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constitution and legal system as an inheritance: ‘an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant’. 18 Wolfram Schmidgen discusses Blackstone’s metaphor of law and the Gothic castle as an allusion that ‘ties together the themes of property, common law, and the English constitution in a single image’. 19 This notion of inherited rights is important in relation to
nation had triumphantly emerged’, 20 and, on the other, an august political inheritance derived from a vaguely conceptualised set of Germanic and Teutonic tribes, including the Anglo-Saxons, who had given birth to modern British liberty, despite their inborn barbarity. 21 The latter usage functioned as a method of critiquing current governmental policies and political trends, with what William Molyneux termed the ‘noble Gothick Constitution’ coming to be understood as a far-removed ‘fount of constitutional purity and political virtue from which the nation had become
to its own ‘Gothick Constitution’ by rethinking its relationship to Ireland ( Amana , [p. v]). 40 The indirect but no less significant deliberations on Ireland, England, and Anglo-Irish relations via non-Irish settings in Amana and The delicate distress anticipate the more obvious and extended treatments of Irish geography in The history of Lady Barton (1771) and The story of Lady Juliana Harley (1776). In both of these novels, Ireland is presented as, alongside Scotland and Wales, an intriguingly liminal area of the