Latest / 1-800-1800 / 1-800-1800: Maria Edgeworth invented political economy

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1-800-1800: Maria Edgeworth invented political economy · 1-800-1800

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Ring, ring.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hello.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Is this 1800?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: For once in your goddamn
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: life, it is.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, oh.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to 1-800-1800.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: And today is a huge day because we are in fact doing 1800.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: It is crazy.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm a little
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: stressed about it.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm Madeline.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: And we are the founders of Mandylion Press,
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: which publishes 19th century novels that have been forgotten or overlooked.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: We bring them back with new introductions,
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: cute design, and we have two new books that are out as of October 6th.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: These are Love Days and The Story of Avis,
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: and you can buy your copy right now at mandylionpress.com.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: We also do bonus episodes of this podcast on our Substack.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: Go to mandylion.substack.com and subscribe now.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: So...
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: We always like to start each episode telling each other something we learned this week.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: Madeline, would you like to tell me what you learned this week?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it sort of requires a visual, so I'm going to just text you something.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Mabel, you describe what you're seeing on your screen right now.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so...
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: I see an Instagram account named IamCarlos Guevara.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: Here, I'll play it.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder if Che Guevara knew his great-grandson would be working at a gay sex shop
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: and listening to Sky Ferreira.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: And the song that the video is, too, is Everything is Embarrassing by Sky Ferreira.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: So...
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: For some reason this week,
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't actually, I didn't do too much like ancestral digging.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: So this could just be someone whose last name is Guevara.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: But according to Instagram and which fed me this video and him himself,
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Che Guevara's great grandson is sort of a thotty Instagram guy who I think has like
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: a music career, unclear to me.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's also a granddaughter who has a music career.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: They're all like pop stars basically.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: We have to get Stalin's granddaughter and Che Guevara's grandson together.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: We need to do a convention and we need
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: to get like Thomas Jefferson's most recently
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: discovered and what do you call it?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Progenitor.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Should we do like a Democrat versus despot or should we do like just everyone?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we could curate them into different groups, I think.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if they do that.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: I want Prince Harry.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: You want him?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: No, not sexually.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: But I want him on
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: the podcast.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think him and Che Guevara's grandson and Stalin's granddaughter.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: I have nothing to say to Prince Harry.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like you have tons to say to Prince Harry.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: You have the same hair color, for God's sakes.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the same sort of taste in Halloween costumes.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: No Nazi jokes.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Just kidding.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: We're only five minutes in.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't even gotten to capitalism's history.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hello.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: You've reached 1-800-1800.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: 1-800-1800.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: I have a burning question.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: 1-800-1800.
• 3:17
  [music]
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: burning question.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Did you learn anything this week?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Good job, Madeline.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: I can't facilitate my own question.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: I did it.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: So the thing I learned this week relates to a book
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: that I started rereading yesterday, which is F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm enjoying it so far on chapter three.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't read it since high school.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm reading a sort of traditional copy with the original cover.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: What does that mean?
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: Like, you know, the famous cover with the eyes, the blue.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I know.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, everyone knows it.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's just like I'm not reading a new edition that looks different.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like not only am I reading.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: Should we do a Mandylion edition?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's in the public domain now, I think.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: It was published in 1925.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost there.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: No, it is.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: When did he die?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: I could look that up for you once.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Don't worry about it.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: move on.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's good.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: He was only 44.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's so sad.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I have something to say about that, but let's...
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: What a life he lived.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: So anyway,
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: I was just kind of curious about the cover because I've never really thought
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: about it.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_03: And as we've described, it's beautiful.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's a blue painting with a faint outline of a woman's face, including these huge big eyes.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: And then there's sort of the bright lights of Coney Island in the Small foreground.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: And it just, it's so jazz age.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's so New York.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_03: So I was looking into it.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: The painting was made by a Spanish painter named Francis Cougat, who was commissioned to do it.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_03: He was, I think, working at, in Scribner's art department.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_03: And he was asked to create something to illustrate the cover.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_03: And he made this painting and it was sent to F.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_03: Scott Fitzgerald,
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: who was living in France at the time,
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_03: And who loved the work and rewrote portions of the novel to relate more to
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_03: the painting.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_03: And he sent a letter to his editor where he said,
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: for Christ's sake, don't give anyone that jacket you're saving for me.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: I've written it into the book.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought that was interesting.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: That is really interesting.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: The history of book design and the way that it inflects the story.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: I've been thinking so
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: much about...
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: The history of art books,
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: just not like doing any research at all,
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: just wondering about it in my own personal life.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because I'm obviously doubting my dissertation topic and think there would be a better one.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like I didn't even think about the history of books.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because dust jacket design and stuff was like kind of new then.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea that it would be such a like part of the process of finishing
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: and marketing the book.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: Now it's kind of an afterthought, I feel.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: I know.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think that it's just another way.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's like when people talk about how you used to be able to like charge everything
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: as a magazine editor and have a town car.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's like my favorite thing is that...
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: The editor I used to work for was like we would take a town car home to shit
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: so we didn't have to use the office bathroom.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's just good
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: business.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if you're interested in the history of art books,
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: you really should see this exhibition at MoMA that I saw yesterday called
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: The Surrealist Book because I was thinking a lot about these are all these works
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: by like Dali and Max Ernst and all these people who are like basically destroying
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: the book.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: Madeline, are you ready for the
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: year that started it all?
• 7:25
  [music]
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm ready.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: I have a question about why you chose 1800 to discuss today's topic.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want to explain yourself or do you want to just dive into it and it will become clear?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: I think it will become clear, but like...
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: On page... Let me...
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: I'm trying to see.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to become clear on page 14 of my 19 pages of notes.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not in your notes document.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Should I be?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want you in there.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you do and sometimes you don't.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's confusing.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want you to have any spoilers.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: She's going in blind, you guys.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: So everything she says that's absolutely brilliant is just her on the spot.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Baby, I'm prepared as ever.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: So...
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: We read a book for this week's episode.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: We read a book called The Invisible Hand of Mariah Edgeworth,
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: How a 19th Century Novelist Taught the World Economics.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: It is written by Gina Smiley and it was published by Knopf.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_03: Its pub date is October 6, 2026.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_03: So if you have an opportunity, grab a copy, I guess.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if we're telling people to buy it.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: So we read this book.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's, you know, 200 pages of sort of popular history.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_03: I learned about this book in a New York Times review.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: And it is interesting, I think, for the Mandylion Project at large.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_03: I'm setting it aside.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_03: I'll work my way there to why we're talking about 1800.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: So we read this book and I will tell you why I chose to do 1800 out of all the years
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: of Mariah Edgeworth's life.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: But first I want to paint a picture of where we are in 1800.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: What's interesting to me about the year 1800 is that it feels less 19th century
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: than like 1776 or 1789.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's actually this like weird, neither here nor there point.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I've always felt a lot of anticipation about what it would mean for us
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: to do this year.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's kind of good to just rip the bandaid off and be like,
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: maybe it doesn't mean anything.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, after all, it's just another year.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: Have we done 1900?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've also been avoiding that one.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm too afraid, but let's try it.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: So first, just three little things that were happening in 1800.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_03: And then I'm going to sort of paint a picture of what's happening at large.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_03: So in 1800,
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: Alessandro Volta describes his new invention of the voltaic pile,
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_03: the first chemical battery.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_03: We discussed what came of that invention a couple of years from
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: now in a past episode.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Very interesting.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: 1803, I think, if people want to go take a listen to that.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_03: In other news, in Vienna, Ludwig von Beethoven premieres Symphony No.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: 1.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: I was listening to this yesterday.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_03: It slaps.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_03: We'll cue a little bit of it right now.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then the Library of Congress was founded in the United States.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_03: The other stuff happening in the United States is
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_03: that there is actually something referred to by historians as the Revolution
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: of 1800,
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: which I had never heard of.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: Nor I.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: And this refers to a major thing that
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_03: happens politically in the United States
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_03: in 1800,
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_03: which is the first peaceful transfer of power in the United States
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_03: after Thomas Jefferson defeated incumbent John Adams.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_03: Whoa.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: Wait, what?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Was it not peaceful when Washington
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_03: stopped being president?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's more about the fact that it was a transition between two different parties.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas before presidents had been coming from the same side.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_03: And this was a slight transition.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_03: Thomas Jefferson defeated incumbent John Adams in the first peaceful transfer
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_03: of power in the history of the United States.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_03: It was also the first presidential election to be a rematch.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: This election took forever.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: It went on between October 31st and December 3rd.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_03: And it ultimately went to Congress to decide it was the first time that that had happened.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_03: And it was the first election where an incumbent president lost re-election.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_03: And it was the first time in modern history where
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: a national government changed hands peaceably following a free election.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: The first time in modern history.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: No, like I think in all history.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: No, well, modern history.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: I assume the difference between like ancient versus modern history.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: Perhaps they were doing this in like ancient Greece.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: I don't really think they had like parties
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: the same way.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: They had democracy, didn't they?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: A tuberous.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: So what's also funny to me is that so this election starts in October, ends in December.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: Back in June, President John Adams moved to Washington, D.C., which is a huge deal.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: But the president's mansion was not ready yet.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: It was still under construction.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: So he moved into a hotel.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sick.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's like when my family moved to Boston and we lived in the Ritz for a month.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what's happening in the former colonies over in Great Britain.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: King George III survives two assassination attempts in the year 1800,
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: one in Hyde Park and the second in a theater.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_03: He was shot at by a crazy man who hit the wood paneling instead of him.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: And also that year,
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_03: Queen Charlotte introduces the Christmas tree at a party for children
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: at Windsor Castle.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: And inflation reaches an all-time high of 36.5%, which is a big deal for this episode.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: Across the channel in France,
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: we have
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_03: France still in its First Republic mode post the Revolution of 1789,
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_03: which basically changes the world forever, as we will discuss today.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_03: So the French Republic was founded in 1792 and would last until Napoleon declared
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_03: the first empire in 1804.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_03: In 1792, the constitutional monarchy was abolished.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_03: This period was defined by extreme violence like the reign of terror and
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: then huge military campaigns led by Napoleon.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_03: In 1800, Napoleon wins a public plebiscite, which names him first consul.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_03: And historians have described his regime as a dictatorship by plebiscite.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: So this is a huge transition in French history.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: Meanwhile, everybody else in Europe is pissed about what's happening in France and Russia.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: Totally.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: Catherine the Great's son, Paul I, who had become emperor.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: You don't hear a lot about Paul I. I know.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't this funny?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: I was intrigued.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: So he was deeply overshadowed by his mother's legacy and he was assassinated in 1801.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: So we really didn't get very much of him.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: Catherine the Great died in 1796.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: He introduced some of the first limitations on serfdom in Russian history,
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_03: which is interesting.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: And he also was in a coalition with Britain and Austria against revolutionary France.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: But again, we don't really think about him much because he was a nobody whose mom was epic.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like West Wilson.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like from Summer House?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Is his mom really cool?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: People say that he's like hates women because his mom is so cool.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's such a shame.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: I was watching Next Gen NYC and Ava Dash was talking to her father who is famous.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: What's his name again?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Damon Dash.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Who that is.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: I've never heard of that person.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: He's like a really important entrepreneur.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: He co-founded Rockefeller with Jay-Z.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's Ava Dash's dad.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: And she was talking to him about this other guy.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Who's Julie Dash?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: Is that her sister?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I'm confused.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, do I know that person or is that a character on a TV show?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Julie Dash, I don't think is of any relation.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway...
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, Damon Dash was telling his daughter Ava Dash that this other guy
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: on Next Gen NYC needs to learn how to love himself so he can learn to love women.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought that was helpful.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's very sweet.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: So this brings me from Ava Dash to
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_03: Mariah Edgeworth.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_03: So as noted before, Madeline and I read this book.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: I learned a lot.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: It made me think.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Mabel's avoiding saying that we didn't like the book.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: But we didn't like the book.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: So for those who are not familiar,
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: Mariah Edgeworth was one of the most popular English language novelists in
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: the 19th century.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: She was born in 1768.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_03: She died in 1849.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: She published dozens of novels and short story collections and fiction for children.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: She was incredibly prolific.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_03: Contemporaries with Jane Austen.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: Really big deal.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: I have never...
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: I just wanted to say,
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: because I feel like you and I are sort of gearing up to rate
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: a fake 19th century novel.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of my takeaways from this book is to make it convincing we have
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: to have the title be a woman's name.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_03: Belinda, Clarissa, Cecilia.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: Lucinda is a good one.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: I found a 19th century novel that's forgotten called Madeline, a tale that I want to publish.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is it like about like a beaten prostitute or something?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: If the story fits...
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: I fear.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: I've tried to read the work of Mariah Edgeworth before and I found it completely impenetrable.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: What I appreciated about this book was it explained to me why I don't enjoy her work.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it also was interesting to me because so the argument of this book is
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: that basically Mariah Edgeworth was one of the founders of political economy as
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: a field,
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: helped popularize the ideas of Adam Smith,
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: was friends
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_03: and contemporaries with all of these great thinkers
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_03: of Early 19th century economic thinking helped identify and understand the trends
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_03: and obstacles of capitalism and did so through the medium of fiction.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: And that is why her books suck.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_03: Because these are not novels that we would enjoy reading today.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas her contemporary Jane Austen was writing social novels that are fun
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_03: and interesting and like fueled by kind of interpersonal dynamics.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_03: Mariah Edgeworth was doing that,
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_03: but infusing it with these very heady,
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: complex, and ultimately boring ideas about economy.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: I like that you're like,
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: the reason I didn't like her books is because there was economics in them.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a boring topic.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_03: It's a boring topic.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: And it's also she was doing it in a didactic way because I also don't want
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_03: to undermine the intelligence of Jane Austen and say that Jane Austen wasn't talking
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_03: about the world because we've talked a lot about Mansfield Park,
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_03: which is Jane Austen's like most kind of political and most embedded in
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_03: the real world novel because it's Set against this backdrop
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: of like colonial relationships with the Caribbean and there's like race implications
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_03: and financial implications.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_03: There's poor characters, there's rich characters.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_03: So Jane Austen was also engaging with the world that she inhabited,
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_03: but she did it in a way where it was like illustrative rather than being like,
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: I'm trying to teach you something,
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_03: learn it, which is what I kind of think Edgeworth was doing.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: I forget his first name.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: The Meyer in Metro Goldwyn Meyer.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like in the MGM?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: MGM.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: The name Meyer, the guy who that is.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: He said once to a screenwriter, if you want to send a message, go to the Western Union.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: As in like, don't write a script that's trying to teach people something.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's boring.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's boring.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_03: And they should get to it on their own.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_03: And it doesn't hold up.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: I think if I was a reader in 1800,
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_03: I would have enjoyed these novels because there frankly wasn't a lot
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_03: of competition anyway.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_03: But also I think that as time goes by, this is the type of novel that is easy to lose to time.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: And Mariah Edgeworth,
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_03: it's like when you go to a bookstore,
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_03: you always can find a Jane Austen or a Charles Dickens.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_03: It's way harder to find a Mariah Edgeworth.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's not like on the popular classic shelf.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_03: But what I still think this, her life story is really interesting.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I learned a lot about it.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_03: I also, I think it just helps me think about the novel as a concept in the 19th century.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: Like we were just talking about like, what is a book in terms of art books and artist books.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: But also I think it's just an important reminder that novels...
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_03: Operated in all of these different ways in the 19th century.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_03: And they were an incredibly important cultural tool.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: And it also makes me think about one of our books,
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_03: Elsie Venner by Oliver Wendell Holmes,
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_03: which is sort of similar in that it's a novel that's like actually a medical,
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_03: like it's a, it's a, Inquiry into a medical question.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_03: We don't see that very much anymore.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: But having never read a Mariah Edgeworth book,
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm assuming what the difference is,
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: is that she has something she wants to impart on you.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas Oliver Wendell Holmes has a question.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: He has a question,
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: but he also does have a mission,
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_03: which is to like further break down kind of Puritan culture ideas.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_03: And like the idea that people are fated for certain hells or heavens based off
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_03: of like something that's out of their control.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_03: But I think that that idea has been accepted to an extent that makes
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_03: that book readable and enjoyable.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the great turn against Mariah that made economics boring has worked so you
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: and I can't be made to care about it.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's like we psychoanalysis
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: is sexy,
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: but like I had never learned about any of these things until I read this book.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: And to the like the kind of third takeaway that I have is
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_03: that I didn't really understand exactly the backlash to the revolutions of
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: the late 18th century and the conservatism
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: that set in after.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: That was really interesting to me.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I wasn't really had never been told that that explicitly before.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: I also will read to you what the author Gina Smielek notes in her acknowledgements
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: because it might be an important caveat.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: I've tried to fact check her work,
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: but she writes,
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: I am a journalist,
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: not a historian or an economist or a literature expert or a feminist scholar.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: So it goes without saying that this book owes a huge debt of gratitude to
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: the many professionals who have given me their time, et
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: cetera, et cetera.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: But they could only do so much is what she's saying.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's the thing that bothered me about this book and I told you is
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: that every single paragraph ends with like, let's see, let's find one.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: But in 1789, a grim turn of fate changed everything.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like these cliffhangers where I'm like, I don't know the history you're telling.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know these people.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: You like leaving these weird cliffhangers
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: on this like objectively boring book is not making it more readable.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's making it like way more obscure and incomprehensible to Exactly.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_03: And also I was always unclear whether like the 1789 passage that you're referencing,
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_03: like,
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_03: is she talking about the French Revolution or something that happened
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_03: in Mariah
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: Edgeworth's personal life?
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because I do think that that's different.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Horrifically unclear.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Horrifically unclear.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: And the timeline- Those famous lectures would become masterworks.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's like all these vague,
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: like jumping off things that assume that you know what's coming- Well,
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: something I was reflecting on,
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: the passage that struck me that I mentioned to you before was,
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: she writes,
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: silver moonlight bathed the driveway as Mariah Edgeworth's carriage trundled
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_03: toward David Ricardo's mansion on a dark evening in late 1821.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: And as I asked Madeline, how does she know that there was silver moonlight?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: How does she know that the carriage trundled?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe she went back and checked the moon cycles and said it wasn't a moonless night.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was not a moonless night.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: But what...
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think if I was being, I don't even know if I'm being generous.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: A theory I have of why the book is written the way it is,
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: is that she's trying to do to Mariah Edgeworth's life what Mariah Edgeworth did
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: to political economy,
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: which is like make it sort of fictional,
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: fun, readable, but also tell a story and explain something complicated.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: I will say it's like way more footnoted than like 1873 was, for example.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: Which is another like popular nonfiction book that we read and discussed.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, totally.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: And I actually really did appreciate looking through the footnotes
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: and just like imagining the process of writing this book,
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_03: which probably was pretty fun because Mariah Edgeworth left behind a huge amount
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: of printed matter from all the letters that she wrote.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: And that has a lot to do with kind of the geographic aspect of her life,
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_03: which I'm excited to talk about.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: So Mariah Edgeworth is a New Year's Eve baby.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_03: She was born on January 1st, 1768.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_03: She was of Anglo-Irish descent.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_03: So her family...
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: Was Anglican English and they had settled in Ireland a few centuries
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_03: before her birth on stolen land.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_03: And we'll talk about that.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_03: And Mariah Edgeworth would go on to,
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: as we said, write all of these books, mostly between 1795 and 1848.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_03: So she had a very long career and she was extremely popular and She was read
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_03: by kings and queens.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_03: Queen Victoria grew up reading Mariah Edgeworth stories.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_03: King George III read one of her novels and said, I know something
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: of my Irish subjects.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: Huge.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: The first time he'd considered
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: that land, I
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: believe.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't even know that he had conquered that land.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: Gina Smielek writes,
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: novels were among the most important mass media of the day,
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: and Mariah was among the most famous novelists of her moment.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: So this is someone who was very much popular culture,
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: which I think is hard for us to understand,
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: given the State of our own popular culture, but imagine a world.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: I will say there is like a sort of popular strain of economics,
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: which is all of the influencers who do like stock tips and day trading.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's made up, but.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: And yet.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what's fascinating to me is,
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: as always,
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: when I'm contemplating the history of capitalism is like, This really just happened.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like the world that we live in is a very recent invention.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: And these people who Mariah Edgeworth was in dialogue with either
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: because she read their work or she was actually friends with them.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like we invented the ideas that
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: rule our world.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's like you're talking about, okay, 1800, like first peaceful transfer of power ever.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like...
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: French Revolution was the first time I believe that government had switched from
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: a monarchy to a democracy like in situ because in the U.S.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: it was like territory, not like they didn't overthrow the king writ large.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so normally like historically they would have just been replaced
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: by another monarch, but this shift was huge.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, yeah, it's only been 120 years now.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Wait.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: 220 years.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: 220 years.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking to you live from 1926.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: I wish.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: That like, that it's even been a possibility.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: And honestly, we will see the dismantlement of this system in our lifetime.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: We're already watching its decay.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: Let's get into Mariah Edgeworth's childhood.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: So Mariah Edgeworth was the daughter of this man named Richard Lovell Edgeworth,
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: who was an icon.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: He was a law student turned philosopher turned gentleman farmer who would go on
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: to have four wives,
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: 22 children and a lifelong interest in seemingly quote,
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: every idea the Scottish and English Enlightenment had to offer.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_02: Honestly, goals.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: Literally epic, epic person.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_03: So He was part of this Anglo-Irish landowning class.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: His Protestant family was among the group of English people who took land in Ireland
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_03: in the 17th century after the crown confiscated it from the Irish Catholic.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: He was sent to England as a young man to study at Oxford
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_03: because his dad didn't trust him to study hard at Trinity in Dublin.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_03: And he falls in love with a family friend's daughter named Anna Maria.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: And basically knocks her up before they get married.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_03: But by the time he's, it's literally a shotgun wedding.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_03: He like doesn't want to marry her and he already hates her, but he feels a sense of obligation.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's good at least.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he did it, but he completely neglected her and their children, including Mariah.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: He did not live with them.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: He was having affairs.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: He was in love with another woman.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: He traveled.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so Mariah Edgeworth,
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_03: until she was five,
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_03: grew up with her mother's family in England and Very estranged from her father.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_03: And her father was out there having an amazing time hanging out with some baller people.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_03: One of his best friends plays a big role in this novel.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's not a novel.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's a book.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: Thomas Day, who I did not know about, who's a fascinating character.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I didn't like him.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: He's disgusting.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: He was an abolitionist and writer who is a huge believer in the ideas of Rousseau.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: Did not believe in the equality of men and women and did something disgusting,
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: which is at one point he adopted two orphan girls and decided to raise them
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: into his ideal wife because he couldn't find a woman who fit the bill.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_02: They both rebelled against him and he abandoned them.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: I do like that story because I respect those women so much.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_03: Amazing.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_02: Imagine
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_02: being an 11-year-old orphan in the early 19th century and
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: yet somehow not ending up marrying your dad.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: Huge.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: Huge.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: Huge.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: I also felt that Gina Smielik was using Thomas Day too hard as a character in the story.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think she does a bad job of...
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think she was using him too much as a villain because obviously he
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: and Richard Lovell,
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Mariah Edwards' dad had a very fruitful intellectual relationship.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I think she also was putting too much emphasis.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think she was doing kind of the classic thing that like feminists do that's wrong
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: and like actually exacerbates the problem,
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: which is like putting too much emphasis on the significance of Mariah Edgeworth
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: and Jane Marcet,
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think is the other one she talks about,
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: who popularized a lot of these ideas, but did not originate them.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I would debate you on that a little bit,
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: but I just think she's like,
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: she's undermining herself a little bit by like writing this book that is mostly
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: about the men around Mariah Edgeworth and then ending by going Mariah Edgeworth is
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: a hugely important economist.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_03: I mean,
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_03: I felt like the organization of this book was really confusing and you're like
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_03: in Mariah Edgeworth's life and then you're like,
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_03: nevermind,
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_03: we're hanging out with Adam Smith
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: and Malthus and Ricardo and you're like,
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: I would just bet word
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: for word we are with Mariah for one fifth of the book and
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: the rest of the time we are with men.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I guess I do think I do actually believe the argument that these women
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: who popularized these concepts also did a huge amount of work to like summarize
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_03: and synthesize ideas that otherwise people would not have consumed.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_03: And I do think that that is like innovative, original work.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: Mm hmm.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if it necessarily like makes Mariah Edgeworth an economist,
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: but I still think it's like meaningful.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't disagree that it's meaningful.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: I just think like, I mean...
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: I said my piece.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: You said your piece.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_03: Among Richard's other friends was Erasmus Darwin,
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_03: who was the grandfather of Charles Darwin and a naturalist
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_03: who wrote this famous book called Zoonomia.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: Richard was also friends with Darwin's other grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: I loved that.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: anyone who hasn't listened to our Darwin episode might not know that Darwin was
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: a product of huge incest and he wrote about it and was deeply concerned about it.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: He was like, maybe this is why all my kids are dying because he had married his cousin.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: Josiah Wedgwood was the founder of Wedgwood Pottery and was a huge innovator
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: of capitalist techniques, actually.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like he invented BOGO and the catalog and stuff like that.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: So really interesting.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: We also did an episode about Wedgwood.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: We've done an episode of basically about everything and this is an amazing podcast.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_02: RIP.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: So Richard's hanging out with these guys and while his wife is still alive,
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: he's Fallen in love with a woman named Honora Snide.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_02: She seems awesome.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: Who is really, really cool.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_02: I described her in my notes as a tubercular hot bitch who shared his intellectual interests.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_03: Honora and Richard had a scandalously short engagement after the tragic death
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_03: of Anna Maria, Mariah's mother.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: I guess her name is probably Anna Mariah, if I had to guess.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: And
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: very short engagement led to a scandalous marriage four months after his ex,
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_02: his wife's death.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I would, do you have a
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: picture of him?
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: I have a picture of Honora.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: Would you like to see it?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just like, was he really hot?
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, she's gorgeous.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think she's gorgeous.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's just impossible to tell from this photo or from this photo.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: From this etching.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's kind of a good photo.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: No, she is gorgeous,
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: but I'm just like,
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: his love life would suggest to me that he was really good looking.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he was very sprightly and young seeming, I think for a very long time.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: Is sprightly an attractive quality in a man?
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think so, because I feel like it speaks to a great amount of energy.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like short kings are sprightly.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: By definition.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: Spritely to me just has a sort of like,
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: like, you know,
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: that's remember that Starburst ad that was like berries and cream.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: No, I don't remember this ad.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's just got a little bit of a like,
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: like Little Lord Fauntleroy quality to it that I don't necessarily register as hard.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: Little Lord Fauntleroy.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: So Mariah's mother has died.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: It leaves a horrible impact on her.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: And she's basically thrust back into a relationship with a man
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_02: that she's never really known, her father, Richard.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_03: And she right off the bat does not make a good impression on her father or Anora.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_03: They bring her to Ireland.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_03: She leaves the world she's always known in England and Ireland is in a crazy state
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_03: at this time in its history.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_03: Dublin is being physically transformed.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_03: The medieval city is being torn down and remade with wide avenues.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_03: Buildings are being built in the Palladian style.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: But there's also just excessive poverty.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_03: And Benjamin Franklin visited in 1772 and wrote,
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_03: they live in wretched hovels of mud and straw,
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_03: are clothed in rags and subsist chiefly on potatoes.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_03: And that's around the time that Mariah goes back there.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_03: She goes to the family seat, which is in Edgeworth's town.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_03: And they have this huge mansion there,
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_03: which is apparently like really ramshackle and insane because her family history is
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_03: that basically for generations,
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_03: this land has been completely mismanaged, which is not uncommon in Ireland.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_03: Like the English landlords are completely absentee.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's called absenteeism.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: I told you about boycott.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: The term boycott was invented in protest of an absentee landlord in Ireland.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the depravity knows no bounds basically at this point in Irish history.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: Mariah is a terrible brat,
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_02: probably a reaction to the loss of her mother, but she's behaving badly.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: My favorite instance is when
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: the family servants have laid out some freshly glazed greenhouse glass panels on
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: the lawn and Mariah stomps on them and destroys them.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, who could resist?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: I know, it sounds so fun.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of like popping bubble wrap.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's the 19th century version of popping bubble wrap.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: I also love in that anecdote in the book,
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: it was like, and she doesn't remember whether she was bleeding horribly or not.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: it was so confusing.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: It was so confusing.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: So her parents, her dad and her evil stepmother do what any parents would do in this situation.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: Also, Onora is just an amazing name for an evil stepmother.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: I know, it's so good.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_02: Anora and Richard do what any good parents would do,
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: which is send their five-year-old away to boarding school.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: Never to return home for weekends or holidays.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: Never to be seen basically for a decade.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: And not only that, they send her away.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: But then develop an epistolary relationship with her where she must earn back their love.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: My favorite quote is she writes to them in 1776.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_02: School now seems agreeable to me.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: I know that it will give you great satisfaction to hear that I am a good girl.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of like,
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: of course,
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: this is not good parenting, except that she ends up being exceptional because of it.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but it only happens or it largely happens that they're able
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_03: to like receive her exceptional qualities because they decide she has worth.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, why did you have to decide that the child was worthless in the first place?
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_03: Because maybe she was always amazing.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_02: She had to earn it.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: So her father starts sending her assignments to do on top of her schoolwork.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: One of them is that she has to write him an Arabian fable.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: She's like seven years old.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: At one point in the book.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's so awesome.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's mentioned that she's given an assignment by her dad
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_03: to like contemplate some complicated idea and they have her do it.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_03: And then he has like his friend have his nephew do it.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: Who's like an Oxford scholar.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: And she's like an eight-year-old girl.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Her essay is better.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: But I do love the like, you will earn back my love
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: through good storytelling.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is really...
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: I identified with this child rearing experience, obviously.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: Honora and Richard at this point are starting
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_03: to have lots of other kids.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_03: Richard will go on to have 22 descendants.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_03: And they're very interested in educational ideals and experiments.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_03: They're like reading Rousseau.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_03: They're reading all of these scholars.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_03: In the Enlightenment,
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_03: everybody is fascinated by the idea of how do you raise the perfect child.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: I will say Thomas Day's experiment was obviously disgusting,
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: but Lovell and Onora are doing something similar.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: They're just not raising their kids to marry themselves.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: They are trying to raise ideal children by the same standards as Day.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_03: And they do believe in gender equality more than Thomas Day did.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_03: So they do let their daughters,
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_03: like the big divide between Richard and Thomas is that Richard believed
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_03: that his daughter should like learn how to read.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas Thomas was like, they should be able to recognize letters, but beyond that,
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: call it A.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: B.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: What does that, I don't know what recognizing letters would do.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, like enough to write your name, I guess, probably.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_03: So you can sign things away to your husband.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_03: So over this period of time,
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_03: Anora and Richard are like doing all of these interesting experiments.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_03: They're keeping very detailed notes, like basically treating their children like lab rats.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_03: But it seems like it was actually kind of a positive environment for a child.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_03: And they're also from afar keeping this correspondence going with Mariah
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_03: and starting to like her more and more.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_03: And then tragedy strikes,
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_03: Honora dies of tuberculosis and Richard basically needs a new woman in his life.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_03: And so he says, Mariah,
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: you're it.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: Come on home.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: So she's no, he also marries Honora's sister.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're right.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: You're right.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: At her insistence.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: I like that vibe.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Yeah.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: He marries his widows.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: What if you died and Rebecca married your sister?
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: That would be beautiful.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: Keep it in the family.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, Honor is dead.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: Richard's married to her sister.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_02: Mariah forms this basically center of gravity in
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_03: Richard's life.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_03: Like he's married to his wife's sister, but he Has all of this focus and love on Mariah.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_03: And he decides that she needs to have an educational refresh.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_03: Because basically what she's learning in these very posh boarding schools is
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_03: to dance, needlepoint, and to speak romance languages.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_03: And he wants more for her.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_03: And he brings her home and they do two things together.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_03: They become immersed in the same...
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_03: Intellectual world that he's obsessed with.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_03: And also he co-ops her into helping him manage his estates because he's kind of come
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_03: to a revelation that he needs to put more Energy into the management
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_03: of Edgeworth's town and the huge amount of land and their relationship
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_03: with their tenants.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: Also, like one of the economic principles that we will,
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure, discuss ad nauseum that is so interesting to them at the time is that...
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: If they make the land,
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: like if they make the conditions correct for their tenants,
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: then the land will be more productive without them actually investing more.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like part of his experiment.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's a good point that you're making that like these experiments
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_03: and these sort of philosophical ideas can directly enrich him.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_03: Which is an important like he wasn't just experimenting out of the goodness
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_03: of his heart or for the sake of these great ideas.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: No, but it was like the sort of idea that Mariah,
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: like also has to the detriment of her tenants later that like by enriching himself,
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: he's benefiting everyone.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: Which is like sort of the simplification of Adam Smith that gets,
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: popularized that like acting in personal interest can be for the greater good.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: But obviously that's not true.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it depends where you stand.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_02: I guess you're a Marxist, Madeline.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_02: Me?
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so I think it's time that we talk about Adam Smith.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_02: So like the author of The Invisible Hand of Mariah.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, can I ask you something?
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever read Adam Smith?
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: Me either.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's go.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about him in depth.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so what I was going to say is that like the author of The Invisible Hand
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_02: of Mariah Edgeworth,
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_02: I am now going to interrupt my story of Mariah Edgeworth's life to speak at length
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_02: about a man who I don't care about named Adam Smith.
• 42:58
  [music]
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_03: so Adam Smith was born in 1723 in Scotland and he died in 1790 in Scotland.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_03: He was an economist and philosopher who pioneered the field of political economy.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_03: He is known as the father of capitalism and he authored two very famous books.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_03: One is called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_03: We'll refer to it as The Wealth of Nations.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was published in 1776, which I actually did not know.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that because I just did the 1776 episode.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: Did you tell it to me and I should have known it?
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure I did, but
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: it's okay.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: Next time.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: We do a lot of talking.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_03: He was an interesting and eccentric man.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_03: He was known as being quite awkward.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_03: He never married.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_03: He lived with his mother.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_03: There's an insane anecdote in here, which
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_02: I just didn't even understand, which...
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: Reads, he was rumored to have once steeped a piece of bread in water and declared it
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: the worst cup of tea he'd ever had.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_02: I also didn't understand.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, does he think the water is tea?
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_03: I don't.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just like, that sounds like a joke.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think he really thought that.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: what do
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: you have to think about whenever he was so absent minded that he thought
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: the bread was a teabag?
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_03: Or people were dipping bread into tea, I guess.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_03: I just I don't get where the joke is.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_03: Also, like the way that things survive as anecdotes about famous people from
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_03: the 19th century, just you got to call bullshit.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_03: Sometimes I'm like, I don't know.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_03: How does anyone know that this happened?
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like, well,
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: because, I mean,
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: I agree with you because there was also a genre of book that a lot
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: of this stuff is taken from and yet we don't really look at anymore,
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: which are these, like, biographical sketches, which were not well researched.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: Are you okay?
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: My microphone just did.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: 60.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: Spinning her microphone around like a helicopter.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there are these like one is a biographical sketch sketch of famous people and
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: the other is a genre of book that was just like quotable quotes and
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: that take famous people's words out of context.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of these anecdotes survive through those two mediums.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: And yet like we those are not like fact checked.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_02: No, not at all.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_03: And like with someone like Adam Smith,
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_03: who was extremely famous in his lifetime,
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_03: you have to assume that there's just so much like fawning
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_03: and like saint worship that's happening even in the contemporary telling
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_03: of his story.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_03: So he is born in Scotland.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_03: He studies in Scotland.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_03: He then goes to Oxford and he...
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_03: Basically,
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_03: he does kind of live his life in intellectual isolation in a way
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_03: and physical isolation, but he's very interested in the world as it's evolving.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_03: At one point in his adulthood,
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_03: he moves to London just to be closer to information that's coming from the colonies
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_03: in America because he has this feeling that whatever's happening over there
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_03: in what will become the United States is extremely important to the history
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_03: that he's telling.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_03: So basically what the wealth of nation does is it diagnosed
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_03: the existing economic order and he coined the term of mercantilism.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_03: He argued that it was not gold or silver in the coffers of a nation
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_03: that made it rich,
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_03: but instead it was what those precious metals were able to purchase and
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_03: the laboring power that that country could produce.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_03: And this work, this idea would become the foundation of modern economics.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_03: And he's born at this time of extreme transformation and flux in the history of
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_03: the world and also in the history of Scotland.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_03: So just two decades before he was born,
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_03: Scotland and England become the United Kingdom through the acts of union.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_03: And he was apparently a very strange child who would speak to himself incessantly.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: Me too.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_03: But had an amazing memory.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_03: And he goes to Oxford and he the kind of like defining thing that happens
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_03: to him there is that he is caught reading the work of David Hume,
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_03: who is thought to be heretical for his ideas about religion.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_03: And so he kind of like becomes an iconoclast via that.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_03: Like he kind of is like, well, then I don't care what you guys have to teach me.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just going to teach myself.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_03: And also Scotland was the center of the intellectual world in the UK at the time.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_03: Like Scotland had five top universities.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_03: England only had two losers.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_03: And he publishes his first book in 1759.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_03: And here is where he starts to put forth this idea about self-interest.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_03: So he argues that humans were fundamentally self-interested creatures,
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_03: but that self-interest could benefit society.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_03: He writes,
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_03: it could encourage people to cultivate the ground,
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_03: to build houses,
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_03: to found cities and commonwealths,
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_03: and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts which ennoble
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_03: and embellish human life.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_03: He here first references the idea of the invisible hand.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_03: That's the invisible.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_03: It's actually it's apparently it's meaningful.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_02: You're not supposed to say the invisible hand.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_02: You're supposed to say an invisible hand.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_02: But this I read that.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_02: But I did.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_02: This book is called The Invisible Hand of Mariah Edgeworth.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't it the invisible hand of the market or it's a more abstract?
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's more abstract.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know what this book also didn't do to my satisfaction is like, okay,
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: he's reading David Hume,
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: who's an atheist,
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: but I don't think there's really a way to interpret an invisible hand of the market
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: in an atheistic way.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's shifting the role of God from the kind of like great designer
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: and like maker of the watch or whatever to market forces.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_03: Amazing point.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I just like, why are we not talking about that?
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_03: And
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_03: Smith's mother was extremely religious and apparently he wasn't an atheist.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think he wanted to undermine religion per se.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_03: The invisible hand is the idea that when individuals make self-centered decisions
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_03: that they can leave everyone better off.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_03: And this book makes him famous.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_03: He ends up being hired as the tutor of a very wealthy man, son, a wealthy man's son.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_03: And he travels around Europe and he makes... A very wealthy man's son.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_02: Wealthy... Marilyn Manson.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_03: Marilyn Manson.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_03: Marilyn.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_03: He is inspired on his travels in Europe and that's when he starts writing The Wealth of Nations.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_03: And...
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's around this point that I believe he writes,
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_02: I am a bow of nothing but my books.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_02: He does not marry.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_02: He is really weird.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_02: Was he gay, do you think?
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty gay to write The Wealth of Nations.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: What do you want the invisible hand to do?
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_02: More like the invisible hand job.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he might have been gay, Madeline.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think he was just really absorbed in his ideas.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_02: And everyone knows he's writing this book and is like, can you hurry it up, man?
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_03: It's a very epic, long project.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_03: And Smilek will argue that it's the length and complexity of the Wealth of Nations
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_03: as a final product that has led to the rampant misinterpretation of Adam Smith
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_03: and his legacy.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: Wait, one more comment on the book.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: Just like her being like,
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: did you see the note where she included a sentence from the Wealth of Nations
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: to be like, look how illegible this is.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, just because you don't understand something doesn't mean like.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: I felt the same way.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if I can find that note.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: That was so funny to me.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it's worth saying at
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: the time there are increasing literacy rates amongst middle class people,
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: but nobody is reading the wealth of nations who is not university educated elite.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: Except for Mariah Edgeworth.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: But she is essentially that in terms of like her class and her surroundings
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: and her like intellectual milieu.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like she's way better off understanding that
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: than some like random merchant son living in London.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: Mm hmm.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: So like the bar for understanding is not like the book needs to be intelligible to the masses.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: The bar for understanding the wealth of nations is that it's intelligible
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: to this wider audience.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: Mariah Edgeworth making things like that more intelligible to
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: the masses is like part of
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: a broader like class shift that's happening around education and like social reform
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: through the beginning to mid 19th century that is like I just felt like there were
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of things like that that should have been addressed in a book about capitalism
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_01: and fiction that weren't.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that's a good point.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_03: And education was extremely important to Adam Smith and Mariah Edgeworth
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_03: as something that would free people and change the world and make it better.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's helpful to talk about Adam Smith in the context of the kind
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_03: of history he's creating of Europe.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_03: So he's looking back at the transformation of European society over
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_03: the last several hundred years.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_03: So Europe's roots in the Middle Ages was as a feudal society where serfs are bound
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_03: to the land and to their landlord.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_03: And there are merchant guilds which organize trade and religion is
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_03: the defining force shaping life and your duty as a human being.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_03: Serfdom starts to decline in the 14th century,
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_03: partly after the bubonic plague kills so many serfs.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_03: And they're like, the landlords need laborers.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_03: And there's also a physical transformation that's happening to European land
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_03: because wool has become an extremely profitable commodity.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_03: And so farmland is being converted into sheep pastures.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_03: And so you see the rise of land enclosure and you also see the birth of
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_03: a more commercialized society.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it makes sense because it's like,
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_03: Wool and cotton and not like cotton's being grown in Europe,
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_03: but just like if you think about the relationship between The American colonies and
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_03: the United States with Britain,
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_03: like this raw material has to be processed somewhere.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like it's also like worth noting that the richest,
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: most famous rich families of the European Renaissance were not
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: that weren't monarchs were people who led textile guilds like the Medici.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: For example, like textiles were currency.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: Mm hmm.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_03: And also the like transition from
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_03: a more farm based society creates not only poverty,
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_03: but also it creates this new world where you're not necessarily growing the food
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_03: that you're eating.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_03: And the other big transformation that's happening in the 16th century is the kind of
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_03: after Martin Luther died.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_03: Religion becomes something a lot more malleable.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_03: And so like all of the kind of traditional ways
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_03: that society has been shaped are starting to be rewritten and remapped.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_03: And there's all these like religious revivals and revelations and revolutions.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_03: And then you also see kind of the beginnings of enlightenment thinking
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_03: and like Isaac Newton identifies like gravity.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_03: Like it's the world has changed a lot.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: Wait, have you seen that TikTok?
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's a guy being like,
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: it's some guy being like Isaac Newton getting called the genius for coming up with
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: the most basic stuff.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: Really funny.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: You should check that out.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'll look for that one.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'll send it to you next time it comes across my feed.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: Please do.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing,
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_03: obviously,
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_03: too, is there's increasing globalization as like the age of exploration advances.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_03: And so the world is becoming bigger.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_03: There's the rise of slavery,
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_03: the rise of a global trade network and the rise of
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_00: colonialism all over the world.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought it was interesting that Adam Smith was an abolitionist, which I didn't know.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I can't remember.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_03: What does she say about that?
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_03: Because it's like he I thought he didn't believe in slavery.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: But he didn't want to abolish it?
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_02: Wait, did you say he thought it was interesting that he is an abolitionist?
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_02: I thought you said he wasn't an abolitionist.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_02: No, he was.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_00: I was so confused.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, really?
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he was an abolitionist.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: I just like,
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_01: particularly because of the role the Wealth of Nations played in the founding of
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_01: the United States.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_01: And the like the refusal to abolish slavery nevertheless.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: It is interesting.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I do think that that does prove the point
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_02: of like Adam Smith has been we have done him dirty in terms of his legacy like.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_02: He had very interesting ideas that have been completely muted.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: and what she's getting at is he was a lot more liberal than history remembers him
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: in part because I think we'll talk about the backlash to these revolutions
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: and his legacy being kind of suppressed by those close to him in order
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_01: to make it more palatable in an increasingly conservative way.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: Political landscape.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: With huge personal consequences
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_03: for people who had heretical ideas.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_03: So Adam Smith is also very interested in the world around him in the 18th century
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_03: because he's witnessing huge social transformation.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_03: So he dies in 1790.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_03: So he lives to see the French Revolution, but he doesn't see what comes of it.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_03: But even in his lifetime,
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_03: you see the The kind of beginnings of what will become that revolution because
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_03: under Louis XIV,
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_03: you see really high taxes and high tariffs that are being used
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_03: to fund domestic projects and wars abroad.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_03: And those huge expenditures are actually restraining workers and industry.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_03: And that combined with like bad weather,
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_03: which leads to crop failure,
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_03: creates terrible starvation in France and tons of social unrest and And whereas
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_03: in Britain,
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_03: you're starting to see the beginnings of its kind of industrial might
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_03: and its like mercantile success.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_03: So Britain has implemented crop rotation,
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_03: which allows it to feed its people and this frees farmhands to grow.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_03: So their population is growing and there's a new class of laborers who are moving
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_03: to work in factories and towns and cities.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_03: But then also there's this huge tension that he's very interested in.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_03: You know, he moves to London to hear about it.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_03: He's witnessing what will become like the Boston Tea Party in 1773.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_03: You see American who will become Americans protesting the fact
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_03: that they're being taxed without representation.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_03: And He's taking this all in, but it's taking him a very long time.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_03: David Hume,
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_03: who becomes his close friend,
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_03: writes to him,
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_02: by all accounts,
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_02: your book has been printed long ago,
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_02: and yet it has never yet been so much as advertised.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_02: What is the reason?
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_02: If you wait till the fate of America be decided, you may wait too long.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_02: So he's being roasted mercilessly.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_02: Brutal.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_02: Brutal.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_02: But he manages to get it done.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_02: The Wealth of Nations is published in March
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_03: 1776, and...
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_03: It is in this work that he makes these huge contributions to Western thought.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_03: So he says that labor is the base of value in our economy.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_03: He writes,
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_03: the real price of everything,
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_03: what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it is the toil
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_03: and trouble of acquiring it.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want something, it costs what it costs because you want it.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_00: I have an amazing idea for a Mandylion book.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: Volume that I'll tell you when we get off the pod called Toil and Trouble.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, Toil and Trouble, I love.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_03: So he's arguing that market prices are based on a combination of wages, profits, and rent.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_03: And so the cost of a bag of potatoes,
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_03: for example,
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_03: is a product of how much the field hands earned to plant and harvest it,
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_03: the profit of the investors who purchased the seeds and made a capital investment in
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_03: the farm, and how much rent the landlord reaped from the use of the field.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_03: And Adam Smith invents the idea of the division of labor pointing out
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_03: that products could be made more efficiently if people split up the task
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_03: into different sections.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_03: And yet he also did not believe that the division of labor should go so far
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_03: that people's jobs were mindless and meaningless, which of course is what happened.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_03: I also thought it was super interesting,
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_03: the ideas about international trade and the idea that not every country is good
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_03: at making everything.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_03: So these protectionist economies that have developed in Europe have to end
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_03: because it's like basically the way that economies were structured
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_03: and This reminds me of how much I spent on grapes this morning.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's like,
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_02: Madeline,
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_02: maybe you shouldn't buy,
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_02: like Adam Smith died not so you could buy local Hudson Valley grapes,
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_02: but so you could buy- For $25 a pound.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like you should be buying grapes from like Mexico because they can make them
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_02: a lot more cheaply there.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I like to support my local farmers because I have a protectionist mindset.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, were we not talking before this episode started about how you needed to be more thrifty?
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's some things I'm not willing to compromise on.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, sucks to suck.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: And my local Concord grapes are one of them.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I get it, but babe, you're never going to make a million with that attitude.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_02: So this is a huge transformative idea.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's instead of having these protectionist economies
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_02: where there's really
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_03: high tariffs discouraging international trade,
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_03: he believes that there should be more open trade happening
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_03: between different countries because each of them can excel in the way
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_03: that suits them the most.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_03: And he believes that this system where people,
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_03: these countries are basically just hoarding wealth because they don't want
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_03: to spend their coffers.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_03: He's basically like, this is a system that only serves the rich and powerful.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_03: And if we could open up our borders and trade more freely,
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_03: it would actually serve the laboring class.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: And where he's wrong.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I kind of think also like,
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_01: and I guess maybe I'm being overly critical for this book
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_01: for not being everything I would have wanted it to be,
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_01: but she also doesn't really explore like so many of the things
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_01: that she's pulling out of Smith feels so prototypical of Marx in a way
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_01: that I think was not explored.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think that's a different book.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_01: But...
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_01: What was I going to say?
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, but the reality and the result is that like these things are enacted
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_01: and what they do is they enrich a middle class but the working class still suffers.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so like in a way Smith is right but he just like as with Malthus and Day and all
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: of these other sort of enlightenment thinkers there's so little nuance in
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: the like Practical application of the arguments they're making
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_01: because they're thinking on this like really macro like theoretical scale that
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_01: as we'll see through Mariah's story like
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: as these things are actually enacted they're not like things are different on
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: the ground than they are like in an idea in your head.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well I'm thinking about the David Ricardo stuff.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that I didn't,
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_03: I decided that we should not focus too much on that because even
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_03: though I really enjoyed
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_00: that section of the book, the like Malthus versus Ricardo.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I just like, I mean,
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: but basically like
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_01: the crux of it is that Ricardo wrote sort of a couple of treaties
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_01: that were countering Malthus that were again, like kind of overly assured treaties
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and Malthus too.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_03: I think the author of The Invisible Hand does well is also talk about what it meant
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_03: to be an economist at this point as the field of political economy is being created.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_03: This was not a hard science or even a social science, really.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_03: This was a field of philosophy.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_03: And so people are putting forth these ideas, which they expect to be interpreted as ideas.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_03: And so also the idea that Economics is like hard and fast and factual.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_01: And like numerical like stratagems and stuff like that doesn't come until much later.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so like Malthus basically puts forward this really bold idea that we're doomed
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_02: and that population growth will always outpace the rate of our ability
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_03: to produce
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_01: enough food and sustenance.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think we have some people in our government right now who still subscribe
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_01: to Malthusian principles.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_03: And it's even like,
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_03: what's the name of that woman who just published this book about the history of
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_03: the Constitution?
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_03: I have no idea.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_03: One sec.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_03: One sec.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_01: I was just going to say also like to that point,
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_01: it's like, well,
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_01: you look this up,
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_01: if the invisible hand as a concept is something that like reeks
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_01: of religious imagery,
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_01: similarly,
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_01: the way these men are negotiating political economy feels almost like catechistic
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_01: or Jesuit where it's like they're,
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_01: they're like testing ideas and But are not thinking about...
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_01: These people would have been religious scholars 200 years earlier.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_02: And also they were religious scholars.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_02: Also the way that people were as thinkers at this point was so much more holistic
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_02: and liberal artsy basically than the way that economists function now.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_01: They were all like Bard and Kenyan graduates.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, basically.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_03: And what I was going to mention was Jill Lepore's new book,
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_03: Which is called We the People, a History of the U.S. Constitution.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_03: The U.S. Constitution is a product of this exact same historic moment.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_03: The idea was that this was a document that was meant to be amended,
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_03: was meant to evolve with time,
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_02: which is where like the complete fallacy of the American political system is,
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_02: where people like look to it as Bible, as like the word
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_03: of God.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like the people who created this country intended for you to change that document.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_03: They intended for it to evolve.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's the same idea with these like economic theories.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_03: And it's just a crying goddamn shame.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_01: This country is coming to hell.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_01: Not to be like bringing up a meme every time we say something,
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_01: but I also saw a meme that I loved that was someone being like...
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone says everything with such,
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_01: such certainty, or it was damn, y'all say stuff with such certainty.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it depends.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it depends.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: And like,
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_01: I just feel like this is all like the way they're arguing in this history
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_01: of like religious issues.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_01: Theorizing is with such certainty because that is the way that that was done.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_01: You would like pull out an argument to the logical conclusion
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_01: because you knew it was an unanswerable question.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so you would like be certain about something.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_01: And when you're making a religious argument, the sort of on the ground reality doesn't matter.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so they're doing that to these like really extreme ends,
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_01: but with things that actually would be affected by like a blight.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_01: Or population moving.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, and what I'm thinking about right now is like Mariah Edgeworth
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_03: and David Ricardo were having a spirited debate in letter form
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_03: about what would happen if there was a failure of potato crops in Ireland.
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like in 1820 or something.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_03: They were like, what if this happened?
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_03: And of course that would happen.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_03: But also what I was going to say is like,
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_03: I just was reading that Jill Lepore's book is on Barack Obama's like top books
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_02: of 2025 list.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, the amount of what a joke that is to me that someone...
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_02: Who was the sitting president of the United States is like, oh, this book's awesome, dude.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, well, you had the power and you didn't.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_02: I know it's not just him and he probably tried more than other people,
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_02: but I'm just like, it's such a fucking joke.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: The government has made a complete laughingstock of itself in the last 20 years.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_01: I was going to say in the last 200 years.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_01: I guess, yeah, Bush was elected in 2001.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_01: So at least...
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_01: He was hilarious.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_02: He was funny at least.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_02: I also think that like the dangerous part of
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_03: Smith's thinking too,
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_03: or the way that it's been misinterpreted,
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_03: not like to his discredit has been like the idea
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_03: that different people serve different purposes,
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_03: kind of the same way that like Scotland shouldn't be making wine.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um, He writes,
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_03: by nature,
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_03: a philosopher is not ingenious and disposition half so different from
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_03: a street porter as a mastiff is from a greyhound.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_03: So he's saying,
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_03: everybody serves a different purpose in this type of economy,
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_03: but also we're all kind of alike.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_03: And that's where the importance of education was for him.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_03: And like the idea that like the more people that know how to read,
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_03: like the more this economy can serve people.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because with an education,
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_01: the street porter could be an economist,
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_01: but you could never make a greyhound do what a mastiff does and vice versa,
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_01: no matter how well you trained them.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what either of those dogs do.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_01: A mastiff is a guard dog and a greyhound is a sighthound.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want me to explain that to you?
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_01: What's a sighthound?
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_01: Greyhounds, sighthounds chase small prey out when you're hunting.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_03: Like S-I-G-H-T?
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was like sight and guards.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's why greyhounds are so fast.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Whippet.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas Mastiffs are like big.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_01: No, Whippets are small greyhounds.
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_01: Mastiffs are like big, heavy dogs.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_01: They're not fast.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're meant to intimidate.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_01: I need one of those for my property.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Keep your neighbors at bay.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_02: Speaking of landlords...
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_02: Let's go back to Mariah Edgeworth.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_02: In 1782 is, I believe, when
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_03: she moves back to Ireland after her time at boarding school.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_03: And it's at this point when her dad throws away the typical education of
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_03: a late 18th century girl and says, you are going to be the landlord's assistant.
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_03: And they read Adam Smith.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_03: It changes them.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I love Richard Lovell Edgeworth because he was like...
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_02: He believed he would read something and be like, I'm changing my entire life around this.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_02: Similar to the way he reads Rousseau and then he creates a whole system for raising children.
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_02: He reads Adam Smith and he says, I'm going to change how I act as a landlord.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I like that he wasn't so firm in it as someone like Thomas Day.
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_01: He was like willing.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_01: To update the system constantly.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_02: He was not afraid of evolving.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_02: So Mariah Edgeworth is 15 years old at this time and she leaves school
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_02: and she writes to her friend.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_03: She basically made one friend at school named Fanny.
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_03: She writes,
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_03: I am not to be ridiculed out of a good thing for surely there is nothing ridiculous
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_03: in a girl of 15s attending to the feelings of her own mind and endeavoring
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_03: to find out what makes her more or less happy.
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_03: And what does a philosopher do more than this?
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_02: Or what else is meant by a philosopher?
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_02: She writes then.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_02: So cute.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's so cute.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_02: She then goes on to say,
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_02: if you like political subjects, I have a great deal to say to you on them.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_02: I will by no means force you to hear me.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is a 15 year old girl.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_01: I like I understand that that's a 15 year old.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like that makes perfect sense to me.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_02: But not that many 15 year old girls were doing stuff like this at the time.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_02: So it is really cool.
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_02: So she and her father want to improve the conditions of the local community
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_02: in Edgeworth's town where there are huge wealth disparities.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not really I don't really think they're that interested in breaking that down,
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_02: but just because obviously they're at the top.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of like in Middlemarch.
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's like they want to improve the conditions of their peasants,
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_01: but they don't like care to make them not their peasants anymore
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_01: who are completely dependent on them.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's basically like when the carriage is driving by,
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_02: they don't want it to be so horrific.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_02: Here's what Mariah writes of a drive to her home.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_02: Miserable huts sunk beneath the side of the road,
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_02: the mud walls crooked in every direction,
• 1:13:09
  SPEAKER_03: some of them opening in wide cracks or zigzag fissures from top to bottom as
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_03: if there had just been an earthquake.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_03: Squalid children with scarcely rags to cover them.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_03: So something that's important here is that there's not that many trees in Ireland.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_03: So everybody's living in mud huts.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's just worth emphasizing again that Ireland was a colony of England
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_01: and the conditions were horrific.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_03: And the tenants,
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_03: the peasants of this community are people whose land was stolen from them
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_03: and now they're being forced to pay rent for land that was theirs.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's insane.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_03: Like this land does not belong to the Edgeworths at all.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the people then profiting not just off the rent,
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_01: but off the products of the land are the people who have basically imprisoned them
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_01: in this servant farmer role.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it could not be more depraved.
• 1:14:02
  SPEAKER_03: And predatory.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_02: So Richard's like, I'm fixing this situation.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_02: He spends the first part of this project actually just fixing his own house,
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_02: which I would say does not benefit the
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_01: population.
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Put your own life mask on before helping those around you.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_00: He's never going to learn to love a woman until he learns to love himself.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_02: So they modernize the old manor house and then
• 1:14:24
  SPEAKER_03: they get to the estate.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_03: So the estate has been mismanaged for generations since the family moved there in 1583.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_03: Richard Lovell has like his forefathers been hiring agents to manage the land
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_03: and agents were basically just like cashing checks and maintaining the status quo.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_03: They're not interested in what the tenants are doing as long as they're paying all good.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_03: And They decide that they're going to basically ride their horses around
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_03: the extensive estate and evaluate the value of each parcel of land.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_03: And what they do in one part is they shorten the lease terms.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of the lease terms were 99 years.
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_03: They shortened them.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_03: So the longest one is 31 years.
• 1:15:09
  SPEAKER_03: The idea not being that people are going to get expelled from their land per se,
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_03: but just basically like Yeah.
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm confused about that as well.
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_03: They also, the Edgeworths do something important, which is they eliminate...
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_03: This thing called duty work,
• 1:15:47
  SPEAKER_03: which is obligatory and unpaid,
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_03: basically slave labor that the tenants have been forced to do.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_03: So instead, they believe in paying people wages.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_02: That's their radical idea that they get from Adam Smith,
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_02: which is the idea that if you're paid, then you'll be motivated to do something.
• 1:16:02
  SPEAKER_01: And there's also an issue which is eventually what will lead to the potato famine,
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_01: which is that because the tenants have to do this duty work, which is...
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_01: Indentured or slave labor.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_01: They do not have time to work on their own like subsistence.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so, for example,
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_01: like A kind of common idea of feudalism is that you would work the land of
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_01: the landlord,
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_01: but then you would also have your sort of own plot or a commons
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_01: that was shared amongst the people and you would garden that and that would be
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: for your own personal subsistence.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_01: And like the brilliant innovation of the English in Ireland is to remove that.
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, which leaves them completely hobbled.
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_03: And something I didn't really understand about potato farming is In Europe
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_03: at this time, I kind of remember this.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's like basically every potato in Europe was a clone of the original potato
• 1:17:00
  SPEAKER_03: that had been brought from South America because there's two ways of planting
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_03: a potato.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_03: You can like plant it from seed,
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_03: which creates a like new genetic potato,
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_03: or you can just cut a spud off of it and plant it in the earth.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's literally every potato was the genetic clone of every other potato.
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_03: So when the water mold happens, it kills everything.
• 1:17:19
  SPEAKER_03: Every potato.
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_01: They had no total monocrop.
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's disgusting.
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_03: So Mariah writes that once they start paying the tenants,
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_03: they are more likely to pay their rent, which
• 1:17:33
  SPEAKER_00: does make sense.
• 1:17:34
  SPEAKER_00: And Adam Smith.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_00: She's also like when they have shoes, they work better.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's crazy that these were ideas that we had.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_02: I know.
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_02: And Adam Smith made them interested in the idea that high wages could be helpful,
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_02: that you should pay people as much as you can afford to pay them
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_02: because it would motivate them.
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_03: But they kind of disagree with Smith, I think, about the cost of rent.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_03: Adam Smith's idea is that rent should be as high as people can afford it to be.
• 1:18:07
  SPEAKER_01: But that doesn't mean like landlords today are like,
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_01: okay, if you can afford it, but it means like sacrificing everything else.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think Smith's idea was that it should be as high as people could afford it to be
• 1:18:18
  SPEAKER_01: while still being able to buy the other things that they needed.
• 1:18:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's different than the context we're living in.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_03: The way that Edgeworths disagreed with Adam Smith is that they believed it could,
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_03: in some circumstances,
• 1:18:32
  SPEAKER_03: they would rather have a tenant who paid less but was a better tenant than have
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_03: a tenant who could pay more.
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_03: So they're implementing these ideas across their land.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_03: And at the same time,
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_03: they're also continuing with these educational experiments within their own family.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_03: We're well on our way to the 22 children at this point.
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_03: I think around this point is when Richard's
• 1:18:58
  SPEAKER_02: third wife has died,
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_02: and then he marries a girl named Frances, who's just a year younger than Mariah.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_02: And she's really upset about it, but...
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_00: She ended up being the best of friends.
• 1:19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_00: She like dies in her stepmother's arm.
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of a beautiful story.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_03: It's around this time too,
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_03: and very importantly,
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_03: that the French Revolution does happen and
• 1:19:21
  SPEAKER_03: the Edgeworths are watching what's happening in France very closely
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_03: and it scares them.
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_03: It scares a lot of people because it's...
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_03: And it's the kind of proof that when you have radical ideas
• 1:19:33
  SPEAKER_03: that there can be radical consequences.
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_03: And so the viciousness and violence of the reign of terror in the early 1790s scares people.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_03: And this has big consequences, too,
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_03: for the legacy of Adam Smith,
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_03: where this guy named Dugald Stewart,
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_03: who is kind of Very responsible for Adam Smith's legacy.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_03: He basically censors Adam Smith's ideas because at this point in the UK,
• 1:19:57
  SPEAKER_03: people are literally being sent to Australia as heretics if they say things
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_03: that are deemed to be radical or revolutionary.
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and Smith dies...
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Right at the same time as the king is beheaded.
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like within days.
• 1:20:12
  SPEAKER_01: So his legacy is like being solidified at the same time
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_01: as this really brutal reign is unfolding.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_01: They're like days apart.
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like kind of a miraculous really.
• 1:20:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a conservative backlash all over the UK as a result of the revolution.
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_03: And also like, I think that just taps into kind of the classic French versus English dialogue.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_03: Debate and rivalry.
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_03: It's like the English kind of doubled down on their conservatism in response
• 1:20:42
  SPEAKER_03: to what's going on in France.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_03: And there is a backlash against intellectual women,
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_03: which has a huge impact on Mariah Edgeworth's life and also kind of
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_03: the intellectual life of women in the UK in the early 19th century.
• 1:20:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's in the 1790s that Mariah Edgeworth publishes her first book,
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_03: which in its kind of tone and structure,
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_03: I think reflects the kind of increasingly narrow idea of what
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_03: a woman should be doing in the public eye.
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_03: So she writes this book in 1795 called Letters for Literary Ladies.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_03: And it's written primarily as a conversation between two men and
• 1:21:19
  SPEAKER_03: And they're debating intellectual ideas.
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_03: But at the same time,
• 1:21:23
  SPEAKER_03: she is still kind of like putting forth the idea
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_03: that like learned women are not really a threat.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_03: And she's also talking about these ideas in economic terms.
• 1:21:34
  SPEAKER_03: And that's kind of where the main argument comes from in this book,
• 1:21:37
  SPEAKER_03: which is that she's using fiction to consider concepts of economy.
• 1:21:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I did actually think this was really interesting.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_03: So This is a quote.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_03: She writes from Smiley,
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_03: excluding women from writing and philosophy creates the same kind
• 1:21:54
  SPEAKER_03: of falsely imposed scarcity as was like being seen in this world
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_03: of like high tariffs and anti-free trade that Adam Smith is criticizing.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_03: The idea that outdated views on women are tied to
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_03: the same outdated commercial system that Adam Smith is criticizing is And like
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_03: if you want to have a diverse economy,
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_03: you also need to have
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_00: diverse people participating in your culture.
• 1:22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And a free market of ideas as much as a free market of goods.
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_02: So this brings me now to 1800, the year that I promised this episode would be about.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_02: So Madeline, at the top of the episode, you asked me why I chose 1800.
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_02: The reason why is that Mariah Edgeworth's arguably most famous novel,
• 1:22:43
  SPEAKER_03: Castle Rack Rent, was published in 1800.
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_03: And Castle Rack Rent would solidify Mariah's reputation as a rising literary star.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_03: And it would also be,
• 1:22:55
  SPEAKER_03: I think, kind of the best reflection of her ideas in relation to Adam Smith.
• 1:23:01
  SPEAKER_03: And the name of the book literally comes from something she learned in Adam Smith
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_03: because, so it's called, it's Castle Rack Rent.
• 1:23:09
  SPEAKER_03: And Adam Smith had been very concerned about this concept of racked rent.
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_03: Which is when a landlord would make the rent of a property so high that
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_03: the tenant would have no choice but to not pay it or it would destroy them
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_03: to pay it.
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's because it was so prohibitively expensive.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_03: So the novel of which obviously caveat, neither of us have ever read.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't feel once, didn't you?
• 1:23:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I did try once.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_03: So that counts.
• 1:23:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I don't feel I need to read this.
• 1:23:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's The novel follows life on an Irish estate.
• 1:23:46
  SPEAKER_03: It is this book that King George III reads
• 1:23:49
  SPEAKER_02: and teaches him about his Irish subjects.
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing revelation.
• 1:23:54
  SPEAKER_03: Which is really interesting.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously, also, all of Mariah's novels are...
• 1:24:01
  SPEAKER_03: Sorry,
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_03: I guess what I'm trying to say is that Mariah Edgeworth is known as the, quote,
• 1:24:06
  SPEAKER_03: Irish Jane Austen,
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_03: which I think is a complete disservice to the Irish people because...
• 1:24:11
  SPEAKER_03: Like they're all of her novels are written from the Anglican Irish perspective,
• 1:24:15
  SPEAKER_03: the Anglo Irish perspective.
• 1:24:18
  SPEAKER_03: And she obviously does.
• 1:24:20
  SPEAKER_03: She's very interested in the Irish people.
• 1:24:22
  SPEAKER_03: And for as far as like an upper class woman goes,
• 1:24:25
  SPEAKER_03: she knew way more about the Irish poor than most because of her relationship
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_03: with her dad and her work as a landlord.
• 1:24:32
  SPEAKER_03: But I would not say that this is like written from the Irish perspective.
• 1:24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:24:36
  SPEAKER_03: So the novel is told by a working class narrator named Thady Quirk.
• 1:24:42
  SPEAKER_03: Quirk is the servant of the Rackrent family.
• 1:24:45
  SPEAKER_03: And the Rackrent family is based off of the Edgeworths.
• 1:24:48
  SPEAKER_03: And they too are a long line of errant, terrible landlords.
• 1:24:54
  SPEAKER_03: And in the novel...
• 1:24:58
  SPEAKER_03: Basically,
• 1:24:58
  SPEAKER_03: Mariah is using different anecdotes from her own family history to illustrate
• 1:25:02
  SPEAKER_03: the lessons that she's learned reading Adam Smith and David Hume.
• 1:25:06
  SPEAKER_03: And she's speaking about the failure of absentee landlords,
• 1:25:11
  SPEAKER_03: the idea that education could lead to personal achievement,
• 1:25:16
  SPEAKER_03: and the idea that Basically,
• 1:25:19
  SPEAKER_03: like what happens at the end of the novel is that the landlords of
• 1:25:23
  SPEAKER_03: the Rackman family become replaced by a savvy capitalist,
• 1:25:28
  SPEAKER_03: the son of the narrator, who's a lawyer named Jason.
• 1:25:32
  SPEAKER_03: Mm-hmm.
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_03: Throughout the book, you see Jason's transformation.
• 1:25:38
  SPEAKER_03: So despite his modest birth,
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_03: he becomes a property agent and an attorney and he leverages that to buy a piece
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_03: of land.
• 1:25:46
  SPEAKER_03: He then improves the plot and then he uses his intellect and his prudence to take
• 1:25:50
  SPEAKER_03: over the entire rack rent family property.
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_03: And so Mariah's like happy punchline is that instead of an idiot landlord,
• 1:25:57
  SPEAKER_03: you have a smart landlord.
• 1:25:59
  SPEAKER_03: You have a capitalist who is of the modern age.
• 1:26:02
  SPEAKER_01: Really smart.
• 1:26:04
  SPEAKER_01: I was also going to say like the George III of it all is it's worth remembering
• 1:26:10
  SPEAKER_01: that like we talk so much about the Victorian era and the rule of Victoria
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_01: on this podcast when empire and the British empire in particular is like
• 1:26:20
  SPEAKER_01: a well-established practice and like I think it's also worth remembering
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_01: that George III is kind of trying it on.
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so like his lack of understanding of his colonial subjects,
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_01: I do think is in part due to the fact that he has not really like ruling colonies in
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_01: the way that he is now.
• 1:26:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's not something that would have been like part of the...
• 1:26:48
  SPEAKER_01: Practice of the King of England.
• 1:26:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that when, not to like, I'm not forgiving him, I'm just saying.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_01: I also know that when the American Revolution happened,
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_01: they cracked down really hard on the Irish colonies because they didn't want
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_01: a similar uprising.
• 1:27:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_02: I was also just going to remind us all that King George III was an absolute psychopath.
• 1:27:13
  SPEAKER_02: And was basically like so mentally ill for most of his reign that it was a regency.
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't think
• 1:27:19
  SPEAKER_02: he was yet.
• 1:27:19
  SPEAKER_03: I think it was later that he was.
• 1:27:20
  SPEAKER_03: It comes later.
• 1:27:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:27:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's, I think after the American Revolution,
• 1:27:24
  SPEAKER_03: like I do think that in the 1770s, he's still somewhat lucid.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_03: He's with us.
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_02: But then his reign does not end until 1820, but he is out for the count for most of that.
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_01: Those last 20 years, it's not really.
• 1:27:39
  SPEAKER_01: 40 years.
• 1:27:39
  SPEAKER_02: So...
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_03: To the point that the English do not want a repeat of what happened in
• 1:27:48
  SPEAKER_03: the United States in Ireland.
• 1:27:50
  SPEAKER_03: What also is really important about the year 1800 is it's when
• 1:27:54
  SPEAKER_03: the United Kingdom passes the Acts of Union with Ireland.
• 1:27:59
  SPEAKER_03: So...
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_03: This comes after the Irish Rebellion of 1798,
• 1:28:05
  SPEAKER_03: which was a popular insurrection against the British crown.
• 1:28:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I just I feel I had never heard about this.
• 1:28:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I feel like in this era of revolution with 1776 in the United States,
• 1:28:16
  SPEAKER_03: 1789 in France,
• 1:28:17
  SPEAKER_03: it's like just so tragic that in 1798 you had this rebellion in Ireland
• 1:28:22
  SPEAKER_03: that was completely destroyed and this like possibility of destruction.
• 1:28:27
  SPEAKER_03: The creation of an Irish Republic was destroyed.
• 1:28:31
  SPEAKER_03: So the reformers sought to create this Irish Republic that would be led by
• 1:28:35
  SPEAKER_03: the country's Catholic majority.
• 1:28:37
  SPEAKER_03: And it's literally motivated by the grievances of a rack rented tenantry.
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_03: So Mariah Edgeworth publishes Castle Rack Rent.
• 1:28:46
  SPEAKER_03: And at the same time,
• 1:28:48
  SPEAKER_03: the Irish public is rebelling against the fact that they're being forced to pay rent
• 1:28:53
  SPEAKER_03: for land that had been stolen from them that is also completely unaffordable.
• 1:28:57
  SPEAKER_03: And I think I did talk about this after I went to Dublin on this podcast
• 1:29:02
  SPEAKER_03: because I went to this tower outside of Dublin where James Joyce stayed for a couple
• 1:29:07
  SPEAKER_03: of nights that inspired the beginning of Ulysses.
• 1:29:10
  SPEAKER_03: That is a Martello tower,
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_03: the sort of which were built all over the coast of Ireland in late 18th century,
• 1:29:17
  SPEAKER_03: early 19th century as lookouts against the French coming.
• 1:29:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:29:21
  SPEAKER_03: Which is super interesting.
• 1:29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because the French were going to come aid the rebellion.
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_03: And the French did come.
• 1:29:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:29:27
  SPEAKER_03: And yeah, the French were going to help them.
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_03: And it's also interesting too, because the Americans were helped by France.
• 1:29:34
  SPEAKER_03: Like the way that everybody is like in,
• 1:29:37
  SPEAKER_03: and like one of the reasons why Louis XIV like wasted all this money,
• 1:29:40
  SPEAKER_02: like The French gave so much money to the United States to rebel against the British
• 1:29:45
  SPEAKER_02: and then,
• 1:29:45
  SPEAKER_02: of course,
• 1:29:45
  SPEAKER_02: like completely destroyed their own relationships with their poor,
• 1:29:49
  SPEAKER_03: which led to their revolution.
• 1:29:51
  SPEAKER_00: He's not a good strategist, I will say.
• 1:29:53
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 1:29:53
  SPEAKER_03: Again, I'm anti-inbreeding.
• 1:29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:29:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, again, like worth noting that Castle Rackrent was not supporting an Irish rebellion.
• 1:30:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was supporting a more like sophisticated landlord class.
• 1:30:11
  SPEAKER_01: So the Edgeworths were against the rebellion and would again later oppose
• 1:30:18
  SPEAKER_01: a Catholic majority uprising like multiple times through their tenureship.
• 1:30:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 1:30:24
  SPEAKER_03: So, but it is interesting because more than other Anglican landlords,
• 1:30:29
  SPEAKER_03: the Edgeworths were more sympathetic with the Catholic and they did believe
• 1:30:33
  SPEAKER_03: in Catholic equality, but they also are obviously threatened by this rebellion.
• 1:30:38
  SPEAKER_03: So in 1798, Richard is on his way home from his honeymoon with his fourth wife.
• 1:30:45
  SPEAKER_03: Romantic.
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_03: Who again is younger than his own daughter.
• 1:30:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:30:49
  SPEAKER_03: And they're on their way home and they have a very close call
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_03: where they're almost captured by there's like They're warned by the woman who's
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_03: an innkeeper who they like stop at her inn.
• 1:31:02
  SPEAKER_01: I was confused about this story too.
• 1:31:04
  SPEAKER_00: She's like, there's boys in the potato cart.
• 1:31:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then they like drive on by.
• 1:31:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, nothing happens.
• 1:31:11
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing happens.
• 1:31:12
  SPEAKER_03: I had to reread this section two times to understand what is happening.
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_03: But so then cut to the Irish rebellion is happening.
• 1:31:19
  SPEAKER_03: The Edgeworths are at home and they hear that there is a crowd
• 1:31:23
  SPEAKER_03: of 300 angry peasants marching by just a few miles from the Edgeworth family home.
• 1:31:30
  SPEAKER_03: And the angry mob is coming for them seemingly.
• 1:31:34
  SPEAKER_03: And there's some British soldiers who pass by the Edgeworth home and they're like,
• 1:31:37
  SPEAKER_03: do you guys want to ride with us and we'll protect you?
• 1:31:41
  SPEAKER_02: And the Edgeworths actually decide not to go with them,
• 1:31:43
  SPEAKER_02: which turns out to be good because their ammunition cart explodes.
• 1:31:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like 20 feet away.
• 1:31:49
  SPEAKER_02: And they all die.
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:31:51
  SPEAKER_01: The horses explode.
• 1:31:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but the Edgeworth family does soon escape.
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_03: But the thing is, is that the angry mob actually does not sack the Edgeworth family home.
• 1:32:03
  SPEAKER_03: And Mariah claims that the reason why their house wasn't robbed is because
• 1:32:08
  SPEAKER_03: the peasants knew them to be good landlords, which how can we really know for sure?
• 1:32:13
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think she was asking them what they thought of them.
• 1:32:17
  SPEAKER_03: And...
• 1:32:18
  SPEAKER_03: This the fact that their house was not sacked becomes very suspicious.
• 1:32:23
  SPEAKER_03: People think that Richard is supporting or at least very sympathetic with the rebellion.
• 1:32:29
  SPEAKER_03: And he's actually seized by an angry mob of like Protestants.
• 1:32:34
  SPEAKER_01: The mobs on both sides.
• 1:32:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it is.
• 1:32:38
  SPEAKER_03: The Orange Men are the name of the Protestant mobs.
• 1:32:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're not supposed to wear orange in Ireland, right?
• 1:32:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:32:45
  SPEAKER_00: I was told that before I went.
• 1:32:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I wore orange because my purse was orange.
• 1:32:49
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 1:32:50
  SPEAKER_00: You wear orange a lot, actually.
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_00: Is there something you'd like to say?
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_00: You're sitting in front of an orange wall.
• 1:32:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I am a Protestant.
• 1:32:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
• 1:32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like that.
• 1:33:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's your culture.
• 1:33:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's not what this is, but I just undeniably am.
• 1:33:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not.
• 1:33:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm on the side of the Catholics.
• 1:33:07
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
• 1:33:08
  SPEAKER_03: I'm anti-Protestant.
• 1:33:10
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:33:10
  SPEAKER_03: So Richard is seized, but he ends up being saved.
• 1:33:14
  SPEAKER_03: The Edgeworths go home and they like board up the windows of their house
• 1:33:17
  SPEAKER_03: and keep arms in every room.
• 1:33:19
  SPEAKER_03: And Then the Acts of Union is put forth in British Parliament.
• 1:33:25
  SPEAKER_03: And at this time, there's also a separate Irish Parliament that Richard Lovell is a MP in.
• 1:33:32
  SPEAKER_03: And that is put forth in 1800.
• 1:33:34
  SPEAKER_03: And the goal of the Act of Union is to integrate Ireland into Britain politically
• 1:33:38
  SPEAKER_03: and economically,
• 1:33:39
  SPEAKER_03: but also,
• 1:33:39
  SPEAKER_03: of course,
• 1:33:40
  SPEAKER_03: to suppress conflict and to prevent Ireland from actually siding with France.
• 1:33:44
  SPEAKER_03: And
• 1:33:47
  SPEAKER_03: Some Protestants actually opposed the act because they fear
• 1:33:51
  SPEAKER_03: that it will give too much power to the Catholics.
• 1:33:53
  SPEAKER_03: And so the vote was highly contentious.
• 1:33:55
  SPEAKER_03: And Richard Lovell actually votes against the act of union,
• 1:33:58
  SPEAKER_03: but he claims that he didn't do it because he doesn't.
• 1:34:01
  SPEAKER_03: He claims that he votes against it because he fears that other people's votes are being bought.
• 1:34:05
  SPEAKER_03: And so he wants to represent like democracy and the idea that there's diverse votes
• 1:34:11
  SPEAKER_00: and Through this, but most historians disagree that that's true.
• 1:34:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like nothing makes sense anymore.
• 1:34:18
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing makes sense.
• 1:34:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if our young listeners are aware.
• 1:34:23
  SPEAKER_01: These conflicts are ongoing.
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:34:27
  SPEAKER_02: Watch Say Nothing.
• 1:34:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:34:28
  SPEAKER_02: Better yet, read it.
• 1:34:30
  SPEAKER_02: Read it.
• 1:34:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's not
• 1:34:31
  SPEAKER_01: that hard of a
• 1:34:32
  SPEAKER_02: book.
• 1:34:32
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 1:34:33
  SPEAKER_02: It is better than
• 1:34:34
  SPEAKER_03: this book.
• 1:34:37
  SPEAKER_03: So...
• 1:34:38
  SPEAKER_03: Irish Parliament, I believe, is dissolved after the Acts of Union are passed.
• 1:34:42
  SPEAKER_03: And what's really important, too,
• 1:34:44
  SPEAKER_03: is that the Irish Rebellion of 1798 inflects and changes the conclusion
• 1:34:48
  SPEAKER_03: of Castle Rackrent.
• 1:34:54
  SPEAKER_03: And basically,
• 1:34:56
  SPEAKER_03: there's like a fictional editor in the novel who ends by saying, well,
• 1:35:00
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 1:35:01
  SPEAKER_03: now that we're all one people,
• 1:35:03
  SPEAKER_03: it's important that you read this and understand your Irish brothers and sisters
• 1:35:07
  SPEAKER_03: because we're all united together.
• 1:35:09
  SPEAKER_03: And that was not going to be the conclusion, obviously, if this hadn't all happened.
• 1:35:15
  SPEAKER_03: And so the novel is a huge hit.
• 1:35:18
  SPEAKER_03: It sells hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies, I think.
• 1:35:21
  SPEAKER_03: And she publishes it anonymously, again,
• 1:35:25
  SPEAKER_03: Basically because like women aren't really supposed to be writing books like that.
• 1:35:27
  SPEAKER_03: But by 1801, she puts her name on the novel.
• 1:35:31
  SPEAKER_03: And then she just continues her extremely productive writing career.
• 1:35:36
  SPEAKER_03: I learned something really interesting.
• 1:35:40
  SPEAKER_02: Did you know that Edgeworth is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary is using
• 1:35:46
  SPEAKER_02: the first published usage of the word arg?
• 1:35:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:35:51
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's awesome.
• 1:35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that cool?
• 1:35:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:35:55
  SPEAKER_00: Arg.
• 1:35:56
  SPEAKER_02: Arg.
• 1:35:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so Mariah never gets married.
• 1:36:00
  SPEAKER_02: And in an 1802 letter,
• 1:36:01
  SPEAKER_02: just two years after Castle Rockwind has published,
• 1:36:04
  SPEAKER_02: she writes to a friend, I am not afraid of being an old maid.
• 1:36:07
  SPEAKER_03: She does have a sort of love affair at one point with the Swedish diplomat.
• 1:36:13
  SPEAKER_03: And she basically regrets turning him down for the rest of her life.
• 1:36:18
  SPEAKER_03: And she just but she chooses the life that she knows.
• 1:36:20
  SPEAKER_03: She chooses a father who supports her writing career rather than a husband
• 1:36:24
  SPEAKER_02: who might like she was.
• 1:36:25
  SPEAKER_02: It was unclear whether he was going to support her career.
• 1:36:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:36:29
  SPEAKER_01: She also,
• 1:36:30
  SPEAKER_01: there was like an interesting scene where she meets a French courtesan who had had
• 1:36:35
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of influence on the court.
• 1:36:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, French courtesans were obviously like prized for their beauty and,
• 1:36:42
  SPEAKER_01: but they were also prized for their intellects often.
• 1:36:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so like many of them did have these sort of sophisticated roles to play,
• 1:36:53
  SPEAKER_01: but she's kind of,
• 1:36:54
  SPEAKER_01: this woman is older and kind of washed up and forgotten and And Mariah takes away
• 1:37:00
  SPEAKER_01: from that,
• 1:37:00
  SPEAKER_01: that the intrigues of the court,
• 1:37:03
  SPEAKER_01: even if you're somebody who has like more intellectual gifts or a point of view
• 1:37:07
  SPEAKER_01: that you're trying to implement,
• 1:37:09
  SPEAKER_01: the intrigues of court like will get you nevertheless.
• 1:37:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so she doesn't want to subject herself to that.
• 1:37:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like doesn't want to be in society.
• 1:37:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because the because her love interest was the secretary to the king of Sweden.
• 1:37:21
  SPEAKER_01: So she would have been in Swedish court.
• 1:37:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:37:24
  SPEAKER_01: Society, which is very distracting.
• 1:37:27
  SPEAKER_01: She was like so traumatized by boarding school.
• 1:37:28
  SPEAKER_01: I can't imagine wanting to go to court.
• 1:37:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:37:30
  SPEAKER_03: And being around all those people.
• 1:37:32
  SPEAKER_03: And there's this interesting anecdote at one point,
• 1:37:35
  SPEAKER_03: like later in her career,
• 1:37:37
  SPEAKER_03: she's been like in Ireland, not hanging out with anybody for like a decade.
• 1:37:40
  SPEAKER_02: And she's like, I need to see some people to get some inspiration.
• 1:37:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure that I'm coming up on this.
• 1:37:49
  SPEAKER_02: No, I keep you apprised
• 1:37:50
  SPEAKER_02: of the broader world.
• 1:37:52
  SPEAKER_02: And just a fun little anecdote that I thought would be fun to end on is that
• 1:37:58
  SPEAKER_03: in her novel,
• 1:37:59
  SPEAKER_03: Northanger Abbey,
• 1:38:01
  SPEAKER_03: Jane Austen makes a fun reference to Mariah Edgeworth's novel,
• 1:38:05
  SPEAKER_03: Belinda, which was published in 1801.
• 1:38:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so Austin's narrator describes an imagined female reader who declares that
• 1:38:13
  SPEAKER_03: the book she is reading is, quote, only a novel.
• 1:38:17
  SPEAKER_03: It is only Cecilia or Camila or Belinda,
• 1:38:19
  SPEAKER_03: or in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed.
• 1:38:24
  SPEAKER_03: So basically,
• 1:38:25
  SPEAKER_03: it reminds me of this
• 1:38:28
  SPEAKER_02: quote that we love from our book,
• 1:38:29
  SPEAKER_02: One or Two, where novels are described as pernicious trash in the 1890s.
• 1:38:34
  SPEAKER_02: But it's basically like, oh, only a novel, only a piece of trash.
• 1:38:40
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, this is like some of the most important intellectual work of
• 1:38:44
  SPEAKER_03: our time.
• 1:38:45
  SPEAKER_03: And Jane Austen is,
• 1:38:47
  SPEAKER_03: of course,
• 1:38:47
  SPEAKER_03: also a novelist and defending the work of Mariah Edgeworth,
• 1:38:50
  SPEAKER_03: not only because she's a female writer and Waging the same war against
• 1:38:55
  SPEAKER_03: the sexist hegemony,
• 1:38:56
  SPEAKER_03: but also because Mariah Edgeworth,
• 1:38:58
  SPEAKER_03: more than most,
• 1:38:59
  SPEAKER_03: was really engaged in these complex intellectual ideas and was trying
• 1:39:04
  SPEAKER_03: to make them accessible to people.
• 1:39:06
  SPEAKER_03: Beautiful.
• 1:39:07
  SPEAKER_03: Beautiful.
• 1:39:08
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's Mariah Edgeworth in a nutshell.
• 1:39:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I hope you guys enjoyed it.
• 1:39:17
  SPEAKER_01: Me too.
• 1:39:19
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll miss you.
• 1:39:20
  SPEAKER_01: And in the interim, like and subscribe and spend more time with us.
• 1:39:27
  SPEAKER_01: Kisses.
• 1:39:29
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• 1:39:36
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• 1:39:46
  SPEAKER_00: I have a burning question.