege are the notable resemblances that Byron’s estate management bears to the objectionable practices of Irish absenteeism.
Works Cited
"An Illustrious Absentee." Norfolk Yeoman's Gazette and Eastern Advertiser; for the Counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridge and Herts, 1 Mar. 1823. Nineteenth Century Collections Online, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/8RFtN5. Accessed 25 Nov. 2018.
"Absenteeism, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/654. Accessed 27 November 2018.
"Absenteeism." Weekly True Sun, 20 Oct. 1833, p. [57]. Nineteenth Century Collections Online, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/8Qog30. Accessed 23 Nov. 2018.
“Absenteeism.” Westminster Review, Jan. 1829, p. [237-243]. HathiTrust Digital Library, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.319510024764081;view=1up;seq=259. Accessed 23 November 2018.
Byron, George Gordon. “Don Juan.” Byron Poetical Works, edited by Frederick Page, Oxford University Press, 1970, pp. 635-858.
---. Byron’s Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols, John Murray, 1973.
Cobbett, William. A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland. Benzinger Brothers, Inc., 1824.
MacCarthy, Fiona. Byron: Life and Legend. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
McKillop, Alan D. “Local Attachment and Cosmopolitanism: the Eighteenth-Century Pattern.” From Sensibility to Romanticism, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 191-219.
Owenson, Sydney. The Wild Irish Girl. Pickering & Chatto Limited, 2000.
Picken, Cassidy. “Maria Edgeworth’s Poetics of Rent.” ELH, vol. 83, 2016, pp. 181-209.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1994.
Wohlgemut, Esther. “Pilgrim, Exile, Vagabond: Byron and the Citizen of the World.” Romantic Cosmopolitanism, edited by Esther Wohlgemut, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 95-119.
Notes
[1] See Keogh, Dáire, and Kevin Whelan, eds. Acts of Union: The causes, contexts, and consequences of the Act of Union. Four Courts Press Ltd, 2001.
[2] In the above-mentioned periodicals, there exists an intriguing economic debate around absenteeism in relation to emerging laissez-faire praxis in the early nineteenth century. The 1829 piece by the Westminster Review listed in the works cited page below begins the discussion by citing two previous occurrences: an article written in the Quarterly Review and a transcript of a committee session in Parliament. The article goes on to insert itself in the debate. The 1833 piece in the Weekly True Sun then rebuts the commentary in the Westminster Review. Studying this back-and-forth gives an intriguing view into the practice of economic dialogue through print, but it also exceeds the scope of this paper. For further reading, reference both articles titled “Absenteeism” in the Works Cited page.
[3] The struggle to sell Newstead abbey was a quandary which plagued Byron for several years. Needing to satisfy his growing debts and his other properties not producing sufficient revenue, he had no choice but to part with his ancestral estate; however, the sale was fraught with complications. For example, an 1812 sale to Thomas Claughton failed when the buyer only supplied part of the promised down-payment (MacCarthy 193). The difficulties later involved mortgage, an auction, and final sale in 1817. For more detail, see MacCarthy’s biography in the works cited: Byron: Life and Legend.
[4] The work of Hanson and Kinnaird reminds one of the role of Clendenning in The Wild Irish Girl. There is little indication in the scholarship that either Hanson or Kinnaird participated in the nefarious practices iterated by Owenson concerning manipulative extortion of the tenantry at Newstead or Rochdale. However, editor Leslie A. Marchand alludes that Hanson may have taken slight advantage of his cosmopolitan Lord’s absence (see Letters, 1: 275).