Essays in Biography by John Maynard Keynes

Author:John Maynard Keynes [Keynes, John Maynard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain, Eastern, Ireland
ISBN: 9781614273264
Google: DTxODwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 161427326X
Publisher: Rupert Hart-Davis
Published: 1933-07-10T23:00:00+00:00

3. F. Y. Edgeworth (1845−1926)

FRANCIS YSIDRO EDGEWORTH was almost the last in the male line of a famous family illustrating his own favourite Law of Averages; for his great-great-grandfather, Francis Edgeworth, married three wives,208 and his grandfather, the eccentric and celebrated Richard Lovell Edgeworth, married four wives209 and had twenty-two children, of whom seven sons and eight daughters survived him. F. Y. Edgeworth himself was the fifth son of a sixth son. Yet, in 1911, after the other heirs had died without leaving male issue,210 he succeeded to the family estate of Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, where the Edgeworths, whose name was taken from Edgeware, formerly Edgeworth, in Middlesex, had established themselves in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. After his succession he had taken interest in gathering up family records and in seeking to restore Edgeworths town House to something of its former tradition under the care of a married niece, Mrs. Montagu. Whilst visiting Ireland every summer, he did not live at Edgeworthstown, but declared that he looked forward to a happy “old age”—though when, if ever, he would have deemed this period to have arrived I do not know211—in the home of his forefathers.

Edgeworth was a notable link with celebrities of almost a century ago—a nephew of the novelist Maria Edgeworth,212 who was born in 1767 and was already famous in the eighteenth century, and a first cousin of the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who died in 1847. Sir Walter Scott sent a copy of Waverley to Edgeworth’s aunt on its first publication, and wrote in the last chapter of it (and afterwards in the preface to the novels) that it was her descriptions of Irish character which first encouraged him to make a similar experiment in Scotland; and Jane Austen sent her a copy of Emma on its first publication; and Macaulay sent her his History, which contains a reference to her. And in her later days she had visited Ricardo at Gatcomb Park.

F. Y. Edgeworth’s father, Francis Beaufort Edgeworth, born in 1809, who had been educated at Charterhouse213 and Cambridge, where he was a prominent member of Sterling’s set, has been immortalised in none too flattering terms by Thomas Carlyle, who devoted some three pages to him in his Life of John Sterling (Part II. chap. iv.). “Frank was a short neat man,” Carlyle wrote, “of sleek, square, colourless face (resembling the portraits of his Father), with small blue eyes in which twinkled curiously a joyless smile; his voice was croaky and shrill, with a tone of shrewish obstinacy in it, and perhaps of sarcasm withal. A composed, dogmatic, speculative, exact, and not melodious man. He was learned in Plato and likewise in Kant; well-read in philosophies and literatures; entertained not creeds, but the Platonic or Kantian ghosts of creeds; coldly sneering away from him, in the joyless twinkle of those eyes, in the inexorable jingle of that shrill voice, all manner of Toryisms, superstitions: for the rest, a man of perfect veracity, of great diligence and other worth.

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