To find her fortune and secure her future, Belinda, like so many orphans in the later novels of British realism, heads to the big city. She is sent by her aunt to London, which functioned as the industrial, political, social, and cultural center of late Restoration England. As such, London is as much a setting as it is a symbol.

This London is not the London depicted in the grim realism of the next generation of British novelists, most notably Charles Dickens, who often explored a city of gritty industrialism, a city of the poor scrambling to make a living in difficult, brutal circumstances. In Belinda London functions as a kind of city on the hill, a beacon of great promise, a city of great estates for wealthy families, where the educated and the well-off conduct the business of a great urban hub with civility, grace, wit, and politesse. The city is a charmed world of sophisticated conversation, elegant manners, lavish homes, and cultivated taste.

It is this symbolic interpretation of London that Edgeworth, herself born in England but raised in Ireland, savages with the eye of a satirist. Through the perception of Belinda, who possesses a strong sense of right behavior because she is not part of London’s elite and educated world, the symbol of London is quickly deconstructed into

Don't Miss Out!

Access Study Guide Now