The Purple Jar

Rosamund and The Purple Jar

The Purple Jar is a well-known short story by Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), an Anglo-Irish writer of novels and stories. "The Purple Jar" first appeared in The Parent's Assistant (1796) and reappeared in Rosamond (1801). Of the dozens of stories Edgeworth wrote in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this parable of desire and disappointment retains an extraordinary hold on the public and literary imagination. The story is about a young girl, Rosamund, who needs new pair of shoes but is attracted to a purple jar that she sees displayed in a shop window. Her mother gives her the choice of spending her money on shoes or the jar and she chooses the purple jar. “You might be disappointed,” her mother cautions, adding that she will not be able to buy new shoes until the next month. However, when she gets home she discovers that the jar was not purple but filled with dark liquid. “I didn’t want this black stuff!” she cries. Adding to her disappointment her father refuses to take her out in public because she does looks slovenly without good shoes.

Scholars have read this story as a parable of Consumer capitalism ^[1][2]. It has also been discussed as dramatizing a girl's sad awareness of menstruation in the context of an unsympathetic mother and a disgusted father ^[3]

Cultural references

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1849) alludes to Edgeworth’s story. The character Rose Campbell in Louisa May Alcott's "Eight Cousins" (1875) refers to the story: "I always thought it very unfair in her mother not to warn the poor thing a little bit; and she was regularly mean when Rosamond asked for a bowl to put the purple stuff in, and she said, in such a provoking way, 'I did not agree to lend you a bowl, but I will, my dear.' Ugh! I always want to shake that hateful woman, though she was a moral mamma." A character in E. Nesbit’s 1913 “Wet Magic,” alludes to the “icy voice” of Rosamond’s mother, “the one who was so hateful about the purple jar.”

"The Purple Jar" was also read by Princess Victoria, Theodore Roosevelt (who admired it), Eudora Welty (who did not), and the actress Fanny Kemble ^[4]

The title of this painting is taken from a series of moralising tales for children written by Maria Edgworth in 1823. Rosamund decides to buy a large jar of purple liquid she had seen in a chemist’s shop window, rather than a new pair of shoes. In this painting her delight turns to dismay as she realises that she will be confined indoors because her shoes are too uncomfortable to wear.

Edgworth was writing at a time when nearly all literature intended for children was didactic in intention, though these moral tales remain very popular today.