Abstract: This study examines the uses of drama for purposes of moral education in the plays of Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This study examines Maria Edgeworth's plays for youth as inter-textual examples of her philosophy of education, as a means of moral education, and as pedagogical models for community relations as seen from a position of family. This researcher explores Edgeworth's use of drama as an educational method, supporting aspects of the Edgeworths' education philosophy, and its application in the form of dramas as contextual examples of a medium of transformation. This researcher finds that Maria Edgeworth, as a writer, developed a practiced application of a moral education methodology to negotiate, to define, and to foster community. These plays present the smallest of communities, the family, as seen from the perspective of the child. Maria Edgeworth informed and educated the youth and adults of her time through her plays and her stories, each of which offered pedagogical strategies such as association, sympathy, approbation, and benevolence to reinforce virtuous life choices. Virtuous choices made by the children supported family unity and reinforced family identity. These choices of virtuous conduct were rewarded through benevolence which resulted in collective happiness. Education for the Edgeworths was the collaborative responsibility of the whole family, and through sympathy and encouragement, the family should stress the utilitarian and the experimental. The Edgeworths placed emphasis upon training people to think for their own benefit, to be able to weigh evidence, and to form independent judgments while respecting the established moral code, social order, law, and justice. This researcher uncovers textual traces in the philosophy and writings by Maria Edgeworth, particularly Letters for Literary Ladies, to which is added an Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification (1795) and Practical Education (1798), that identified educative strategies which were reflected as character and thematic traces in Edgeworth's plays. These dramas are examined as a form of the Edgeworths' philosophical ideas presented as a rational discourse that provides a process of moral education.