Hi! It turns out that redesigning a site that was built in 2012 and looked it is no small feat! All hail Leha at Web People Media.

Also, an announcement: There will be a SorryWatch book!

Look for it in the winter of 2022. (Publication date pushed back because of this farshtunkiner plague.)

If you’ve been reading us for a while, heeeeeeey. We’re so happy to see you again. If you’re new, welcome. Here’s a little intro to who we are: SorryWatch is Susan McCarthy (aka Sumac, aka Chief San Francisco Correspondent) and Marjorie Ingall (aka Snarly, aka Chief NYC Correspondent). We post about apologies – in the news, in literature, in history, in pop culture, you name it — and about apology research. We do quickie apology analysis on our Twitter and FB and more in-depth work here. We try hard to share good apologies as well as crappy ones, though the crappy ones always get more traffic. It’s important to us not to just be a force of snark in a world that already snarks too much. Good apologies – and even flawed but well-intentioned apologies – are worth celebrating. They’re an essential part of creating a world we want to live in.

Enough administrivia! Let us today examine a nuance-y literary apology for antisemitism that expresses itself in actions more than in words. Snarly learned about it via the snappy and edifying new feminist pop history, Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency by Bea Koch, co-proprietress of the delightful bookstore The Ripped Bodice (which Snarly raved about in Tablet Magazine, wearing her day-job hat).

Friends, this apology story has everything! A super-famous British lady novelist who was the most commercially successful writer of her time! An American fangirl who helped establish progressive education in the United States! A 127-year epistolary relationship! A romance novel brimming with villainy, families in turmoil, attempted kidnappings, double-crosses, a hero’s journey, a hot Jewess!

Have I made you horny (to know more)?

Young Rachel Mordecai (later Lazarus), superfan of mega-author Maria Edgeworth, sent a letter in 1815 to her problematic fave, asking why Edgeworth kept writing “mean, avaricious and unprincipled” Jewish characters (in 1800’s Castle Rackrent, 1801’s Belinda and Moral Tales for Children, and 1812’s The Absentee):

Relying on the good sense and candour of Miss Edgeworth, I would ask, how can it be that she who on all other subjects shows such justice and liberality, should on one alone appear biased by prejudice: should even instill that prejudice in the minds of youth! Can my allusion be mistaken? It is to the species of character which where a Jew is introduced is invariably attached to him. Can it be believed that this race of men are by nature mean, avaricious, and unprincipled? Forbid it, mercy.

Maria and her father, her frequent collaborator, both responded. Their letters were “kind and conciliatory,” Bea Koch tells us, “thanking Rachel for writing and promising amends.” But Maria wants to apologize publicly as well. “She tells Rachel she is writing a new book to make up for her past mistakes and asks if she might send a copy to her for her perusal when it’s done.”

And in 1817 Maria Edgeworth published Harrington. Its preface noted that it was written in response to “an extremely well written letter” from one of her American readers, “a Jewish lady, complaining of the illiberality with which the Jewish nation had been treated in some of Miss Edgeworth’s works.”

:In the book, the eponymous hero, “a recovering anti-Semite,” grows up, goes out in the world, and learns that his family and culture are sadly ignorant and hateful about Jews. The novel opens when the narrator is six, clinging to the stair rails, resisting going to bed. His nanny tells him, “If you don’t come quietly this minute, Master Harrington, I’ll call to Simon the Jew there and he shall come up and carry you away with in his great bag.”

I was struck with terror —my hands let go their grasp — and I suffered myself to be carried off as quietly as my maid could desire…The threat of ‘Simon the Jew’ was for some time afterwards used upon every occasion to reduce me to passive obedience; and when by frequent repetition this threat had lost somewhat of its power, she proceeded to tell me, in a mysterious tone, stories of Jews who had been known to steal poor children for the purpose of killing, crucifying, and sacrificing them at their secret feasts and midnight abominations. The less I understood, the more I believed.

One such story (“horrible! most horrible!”) was about a Jew in Paris who lived in a dark alley and sold…pork pies. Riiiiiiight.

But it was found out at last that the pies were not pork — they were made of the flesh of little children. His wife used to stand at the door of her den to watch for little children, and, as they were passing, would tempt them in with cakes and sweetmeats. There was a trap-door in the cellar, and the children were dragged down; and — Oh! How my blood ran cold [at] the terrible trap-door!

Harrington grows up, goes out into the world, and starts to see how despicably actual Jews are treated. He also falls in love with a young woman named Berenice Montenero, the daughter of a cultured, art-loving, gentlemanly Spanish-born Jewish merchant. He realizes that:

[N]ot only in the old story books, where the Jews are sure to be wicked as the bad fairies, or bad genii, or allegorical personifications of the devils and the vices…but in almost every work of fiction I found them represented as hateful beings; nay, even in modern tales of very late years…I have met with books by authors professing candour and toleration – books written expressly for the rising generation, called, if I mistake not, Moral Tales for Young People; and even in these, wherever the Jews are introduced, I find that they are invariably represented as beings of a mean, avaricious, unprincipled, treacherous character.

Guess who wrote the actual book Moral Tales for Young People, published in 1801? That’s right, Maria Edgeworth! Self-own! Fourth-wall break!

Harrington’s parents are horrified by his intention to marry “that Jewess,” but grudgingly come around when the wealthy and good-hearted Mr. Montenero bails the family out of a financial jam. And then, surprise ending! It turns out that Berenice isn’t a Jew after all! “Her mother was a Christian,” Mr. Montenero big-reveals, “daughter of an English gentleman, of good family, who accompanied one of your ambassadors to Spain,” and in accordance with “my promise to Mrs. Montenero, Berenice has been bred in her faith – a Christian – a Protestant . . . an English Protestant.” Yay?

Basically, the novel posits that Jews are good because at their core, they’re Christians, morally or figuratively. One scholar noted that Edgeworth “never fully abandons the Shylockian myth employed in her works prior to Harrington..Although the Christianization of the Jew promotes tolerance, it does not encourage the social integration of the Judeo-racial other.”

Critics of the time weren’t impressed either. Flawless perfect-Christian characters are dull, even when they’re Jews. Blackwood’s magazine said drily, “We regret, for the sake of this oppressed and injured people, that [Edgeworth’s] zeal has in this case rather outrun her judgment; and that, by representing all her Jewish characters as too uniformly perfect, she has thrown a degree of suspicion over her whole.”

When Edgeworth sent Lazarus the novel, the latter wrote back with thanks and praise (Edgeworth had even cribbed a paragraph from Rachel’s letter in defense of Jews and stuck it in the book!), but also with a pointed critique:

It is impossible to feel otherwise than gratified by the confidence so strongly, yet so delicately manifested, by the insertion of a passage from the letter in which I had endeavored to give an idea of [Jews’] general standing in this country. Let me therefore, without dwelling longer on its many excellences, confess with frankness that in one event I was disappointed. Berenice was not a Jewess.

Edgeworth did not write back. A four-year silence between the two ensued. Awkward!

Eventually, though, they resumed their correspondence, and the Lazarus and Edgeworth families went on to correspond for 127 years.

I do wish I knew which of the two women reached out to renew their letter-writing first. Did Edgeworth apologize for hurting Lazarus? If so, was it a pro forma apology? Did she ever come to understand exactly how and why she’d offended? Or was it Lazarus, the party with less status, who apologized for offending Edgeworth with her criticism? Or maybe neither of them mentioned Lazarus’s response to Harrington and they both pretended it hadn’t happened? This is a non-apology technique in many relationships, particularly familial ones: Don’t apologize, but also don’t acknowledge the fight. And be especially polite or kind after a moment of criticism or rage in lieu of saying the words “I’m sorry.”

Perhaps the answer to this question is discoverable, but the scholarly book of Edgeworth and Lazarus’s correspondence published in 1977 costs like $900 on Amazon and I can’t read the non-circulating copy at the NYPL because Covid.

Regardless, on one level it doesn’t matter: Lazarus clearly decided she wanted a rapprochement with Edgeworth. She was the wronged party, in that Edgeworth stopped speaking to her for telling the truth (after soliciting a response! Edgeworth just didn’t like what she heard!). If the wronged party forgives, we observers, even 203 years in the SURELY more enlightened future, don’t get to tell her she’s wrong. We can acknowledge the antisemitism of Edgeworth’s work without saying Lazarus was wrong to forgive. Humans are complex!

An aside: Edgeworth’s (failed) literary apology reminds me very much of a similar but somewhat more successful literary apology we covered a while back: Charles Dickens’ apology to Eliza Davies for his wildly problematic portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist. After Eliza, a Jewess, read the book, she wrote to Charles (an acquaintance) saying, essentially, CHUCKIE, NO!

At first Charles responded with defensiveness, as so many of us do when called out. He pompously tells Eliza he didn’t respond to her for a while because he gets TONS of fan mail. TONS. Then he says he LOVES Jews! Yay, Jews! “Fagin the Jew” is called that “not because of his religion, but because of his race”! (Sure, Chuck.) Why, he notes, once he even wrote a thing about how the Jews used to be oppressed! (Operative words: “used to be.”)

It is often impossible for me by any means to keep pace with my correspondents…But surely no sensible man or woman of your persuasion can fail to observe – firstly, that all the rest of the wicked dramatis personae are Christians; and secondly, that he is called “ The Jew”, not because of his religion, but because of his race…I have no feeling towards the Jewish people but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public, or in private, and bear my testimony (as I ought to do) to their perfect good faith in such transactions as I ever had with them. And in my Child’s History of England I have lost no opportunity of setting forth their cruel persecution in old times.

But apparently Eliza’s words sank in. Because when Oliver Twist was reprinted, Dickens made some significant changes in the text. He cut approximately 180 references to “Fagin the Jew” (changing them to just “Fagin” or “he” or “him”). Better. But Fagin is still an antisemitic stereotype: greedy, miserly, opportunistic, alien, suck-uppy and big-nosed. (Some literary critics argue that Oliver Twist is actually an indictment of “good Christians” who aren’t, a condemnation of a purportedly Christian society that doesn’t take care of its children and poor people, and Fagin the Jew, who happens to be the most vivid character, is also its most truthful, throwing the hypocrisy of the Christians into sharp relief. Could be. But that doesn’t excuse the portrayal of the single Jew in the text.)

Like Edgeworth, Dickens plopped a good Jew into his next novel as a form of atonement. Our Mutual Friend (1865) features the saintly (as it were) Mr. Riah. Critics noted that like Mr. Montenegro, he was boring as hell. (I paraphrase.)

Dickens’s novelistic apology was somewhat more successful than Edgeworth’s, though. After all, Riah doesn’t turn out to be a Christian. But is a mediocre apology better than none at all? Does it matter if the person apologizing means well, even if they screw it up? If Lazarus and Davies accepted the apology, we are not entitled to say they’re wrong. But we don’t have to forgive Dickens ourselves. We are all – not just Davies and Lazarus, and not even just Jews — hurt by bias and prejudice in our culture and literature.

It’s also our call whether we want to say a particular artist was “a product of his time” and automatically forgive his offenses, or whether we use the phrase “product of his time” without the accompanying forgiveness but while continuing to read (or listen to, or look at) the work in question, or whether we point out that not every artist of that particular time was a hate-y schmuck so why excuse this hate-y schmuck. We are entitled to choose on a case-by-case basis to engage with problematic art and artists (antisemitic racist Rudyard Kipling seems to have fallen out of general favor, while antisemitic racist Roald Dahl has not) and we are entitled to be inconsistent. We may decide our limited energies are better served by working to include diverse and less-heard authors on our bookshelves and in classrooms.