Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s: A Revolution of Opinions

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Conversion and Refor m in the Br itish Novel in the 1790s

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Conversion and Refor m in the Br itish Novel in the 1790s A Revo lutio n of O p i n i o n s

A. A. Markley

conversion and reform in the british novel in the 1790s Copyright © A. A. Markley, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-61229-7 ISBN-10: 0-230-61229-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: January 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Stuart and Joe


Contents

Acknowledgments Chronology of Works Published in England, 1788–1805 Introduction: An Epoch in the Mind of the Reader

ix xiii 1

1

The Many Faces of the Reformist Hero

23

2

Incarcerated Women and the Uses of the Gothic

57

3

Race and the Disenfranchised in 1790s Britain

87

4

Gambling, Dueling, and Social Depravity in the Haut Ton

125

5

The Dulci with the Utile: Allegorical and Utopian Romance

151

Notes

181

Bibliography

227

Index

267


Acknowledgments

This project originated in a series of conversations with Stuart Curran, to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude for encouraging me to cast a wider net than I had originally planned and to look at a variety of little-known and long-forgotten novels published in the 1790s that I would not have thought to turn to otherwise. Stuart invited me to visit his classes at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss my work with his students and with Jared Richman arranged an opportunity for me to give a talk based on my first chapter at Penn’s Eighteenth-Century Seminar in March 2006, after which I received helpful suggestions from Brycchan Carey, Max Cavitch, Sarah Ferguson-Wagstaffe, and Michael Gamer, among others. I am also most grateful to Joseph Wittreich, who likewise invited me to discuss my research with his students at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and who arranged for me to present my work-in-progress at the Graduate Center’s Faculty and Graduate Student Forum in April 2004. Both Stuart and Joe have been instrumental at every stage of the writing of this book, from its earliest inception to the process of seeking a publisher, and I am deeply thankful for their expert mentoring and for their constant friendship. At Penn State Brandywine, it was George W. Franz who most believed that this book could and would be written, and I thank him for his confidence. I was extremely fortunate to be awarded the Jane E. Cooper Faculty Fellowship by George Franz and Edward Tomezsko, a fellowship that helped to fund much of my research, and I honor my late colleague Jane Cooper for the high standards she set for academic scholarship. I was also fortunate to receive research support from Dean Diane Disney and Dean Sandra Gleason of the Commonwealth College, Penn State University. I would like to thank a number of my colleagues at Penn State for their encouragement in the years I spent at work on this project, particularly Elizabeth Buckmaster, Phyllis Cole, Paul deGategno, Elizabeth Dudkin, Myra Goldschmidt,

x

Acknowledgments

Patricia Hillen, Richard Kopley, Wayne McMullen, Jeanette Rieck, Adam Sorkin, Sophia Wisniewska, and Gail Wray. This particular project required an unusual degree of assistance from the library staff at Penn State. Sara Whildin, Susan Ware, Jean Sphar, and Mary Fran McLaughlin at Penn State Brandywine and Shane Burris at University Park assisted me with a variety of challenging research questions and went to great lengths to obtain readable copies of dozens of novels that were in many cases extremely difficult to locate. I also enjoyed the advantage of proximity to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania, whose vast collection of late eighteenth-century fiction greatly facilitated my work. Here, John Pollack was particularly gracious with his time in helping me to access materials. A number of fellow scholars have been instrumental in sharing ideas and suggestions with me regarding particular authors and novels of the 1790s, including Elizabeth Dolan, Joel Faflak, Gary Handwerk, Rick Incorvati, Patricia Matthew, Lucy Morrison, Jared Richman, David Robinson, Wil Verhoeven, and Miriam Wallace. I am grateful to Joel Faflak, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, and Lisa M. Wilson for providing opportunities for me to present my work at conferences. Particular thanks are due to Elizabeth Dolan and her colleagues and students at Lehigh University for inviting me to talk with them about race in late eighteenth-century Britain in February 2007. I have been unusually fortunate to benefit from a great number of truly gifted teachers and mentors over the years, and I would be remiss if I neglected to mention those whose influence has made me a profoundly better reader of fiction, particularly Nancy Allen, Pamela Clemit, Nora Crook, Carter Delafield, Dorine C. Lord, Jeanne Moskal, and Ellen O’Brien. I also owe a great debt to all of my students, who continually challenge me to think about literary works in new ways. In particular, I am grateful to the students in my English 487W seminar in the spring of 2005, including Charlotte Barr, Rachel Carpenter, Melissa Ciccarelli, Robert Hyers, Elizabeth Kline, David Tatasciore, and Stephen Watson, who assisted me in original research on the two romances addressed in Chapter 5. My colleague Alita Kelley was instrumental when difficult questions arose with this research pertaining to the history of Spain. In addition, Joseph Crisafulli served as an invaluable research assistant in the summer of 2005. At Palgrave, I would like to thank Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Brigitte Shull, Matt Robison, Rosemi Mederos, and Julia Cohen. I also wish to thank a host of loyal friends and family members for their continual encouragement, including Peter Albrecht and Eric

Acknowledgments

xi

Auciello, Roger Anderson and Christian Jussen, Neil Bonavita, Molly Brennan, Rodger Broadley and Joe Quinn, Chris Findlay, Kammy Franz, Bill Goldstein and Blake West, Mike Haines, Vincent Lankewish, Chris Looby and Joe Dimuro, Holley Markley, Mary Markley, Bill and Cori Markley, Eileen Meyer, Gene and Joan Meyer, Grant Moss, Charlotte, and Bella. As always, it is Brian Meyer whose companionship and support make my work possible and whose limitless store of enthusiasm for discussing late eighteenth-century reformist novels at all hours has allowed my ideas to grow and develop. Finally, for her time and good judgment on a wide range of issues, I wish to thank my mother, Julia D. Markley, who has enthusiastically encouraged me in this project from the beginning and who has gone far beyond the call of maternal duty in reading every revision from the first page to the last to assist in catching errors and in refining my writing. An abbreviated version of the argument in Chapter 4 has appeared as “Aristocrats Behaving Badly: Gambling and Dueling in the 1790s Novel of Reform,” in European Romantic Review 17, no. 2 (April 2006), 161–68. Philadelphia, March 2008


C hronology of Work s Pu blished in Engl a nd, 178 8 –18 0 5

1788 James Wallace Emmeline Mary, A Fiction

Robert Bage Charlotte Smith Mary Wollstonecraft

1789 The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake

Olaudah Equiano

1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France Dangers of Coquetry A Sicilian Romance Julia, A Novel Letters Written in France

A Vindication of the Rights of Men

1791 A Simple Story The Rights of Man, Part I The Romance of the Forest An Italian Romance

Ann Radcliffe Charlotte Smith

Edmund Burke Amelia Opie Ann Radcliffe Helen Maria Williams Helen Maria Williams (additional volumes 1792, 1793, 1795, and 1796) Mary Wollstonecraft

Elizabeth Inchbald Thomas Paine Ann Radcliffe Ann Radcliffe

xiv

Chronology of Works Published in England, 1788–1805

1791 (continued) Impartial Reflections on the Present Situation of the Queen of France by a Friend to Humanity Celestina

Mary Robinson

Charlotte Smith

1792 The Excursion of Osman Man As He Is Anna St Ives Slavery: Or, The Times The Rights of Man, Part II Vancenza; or, the Dangers of Credulity Desmond A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Anonymous Robert Bage Thomas Holcroft Anna Maria Mackenzie Thomas Paine Mary Robinson

1793 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous The Emigrants, & c., or the History of an Expatriated Family The Old Manor House

William Godwin

1794 Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, vols. I–III The Age of Reason The Mysteries of Udolpho The Widow, or A Picture of Modern Times The Banished Man The Wanderings of Warwick

Charlotte Smith Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary and Elizabeth Hays Gilbert Imlay Charlotte Smith

William Godwin Thomas Holcroft Thomas Paine Ann Radcliffe Mary Robinson Charlotte Smith Charlotte Smith


1795 Such Follies Are Letters for Literary Ladies Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock Memoirs of Planetes Montalbert Rural Walks

Anonymous Maria Edgeworth Eliza Fenwick Thomas Northmore Charlotte Smith Charlotte Smith

1796 The Female Gamester; or The Pupil of Fashion Hermsprong; or Man As He Is Not Camilla Memoirs of Emma Courtney Nature and Art The Monk Angelina, a Novel Hubert de Sevrac, A Romance, of the Eighteenth Century Marchmont Rambles Farther, a continuation of Rural Walks Theodore Cyphon; or The Benevolent Jew Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Anonymous Robert Bage Frances Burney Mary Hays Elizabeth Inchbald Matthew G. Lewis Mary Robinson Mary Robinson Charlotte Smith Charlotte Smith George Walker Mary Wollstonecraft

1797 The Enquirer. Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, vols. IV–VI The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature

William Godwin

1798 Henry Willoughby

Anonymous

Thomas Holcroft Ann Radcliffe Mary Robinson

xv

xvi


1798 (continued) Practical Education Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in behalf of Women The Young Philosopher A Tour in Switzerland The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (Posthumous Works) 1799 St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century The Victim of Prejudice The False Friend: A Domestic Story A Letter to the Women of England The Natural Daughter The Vagabond Sketches of Modern Life

Maria and R. L. Edgeworth William Godwin

Mary Hays Charlotte Smith Helen Maria Williams Mary Wollstonecraft

William Godwin Mary Hays Mary Robinson Mary Robinson Mary Robinson George Walker William Frederick Williams

1800 Obi; or, The History of Three-fingered Jack Castle Rackrent, an Hibernian Tale The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, vols. I–III

William Earle, Jr.

1801 Belinda Moral Tales for Young People The Father and Daughter Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic

Maria Edgeworth Maria Edgeworth Amelia Opie Mary E. Robinson, ed. John Thelwall

Maria Edgeworth Charlotte Smith

Helen Maria Williams


xvii

1802 Essay on Irish Bulls The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, vols. IV–V

Maria and R. L. Edgeworth Charlotte Smith

1803 Female Biography; or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries The Political and Confidential Correspondence of Lewis the Sixteenth

Mary Hays

Helen Maria Williams

1804 Popular Tales Harry Clinton; or, A Tale of Youth Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter

Maria Edgeworth Mary Hays Amelia Opie

1805 The Modern Griselda Fleetwood: or, The New Man of Feeling Memoirs of Bryan Perdue

Maria Edgeworth William Godwin Thomas Holcroft


If in any society wealth be estimated at its true value, and accumulation and monopoly be regarded as the seals of mischief, injustice and dishonour, instead of being treated as titles to attention and deference, in that society the accommodations of human life will tend to their level, and the inequality of conditions will be destroyed. A revolution of opinions is the only means of attaining to this inestimable benefit. —William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1796 ed.), book VIII, chapter 2


I ntroduction A n Epo ch in the M ind o f t he R e ad er

Every man that reads the composition of another suffers the succession of his ideas to be, in a considerable degree, under the direction of his author. —William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793 ed.), book VIII, chapter 6

T

he outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the tumultuous political events that shook France in the decade to follow brought about dramatic repercussions in the development of British fiction. As the British focused their attention on shocking events in France, those events gave rise to heated political debate. Liberal thinkers—typified by perhaps their most influential spokesman, Thomas Paine—recognized the parallels between the ideals of the French revolutionaries and those of the American colonies thirteen years earlier. Those who championed individual rights applauded the French people’s determination to free themselves from an oppressive government and class system. By contrast, conservatives such as Edmund Burke mourned the passing of France’s ancien régime and feared that the violent actions of the French would inspire the lower classes in England to attempt to launch a similar revolution at home. During the early 1790s, political thinkers in Britain who shared the conviction that social and political change were needed in their own country began to be called “Jacobins,” a misnomer borrowed from a political group in France.1 The Jacobin label was imposed mainly by the conservative “anti-Jacobins,” who decried reformists’ political beliefs as threatening and seditious despite the Jacobins’ professed commitment to gradual and nonviolent change.2 Reformists were also called “levellers,” “republicans” and even “anarchists,” but the Jacobin label seems to have become most common among conservatives due to its association with controversial contemporary events in

2

Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s

France.3 Although those labeled as Jacobins never became a unified political party espousing one particular doctrine of political change, they did share a devotion to the promise of reform and to the Enlightenment ideal that reason could triumph over tradition.4 “To a refined and sensible people,—says Mr. Rousseau,” quips Robert Bage in the preface to his novel Man As He Is (1792), “instruction can only be offered in form of a novel.”5 Throughout the revolutionary decade, British reformists began to experiment with the conventions of the popular novel to open the eyes of the reading public to the possibilities of reform. Focusing on a group of approximately thirty-five novels and two romances written from 1788 to 1805, Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s revisits the novels that have traditionally been labeled as Jacobin works by such authors as Bage, Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and it analyzes novels by a number of lesserknown and often entirely forgotten writers of the period who were also beginning to experiment with the novel as a vehicle of reform. The novels these authors produced during these years represent a continuum that ranges from subtle expressions of reformist convictions on particular topics to openly radical exposés of contemporary social and political evils. This book aims to read these reformist novels as works on such a continuum in order to develop more nuanced interpretations of these texts. My argument is based on the conviction that the Jacobin label has limited our understanding of the political and formal complexities of a wide variety of novels that incorporate a reformist agenda in some form. While the categories of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin have been useful as a starting point, these labels are not adequate to describe the diverse group of political novels published in the 1790s and the early years of the 1800s. Moreover, the desire to categorize these works has often led to reductive readings of works on both sides of the political spectrum. Conversion and Reform asks readers to reconsider the reformist novels of the 1790s as a group of complex texts that defy easy categorization as wholly liberal or conservative. Throughout the book I will generally use the term “reformist” instead of “Jacobin” because I believe it to be a broader and more accurate way to refer to novels that, in some way or another, seek to foster some aspect of social or political change. Although these novelists tended to be aligned with Whig and more radical liberal circles politically and many of them shared a dissenting religious background, they nevertheless represent a broad range of social and economic backgrounds, moral and

Introduction

3

religious beliefs, and literary distinctions. The specific areas in which each worked for reform and the style in which they did so is widely diverse. Nevertheless, the reformist authors analyzed herein do share three particular ideals, including (1) a commitment to the rights of the individual that included an emphasis on equality between men and women and an emerging awareness of the disenfranchisement of the lower classes and the racial other, (2) a devotion to the idea that reason could and must triumph over convention through social and political reform, and (3) a conviction that reform could best be achieved by working to alter “the private and internal operations of the mind” of the individual.6 The reformist authors analyzed in this book devoted themselves to exposing a variety of contemporary problems in need of change in contrast to the conservative anti-Jacobins, who defended the status quo, which included a clearly defined class structure, king and crown, and the Church of England. The controversies that occupy these reformists range from problems with English law and the prison system to the abolition of slavery and the slave trade and from the status and treatment of Jews and other minorities in Britain to the rights and exploitation of women. Many wished to call attention to more particular social evils of the day, most of which involved the destructive conduct of the aristocracy. As was common throughout the eighteenth century, some of these writers satirized specific subgroups of English culture, drawing attention to the hypocrisy of the clergy, for example, or corruption within the legal and justice system or among members of Parliament. By focusing on particular topics and issues from one novel to another, particularly those pertaining to gender, race, and class, it is hoped that this book will contribute to a deeper understanding of what these novels have in common as works intended to promote social and political change.

The Jacobin and the Anti-Jacobin Novel The labeling of the Jacobin novelists created a category that has been preserved by literary critics and scholars in the centuries since the 1790s. In the 1970s Gary Kelly and Marilyn Butler began to make significant contributions toward defining and understanding this subgenre.7 In The English Jacobin Novel (1976), Kelly enumerated characteristics shared by four Jacobin novelists: Bage, Godwin, Holcroft, and Inchbald. Kelly emphasizes these writers’ concern with balancing reason and the emotions, their opposition to oppression and persecution of any kind, and their resistance to all distinctions made between

4


individuals that are not based on moral or ethical terms.8 Kelly points out that their preoccupation with the relationship between private and public experience and between the individual and society at large made the confessional narrative a popular format for these authors.9 Unfortunately, Kelly’s initial study was limited to only four authors. While it is clear that Godwin and Holcroft together planned similar projects in adapting the novel to political purposes, the political motivations of Derby papermaker Bage are much harder to ascertain, and Bage’s approach to using both humor and more conventional romantic plotlines distinguishes his novels from Godwin’s and Holcroft’s experiments. In addition, while Inchbald’s fable-like Nature and Art (1796) clearly shares a political bent in line with Godwin and Holcroft, her earlier novel A Simple Story (1791) is less overtly political; in fact, to read it merely as a political novel threatens to distract readers from its profound importance as an early and strikingly skillful exploration of human psychology. Butler devotes two chapters to the Jacobin novel in her Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975) but ultimately claims that “as a group, the Jacobin novelists of the 1790s fail to find an artistic vehicle for what they most believe in, the conscious, sentient, unique individual.”10 Butler focuses, like Kelly, on Bage, Godwin, Holcroft, and Inchbald, although she includes Mary Hays and Wollstonecraft in her discussion, and she mentions Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson as figures who “intermittently . . . would reveal liberal sympathies” and thus “incurred some of the odium attached to the ‘jacobinical.’”11 Butler singles out Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Bage’s Hermsprong; or, Man As He Is Not (1796) as the two novels of the era deserving of the name “Jacobin,” arguing that, as a rule, Jacobin novels “end by creating central characters with less inward life than the sentimental heroes and heroines whose passivity gives [the Jacobians] such offence.”12 Surely there is much to be gained, however, from studying a wide array of the novels of the period regardless of how they may be judged as literary successes. While Kelly’s and Butler’s early works leave out a number of writers whose political novels are more easily aligned with those of Godwin and Holcroft, their contributions over the past several decades have greatly expanded our understanding of many others, particularly women authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Hays, Amelia Alderson Opie, and Wollstonecraft. With contributions such as these to the scholarship on a variety of other novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the time has come to reassess the fiction

Introduction

5

of the period and to move beyond the categories of Jacobin and antiJacobin. In his essay “Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790s,” Kelly himself has demonstrated the extremely complicated relationships between novels that have been labeled as “Jacobin” and “antiJacobin,” claiming that the two categories have created the impression that the novels written by liberals and conservatives in the 1790s were entirely at odds when in fact both Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novelists value many of the same virtues and both often satirize many of the same social institutions and conventions, such as gambling and dueling, with the aim of influencing popular thought. As Kelly argues, both groups “represent the range of ideological attitudes of the rapidly expanding and increasingly powerful professional middle class, as that class was in the process of clarifying its own values, blending with while subverting the hegemonic gentry class.”13 Many of the novels that have been classified as either Jacobin or anti-Jacobin express profound anxiety about the balance of sensibility and reason, and many illustrate the repercussions of failing to achieve such a balance. Both Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novels share an interest in the relationship between individual behavior and the welfare of society. Moreover, both camps shared the conviction that literature could be a useful tool in swaying the opinions of the reader. Thus the categories of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin were reductive ones even in their own day.14 To complicate matters further, the differences between the two poles of thought became much less distinct as the events in France became more bloody by 1792 and 1793, by which time many socalled Jacobins became much less firmly committed to reformist politics that might have been associated with the French.

Stir r ing the I ndiv i dual Rea de r What links these reformist novelists more distinctly than any shared political ideology is their mutual commitment to the idea that the best means of initiating reform lay in the conversion of the individual reader—that is, in fostering a revolution of opinions one reader at a time. In an essay in The Enquirer. Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797), Godwin distinguishes between the “moral” of a work and its “tendency,” defining the moral as “that ethical sentence to the illustration of which the work may most aptly be applied” but calling its tendency “the actual effect it is calculated to produce upon the reader.”15 Significantly, Godwin calls the moral “a point of very subordinate consideration” and places a much higher value on

6


a work’s tendency due to its potential “to increase the powers of the understanding, or to mend the disposition of the heart” (V:140). Throughout his career, Godwin experimented with a variety of genres in exploring how the tendency of a given work might affect his readers. Concerned about the efficacy of his 1793 treatise of political philosophy, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Godwin realized that the format, length, and cost of the work dramatically limited its reading audience. Thus, to more effectively reach a mass audience, he set about to “write a tale, that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before.”16 In his original preface to Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, which was withdrawn from the volume when the publishers feared governmental reprisal, Godwin explains his reason for turning to the medium of fiction: “It is now known to philosophers, that the spirit and character of the government intrudes itself into every rank of society. But this is a truth highly worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach. Accordingly it was proposed, in the invention of the following work, to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man.”17 When his experiment in Caleb Williams was condemned in the conservative British Critic in April of 1795 as an attack on the laws of his country, Godwin defended himself in a published reply in which he describes his project in more detail. Here he explains that his object had been “to expose the evils which arise out of the present system of civilized society; and, having exposed them, to lead the enquiring reader to examine whether they are, or are not, as has commonly been supposed, irremediable; in a word, to disengage the minds of men from prepossession, and launch them upon the sea of moral and political enquiry.”18 Far from merely attacking the laws of England, Godwin hoped that Caleb Williams would cause readers to question “the administration of justice and equity, . . . as it exists in the world at large, and in Great Britain in particular.”19 Such an act of questioning would become a first step toward improving justice and equity on a grand scale. Other reformist novelists also concerned themselves with the tendency a particular work might have on a reader’s thinking. Rejecting the common argument that novels could be dangerous influences on their readers, Holcroft professed that novels “are a high source of gratification, to the half informed; and especially to youth, by whom they are constantly read.”20 Holcroft asks, “if their morality be

Introduction

7

definite, their language flowing, their diction pure, and the lessons they teach impressive, are they not a noble public benefit?” (IV:4). For Holcroft, “the labours of the poet, of the historian, and of the sage, ought to have one common end, that of strengthening and improving man, not of continuing him in error, and, which is always the consequence of error, in vice. The most essential feature of every work is its moral tendency.”21 The novelist Hays agreed, writing in the preface to her novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) that “every writer who advances principles, whether true or false, that have a tendency to set the mind in motion, does good.”22 Historian Lynn Hunt has argued that the development of the novel in the mid-eighteenth century contributed directly to the emergence of human rights in the final decades of the century because novels developed their readers’ abilities to identify with individual characters. Looking mainly at Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740–41) and Clarissa (1747–49), Hunt writes that “new kinds of reading . . . created new individual experiences (empathy), which in turn made possible new social and political concepts (human rights).”23 Hunt focuses on “what goes on within individual minds” and the ways individual minds shape social and cultural contexts.24 From this perspective, the reformist works of the 1790s are the natural successors of the novels of sensibility published earlier in the century. Butler has made a similar claim for the influence of the novels of sensibility, explaining that “three decades earlier the sentimental novelists made technical innovations which reflected a new awareness of the subjective life of the individual.”25 According to Butler, the Jacobins failed to follow the sentimentalists’ lead. On the contrary, I would argue that these reformist writers were consciously attempting to take advantage of the developing novel’s inherent potential to use empathy to shape the individual reader’s thinking. As Kelly has written, reformist novelists “attempt to reveal to readers the necessity of radical social change, and, at the same time, . . . to move them to revolutionary action based on the ‘truth’ revealed in the narrative.”26 In Bage’s novels in particular, Kelly explains that “it is individual rather than institutional or systemic change that sets the local world to rights, even though radical social change is discussed and applauded.”27 The reformist novel in the 1790s aims to produce “a reader who thinks like the narrator.”28 On several occasions in his works, Holcroft even explains his project to the reader directly. In his attack on capital punishment in Memoirs of Bryan Perdue (1805), for example, his narrator states that

8


“the grand plan, for the reform of this abuse, must be the work of some individual; as indeed all grand plans are, each, first the work of an individual.” Then he asks the reader, “And who, my noble Sir, can you conceive to be so fit for it as I am, except yourself?” (IV: 146). “On you I call,” he continues, “in the name of the present and of future generations, to study how life may be preserved and vice corrected” (IV:211). J. M. S. Tompkins has written of the novels of Godwin and Holcroft that “in them the new light shines in the most concentrated and dazzling degree. But there is an outer ring of minor fiction in which certain recurrent characters and situations reflect the illumination.”29 Once a few reformists began to experiment with using the novel to expose and to decry “things as they are,” other writers quickly began to do the same. Within a few years, the novel became, as Kelly has called it, “the most important single vehicle of ideological communication amongst the middle and upper classes in Britain,”30 a change that the conservative novelist Jane West laments in the concluding words of her 1799 novel A Tale of the Times: One of the misfortunes under which literature now labours is, that the title of a work no longer announces its intention: books of travels are converted into vehicles of politics and systems of legislation. Female letter-writers teach us the arcana of government, and obliquely vindicate, or even recommend, manners and actions at which female delicacy should blush, and female tenderness mourn. Tracts on education subvert every principle of filial reverence: Writers of morality lay the axe to the root of domestic harmony: Compilers of natural history debase their pages with descriptions which modesty cannot peruse. . . . And last, though not least in its effect, the novel, calculated, by its insinuating narrative and interesting description to fascinate the imagination without rousing the stronger energies of the mind, is converted into an offensive weapon, directed against our religion, our morals, or our government, as the humour of the writer may determine his particular warfare.31

For West and many social conservatives like her, the novel was not an appropriate venue for liberal politics, and it was not to be used as a weapon in an assault on the time-honored conventions of English culture.

Introduction

9

Th e R ef o r mist C o n ti nuum i n the R evo lutio nary D ec ade Moving beyond the limits of the Jacobin category promises a deeper appreciation of the importance of conversion and reform in works by authors who have not necessarily been included in the short list of Jacobin novelists. Robinson, for example, is a figure whose artful selfrepresentation and whose works in a wide variety of genres defy easy categorization into any one faction. Robinson has been remembered as an actress, a celebrity, and a highly respected poet. Nevertheless, she wrote a treatise entitled A Letter to the Women of England (1799) that can be compared to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and this work, as well as such novels as Walsingham (1797) and The Natural Daughter (1799), reveals a deep concern with popular assumptions about gender and with the status of women in contemporary society. Robinson appears to have grown more radical as the 1790s progressed, and she worked consistently to expose not only gender inequity but also the abuses of political power and the irresponsibility of the upper classes.32 Another prolific novelist whose complex works defy easy categorization is Smith. Like Robinson, Smith has been remembered mainly as a poet, and scholars have only recently begun to give her many novels their due. Smith’s ten novels and her other experiments in a variety of formats of fiction and children’s literature display a remarkable range of thematic complexity and the abiding presence of a profound social consciousness, from her attention to gender issues and the status of women in her first novel Emmeline (1788), to her bold endorsement of French revolutionary politics in Desmond (1792), to her reassessment of English radical politics at the end of the decade in The Young Philosopher (1798). Perpetually distressed by her struggle to support her nine children and by a long and fruitless attempt to win a settlement from her father-in-law’s estate to aid in feeding her family, Smith laced her novels with incisive attacks on the privileged and on common abuses of the British legal system. This book also challenges misleading classifications that have led to reductive readings of particular authors’ works. In his study of antiJacobin novels, for example, M. O. Grenby labels Smith’s The Banished Man (1794), along with Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac (1796) and The Natural Daughter and Anna Maria Mackenzie’s abolitionist Slavery: Or, the Times (1792), anti-Jacobin works for their unsympathetic depictions of the revolution.33 It is true that the hero of The Banished Man, D’Alonville, is a French émigré who, like Smith

10


herself, loathes the irrational violence of the Reign of Terror. Nevertheless, D’Alonville’s friends Ellesmere, Carlowitz, and the Smithlike Charlotte Denzil each espouse distinctly reformist points of view, and D’Alonville himself admits at the novel’s close that adversity has taught him to rethink his aristocratic prejudices. Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac also follows the adventures of a French émigré, and this hero’s ultimate transformation into a self-proclaimed “convert of liberty” is encouraged by fellow characters who question the arbitrariness of social distinctions and preach merit as the true source of nobility in nearly every chapter of the novel.34 The reformist tendencies of Robinson’s The Natural Daughter and Mackenzie’s Slavery will be discussed at length in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively. Similarly, Opie has been commonly classified as an anti-Jacobin because her novel Adeline Mowbray (1804) has been read as an attack on Godwin and Wollstonecraft. Although he acknowledges that Opie’s politics were “ambiguous,” Grenby reasons that Adeline Mowbray “could only have been interpreted by the majority of her contemporaries as an inquest into both the practicalities and morality of cohabitation and childbearing without marriage” and elsewhere lists the novel among works labeled “Anti-Jacobin Quixotes.”35 Opie was an active member of the Godwin circle in the 1790s, and she dedicated herself to a reformist political agenda throughout her life, ultimately joining the Society of Friends (Quakers). While Grenby may be correct in stating that Adeline Mowbray was read by most contemporary readers as an attack on Jacobin politics, continuing to label the novel as anti-Jacobin today will continue to lead to one-sided interpretations of Opie’s full achievement in this complex work. Adeline Mowbray does in fact depict the tragic story of a woman who, like Wollstonecraft, chooses to live with a man outside of marriage and suffers severe social ostracism for doing so.36 However, as Eleanor Ty has pointed out, while it does appear to attack the “new philosophy” of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, other aspects of the novel “reveal a contradictory view, an underlying sympathy for revolutionary advocates.”37 As Ty argues, the novel critiques the hypocrisy of self-proclaimed progressive thinkers who, like Adeline’s mother, lack the strength of their convictions in the face of social ostracism. The novel also clearly works to expose the hypocrisy of a society that utterly rejects the pure Adeline simply on the basis of her marital status, and it does so by chronicling the stages of Adeline’s ostracism as a victim of rumor, just as Godwin had done in Caleb Williams.38 Furthermore, while Opie does advocate marriage, she also delineates its deficiencies in her characterization of Adeline’s unhappy

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marriage to Charles Berrendale and in her mother’s disastrous marriage to the dissolute Sir Patrick O’Carrol. Adeline’s relationship with the philosopher Frederic Glenmurray is actually the one healthy romantic relationship that Opie depicts in the novel despite the fact that the two never marry.39 Opie’s treatment of the institution of marriage may be more closely aligned with the views of the GodwinWollstonecraft circle than has been recognized. It is possible that Wollstonecraft herself was planning a similar critique of marriage in her unfinished The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798) by having her heroine choose to live with her lover Henry Darnford outside the limits of the law. Finally, it might be argued that a novel labeled as a purely Jacobin work, such as Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney, might be classed just as readily as anti-Jacobin as Adeline Mowbray has been. If Adeline Mowbray critiques Godwinian notions of marriage, Emma Courtney clearly illustrates the potentially ruinous effects the Godwinian principle of absolute sincerity might have on women’s lives.40 Indeed, both novels explore the importance of achieving a balance between reason and sensibility. Another example of a complex writer who has been firmly set in the anti-Jacobin camp is George Walker. While Walker did in fact ridicule Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and other reformists and their philosophical positions in his 1799 The Vagabond, his earlier novel Theodore Cyphon; or The Benevolent Jew (1796) is a close imitation of Godwin’s Caleb Williams that follows Godwin’s objective of exposing the worst abuses of the British class system.41 Theodore Cyphon is a young gentleman whose hopes of marrying a working-class girl are thwarted when his villainous father and uncle ruin the girl’s family and commit Theodore to a private madhouse. Walker’s stated design in this work was “the delineation of the effects of passion, when supported by power,” and, like Godwin, he carefully explores not only the abuses of the powerful but also how an intelligent and moral man can be driven to murder.42 When the otherwise noble Theodore resolves to murder his uncle, he does so with the conviction that he is removing a blight on the British nation. Walker takes pains to point out the illogical aspect of this reasoning, however, by reiterating a Godwinian tenet that it is wrong under any circumstances to deprive another human being of life and that “private justice,” even when seemingly justified, is never a viable solution to any problem. Like such reformist writers as Godwin and Wollstonecraft, Walker loads Theodore Cyphon with examples of the mistreatment of the poor and the disenfranchised. After his flight from the madhouse, Theodore meets a fellow fugitive who explains that if he is caught, he will

12


be hanged for attempting to escape a sentence of transportation. The escapee and Theodore puzzle together over the fact that the man’s original crime was simply the damaging of a neighbor’s tree during a drunken revel. After an old peasant woman feeds Theodore, she is later arrested and drowned as a witch. Walker comments sarcastically that this episode was conducted “to the honour of our enlightened understandings, and the glory of the eighteenth century, so famed by the heroes of the mouth” (II:128). As Godwin does in Caleb Williams, Walker underscores the topical relevance of this detail by adding a footnote to assure the reader that “a transaction like this took place, not out of remembrance, nor a hundred miles from Nottingham” (II:128). Beyond its analysis of arbitrary law and abused power, however, Theodore Cyphon is a remarkable book for its development of two of the only fully realized and sympathetic portrayals of English Jews in the period in the characters of Shechem Bensadi and his daughter Eve, who befriend and house Theodore despite the personal risk they take in doing so. Moreover, Walker includes a surprisingly early indictment of imperialism in a graphic description of a violent British attempt to put down an insurrection in India, witnessed by another of the novel’s characters when he is pressed into service to the East India Company. Walker’s treatment of the “Hindoo” peoples in the novel, like his portrait of the lives of Jews and the poor in contemporary England, suggests a close alignment with the situation of the outcast and disenfranchised. “I saw a wide extending theory of reform,” Theodore explains of his experiences in the world, “but to practice required the skill of divinity, and a renovation of morality and maxims” (I:239). Like the novels of other writers who worked toward reform, Theodore Cyphon recognizes that such a renovation is possible only if “men of integrity and virtue” bring it about (I:239). Labeling Walker as an anti-Jacobin based solely on his authorship of The Vagabond has dramatically limited our understanding of the full range of his accomplishments as a novelist. Conversion and Reform also includes a look at the work of Edgeworth, particularly her 1801 novel Belinda. Critics such as G. J. Barker-Benfield and Chris Jones, among many others, have read Edgeworth as a conservative figure, and many scholars have argued that her popularity as an author in the early 1800s and afterward was linked to her orthodoxy.43 Nevertheless, as Ty argues of Belinda, Edgeworth “deliberately confuses readers’ allegiances between the conservative and radical sides” in developing new twists on a familiar line of narrative.44 Belinda turns the contemporary female

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bildungsroman on its head by presenting a clear-thinking heroine on the verge of entering society who quickly sees that she cannot rely on the advice of the high-society types in her circle and learns to rely entirely upon her own judgment. Throughout the novel Edgeworth critiques a range of examples of exaggerated female sensibility, including the eccentric, Amazonian Harriet Freke at one extreme and the impressionable and submissive young Virginia at the other. As Belinda learns to strike a balance between these extremes, she embodies the very sort of blending of reason and emotion for which Wollstonecraft vehemently argued in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.45 Butler, who calls Edgeworth a Jacobin, admits that she is a bipartisan whose novels “do not belong unequivocally to one side.”46 Similarly, Kelly rightly points to the difficulty of labeling Edgeworth by calling her “both a conservative and a progressive.”47 Kelly has demonstrated how Edgeworth renegotiated the controversial subject of revolutionary feminism in her novels of the early 1800s and how she persistently “argued for and demonstrated a progressive reconciliation” of social conflict stemming from gender difference.48 Any attempt to force-fit such complicated figures as Edgeworth, Walker, and Opie neatly into one political camp would merely continue to lead to one-sided readings of their fiction. Finally, this book will draw attention to single novels written by figures who were known to be active in radical, Jacobin, and reformist circles but who are not remembered as novelists, including Helen Maria Williams’s Julia (1792), Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy (1795), and John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801). In addition, Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants is not often included in studies of British fiction of the period due to the author’s American citizenship; nevertheless, while originally published in London in 1793, The Emigrants was not published in America until 1964.49 Finally, attention will be paid to the reformist tendencies of such unremembered novels as Mackenzie’s abolitionist Slavery: Or, the Times, the remarkably readable anonymous novels Such Follies Are (1795) and Henry Willoughby (1798), a peculiar political allegory entitled The Excursion of Osman (1792), and Thomas Northmore’s homage to Godwin’s political philosophy in his utopian romance Memoirs of Planetes (1795).

The Challenging Conventions of the Popul ar Novel In working with the conventions of the popular novel of the day, the reformists analyzed in this study faced a significant challenge in

14


attempting to instill a fictional work with political content without impairing the work’s potential to entertain the reader with romance and suspense.50 Nowhere is this challenge more palpable than in the dilemma of composing a suitable ending for a reformist novel. Ending such a novel tragically, like such novels of high sensibility as Julie or Clarissa, risked alienating readers from the political content of the work by suggesting that radical views were ultimately impracticable or that the hero or heroine was incapable of surviving and flourishing in the world as it is. On the other hand, a happy ending risked undercutting the gravity of the social and political realities the novelist had worked to expose. In composing Caleb Williams, Godwin found this problem difficult to solve. In an original conclusion to the novel, Godwin depicted a defeated and apparently drugged Caleb gradually losing touch with reality as the novel itself fragments into ever less rational passages. Such an ending put an effective final point onto Godwin’s sharp indictment of the power of the British aristocracy. Maggie Kilgour has described this ending as demonstrating “at two levels a world in which individual agency and authority are impossible” and illustrating how “we are all constructed by forces, literary as well as social, outside of our control.”51 Unsatisfied with this conclusion, however, Godwin rewrote it a few days later. In his revision, Caleb survives, albeit as a shell of his former self. Caleb is reunited with a broken Falkland just in time to watch Falkland die of remorse, and he ends his narrative full of praise for the nobility of his persecutor, painfully subscribing to the very system of values that has oppressed him.52 While some scholars have criticized the new ending as an unsuccessful departure from the principles of Political Justice, many have seen it as Godwin’s attempt to illustrate “things as they might be” as his characters transcend victimization through sympathy and love.53 For B. J. Tysdahl, the final ending is “politically more effective: it enlists a more subtle pity, and not only righteous anger and indignation, on the side of reform; and it is less defeatist than the first ending, in which Caleb alone is the loser and Falkland is victorious.”54 Thus Godwin’s revised conclusion, though perhaps not as conventionally tragic as the first, is far more subtle in its anatomy of how social oppression operates. Mitzi Myers explains that Godwin’s substitution of a new ending suggests his “realization that his valuable moral lesson had been developed primarily in individual rather than in social terms” and that Godwin “recognized that the proper completion of the psychological and moral patterns worked out in the

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book demands a denouement in which the chief onus is laid on the demonic egocentrism of the central characters rather than on a corrupt society.”55 Once again, reform must begin with the thoughts and behavior of the individual. Godwin’s famous difficulty in ending Caleb Williams illustrates the great care such writers took to design a conclusion that not only answered the popular demands of the contemporary novel but also made the most efficacious impression upon the reader. Kenneth Graham has pointed out that at the conclusion of Caleb Williams “‘things’ remain ‘as they are,’ yet Falkland and Caleb are changed. Except infinitesimally, the world has not improved, but the reader is left with a sense of the direction that improvement will take; that is, in a spirit of open and rational inquiry that can transform both individuals and institutions into instruments for the discovery and communication of truth.”56 For Kristen Leaver, Godwin’s purpose in Caleb Williams is to train his reader to develop a reading practice “that would draw on individual judgments arrived at through developing faculties of interpretation.”57 Leaver explains that Godwin intended “to bring the reader into a conversation” with the text “and to develop conversation as a mode of communication that could change the reader’s relationship to the world.”58 Each of these critics describes in different terms how Godwin worked to stimulate a reaction in his reader that would alter that reader’s engagement with the world at large. While the effectiveness of Godwin’s revised ending to Caleb Williams continues to engender debate, Walker’s manner of concluding Theodore Cyphon illustrates how despairing such a novel can become when it is ended tragically. A striking parallel between Theodore Cyphon and Caleb Williams can be seen in the emotional trial scene at the end of each novel’s climactic conclusion. When Caleb Williams finally has his day in court, he lays bare the truth of his story, striking his listeners dumb with astonishment. His praise of Falkland leads his listeners to believe his story and even manages to break down the resolve of Falkland himself. Theodore follows Caleb in recounting the whole truth of his story before the court, and once again the people are astonished by the truth of his tale and cry out for his release. Unfortunately, however, Theodore’s admission that he is guilty of murder requires that he must be sentenced to death, and he dies on the scaffold. Walker defies convention with such an ending, and his dark conclusion befits the novel’s biting indictment of the power exercised by Britain’s ruling class. Nevertheless, the novel itself suffers as a result of his devotion to principle. Despite the author’s suggestion that the remaining characters will lead happier lives in the future, it is hard for

16


the reader to believe they will. Tragically, no one has been redeemed by Theodore’s suffering. Many reformist novelists, such as Bage and Robinson, attempted to meet readers’ expectations by offering at least one marriage to conclude a narrative that is presented all along as a romance. The novels that conclude most effectively in political terms, however, leave their heroes and heroines greatly affected and often broken and damaged by the experiences they have suffered, despite a conventionally comic rather than tragic ending. Nevertheless, the balance between the demand for a happy ending and the political efficacy of the work was easily tipped. In Hugh Trevor, Holcroft concludes seven volumes of Hugh’s struggles to navigate the vice of the modern world by suddenly granting his hero an unforeseen inheritance, bringing him great riches and a social position. Although such an ending was typical for the picaresque mode Holcroft was employing, this conclusion obliterates the gravity of the social critique he had developed throughout the work by contradicting the fundamental Godwinian tenet that human affairs are ruled by necessity rather than by mere chance.59 Similarly, at the conclusion of Bage’s Hermsprong, Charles Hermsprong, the outspoken embodiment of Rousseau’s noble savage, is revealed to be the rightful Lord Grondale and thus is legally granted the social position of the very enemy who has opposed him throughout the novel. This sudden elevation also makes Hermsprong a more than worthy match for his beloved, the former Lord Grondale’s daughter Caroline Campinet. As in Hugh Trevor, this conclusion dramatically detracts from the strength of Hermsprong’s earlier professions against the arbitrary status and abuses of the aristocracy.60 Nevertheless, despite Hermsprong’s sudden rise to wealth, it is clear that the moral core that makes him such an unusual figure for his times will remain intact. At the end of the novel, Bage depicts a small circle of freethinking characters who come together to form a small, idyllic community based on their shared social and political values and centered around the hero and his new bride. In Inchbald’s Nature and Art, the freethinker Henry Norwynne, his son Henry, and his son’s new bride retreat to a simple, rustic life of fishing and gardening that resonates with the conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide (1759).61 Inchbald describes this family’s happiness as they live “exempt both from patronage and from controul—healthy— alive to every fruition with which nature blesses the world; dead to all out of their power to attain, the works of art—susceptible of those passions which endear human creatures to one another, insensible to those which separate man from man—they found themselves the

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thankful inhabitants of a small house or hut, placed on the borders of the sea.”62 Similarly, at the end of Smith’s The Banished Man, a group of friends from a variety of European nations establishes their own community of like minds near Verona. And, as Smith’s The Young Philosopher concludes, a family of radical thinkers survives the worst of what avarice and greed can do to them in England and makes plans to emigrate to America to establish a new and simpler life like that of Inchbald’s Norwynnes. In the conclusions of other reformist novels, small groups of characters move on from their own sufferings to devote themselves to raising a new generation. In Smith’s Desmond, Lionel Desmond and his beloved Geraldine Verney form a new family in which they will raise her children and his young daughter. In several cases, groups of women, often from a variety of backgrounds, band together in a distinctly new antipatriarchal family. In Williams’s Julia, the heroine abandons any hope she may have had for marriage and finds personal fulfillment in helping her cousin Charlotte raise Charlotte’s infant son. Opie’s Adeline Mowbray ends with a small circle of women who will raise Adeline’s daughter together: Adeline’s mother, Editha; her Quaker friend, Rebecca Pemberton; and her loyal African companion, Savanna. Editha Mowbray’s conversion at the end of the novel suggests that she will be a better parent having learned from the circumstances of her daughter Adeline’s tragic life.63 Finally, the notes left by Wollstonecraft regarding her plans to conclude her unfinished The Wrongs of Woman suggest that she planned a similar ending in which her heroine Maria and Maria’s friend Jemima would put their tragic pasts behind them and find renewed purpose in raising Maria’s daughter. “The conflict is over!” Maria cries in these notes for the novel’s conclusion, “I will live for my child!”64 These depictions of small communities of reformist thinkers living in isolation from the rest of the world link these works directly to the novel of sensibility. Eighteenth-century sentimental novels do tend to emphasize the benevolent potential of sensibility, but they do not necessarily demonstrate that benevolence automatically leads to acts of social justice. Janet Todd has discussed how the novel of sensibility illustrates instead how benevolent feelings create ties between human beings that can provide the foundation for new family and community units in the midst of a cruel world.65 Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted that many of the political novels of the 1790s work to reveal “the urgency of change” but that there is nevertheless “a necessary disjunction between medium and message.”66 For Spacks, these works include “no imagining of group

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action,” and their “political imaginings tend toward the abstract and general rather than the concrete and specific.”67 Although she admits that several of these novelists “wrenched [the novel] successfully to fulfill such an aim,” Spacks argues that “the eighteenth-century novel, with its stress on the individual, does not readily lend itself to political purpose.”68 Indeed, modern readers may come to such endings as these expecting conclusions that are intended to serve as blueprints for revolution. Such readers may be disappointed to find modified happy endings in which the main characters separate from society and form small, secluded circles with little interaction with or influence on the rest of the world. How can such conclusions sow the seeds of reform? I believe the answer lies in the fact that these novelists were not attempting to illustrate how a revolution might be set in motion through group action. Instead, they aimed to work gradually toward reform by converting each individual reader to a new way of thinking about particular social and political problems.

Conversion as a Refor mist Strategy “I have lived in vain! unless the story of my sorrows should kindle in the heart of man, in behalf of my oppressed sex, the sacred claims of humanity and justice.”69 So cries the heroine Mary Raymond at the conclusion of Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799). “From the fate of my wretched mother (in which, alas! My own has been involved,)” Mary proclaims, “let him learn” (174). This conclusion exemplifies the hope of reformist novelists that their work will convert their readers to a new understanding of contemporary problems. In many cases the narratives are addressed to a specific reader. Wollstonecraft’s Maria addresses the account of her sufferings to her young daughter as a means of instructing her. Likewise Hays’s Emma Courtney addresses her memoirs to her adopted son Augustus Harley, writing to him that “I have unfolded the errors of my past life—I have traced them to their source—I have laid bare my mind before you, that the experiments which have been made upon it may be beneficial to yours!” (220).70 Emma directs her son to sharpen his understanding of the world by reading her narrative; thus Hays models the process that she intends for the actual readers of her novel to undergo. In many reformist novels, such an act of conversion is demonstrated before the reader’s eyes as the novel’s villain is brought around to the truth of reformist views he had earlier resisted. The seven volumes of Holcroft’s Anna St Ives detail the many schemes of the rake Coke Clifton, who continually devotes himself to insulting and injuring the

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reformist heroine Anna and her laboring-class lover Frank Henley. Nevertheless, Clifton undergoes a dramatic change of heart in the novel’s final pages when he sees that Anna and Frank treat him with neither anger nor vengeance but remain calmly committed to convincing him of his errors. “I have surgeons for the body, and surgeons for the mind,” Clifton shouts in delight, “who cut with so deep yet so steady a hand that they take away the noxious, and leave the wound to suppurate and heal!”71 Frank’s reply epitomizes the Godwinian notion of conversion and perfectibility: “Can we do less?” he asks in reference to their work to convert Clifton. “Ours is no common task! We are acting in behalf of society: we have found a treasure, by which it is to be enriched” (II:419). Spacks has pointed out how Holcroft’s excessive use of exclamation points in this passage clearly demonstrates his intention “to exercise persuasive or coercive or at least inspirational force on the reader’s mind.”72 Holcroft concludes Hugh Trevor with a similar conversion in which the villain Wakefield is inspired by Hugh’s virtues to amend his ways. In the novel’s closing paragraphs, Hugh calls the reformed Wakefield a brilliant man from whom “the world has so much to profit and so much to expect.”73 “Are there any who hate him,” Hugh asks the reader, “because he once was guilty of hateful crimes? I hope not. It is a spirit that would sweep away half the inhabitants of the ‘peopled earth’” (III:433). Having brought his narrative to completion, Hugh closes with the hope that “if it should afford instruction, if it should inspire a love of virtue, . . . if it should contribute to the happiness of mankind, I shall have gained my purpose” (III:434). As April London explains, Hugh Trevor thus demonstrates that “revolutionary change . . . issues most potently from the amendment of individuals; social justice discovers its origins in personality, not law.”74 Edgeworth’s Belinda can also be read as a novel of conversion in light of the fact that Belinda Portman’s clear sense of personal virtue influences the errant society types around her. Belinda’s socialite friend Lady Delacour, for example, is won over to a new sense of herself as a wife and mother after years of devoting herself strictly to the pleasures of the fashionable world. Lady Delacour’s family life is dramatically improved when she and her husband are inspired to repair their troubled marriage and when they are reunited with the young daughter they had sent away to be raised by friends. Even a cancerous wound in Lady Delacour’s breast is healed, symbolizing the restoration of her health on other levels. While some readers may consider these domestic alterations to be conservative ones, the transformation of Belinda’s suitor Clarence Hervey offers a more typical reformist

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approach to illustrating proper masculine behavior. Over the course of the novel, Hervey matures from a man who too readily submits to his own sensibility into one who can meet a levelheaded woman like Belinda on equal ground to form a healthy romantic partnership.75 As the 1790s progressed, reformists in Britain saw enough of the violent events in France to know that revolution on a grand scale was not likely to be bloodless, nor was it likely to succeed in extirpating political corruption once and for all. For these writers, the only success for reform lay in working slowly for change in their own lives and within their own circles, speaking the truth, treating their neighbors with absolute sincerity and in a spirit of benevolence, and striving to live according to their philosophical values. Despite the constraints of convention that all writers of the day had to negotiate in finding a market for their work, most reformist novels of this period leave the reader with a vision of a well-intentioned hero or heroine and perhaps a transformed villain who together embody a commitment to gradual and nonviolent social change at the grassroots level. In analyzing how reformist novelists began to experiment with popular forms of fiction to disseminate their political agenda, the first chapter of this book will focus on ways in which they refashioned the typical hero of eighteenth-century fiction, particularly the hero of the novel of sensibility or “man of feeling,” to create new protagonists who combine the sentimental hero’s spirit of benevolence with an ability to articulate a clear, reformist vision for the future of Britain. The second chapter will analyze how the popular genre of Gothic fiction provided the perfect context for exposing the status and powerlessness of women in the late eighteenth century, leading to a wide array of reformist works in which the sufferings of abused and incarcerated heroines were intended to raise public consciousness concerning women’s rights and the rights of the individual more generally. Moving from issues of gender to those of race, Chapter 3 will discuss how an awareness of the exploitation and disenfranchisement of other races begins to permeate reformist works in the 1790s. This chapter opens with a look at how particular writers used stereotypical depictions of both the African and the West Indian Creole to foster support for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. The chapter also analyzes slowly changing stereotypes of Jews in England and the subtle ways in which several novelists began to ask their readers to question the validity of age-old prejudices. Chapter 3 concludes with an analysis of a few early expressions of concern regarding the

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potentially injurious effects of Britain’s gradually emerging imperialist agenda. The fourth chapter will turn to class considerations, exploring how reformist writers of the period began to attack what they saw as irresponsible behavior in the aristocracy. A surprising number of these writers became fixated on two particular social practices that served as markers for destructive behavior in the upper class: an unbridled devotion to gambling and the persistence of dueling despite laws prohibiting the practice. Finally, Chapter 5 explores reformist thought on social class from another angle by analyzing two political romances. The first of these, a political allegory that ranges in focus from Spain and the continent to North America, illustrates the worst excesses and effects of the European class system. A second, utopian romance envisions an ideal world founded on the principles of Godwin’s Political Justice. Readers’ expectations that romances offered highly virtuous examples of human behavior worthy of imitation may have led these authors to experiment with this form as opposed to the novel, whose moral influence was hotly debated in the late eighteenth century. Chapter 5 concludes by exploring utopian elements in reformist novels of the period, demonstrating how a few writers offered their readers idealized alternatives to “things as they are” by emphasizing the promise of the New World for more enlightened social experiments. While these five chapters cover a wide array of texts and social issues, what links them is a concentration on the ways reformist novelists reworked the conventions of the popular novel to engineer a revolution of opinions in the mind of the individual reader. What did the reformist novelists of the 1790s ultimately accomplish? First, their work broke new ground in many directions as they explored new ways to utilize and to develop the forms and conventions of narrative that had become popular throughout the eighteenth century. Moreover, and most significantly, these writers identified and demonstrated a new potential in the novel for the articulation of a social mission, thus laying the foundation for the continuing development of political fiction and the fiction of social consciousness throughout the nineteenth century.76


4

Chapter 1

The Ma ny Faces of the Refor mist H ero

O

ne of the most significant ways in which reformist novelists reworked the conventions of late eighteenth-century fiction involves their manner of appropriating contemporary ideals of masculinity in fashioning protagonists who would appeal to their readers yet also serve as effective spokesmen for their politics. To a large degree, the reformist hero of these authors’ works owes his origin to the novel of sensibility that dominated the eighteenth-century novel. Distinct versions of the sentimental hero that captivated the reading public include Samuel Richardson’s highly idealized title character of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54) and Henry Fielding’s less idealized but more lovable hero of The History of Tom Jones (1749), certainly one of the most memorable figures in English fiction.1 The English sentimental hero was also greatly influenced by popular European models, such as St. Preux of Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and the pathetic protagonist of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). As scholars such as G. J. Barker-Benfield, Chris Jones, and Markman Ellis have argued, questions of politics and reform lay at the heart of the subgenre of the novel of sensibility from the very beginning.2 Jones has written that “the didactic and progressive tendency of sensibility lay in its expansion and refinement of emotional response.”3 In Sir Charles Grandison, for example, the character Ambrose Bartlett attests that “a feeling heart is a blessing that no one, who has it,

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would be without; and it is a moral security of innocence; since the heart that is able to partake of the distress of another, cannot willfully give it.”4 Along similar lines, Laurence Sterne wrote that his goal in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) had been “to teach us to love the world and our fellow-creatures better than we do.”5 As Jones explains it, “the didactic art of sensibility relied on the identification of the reader with a character whose emotional and moral responses might refine their own and strengthen the social passions which were hailed as the forces of progress.”6 Barker-Benfield has established that a large part of the reform that was associated with sensibility had to do with the liberation of women and the reformation of men, and he links that reformation to a movement toward the refinement of manners that dominated English culture throughout the eighteenth century.7 Barker-Benfield also argues that a significant aspect of the reforming potential of sensibility lay in the degree to which sentimental fiction allowed women to play a significant role in the reformation of male manners.8 By the 1790s, however, the reformist potential of sensibility had become profoundly politicized and hotly contested. Jones writes that “the debates of the 1790s were characterized by a politicizing of issues raised within the school of sensibility to the extent that one’s stand on matters such as the conduct of the private affections, charity, education, sympathy, genius, honor, and even the use of the reason, became political statements, aligned with conservative or radical ideologies.”9 In fact, by the end of the eighteenth century, what was considered the “cult of sensibility” was often condemned by Jacobins and anti-Jacobins alike.10 As Jones points out, the disputes between such figures as Edmund Burke and William Godwin and Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, were “disputes between different viewpoints within the same formation.”11 Janet Todd has noted that conservatives worked hard to encourage the reading public to associate sensibility with radicalism, fearing that its tendency to evaluate individuals “not by achievement or breeding but by ability to feel” represented a leveling bent.12 The bitingly satirical Tory publication the Antijacobin, for example, associated sensibility with the excesses of the French revolutionaries.13 Reformists, by contrast, associated sensibility with an inclination toward personal pleasure and luxury—qualities that they associated with the aristocracy. This association stemmed in part from Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which Burke argued that sensibility was integral to the health of a civil society and that men must be


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encouraged to develop feeling, tenderness, and a capacity for expressing emotion—qualities traditionally considered more feminine in nature. Burke’s conservative defense of the age of chivalry was one of the strongest catalysts of reformist politics in the early 1790s; thus his praise of sensibility made it highly suspect to those who wished to see an end to the system of class hierarchy.14 According to Jones, reformists’ attacks on the excesses of the conservative brand of sensibility associated with Burke in the 1790s “became more pointedly directed at its subversive and individualistic tendencies.”15 Godwin, for example, criticized “the servility of gratitude” and family and personal loyalties “which narrowed the range of benevolence and perpetuated inequality.”16 Godwin’s antidote was an emphasis on public service, respect for women, and the privileging of personal friendship and family relationships over relationships based on power.17 Wollstonecraft focuses her attack on sensibility on “the specifically feminine interpretation of sentimental virtues like modesty, delicacy, passive fortitude, and honour.”18 For both Godwin and Wollstonecraft, dangerous extremes of sensibility must be balanced carefully with reason. As even the most superficial study of sensibility in the fiction of the 1790s indicates, gender and the proper spheres of masculinity and femininity were among the most ardently debated grounds by which Jacobins struggled for reform and anti-Jacobins struggled for the maintenance of the “natural order.”19 As a result, the protagonist of the popular novel underwent dramatic alterations, particularly during the late 1790s. In the heroes of many reformist novels published during these years there is a distinct tension between appealing qualities of social refinement and traditional definitions of manliness.20 The manner in which a man conducted his private life was seen as having the potential to benefit both himself and the community in his public life. Thus reformists aimed to reshape readers’ conceptions of the personality traits most desirable in contemporary men with a particular emphasis on the potential dangers of high sensibility.21

Th e Danger s o f S ens i b i li ty Reformists in the 1790s frequently recast two extreme prototypes of the man of feeling, which they borrowed from the sentimental novel, to illustrate their particular concern with the tragic potential of sensibility when it is overly indulged.22 One extreme is the unprincipled, self-indulgent rake who usually serves as a novel’s villain. Most famously embodied in Robert Lovelace of Richardson’s Clarissa, this

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type reappears in such characters as Tyrrel of Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Coke Clifton of Thomas Holcroft’s Anna St Ives, Wakefield of Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor, and Sir Peter Osborne of Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice. Characteristics of the type can also be traced in characters who gradually abandon their finer qualities to indulge their passions, such as Caleb Williams’s employer Falkland; the mercenary Clement Montgomery and the rakish Lord Filmar of Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy; and the obsessive gambler Bryan Perdue of Holcroft’s Memoirs of Bryan Perdue.23 The other extreme is that of the weak sentimental hero who is emotionally crippled by his sympathy for the outcast and disenfranchised, a type widely popularized by such characters as Sterne’s Mr. Yorick of A Sentimental Journey and Henry Mackenzie’s Harley of The Man of Feeling (1771). This type of protagonist feels keenly the wants of all of those he encounters, sheds copious tears over the unfortunate, and devotes himself to attempting to mitigate the hardships of the poor or bereaved. Some novelists were particularly interested in such a character’s inability to handle the force of his romantic passion when he falls in love. Mackenzie’s Harley, for example, like Goethe’s Werther, is ultimately unable to survive his unrequited love for his adored Miss Walton, even when he discovers that Miss Walton does in fact return his love. For reformists, this was ripe ground for showing the reader how an overdeveloped sensibility can lead not only to death but also to irresponsible and often antisocial behavior and especially to the mistreatment of women. Helen Maria Williams’s Julia, A Novel dramatizes just such a scenario. In this work the aristocrat Frederick Seymour pines away for the idealized heroine Julia Clifford despite the fact that he is engaged to Julia’s cousin and closest friend, Charlotte. Both the title and the love triangle theme suggest the novel’s relationship to Rousseau’s widely read Julie.24 In the opening lines of her “Advertisement” to the novel, Williams clarifies her purpose “to trace the danger arising from the uncontrouled indulgence of strong affections; not in those instances where they lead to the guilty excesses of passion in a corrupted mind— but, when disapproved by reason, and uncircumscribed by prudence, they involve even the virtuous in calamity.”25 Frederick’s inability to control his feelings and to behave as a proper gentleman drives the novel’s plot. Frederick marries Charlotte to fulfill his duty to her, but his love for Julia becomes less and less manageable for him, a fact that torments both him and Julia, who loves him in return but does everything she can to discourage his romantic professions.


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To make her point about the potential dangers of high sensibility, Williams settles Julia firmly in the tradition of the popular sentimental novel by utilizing a host of conventions familiar to the genre. Julia, for example, bears a strong resemblance to a long list of sentimental heroines in her unwavering commitment to serving others.26 While living on her uncle’s estate, Julia regularly seeks out opportunities for helping the poor, and she spends two hours every day teaching the cottagers on the estate to read. Williams also layers one melodramatic rescue episode over another to demonstrate the depth of her characters’ sensibilities; similarly, many sentimental novels are characterized by an obsessive emphasis on the performance of such acts of benevolence. Julia rescues a small thrush that is unable to fly and, when she loses it, writes an elegy for the poor bird. She forms a particular affection for a peasant girl named Peggy when she sees the little girl rescuing flies from drowning in a bowl of water. When Peggy is unable to rescue her infant brother from a galloping horse in the road outside her cottage, Julia intervenes just in time to save the little boy’s life. Williams makes this particular episode a critical turning point in the narrative because the rider of the horse is Frederick, who falls helplessly in love with Julia when he witnesses this selfless action. Another overdramatic rescue leads to important repercussions when Frederick in turn rescues Julia from a landslide of stones and debris while touring the ruins of a deserted abbey. After this incident, Frederick becomes fixated on the fact that he has preserved the life of his beloved Julia, and he is inspired to confess his love for her. In fact, Julia’s acts of benevolence often inflame Frederick’s high emotions. When she rescues her acquaintance Mrs. Meynell from imminent poverty by securing a position for her reprobate husband in India, Frederick again aggravates Julia with unwanted professions of love. As backdrop to this series of ever more dramatic rescues, Williams interweaves her narrative with heartrending tales that are not directly connected to the novel’s plot—a convention typical of the novel of sensibility. In one chapter she departs from the main story line to illustrate the horrors of war in the story of a distraught American girl who dies of grief during the Revolutionary War when she loses her father, her brother, and the British captain she had loved. In another episode, Julia and Charlotte encounter a young peasant named Hannah who is inconsolable over the loss of her lover’s dog; the two women learn that Hannah had become fixated on this animal after her lover had drowned in a boating accident. Contemporary readers would have recognized this clear parallel to the famously pathetic Maria of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey—a young French woman

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who had gone mad after losing both her lover and the little pet goat she had doted upon after her lover left her. Williams alludes directly to yet another famous sentimental novel when an engraving of Goethe’s Charlotte at the Werther’s tomb sparks a debate between Julia and Frederick that exposes the heart of the novel’s aim. “I think there can be but one opinion of that book,” Julia boldly declares. “Everyone must acknowledge that it is well written, but few will justify its principles” (II:202). Frederick, however, enthusiastically defends the book and praises the character of Werther because “he is not a phoenix of romance, but has the feelings and infirmities of man. He is subject to the power of passion.” Frederick continues, “let those who never felt its influence, condemn him; those who have felt its influence too well know that it is absolute, that it is unconquerable” (II:203).27 Julia refuses to continue the conversation and leaves the room before Frederick can finish this paean. By alluding to Werther in this way, Williams draws on contemporary preconceptions about the significance of Goethe’s treatment of “the power of passion” and asks her readers to debate its value and its dangers as Julia and Frederick do. Like Werther’s passion for his beloved Charlotte, Frederick’s obsession with Julia grows steadily more alarming to her, and the language Williams uses in describing that obsession becomes more sexual and thus more ominous as the novel progresses. In social gatherings Julia begins to notice with great embarrassment “that Mr. Seymour’s penetrating eyes [are] fixed upon her” (I:132). At one point Frederick crosses the boundaries of decorum by stealing one of Julia’s gloves and “putting it hastily into his bosom” (I:185). Williams writes that Frederick then went to his room, “locked the door, pulled the precious prize from his bosom, pressed it to his heart and lips ten thousand times, and was guilty of the most passionate extravagancies” (I:185–86).28 Frederick fetishizes this glove to such an extent that he asks Julia to bring it, and several verses and notes in her hand, to him as he lies on his deathbed, declaring that he will part from these treasures only in death. Predictably, Frederick finally dies of his passion for Julia, even as his wife Charlotte lies in another room giving birth to his infant son. Williams makes her moral very clear: men must master their passions in order to live productive lives. Women, moreover, have an even greater need to “fortify their hearts against those strong affections,” she argues, quoting Dr. John Gregory’s statement in his A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774) that women “cannot plunge into business, or dissipate themselves in pleasure and riot, as men too often do, when


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under the pressure of misfortunes; but must bear their sorrows in silence, unknown and unpitied” (II:239–40). As Lord Byron would write in the first canto of Don Juan, when the pathetic Donna Julia laments to her lover: “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, / ’T is woman’s whole existence.”29 As the novel ends, Julia forms a new family with Charlotte and her friend Mrs. Meynell, and these women lead productive lives entirely without men, raising Charlotte’s son, enjoying the rewards of “the most perfect friendship,” and embracing “the duties of religion, the exercise of benevolence, and the society of persons of understanding and merit” (II:242, 244). The ending is not purely a happy one, however. It is clear that both Julia and Charlotte have been damaged by Frederick’s behavior, which has deprived Charlotte of the loving marriage she had begun in good faith and has blighted Julia’s chances for a healthy relationship. The novel’s final lines note that Julia’s memories of Frederick continue “to embitter the satisfaction of her life” (II:245). Julia’s resistance to Frederick’s drive to possess her, her ultimate freedom from him, and her establishing of a purely female family unit illustrate the potential for social change that such reformists as Williams saw in the early years of the French Revolution, an aspect of her novel that relates it to her other work during the 1790s.30 The revolutionary character of the novel is subtle but is supported by the fact that Williams included the poem “The Bastille, A Vision” at the end of the novel’s penultimate chapter. In the poem, a British prisoner in the Bastille describes a prophetic vision in which the prison is destroyed and a highly idealized revolution is instigated by “millions with according mind, / Who claim the rights of human kind” (II:221). Though at first glance this is simply another of the tangential stories of human suffering that Williams has woven throughout the novel, this poem and its significant placement immediately before the novel’s final chapter suggest its relationship to Julia’s own future. It can be argued that the prisoner’s freedom from bondage in France foreshadows the freedom from male domination that Julia will experience after the novel’s close.31 Perhaps even more significant than the removal of the man from Williams’s revolutionary portrait of the modern family is the removal of the gentleman. For Williams, the middle class is very clearly “the society of all others from which the greatest improvement may be derived; for the middle station of life appears to be that temperate region, in which the mind, neither enervated by too full a ray from prosperity, nor chilled and debased by the freezing blast of penury, is

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in the situation most favourable for every great and generous exertion” (I:172).32 One of many haughty socialites in the novel proclaimed of the disconsolate Mrs. Meynell, “I cannot understand what right people have to the indulgence of so much sensibility, who are in poverty. People in affluence may indulge the delicacy of their feelings” (II:102). Williams goes to great lengths, however, to illustrate just what can happen when such an aristocrat as Frederick Seymour indulges the delicacy of his feelings. Thus Williams adroitly maneuvers her critique of the dangers of sensibility into a much broader and more politically charged statement on the inequities of the class system. After all, it is Frederick’s status as an aristocrat that affords him the leisure and the resources to indulge his passions with so little self-control. Charlotte Smith analyzes the potential danger of male sensibility in a similar way in her first novel, Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788). Emmeline clearly draws upon and extends Frances Burney’s exploration of the negative effects of aggressive, unwanted suitors, particularly in her 1778 novel Evelina.33 Like Evelina, Julia, and other sentimental heroines, Emmeline is devoted to good works and acts of benevolence. Moreover, she too is plagued by the relentless attentions of an unwanted suitor. When the passionate Frederic Delamere impulsively decides that he must marry Emmeline immediately upon first seeing her, he becomes resolute in his devotion to this aim despite the lengths to which his wealthy parents go to prevent the match. “Accustomed from his infancy to the most boundless indulgences,” Smith writes, “he never formed a wish, the gratification of which he expected to be denied: and if such a disappointment happened, he gave way to an impetuosity of disposition which he had never been taught to restrain, and which gave an appearance of ferocity to a temper not otherwise bad.”34 Of Delamere’s stubbornness, Smith notes that his heart “was accessible only by the avenues of affection and kindness; compulsion and threats only made him more resolutely persist in any favourite project” (II:174). As in the case of Frederick Seymour, the stage is set for impending tragedy. Highly prone to intense jealousy of others’ attentions to Emmeline, Delamere makes himself the easy prey of schemers who wish to frustrate his intended match. Moreover, his jealousy leads to his distrust of even his closest friend, Fitz-Edward. Delamere’s inability to control his passions leads to rash and often destructive behavior. In an extension of a plot device borrowed from Evelina, Delamere goes so far as to abduct Emmeline and to attempt to take her by force to Gretna Green for an impromptu wedding ceremony. By doing so,


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Smith’s putative hero sinks to the tactics of a rake such as Clarissa’s Lovelace. In many ways, however, Delamere is an appealing character; his relentless devotion to Emmeline despite her lack of wealth, for example, strikes a strong contrast to his parents’ selfish and superficial determination to see him married to a wealthy heiress. Nevertheless, his unpredictable outbursts, violent tantrums, and occasional fits of weeping epitomize the man of sensibility at his very worst. As Williams would do in Julia, Smith uses Goethe’s Werther as a catalyst to provoke a debate between Emmeline and Delamere that cuts to the heart of the differences between them. When Delamere brings Emmeline a stack of books in one episode, Emmeline notices the second volume of Werther and smiles, saying “That will not do for me tonight” (II:154). Like Frederick Seymour, however, Delamere is quick to make use of the novel to draw attention to his own emotional state. “I have read it,” he states, “and if you have, Emmeline, you might have learned the danger of trifling with violent and incurable passions” (II:154). Delamere asks Emmeline whether she could live with herself were she to be the cause of such a catastrophe as that of Werther’s suicide. When she sharply responds that Delamere values his life too highly to throw it away, Delamere warns her that “without you, my life is no longer valuable—if indeed it be supportable; and should I ever be in the situation this melancholy tale describes, how do I know that my reason would be strong enough to preserve me from equal rashness” (II:154). Once again a reformist writer has used this universally admired novel to compel her reader to think beyond the romance of Goethe’s tragedy and to reconsider the potential dangers of unrestrained sensibility. The plot of Smith’s Emmeline is characterized by an unusual degree of inaction and restraint. From the novel’s earliest chapters, when Delamere boldly and rudely bursts into Emmeline’s castle chamber at night, Emmeline is nearly disabled from any action whatsoever by her anxieties concerning Delamere’s potential behavior.35 When he initially persuades her to accept his offer of marriage, Emmeline’s anxieties escalate even more unexpectedly when his overweening jealousy and his susceptibility to rumor worry her incessantly that he will involve himself in a duel. The constrained atmosphere of the novel beautifully recreates the emotional dilemma of a young woman who wishes to behave according to the dictates of social convention when faced with the erratic and unpredictable behavior of a man who will not restrain his passions. Ultimately Emmeline’s morbid anxiety is justified when Delamere rashly challenges another of Emmeline’s impetuous suitors

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and is killed in a duel.36 Once again, an allusion to Werther has foreshadowed a tragic end for another sentimental protagonist. By the third volume of the novel, Smith begins to meddle with her reader’s expectations that Emmeline and Delamere will ultimately marry by concentrating on Emmeline’s gradually growing interest in another man, William Godolphin. In stark contrast to Delamere, Godolphin is idealized not only in physical terms but also in Smith’s description of his manner of address as “a compound of the insinuating softness of Fitz-Edward with the fire and vivacity of Delamere” (II:243) and of his character as “all that is noble minded and generous” (II:275). Describing Godolphin’s care for his distressed sister Adelina and her illegitimate son, Smith continues to mix qualities from both genders in her description, writing that “with all the humanity of a brave man, Godolphin possessed a softness of heart, which the helpless innocence of the son, and the repentant sorrow of the mother, melted into more than feminine tenderness” (II:278). It is clear that Smith’s conception of the ideal hero is a perfect blend of traditional masculine strength and feminine gentleness and compassion.37 Early in the novel’s final volume, Emmeline sits on the banks of Lake Geneva, which contemporary readers would have recognized immediately as the setting of Rousseau’s Julie. As Emmeline reflects upon her feelings for Godolphin, Godolphin suddenly appears before her. Here Smith literally inserts her own updated sentimental hero in the place of Julie’s beloved St Preux, drawing, as Williams does, on the power of Rousseau’s work to underscore the reader’s impression of Emmeline’s love for Godolphin.38 Significantly, Smith’s new brand of hero is a working man who offers a marked contrast to such dangerously uncontrolled aristocrats as Delamere and Williams’s Frederick Seymour. Thus Emmeline’s preference for Godolphin over Delamere marks what Nicola Trott has called “a shift in class allegiances, away from the improvident aristocrat and in favour of the professional new man.”39 Like Williams, Smith skillfully reshapes the conventions of the sentimental novel into a pointed condemnation of Britain’s class system by allowing Emmeline and Godolphin to “displace the undeserving representatives of the old aristocracy.”40 Godwin’s 1805 Fleetwood: or, The New Man of Feeling follows Emmeline and Julia in anatomizing the potentially disastrous effects of masculine sensibility. Rather than focusing on extraordinary events as in his earlier novels Caleb Williams and St Leon (1799), Godwin claims in his preface to Fleetwood that he has aimed to record “such adventures, as for the most part have occurred to at least one half of the Englishmen now existing, who are of the same rank of life as my


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hero.”41 Godwin thus establishes the relevance of his critique to everyday life and particularly to the upper class. Moreover, he suggests that his topic will pertain to marriage and to the lives of married women: “I am afraid,” he writes, “there are few of the married tribe who have not at some time or other had certain small misunderstandings with their wives” (V:13–14). In exploring the subjection of women, Godwin follows both Williams and Smith in making the attribute of sensibility itself the focus of his call for social reform. In fact, Fleetwood takes “the new man of feeling” to a new extreme in illustrating how external circumstances can transform potentially beneficial human attributes into harmful ones. As B. J. Tysdahl has written, Godwin’s experiment lay in developing a new kind of sentimental protagonist “in whom there are no longer any absolute and sacred ties between sensibility and benevolence.”42 Casimir Fleetwood begins his life in a fashion typical of the sentimental hero: with a rescue episode. The potential value of Fleetwood’s innate sensitivity toward his fellow man is illustrated when he bravely rescues a young shepherd from drowning on his father’s estate. Fleetwood follows this act by persuading his father to provide the young man with a farm so that he can marry and begin a family. Nevertheless, the injurious effects of several critical external circumstances ultimately weaken Fleetwood’s potential to be a productive member of society. Significantly, he suffers the early and critical loss of his mother and thus loses the benefit of a nurturing feminine influence in his early development. To make matters worse, his father is aloof and detached, and the tutor who is hired to educate him as a young child is ineffectual. Godwin also suggests that an unhealthy degree of solitary play in the wilds of rural Wales spoils the young Fleetwood’s chances for appropriate social interactions as an adult. None of the circumstances of his early life make it clear to Fleetwood that he is a social being.43 Thus, as he matures, Fleetwood’s selfish qualities come to overshadow his finer points. An Oxford education serves only to bury his social conscience more deeply when his fear of ridicule leads him to join his peers in tormenting social outcasts. When he leaves Oxford for France, he falls easily into a hedonistic lifestyle of vice in the high society of contemporary Paris. As Smith and Williams would revisit popular notions of sensibility as they are represented in Goethe’s Werther, Godwin’s assessment of Fleetwood’s ever-increasing egomania and misanthropy resonates profoundly with the writings of Rousseau. Fleetwood’s personality and his early years are in part drawn from those of Rousseau’s St Preux of Julie; Fleetwood’s manner of narrating his tale, moreover, draws on

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Rousseau’s Les Confessions (1781–88) and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782).44 At its heart the novel reveals Godwin’s response to one of the central tenets of Rousseau’s philosophy: his belief in the purity of man’s innate nature as compared with corrupted, civilized man.45 Godwin clearly wished to show that it is external circumstances—a practical education and proper socialization—that allow a man to develop into a productive member of a social context, regardless of innate goodness. Godwin takes issue, however, with the principles of education that Rousseau outlined in Émile (1762), a system in which the child is allowed to pursue his own course of development according to his natural interests and desires. In Émile Rousseau also argues for the necessity of deceiving the pupil to force him to learn from experiences engineered by his tutor. Godwin critiques this particular concept in a climactic passage in which the highly Rousseauvian character Ruffigny attempts to manipulate Fleetwood into altering his wayward behavior. When Fleetwood visits Ruffigny at his humble home in Switzerland, Ruffigny rows the young man into the middle of the dramatic scenery of Lake Uri, where Fleetwood’s mind is deeply affected by the sublime setting and inspiring scenes recalling the achievements of the great liberator William Tell. In the midst of such overpowering impressions, Ruffigny gives Fleetwood the news of his father’s death and shames him into acknowledging how he has fallen short of his father’s hopes and expectations. Many years later, Fleetwood would again have Rousseauvian philosophy preached to him in the picturesque setting of the English Lake District by his friend Macneil. Macneil attempts to win over Fleetwood to a Rousseauvian belief in the inherent goodness of all men when unspoiled by cultural conventions, but his philanthropic outlook fails to temper Fleetwood’s misanthropy. Macneil even claims to have known Rousseau personally, and he describes Rousseau to Fleetwood as “a man of exquisite sensibility, and that sensibility had been insulted and trifled with in innumerable instances, sometimes by the intolerance of priestcraft and power, sometimes by the wanton and ungenerous sports of men and letters” (V:159). To Macneil, Rousseau was a madman who “was not in his sober mind” and who lived “in a world of his own, and saw nothing as it really was” (V:159). The relevance of this portrait to the character of Fleetwood himself is unmistakable. The real catastrophe of Godwin’s novel begins when Macneil convinces Fleetwood to marry his daughter Mary, who is many years younger than the middle-aged misanthrope. At this point Godwin


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reveals how easily narcissism and a tendency toward obsessive thinking can lead to paranoia as he unfolds a plot of jealousy and abuse closely modeled on the events of Othello and Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné (1777), a rewriting of Rousseau’s Julie in which a love triangle leads to murder and suicide. From the beginning Fleetwood is an unsuitable candidate for marriage. He admits to disappointment when Mary is unexpectedly deprived of her family’s inheritance. He considers Mary as a toy and an inferior being, and he resents the modest claims she makes on his time and on his personal space in the home they now share. Ultimately he becomes the perfect dupe of a corrupt relative named Gifford, who successfully convinces him that Mary is carrying on an adulterous affair. Gifford brings a dark cast to the role of Rousseau’s tutor as he easily manipulates a series of simple situations to convince Fleetwood of Mary’s guilt. Godwin then makes the dramatic effects of Fleetwood’s irrational responses on Mary perfectly clear in detailing how Fleetwood abuses her emotionally, abandons and divorces her, deprives her of the means to support both herself and his infant son, and drives her to desperation and near death. According to Gary Handwerk, Fleetwood’s treatment of Mary reflects Godwin’s misgivings about the misogynistic treatment of women in Émile and, in particular, Rousseau’s characterization of women as naturally deceptive. Handwerk argues that the tutor’s derogatory portrayal of women is intended to distract the pupil from his tutor’s deceptive manipulation. Fleetwood’s misogyny can be interpreted as an outburst of repressed anger at being manipulated by the Rousseauvian influences in his life, particularly his mentor Ruffigny.46 In Fleetwood Godwin wished to demonstrate the degree to which deficiencies in childhood and education can lead to the distortion of particular character traits in adulthood—distortions that can predictably result in the detachment of the individual from his social context and in his abuse of others. Although innately virtuous, Fleetwood cannot escape the effects of a ruinous education, and he becomes a worst-case scenario of the destructive potential of uncontrolled masculine sensibility. As with Julia and Emmeline, it would be difficult for any reader to miss the clear warning that high sensibility untempered by reason and self-control can have disastrous effects on the social polity and most particularly on the lives of women. Most importantly, each of these writers makes it clear that such extravagancies of temper and self-control prevail among members of the aristocracy and thus illustrate a major detriment of the British social

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hierarchy for an expanding reading public. As Wollstonecraft explains in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “whoever the devil finds idle he will employ.”47

Re c a s ting the Fl awed M an of Fe eli ng In addition to providing fertile ground for illustrating the dangers of sensibility, the popular sentimental hero became a useful tool for reformists in the 1790s as they fashioned new versions of heroes who are clearly flawed but whose gradual maturation into more thoughtful and more socially productive citizens over the course of the narrative served as an important model for readers. Chris Jones suggests that Fielding’s character Tom Jones served as a common version of the sentimental hero from the height of the genre’s popularity earlier in the eighteenth century. Heroes patterned on Tom Jones usually reflect both Tom’s great affability and his impetuosity, qualities that lead to “incautious acts of benevolence and of love” and “chivalrous feelings [that] render him loyal and honourable.”48 Greatly motivated by an idealized notion of romantic love, this type of the hero usually displays a sincere respect for women.49 Less nobly, however, he can be selfish and neglectful of benevolent actions, he may struggle to control his passions, and he can be led easily to vice, particularly to such vices as gambling and dueling.50 Like Tom Jones’s picaresque exploits, the adventures of the heroes of Tobias Smollett’s novels also influenced a number of reformist novelists, particularly in the commonplace use of the melodramatic rescue episode and in the hero’s difficulty in winning the love of the woman he worships.51 In Hugh Trevor, for example, Holcroft employs these common conventions as he portrays Hugh’s gradual transformation from an impetuous youth of high passion to a responsible and thoughtful man.52 In an early passage closely paralleling one in Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Hugh rescues his estranged grandfather from drowning when his coach is overturned into a stream and thus inadvertently brings about a reunion between his mother and her father, resulting in his parents’ return to financial stability. Later in the novel, Hugh rescues his beloved Olivia Mowbray from similarly disastrous carriage accidents or a runaway horse not once, but three times.53 Despite these acts of heroism, Olivia characteristically misinterprets Hugh’s motives. As Tom Jones’s potential romance with Sophia Western is regularly thwarted by enemies, Hugh’s enemies invent stories of his profligate behavior to mislead Olivia regarding his true character. Patterning Hugh’s character on the model of Tom


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Jones allows Holcroft to focus on his hero’s weaknesses as well as his more likeable qualities as he brings the latter more gradually into focus over the course of the novel. Moreover, like Tom, Hugh’s devotion to Olivia and his many feats of rescue ensure a favorable response in the reader, who may therefore be more likely to absorb his reformist philosophical ideals as Hugh himself develops them.54 It is worth noting that Hugh succeeds in developing reformist ideals because he enjoys a succession of relationships with invaluable mentors who counsel him through the ups and downs of his adventures as he searches for the right professional career. While at Oxford, Hugh becomes friends with a fellow student named Turl, a social outcast with a reputation for unorthodox opinions. Embodying a Godwinian principle, Turl insists on speaking with absolute sincerity, even though he knows that in doing so his motives are likely to be misread. Turl’s philosophy for living, which eventually begins to influence Hugh, is based on the Jacobin tenet that “it is an immoral act to waste time in doing any one thing, if there can be any other done that will contribute more to the public good” (III:122). Significantly, it is Turl who ultimately succeeds in convincing Hugh that he has been the source of most of his own troubles. Turl points out to Hugh that in his mad rush to achieve quick professional success in a variety of fields, he has pursued a succession of exploitative friendships in high society, in the church, and in the government—a succession that has allowed Holcroft to attack one corrupt aspect of contemporary British culture after another. In the second half of the novel, which Holcroft published three years after the first, Turl’s influence over Hugh is replaced by that of the philanthropic scientist Mr. Evelyn. After their chance meeting, Evelyn becomes an important mentor to Hugh, both philosophically and financially, when he agrees to use his fortune to support Hugh’s ongoing quest for a career. Evelyn shares Godwin’s view that money should be available to all who need it, and he disdains the concept of private property, which reserves resources for a few that should rightfully be available to all. Evelyn’s commitment to support Hugh in his quest for a productive career is based on his belief that it is a crime to waste any talent that might contribute toward general happiness. Evelyn also espouses the Godwinian notion that human society is perfectible. “It is the moral system of society that wants reform,” Evelyn says. “This cannot suddenly be produced, nor by the efforts of any individual: but it may be progressive, and every individual may contribute” (III:262). Like Turl, Evelyn also subscribes to the Godwinian tenet that “there can be no happiness without security; and there can

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be no security without sincerity” (III:330). Significantly, Evelyn balances the influence of the rational Turl by teaching Hugh the value of human sympathy.55 By utilizing such figures as Turl and Evelyn, both articulate spokesmen for reformist political values, Holcroft cannily instructs his reader alongside his hero.56 Hugh Trevor is loaded with one picaresque episode after another in which Hugh learns to be a more responsible member of society. In one such episode, for example, Hugh finds that his handkerchief has been stolen, and he is gulled by a crowd into accusing and then fighting an innocent man named Clarke who is singled out by the crowd as the putative perpetrator. When Hugh knocks Clarke out and initially believes he has killed him, he greatly laments his rash behavior and his penchant for jumping to conclusions. Clarke then teaches Hugh an invaluable lesson about the virtue of human sympathy. He and his wife nurse Hugh through a dangerous fever, and Clarke afterward insists on accompanying Hugh as a loyal companion in his further adventures, determined to protect him despite Hugh’s earlier violence toward him. Hugh and Clarke learn a similar lesson about drawing undue conclusions in the episode in which they first meet Mr. Evelyn. In a memorable chapter that draws on all the shock and horror of contemporary Gothic fiction, Hugh and Clarke are caught in a terrible storm and seek shelter in the first building they come to, only to find themselves surrounded in the darkness by dozens of corpses and human body parts. After a hair-raising interval in which they expect their own murder at the hands of bandits, they discover that they are in the home of the anatomist Evelyn and thus learn that there is a logical explanation for this gruesome discovery. By the end of the novel it is clear that Hugh’s gradual conversion has taken place when he passes what Gary Kelly has called his “real test, both as an individual and as a missionary of the ‘New Philosophy.’”57 Hugh has gradually come to forgive the villainous Wakefield for duping him in the guise of a friend named “Belmont,” for ruining and abandoning his friend Lydia Wilmot, and for marrying Hugh’s mother and squandering her fortune. When Wakefield challenges Hugh to give up his financial claims against him so that Wakefield might marry Lydia, Hugh selflessly acknowledges that this money can bring more good to Wakefield and Lydia than to himself and thus perfectly illustrates one of the most important principles of Godwin’s Political Justice.58 This demonstration of altruism in turn converts the rakish Wakefield to a new way of thinking and living. Thus Hugh himself has become a reformist.


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Holcroft’s vision of the world of Hugh Trevor is one in which contemporary society has become so corrupt that there is virtually no escaping its harmful influence.59 Hugh’s attempts to find a respectable profession bring him into contact with an array of caricatures of contemporary social types who embody the extreme corruption of academia, the aristocracy, the church, the law, and the government. Nevertheless, Hugh continually struggles to impose the Enlightenment ideal of reason over his passionate tendency toward anger and revenge and to abandon his strong sense of pride and personal ambition in favor of the Godwinian ideals of simplicity, sincerity, and social benevolence. Often this struggle is one that we see Hugh lose. He complains that even men of genius are “entangled, and bewildered, by the destructive incongruity of those who assume to themselves the highest wisdom, because they possess the highest stations in society,” but despite his struggles Hugh ultimately commits himself to a purely reformist mission to declare the truth “openly, undauntedly, and with a perseverance that no threats or terrors can shake” (III:332). His disastrous experiences in a range of potential professions have confirmed him in this goal. Nevertheless, Holcroft can be profoundly inconsistent in his work to convert the reader to Hugh’s line of thinking. Hugh often serves simply as Holcroft’s mouthpiece, announcing at one point, for example, that “nothing can reconcile men, so as to induce them to remain peaceable spectators of enjoyments beyond their attainment, except that unaffected benevolence which shall continually actuate the heart to communicate all the happiness it has the power to bestow. This only can so temper oppression as to render gradual and orderly reform practicable.” Hugh then cynically adds, “But I am talking to the winds” (III:344). Such a statement makes the damage Hugh has suffered in the real world credible, but it also seriously undercuts the declaration it follows by suggesting that Hugh has lost faith in human perfectibility. Even more troubling is the abruptness with which Holcroft ties up his narrative. Many readers find it hard to accept the sincerity of Wakefield’s immediate conversion. And, of course, there is the problem of the typically picaresque ending in which Hugh rescues a stranger and then discovers this stranger to be a long-lost uncle who elevates him to a position of wealth and social status. Unfortunately, this particular plot twist dramatically counteracts Holcroft’s efforts to make his hero a “new philosopher” who succeeds as a result of his reformist convictions and not simply because of fortunate changes in his circumstances. Nevertheless, the novel remains an important one for illustrating how one committed reformist set out to make the

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popular hero’s entrance into the world a conversion experience for his reader as well. Like Hugh Trevor, Mary Robinson’s Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature (1797) focuses on the life experiences of a flawed and downtrodden protagonist whose experiences are likewise intended to enlighten the reader. Robinson’s narrator Walsingham Ainsforth begins his tale by describing a solitary childhood in the wilds of Wales that closely resembles that of Godwin’s Casimir Fleetwood—indeed, Godwin may have been influenced by Robinson’s novel in composing Fleetwood eight years later. As a young child Walsingham loses his mother and is abandoned by his father. His status as favored son in the home of his aunt, Lady Aubrey, is forfeited when Lady Aubrey gives birth to a child, Sidney, who takes Walsingham’s place both in the affections of the household and as the new heir to the family estate. Unwanted and neglected, Walsingham grows up as a “pupil of nature” like Fleetwood, spending too many solitary hours wandering about the rural Welsh landscape “like a wild inhabitant of the mountains.”60 “I began to cherish that love of solitude,” Walsingham confesses, again prefiguring Fleetwood, “which rendered me, almost, an infant misanthrope” (64). Significantly, when he is taken away from his first home, Walsingham wanders over the property to take a woeful last look at his favorite haunts, “for, having nothing human on which I could bestow my affections, they had, imperceptibly, attached themselves to inanimate objects” (67). As Godwin would do with Fleetwood, Robinson sets out to illustrate the ill effects that such early experiences can have on the growth of the mind. Walsingham blames the circumstances of his childhood for implanting “the first roots of that melancholy which has never ceased to be the prominent characteristic of my nature. For nothing can be more certain,” he declares, “than that the general tenor of the mind through life fashions its bent from the impressions of that period, when reason begins to dawn, and memory takes root in the young and opening fancy” (64). The rest of Robinson’s narrative illustrates the extent of the damage Walsingham had suffered. Despite his chronic melancholia, Walsingham shares several conventional personality characteristics with other sentimental heroes of the day. Most important of these is a benevolent spirit that Robinson highlights with a string of conventional rescue episodes, as when he rescues his young cousin Sidney and Sidney’s nurse Judith Blagden from a near carriage accident. Walsingham’s sensibility is also greatly moved by the plight of animals; as a boy he saves a spaniel from


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drowning, and he uses his financial savings to rescue an old horse from the slaughterhouse. In one particularly climactic episode, when the family manor house catches fire, Walsingham risks his life to retrieve Lady Aubrey’s most valued possession, an ivory box containing what she claims to be papers that explain the family’s secrets. This scene parallels the fire in Mr. Falkland’s home, during which Caleb Williams seizes the opportunity to take a look into Falkland’s mysterious trunk as the house burns around him. The episode also shrouds Lady Aubrey’s behavior in mystery and foreshadows the exposure of dark secrets later in the novel. Walsingham’s tendency toward philanthropic behavior is encouraged by his tutor, Walter Hanbury, a reformist mentor in the tradition of Hugh Trevor’s Turl and Evelyn. Hanbury lectures to the young Walsingham on the arbitrary nature of social hierarchy and argues enthusiastically with the arrogant Lady Aubrey in defense of his radical “levelling” philosophy. Walsingham is also influenced by the benevolent Mr. Optic, who tirelessly devotes himself to others and who teaches Walsingham that “a love of virtue . . . was the true basis of religion; the foundation of every moral good, and the first distinction which man could evince in this scene of perpetual vicissitude” (259). Mr. Optic’s singular view of the world strikes a sharp contrast to the wide range of caricatures of social types that Walsingham encounters when he enters high society. No less biting than Holcroft’s caricatures, Robinson tends to draw her satirical portraits with much more humor, from the deceitful socialites Lady Amaranth and the Duke of Heartwing to the ineffectual Dr. Pimpernel and the pompous critic Mr. Gnat. Predictably, despite his innate tendency toward benevolence, Walsingham’s childhood experiences prevent him from becoming a productive member of society as an adult. First, his jealousy and misanthropy are exacerbated when Sidney counteracts his attempts to win the love of the object of his obsession, Isabella Hanbury, and later thwarts all of Walsingham’s encounters with women. In addition, Walsingham’s naïveté makes him easy prey to duplicitous socialites who embroil him in gambling disasters and romantic entanglements. In a long series of disasters, Walsingham loses great sums of money, twice involves a close friend in a duel on his account, clumsily seduces and destroys the life of a young woman who falls in love with him, nearly kills a man who attempts to rob him, and considers suicide on a variety of occasions. Walsingham laments that he is “the most ill-fated of mortals—the Pupil of Nature—the victim of prejudice— the heir to misfortune!—From my infancy I have been the dupe of

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false hopes and imaginary evils: I have alternately trusted the world, and been deceived by my credulity” (470). A reviewer in the British Critic acknowledges Robinson’s point regarding sensibility, writing that “the obvious lesson from this whole story is that uncontrolled passion involves men in misfortune and misery.”61 But more importantly, Robinson also clearly intended to illustrate the degree to which neglect and solitude in one’s childhood can have disastrous social effects later in life. Throughout Walsingham, Robinson repeatedly contrasts her protagonist’s struggles with Sidney’s successes. Sidney, however, hides one of the great secrets of eighteenth-century fiction. In the final pages of the novel, Sidney is revealed to be a woman; Lady Aubrey has forced her daughter to pass as a man in order to maintain their hold on her father’s estate by preventing its passing to the next male relative. Until this revelation, however, Sidney is universally acknowledged as the ideal man—accomplished in all manly pursuits while simultaneously expressing a feminine tenderness and capacity for affection that astonishes and attracts other women. Walsingham describes Sidney as “handsome, polite, accomplished, engaging, and unaffected” (129). Perfecting the best qualities of both genders, Sidney “sung, he danced, he played on the mandolin, and spoke the Italian and French languages with the fluency of a native,” yet he also “fenced like a professor of the science; painted with the correctness of an artist; was expert at all manly exercises; a delightful poet; and a fascinating companion” (129). This final attribute is perhaps the most difficult for Walsingham to accept because Sidney effortlessly charms every woman with whom Walsingham becomes involved. Ironically, in his envy of Sidney’s successes with women, Walsingham interprets Sidney’s behavior as that of a rakish libertine, a character type that at the time was considered a masculine extreme.62 It is true that Robinson balances her masculinization of Sidney by feminizing her depiction of Walsingham as a depressive victim who repeatedly fails to function effectively as a gentleman in society. Julie Shaffer explains that this balance of contrasts raises “questions about the adoptability and changing definitions of masculinity, itself as constructed and shifting in this period as was femininity.”63 According to Shaffer, the hasty marriage that Robinson uses to tie up the novel’s loose ends does not wipe out the illustration she prolongs throughout the work “in which both gender and sexuality are greatly destabilized, unraveling the certainties that continue to be reasserted with every insistence that the sexes are different not only in biology, but in behavior, rights, and roles.”64 As Shaffer points out, it is


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significant that Robinson does not punish Sidney for her transgressive cross-dressing but rewards her, despite the fact that she is merely reabsorbed into the proper role of wife at the novel’s close. Similarly, Eleanor Ty argues that Robinson’s play with gender “demonstrates the unnatural aspects and instability of sociocultural constructions of gender that in turn are the basis for the deployment of wealth and power in late eighteenth-century culture.”65 Robinson raises significant and probing questions about both the arbitrariness of gender distinctions and the arbitrariness of distinctions based upon wealth and privilege. Despite its happy, if abrupt, conclusion, Walsingham is a profoundly dark novel. Walsingham’s perpetual brooding and his rage in response to repeated instances of rejection and ostracism leave an indelible impression on the reader. Chris Cullens has explored the degree to which “the displacement, disorder, and disorganization” of the world of the novel merely serve to reinforce Walsingham’s “‘natural’ condition.”66 Cullens also argues that Sidney’s transgression represents neither liberation nor perversion, but “rather, it is psychologized as blockage—that is, as a temporary liberation purchased at the price of prolonged infantilization, a maternally imposed arrested development for both male and female.”67 Like Walsingham, Sidney is also the victim of irresponsible parenting. Not only is she continually frustrated in her desire to declare her love for Walsingham, she is also clearly tormented by the trap into which her mother has forced her. “What am I, amidst the profusion of wealth which chance has heaped around me?” she asks, “A monster of dissimulation! a wretch, weighed down with guilt! a vile, degraded, infamous, and sordid hypocrite!” (155). Like Walsingham, Sidney pays a high price for her mother’s determination to maintain her fortune and social status. Cullens also insightfully points out the degree to which Robinson underscores her complex exploration of gender transgression with two important episodes that take place at masquerades—a popular social practice in which participants were allowed to use dress and disguise to transgress the borders of gender and class, and one that is often used in the novels of the period to expose the sexual license of the upper classes.68 Even more significantly, Cullens relates these episodes to Robinson’s use of incidents of mistaken identity in the novel in which Walsingham “is repeatedly arrested or suspected as a result of being taken for someone else” and then “compounds the confusion by continually committing the same mistakes with others.”69 Robinson even includes cross-dressing in “The Doublet of Grey,” a poem she inserts into the narrative largely to add Gothic flavor to a chapter

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in which Walsingham is attacked and robbed. Each of these cases of transgressing the boundaries of identity contributes to a sweeping illustration of the destructive potential of artifice and duplicity. As Hugh Trevor had done for Holcroft, Walsingham Ainsforth often serves as Robinson’s mouthpiece for delivering her reformist arguments. For example, Walsingham proposes to a group of high society types, “take the offspring of the noblest parent, and the hovelborn child of adversity—educate them with equal liberality—and the chance is even, that the one exhibits all the attributes of reason, all the graces of illustrious virtue, as proudly as the other.” Walsingham points out, however, that “the most enormous vices are not practised by the humble orders of the community, even with all the disadvantages of low birth and education” (346). During the same conversation, Walsingham boldly proclaims that it is men of letters, not men of titles, who are “the most powerful of the human race, in these momentous times,” specifically because such men can “influence the country by the genuine language of truth and philanthropy” (345). Finally, in the novel’s closing passage, Walsingham makes Robinson’s ultimate point clear when he laments that in the modern world the “demons of art are permitted to oppress with wrongs, while they lift the empty brow of arrogance and pride above the illustrious pupils of GENIUS, TRUTH, and NATURE!” (496). He reminds the reader that “in my opinion, greatness consists in VIRTUE” and not in wealth, title, or social position (496). Hugh Trevor and Walsingham are extremely different novels in style, tone, and content. Nevertheless, both works offer the reader a series of caricatures of the worst examples of the affluent, the titled, and the highly esteemed in contemporary British society. More importantly, both use the experiences and reactions of an embattled man of feeling to illustrate the potential damage caused by those who will stop at nothing to preserve the benefits they reap from a profoundly inequitable social hierarchy.

Th e C hil d o f N ature a s R ef o r mist Spec tator Another embodiment of the man of feeling in late eighteenth-century reformist fiction appears in the figure of the “child of nature,” inspired in part by Rousseau’s conception of the noble savage. Usually raised among the native peoples of Africa or North America and brought to England as an adult, this common figure has a unique perspective that allows him to identify and criticize serious sociocultural problems


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that he witnesses in England, such as the hypocrisy of contemporary religious practice, the mistreatment of women, the inequities of the judicial and prison systems, and a range of other abuses of the contemporary class system. The English version of the child of nature has his origin in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s “Mr. Spectator,” a detached observer of the world around him, whose satiric commentaries on a variety of contemporary conventions and institutions delighted the reading public on a daily basis from March 1711 to December 1712. Novels such as Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and The History of Ophelia (1760) and Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1765–70) build on this example with innocent heroes or heroines who are astonished by their exposure to the hypocrisy of the modern world.70 Writers in late eighteenth-century Britain were also influenced by a new and extremely popular type of satirical novel, the “object narrative” or “novel of circulation,” typified by Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little; or The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog (1751), Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal; or, the Adventures of a Guinea (1760–65), and Smollett’s The Adventures of an Atom (1769), in which an animal, a common object, or, in Smollett’s case, an atom, is embodied with the capacity to view and comment upon the follies of the modern world as it makes its way from one owner to the next. These popular works were constantly imitated in the final decades of the century in such titles as Adventures of a Bank-Note (Thomas Bridges, 1770), A Cork-Screw (Anonymous, 1775), A Hackney Coach (Anonymous, 1781), A Rupee (Helenus Scott, 1782), A Flea (Anonymous, 1785), A Watch (Anonymous, 1788), and Argentum, or Adventures of a Shilling (Anonymous, 1794), not to mention the reputedly pernicious Frailties of Fashion, or the Adventures of an Irish Smock, Interspersed with Whimsical Anecdotes of a Nankeen Pair of Breeches (Anonymous, 1782). The most direct source of influence on the child of nature of the 1790s, however, was Voltaire’s 1767 L’Ingénu, the story of a prior and his sister in Lower Brittany who are reunited with their longlost nephew, a young man who has been raised among the native Hurons of North America. As the prior and his sister busily set about educating the Huron as a proper European, the youth’s refreshing honesty and his utter confusion at the range of modern religious and social conventions allow Voltaire to make biting attacks on contemporary French society, the Catholic church, and the abuses of the French monarchy.

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In 1796 both Elizabeth Inchbald and Robert Bage published novels with protagonists clearly modeled on that of Voltaire’s L’Ingénu. Inchbald’s Nature and Art concerns the difficulties that ensue when the ingenuous young Henry Norwynne returns to England from a childhood spent on the fictional African island of “Zocotora” to live with his uncle, aunt, and cousin, all of whom embody the most superficial values of contemporary social climbers. Henry’s father writes to his family in England to explain how he has approached his son’s education. “I have taught him to love,” he writes, “and to do good to his neighbour, whoever that neighbour may be, and whatever may be his failings. Falsehood of every kind I included in this precept as forbidden, for no one can love his neighbour and deceive him” (56). The culture shock that Henry experiences when he is exposed to the high society of cosmopolitan England is profound. This shock is initially dramatized in a humorous episode in which Henry marvels at his uncle’s wig. When the wig is explained to him as an article of high fashion, Henry compares the practice to that of his familiar savages, who “hang brass nails, wire, buttons, and the entrails of beasts all over them, to give them importance” (59). Henry’s questions and comments concerning aspects of English fashion and manners, and his obstinacy in standing by his unconventional judgments of such matters, cause much consternation in his uncle’s family. Nowhere is this better observed than in his uncle’s attempt to explain the British class system. Henry is told that the poor are born to serve the rich, and if they are dutiful, they will be rewarded in a better world where no such distinctions exist. When told that this world cannot be made more like that better world to come because God has ordained it thus, Henry replies, “How! Has God ordained a distinction to be made, and will not make any himself?” (62). Later Henry refuses to acknowledge the logic of the poor going hungry in a land in which there are ample provisions for all. His uncle concludes that the boy is either too young or too stupid to understand the issue. The family attributes Henry’s perpetual state of confusion to his having paid a “childish inattention” to the “proper signification” of words: “He would call compliments, lies—Reserve, he would call pride—stateliness, affectation—and for the words war and battle, he constantly substituted the word massacre” (63). When explained some of the finer points of the law, young Henry infuriates his uncle by consistently interchanging the word persecute for prosecute (68). As Henry and his cousin William grow to adulthood, Inchbald continually contrasts Henry’s character with William’s, thereby contrasting nature with artifice. Henry devotes himself to benevolent


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acts; for example, when William misleads and seduces the innocent Hannah Primrose, Henry and his beloved Rebecca Rymer take the imputation of shame upon themselves by taking care of Hannah’s abandoned infant rather than allowing the child to die. William, however, like his father before him, devotes himself purely to a successful career and a high social position; he marries an aristocratic bride and climbs the ranks from lawyer to judge. William’s blindness to his own hypocrisy is beautifully symbolized in the novel’s climactic and most memorable scene when he passes a sentence of death on the fallen Hannah without recognizing her as the woman he himself had abandoned to a life of poverty and desperation. Despite William’s acquisition of wealth and position, however, Inchbald makes it clear that these “did not render him happy,” nor did Henry’s poverty and ostracism “doom him to misery” (133–34). As she draws her tale to a close Inchbald compares the miserable endings of William and his parents to the happy existence of Henry and Rebecca, who establish a humble home with Henry’s father in which the poor are celebrated for their advantages and the rich are pitied. Henry’s final words call for the poor to stop paying homage to those with wealth and position, for only then, he says, “instantaneously the whole idolatrous worship will cease—the idol will be broken” (154). As in Hugh Trevor and Walsingham, Inchbald’s principal attack in this novel is aimed directly at a profoundly injurious class system. Like Henry Norwynne, the title character of Bage’s Hermsprong, or Man As He Is Not is a European who has been raised among “savages”—in this case the Nawdoessie tribe of Native Americans in the territory of Michigan.71 Bage links the novel to the tradition of Mr. Spectator by opening with an allusion to the initial Spectator essay, which opens with “a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure, ’till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an Author.”72 Bage sarcastically suggests that his reader may enjoy his work more “when they know something of its author” (57). Indicating that his novel will focus on issues of class and social distinction, however, he continues by allowing that “the question now, perhaps, would not be so much, whether he is tall or short, round faced or long; as, How does he dress? Is he a person of any fashion? What is his rank? What is his condition?” (57). Clearly the contemporary obsessions with identity and artifice will once again fall under attack. Bage’s unusual hero Charles Hermsprong values the Godwinian ideal of absolute truth and sincerity in all of his social interactions.

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Hermsprong avows that “I hold a manly freedom of thinking and speaking, amongst the most estimable qualities of man” (97), and he describes the education his father gave him in terms that recall Henry Norwynne’s: “It was imposed on me as a duty . . . to speak, when I did speak, with the spirit of conscious truth; and to act, when I did act, with the spirit of conscious justice” (171). Hermsprong’s philosophy of life has been strongly influenced by the Native American tribe among whom he was raised. He describes his idyllic childhood in this tribe, focusing particularly on the figure of the tribe’s chief, or “Great Beaver,” Lontac, a man who embodies a profound respect for other cultures when he welcomes Hermsprong’s family to join his tribe. Lontac’s open acceptance of these strangers is not returned in full measure, however. When Hermsprong’s French Catholic mother attempts to convert Lontac to Christianity, the chief replies with exceptional patience and respect but refuses to agree that Christian beliefs have greater claim to credibility than the religion passed down to him from his own ancestors. When the adult Hermsprong travels to England, he carries his Native American values with him and becomes a great philanthropist to those in need. Nevertheless, his philanthropy and growing popularity incur the violent hatred of the local gentry and clergy when Hermsprong openly identifies and renounces their abuses of both women and members of the lower classes. Hermsprong faces a particularly formidable opponent when he meets the arrogant Lord Grondale. When Grondale insists that he must know more of Hermsprong’s fortune and rank before determining the suitability of his acquaintance with his daughter, Caroline Campinet, Hermsprong coolly replies that “my fortune . . . kings might envy; it is equal to my desires. As to rank,—I have been taught only to distinguish men by virtue” (82). Hermsprong is also quick to alienate the local rector, Dr. Blick, by challenging his attempt to exploit his parishioners’ fear of dying. To the delight of the villagers, Hermsprong insists that fearing death is illogical because it is a natural part of life and because the religious are taught to regard it as a “passport to eternal joys” (104). The women and working-class characters Hermsprong meets are charmed by his plain manner of speaking the truth and by his professions of independence from oppressive social institutions. “I cannot learn to offer incense at the shrines of wealth and power,” Hermsprong protests, “nor any shrines but of probity and virtue. . . . Nor can I learn to suppress the sentiments of a freeborn mind,” he adds, “from any fear, religious or political” (240). Many of Hermsprong’s statements and beliefs closely echo the tenets


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professed by Godwin in Political Justice. Hermsprong’s kindness to a poor curate, for example, results in a Godwinian pronouncement on gratitude: “I hope . . . we may be able soon to get rid of the word obligation . . . with all its humiliating appendages” (115). When told that he is “accomplished,” Hermsprong asks whether the term is meant to reference his honor, honesty, learning, knowledge, virtue, and integrity. When the woman explains that “accomplished” refers to “every thing that is elegant and genteel,” Hermsprong politely fears that “I have not hit upon the proper ingredients” (124), thus once again making his values perfectly clear, if only to the reader. Of particular interest is Bage’s devotion to the topic of women’s rights in this novel. Hermsprong often echoes Wollstonecraft’s arguments that women’s minds are constrained by their limited education and that women have been trained to believe that they are inferior to men. Like Wollstonecraft, Hermsprong argues for a reform in women’s education that must begin with the manner in which women are treated. “The change,” he argues, “must begin with men. Lovers must mix a little more wisdom with their adorations. Parents, in their modes of education, must make less distinction of sex” (214). Later Hermsprong extends this argument, suggesting that “my recommendation to the ladies would be, to acquire minds to reason, understandings to judge; for when they will take the trouble to reason a little, and judge for themselves, they do it so well, that propriety of action must follow of necessity” (253). Lord Grondale and Dr. Blick associate Hermsprong’s newfangled ideas with those of Thomas Paine’s controversial Rights of Man (1791–92) and ultimately attempt to have him imprisoned as a traitor, using his purported knowledge of Paine and his assumed support of the French constitution as evidence before the court. The novel’s conclusion may be read as a reply to that of Caleb Williams as Hermsprong dares Grondale to experiment with what “wealth and power, aided by malignity and the spirit of the times, can do against innocence” (290). As Caleb does, Hermsprong relies on the promise of speaking truth to power, and he easily wins his case by doing so. Nevertheless, as discussed in the Introduction, Bage ultimately undercuts Hermsprong’s effectiveness as a symbol of the virtue of mental clarity over titles and riches by revealing him to be the rightful Lord Grondale in the novel’s final chapters. While Hermsprong, Caroline, and the friends in their immediate circle continue to devote themselves to live in accordance with their political ideals, the social circle they form at the novel’s end does not suggest that their example will necessarily be a reforming one in their local community. Clearly Bage did not intend to present

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a character who eschews property altogether, but one who represents a new conception of proprietorship, a young man descended from a French mother and an English father who embodies rightful notions of entitlement, and a man whose New World education empowers him to counteract the corruption of contemporary Britain.73 In Voltaire’s dark L’Ingénu, the potential of the Huron’s vision for social change is gradually obliterated by the widespread vice he encounters in the world. The English reformists who borrowed Voltaire’s satiric approach in this work, however, make a significant change in the tone of their conclusions. Rather than ending in defeat and disillusionment, the ingenuous heroes of Hermsprong and Nature and Art devote themselves to life within a humble community of likeminded family and friends, dedicated to enacting their reformist values within their own circles. It is true that these circles are not shown to alter the political opinions of society on a grand scale. The reform that these writers worked toward is concentrated not on the novel’s characters, but, significantly, on the novels’ readers.

Th e P ro mis e o f the Yo ung Phi losophe r The hero who perhaps best exhibits those virtues most highly valued by the reformists of the 1790s is Holcroft’s aptly named Frank Henley of Anna St Ives. Often called the first Jacobin novel, Anna St Ives recasts both the epistolary format and the plotline of Richardson’s Clarissa, although Holcroft replaces Richardson’s vulnerable heroine with an eloquent spokeswoman for his reformist mission. Anna’s dilemma lies in the choice of a husband. Her father wishes her to marry the socially prominent Coke Clifton, largely indistinguishable from Clarissa’s Lovelace, but Anna prefers Frank Henley, the freethinking son of the gardener on her father’s estate. Frank has wisely counteracted the influence of his corrupt father, Abimelech, by pursuing his own education and by relying on the guidance of the father of his friend Oliver Trenchard.74 Damned as a “philosophical leveller” by the Critical Review, Frank epitomizes everything that the idealistic Anna desires in a potential mate75 Anna’s expectations are nowhere more clear than when she spells them out for Clifton, telling him, “you imagine you have a right to attend to your appetites, and pursue your pleasures. I hope to see my husband forgetting himself, or rather placing self-gratification in the pursuit of universal good, deaf to the calls of passion, willing to encounter adversity, reproof, nay death, the champion of truth, and the determined the unrelenting enemy of error” (II:152). Coke Clifton is not put off, however,


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by the superhuman bar that Anna sets for him. She continues by asking him a series of more pointed questions: Dare you receive a blow, or suffer yourself falsely to be called liar, or coward, without seeking revenge, or what honour calls satisfaction? Dare you think the servant that cleans your shoes is your equal, unless not so wise or good a man; and your superior, if wiser and better? Dare you suppose mind has no sex, and that woman is not by nature the inferior of man?— . . . Dare you think that riches, rank, and power, are usurpations; and that wisdom and virtue only can claim distinction? Dare you make it the business of your whole life to overturn these prejudices, and to promote among mankind that spirit of universal benevolence which shall render them all equals, all brothers, all stripped of their artificial and false wants, all participating the labour requisite to produce the necessities of life, and all combining in one universal effort of mind, for the progress of knowledge, the destruction of error, and the spreading of eternal truth? (II:152)

Astonished by what he calls Anna’s “energy” in this passionate discourse, Clifton promises that he will “dare do any thing, dare promise any thing” (II:152). Naïvely, Anna takes his sincerity at face value, not realizing the degree to which he has simply been swept up in his attraction to her. Even more naïvely, she persists in her idealistic scheme to marry and reform Clifton despite the fact that her list of features of the ideal husband perfectly describes Frank Henley and despite the fact that she and Frank have acknowledged their mutual affection.76 Frank’s humble social position is a critical aspect of his appeal to Anna and to the reader, as Holcroft consistently compares his intelligence and carefully measured sensibility against the hedonistic Clifton, who is characteristically unable to control his passions. Anna praises Frank because “he does not endeavour to make his principles accord with his practice, but regulates his practice by his principles” (II:301). Frank’s unusual qualities are perhaps best viewed, however, through the eyes of his astonished rival Clifton, who complains that Frank “has no sense of inferiority. He stands as erect, and speaks with as little embarrassment and as loudly as the best of us: nay boldly asserts that neither riches, rank, nor birth have any claim” (II:84–85). Clifton bristles at the “absurdity” of Frank’s belief in the equality of mankind, describing him with great revulsion to a friend as “one of your levellers!” (II:85). Significantly, Clifton’s chief grievance involves Frank’s radical ideas regarding the social hierarchy. Lionel Stevenson has even called Frank “the first proletarian hero in an English novel.”77

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Like many of the other sentimental heroes discussed in this chapter, Frank plays the role of superhero on a number of occasions.78 When Anna and her father travel to France early in the novel, Frank bravely suffers a wound in protecting the party from highwaymen. In true reformist fashion, he goes one step further and converts one of the bandits to the new philosophy. While in France, Frank offends contemporary propriety by preventing a duel in which Coke Clifton had become embroiled, thus earning Clifton’s hatred. It is not long before Frank is called upon to rescue Clifton once again, when Clifton rashly hurls himself into a lake in a ravine to demonstrate his courage to Anna. When the St Ives family travels back to England, Frank supersedes all his former heroics when he rescues the entire party from drowning in a storm by guiding their lifeboat safely ashore. Perhaps the most notable element of these many rescue scenes is how few of them actually involve Anna herself, whom Holcroft is at pains to present as the strong and independent embodiment of the reformist ideal of woman. When Clifton has both Frank and Anna kidnapped toward the end of the final volume, Anna does not become the damsel in distress as Clarissa Harlowe does, nor does she simply hope for help from the outside. Boldly defying Clifton’s attempts to rape her, Anna asks him whether he expects her to “sink before unruly passion” or to “stand in awe of vice” (II:369). “Base threats, unmanly terrors, and brute violence are your despicable engines!” she tells him. “They are impotent!—They turn upon yourself; me they cannot harm!—I am above you!” (II:370). Anna continues by warning Clifton, “if you mean to deal me blows or death, here I stand ready to suffer: but till I am dead, or senseless, I defy you to do me harm!” (II:371). Anna’s strength and presence of mind shock Clifton and weaken his resolve. Finally, she escapes her imprisonment by climbing over a tall wall and goes on to play a key role in rescuing Frank from being murdered by Clifton’s hired men. Holcroft’s frequent use of the rescue motif thus becomes a key to understanding the novel’s political message. His variations on this common theme illuminate exactly what is unique about Anna’s personality: she epitomizes what women can be and should be allowed to be.79 Equally unusual is the fact that Frank repeatedly finds himself in the position of having to rescue his rival for Anna’s affections. In Anna St Ives, the aristocrat has literally become a liability who must continually be saved from his own idiotic behavior by the rational man of the laboring class. Like many of his predecessors in the 1790s, Charlotte Smith’s “almost faultless” George Delmont, the hero of her final novel The Young Philosopher, was clearly modeled on Rousseau’s St Preux.80 Like


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Henry Norwynne and Charles Hermsprong, George embodies many qualities of Rousseau’s child of nature, educated as a freethinker trained to balance reason and sensibility. That Smith intended George as the embodiment of the antipatriarchal male is evident even in descriptions of his appearance. The besotted character Martha Goldthorp describes the aspects of George’s “manly beauty” in detail, including his close-cropped hair, which with his rustic clothes associate him with contemporary reformists and revolutionaries (X:61).81 His reformist sympathies are clear in the sentiments he expresses and in his behavior. Like Hermsprong, his unusual views frequently alienate him from relatives and social acquaintances who are shocked by what he considers to be “man’s best prerogatives,” that is, “thinking, saying what he thinks, and, where he can, acting up to his thoughts” (X:82). George’s education was provided entirely by his freethinking mother, and as a result his values are entirely the opposite of those of his conservative elder brother Adolphus, against whom Smith contrasts him throughout the novel.82 Unlike Fleetwood, when George is sent to school at Eton, his philanthropic tendencies begin to grow. He becomes renowned for his inability to refuse a request for money, and Smith explains that “he was led to enquire if the complicated misery he every day saw . . . could be the fruits of the very best laws that could be framed in a state of society said to be the most perfect among what are called the civilized nations of the world” (X:24). At the university George finds it difficult to settle upon the right vocation. Neither medicine nor divinity appeals to him, he shuns the practice of law because it feeds on the troubles of others, and his mother has carefully curbed the “ardent spirit” that often leads young men into the army, training him to ask himself “‘if I try to do as those men have done, shall I really acquire glory; and shall I run no risque of being a curse rather than a benefit to the world?’” (X:34). Having no ambition for social status, George ultimately repudiates the aristocratic lifestyle of his family and chooses to devote himself to the life of a simple farmer on his small estate, Upwood. Smith praises George’s acquisition of “a way of looking at whatever proposition was presented to him, . . . in every light it would bear” (X:57). This open-mindedness stems not only from his mother’s teachings but also from the influence of perhaps the most fully realized reformist mentor in the fiction of the period: Mr. Armitage, a thinly veiled portrait of Godwin who functions as a second mouthpiece for reformist values in the novel. Armitage is blamed by such conservative characters as the outspoken Mrs. Crewkherne for a detrimental effect on George’s thinking. In Mrs. Crewkherne’s view, the world has fallen

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on evil times, and writers like Armitage—who encourage the laboring class to read pamphlets and newspapers and to ask questions and engage in debates about the law and the government—are the cause. In her eyes men like Armitage “would dissolve all the chains of due subordination and obedience, and set the mechanic and the labourer a thinking when they ought to be working for their superiors; and who avail themselves of the foolish inexperience of wrong-headed youth, to teach them not to follow in the paths that have led up their progenitors to honours, and titles, and preferments, and fortune, but to find something they call reasons against the most eligible objects of human pursuit” (X:18). Mr. Armitage’s offense to Mrs. Crewkherne and her fellow conservatives lies in his reputation as a freethinker. All other virtues are disfigured by this simple fact. “In most of the charities of life he was exemplary,” Smith explains, “the best master, and the best friend; his humanity to the poor, and his benevolence to all the world, were bounded only by his circumstances, which were not affluent; but he dared, in many respects, to live for himself; and, conscious of the equity and integrity of his own heart, served God less according to the rules prescribed in the country in which he resided, than according to certain ideas of his own” (X:63). The list of Armitage’s offenses includes his having supported the cause of the American and, worse yet, the French revolutionaries. Rumor had it that he had been present at the storming of the Bastille and that “he had applauded the speech of Mirabeau, in the Jeu-de-Paumes” (X:64). Worst of all, Armitage had published a pamphlet in which he encouraged the French not to allow the initial tide of revolution to be miscarried into violence and “hazarded a few opinions on the rights of nations, and the purposes of government” (X:64), a description that calls to mind both Paine’s Rights of Man and the reformist pamphlets of the Jacobin corresponding societies of the 1790s. Another of Armitage’s philosophical tenets bears a particular resemblance to Godwin’s philosophy: like Godwin, Armitage feels strongly that money should be available to any and all who need it. To him, “true friendship consisted in a mutual communication of the good, and a mutual alleviation of the evils of life” (X:222). Toward the end of The Young Philosopher, Armitage takes an opportunity to answer Mrs. Crewkherne’s spiteful accusations. His defense of freethinking is passionately articulated and is followed by a passage in which he qualifies the definition of “Jacobin,” among the many names Mrs. Crewkherne has called him, which include “an atheist, a deist, a freethinker, an illuminy, . . . a jacobin, and a republican”


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(X:302). “If you mean . . . that I either approve, or ever did approve of the violence, cruelty, and perfidy, with which the French have polluted the cause of freedom, you are greatly mistaken,” he tells her, arguing that the bloody violence following in the years after the overthrow of the French monarchy has only served to delay the day “when rational freedom . . . shall be established in the world” (X:306). Armitage’s repudiations demonstrate his loyalty to his country despite the fact that there is little hope expressed in the novel for its reform. The broad range of reformist heroes of the 1790s clearly embodies their authors’ anxieties about the proper balancing of reason and emotion, of sense and sensibility. From this array of characters, four stand out as the fullest embodiments of the reformist ideal of the man of feeling in figures who merge qualities of the child of nature with those of the young philosopher: Inchbald’s Henry Norwynne, Bage’s Charles Hermsprong, Holcroft’s Frank Henley, and Smith’s George Delmont. The writers who pushed beyond the flawed protagonists of their colleagues’ fiction to present their readers with heroes who boldly embody reformist values and radical political opinions certainly ran the risk of being labeled and dismissed as Jacobins by more conservative readers. Nevertheless, these writers attempted to do more than merely open their reader’s eyes to the destructive aspects of particular social behaviors by modeling for them both reformist thought and more constructive social conduct. For these reformists the true hero was the one who could balance a deep sense of compassion with reason and cling to his “new philosophical” values in the face of a nation struggling to maintain its age-old class hierarchy. The next chapter will examine how these writers and others like them worked to show readers how women’s complicity with men’s antisocial behavior and their own indulgence in excessive sensibility contributed to their oppression and how the status and exploitation of women signaled the need for reform on a grand scale.


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Chapter 2

I nca rcerated Women and the U ses of the Gothic

T

he dramatic political debates that embroiled the English in the 1790s were not limited to discussions concerning the rights of men alone. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft famously broke new ground with her controversial A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and inspired similar treatises by other early feminists, such as Mary Hays’s Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in behalf of Women (1798) and Mary Robinson’s A Letter to the Women of England (1799). These writers and others who wished to see a reform of the status of women in contemporary Britain also used the format of the popular novel to draw attention to the ways in which women were oppressed by their domestic duties, by the limited professional options open to them, and by their extremely limited legal status. For Wollstonecraft, the subjection of women was one among the many injurious effects of the “unnatural distinctions” perpetuated by “the respect paid to property.”1 Wollstonecraft claims that “the society is not properly organized which does not compel men and women to discharge their respective duties, by making it the only way to acquire that countenance from their fellow-creatures, which every human being wishes some way to attain” (V:212). She argues that “the preposterous distinctions of rank, which render civilization a curse, . . . corrupt, almost equally, every class of people, because respectability is not attached to the discharge of the relative duties of life, but to the station” (V:215). While Wollstonecraft allows that

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there are “loop-holes” in this system “out of which a man may creep, and dare to think and act for himself,” she argues that for a woman “it is an herculean task, because she has difficulties peculiar to her sex to overcome, which require almost super-human powers” (V:215). For Wollstonecraft and other reformists like her, the plight of contemporary women was intimately connected to the larger problem of a profoundly inequitable class system. Thus, in arguing for the reform of the status and treatment of women, such writers simultaneously argued for a more sweeping reform of Britain’s social hierarchy. Hays, Wollstonecraft’s friend and fellow reformist, also recognized a relationship between the oppression of women and the widespread inequities of the social order. In her Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in behalf of Women, Hays extends Wollstonecraft’s efforts to expose erroneous assumptions about women’s characters and abilities and supports her claims with evidence based on reason and drawn from Biblical scripture. Hays contends that men maintain their power over women “by the same law by which the strong oppress the weak, and the rich the poor; and by which the great and powerful, crush the friendless, and him who has none to help him.”2 Hays asks her male readers to reconsider whether they “maintain [their] empire by force alone; or if it is founded on the eternal and immutable laws of nature, and supported by justice and reason” (28). Making the issue’s relevance to the equality of all human beings perfectly clear, she asserts, “I am pleading the cause of the men, more, if possible, than that of the women” (29). For many women writing in the 1790s, the conventions of the wildly popular Gothic novel provided the perfect context for signifying the subjugation of women. Because of their tendency to explore the irrational and perverse aspects of human experience, Gothic novels seem to have flourished in the late eighteenth century as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. The terrifying and suspenseful plots of these works often include elements of the supernatural and incidents of transgressive sexual license such as adultery, incest, and homosexuality as well as entrapment and murder. The Gothic novel tends to foreground the imagination and the emotions over reason, a characteristic that indicates its relationship to the novel of sensibility. Moreover, the episodic structure of many Gothic novels in which the tale of adventure is transformed into the flight and pursuit narrative and such novels’ interest in crime and the criminal world suggest a commonality with the eighteenth-century picaresque novel. Despite their similarity to other forms, however, Gothic novels, in the words of George Haggerty, “resist the mechanisms of repression and work


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to subvert literary expectations and cultural assumptions.”3 Thus, by its very nature, Gothic fiction tends to work against cultural norms. “You can’t think how frightful the stories are,” attests a servant in Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher, “—all about tapestry waving in the wind, a bloody dagger, and voices calling at midnight, howlings in the air, and dark passages, and coffins full of bones, and poor young ladies got among these alarming objects; quite shocking, I’ll assure you” (X:114). Indeed, it was the recurrent theme of the pursuit and confinement of women that made the Gothic novel such fertile ground for feminists who wished to illustrate the oppression of women in graphic terms. Gothic conventions allowed writers much more scope in portraying victimized women who are required to act with fortitude and courage without sacrificing social propriety.4 Among the most popular Gothic works published during the 1790s were the novels of Ann Radcliffe, all of which reconfigure the damselin-distress scenario in some form. In The Romance of the Forest (1791), for example, Radcliffe’s heroine Adeline de St Pierre is kidnapped and imprisoned in a pleasure palace by the licentious Marquis de Montalt; in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Emily St Aubert is confined in a castle by the wicked Montoni; Julia Mazzini of A Sicilian Romance (1790) flees her imperious father and ultimately discovers that he has kept her mother imprisoned in the dungeon of the family mansion for fifteen years. Such scenarios naturally raise questions about how power is structured in the modern world and invite readers to imagine how an individual woman might challenge that structure. Diane Long Hoeveler has used the term “Gothic feminism” to describe the works of women novelists who were drawn to Gothic conventions “because they could explore within it their fantasized overthrow of the public realm, . . . in favor of the creation of a new privatized, female world.”5 Beginning with a brief look at how William Godwin adapted the Gothic to a political purpose in composing Caleb Williams, this chapter will focus on how such writers as Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Smith used Gothic conventions to call their readers’ attention specifically to the plight of contemporary women.

I n c a rc er atio n in C A L E B W I L L I A M S an d THE WRONGS OF WOMAN; OR, MARIA Caleb Williams owes much of its success to Godwin’s creative amalgamation of a wide variety of popular Gothic conventions.6 In the first volume, the story of the villainous aristocrat Barnabas Tyrrel and

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his abuse of his helpless cousin Emily Melville is virtually indistinguishable from other Gothic plots of the period.7 The most significant difference involves Godwin’s transfer of the Gothic setting from the traditional castle or monastery in France, Italy, or Spain to the country home of a contemporary English aristocrat. Moving the Gothic story line from the continent obliterates the Gothic novel’s obsession with Catholicism as an engine of social destruction, allowing Godwin to focus instead on the particular abuses of the contemporary British class system he wished to expose. When Emily Melville dies after a crescendo of Tyrrel’s abuses, Caleb Williams strikes off in an entirely original direction in which Caleb himself takes over the conventional role of the persecuted heroine.8 Once the prying Caleb uncovers the secret of a crime in his employer Falkland’s past, Falkland’s response perfectly illustrates the power differential between master and servant in eighteenth-century Britain. As Kate Ferguson Ellis explains, Falkland accuses Caleb of theft, has him imprisoned, and, after his escape, has him trailed from place to place, thus turning Caleb’s “scopophilia back upon him until the whole world becomes for Caleb a classic Foucaultean institution of confinement.”9 The episodes of Caleb’s confinement play a dual role in the novel. First, they allow Godwin to add a biting critique of contemporary prison conditions to his analysis of “Things as They Are.” Drawing heavily on details borrowed from John Howard’s 1777 study The State of the Prisons, Godwin uses footnotes in key passages to link his depiction of contemporary jails with Howard’s work and to assure the reader that his details are based on current fact.10 Second, Caleb’s repeated imprisonment and his carefully described escapes allow Godwin to create a level of terror and suspense that effectively keeps the reader in the novel’s grip as it powerfully illustrates how easily social status can be abused. Godwin’s experiment in Caleb Williams clearly influenced Wollstonecraft’s idea of the possibilities inherent in the novel for fostering reform. In her first novel, Mary, A Fiction (1788), Wollstonecraft experimented with the female bildungsroman, anatomizing the psychological development of a young woman of high sensibility and one “who has thinking powers.”11 When she began to plan a second novel nearly a decade later, she set out to blend her earlier experiment with sentimental fiction with the Gothic scenario of the victimized woman. As Caleb Williams illustrated aspects of Godwin’s arguments in Political Justice, Wollstonecraft’s novel would translate into fiction the observations she published in A Vindication of the Rights


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of Woman and perhaps even plans she may have been forming for a sequel to the Vindication.12 In his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Godwin writes that Wollstonecraft labored over The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria in the twelve months leading up to her death in September 1797. Godwin wrote that “the purpose and structure . . . of the work, had long formed a favourite subject of meditation with its author, and she judged them capable of producing an important effect.”13 Godwin complained that The Wrongs of Woman departed from his own conception of the novel in its emphasis on emotion and feeling over incident. Arguing that each new element of feeling should be revealed through a new incident in the plot, he dismissed Maria’s story as a commonplace, overly emotional tale of a brutish husband.14 In a letter to Godwin dated September 4, 1796, however, Wollstonecraft defended her work by writing that “there is some thing in my writings more valuable, than in the productions of some people on whom you bestow warm eulogiums—I mean more mind . . . more of the observations of my own senses, more of the combining of my own imagination—the effusions of my own feelings and passions than the cold workings of the brain on the materials procured by the senses and imagination of other writers.”15 Wollstonecraft obviously had her own vision of how she would explore the influence of culture and society on a particular woman’s private life.16 From the beginning it is clear that Wollstonecraft intended Maria’s life story to illustrate a worst-case scenario. As a young wife, Maria describes the mounting abuses she suffers at the hands of her husband George Venables, first in instances of ill treatment and later with his adultery, his squandering of his finances, and even his attempt to sell Maria herself as a sexual partner to one of his cronies. The crisis of the novel centers around Maria’s attempt to end her marriage by her own declaration and to flee the country with the money that is rightfully her own. When her actions prompt her husband to imprison her in a private madhouse, Wollstonecraft cleverly calls attention to the Gothic conventions she will employ and refigure, invoking a typical Gothic setting and then concentrating on her heroine’s emotional state: “Abodes of horror have frequently been described, and castles, filled with spectres and chimeras, conjured up by the magic spell of genius to harrow the soul, and absorb the wondering mind. But, formed of such stuff as dreams are made of, what were they to the mansion of despair, in one corner of which Maria sat, endeavouring to recall her scattered thoughts!” (I:85).17 For Wollstonecraft’s purposes, Maria’s imprisonment serves as a perfect metaphor for the vulnerability of

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women to the men who hold power over them. Paralleling Falkland’s manipulations of Caleb Williams, the ease with which Venables has Maria proclaimed mad and imprisoned signifies the helplessness of a married woman as the legal property of her husband. Similarly, in Walsingham, Mary Robinson includes an episode in which a vulnerable young woman is imprisoned in a madhouse by her family. Robinson explains that “a husband who wanted to have a troublesome wife taken care of—a libertine who wished to provide for a mistress, when the edge of passion became blunted by satiety—or a man of refined taste, who sought to secure unguarded innocence, found infinite advantages in the subduing atmosphere of the all-potent mind-mill” (362).18 Maria’s confessional narrative in The Wrongs of Woman parallels that of Caleb Williams in several important ways.19 First of all, both Maria and Caleb describe their reading and how they were affected by it. Both narrators refer to their own act of penning their memoirs, and the novels share a self-conscious tone in which the narrator raises questions about the relationship between reading, writing, and political action.20 Moreover, as Caleb describes the psychological anguish of entrapment in referring both to prison and to his relationship with Falkland, Maria relates her imprisonment in the madhouse to her marriage, comparing the married woman to a bird in a trap (I:138) and stating that “marriage had bastilled me for life” (I:146). Like Caleb, Maria is ultimately made a social outcast and public criminal when a newspaper advertisement publishes an account of her “crimes” against her husband. Finally, Godwin exposes the power of public perceptions of class when Caleb continually fails to exonerate himself from Falkland’s accusations by speaking the truth. Maria also fails to free herself by relying upon the truth: first in declaring her marriage null and void when her husband’s abuses exceed her idea of what a wife should have to bear, and later in appealing to the court to recognize her right as a human being to follow a law of truth that overrides any man-made legal system. Neither Caleb nor Maria succeeds in their attempts to gain public recognition of their persecution; indeed, both manage to make their situations worse merely in attempting to voice the wrongs they have suffered. The public proves unwilling to overlook both Caleb’s inferiority as a member of the lower class and Maria’s inferiority to her husband by virtue of her gender. While it is difficult to tease apart Wollstonecraft’s plans for concluding her unfinished novel from Godwin’s editing of the notes and fragmented passages she left, it appears that she intended to take the situation of the abused woman to the extreme.21 Wollstonecraft


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makes a direct attack on bias endemic to the judicial system when a judge upholds a bed and board separation for Maria and Venables, but leaves all of Maria’s family inheritance under her husband’s control. Wollstonecraft attacks contemporary prejudices when Maria chooses to marry herself to her fellow captive Henry Darnford, bypassing a legal ceremony by privileging their shared spiritual connection and, in doing so, giving up any chance of holding a “respectable” position in society. Wollstonecraft’s notes also suggest that she planned for Maria to be abandoned by Darnford and to attempt suicide. Ultimately, however, Maria would find a renewed commitment to life in her role as a mother and would establish an all-female household in defiance of an overbearing patriarchal culture. Gary Kelly has placed The Wrongs of Woman in the context of Wollstonecraft’s inconstant attitude to Rousseau and his works, writing that the importance of the themes of human suffering and folly in the novel, as well as in her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), reflects Rousseau’s continued influence on her thinking despite her excoriation of many of his theories concerning the character of women in the Vindication.22 If Mary, A Fiction explored some of the problems a heroine may face in subscribing to a Rousseauvian foregrounding of the emotions, The Wrongs of Woman presents these dangers more subtly but far more critically. Maria exemplifies both the general dangers inherent in the highly sentimental personality and the specific danger that comes of idealizing a particular man.23 While some readers have criticized the projected conclusion of The Wrongs of Woman, arguing that the novel suffers from Wollstonecraft’s defiant clinging to her belief in the importance of individual feeling, it is clear that Wollstonecraft intended to offer Maria as an example of what can become of the woman of feeling in the contemporary world rather than as a model for women’s conduct.24 As Janet Todd has pointed out, certainly it is “the misfortunes of Maria rather than her expressed argument that deliver the message.”25 Moreover, it is important to recognize that Wollstonecraft does not focus on the misfortunes of merely one individual woman. In the “Author’s Preface” to The Wrongs of Woman, she clarifies her ambitious intention “of exhibiting the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society” (I:83).26 As Godwin does in Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft extends her catalog of the wrongs of woman by augmenting Maria’s experiences with those of a variety of minor characters. For example, the keeper in her madhouse, Jemima, describes a life history not unlike that of

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Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, including a stepmother’s neglect, her rape by an employer, a self-induced abortion, and a financially successful if dangerous career as a prostitute.27 Other women’s stories are also included, such as those of the destitute widow Peggy for whom Maria attempts to raise money, the mistress who is impregnated and abandoned by Maria’s husband, and the pathetic madwoman in the cell adjoining Maria’s, all of whom contribute to a dark picture of the inequities and abuses that women suffered at all levels of contemporary society. The society that Wollstonecraft depicts through the lens of these women’s sufferings is a profoundly corrupt and damaging one, from the highest political and judicial levels to domestic life in the private home. Elaborating the Wrongs of Woman: Mary Hays and Mary Robinson It can be argued that Wollstonecraft’s aim to illustrate the wrongs of woman in the format of a novel was more fully realized by Hays in The Victim of Prejudice, which she published in 1799.28 To publish a novel so clearly related to Wollstonecraft’s objectives was a courageous move in the violent turn of public opinion that clouded Wollstonecraft’s reputation following Godwin’s 1798 publication of her Posthumous Works, including The Wrongs of Woman, and his scandalous Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Like Wollstonecraft’s Maria, Hays’s heroine Mary Raymond exemplifies the plight of a woman subjected to a life of tragedy despite her intelligence and innate virtue. As a young orphan, Mary is raised by a kindly guardian, but as an adolescent she learns a tough lesson about the crushing power of reputation when she is told that she cannot marry the young man she loves because of her mother’s notorious history. Mary is horrified to learn that her mother’s misplaced love for a degenerate man had led her from betrayal and abandonment to prostitution, to murder, and ultimately to public execution. In contemporary England, Hays is careful to make clear, such a family history cannot be overcome, even in the next generation. Mary’s disappointment in learning that her mother’s history precludes her marrying the man she loves is compounded by a series of repeated outrages she suffers at the hands of a vicious aristocrat, Sir Peter Osborne. Hays cleverly foreshadows Mary’s recurrent troubles with Sir Peter in a series of symbolic episodes set during Mary’s childhood. In one scene Mary is tempted to steal grapes from Sir Peter’s neighboring estate and is caught by a party of young men. One of the


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young men calls her “a true daughter of Eve” and brutally attempts to kiss her by force (14). In another episode Mary tries to protect a frightened hare that Sir Peter is hunting; in his frustration, the nobleman strikes her several times with his whip before seizing her and kissing her “with an odious violence” (22). In both of these episodes the vulnerable Mary is shocked by startling acts of physical abuse and sexual violence that ominously foreshadow the experiences she will suffer as an adult. Hays reshapes elements borrowed from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa as she develops Mary’s life story. Sir Peter’s incessant attempts to entrap and seduce Mary clearly recall the similar behavior of Pamela’s relentless employer, Mr. B. Like Mr. B., Sir Peter eventually abandons his plan to seduce Mary and offers her his hand in marriage, but while Pamela eventually does accept Mr. B. as a husband, Mary consistently rebuffs Sir Peter’s many proposals. Predictably, Mary’s repeated rejections drive Sir Peter to greater lengths in his attempts to dominate her. Like Clarissa’s Lovelace, he eventually engineers Mary’s abduction, imprisons her in his home, and rapes her. Hays takes great pains to make Sir Peter’s crime clear without referring to it in a manner that would scandalize her readers. In an emotional passage that recalls Clarissa’s passionate language and eventual loss of reason after being raped by Lovelace, Mary’s narrative breaks into short, staccato phrases separated by dashes as she describes Sir Peter’s assault: “Deaf to my remonstrances, to my supplications,—regardless of my tears, my rage, my despair,—his callous heart, his furious and uncontrollable vehemence,—Oh! that I could for ever blot from my remembrance,—oh! that I could conceal from myself,—what, rendered desperate, I no longer care to hide from the world!—I suffered a brutal violation” (116–17). This passage is followed by a line of asterisks that mark a break in the narrative before Mary resumes with the details of the lingering physical illness that followed the assault. The litany of Mary’s attempts to put her life back together after she is raped makes a forceful impression on Hays’s reader. When Mary turns to acquaintances for assistance, she discovers, as Caleb Williams does, that all doors are now closed to her by the force of rumor. She then struggles with a series of attempts at employment in an effort to feed herself. An opportunity to sell her artwork ends when her new employer attempts to seduce her, and a position working for an engraver proves to be unattainable without the money for an apprenticing fee. Going into service is precluded by Mary’s lack of character references, and a promising prospect to be paid as a lady’s traveling companion is lost when rumors reach her potential employer. Mary

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closes her dark narrative after a period of imprisonment for debt and after thoughts of suicide. She laments that “the vigorous promise of my youth has failed” and calls herself “the victim of a barbarous prejudice” (174). To intensify the power of this ending, Hays contrasts Mary’s tragic story to that of her friend Mrs. Neville, a self-abnegating woman who has repressed her own individuality in excessive devotion to her husband. In illustrating how both the strong and independent Mary and the submissive Mrs. Neville suffer, Hays emphasizes the degree to which all women are affected by an entirely inequitable distribution of social power.29 Moreover, by exposing the ease with which an aristocrat can manipulate the lives of others, she follows Godwin in suggesting that the greatest abuses of social power are committed by those who enjoy the greatest advantages. The fall and tragic end of Mary Raymond’s mother clearly represents a worst-case scenario in which a woman who makes mistakes pays the ultimate price for her choices. But in demonstrating that Mary’s undeserved loss of reputation dooms her essentially to the same fate as that of her mother, Hays makes a far more compelling point. Despite Mary’s innocence and her continual attempts to make virtuous life choices, she too is soundly defeated by a crushingly oppressive society. Hays clearly wishes for her reader to read the stories of Mary and her mother as typical of “my oppressed sex,” a sex that is deprived of “the sacred claims of humanity and justice” (174). It can be no accident that both Hays’s and Wollstonecraft’s heroines bear the very names of the authors who invented them. For both Hays and Wollstonecraft, Mary’s and Maria’s stories are the stories of their own lives, as they are the stories of all women. Like Hays, Robinson also defied the public outcry against Wollstonecraft in the years immediately following Wollstonecraft’s death by valorizing a female victim of prejudice in The Natural Daughter, her 1799 novel based heavily on her own life experiences. As Elizabeth Inchbald had done in Nature and Art, Robinson introduces us in her opening chapter to two distinctly different siblings. Martha Bradford, “giddy, wild, buxom, good-natured, and bluntly sincere” has been educated at a country boarding school, while the superficial and hypocritical Julia, considered “a model of feminine excellence,” has been educated at home by a French governess.30 Contemporary critics immediately recognized the dual meaning of Robinson’s title; the “natural daughter” refers not only to the illegitimate infant Fanny whose birth drives the novel’s plot but to Martha herself, the more “natural” of the two Bradford girls.31


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Early in The Natural Daughter, Martha Bradford is rescued from a callous and neglectful father by a husband, Mr. Morley, who embodies another stereotype of oppressive male authority.32 When Morley learns that Martha has become the benefactor of an abandoned infant in the neighborhood, he immediately concludes that she had given birth to an illegitimate daughter and then bars Martha from his home. Robinson then puts her heroine through a catalog of sufferings that, as in Mary Raymond’s case, clearly illustrates the extremely limited options available to women for earning a living. Significantly, most readers would have recognized the relationship between Martha’s successive attempts to earn a living and Robinson’s own professional endeavors as an actress, poet, and novelist. For a short time, Martha works as a teacher, and later as a successful strolling actress, only to find herself hounded out of both careers by rumors that are spread by her sister Julia’s in-laws, the self-important Leadenhead family. The Leadenheads scorn Martha for having stooped to the profession of acting, even though they ignore Julia’s actual deviation from morality when she shockingly gives birth to an illegitimate child four months after marrying Gregory Leadenhead. Following her stint as an actress, Martha tries her hand at poetry and even writes a novel, penning a “melancholy” work of two volumes with characters based on actual people—details that cleverly allude to the two-volume The Natural Daughter itself (208). Martha’s visit to the booksellers and publishers of Paternoster Row allows Robinson a rich opportunity for satirizing the contemporary publishing industry. One publisher, a Mr. Index, finally gives Martha ten pounds for her manuscript, assuring her that “we have our warehouses full of unsold sentimental novels already” and that her book will likely end up “lining trunks, or enveloping the merchandize of pastry-cooks and cheese-mongers” (208–9). Mr. Index advises Martha in the future to borrow a topic from a current social scandal or event from “real life” and promises that if she becomes embroiled in prosecution as a result, her work will be a great success. Robinson takes a stab at the reformist novel itself as Index tells Martha to write not with a pen, but with a lancet: “You should cut your subject keenly,” he advises, “make your operations salutary; teach your patients to tremble, while you cure them of their most obstinate and contagious follies” (209). Obsessed with bandying about potential titles for successful novels, Index encourages Martha to take her title seriously, for “nothing in these times will sell so highly as a title” (209). A good title, he continues, “pleases every order of the high world, and charms into admiration every species of the low: it will

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cover a multitude of faults” (209–20). “Do not forget,” Index tells her, “that a title is a wonderful harmonizer of things, in all ranks and all opinions of men, both morally and politically” (210). Here Index’s unintentional puns on the word “title” give Robinson the scope for a humorous attack on the class system in addition to her satirical depiction of the publishing industry. Robinson makes a final reference to Martha’s brief career as a novelist later in the novel when Martha is imprisoned in a madhouse and is given a novel to read. Humorously, the volume Martha is given is her own novel—in its sixth edition, despite Index’s assurances when paying her a mere ten pounds that the book would never sell. When Martha runs through all the employment options she can imagine, she briefly considers accepting an offer to be a gentleman’s kept mistress. While Robinson’s relationships with the Prince of Wales, Charles James Fox, and Banastre Tarleton were common knowledge, she nevertheless preserves Martha’s sexual innocence throughout her long series of trials and threats. This tactic makes a much stronger political point because Martha never behaves in any way that conservative readers might deem scandalous or inappropriate. Despite the resilience of Martha’s virtue, however, several conservative critics scorned Robinson’s approach to social criticism, calling Martha an “Unnatural Wife, Daughter, and Sister”33 and “a flippant female, apparently of the Wollstonecraft school.”34 Like the many characters Robinson satirizes in the novel, such readers clearly found Martha’s unconventional convictions tantamount to weak moral virtue. Like Charlotte Smith, who often created a double for her heroines to illustrate society’s castigation of the “fallen” woman so as to avoid impugning the pure virtue of the heroine that the reading public expected, Robinson provides Martha with a double in her friend and fellow actress Mrs. Sedgley, later revealed to be both the actual mother of the infant Fanny and a lady of aristocratic birth.35 Together Martha and Mrs. Sedgley win fame as popular strolling actresses; Martha is known for her successes in comic roles and Mrs. Sedgley as an actress in tragedies. By the novel’s close, the reader learns that both Martha and Mrs. Sedgley have had relationships with Martha’s husband Morley, each has played the role of mother to Fanny, and each has struggled to find a viable way to earn a living when Morley casts her off.36 Significantly, like Mary Raymond and Caleb Williams, both Martha and Mrs. Sedgley are also hounded from place to place and from livelihood to livelihood by persistent rumors.37 Robinson’s debt to Caleb Williams is even more conspicuous in her characterization of Martha’s villainous husband, Morley. In Godwin’s novel, Falkland commits a murder, but it is the innocent Caleb


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who suffers punishment and public scorn. Similarly, in The Natural Daughter, the hypocritical Morley is ultimately revealed to be the true adulterer, while the innocent Martha suffers public humiliation and abuse merely because Morley has accused her of adultery. As in Caleb’s case, Morley’s word that Martha has sinned is taken at face value due to his status as a man and as an aristocrat. As his abandoned lover Mrs. Sedgley explains the situation, “So pure, so amiable was he in the opinion of all mankind, that even had I accused him of dishounor, the story would not have been believed” (174). Morley also strongly parallels Falkland in his obsession with his status and reputation. Robinson describes him as “a most decided enemy to every thing that could possibly degrade the dignity of his ancestry” (117) and writes that “the labour of his life was that of obtaining a reputation, which might, when the grave closed upon his efforts, ensure the applause and admiration of posterity” (252–53). Ultimately Morley’s crimes manifest themselves upon his physical body in a manner that recalls Falkland’s deterioration from guilt and anxiety. By the novel’s conclusion, Morley’s health has wasted away, and he has begun a rapid decline toward an early death. In aligning her novel so closely to these particular aspects of Caleb Williams, Robinson makes it clear that her illustration of women’s subjection is also intended to expose the inequities of the contemporary social order on a grander scale. In one important episode, Martha visits a potential patroness, Lady Eldercourt, who has expressed an interest in hearing her poetry. In the midst of a social gathering at Lady Eldercourt’s home, Martha chooses to recite a poem entitled “To the Blue-Bell,” which Robinson inserts into the text in full. The poem opens as an ode to the lovely bluebell and the cowslip but then shifts its tone to point out that the nearby nettle and hemlock enjoy the same measure of sun and rain as these lovelier flowers. Thus Martha’s poem exposes the arbitrariness of social distinctions.38 Its final stanza makes its purpose perfectly clear: Then why dispute this wide domain, Since NATURE knows no partial care? The nipping blast, the pelting rain, Both will with equal ruin share: Then what is vain DISTINCTION, say, But the short blaze of summer’s day? And what is pomp, or beauty’s boast? An empty shadow, seen and lost! Such is thy power, Vain flower! (236).

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Not surprisingly, Lady Eldercourt is astonished by Martha’s poem and wonders aloud “how the woman could presume to read such audacious verses in the presence of people of rank and title!” (237). It is significant that Robinson includes the entire poem in this episode, because its theme and argument clarify the overarching objective of the novel as a whole. Echoing the sentiments of such reformist heroes as Henry Norwynne and Charles Hermsprong, Martha boldly asserts that the only distinctions she recognizes are those based on merit and virtue. “I respect superior talents,” she explains, “when they are converted to laudable uses by the polish of education” (282). Perhaps the most unusual feature of The Natural Daughter is Robinson’s use of sensational scenes in which her characters come into contact with infamous historical figures involved in France’s Reign of Terror. At one point in the novel, for example, Mrs. Sedgley describes her tragic adventures while traveling through Paris. When she is arrested and imprisoned as an Englishwoman, she is confronted by none other than an evil Jean-Paul Marat, who offers her the choice of becoming his mistress or facing the guillotine. Mrs. Sedgley narrowly escapes both fates only because Marat is murdered on the following day. Pushing her depiction of the horrors of the revolution farther yet, Robinson takes Martha to Paris in the final chapters of the book, where she is shocked to discover that her sister Julia has become the lover of Maximilien Robespierre. Again, the timing of Robespierre’s overthrow and execution allows Martha to escape imprisonment and to get out of France. Of course these hair-raising escapes give the novel a lurid Gothic mood. But, more importantly, they reveal the specific relationship Robinson wished to expose between the oppression of women and the system of random class distinctions that dictated social behavior in Britain—the very sort of social order that the French had attempted to eradicate, only to see it replaced by one bloody and tyrannical government after another as the 1790s progressed. In this sense Robinson follows the example of Helen Maria Williams, who had subtly suggested a link between men’s oppression of women and the French Revolution in the closing chapters of her novel Julia. As Sharon Setzer has rightly pointed out, Robinson works to expose the fact that the French terrorism that haunted the British throughout the 1790s “was not the antithesis of English law and order but rather, in some instances, its own dark double.”39 Robinson’s point was not lost on contemporary readers; several critics, in fact, were clearly annoyed by the improbable scenes involving Marat and Robespierre. In reproaching Robinson for her work, one reviewer in the British


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Critic censures her for her radical political views and relates them to that of the French revolutionaries. “It is of little use to lament or censure the French revolution,” this reviewer writes, “if the morals and manners which tended to produce it, are inculcated and held up for imitation.”40 This conservative reviewer’s reaction makes it clear that The Natural Daughter was meant to do more than simply underscore the plight of women in modern-day England. Robinson’s attack of the British social hierarchy and its foundation in a system of arbitrary distinctions is one that few readers could miss. Gothic Conventions in the Novels of Charlotte Smith Wollstonecraft’s and Robinson’s depiction of abusive husbands may well have been influenced by strikingly similar characters in Smith’s novels. Smith frequently included thinly veiled portraits of her own financially irresponsible husband Benjamin Smith in her works. In Emmeline, for example, Benjamin Smith appears as the self-indulgent husband of Emmeline’s friend Mrs. Stafford. Separated from his wife for long stretches of time, Mr. Stafford devotes himself to a dissipated lifestyle of heavy drinking and gambling. Once he has run through all of his financial resources, he avoids his creditors by fleeing to the continent, leaving the beleaguered Mrs. Stafford to feed her children, to save her family’s home, and to attempt to repair his fortune by her own means. Stafford continually frustrates his wife’s attempts to manage his resources effectively. He insists upon investing in a large collection of canaries, for example, and he petulantly demands that she join him on the continent when he feels she is taking too long to stabilize his finances in London. Stafford’s ludicrous attempts to resuscitate his finances, such as his investment in a scheme to use old wigs as fertilizer, are developed for comic effect. His ultimate return to England and to a decent home and income is engineered entirely by Mrs. Stafford and her friends. In her preface to The Young Philosopher, Smith explains that “as no distresses can be created without such men, as in the present state of society stand in place of the giants, and necromancers, and ogers of ancient romance, men whose profession empowers them to perpetrate, and whose inclination generally prompts them to the perpetration of wickedness, I have made these drawings a little like people of that sort whom I have seen” (X:4). In her 1792 novel Desmond, Smith again recasts her husband as the dissolute Richard Verney, a character who surrenders himself to a profligate lifestyle in the haut ton of London society as his wife, Geraldine, struggles to feed their children

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on her own. As Verney’s gambling debts mount, he runs through his wife’s fortune, and, like Wollstonecraft’s George Venables, he goes so far as to attempt to sell her to a French nobleman to clear his debts. Geraldine, however, has the advantage of a devoted admirer in her friend Lionel Desmond, who secretly watches over her and does everything in his power to counteract the consequences of Verney’s bad behavior. It is significant that Geraldine Verney sees herself not as a conventional Gothic victim but as one who has caused her own troubles by having been too blindly obedient to both her father and to her husband. In one passage she describes with delight her particular love for Gothic fiction, writing that as a young girl she “devoured with an eager appetite the mawkish pages that told of a damsel, most exquisitely beautiful, confined by a cruel father, and escaping to a heroic lover, while a wicked Lord laid in wait to tear her from him, and carried her to some remote castle.—Those delighted me most that ended miserably, and, having tortured me through the last volume with impossible distress, ended in the funeral of the heroine.”41 Geraldine states that had she been more of a romantic—that is, more influenced by her reading—she might have waited for an idealized hero to appear, one of the “charming fabulous creatures” from novels, rather than passively accepting her father’s choice of a husband for her (V:165). Far from having been damaged by her reading of novels as many at the time feared young women were, Geraldine defends novels by wishing she had held out for the sort of idealized hero they so often depict. Nevertheless, Geraldine’s world does become more like one drawn from contemporary fiction when her husband joins the French antirevolutionary forces and summons her to join him. As soon as Geraldine arrives in France, Smith begins to work aspects of the Gothic tradition into her experiences. Before long, Geraldine notices the presence of a strange Capuchin monk who slips in and out of her garden, and she imagines that he is a solitary man beset by grief in the wake of revolutionary upheaval. Although the reader soon identifies this monk as the protective Desmond in disguise, Smith’s use of this familiar figure from Gothic fiction allows her to add drama and suspense to the novel as the plot continues to unfold. When Geraldine learns that her husband has been injured and sets out to find him, the domestic/sentimental mode of the novel shifts entirely into that of the Gothic. After several days of travel, Geraldine is forced to halt her journey due to rumors of “free-booters”


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in the area, that is, Frenchmen armed by the aristocracy to resist the revolutionaries. She finds herself in a Gothic landscape—a “wild uncultivated plain” that she describes as “more dreary than the wildest heath in England” (V:310). The Gothic conventions reach a crescendo when Desmond appears to accompany Geraldine to the ancient castle where they expect to find her husband. In detailing the troubles that beset them as they approach the dark chateau, narrowly avoid falling into its dark moat, and enter the ancient building only to find it besieged by free-booters, Smith’s language matches the most thrilling of Radcliffe’s Gothic tales. Even one of the novel’s more conservative reviewers applauded the manner in which she drew on such popular conventions: “the concluding scenes, when Geraldine is in pursuit of Verney, are conducted with so much skill, and worked up with so much terror and pathos, as to fix the rank of this last work of Mrs. Smith in the very first class.”42 As in Robinson’s The Natural Daughter, the most exaggerated features of the Gothic novel allow Smith to amplify the extremes of Geraldine’s danger as the direct consequences of her husband’s behavior. Like Robinson, Smith also recognized that sending her characters to revolutionary France offered the perfect context for extending her exploration of the wrongs of woman into a more general attack on a severely inequitable class system. Throughout the novel Smith works to counter Edmund Burke’s recent Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which he mourned the passing of the age of chivalry.43 Smith compiles a long list of the abuses of prerevolutionary France, and her spokesman Lionel Desmond is quick to draw parallels between France’s ancien régime and contemporary Britain. Of the “dreadful contrasts” in the condition of the English people, Desmond asks, “who can walk through the streets of London without being shocked with them?” (V:148). According to Desmond, the English constitution is greatly weakened by “the inequality of representation” and by unbalanced penal laws “by which the property and the life of the individual are put on an equal footing, and by which murder, or a robbery to the amount of forty shillings, are offences equally punished with death” (V:151). Desmond complains that English law focuses on the punishment of crime rather than its prevention and laments that greater numbers are executed in England than in any other country. “We must . . . acknowledge,” he says, “either, that the English are the worst and most unprincipled race of men in Europe, or, that their penal laws are the most sanguinary of those of any nation under heaven” (V:151).

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Smith also focuses her attention upon the corruption and abuses of the English courts, “in which even success is ruin” (V:152). Desmond’s diatribe on the “ruinous tediousness of a Chancery suit” prefigures the obsession with the court’s abuses that Charles Dickens would make the central focus of Bleak House sixty years later (V:152). In his call for reform, Desmond asks for a return to truth as the only resource for the improvement of a judicial and political system that is rife with inequity. Such a radical stance was extremely controversial, however, even in the early years of the French Revolution. Even Desmond’s loyal friend and correspondent Erasmus Bethel believes him to be too far gone “in what are called . . . the new doctrines” (V:244). Similarly, Smith’s reviewers often criticized her for her strong political convictions, and even the most liberal critics tended to feel that such views were misplaced in a novel. The reviewer in the Critical Review, for example, complains that “her politics we cannot always approve of. Connected with the reformers, and the revolutionists, she has borrowed her colouring from them, and represented their conduct in the most favourable light. If an aristocrat is introduced, he is either to be confuted or ridiculed.”44 For this reviewer, the important issue lay in whether such sentiments ought to be included in a novel at all. Lionel Desmond embodies many qualities of the conventional eighteenth-century sentimental hero, and in his radical political convictions he resembles many of the reformist heroes discussed in Chapter 1.45 Desmond is overwhelmed by emotion as he pines for his beloved Geraldine, follows the events of her life closely, and ultimately rescues her when her husband sinks into vice and begins to threaten her safety. Nevertheless, even as Smith uses him as a mouthpiece for her ideals, she simultaneously critiques his character at the end of the novel when she reveals that Desmond had impregnated Josephine de Boisbelle, the sister of his friend Montfleuri, while visiting the family in France. For Smith’s reader, this knowledge comes as an unexpected blow to the credibility of Desmond’s passionate professions of love for Geraldine. Geraldine, however, takes the news of his illegitimate infant in stride and happily raises the child alongside her own children when the two marry after her husband’s death.46 Such an image of an idealized family circle represents what can result when women are allowed to choose their own partners and take control over their own lives. Nevertheless, the suggestion of a happy ending here carries with it no guarantee of its inevitability.47 Stuart Curran writes that “Smith leaves the denouement unenacted, thereby ending the novel with a stress on the sexual exploitativeness of both male figures and the vulnerability of her women.”48 Even the most enlightened and caring of


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men is presented as a potential disaster for women. The fact that Desmond can be such an eloquent spokesman for social change in France and Britain and one who can impregnate one vulnerable woman while professing his undying love for another indicates the extent of women’s defenselessness in a world dominated by men. Thus, in Smith’s recasting of the Gothic formula in this novel, the heroine is entirely safe neither from the villain nor from the hero, both of whom derive extensive privileges from a culture that denies those same privileges to women. It is worth noting that the effectiveness of Smith’s attack on the British social order in Desmond derives in great part from her skillful use of the popular format of the epistolary novel. The epistolary format allows Smith to develop remarkably convincing voices for multiple characters, each of whom contributes a distinct point of view to the complicated debates she investigates. Significantly, Curran has noted that as Smith builds on the achievements of her forebears Rousseau, Richardson, and Frances Burney in utilizing this format, she likewise links the novel to the projects of other radical women writers in the early 1790s, particularly Helen Maria Williams’s widely read Letters Written in France.49 In The Old Manor House (1793), published a year after Desmond, Smith once again puts Gothic conventions to work in the service of political reform. As the novel’s title indicates, here Smith makes the Gothic setting itself central to her agenda. In this work the plot is structured entirely around the struggles of her characters to possess and control the ancient home of an old English family. Thus a deteriorating mansion becomes the central metaphor for what Smith wishes to expose concerning the authority of property owners over the middle and lower classes and the corruption of a culture obsessed with the possession of property. As Jacqueline Labbe has explained, The Old Manor House “calls into question the very notion of ownership and by extension the power that such privilege confers.”50 The current owner of this estate is the elderly spinster Mrs. Rayland, a woman who embodies the anger and cruelty of an impotent aristocracy in the process of dying out and holding tenaciously onto the relics of its former glory. Forced to find a worthy heir to carry on her family’s dwindled dynasty, Mrs. Rayland settles on her nephew Orlando Somerive, but she arrogantly plans a variety of tests for Orlando before she will finally decide whether or not he is a suitable successor as lord of the manor. Having married a woman of a lower station, Orlando’s father has established a family that represents the emerging middle class. While related to the Rayland family, the

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Somerives nevertheless share neither their social standing nor their wealth and thus must struggle to secure both social position and livelihood in a rapidly changing world. One of the greatest deterrents to Orlando’s great expectations is his love for Monimia, the orphaned niece of Mrs. Rayland’s heartless housekeeper Mrs. Lennard. Monimia’s history is never fully explained, and, as an orphan of unknown birth, she holds a place of no significance whatsoever in the social hierarchy of the small community surrounding the manor. Monimia represents the least enfranchised class of all—the young woman without money or a family name and thus without much hope for making a good match for herself or even for making an honest living. Smith casts Monimia as a Gothic heroine from the start. When Orlando’s interest in her is suspected, Monimia is locked up in a turret room, complete with iron bars on the windows. Monimia draws on a list of typical Gothic conventions when she describes this room and her terror at being locked up. The howling wind, the great, dark green damask hangings that swell with drafts of air, the rats that boldly nibble at the candles near her bed, and the portrait of an armored Rayland ancestor keep her in a state of terror. “How weak I was to add imaginary horrors to the real calamities of my situation,” she laments, “rather than try to acquire strength of mind to bear the evils from which I could not escape!”51 Smith continues to make full use of conventional Gothic machinery in describing Orlando’s regular attempts to meet Monimia despite her imprisonment, stealing through passages and an abandoned chapel late in the night and helping Monimia to leave her room by use of a secret staircase hidden by a panel behind her bed. Seemingly supernatural events that Orlando and Monimia experience in the dark house at night create an air of suspense that contemporary readers would have found familiar. But, like Radcliffe, Smith neatly provides a rational explanation for every apparently supernatural occurrence by the end of the final volume. The world that her characters inhabit is the real world, not the world of an imaginative romance. To divert him from his interest in Monimia, Orlando is sent into the army and soon finds himself shipped away to the North American colonies to fight the revolutionaries there. Curran has argued that Smith’s choice to set the novel during the American Revolution in the 1770s allowed her to comment on contemporary social evils in a more indirect way than she had in Desmond.52 The rigid censorship that followed England’s declaration of war with France early in 1793 made it harder for Smith to express her views as openly as she had the year


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before. Although utilizing the guise of the historical novel, Smith’s voice is nevertheless as finely attuned to the controversial issues of the present day as ever before. As Lionel Desmond had done, Orlando Somerive provides her with a mouthpiece for her views on a range of political topics, and here specifically on war. Smith compares, for example, the miserable conditions suffered by soldiers on a sea voyage to America to the abuses of Africans forced into slavery.53 She writes that when Orlando considered the soldiers like himself, sent “to another hemisphere to avenge on a branch of their own nation a quarrel, of the justice of which they knew little, and were never suffered to enquire,” he sadly began “to wonder at the folly of mankind, and to enquire again what all this was for?” (VI:300). Smith sharply criticizes “the modern directors of war,” who incur “no personal danger” but simply “raise money from one part of their subjects, in order to enable them to destroy another” (VI:300). Furthermore, she notes that the contractors who benefit from war are “for the most part members of parliament,” who vote to pursue war while “disregarding the voices of the people in general, or even of their own constituents” (VI:301). An unusual aspect of her attack on war includes her attention to the abuses suffered by the Native Americans during the Revolution and a particular condemnation of the British tactic of turning native tribes against the Americans, the factual accuracy of which she supports with a lengthy explanatory footnote (VI:310). Orlando’s experiences in battle and while living among the Iriquois afterward alter him significantly enough to transform him into a fitting hero for Smith’s novel and a suitable heir to the old manor house. When he returns to England, the extent of his transformation is symbolized by the fact that he is not recognized and is forced to struggle to prove his identity. Smith puts Monimia through a similarly transformative series of experiences during Orlando’s absence and expands her role as Gothic heroine when her marriage to a rakish neighbor is arranged against her wishes. “Though I had often ridiculed the stories in novels where young women are forcibly carried away,” Monimia explains after the fact, “I saw great reason to believe some such adventure might happen to me, for I was totally unprotected, and I believe, absolutely sold” (VI:412). Monimia manages to escape this fate with the help of a friend “who saw in me a poor, deserted heroine of a novel” (VI:419). Nevertheless, despite her earlier fear that she lacked the strength to bear her troubles, Monimia endures them with fortitude, not merely waiting idly for the novel’s hero to rescue her. Although Orlando goes to great lengths to find her, he finally stumbles upon her quite by accident. As in Orlando’s

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case, the strength with which Monimia faces her trials transforms her into a woman worthy of taking over the old manor house.54 Significantly, when Orlando and Monimia move into the decrepit house in the novel’s final chapter, they refurbish it with “every comfort and every elegance of modern life” (VI:455). Smith has thus modeled for her reader the promise of a new era that may yet be ushered in. As in Desmond, Smith is not concerned in this novel with the abuses of women alone. Rather, she details the sufferings of women as merely one serious consequence of a corrupt social system in dire need of reform at every level. Her profound concern for the dispossessed is expressed toward women at all strata of society, but she also extends that concern to men of the lower and middle classes, to soldiers and disabled veterans, to Africans subjected to slavery, and to Native Americans.55 The ancient house with its hidden passages and secret panels is a common Gothic convention, but in Smith’s hands it becomes nothing less than an embodiment of a deteriorated “myth of the English nation,” as Ina Ferris has described it—a symbol that raises questions about “national history, national identity, and the role of the past,” and one that highlights Smith’s concern that the abuses of the past not be renewed in the present and future.56 Fathers, Daughters, and Revolution Although few reformist novelists rivaled Smith’s success in intensifying her biting social critiques with Gothic suspense, Eliza Fenwick exploits a wide range of Gothic conventions to a similar degree in Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock (1795).57 A member of the Godwin and Wollstonecraft circle, Fenwick wrote mainly for children, and from 1807–8 she helped to manage William and Mary Jane Godwin’s Juvenile Library. In her only novel for adults, Fenwick follows Smith in transferring the familiar Gothic setting from the continent to Britain, setting her story in a ruined English castle that serves as a symbolic vestige of a former era. In Secresy Fenwick also utilizes the motif of the imprisoned woman to comment on the errors fundamental to contemporary ideas concerning education and on the dangers of hiding personal motives and desires. The Godwinian ideal of absolute sincerity is among the novel’s major themes, and the tragic events that unfold in the narrative are shown to result from the characters’ inability to recognize that sincerity and truth are, in Godwin’s words, “intimately connected with the general dissemination of innocence, energy, intellectual improvement, and philanthropy” and thus are integral to the health of a society.58


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“Did every man impose this law upon himself,” Godwin writes, “did he regard himself as not authorised to conceal any part of his character and conduct, this circumstance alone would prevent millions of actions from being perpetrated, in which we are now induced to engage by the prospect of secrecy and impunity” (IV:161). Fenwick’s project in Secresy lay in illustrating the injurious consequences of both concealment and duplicity and in highlighting the degree to which reform on a grand scale must begin in the home. As Julie Carlson has written, “reform of the family is central to Wollstonecraft’s and Godwin’s political theories, their notions of perfectibility, and their proposals for more equitable social conditions.”59 Secresy clearly demonstrates that Fenwick too shared such a conviction. In her novel Fenwick focuses on the relationship between the patron of the ruin on the rock, George Valmont, and his niece and ward, Sibella. Valmont’s surname alludes to the infamous abuser of women in Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782); thus Fenwick associates this character with the worst excesses of prerevolutionary France from the very beginning. Valmont’s rigid ideas concerning gender roles and the education of young women make him an overly strict guardian who deliberately secludes Sibella from the world to provide her with a Rousseauvian “natural” education.60 To her friend Caroline Ashburn, Sibella describes a sad tale of a childhood of solitude and neglect and complains of Valmont that “he daringly asserts that I am born to the exercise of no will; to the exercise of no duties but submission; that wisdom owns me not, knows me not, could not find in me a resting place.”61 Unable to find affection or companionship with either Valmont or his sickly wife, Sibella lives a life of the imagination, wandering about the castle grounds by herself, her only companion a similarly vulnerable deer that she has trained as a pet. Predictably, Sibella’s attachment to Valmont’s other ward, Clement Montgomery, takes on an unnatural level of importance for her as a result of the severity of the emotional neglect she suffers. In an act of desperation, she declares herself married to Clement and gives herself to him as a wife, just as Wollstonecraft’s Maria would declare herself divorced from her husband and later married to her new love, Henry Darnford. Sibella’s ensuing pregnancy only serves to reconfirm Valmont’s views of women. “Unfortunate that house whose dignity is left to be supported by a female!” he exclaims; “whether in solitude or society, I find the female mind still a mere compound of folly and mischief” (294–95). Fenwick draws on Gothic conventions throughout her narrative to develop mystery and suspense and to elicit a strong emotional response

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in the reader. Strange occurrences that Sibella cannot explain begin to occur in the first volume, and on several occasions she encounters a stranger who appears to be a hermit on the castle grounds. As in the novels of both Radcliffe and Smith, the inexplicable occurrences are given rational explanations later in the novel; the mysterious hermit, for example, is ultimately exposed to be the morose Arthur Murden, who has fallen in love with Sibella. Like all Gothic heroines, Sibella is also pursued by a relentless rake—in her case, the foppish Lord Filmar, who repeatedly plots to abduct her. One of the most unusual aspects of Secresy, however, can be found in Fenwick’s depiction of Sibella’s friend Caroline Ashburn, whose boldness and self-assurance provide a marked contrast to Sibella’s passive personality. It is Caroline who provides the reader with an explanation of how secrecy has led to tragedy, confidently blaming Valmont’s secrecy and manipulation of his wards and Sibella’s secrecy in hiding her determination to marry Clement from her guardian. For Arthur Murden too, Caroline has strong words. “Tell me, if you have well employed your time and talents,” she asks him when she learns of his impersonation of the hermit. She asks Murden whether he has done service to his fellow man, “or if you have not in fraud and secrecy bubbled away your happiness?” (284). Here Fenwick underscores another Godwinian tenet concerning the right use of one’s life and abilities in the service of others. Despite her own role in the tragedy that unfolds for both Sibella and Arthur Murden, Caroline admits her faults with a commitment to self-improvement, and she continues to devote herself to a life of working toward the conversion of others; indeed, some of her final comments at the novel’s close concern the reformation of Lord Filmar. One of Caroline’s most significant characteristics is her willingness to challenge Valmont on his educational theories and his deprecating assessment of women’s nature and abilities. Caroline even questions Valmont concerning his rights as a parent: “I reminded him,” she reports, “that an abuse of power might be the forfeiture of power; and that the law, useless as it is for the relief of general oppression, might reach this particular instance” (305). When Valmont scoffs at her threats, Caroline responds that “you complain, Sir, that my opinions pay too little deference to the obedience due from children to parents, and in answer to that I must observe, . . . wherever the commands of parents are contrary to the justice due from being to being, I hold obedience to be vice” (349). Caroline’s belief that children have the right to free themselves from the control of autocratic parents provides a clear of example of how reformists use conflict within


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the domestic sphere to symbolize and to justify such larger disputes as those between the American and French revolutionaries and the governments that oppressed them.62 Robert Bage draws the same parallel in Hermsprong as he depicts the relationship between Caroline Campinet and her father Lord Grondale, whom Bage links with the abusive Bourbon kings of France.63 Throughout Hermsprong, Lord Grondale repeatedly announces his disapproval of Caroline’s friendship with the stranger Charles Hermsprong and insists that she must marry his choice of a husband for her: the pompous dandy Sir Philip Chestrum, whose obsession with social status takes an exaggerated form in his fixation on his family’s claims of descent from Richard I. When Caroline rejects Sir Philip in favor of Hermsprong, she incurs her father’s tyrannical wrath. Declaring that he has come to hate his disobedient daughter “as much as he once thought he loved her,” Grondale hastily imprisons Caroline and her friend Maria Fluart in their chambers, stations guards by their doors, and refuses to allow any correspondence to pass between them and the outside world (291). Hermsprong speaks in concert with the revolutionary spirit of the times when he assures Caroline that because her father has violated the duties of a father, it is no longer incumbent on her to obey him as a daughter (302). He attempts to convert Caroline to the belief that her father’s irrational cruelty justifies her disobedience of his commands.64 “Tell me now, and let no prejudice arrest your judgment,” he says to her of the father-daughter relationship, “are there obligations binding on one party only? Obligations that are not reciprocal?” To Caroline’s responding question, “Does a breach on one side dissolve the obligation on the other?” Hermsprong replies, “I think so” (256). Later, after Caroline has succeeded in escaping her imprisonment, Hermsprong reassures her that her actions were justified. “The condition of your being, would have carried you almost instinctively, to have resisted your father, had he made a sudden attack upon your life and happiness,” he argues; “ought he less to be resisted because the attack is pre-meditated?” (305). In complete agreement with Hermsprong’s philosophy concerning the obedience owed by children to their fathers, the irrepressible Maria Fluart likewise encourages Caroline to rise above the foolish notion that women should love tyrants, “whether husbands or fathers” (180). After assisting in Caroline’s escape, Miss Fluart boasts to Grondale that “I taught her, that your lordship, having violated all the duties incumbent on you as a father, she owed you nothing as a daughter” (302). Maria Fluart handles Lord Grondale with a

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degree of self-possession that parallels and even supersedes Caroline Ashburn’s bold confidence. Rather than the hero, it is Miss Fluart who liberates Caroline from her incarceration in her father’s home by exchanging places with her and by appearing as the veiled bride at Caroline’s arranged wedding to Sir Philip in a scene worthy of a Shakespearean comedy. Despite Grondale’s threats, Fluart then packs her bags and leaves his home. No one attempts to stand in her way as she triumphantly departs, fearlessly brandishing a pistol as she walks out of the house.65 As women who resolutely refuse to accept the passive role that society has dictated for them, Caroline Ashburn and Maria Fluart follow Holcroft’s Anna St Ives as embodiments of the reformist ideal of the modern woman who puts her convictions fully into practice. In their triumphs over conventional Gothic entrapment, these unconventional women modeled for readers how women might also prevail over men who subscribe to limited ideas of what women can and ought to be. As a blueprint for rebellion, however, such a mode of action was not likely to be practicable for many women. It is more important to recognize that Secresy and Hermsprong both enact conflict in the father-daughter relationship as an oblique means of dramatizing and justifying revolution and reform on a grander scale. Wollstonecraft made such a connection much more directly when she wrote in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman that “obedience, unconditional obedience, is the catch-word of tyrants of every description,” and “one kind of despotism supports another” (V:221). As Fenwick and Bage attempt to illustrate, Wollstonecraft believes that “obeying a parent only on account of his being a parent, shackles the mind, and prepares it for a slavish submission to any power but reason” (V:225). For these reformists, the misuse of power at every level of contemporary society was a practice that was learned in the home. Thus reform must begin not merely in the way women are treated by men but in the way all children are treated and educated by their parents from their earliest years. “Till esteem and love are blended together in the first affection, and reason made the foundation of the first duty,” Wollstonecraft writes, “morality will stumble at the threshold. But,” she continues, “till society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed, because they will be obeyed, and constantly endeavour to settle that power on a Divine right which will not bear the investigation of reason” (V:228). Such a “Divine right” had been claimed from time immemorial by both parents and kings. Thus the system of reform that Wollstonecraft


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proposes demands a reconstitution of society and a reform of morality on a monumental scale. Captivity and Liberation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda In her 1801 novel Belinda, Maria Edgeworth takes the figure of the captive woman in a new direction by exploring the figurative imprisonment experienced by women in Britain in the early years of the nineteenth century. Paralleling the situations of Burney’s popular Evelina (1778), Cecelia (1782), and Camilla (1796), in which a young heroine makes her entrance into society, Edgeworth’s plot follows Belinda Portman when she is sent by her aunt to live with Lady Delacour in London to be properly introduced into high society and, ultimately, to make a good match for herself.66 Belinda soon finds herself trapped in a world in which she can please no one and in which her good intentions to act and to speak sincerely do nothing to prevent her entanglement in an endless succession of social misunderstandings. When she complains to her aunt that Lady Delacour is not an appropriate role model for her, both her aunt and Lady Delacour rebuke her. In social gatherings Belinda realizes that she is assumed to be another hunter of husband and fortune like her aunt’s other social protégées. From the beginning, Belinda and her eventual suitor Clarence Hervey seem destined to misjudge each other’s character and to misinterpret each other’s behavior at every turn. Eventually, and despite her innocence, Belinda suffers from unfounded rumors that she has pursued an affair with Lady Delacour’s husband. The world of high fashion that Edgeworth depicts is one that is rife with gossip, deceit, and debauchery. Belinda’s sense of entrapment and her confusion about how to navigate the complex rules and expectations of this world are compounded as she is bombarded by advice and lectures about how to conduct herself, how to conceive of love and romance, and how to catch a suitably rich husband. Clarence Hervey’s own story provides a subplot involving female captivity that effectively parallels Belinda’s figurative entrapment. Clarence has attempted to create the ideal wife by raising a young French girl in complete seclusion from society, following Rousseau’s controversial suggestions concerning the education of young women.67 His belief that women should be raised merely to be the helpmates of men mirrors that of George Valmont of Secresy, who brags that he has purposely raised Sibella “to be the tractable and obedient companion of a husband, who from early disappointment and a just detestation of the miserable state of society is willing to abandon the world entirely”

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(182). When Lord Filmar first learned of Valmont’s plans for educating Sibella, he expressed a delight that parallels Clarence’s hopes: “If the dear creature is but any thing like what her uncle intended to make her with his wire-drawn principles about female weakness and female obedience,” Filmar boasts, “I shall be the least noosed of any married man in England” (174). Clarence Hervey’s scheme reveals a lack of respect for women at its worst extreme; nevertheless, his character matures and develops, gradually but significantly, over the course of the novel. From the beginning, Edgeworth planned him as the sort of gentleman whose “character, or at least his conduct, varies with every new company or new situation.”68 Early on, he behaves as another prototypical rake, indulging his pleasures and once nearly drowning when he rashly jumps into the Serpentine on a dare, a clear parallel to the behavior of Anna St Ives’s Coke Clifton. Clarence’s gradual exposure to Belinda’s character, however, promotes his gradual reform. Ultimately he abandons his oppressive treatment of his young ward, Virginia, and becomes an appropriate suitor for Belinda—one who recognizes her virtues and one who devotes himself, as Belinda does, to “never acting or speaking contrary to his conscience.”69 To counterbalance the portrait of the submissive Virginia, Edgeworth depicts several strong and eccentric female characters, particularly the truly unforgettable Lady Delacour. Lady Delacour engages in a variety of ill-advised adventures because she is consumed in a rivalry with her hated enemy, Mrs. Luttridge, her husband’s mistress. Lady Delacour and Mrs. Luttridge stop at nothing in their attempts to humiliate each other in public. And, in perhaps the most unusual episode in the novel, Lady Delacour describes having cross-dressed as a man to fight a female duel with Luttridge, spurred on by her malicious companion Harriet Freke, whose very name signifies her role as a wild and disruptive presence. Harriet Freke loudly champions the rights of women over traditional gender roles and clearly represents a fanatical view of Wollstonecraftian feminism in the early 1800s. “Whatever is, is wrong,” she chants, satirizing the extremes of the contemporary reformist movement.70 Nevertheless, Harriet Freke’s irresponsible behavior, like Lady Delacour’s, highlights the effectiveness of Belinda’s balanced approach toward life.71 Lady Delacour is certainly no model for female behavior, but it is important to note that Edgeworth altered her original plan to kill off Lady Delacour in favor of showing how she allows herself to be reformed—in her words “won not tamed”—through the gentle influence of the wiser and more rational Belinda (II:243).72 It is Belinda


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who repudiates the mischievous influence of Harriet Freke and convinces Lady Delacour to forget her rivalry with Mrs. Luttridge and to work on repairing both her marriage and her relationship with her young daughter Helena, whom she had long neglected. Belinda also encourages Lady Delacour to unveil the mystery she goes to great lengths to hide, that she had suffered a highly symbolic wound to her breast during her duel with Mrs. Luttridge. With Belinda’s encouragement, Lady Delacour finds a surgeon who is able to restore her to health.73 If these alterations strike the modern reader as unduly conservative, it should be noted that Lady Delacour’s outspoken opinions and her bold self-assurance are undaunted by her having been “won.” At the end of the novel, Edgeworth literally allows Lady Delacour to take control over concluding the narrative by leading the other characters in a metafictional discussion regarding how a novel ought to conclude and by physically arranging them in a fitting tableau vivant. “For what signifies being happy, unless we appear so?” Lady Delacour asks, indicating that she has preserved a degree of the value she has always placed on appearances, an emphasis that has characterized her throughout the novel (II:365). One of Edgeworth’s greatest achievements in Belinda lies in her carefully modulated depiction of the changes Belinda undergoes as she attains greater self-confidence and strength of mind over the course of the novel. Of course, it is Belinda and not Virginia whom Clarence Hervey ultimately recognizes as the embodiment of the ideal woman. Although Belinda Portman is no Caroline Ashburn or Maria Fluart, the manner in which she learns to balance reason and sensibility as she responds to oppressive social restrictions, bad role models, vicious rumors, and a range of men’s and women’s expectations regarding how women ought to behave may have provided a more practical example for many contemporary women readers. In the story of Belinda’s coming of age, Edgeworth raises important questions about how women might attempt to make their own choices in life and confront the “giants, and necromancers, and ogers” of the present day without risking the sort of social ostracism experienced by a woman such as Wollstonecraft.74 In each of these novels, the plight of contemporary women is revealed to be a wrong that can be corrected only by the grand reformation of Britain’s social system. To engineer such a reformation, the author of each of these heroines’ stories either directs her reader to learn something from the narrative, as do Wollstonecraft and Hays, or she highlights the conversion, maturation, or transformation of one or more characters to reveal how convictions and prejudices can

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be modulated, as do Robinson, Smith, Fenwick, and Edgeworth. The following chapter will move from issues of gender to those of race in analyzing how a number of reformist novelists in the revolutionary decade also worked to open their readers’ eyes to the oppression and disenfranchisement of Africans and Jews in Great Britain and its colonies.

4

Chapter 3

Race and the Disenf ranchised i n 1790s Br itain

I

n the second volume of her dialogues for children, Rambles Farther (1796), Charlotte Smith addresses the subjects of race and slavery in a dialogue entitled “The Little West Indian.” In this work the main characters, Mrs. Woodfield, her children, and her niece Caroline, are joined by Ella Sedley, a child from the West Indies who is sent to England along with her African nurse, Mimbah, when she loses her mother. Mimbah’s homesickness inspires a discussion of the strong habit that attaches even slaves to their home. “Happiness depends, after all,” Mrs. Woodfield says, “less on local circumstances than on the habits of our minds.”1 Mrs. Woodfield takes advantage of the opportunity to teach the children about slavery, explaining that those who are brought up in the West Indies do not recognize slaves as fellow human beings (XII:119). When Caroline asks how slavery can be justified, Mrs. Woodfield presents contemporary arguments for the institution and points out the fallacy behind each one. The argument that slavery is justifiable due to its long custom is one, she explains, that could support any abuse. Mrs. Woodfield also argues that the claims that slavery is an economic necessity and that slaves are happier than they would be in their native environment are equally fallacious. When one of the children asks why slaves are black, Mrs. Woodfield answers that “it has pleased God to make them so; as it was his pleasure to make us white.—Another race of men in North America are of a copper colour,” she explains to the children, “and the Asiatics, within certain degrees of the line, are of another shade of yellow”

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(XII:121). Smith’s dialogue offers a glimpse at a reformist’s attempt to teach children about race in a manner intended to dispel racial prejudice. For Smith and many like her, the racism of the English, and particularly their devotion to slavery and the slave trade, suggested a fidelity to a feudal economy and an inequitable system of social power that inhibited the spiritual health of the culture.2 For many reformist novelists, the status of the racial other in Britain paralleled the situations of those disenfranchised by class and gender in significant ways. Although African and Jewish characters, for example, appear only occasionally in the fiction of the 1790s, the manner in which they are depicted offers insight into several reformists’ attempts to advocate for the humane treatment of all human beings. When saturated with discourse borrowed from the abolitionist movement in the 1780s and 1790s, the novel of sensibility became a valuable tool for such a mission. Chris Jones has written that the sentimental novel “gave an impetus to humanitarian and philanthropic crusades which sought reform in the treatment of orphans, prisoners, and slaves on an international scale.”3 Although the establishing of equal civil rights for British citizens of all races would take centuries more, it is possible to see early glimmers of an emerging social conscience in the late eighteenth century that would contribute significantly to the first stages of that movement.

Am I N ot a Man and a Brothe r? The cataclysmic political changes occurring in America and Europe in the last decades of the eighteenth century brought with them an emphasis on the rights of the individual that greatly stimulated debate in Great Britain about the morality of slavery and the slave trade. The abolitionist movement had originated earlier in the century in reformed religious communities in England and America, including the Society of Friends, or Quakers, the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Unitarians.4 Abolitionists were greatly encouraged by a ruling by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in the James Somerset case in May of 1772 that slaves brought to England could not be forced back into slavery, a decision that was construed as the abolition of slavery in Great Britain.5 In 1777 a Scottish court ruled in a similarly influential case that the laws of Scotland did not allow a man to hold a slave in Scotland under any circumstance.6 Despite these legal steps forward, however, the slave trade in the British colonies continued to flourish throughout the final decades of the eighteenth century, and the demands of the English market for sugar, indigo, rice, cotton,


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tobacco, and other products from the West Indies ensured the persistence of slavery there.7 In 1787 the antislavery movement reached a peak with the founding of the “Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” a group determined to influence Parliament to eliminate the slave trade altogether. Unfortunately, the outbreak of the French Revolution and the slave insurrections it inspired on French plantations in SaintDomingue in 1791 and afterward led to a conservative backlash and the defeat of William Wilberforce’s abolition bill in April of 1791.8 Legislation abolishing the slave trade would not be passed until 1807, and the institution of slavery was not finally abolished in Britain’s colonies until 1833.9 Even after 1833, Britain’s continued reliance on imports from North America ensured the persistence of slavery in the southern United States for decades more. Roxann Wheeler has argued that through the middle to late eighteenth century the English recognized geographical region, climate, religion, rank, and a variety of socioeconomic factors as the most significant determiners of race. By the 1780s and 1790s, however, as the abolition movement grew and as the public became more exposed to Africans in England, skin color and other physical attributes became increasingly more important in popular understandings of racial difference.10 Proslavery writers attempted to convince the public that slavery was justifiable based on physical “evidence” that the black body was inferior to the white; some even argued that Africans and white Europeans originated in distinct acts of creation, a theory known as “polygenesis.” Abolitionists often countered this argument by claiming that the African peoples shared Abraham as a common ancestor with the Jews and Europeans. Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, a variety of reformist writers began to contribute their efforts to the abolitionist movement. Among these were Mary Wollstonecraft, who condemned slavery in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and William Godwin, who did the same in his An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a lecture against slavery in the fourth issue of The Watchman (1795). Numerous poetic contributions began to appear in print, including Thomas Day’s and John Bicknell’s influential “The Dying Negro” (1773), William Cowper’s “The Negro’s Complaint” (1778) and “Pity for Poor Africans” (1788), Helen Maria Williams’s “A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade” (1788), Hannah More’s “Slavery: A Poem” (1788) and “The Sorrows of Yamba, or the Negro Woman’s Lamentation” (1795), Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on

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the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade” (1792), and Mary Robinson’s “The Negro Girl” (1800), among many others.11 In addition to this proliferation of antislavery poetry, an increasing number of prose tracts appeared in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Perhaps most notably, Thomas Clarkson published An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (1786), A Summary View of the Slave Trade, and of the Probable Consequences of its Abolition (1787), An Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (1788), and The Substance of the Evidence of Sundry Persons on the Slave-Trade (1789). Clarkson traveled throughout Britain in the early 1790s, founding abolitionist groups, promoting support for the antislavery bill, and contributing to a mounting effort to boycott the sugar that was produced by slave labor in the West Indies.12 The personal narratives of actual slaves were also particularly influential in the 1780s and afterward, including such accounts as Quobna Ottabah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787) and Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), which ran to nine editions by 1794.13 From 1789 to 1794 Equiano followed the publication of his memoir with a book tour throughout Britain and Ireland during which he promoted his autobiography and worked to convert his readers into active abolitionists.14 Late eighteenth-century readers were also familiar with the unusual figure of Ignatius Sancho (1729?–1780), a former slave who became a successful businessman and man of letters in London. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African was published in 1782. Alexander Falconbridge’s An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (1788) and his wife Anna Maria Falconbridge’s Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone, During the Years 1791–2–3 (1794) also raised readers’ awareness of the grim realities of the slave trade in Africa.15 In 1800 William Earle Jr. published Obi; or, The History of Threefingered Jack. In a Series of Letters from a Resident in Jamaica to his Friend in England, a true account of an escaped slave named Jack Mansong, famous for his practice of “obi” or “obeah,” a West African brand of sorcery or voodoo, and for his role as leader of a band of robbers in the early 1780s.16 It is noteworthy that Earle casts Jack in an extremely sympathetic manner, describing him as seven feet tall and as a man of prodigious strength. “He was every thing in soul and person requisite for the hero,” his narrator George Stanford writes, “a bold and daring fellow, ready to undertake any thing for the good of


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his country, inspired by a rooted revenge, on the strongest foundation villainy can fabricate.”17 Stanford recounts a typical argument he has with his fellow Jamaicans regarding Jack’s character: Jack is a noble fellow, and in spite of every cruel hard-hearted planter, I shall repeat the name to the last hour of my life. “Jack is a negro”, say they. “Jack is a man”, say I. —“He is a slave.” —“MAN cannot be a slave to MAN.” (4)

Stanford remarks that the Jamaicans often counter his abolitionist arguments by saying, “I never heard that the traffic was infamous. Is it not authorized by all the nations of Europe, Asia and America?” To this question he answers, “that does not make it more honorable” (5–6). Inspired by Earle’s narrative, James Fawcett adapted the story in a pantomime entitled Obi, or, Three-fingered Jack that became a sensation on the London stage in the summer of 1800 and remained popular for decades afterward. While the success of Fawcett’s pantomime was likely due to the superhuman portrayal of Jack and the violence of his rebellious life and of his capture, the story of Obi played an important role in opening Londoners’ eyes to many of the realities of slave life in the West Indies and to the injustice of slavery as an institution. Charles Rzepka has pointed out that by the 1820s Obi became an even more powerful vehicle for English abolitionists when it was converted into a melodrama and when Jack was given a speaking role, which allowed him to speak out against the atrocities of the capture of Africans and of their treatment by planters in the West Indian colonies.18 Of course the abolition debate also found its way into a variety of reformist novels of the period. One of the best examples can be found in Anna Maria Mackenzie’s little-known abolitionist novel Slavery: Or, The Times (1792), one of the only novels of the 1790s that is predominantly concerned with plight of the West Indian slaves. Mackenzie was one of several authors in the late eighteenth century who followed Voltaire and Rousseau in recasting the figure of the child of nature and combining his characteristics with those of the popular man of feeling.19 As her epistolary novel opens, the African chief Zimza of Tonouwah puts his son Adolphus under the guardianship of his friend Hamilton in London so that the boy can be given an English education; significantly, Mackenzie makes it clear that Adolphus’s mother was English. Mackenzie may have based the character of Adolphus

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and his experiences in England on any of a number of contemporary accounts of African princes who were brought to Europe to be educated, many of whom were sold into slavery despite their parents’ trust in the white traders and sailors who promised them safe passage.20 In 1749, for example, the son of the West African king of Annamaboe and a friend were sold into slavery by their ship’s captain rather than being carried to England as promised. After their ransom by the British government, the young men enjoyed celebrity in London. One account holds that they were greeted by public applause when they attended a Covent Garden revival of Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko (1695), a dramatization of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel Oroonoko; or, The History of the Royal Slave.21 Drawing on this account, Mackenzie includes an episode in her novel in which her hero also attends a revival of Southerne’s play.22 Like Elizabeth Inchbald’s Henry Norwynne and Robert Bage’s Charles Hermsprong, Adolphus has been raised in a simpler, yet in many ways more civilized, culture, and his voyage to England via Jamaica gives him the opportunity to point out the many contrasts between his home in Africa, cosmopolitan London, and plantation life in the British colonies. As soon as he arrives in England, his preconceptions of what the “civilized” world will be like are challenged when he witnesses a press-gang capture a group of sailors on his ship as it sails into port. “I thought . . . England was a land of freedom,” he says to his guardian, Hamilton, “and that you made no slaves here” (I:65). Adolphus and his English guardian, Hamilton, debate the efficacy of enforced military service, and the boy insists that only free will can inspire vigor and courage in battle. When Hamilton tells Adolphus of a young sailor on board a ship known as the Bedford who was likewise pressed into military service, Mackenzie’s personal investment in this issue is made clear to the reader by a footnote in which she indicates that this anecdote refers to “the Author’s son” (I:69). When he is introduced into London society, Adolphus is also astonished by the gravity with which the English approach their nightly gambling parties, and he is appalled by the cold reserve of young English women who feign a lack of interest in those who wish to court them. Because Adolphus’s comments continually ruffle the feathers of the Londoners he meets, Hamilton attempts to curb the boy’s spirit in the interest of smoothing his acceptance into society. “Never . . . shall Adolphus,” the boy protests, “in compliance with the vile servility of flattering Europeans, be induced to say the thing that is not” (I:144). When encouraged to see that silence is often the


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“test of prudence,” the proud Adolphus retorts that “Then, sir, I shall never be prudent” (I:144). As a typical eighteenth-century man of feeling, Adolphus’s keen sensitivity to the plights of others leads him through a rather implausible succession of benevolent acts. After a fight aboard ship with a sailor who had insulted him, for example, Adolphus pleads for his enemy’s release when he learns he is to be whipped. In Jamaica, he goes to great lengths to purchase the freedom of a former servant he recognizes there, along with the man’s wife and child. When he meets the unfortunate Mr. Hawkins, who lacks the financial stability required to take care of his orphaned niece, Mary Ann St Leger, Adolphus asks his guardian to employ Hawkins as his tutor, and he becomes involved in a complicated plot to rescue Mary Ann from the exploitation of a corrupt legal guardian who plans to defraud her of her inheritance. Putting as many of the day’s popular conventions into play as possible, Mackenzie also draws on the familiar figure of the rake as a perfect contrast to the purity and naïveté of Adolphus’s character. Her villainous Francis Berisford, like Thomas Holcroft’s Coke Clifton, is closely modeled on Samuel Richardson’s Robert Lovelace. Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects of the novel is Mackenzie’s manner of achieving a distinctive voice for Berisford in his letters, emphasizing his anger and his impulsiveness with short staccato sentences and an abundance of dashes—an exaggeration of Clifton’s style of writing in Holcroft’s novel. Anna St Ives, which was published the year before, may well have been a strong influence on Mackenzie’s novel, for the hatred that Berisford expresses toward the prim Adolphus and his conservative philosophical opinions closely echo Clifton’s outbursts against Frank Henley for similar reasons. Berisford’s dislike of Adolphus, however, has a particularly racist edge. When he is angered by Mary Ann’s clear preference for Adolphus, Berisford writes to a friend, “what is there in him to engage the attention, when put in competition with a man of fashion? And am I to be refused for a ? ——” (I:185). “His manner, his principles, his person,” Berisford complains, “truly all so perfect! . . . Gaming, rambling, noble living, all we men of the world enjoy, he dares not even approve” (I:185–86). Shocked that he has not been preferred to this unusual foreigner, Berisford cannot even name the racial difference that he finds so objectionable in his rival. Mackenzie’s primary interest in Slavery is to expose the evils of the slave trade and the mechanisms by which it had been perpetuated

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both in Africa and in North America, and she exploits the conventions of the sentimental novel to the fullest in exposing her reader to the worst abuses of the institution. Toward the novel’s conclusion, Adolphus’s father, Chief Zimza, is captured and taken to Jamaica as a slave. Predictably, Zimza is eventually discovered and released through the efforts of his son, Adolphus. Naturally Zimza’s firsthand experience of slavery alters his views of the interests that drive it. “Interest governs the world,” Zimza writes in his journal. “It makes the Africans unnatural betrayers of their fellow-creatures, deceitful and tyrannous; while it induces the Europeans to be savage, greedy, and selfish” (II:159). Significantly, here Mackenzie extends her critique of slavery into a broader critique of the European class system when Zimza is forced to admit that a life devoid of titles and riches is preferable to the proud sovereignty he and his son had possessed over his people in Africa. Thus she effectively expands what might have been merely an abolitionist tract into a wide-ranging assessment of the characteristics of a “civilized” world that allows for and even nurtures such institutions as slavery, enforced military service, and the subjection of women. Not satisfied with political concerns alone, Mackenzie also dips into contemporary religious debate, closely following the example of Voltaire’s L’Ingénu by utilizing the issue of Adolphus’s conversion to Christianity to launch a bold attack on modern religious mores. Like Voltaire’s Huron, Adolphus embraces Christianity when he is exposed to it; and, like the Huron, he also immediately recognizes the blatant contradictions between the doctrines of Christianity and its practice in the Western world. Though impressed with the tenets of the Christian faith, Zimza chooses not to convert due to the hypocrisy he sees as rampant among Christians. “When I observe how small the influence of these noble principles, even in the conduct of many of your priesthood,” Zimza explains to an English friend, “and how weak their power in guiding the practice of a great majority of those who profess to be members of the Christian church, I am again involved in doubts and uncertainty” (I:79). Thus Mackenzie recalibrates Voltaire’s exposé of religious hypocrisy into an indictment aimed specifically at those who consider themselves Christians while sanctioning the capture and sale of human beings and hungrily consuming goods produced by slave labor. It is noteworthy that Mackenzie concludes Slavery by sending her characters to a France that is “no longer the seat of gaiety and peace,” but one where “each mistrusts the principles of his neighbour” (II:223). Mackenzie goes so far as to insert an unlikely passage into the final lines of the novel in which a French character praises


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the British. “The liberty we contend for blossoms sweetly in your nation,” the Frenchman says. “Had our mode of government been mild as yours, the rights of royalty would have been equally secure” (II:237). Such an ending may strike a modern reader as surprisingly conservative for an abolitionist who has been strident in her attacks on British culture throughout the novel. Nevertheless, by 1792, distancing oneself from the contemporary political situation in France may have been a critical tactic for a novel containing such clearly reformist views. One might compare the tactics Smith used to make her reformist agenda less obvious in The Old Manor House (1793) and The Banished Man (1794) after the heated critical response to her bolder Desmond, published in 1792.23 While these final comments jar with the political tone of the rest of the book, it may be worthwhile to read Mackenzie’s treatment of France as a final illustration of how thoroughly a modern culture, even one in the process of liberating itself from political and religious tyranny, can become corrupted by human vice. Few late eighteenth-century novels include African characters in roles as major as that of Adolphus. Nevertheless, African characters do appear in minor roles from time to time, and it can be productive to study the manner in which they are portrayed. In many cases, the African character appears as the stereotype of the unflaggingly faithful servant, largely influenced by the representation of Africans on the late eighteenth-century stage. In a few significant cases, however, such a character exhibits deliberate, if subtle, traits that suggest a novelist’s attempt to emphasize something particularly human and nonstereotypical about him or her. Such an example can be found in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1804). In one melodramatic episode in this novel, the heroine Adeline sells a valuable veil at one-third of its value to buy a pineapple as a treat for her dying lover Glenmurray. On the way to the fruit-seller’s, she sees a family of escaped slaves in distress. The father, William, though deathly ill, is being arrested and taken to debtor’s prison for a debt of six pounds. Adeline deliberates on the situation until she hears the creditor make a nasty statement about William and his wife Savanna: “Why, bring him along, and have done with it; here is a fuss to make indeed about that idle dog, and that ugly black b—h!”24 The most important aspect of this passage lies in Opie’s description of Adeline’s thought process. Until Adeline hears the creditor’s slur, she “had not recollected that [Savanna] was a mulatto; and this speech, reflecting so brutally on her colour,—a circumstance which made her an object of greater interest to Adeline,—urged her to step forward to their

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joint relief with an almost irresistible impulse” (138). Because this particular case of brutality is compounded by racial prejudice, Adeline cannot resist her inclination to assist the family despite the fact that alleviating their debt will deprive her beloved Glenmurray of perhaps his last pleasure. The significance of this episode lies in Opie’s demonstration that her heroine does not initially recognize racial difference until it is drawn to her attention. After this episode the grateful Savanna and her son “Tawny Boy” become devoted companions and servants to Adeline, enduring poverty alongside her. The embodiment of perfect loyalty, Savanna stays by Adeline’s side for the rest of Adeline’s life, nursing her through illness, helping her eke out a meager living, and going so far as to protect Adeline when she makes an unfortunate marriage to the deceitful Charles Berrendale. In the final lines of the novel, the dying Adeline rests her head not on her mother’s bosom, but on Savanna’s.25 The subtitle of Adeline Mowbray, “The Mother and Daughter,” clearly indicates the emphasis Opie wished to place on Adeline’s troubled relationship with her mother, Editha. After raising Adeline according to a system of modern philosophical convictions that disdain the institution of marriage, Editha values her status in society too highly to stand behind Adeline when Adeline acts on those convictions and chooses not to marry her lover Glenmurray. Editha then further alienates Adeline by repeatedly exhibiting a selfish preference for her dissolute husband over her own daughter. In the final analysis, it is the nurturing Savanna who provides Adeline with the care and protection of a true mother. A modern reader may wonder why Opie chose to depict an African character in a period in which so few such characters appear in the British novel. As a woman and as an escaped slave who is sold back into slavery when she returns to Jamaica, Savanna represents perhaps the most extreme example of the dispossessed in contemporary British culture. Savanna’s status as an outcast and as the survivor of actual slavery make her an example with which the reader is asked to compare Adeline’s situation as a woman and a social outcast. Carol Howard argues that Adeline Mowbray “establishes an idealized and nostalgic relationship of what might best be called fealty” between Adeline and Savanna, providing a “melioristic, rather than revolutionary, solution both to the ‘problem’ of slavery and the problems of marriage.”26 Going one step farther, Roxanne Eberle suggests that “the escaped black slave can serve as an empowering model for the psychologically shackled white British woman” because she has “reclaimed herself from an economic and legal system which had considered her


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‘chattel.’”27 In Eberle’s view, Opie offers the plight of the African woman in England as inspiration to the women of Britain. Wollstonecraft herself had made the comparison in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, asking, “is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to the prejudices that brutalize them, when principles would be a surer guard, only to sweeten the cup of man?” (V:215).28 Clearly Opie worked to elaborate this compelling analogy. In his 1799 novel St Leon, Godwin also draws on the conventional stereotype of the African in depicting a character who, like Savanna, embodies perfect fidelity to his white patron.29 Having been born a wealthy aristocrat, Godwin’s hero, Reginald de St Leon, is incapable of adjusting to a simpler lifestyle when he loses his fortune and is forced to leave his native France, even though his wise wife, Marguerite, and his children happily embrace their freedom from the corruption of high society.30 To illustrate the devastating effects of St Leon’s inability to abandon his desire for wealth and social status, Godwin explores the complexities of St Leon’s psychological reactions when he is given the secret of the philosopher’s stone and learns to manufacture his own wealth. What St Leon discovers, of course, is that his inability to explain the source for an endless supply of ready money engenders only suspicion, hatred, and violence and repeatedly forces him to move his family from one community to another all over Europe. In one episode, St Leon is arrested in Constance, Germany, and is imprisoned on suspicion of criminal activity. He immediately plans to use his unlimited wealth to procure his freedom, and he attempts to bribe an African turnkey by the name of Hector. In this episode, Godwin demonstrates the extent of St Leon’s misguided obsession with money by contrasting him with a character who is his opposite in every conceivable way. St Leon easily assumes that he will have no problem bribing the simple Hector, judging him purely and superficially on “the meanness of his rank and his apparent poverty.”31 Hector, however, responds in a manner St Leon describes as “altogether new to me” and leaves him “overwhelmed with astonishment” (IV:196). When St Leon asks Hector whether or not he will be his friend, Hector replies, “I have been used to call the man I love my friend. If you mean that, you know I cannot choose whether I will be a man’s friend; it comes of itself” (IV:195). When asked whether he is content with his lot in life, Hector surprises St Leon by affirming that he is satisfied to be a servant and that he is pleased to serve a master who had rescued him from imprisonment in the past. “When I took the keys,” Hector explains of his position as turnkey, “by that action I pledged myself to be faithful to my trust; and the nobleness of

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my master’s behavior to me in removing me from being a prisoner to be a free servant, is a double bond upon my fidelity” (IV:196). St Leon inhabits a world in which he believes that “every man had his price,” yet Hector shows him that there are those who have “no sense of those attractions, which so often degrade the best, and convert virtue into the most shameless profligacy” (IV:196). Of Hector, he admits with amazement that “it cost him no effort to be honest, and he uttered sentiments that would have given luster to the most heroic character, without any consciousness of their greatness” (IV:196–97). It had never occurred to St Leon that he might discover such “sublime integrity” in a man possessing no advantages of wealth or education—a man content with living an honest, ordinary life. “Kings might have confessed their inferiority to this man,” St Leon attests (IV:197). Failing to absorb the import of this discovery, however, St Leon subsequently bribes Hector’s master, the jailor, and thus manages to escape. The jailor agrees to the scheme on the condition that Hector leaves with St Leon so that he can be blamed for accepting St Leon’s bribe. Pathetically, the honest Hector begs the jailor not to dismiss him from his service. “He said he would be generous and kind to me,” Hector says of St Leon, “if I turned a villain; I shall never be able, and shall never desire to earn his kindness” (IV:198). But the jailor insists, and St Leon wryly remarks “thus were his exemplary fidelity and affection rewarded! So little do some men seem capable of feeling the value of attachment!” (IV:199). As he delineates the weaknesses of the corrupt jailor’s character, St Leon ironically fails to see what he has in common with this man. Having just attempted to bribe a turnkey to betray his duty to his employer, St Leon too is incapable of feeling the value of attachment. Indeed, to make this point all the more obvious, Godwin immediately follows St Leon’s analysis of the jailor with an episode in which St Leon is visited by his devoted wife, Marguerite, whom St Leon undervalues and misunderstands. As he was shocked by Hector’s refusal of his bribe, he is also shocked to find Marguerite in a state of depression over the magnitude of his errors rather than overjoyed by the news of his impending escape. When St Leon escapes with his family and Hector to Pisa, he makes the mistake of accepting Hector’s assistance in conducting his alchemical labors. Although he had sworn to keep his knowledge a secret from all others, he assumes that Hector’s simplicity and innocence will preclude his curiosity. When Hector becomes romantically involved with a local barmaid, however, his new girlfriend uses “female arts” to pry St Leon’s secret out of Hector despite the fact that Hector


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“would sooner have died upon the rack, than run the slightest risk of betraying it” (IV:218). The information spreads rapidly through the town, and an angry mob gathers to attack and burn St Leon’s home. St Leon escapes with his family, but, like his Trojan namesake, Hector gives his life to defend his master’s home, determined either to make amends for the trouble he has caused or to die in an attempt to protect his master’s property. Hector is seized by the mob and is brutally ripped limb from limb. Hector’s death is prefigured when St Leon’s neighbors murder St Leon’s black dog, Charon, a remarkable animal whose greatness of spirit and depth of loyalty to his master are described in lengthy detail. St Leon continues to learn from Hector when he witnesses Hector’s emotional reaction to Charon’s death: “The poor negro, who, in the innocence of his heart was uninitiated in the proud distinctions by which civilised man is taught to place so vast a barrier between the human nature and the brute, was struck speechless with sorrow and amazement. He recognised the dead being before him for his fellowcreature. He recollected in him his friend, his companion, his intimate acquaintance, between whom and himself there had for some time passed an uninterrupted reciprocation of acts of kindness and assistance” (IV:224). Whether or not one reads St Leon’s reference here to “civilised man” as ironic, Godwin is clearly drawing a distinction between Hector’s emotional response to Charon’s death and St Leon’s. Again, St Leon is amazed by the depth of Hector’s loyalty to a fellow being. More importantly, Godwin clearly wishes his reader to compare St Leon’s responses to the unflagging fidelity of Hector with his feelings about the black dog. Of Charon’s death, St Leon states that “a morose and fastidious reader perhaps will ask why I lay so great a stress upon so petty and insignificant an incident as the death of a dog” (IV:224). Similarly, and astonishingly, he remarks after Hector’s death that “some men perhaps will ask, why I lamented so bitterly over so uncultivated and uninformed an individual as this negro” (IV:237). In interpreting this aspect of the novel, it is important to recall Godwin’s focus on a major weakness of St Leon’s personality. “A feature of my individual character,” St Leon freely admits, “is the love of admiration and spontaneous deference,” qualities that both Charon and Hector offer him unreservedly (IV:214). Both Charon and Hector have treated him with the attention and deference he feels he deserves as a former nobleman. Despite Hector’s influence, St Leon remains a man who values the “proud distinctions” of “civilised man.” When Hector is killed, St Leon feels a pang of grief that can be compared to Hector’s grief for Charon. Initially, the reader may

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think that he has learned something about “the value of attachment” from observing Hector’s love for his fellow beings. But St Leon then avows, “I believe for the moment I felt a sharper pang in it, than in the strange and extraordinary loss of my only son, or perhaps in the premature death of my beloved Marguerite” (IV:237). Something has shifted in St Leon’s mind. Hector’s loyalty to others and his ultimate act of self-sacrifice have made a profound impression on him, and here for perhaps the first time he fully comprehends Hector’s humanity and the full magnitude of the loss of his friendship. Nevertheless, many readers will be astonished by the comparison he makes between his grief for Hector and his grief for his son and wife. St Leon continues to rate and measure human worth as one who weighs and counts gold coins. It is puzzling to consider why Godwin chose to include an African character in a narrative set in sixteenth-century Europe. As in the case of Opie’s Savanna, he begins with the contemporary stereotype of the simple, emotional, and fiercely loyal servant. At the very least, it can be argued that Hector’s innocence, trust, and unconditional fidelity intensify the reader’s emotional reaction to the escalating tragedies resulting from St Leon’s destructive behavior. Certainly Godwin uses St Leon’s loss of Hector, along with his loss of his dog, his children, and his highly idealized wife, to amplify St Leon’s profound character flaw in allowing his obsession with status and property to destroy all those who love him. Here it is important to recall that Godwin had dedicated an entire book of Political Justice to the problems that are endemic to an inequitable distribution of property. “The subject of property,” Godwin writes at the beginning of that book, “is the keystone that completes the fabric of political justice.”32 In his use of a racial stereotype here, however, it can also be argued that Godwin, like Opie, pushes a familiar character type to a new extreme. It is important to note that in illuminating the destructiveness of privileged Europeans who are damaged by their corrupted culture, both Opie and Godwin simultaneously emphasize the selflessness, humanity, and even superiority of the most dispossessed class of human beings imaginable. The Creole Stereotype in the Hands of Reformists Late eighteenth-century literary treatments of the West Indian Creole tend to offer more insight into contemporary attitudes toward slavery and abolition than representations of African slaves themselves. The term “Creole” was applied broadly to Europeans who had settled in


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the Caribbean from a variety of countries, including England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Despite the fact that British consumers demanded West Indian exports in ever-increasing quantities, depictions of Creoles in the British novel often indicate a distinct discomfort with perceived differences in personality and manners between the British at home and those who lived abroad. The ardently conservative Mrs. Rayland of Smith’s The Old Manor House, for example, calls Creoles “low bred upstarts” and laments that such people tend to “give one the notion of having got into the coaches they were designed to drive” (VI:141). “Money destroys all distinctions!” she complains; “your Creoles and your East India people over-run every body” (VI:141). In many cases this sort of uneasiness about the social position of Creoles is overshadowed by a deeper anxiety concerning miscegenation, an anxiety that is particularly noticeable in the contemporary obsession with classifying people of color into such categories as “Sambo,” “Mulatto,” “Quadroon,” “Mustee,” “Mustiphini,” “Quintroon,” and “Octoroon.”33 The narrator of Holcroft’s Memoirs of Bryan Perdue (1805) clearly distinguishes Creoles from whites; upon arriving in Kingston, Jamaica, he describes his amazement at the ethnic diversity there: “The sight of so great a number of [negroes], mixed with the creoles, or people of color, and the white, had a novelty which made a strong impression upon me” (IV:235). The portrayal of a Creole aristocrat in the anonymously authored Henry Willoughby (1798) offers a brief glimpse of how a Creole living in England responded to such anxiety concerning racial mixing. Of his friend Hector McFraser, the narrator Henry states that “every shilling he could spare from his urgent necessities, he applied to the beautifying and adorning his darling face; and when, after a variety of experiments, he despaired of being able to whiten his visage with cosmetic lotions, he resolved to remove the defect by a very liberal application of paint, and to conceal, under plaster-of-paris, the sombre tint of Antigua.”34 Similarly, of the white women in the West Indies, John Thelwall writes in The Daughter of Adoption (1801) that their “whole care and ingenuity” lay in “preserving the sickly delicacy of their complexions, and repelling, by masks and gloves, by curtains and umbrellas, the dreaded influence of the tropical sun.”35 Richard Cumberland’s play The West Indian (1771) offers one of the most detailed portraits of a Creole in the late eighteenth century, although it is an unusually benign one. Cumberland’s good-hearted hero “Belcour” is introduced as a Jamaican landowner of lavish wealth with what an English servant describes as “rum and sugar enough

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belonging to him, to make all the water in the Thames into punch.”36 Belcour arrives in London with a host of slaves carrying his many portmanteaus, trunks, and cargo of “Muscovado sugars, rum-puncheons, mahogany-slabs, wet sweetmeats, and green paroquets” (I:41). An English friend characterizes Belcour as the product of “an education not of the strictest kind” and allows that “strong animal spirits, are apt sometimes to betray him into youthful irregularities,” but he also attests to Belcour’s unusual candor and his “uncommon benevolence” (I:40). Despite his good heart, however, Belcour instantly incites a riot upon arriving in London, when, “accustomed to a land of slaves,” he attempts to brush away a swarm of “custom-house extortioners, boatmen, tide-waiters, and water-bailiffs” with his rattan (I:6). It is not surprising that Belcour’s New World upbringing has not prepared him for life in England, and his experiences there quickly reveal him to be far too naïve for sophisticated Londoners. Belcour himself is quick to blame the “irregularities” of his character on the region of his birth (I:40; 77). He explains his sudden obsession with the beautiful Louisa Dudley, for example, by stating that “if this is folly in me, you must rail at Nature: you must chide the sun, that was vertical at my birth, and would not wink upon my nakedness, but swaddled me in the broadest, hottest glare of his meridian beams” (I:33). Despite a precipitous nature, Belcour’s “heart beaming with benevolence” and “animated nature, fallible indeed, but not incorrigible” (I:77) ultimately win him Louisa’s love, as well as the affection of the other English characters. By contrast, reformist texts of the 1790s tend to portray the Creole as hedonistic, voluptuous, and exploitative—clear manifestations of an abolitionist agenda. Barbauld’s “Epistle to William Wilberforce,” for example, illustrates how a fervent abolitionist placed a decidedly different interpretation on traits that Cumberland treated as innocuous and even charming. Barbauld’s slave owner is ruled by passions and vices that stem from his participation in slavery: Each vice, to minds deprav’d by bondage known, With sure contagion fastens on his own; In sickly languors melts his nerveless frame, And blows to rage impetuous Passion’s flame:37

Many contemporary novelists characterize Creoles as hardened to the realities of slavery from long habit. A character in Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Rubigné (1777), for example, states that “habit, the tyrant of nature and of reason, is deaf to the voice of either; here


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she stifles humanity, and debases the species—for the master of slaves has seldom the soul of a man.”38 Of the West Indians Earle writes in Obi that “those are not my countrymen. . . . They may be Britons born, but they are not Britons at heart, and I disclaim them. There are thousands here that have hearts like rocks. Children, from their birth, tutored to inhumanity, and treat our fellow creatures worse than the dogs that lick the morsel beneath their table” (35). A former slave in Bage’s Man As He Is (1792) concurs, stating, “I do tink the groans and shrieks of we de poor negroes unde whip, be the finest music in the vorld to dem” (IV:231–32). Several episodes in later eighteenth-century fiction depict the shock of British characters when they encounter Creoles. The title character of Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), for example, is horrified by his Jamaican wife’s indifference to the plight of her slaves; Mrs. Ellison weeps when her lapdog is injured but exhibits no emotional response to the sufferings of her slaves. Smith crafts a similar episode in The Wanderings of Warwick (1794), in which a British soldier stationed in Jamaica abandons his Creole fiancée when he inadvertently sees her presiding over the brutal beating of a young mulatto girl. Smith reworks this stereotype again in the novel in her portrait of a Creole widow, Mrs. Effingham, who “had all the West-Indian indolence about her.”39 Mrs. Effingham makes little effort to extend the education she had been given. “Her reading,” Smith writes, “never went beyond a fashionable novel, a magazine, a popular pamphlet, or a newspaper; which she caused one of her mulatto women to read to her, while another of them, or her black valet-de-chambre, dressed her hair” (VII:38).40 In “The Story of Henrietta,” which comprises the second volume of Smith’s The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800), Smith depicts Creole life in its farthest extremes when she takes the reader into the heart of plantation life in Jamaica and even into the midst of an uprising of “Maroons,” a term used for bands of fugitives from slavery and their descendants in the West Indies. Smith places her beleaguered heroine Henrietta Maynard in a highly Gothic setting, albeit one adapted to contemporary Jamaica. Henrietta is faced with “a father possessing unlimited power, and surrounded by slaves; in a remote house, of an island, many parts of which are liable to the attacks of savages driven to desperation, and thirsting for the blood of any who resembled even in colour their hereditary oppressors.”41 Henrietta’s father embodies the worst possible stereotype of the cruel Jamaican landowner. It is noteworthy that Smith does not shrink from describing Henrietta’s shock at discovering that several of the

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mulatto servants in her father’s household are his own daughters and thus her half sisters. When her father attempts to force Henrietta to marry a man he has chosen for her, her position is compared to that of her father’s slaves when one of the slaves tells her that “master give him you, Miss, and all this great rich estates, and pens and all” (XI:117). As in Opie’s Adeline Mowbray, here Smith points out a distinct parallel between the status of women and slaves. Smith’s portrait of Henrietta’s father is counterbalanced by that of his brother, a man who gives up on life in England after a series of miserable misfortunes and finds a renewed purpose in attempting to improve the lives of the Jamaican slaves. “If I was disgusted with the mere representation of scenes which I had never witnessed since I had made use of my reason,” Henrietta’s uncle Maynard states, “I found the reality of oppression, in which I was myself a party, utterly insupportable” (XI:182). Maynard’s attempts to make improvements backfire, however, when his neighbors threaten to lock him up as a lunatic and when their fear of insurrection leads them to treat their slaves with even greater severity. “Malice irritated by avarice is hardly ever weary,” Maynard professes, regretting that “the continued outrages of these unhappy people render even the suspicion of wishing them less wretched, a crime which may involve in very serious embarrassment those who are suspected” (XI:183). Maynard goes so far as to defend the violent Maroons, stating that “these men, whom we call savages, have neither the blindness nor the ingratitude of the polished Europeans” (XI:185). The moral of Smith’s tale is a clear one: “Misery . . . is, indeed, the certain concomitant of slavery” (XI:139). One of the most fully realized portraits of a Creole in this period can be found in the Jamaican planter Augustus Vincent of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. The cheerful Vincent appears to have been inspired by Cumberland’s Belcour, although Edgeworth ultimately emphasizes the threatening potential of his vices rather than mollifying them as Cumberland does.42 Vincent’s typical “sunburnt complexion” is aligned to a personality that is “full of fire and animation” (II:170). Like Belcour, he “had not the common manners of young men who are, or who aim at being thought, fashionable” (II:170). “All the goods of life he tasted with epicurean zest,” she writes, and “all the evils he braved with stoical indifference” (II:171). Despite these impressive qualities, however, Edgeworth explains that Vincent’s “social prejudices were such as, in some degree, to supply the place of the power and habit of reasoning, in which he was totally deficient” (II:170–71). Worst of all, Vincent expressed a “disdain of


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reason as a moral guide” and he “thought, acted, and suffered as a man of feeling” (II:326–27). As in Belcour’s case, Vincent’s weak reasoning abilities and his high spirits get him into trouble in England. The combination of his naïveté and his love of pleasure makes him easy prey to high-society gamblers who cheat him of his fortune.43 Ultimately, his high passions make him unsuitable for life among the English and for a marriage to such an ideal of English womanhood as Edgeworth’s heroine. Throughout the novel Lady Delacour takes great pains to maneuver Belinda away from Vincent and toward her choice of a more appropriate suitor. Susan Greenfield argues that Lady Delacour “represents a form of national and racial border patrol” in “securing Belinda’s sexual borders” from Mr. Vincent and maneuvering her eventual marriage to the thoroughly English Clarence Hervey.44 For Greenfield, Lady Delacour’s fixation on racial distinctions “may reflect concerns West Indian colonialism generated, as British settlement complicated efforts to separate English citizens from English settlers and their Creole descendants and as the West Indies became potential economic and political liabilities at the end of the eighteenth century” (216).45 Indeed, the differences between Belcour and Vincent reflect thirty years of changing attitudes toward the English living in the West Indies; certainly a significant aspect of those changes involves an increased public awareness of the terrible realities of slavery and the slave trade. Belinda includes an episode in which Belinda and Mr. Vincent read together Day’s and Bicknell’s melodramatic “The Dying Negro,” a poem based on the account of a former slave who plans to marry a white woman in England but takes his own life when he is captured to avoid being returned to America. Edgeworth’s use of the poem in this context raises important questions about Vincent’s moral character as a West Indian planter. While Vincent praises the poem, his imperfect understanding of it suggests his inability to acknowledge fully the evils of slavery. Greenfield explains that Vincent identifies with the poem from a romantic point of view and not a political one, writing that he “apparently sympathizes with the African speaker of the poem, who, like him, discovers the supposed superiority of European female beauty.”46 Vincent’s blindness to the exploitation of slavery is also evident in his relationship with Juba, the loyal slave he brings with him to England. While Vincent treats Juba with kindness, it is telling, and troubling, that Juba bears the same name as Vincent’s loyal dog, an association that brings to mind St Leon’s Hector and Charon.47 Juba’s role in Belinda adds another layer to unravel in analyzing the treatment of African slaves in the novel of the period. Edgeworth

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includes an episode in which Juba courts and marries an English girl named Lucy, the daughter of an elderly porter and his wife who encourage the match despite Lucy’s initial fear of Juba’s black face. Felicity Nussbaum has pointed out that miscegenation did not appear to trouble the British during this period if the darker partner’s social rank was equal to or greater than that of the white partner.48 To Lucy’s parents, Juba’s color is irrelevant; they recognize him as a good potential son-in-law because of his good nature and his industriousness in caning chairs and weaving baskets. Typical of the stereotype of fidelity, Juba’s most overwhelming emotion on his wedding day is his gratitude to his master. Rather than singing to his new bride, Juba composes a wedding song in honor of Mr. Vincent, “which he sang to his banjore with the most touching expression of joyful gratitude” (II:200). It is important to note that Edgeworth was persuaded by her father and others to rewrite this episode when she prepared the novel for a new edition in 1810. In her revision Edgeworth replaces Juba as Lucy’s groom with an Englishman by the name of James Jackson, although Juba’s grateful “banjore” song remains a part of the wedding festivities.49 This alteration may support Nussbaum’s argument that increasing numbers of freed slaves in England in the early years of the nineteenth century led to more distinctly defined racial categories as well as to increased anxieties about miscegenation.50 One of the most extended treatments of contemporary life in the West Indies can be found in Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801), published under the pseudonym “John Beaufort, LL.D.”51 A vocal and widely known reformer, Thelwall was arrested and imprisoned for treason in 1794 and was shadowed by government informers throughout the 1790s, largely due to his prominence and popularity as a radical public speaker.52 Thelwall continually experimented with new literary genres in looking for ways to disseminate his political agenda, and his politics are never far beneath the surface of this novel, a work that includes impassioned statements against the practice of slavery. Thelwall opens his novel by describing the early education of his flawed hero Henry Montfort, a “discordant” education that has regretfully produced the young gentleman’s “diversity and inconsistency of character.”53 Thelwall carefully demonstrates how Henry’s overdeveloped sensibility, his “capricious fretfulness, wanton acts of petulance and tyranny,” and “untractable impetuosity,” all stem from the conflicting approaches of Henry’s parents in raising their son (I:57, 71). For the first six years of his life, Henry is raised solely by his mother, Amelia, in England while his father, Percival Montfort,


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manages the family estate in the West Indies. Amelia raises Henry on the “little sensible publications” of Barbauld and takes time to compose her own lessons for Henry based on incidents in the family’s day (I:62). Henry is never struck, is never “caressed because he was fretful,” and is never “appeased with sugar plumbs when impatient under inevitable disappointments” (I:53). When punishment is required, he is sent to a special room to play quietly, and when his wishes must be denied, Amelia always explains “the true reason of the restriction” in terms the child can understand (I:53). When Percival Montfort returns from the West Indies, however, he fills Henry’s mind with “the antiquated jargon of the nursery,” reciting stories of “nautical superstition,” old wives’ tales, and “narrations of the terrible and the marvellous” (I:63). “In vain,” Thelwall writes, “were little Red Riding Hood, the Seven Champions, and Jack the Giant-killer excluded from the nursery” but instead found their place alongside tales of devils, witches, and hobgoblins that instill in Henry “false systems of morality” (I:63). When Amelia complains to her husband of the dramatic change in Henry’s behavior, an enraged Percival replies that he will not be dictated to by “newfangled notions,” nor have his brains “turned topsy-turvy with the doctrines of [her] petticoat philosophers,” preferring that Henry be educated “like other boys” (I:58). Thus Amelia’s efforts to provide her son with a modern education are thwarted by a husband who exhibits the worst excesses of destructive male behavior, both in the exploitation of the slaves on his estate and in a lifestyle characterized by “sordid pursuits of voluptuousness and profusion” (I:65). Predictably, the inconsistencies in Henry’s early education result in an inability to control his passions as he grows older and attends school at Eton and later at Oxford. With a faulty understanding of wealth and the social responsibilities of the rich, Henry squanders money on excessive feasts and drunken parties. After one such evening of dissipation, he joins in a stunt to rob a poor farmer’s henhouse. Despite his good intentions in attempting to repay the wronged farmer the following day, Henry attempts to seduce the farmer’s young daughter Mary.54 By detailing the events of Henry’s young adulthood, Thelwall clearly demonstrates how the inconsistencies of Henry’s character and his uncontrolled sensibility make him both a perfect dupe to scheming friends with dissipated habits and a highly destructive member of society. Significantly, Henry’s parents also embody two extremes concerning abolition. Henry’s dissolute father is described as having “trafficked, without remorse, in the blood of his sable brethren” (I:93)

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and having amassed great wealth from his plantations in St Domingo. For Amelia, however, “the very conditions of master and of slave, and all those distinctions which measure respectability by the gradations of complexion, were equally repugnant to her principles and her feelings; and, in her opinion, more fatal to the best virtues of humanity than even that unbounded licentiousness of morals which seem, almost universally, to characterize the tropical regions” (I:222). Where the issue of slavery is concerned, Henry’s mother fortunately proves to have the greater influence on her son. When Henry travels to St Domingo, he describes his impressions of the people he meets there in great detail. In many cases he finds that Creoles exhibit the worst kinds of social behaviors that he has also encountered at home in England. One couple, for example, had been “qualifying themselves (one at a celebrated monastery, and the other in the coffee-houses of Paris) to vaunt their superiority over the other colonists” (I:226–27). Henry is dismayed by several planters “who had been spending, in a few months of ostentatious parade, all that the rapacity of six or eight years had scourged out of the limbs of their miserable negroes” (I:227). He notices the indolence of the Creoles, who take long siestas to cope with the hot climate, and he regrets the complete absence of books, which cannot be protected from indigenous insects. The Creoles’ lavish banquets also amaze him, as do the slaves’ wild dances that commonly follow such meals. After his first drunken banquet, Henry is shocked the next morning when he awakens to find that a young slave woman had been sent to share his bed. What Henry witnesses is a culture characterized by “sensuality, luxury and inebriation, paucity of topics, ebullitions of childish flippancy, barrenness of idea, and superabundance of verbiage” (I:271). Most importantly, Henry is horrified by the Creoles’ treatment of their slaves and particularly by their nonchalance about disciplining the slaves with brutal forms of corporal punishment. When he raises questions about the issue, Henry is called an “ami des noirs,” a name alluding to a contemporary abolitionist society in France. “What is there . . . of fair and beautiful in this magnificent structure of the universe that common rapacity will not deform?” Henry asks with great passion as he enjoys the sight of a magnificent West Indian landscape (I:268–69). Clearly serving as a mouthpiece for his author, Henry continues, “Where is the elysian scene that vice and misery will not pervade, . . . when impious man, trampling the sacred rights of nature in the dust, erects the arbitrary distinctions of races and of colours; and makes the vulgar accidents of climate—the tints and traits of feature imparted by a too fervid sun, the shallow pretexts for


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trafficking in human gore, and bending the necks of a large proportion of the human race under the iron yoke of slavery?” (I:268–69). Though expressed in florid language, this statement is a remarkably early demonstration of the inappropriateness of skin color as a measure of human worth. Despite his clear abolitionist agenda, Thelwall’s treatment of race in The Daughter of Adoption is complicated in ways that are likely to be disturbing to modern readers. The novel’s villain, for example, is Lucius Moroon, a wealthy planter whose name embodies racial tensions of the West Indies: the word “maroon” derives from the French word marron, meaning “feral.” Moreover, the bloody Maroon War of 1795–96 would have been a recent memory for Thelwall’s readers in 1801.55 Moroon’s dissipated character is blamed on the fact that he was raised by mulattoes. Here contemporary anxiety about the potential danger of miscegenation is brought to the fore as Thelwall characterizes mulattoes as “a set of people in whose composition vices the most atrocious, and virtues the most rare and disinterested, are frequently so confused and blended, that it is sometimes equally difficult to condemn with sufficient abhorrence, or applaud them with sufficient ardour” (II:143). In Thelwall’s eyes, the mixing of African and European promises to bring out the worst vices of both races. Lucius Moroon’s history rivals that of the most excessive Gothic villains of the period in shock value. Having begun a “criminal commerce” with his mulatto foster-mother as a sixteen-year-old, the two plot the murder of his foster-father when he discovers their relationship. Afterward the couple lives “in the most open and undisguised intercourses of criminality” (II:146–47). Thelwall explains that in a “civilized” country, such circumstances would never escape the notice of the law. But here, “so long as the negroes are kept in orderly obedience, and the subordination of classes and complexions is duly preserved, Juridical Polity is satisfied” (II:147). Because the testimony of blacks against whites is not trusted in West Indian courts, Moroon is never tried for the murder of his foster-father. His sense of lawlessness leads to the novel’s climax when he kidnaps the heroine Seraphina, motivated by desire, jealousy, and revenge: passions, Thelwall writes, that “burned in his bosom with a degree of fury which, happily for this country, a mere Englishman can scarcely comprehend” (III:277). When Thelwall introduces the Creole Seraphina, he is careful to describe her in a way that makes her racial heritage unclear: her eyes are “too dark for hazel,” her brown hair is “glossed with a tint of orient,” and the shade of her skin is conspicuously not mentioned (I:320). In contrast to Henry’s flawed education, Seraphina has been

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raised and educated in seclusion by her foster-father Parkinson, a reformist of the Godwinian vein. She is described by her fellow Creoles as a female philosopher, and she is highly regarded for her great intelligence as well as her great beauty. Like the best of the reformist heroes and heroines of the period, Seraphina embodies the finer qualities of both genders. Henry calls her “thou more than man in dignity and firmness—in every alluring softness more than woman!” (IV:95). As Seraphina becomes the most vocal mouthpiece for the novel’s reformist ideals, she clearly illustrates Thelwall’s and his fellow reformists’ conviction that education is central to the formation of moral character.56 From the beginning, Seraphina bears little resemblance to other heroines of the day. One of the most remarkable differences in her characterization is the degree to which Thelwall presents her as a sexual being. Thelwall even occasionally resorts to the conventions of the bodice-ripper, working perhaps too hard to hold his readers’ attention. One reviewer complained of the novel that “scenes of debauchery and libertinism, in which the hero acts a principal character, are too frequently brought to our view, and described in language too impassioned and prurient.”57 Henry, for example, first encounters Seraphina when he rescues her from being brutally raped by two escaped slaves during a violent slave insurrection. Immediately afterward, Thelwall writes that “for a few seconds, indeed, he could not avoid gazing, with admiration and tenderest sympathy, on the naked beauties of the maiden whom his heroism had rescued from a fate worse than death; but who still . . . lay motionless upon the earth, utterly insensible to her own situation” (II:54). It may be that Seraphina’s status as a Creole made Thelwall more comfortable in allowing her relationship with Henry to become a sexual one virtually from the start. On their voyage to England immediately after the insurrection, Seraphina becomes pregnant, but the couple does not marry for fear that Henry’s father will disinherit him. Seraphina’s words closely parallel those of Wollstonecraft’s Maria when she explains that she lives without shame because she considers herself married to Henry in her heart. In English society Seraphina refuses “to act a hypocritical farce to conceal what, in her heart, she did not consider as a crime” (III:56). In England, of course, Seraphina’s modern ideas on love and marriage serve only to confirm English suspicions about West Indian morals. In references made to her by English characters, the term “Creole” is used with a strong racist edge. Henry’s father, for example, calls her Henry’s “fine Creole” and rages that his son “should . . . think of profaning the altars of God, by the mockery of a marriage


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with such a creature!” (III:259, 261). Nevertheless, Seraphina never fails to epitomize the reformist heroine at her best. When she is kidnapped by Moroon and imprisoned in a highly typical Gothic mansion overrun by Moroon’s band of smugglers, she echoes the strength and clarity of Anna St Ives when she cries out to her captor, “Force me to Barbadoes. . . . Drag me across your ruthless seas. You drag but your own chastisement. . . . Not mine shall be the terror, guilty wretch! But thine!” (III:309). As in Anna’s influence over Clifton, Seraphina’s astonishing behavior works a magical conversion in the wicked Moroon, who ultimately becomes a Moravian minister and dedicates himself as a missionary to the West Indian slaves. Of course, Seraphina’s strength of character also works a remarkable conversion in her lover Henry, enabling him to master the weaknesses of his character. One aspect of this conversion involves Henry’s changing notions of social class as they are played out in his relationship with his loyal servant, Edmunds. When the two travel to the Caribbean early in the novel, Edmunds enjoys a relative erasure of the boundaries of social class among the Creoles. Here Edmunds becomes more a friend to Henry than a servant, “for the wide distinctions of freeman and slave—of white, and man of colour,” Thelwall explains, “swallow up and obliterate, as it were, the less important gradations; and correspondence in the two essential attributes, brings the dependant and the employer to a sort of comparative equality, which the established prejudices make it a sort of point of morality to support” (I:265). Unfortunately, however, the distinctions become much more solid in Henry’s eyes when they return to England, where he begins to rebuke Edmunds for imagined presumptions and reminds him of the difference in their social stations. In the novel’s closing pages, the full measure of Seraphina’s influence on Henry is evident when Henry tells Edmunds that they are no longer to be considered as master and servant. It is clear that Thelwall particularly identified with Edmunds as a spokesman for his political views. Early after Henry’s arrival in St Domingo, the staggering beauty of the landscape prompts him to proclaim to Edmunds, “What a scene, and what an hour . . . to hatch treason in!” To this statement Edmunds replies, “What a scene, and what an hour, . . . to make one forget that treason was ever necessary in the world!” (I:283). This episode, in fact, recasts an actual experience that Coleridge remembered sharing with Thelwall. Coleridge wrote in his Table Talk (1836) of a time when he and Thelwall once enjoyed a beautiful view in Somersetshire. “Citizen John!” Coleridge proclaimed, “This is a fine place to talk treason in!” Thelwall’s reply

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would later anticipate that of Edmunds: “Nay, Citizen Samuel! it is a place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason.”58 Like Thelwall, Edmunds professes that one must always “speak his thoughts fully upon all occasions, and at all hazards” and that one “ought not to lick the dust at the bidding of every prosperous knave whose bags are full of plunder” (I:285). Perhaps echoing the embattled Thelwall’s own voice even more closely, Edmunds admits that a young man who engages in such plain speaking will be suspected by all of brooding over “daggers and insurrections” and “plots and treasons” (I:286). Although The Daughter of Adoption promotes the reformist notion that marriage is merely a ceremony and has no bearing on the essential purity of the heart, Henry and Seraphina do marry at the novel’s conclusion. The actual ceremony does not take place, however, until Seraphina is revealed to be the natural child of Henry’s father, Percival Montfort, as is, surprisingly enough, Lucius Moroon. After a few chapters in which the reader is left to worry that incest has been committed, Henry is conveniently revealed to be Percival Montfort’s adopted son. Thus, as the novel comes to a close, Thelwall diffuses any tension stemming from the uncertainty of Seraphina’s background by revealing her to be a purely white English girl after all. The fortune Montfort wished to deny Henry if he married a Creole will now be passed down to wholly English children. Michael Scrivener has observed that despite the novel’s abolitionist agenda, its conclusion “only mildly disrupts the racist categories, because the utopian community formed around Seraphina and Henry in north Yorkshire is all-white and socially homogenous.”59 The confirmation of Seraphina’s racial status as purely white at the end of the novel may be compared to the conclusions of Bage’s Hermsprong and Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor, in which these heroes’ unexpected elevations to the status of the aristocrat regrettably undercuts the force of the novel’s social criticism. Perhaps, like Bage and Holcroft, Thelwall felt the necessity of capitulating to the demands of contemporary literary convention in order to get his novel into print and to please his readers. His use of the pseudonym “John Beaufort,” a name that would hide his identity from the general public yet make it clear to fellow reformists, indicates the degree to which he must have believed that a novel judged to be too politically radical would not be widely read. It appears that Thelwall succeeded in writing a novel that was judged generally to be a good one, even by conservative critics. While the reviewer in the Monthly Review recognizes that “the author is a Godwinian in principle,” he does not criticize


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Thelwall’s politics, although he does condemn the manner in which he “represents the loss of female chastity as a matter of light concern.”60 A reviewer in the Critical Review likewise wishes that “the bosom of Seraphina had not been so tender, or her conduct so weak,” for “it injures the moral of the story.”61 This critic also regrets the author’s attempt “to detail and expose the miseries of the slave trade” but otherwise makes no mention of reformist politics (235). Indeed, this reviewer calls the novel “greatly superior to those ephemeræ which, under the appellation of novels, buz [sic] for a short period, and then are heard no more” (234). Despite a capitulation to convention that greatly diminishes the novel’s potential to challenge contemporary assumptions about racial difference, Thelwall does require his reader to rethink a variety of common notions about race and racial stereotypes throughout the greater part of his four-volume narrative. In addition, he leaves his reader with a vivid depiction of an extremely modern reformist marriage when Henry and Seraphina discuss how their children will be raised.62 “We will have none of the Gothic savagery by which the bonds of affinity are cracked asunder,” Henry says, and “by which the first born is rendered a lordly tyrant, and the rest dependent slaves” (IV:287). “They build a family indeed,” Seraphina chimes in, “who bring them up in social equality and reciprocal love.” Seraphina continues by promising that “if the heirs of Montfort are not too proud, they will endeavour to be too just, to accumulate every thing to a few, and leave the many wretched” (IV:287–88). When a wealthy family friend is dissuaded from leaving his entire fortune to the couple’s future eldest son, he complains, “I suppose this is the new philosophy too; and the universe is to be our family!” (IV:290). Thus in the novel’s final pages Thelwall slips in strongly reformist notions regarding marriage, the family, and the education of children, despite his use of an array of unexpected plot twists that unfortunately weaken the novel’s potential to make the most of its often progressive depictions of racial difference. By the final years of the eighteenth century, the stereotype of the Creole clearly became the site of important cultural discourse on race and racial difference. In most cases, as in that of Belinda’s Mr. Vincent, the Creole’s moral laxity makes him simply unfit to be accommodated by English society. In The Daughter of Adoption, the wavering moral characters of both Henry and his father are blamed at least in part on their participation as plantation owners in the slave economy of the West Indies. Nevertheless, both are fully recuperated by the example of a well-educated, thinking woman whose indoctrination in strong reformist principles has effectively countered any

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pernicious effects of her Creole childhood. Ultimately, Henry’s full conversion to the reformist way of thinking provides a significant model for Thelwall’s readers. For reformists who were invested in converting their readers to a recognition of the horrors of slavery and the slave trade, the Creole stereotype offered rich ground for demonstrating that the plight of slaves in the British colonies demanded both sympathy and action. Given the paucity of fully realized African characters in the literature of the period, it appears that such writers found it more promising to attempt such a conversion by directly attacking the perpetrators of slavery and those who benefited the most from slave labor. The abolition of slavery and the slave trade in Britain and its colonies would take place slowly and over a period of many years, but there is no doubt that the reformist literature of the late eighteenth century played a significant role in helping to bring those changes to pass. Is Not a Jew a Man? Reformist novelists of the late eighteenth century were also clearly attuned to racial difference in their treatment of English Jews, who most commonly appear in the novels of the period in the familiar stereotype of the shrewd and heartless moneylender drawn from Shakespeare’s Shylock. The majority of the Jews living in England by the end of the century were of German and central European descent (Ashkenazi) or Spanish and Portuguese (Sephardi). Having few options for earning a living, most Jewish immigrants to Britain earned meager livings by peddling produce, inexpensive jewelry, and, most commonly, old clothes. The more fortunate eventually established themselves as merchants, shopkeepers, brokers, or craftsmen.63 As a racial group, the Jews in England were always difficult for the English to categorize easily. Judith Page has explained this difficulty by pointing out that they “were mostly poor but they were also rich, they were foreignlooking but they also simulated British gentility, they spoke English but not always the King’s English.”64 In the late eighteenth century, public sentiment largely opposed the naturalization of Jews as British citizens. In May 1753, the Jewish Naturalization Bill, or “Jew Bill,” was passed by Parliament only to be repealed later the same year. This bill aimed to remove the requirement that foreigners seeking naturalization must partake of the sacrament of the Eucharist within a month before their naturalization.65 The issue was not finally resolved until July 1858, when the words


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“on the true faith of a Christian” were omitted from the oath of office for members of Parliament, allowing Baron Lionel de Rothschild to take a seat in the House of Commons.66 Despite the political climate concerning immigration and naturalization, the period from 1753 to the emancipation of Jews in Britain in 1858 is referred to as the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and this era is significant for the degree to which Jews became more integrated in British society while also managing to preserve their own cultural and religious traditions.67 The last decades of the eighteenth century particularly witnessed a surge in the publication of Hebrew grammars and dictionaries in England, such as David Levi’s threevolume Lingua Sacra (1785–88) as well as his A Succinct Account, of the Rites, and Ceremonies, of the Jews (1782), his A Defence of the Old Testament, addressed to Thomas Paine (1797), and his three-part Dissertations on the Prophecies of the Old Testament (1793?–1800).68 Nevertheless, the 1790s also witnessed a backlash of prejudice toward Jews due at least in part to the popular perception of roles played by Jews in highly publicized crimes. In 1791, for example, four French Jews were caught and convicted when they fled to London after stealing the jewels of Madame du Barry.69 The stereotype of the Jew as thief was strengthened by the work of Patrick Colquhoun, a police magistrate who commented at length on crime in the Jewish community in England in A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, explaining the various crimes and misdemeanors which at present are felt as a pressure upon the community; and suggesting remedies for their prevention. First published in 1796, Colquhoun’s work went through six editions by 1800.70 Sheila Spector has enumerated four particular stereotypes by which Jews tend to be depicted in English literature through the eighteenth century, including those based upon Faust, the evil magician; Shylock, the usurer; Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew; and Jessica, the assimilated convert to Christianity.71 In the novel of the period, the moneylender stereotype is predominant, appearing, for example, in Mackenzie’s Slavery: or, The Times, Smith’s The Young Philosopher, and Edgeworth’s Belinda, among many others. Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor provides a typical example when the destitute playwright Mr. Wilmot approaches a Jew who is known to be a fan of the theatre to ask for money to finance the production of a new play. Because Wilmot cannot provide any security for such a loan, the Jew explains to him that “Jews themselves, kind as they were, could not lend money without security” (III:213).

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Perhaps in response to the vehemence of the conservative reaction against Jews in the 1790s, a few references in reformist fiction indicate an emerging sympathy for this disenfranchised race. In Caleb Williams, for example, Godwin makes an unusual reference to the status of Jews in England when Caleb disguises himself as a Jew to hide from Mr. Falkland’s agents. Caleb goes to the Jewish ghetto of London to learn to imitate the Jews’ pronunciation of English, as well as to study their “complexion and countenance” (III:227). He then fashions a disguise for himself, going so far as to “discolour” his complexion to give it “the dun and sallow hue” that he associates with the race (III:227). Caleb also attempts to earn money by becoming a writer, and he finds a publisher who is astonished by his talents. “He writes them all to my mind extremely fine,” the publisher says of Caleb’s stories, “and yet he is no more than a Jew” (III:233). “To my honest printer,” Caleb states, “this seemed as strange as if they had been written by a Cherokee chieftain at the falls of the Missisippi [sic]” (III:233). R. S. White has written that in this choice of disguise and profession for Caleb, Godwin points to “the status of outsider and critic occupied by writers and Jews alike.”72 In St Leon, Godwin goes even farther in depicting a Jewish character who defies the stereotype of the day. When St Leon narrowly escapes public execution by the Spanish Inquisition in Valladolid, he is rescued and sheltered by a Jew by the name of Mordecai, who puts himself and his young daughter Leah at great risk by taking him in. The stereotype is in full play when the money-obsessed St Leon wonders whether the Jew is motivated by his desire for a potential financial reward. Nevertheless, to his surprise, St Leon soon learns that “every thing that I observed in the Jew was apparently fair, plausible, and encouraging” (IV:279). Having been forced to become a “new Christian” to remain in Spain, Mordecai explains his motivations to St Leon, saying that “you little know by how strong a motive you have now engaged me to your cause. We poor Jews, hunted on the face of the earth, the abhorrence and execration of mankind, have nothing but family affections to support us under our multiplied disgraces” (IV:280). Moved by the experiences of this fellow sufferer of extreme ostracism, St Leon attests that “now, then, for the first time I thought, in the course of twelve years, I had opportunity to communicate with a man, whose soul was not enslaved to the bloodthirsty superstition of this devoted country” (IV:278). Thus in the context of a country consumed by the worst excesses of Roman Catholic oppression, a reformist hero does not merely empathize with the


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plight of the Jew in Western Europe but can even commune with him as a fellow outsider. Certainly the most fully drawn and the least stereotypical depiction of a Jew in a novel of the 1790s is to be found in George Walker’s Theodore Cyphon; or The Benevolent Jew (1796). At the novel’s opening, the Jewish Shechem Bensadi is rescued by the fugitive hero Theodore while being harassed by a group of thugs in a dark winter snowstorm. When called “a sneaking hound of a Jew” by one of the robbers, Bensadi sets the political tone of the work by asking “Is not a Jew a man?”—an allusion to Shylock’s famous speech including the question, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” (I:4).73 Bensadi offers Theodore a room, board, and a job in his counting house without asking questions about Theodore’s past. The young man is shocked by Bensadi’s generosity, and he makes the novel’s stance on contemporary Christianity quite clear when he tells Bensadi, “I have felt in a country where ostentatious charity gilds the insides of our churches, and erects magnificent buildings, that from the forlorn wanderer, even justice is withheld” (I:12–13). “Where is the Christian who would have done this?” the narrator asks of Bensadi’s generosity (I:18). Although Walker does draw on several contemporary Jewish stereotypes, he tends to mollify them as his story unfolds. Bensadi is depicted as being extremely penurious and concerned with his investments, for example. Nevertheless, Theodore is amazed to learn from a servant that once Bensadi not only had pardoned a former employee who stole a great sum of money from him but also had helped the man escape to Lisbon to avoid prosecution and execution. Theodore is also amazed when Bensadi lends freely and without interest to save a poor family from ruin while simultaneously charging a high rate of interest to a needy peer. “From the over fulness of the rich,” Bensadi explains to him, “I take away to give to him who hath need. Every farthing I extort from the profligate, is a farthing less in the sum which was to destroy the innocent, to oppress the needy, to be squandered in luxuriousness and baneful profusion, or lost to sharpers and villains. I sit in the seat of distributive justice——” (I:41). In a rare scene in the fiction of this period, Theodore accompanies Bensadi to a meeting of the local Jewish community and witnesses how Bensadi functions as a private bank, supplying the wants of his friends and neighbors and accepting their repayments whenever they are able to pay him back. Bensadi’s daughter Eve also embodies elements of the Jessica stereotype, particularly in the degree to which she is drawn toward Theodore as a potential lover. Initially Bensadi warns both Theodore

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and Eve to avoid the friendship that is growing between them, pointing out that Eve’s religion would preclude her marriage to a Christian. Walker nevertheless depicts Bensadi as open-minded on religious matters, explaining that he was “without those prejudices that attend on superstition” (I:110–11). Bensadi sees Jews and Christians as “agreeing in the chief article of worship, though divided about what the understanding of neither can comprehend. In a civil light,” he believes, “man was created for the society of man.” According to Bensadi, “the distinction of kingdom and people was childish, and fit only to insult the understanding” (I:110–11). Although Bensadi discourages Eve’s attachment to Theodore, his reason for doing so lies in the fact that Theodore is committed to another woman. By the end of the novel, his mind has been broadened enough to encourage Eve’s affection for Theodore’s brother-in-law, another Christian, Jason Hanson. The novel closes with the assurance to the reader that Bensadi will continue “to extort from the spendthrift, to accumulate bond to bond, and in defiance of every Christian example, to bestow charity without applause, and benefit mankind in secret” (III:224). The reviewers of Theodore Cyphon immediately identified Shechem Bensadi as a reinterpretation of Sheva, a character made popular on the London stage two years earlier in Cumberland’s 1794 comedy The Jew.74 Initially, Cumberland’s Sheva is presented as the embodiment of the avaricious stereotype of the Jewish moneylender. But Sheva lends literally all of his money to help others and assumes the life of a pauper, explaining that “I love my monies, I do love them dearly; but I love my fellow-creatures a little better.”75 The plot of Cumberland’s play is the inverse of Theodore Cyphon. The generous Sheva lends huge sums to allow a young Christian to repair a rift with his proud father after defying him in marrying a penniless bride. Theodore Cyphon too defies his father by marrying the bride of his choice, but his rift with his father is never repaired and his story ends tragically. Critics are divided on the significance of Cumberland’s play as a social document. For Page, Sheva is merely a reversal of the usurer stereotype, and Cumberland’s ostensible goodwill in presenting a benevolent portrait of the Jew is undercut by his own admission in his later, Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, that he hoped this original approach to the stereotype would make his play a success.76 It is possible that Walker patterned his novel on Cumberland’s play for similarly mercenary reasons, especially when one recalls his extremely derivative Gothic novels The Romance of the Cavern and The Haunted Castle of 1793 and 1794 and his fervently anti-Jacobin attack on Godwin and Wollstonecraft in The Vagabond of 1799, which appeared at


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the height of the popularity of such conservative works. For Michael Ragussis, however, The Jew plays a far more significant role in British literary history. Ragussis argues that Cumberland subverts the stereotype by imagining the transformation of financial debt into moral debt. For him the play formulates “the basic paradigm for representing the way in which national populations divided by ethnic or religious conflict could be reimagined as whole and integrated beyond prejudice.”77 The success of Walker’s project in Theodore Cyphon is likewise open to debate. Even though Walker’s own objectives cannot be known, the novel’s readers may well have been influenced by its reevaluation of a derogatory stereotype and its reimagination of racial integration in England. At least one reviewer seems to have read the book in such a way: the reviewer in the Monthly Review classes Theodore Cyphon alongside contemporary works that demonstrate that the novel has become “a very effectual and interesting vehicle for truths and speculations of the utmost importance, in moral and political philosophy.”78 Perhaps the most extraordinary case in which a novelist of this period altered her opinion concerning the situation of the Jews in England is that of Edgeworth. Edgeworth’s characterizations of Jews in at least two of her novels were largely stereotypical. In Belinda, for example, Mr. Vincent resorts to the “desperate expedient” of approaching the Jewish Solomon for a loan when he loses his fortune at gaming (II:340). When Solomon learns the degree of Vincent’s distress, he becomes “exorbitant in his demands” (II:340). Typical of the parsimonious stereotype, Solomon is “dilatory and circumspect, in reading over and signing the bonds” (II:341). Vincent is rescued from the transaction by the sudden appearance of his slave Juba, and the ensuing scuffle between Juba and Solomon, each arguing in his own “angry gibberish,” is a rare, if unfortunate, example of contact between two distinctly different racial outcasts (II:342).79 Similarly, in her 1812 The Absentee, Edgeworth drew on the worst contemporary stereotypes in her characterization of the cold-blooded Mr. Mordicai, a vicious coach-maker and moneylender. In August 1815, however, Edgeworth received an unsettling letter from a Jewish American reader by the name of Rachel Mordecai, who praised Edgeworth’s novels but asked how an author “who on all other subjects shows such justice and liberality, should on one alone appear biased by prejudice.”80 “Can it be believed,” Mordecai asks, “that this race of men are by nature mean, avaricious, and unprincipled?”81 A chagrined Edgeworth was thus inspired to respond to this just criticism by

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publishing a sympathetic treatment of the Jews in England in her 1817 novel Harrington.82 Harrington chronicles the psychological history of a confessional narrator who develops a psychotic antipathy toward Jews as a result of outlandish tales told to him by a racist and uneducated nurse. As Harrington grows up, his interactions with real Jews allow him to challenge and eventually overcome his prejudices. This process begins when the schoolboy Harrington becomes acquainted with an honest Jewish peddler by the name of Jacob. Edgeworth introduces actual historical figures in her narrative when Harrington enrolls at Cambridge and meets both the distinguished scholar Israel Lyons and Charles Macklin, the actor responsible for an extremely influential revival of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as of 1741. The use of such actual figures allows Edgeworth to make a strong point concerning the injustice of contemporary stereotypes relating to the Jewish people. Ultimately, Harrington becomes friends with the affluent and brilliantly educated Mr. Montenero, a Spanish Jew who had escaped persecution by the Inquisition by fleeing to America and later to England. Predictably, Harrington falls in love with Montenero’s beautiful daughter Berenice. In one particularly climactic episode, Harrington and the Monteneros attempt to protect themselves from a violent mob when the Gordon Riots break out in 1780. During these riots, mobs attacked and destroyed the homes of non-Protestants and foreigners, crying “No Jews, no wooden shoes!” The Monteneros and their home are saved largely through the efforts of a well-meaning orange-seller who runs for help. This woman, who calls herself the widow Levy, voices perhaps the most open-minded attitude toward Jews in the novel. Loyal to the Monteneros for their generous patronage in the past, she calls Montenero “the best Christian any way ever I happened on” and proclaims that “we were all brothers and sisters once . . . in the time of Adam, sure, and we should help one another in all times.”83 Throughout Harrington, Edgeworth alludes liberally to such earlier literary treatments of the Jewish question as The Merchant of Venice, Cumberland’s The Jew, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779), an influential play in which the Jewish merchant Nathan demonstrates to the other characters the futility of racial and religious prejudice. Her most overt reference to Lessing’s play can be found in the novel’s conclusion, when Montenero reveals that Berenice is not a Jew after all. Montenero explains that his late wife was a


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Christian and that he had allowed Berenice to be raised as a Christian as well. The two had kept this fact a secret to test potential suitors for anti-Semitic tendencies. Berenice insists that she will not marry a man who displays any prejudice toward her father’s religion, nor will she accept a lover so unfaithful as to be willing to abandon Christianity to marry her. Harrington, of course, manages to meet her criteria. It may be difficult for a modern reader not to be disappointed by Edgeworth’s conclusion. As in Thelwall’s revelation of Seraphina’s true English heritage, the tensions inherent to an interracial marriage are dissolved at the novel’s close and so is the opportunity for a final, grand demonstration of the groundlessness of racial prejudice. Rachel Mordecai too expressed disappointment that Berenice was not allowed to stand as a constructive example of a young Jewish woman.84 Edgeworth’s reason for this choice may stem from an attempt to align Harrington with Nathan der Weise, which concludes with Nathan’s revelation that his foster daughter Recha is actually the sister of her suitor, a Knight Templar, as well as the long lost niece of the Sultan Saladin. This plot twist makes an unmistakable point regarding the arbitrariness of racial and religious distinctions among not only Jews and Christians but Muslims as well. Edgeworth’s conclusion, nevertheless, is far less successful. In making Berenice a Christian, she dramatically weakens her attempt to illustrate that human beings of all races embody the same virtues. A product of her times, Edgeworth can envision an interracial marriage, but she cannot quite make the leap to it in 1817.85 Like The Daughter of Adoption, Harrington disappoints in the final analysis. Nevertheless, both Thelwall and Edgeworth have at the very least taken a step forward in asking their readers to question common prejudices about racial difference. Moreover, despite its ending, Harrington is perhaps the first British novel wholly intended to work toward dispelling racism. Berenice’s final words make Edgeworth’s intentions clear. When Mr. Montenero insists that the family’s enemies be forgiven, Harrington’s father praises his new in-law, echoing words spoken of such characters as Cumberland’s Sheva and Walker’s Bensadi in stating that “none but a good Christian could do this!” Berenice then answers him with the simple question, “and why not a good Jew?” (III:331). Imperialist Anxieties Besides an emerging concern for the Jew and the African in contemporary Britain, a handful of novelists in the revolutionary decade

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also expresses anxiety about the exploitation of native peoples in the distant regions of Britain’s growing empire. Despite its complex and decidedly conflicted treatment of race, one of the most remarkable aspects of Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption, for example, is the very early glimpse it provides of one Briton’s concern regarding the effects of imperialism and colonization. In a scene in which Henry Montfort is overcome by the beauty of a Caribbean landscape, he is reminded of the tyranny and oppression that Europeans had brought with them to the West Indies. Thinking of the mines where Spaniards forced Central American natives to labor, Henry declares to his servant Edmunds, “could you and I become Indians, . . . this deep solitude, . . . might only embolden us, . . . to question the authority of our oppressors, and to demonstrate that against the ravages of foreign usurpation, at least, it is at all times lawful both to conspire and to act” (I:284–85). Here Thelwall begins to extend his critique of slavery and the British class system into an exposé of the evils of imperialism on a global level. For Thelwall the same avarice and greed of the upper classes had engendered the oppression not only of the laboring class in Britain and the African slaves in the West Indies but also of races around the world.86 This unexpected perspective on imperialism is matched in Walker’s Theodore Cyphon in a subplot in which the working-class Englishman Jason Hanson is sold into service to the East India Company by villainous aristocrats. Jason manages to escape his captors when he and other troops are sent to suppress an insurrection of native Indians. He describes this episode as a scene of unusual brutality, violence, rape, and desecration. When the battle is over, so many lie dead that it is easy for Jason to walk away from his service and set out for home. “I quitted the reeking village, where so much had been done to convince the wretched Hindoos of the justice, humanity and bravery of the British nation,” he comments sarcastically (II:177). As he attempts to make his way home, Jason is befriended by a “Hindoo” who offers him food and shelter. When the Hindoo explains that his god “Brama” forbids the destruction of animals but provides plenty of vegetables and fruits, Jason laments that the Hindoo people “know nothing of the divine art of navigation which opens one country to another, and supplies the inhabitants of the frigid zone, with the luxuriances of the temperate and torrid” (II:186). As St Leon is astonished by the unexpected perspective of the turnkey Hector, Jason is surprised by the Hindoo’s response to his statement. “Happy would it have been,” the wise Hindoo replies, “if I had not known, nor ever heard of this divine art, for I see nothing result from it but


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murder and oppression” (II:186). The Hindoo asks Jason whether the English people would welcome Hindoos, “give us settlements,” and “allow us to make contributions” if they too built large ships for travel. Jason replies that doing so “would be contrary to the laws of nature and the rights of possession” (II:186). Here the Hindoo is provided the perfect opportunity to alter Jason’s perspective. “Then . . . you act contrary to the laws of nature and the rights of possession,” he replies. “You are at great pains to brave storms and distresses, that you may extort from us our property, and convert us into slaves, to till your rice, your poppies, and your cottons. We would willingly have traded with you, we would have given you our cottons, our gold, our diamonds, and our ivory” (II:186–87). Jason blushes for his countrymen. “Of what avail,” he thinks to himself, “is our boasted learning and knowledge? For what are all our researches, but to deal out slavery and death to those less learned than ourselves? Wonderful improvements, indeed!” (II:188). Here a writer who has invested himself in the plight of the laboring class in Britain expresses similar outrage against the crimes perpetrated on peoples in other parts of the world in the name of a global economy. And, once again, the reader has been confronted with a character of another race whose world view proves to be the very opposite of what might have been expected. A modern perspective on the evils of exploiting the races of other nations is beginning to emerge. As a result of his exposure to the peoples and cultures of other countries, Jason Hanson grows to embody an unusually broad-minded and modern approach to religious faith. When it is pointed out to him that being Christian may impair his plan to marry the Jewish Eve Bensadi, Jason professes that “I am not a christian, unless being born in Christendom constitutes me such. My religion is universal, it embraces all sects, countries, and tongues. ’Tis the religion of reason, and as to the various modes of expression in England, I can listen with attention to the national faith—at Smyrna and Jerusalem to the law of Moses—in Arabia to that of Mahomet—and I do not see why, because I do not think exactly like another, that the affairs of life should be retarded” (III:198–99). Such a freethinking approach to religion was rare indeed in 1796. By the end of the 1790s, nearly two centuries of exploration and colonization had exposed the British to a variety of new nations and peoples, more and more of whom were beginning to settle in Great Britain itself. A new era had dawned, and the nineteenth century would witness ever-increasing efforts to expand the emerging British empire around the globe. These massive cultural changes were

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naturally accompanied by increasing tensions and anxieties about racial difference. The handful of reformist novels explored in this chapter reveal a few glimmers of an awakening conscience and an awareness that the novel might be used to foster humane relations between races now living in closer proximity. None of these texts displays an author’s complete freedom from long-held cultural stereotypes. Indeed, as Page has written of sympathetic texts on Judaism in the period, even the most progressive of these works “cannot quite contain [their] own representations.” Page is right to point out that “revolutions in politics and culture do not necessarily develop evenly.” 87 Nor do they develop quickly. Significant social change on behalf of Africans, Jews, and other minorities in Britain would take centuries more. Nevertheless, the roots of such change can be traced at least in part to the anxieties and changing attitudes reflected in the fiction of the final years of the eighteenth century. The next chapter will explore another way in which reformists during these years also worked on behalf of the disenfranchised by exposing an oppressive class system characterized by blatant inequity and by the destructive behavior of an oppressive and outmoded aristocracy.

4

Chapter 4

G a mbli ng, Dueling, and Soc ial Deprav ity in the H AU T T O N

P

erhaps the one objective that links reformist writers of the 1790s more than any other is their shared goal to draw attention to the corruption of the British upper class. Inspired by the early promise of the French Revolution, many of these authors worked to convince their readers that the behavior of Britain’s age-old aristocracy had become increasingly damaging to the common good. Such writers traced a host of contemporary social problems to the behavior of aristocrats who continued to live off of the labor of the poor despite the fact that many of them were rapidly beginning to run through their own fortunes. By the end of the eighteenth century, many upper-class families who had been entrenched in ancient estates for generations found themselves rich in land and in pride but increasingly poor in cash. Nevertheless, such families tended to hold tenaciously to their hereditary social status and their lives of high fashion in the “haut ton.” To open their readers’ eyes to the decadence of the British upper class and to the promise of a reformed class system, many reformists set out to expose two particularly destructive social behaviors that they recognized as persistent markers of an era whose time had passed: gambling and dueling. Critiques of these two practices in novels and in other works of social criticism were rampant in the late eighteenth century, and it is true that such critiques were aggressively launched by both liberals and conservatives who objected to gambling and to dueling for distinctly different reasons. This chapter, however, will focus

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specifically on attacks on gambling and dueling made by reformists interested in converting their readers to the position that the aristocracy must be eradicated once and for all. Before doing so, however, it is important to analyze other, more general ways in which the behavior of English aristocrats is depicted as corrupt and excessive in a range of novels published in the revolutionary decade.

Th e Family o f Yes terday a nd the Family of Today A delightful exposé of corruption in the modern upper-class family can be found in the long-forgotten epistolary novel Such Follies Are, an anonymously authored Minerva Press publication of 1795 whose title recalls Elizabeth Inchbald’s play Such Things Are (1788). Such Follies Are opens with the narrator’s declaration of his “utter detestation of those Aristocratical principles which would reduce the bulk of mankind to a servile awe of the hereditary privileges and honours of a few.”1 “Surely, of all the ridiculous notions which have ever agitated the human brain,” the author writes, “the pride of blood is the most contemptible” (I:2). The narrator condemns the rich who scoff at the laboring classes while benefiting from their labors, then praises that member of the emerging middle class who “by honest industry . . . attains to the possession of affluence” after having “contributed to the comfort and riches of the whole community” (I:4). The author then provides an example of such a man in Mr. Hanbury, a successful middle-class merchant who has lately retired to the country to enjoy the wealth he has amassed by a life of honest work. In stark contrast to Mr. Hanbury and his wife are their neighbors the Seaforths, who inhabit the derelict Gothic mansion of their ancestors and an estate they can barely afford to maintain. To the Hanburys’ open and honest friendliness, the Seaforths offer only pride and affectation; on their initial visits to each other’s homes, each family is shocked by the behavior of the other. The Hanburys quickly become benevolent figures in their neighborhood, working to find employment and food for the poor, while the Seaforths do nothing but complicate the lives of the working-class people around them. When a poor girl offends Mrs. Seaforth by curtseying only to Mrs. Hanbury during an outing, Mr. Seaforth has the girl’s family evicted from its home. The Hanburys, in turn, make reparation by building a new home for the family. When the eldest Seaforth son, Edric, seduces and impregnates their young ward, Matilda Lavington, the Seaforths make a great display of outrage over the pregnancy and use

Gambling, Dueling, and Social Depravity in the HAUT TON

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this pretext to justify retaining Matilda’s fortune of 8,000 pounds. The Hanburys, by contrast, help Matilda find a home and a job in London, and when she later dies, they raise her young son, George, as their own. Predictably, the Seaforths begin to consider the growing popularity of their new neighbors as “an encroachment on their natural privileges—their high birth they supposed entitled them to the deference of all around” (I:65). Many reformists of the period complained about aristocrats’ tendency to privilege the welfare of their oldest son far beyond that of his younger siblings. Mr. and Mrs. Seaforth perfectly embody this tendency, regularly demonstrating a distinct preference for Edric and a shocking neglect of their two younger children, Julia and William. When William wishes to secure a commission in the army, his parents refuse to borrow the needed money against Edric’s future inheritance. “It is not my fault,” Edric reasons, “if he was born after me” (I:90). William later obtains his commission with the assistance of the Hanburys’ son Frank. The Hanburys indeed rejoice that they are able “to crown a youth of industry, by an old age of benevolence” (I:178). Moreover, when Frank and Julia fall in love and wish to be married, the Seaforths set down insuperable conditions for such a union, based upon the fact that the Hanburys “are not a family of yesterday” (I:189). In the second volume of Such Follies Are, the Seaforths are taken in by two imposters with humorously phony accents who pass themselves off as a Polish baron and his sister. Greatly desiring the financial and social advantage that European nobility might provide them, Mrs. Seaforth encourages Edric to marry the Baron’s sister. As the Seaforths’ son William says of his mother, “her ridiculous passion for antiquity of descent would lead her, I am persuaded, to worship a rotten plank of Noah’s Ark, could she meet with it, for the sake of its antiquity” (II:110). To their shock and dismay, the Seaforths soon learn that the Baron has neither money nor title and that they have married their eldest son to none other than an Italian courtesan. The narrative resolves when Mr. Seaforth is arrested for debt and Edric is unable to come to his aid; it is, of course, the Hanburys who bail him out and pay his obligations. Thus the Seaforths are compelled to a full understanding of the novel’s lesson that “what gives a real superiority in social life, is not birth but virtue” (II:223). It is noteworthy that the author includes a rather incongruous disclaimer in the final pages of the novel that he or she has not “adopted the levelling system,” but merely wishes “to shew the futility of rank and precedence, when not distinguished by those moral and intellectual attainments which

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form the different characteristics of the ennobled, or the vulgar mind” (II:261–62). Despite this disclaimer, however, a reviewer in the conservative British Critic complained that “the lessons most wanted in the present times are of an opposite kind; namely, lessons of order, of just subjection, and of that rational subordination, which is so far from being unworthy of free men, that freedom itself cannot subsist without it.”2 Much like the Seaforths are Mary Robinson’s social-climbing Leadenheads of The Natural Daughter. “The most rigidly fastidious in their opinions of social distinctions,” Robinson writes, the Leadenheads “had gradually risen from obscurity, and they were now of the most weighty consideration in the great scale of worldly importance” (181–82). “But, alas!” Robinson adds humorously, “the swift wing of time had wasted from their memory the means by which they had acquired their consequence”; thus, they “were too exalted to reflect, too wealthy to be humble” (182). Humphry Leadenhead’s motto for his children is, tellingly, “Ennoble your family; buy honours, dignities, titles, precedence, and connections; and above all things consult the book of heraldry as the book of fate” (183). Always eager to purchase the latest trappings of social standing—whether it be a new landau or a new trousseau for the Leadenhead girls—the family is careful never to speak to those in their own rank in life, now that they are “destined to soar in a more exalted sphere” (186). Robinson contrasts such behavior to that of her level-headed heroine, Martha, a woman whose experience of the world has taught her that “the attributes of nature have little weight in the vast scale of popular estimation” and that “vice and folly will ever find their votaries, while they place their deformities beneath the mask of wealth” (220). Similarly, Charlotte Smith’s portrait of the socially prominent Lady Montreville of Emmeline makes it quite clear that reformists associated such excesses as those exemplified by the Seaforths and the Leadenheads with the French aristocrats who were then under siege. Lady Montreville’s very name, stemming from the French montrer, meaning “to show” or “to appear,” clearly signifies her investment in displaying her status to the public. When her son Delamere prefers Smith’s penniless heroine to an heiress of wealth and social status, Lady Montreville fantasizes that “if this little wretch . . . was in France, it would not be difficult to put an end to the trouble she has dared to give us. A letter de cachet would cure the creature of her presumption, and place her where her art and affectation should not disturb the peace of families of high rank” (II:116).


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Th e E xc esses o f the Ar i s tocr ac y Satirical caricatures of upper-class snobbery and excess such as those drawn by Smith, Robinson, and the author of Such Follies Are can be found in profusion in Thomas Holcroft’s The Adventures of Hugh Trevor.3 Hugh’s experiences while attempting to enter one vocation after another allow Holcroft to expose the graft and corruption endemic first in the academy at Oxford, next in the patronage of the aristocracy and in the ranks of the church, then among lawyers and the judicial system, and finally among politicians in Parliament. At every echelon of society, Hugh is astonished by the behavior of the very wealthy. In one episode Hugh attends a dinner attended by several of his former friends and patrons, including an earl, a bishop, and the president of his former college at Oxford. Hugh remarks on the horrible alteration obvious in each of these men since their earlier acquaintance, and he describes how these men had ruined their health by excessive drink and dining, resulting in “waste, want of animation, lethargy, debility and decline” and appetites like “vipers that were eating away their vitals” (III:349). When the men sit down to a sumptuous dinner, they “encouraged and countenanced each other in the vice to which they were addicted. Dish succeeded to dish: and one plateful was but devoured that another and another might be gorged” (III:350). The bishop suffers the worst effects of the lot when his overindulgence at the table leads him to drop from his chair in an apoplectic fit. “This incident left an impression upon me,” Hugh states, “which I am persuaded will be salutary through life” (III:351). Helen Maria Williams’s heroine of Julia similarly finds that “among the fashionable world eating had become a science” (I:39). When she has the opportunity to observe the behavior of the affluent, Julia notes that gentlemen “talked in a decisive tone of the proper flavour of every dish, discriminated with the nicest accuracy the different ingredients of the sauces, devoured each other’s remarks with ‘greedy ear,’ and seemed to take as much heart-felt satisfaction in the delineation of a ragoût, as ‘if to live well, meant nothing but to eat’” (I:39–40). Robert Bage’s Charles Hermsprong is equally astonished by the dining rituals of the English upper classes. Hermsprong makes this excess central to his critique of the lives and values of the contemporary aristocracy, telling an English gentleman, If to dine . . . were only to eat, twenty minutes would be ample. You sit usually a couple of hours; and you talk, and call it conversation. You make learned remarks on winds and weather; on roads; on

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dearness of provisions; and your essays on cookery are amazingly edifying. Not much less so are your histories of your catarrhs and tooth-achs. Not content with this mass of amusement, you continue your beneficence to that unfortunate viscus, the stomach, under the name of dessert, till it almost faints under the obligation. No matter; spur it on with wine. It is said, that physicians have much increased in your country; one great reason may be, because you dine. (208)

Bage’s outspoken Maria Fluart shares many of Hermsprong’s values. Choosing to remain single, she congratulates herself on escaping a marriage to the species of English aristocrat that she refers to as “the wild buck of London or Paris,” who typically “breakfasts in London; dines at Newmarket; devotes six days and nights to the fields of sport, of hazard, and champagne; and having done all that he has to do, that is, lost his money, returns to town, to the arms of his fair Rosabella; dozes away forty-eight hours between love and compunction; awakes; damns all impertinent recollections; sends for an Israelite; signs, and is again a buck” (158). Bage’s use of the contemporary stereotype of the Jew here indicates how aristocrats were increasingly forced to borrow money to continue to support their profligate lifestyles. The gout-ridden Mr. Bradford of Robinson’s The Natural Daughter similarly embodies upper-class excess at its worst. Mr. Bradford frets over his health, yet completely ignores his physician’s directions. “Never contradicted,” Robinson writes, “he indulged in every luxury, ate immoderately, played deeply, fretted incessantly, drank inordinately, and slept three times during the twenty-four hours. His malady increased, his form became every hour more corpulent; his temper more irritable; his pocket more light; and his expenses more heavy” (116). Not surprisingly, Bradford dies suddenly after enjoying “a voracious dinner” (125). Inchbald uses similar portraits of gluttony and excess in Nature and Art to emphasize the vast difference between the lifestyles of the wealthy and the dire needs of the poor. Her bishop William Norwynne is a man who “kept a dainty table himself” (148) and who made sure his dogs and horses were well fed, while referring the poor and hungry to the local workhouse. Inchbald condemns the aristocrats in her novel to early deaths that result from their excessive behavior. The bishop’s in-law Lord Bendham, for example, expires “from the effects of intemperance; from a mass of blood infected by high seasoned dishes, mixed with copious draughts of wine” (152). “Repletion of food and liquor,” Inchbald points out, is “not less fatal to the existence of the rich, than the want of common sustenance to the lives of the poor” (152).4


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Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft each explore the darker side of such excess, particularly drinking. Smith provides a remarkably early portrait of the effects of alcoholism in Desmond as Geraldine Verney describes her husband’s “propensity” to intoxication. “In this habit,” Geraldine writes, “he has indulged himself ever since he has been told that it endangers his life; and when he is absolutely denied it, he sinks into a sullen or torpid state, and complains that I will let him die of faintness and dejection” (V:326). Verney’s alcoholism eventually leads to his premature death. Similarly, Wollstonecraft’s Maria Venables of The Wrongs of Woman describes her husband’s quick descent into a perpetual drunkenness soon after their marriage: “The very countenance of my husband changed; his complexion became sallow, and all the charms of youth were vanishing with its vivacity” (I:139). “I think I now see him lolling in an arm-chair,” she recalls, “in a dirty powdering gown, soiled linen, ungartered stockings, and tangled hair, yawning and stretching himself” (I:140). Whenever “wine had loosed his tongue,” George Venables also has the particularly odious habit of discussing with his wife his dalliances with “wantons of the lowest class” (I:139–40). Both Smith and Wollstonecraft illustrate in plain terms how the abuse of alcohol can lead to the abuse of women. In both Verney’s and Venables’s cases, excessive drinking leads to high losses in gambling, to sexual promiscuity, and, worst of all, to attempts to generate even more money by selling their own wives as mistresses to other men.

Ga m b ling a s a Mark er o f S oc i al Di ssi pati on By far the most common examples of aristocratic excess that preoccupied reformists in the late eighteenth century involve instances of gambling and dueling. While these two social behaviors are very common features of the popular novel throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the frequency with which excessive gambling, dueling, or both appear in nearly every novel with a reformist bent in the 1790s and the early 1800s is remarkable. Clearly reformists saw these behaviors as distinct markers of class difference that epitomized the aristocracy’s devotion to a dissolute and outmoded way of life. Thus gambling and dueling became important symbols of the irresponsibility of the aristocracy and its unfitness to continue to serve as the ruling class, not only on the continent, but in Britain as well.5 Like the examples of gluttony and alcoholism mentioned above, gambling was seen by reformists as a perfect illustration of the irresponsibility of upper-class gentlemen and ladies who benefited

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disproportionately from a vastly inequitable distribution of wealth and who regularly abused the advantages with which they were born. Although gambling had been a common practice in Western Europe for centuries, the practice experienced explosive growth at Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV, who is thought to have encouraged his nobility to play to keep them idle and financially weakened. Gambling thus became a common habit of the aristocrats of the ancien régime and particularly women; some scholars argue that gambling offered women a means of influencing popular taste and fashion despite their exclusion from the political arena.6 European aristocrats came to consider gaming a necessary skill for a successful life in the haut ton, and they often hired gaming masters to teach their children how to play at cards and dice.7 As a new middle class began to emerge in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, gambling in aristocratic circles became ever more persistent as aristocrats felt driven to protect class boundaries. Thus the code of behavior associated with gambling became an increasingly more important marker of class distinction. Gillian Russell has noted that, from the aristocrat’s point of view, gambling served not merely to display one’s wealth publicly but, more importantly, to display “one’s insouciance in losing it.”8 Losing great sums and paying one’s debts with indifference became a means of expressing disgust with the values of the new middle class, which had risen to higher social prominence by hard work rather than by birth.9 From an aristocratic perspective, it was socially unacceptable to play with the intention of winning or to express regret upon losing.10 “The essential trait of the noble’s lifestyle,” Thomas Kavanagh has written, “was a disdain for any limit on personal prerogative by reason of cost.”11 To members of the upper class, gaming was to be approached purely as entertainment. As William Godwin’s aristocratic St Leon would attest, “he who games for the express purpose of improving his circumstances must be an idiot. . . . It is past a question, that he who thus turns his amusement into his business loses the dignity of a man of honour, and puts himself upon a level with the most avaricious and usurious merchant” (IV:54–55). St Leon makes his association between a concern for money and the concerns of trade and commerce perfectly clear. In his study of the French novel of the period, Kavanagh has traced “the new moralizing of gambling by the rising bourgeoisie” as a key factor in their attempt to exert control over the aristocracy.12 Kavanagh argues that differing attitudes toward gambling can be interpreted as “the clearest expression of a profound mutation in the Enlightenment’s fundamental understanding of individual merit.”13 Members


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of the middle class who worked hard to establish their place in the contemporary world had a diametrically different view of chance and fortune than that of the upper and lower classes, who had traditionally accepted chance and fortune as uncontrollable determinants of personal identity and lot in life.14 Not only did the middle class see gambling as an example of aristocratic excess and self-indulgence at their worst, but they also came to revile particular social behaviors involved in winning and losing. Because debts incurred by gambling were not legally binding, the paying of one’s debts was considered a display of personal honor—an act in accordance with a code of conduct that superseded civil law. Moreover, aristocrats commonly took their “debts of honor” more seriously than other debts, often paying them before reimbursing their commercial creditors.15 Russell has observed that middle-class anxiety over the popularity of gambling “tended to become more acute during periods of social and political upheaval,” as in the 1790s.16 Russell has noted that on February 2, 1790, the Times reported the presence of 1,356 hazard, E.O., and faro tables in London, as well as 742 billiard tables, “besides a little snug room in every Tavern, Coffee House, Porter House, and Wine Shop.”17 Men gambled frequently at “subscription clubs,” such as Brooks’s, known as a Whig establishment, and White’s, frequented by Tories—clubs where private play and political decision making were not easily separated.18 As gambling became a national obsession, liberal-minded reformists and conservatives alike worried increasingly about the influence of the vice, particularly by the end of the eighteenth century as it became more commonly practiced by members of the middle and lower classes. Many conservatives objected to the fact that aristocrats often mixed with the middle classes at the gaming table and worried that money was beginning to supersede rank as a new basis for social status. Every effort was made to prevent gambling among the working classes by barring them access to commercial gaming clubs and by imposing high taxes on cards and dice, which pushed the lower classes to gamble illegally in lotteries and in unlicensed taverns and coffee houses known as “hells.”19 Similarly, religious conservatives published tracts objecting to gambling because it encouraged a disproportionate concern with material wealth, and it involved the heedless diffusion of funds that might be used to alleviate the sufferings of the less fortunate.20 Such critics argued that gains were won in gambling through others’ losses and thus could lead to the abuse of friendships. Others believed that gambling encouraged the loss of self-control in a more general sense.21 Some even likened gambling to suicide as an act of unabashed

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individualism that “denied social ties and responsibilities.”22 Contemporary moralists worried about occasions in which gambling actually led to suicide as well as the frequency with which conflict over large winnings so often led to dueling. In his A Dissertation on the Pernicious Effects of Gaming (1783), for example, essayist Richard Hey devotes an entire section of his argument to dueling and suicide as joint vices stemming from excessive gaming. Similarly, Charles Moore’s A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide (1790) carried the subtitle To Which Are Added (As Being Closely Connected With the Subject) Two Treatises on Duelling and Gaming. Conservatives and liberals also both worried over women’s involvement in gambling. Although gaming clubs generally did not permit women’s attendance, women’s gambling increased dramatically during the 1790s, most commonly in private houses at evening “routs.”23 Robinson beautifully captures the atmosphere of such a rout in upperclass circles at Bath through the voice of her narrator in Walsingham: I found a large circle of both sexes, seated round a table: men intent on the turn of a card, which was destined either to ruin themselves or their intimate associates; and women, sacrificing all the graces of mind and person, wholly absorbed in the vortex of destruction. I cannot describe the disgust which I felt, while I contemplated features, decked with the bloom of youth, yet distorted by internal emotions! Bosoms, which nature formed for the abodes of gentleness and virtue, burning with rage, and panting with disappointment! Eyes, darting forth the lightnings of despair; and lips, pallid with the apprehension of impending ruin! Is this, what men call the world? thought I. Are these the votaries of pleasure, the children of luxurious life? (179)

The controversy over women gamblers was in part driven by the fact that, in the eyes of the public, great debt implicated a woman’s sexual honor. Conservatives also feared that gaming might lead to women’s more active involvement in politics.24 Although conservatives and reformists make many similar arguments in their attacks on gambling, their reasons for attacking it were markedly different. Conservatives, of course, wished to eliminate gambling to prevent the mixing of the classes in an effort to preserve traditional class boundaries, while reformists used gambling as a means of illustrating that the traditional class hierarchy should be eliminated altogether. In addition to Walsingham, Robinson was driven to expose the evils of gaming in her essay on the “Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England,” which appeared in


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the Monthly Magazine over a four-month period in the fall of 1800. In this remarkable essay, Robinson touches on nearly every argument made against gambling in the late 1790s. First, she points out the hypocrisy of a society in which the lower classes are punished for gambling while the rich engage themselves in the vice without restraint. “It is at the gaming-tables of the exalted,” she writes, “that our legislators, our nobility, our generals, and our country-gentlemen practice those very vices which the needy and the private individual is punished for attempting.”25 Robinson also regrets the degree to which women are involved in gaming: “Men now devote their hours to clubs, to gaming-tables, to tennis-courts, and to cricket-grounds. Wives are left to roam, or permitted to hold their midnight orgies, with the most dissipated of their own as well as of the other sex” (113). Robinson concludes by lamenting the fact that women’s involvement in gaming often exposes them to “the miseries of seduction,” undermines “the wealth and the honour of their family,” and may even involve them “in debts of honour, which the sacrifice of honour too frequently discharges” (113). She also points out the connection between gambling and suicide, writing of popular gaming routs that “it is at those ennobled midnight scenes of folly and rapacity, that the DEMON of SUICIDE anticipates his triumphs over the weakness, avarice, and false pride of mortals. The effects of those scenes have recently presented HORRORS and DEATH! yet the magistrates are passive, and the laws tardy in the occupation of administering justice” (113). Robinson had launched earlier attacks on gaming in her satirical poem “Modern Manners,” published under the pseudonym of “Horace Juvenal” in 1793,26 as well as in a 1792 play entitled Nobody. In choosing the stage for an attack on gambling, Robinson followed the tradition of Edward Moore’s popular tragedy The Gamester (1753), in which the gambling habit of the protagonist, Beverley, leads ultimately to financial ruin and death. Robinson couches her attack in a comedy, however, and begins by contrasting the naïve Nelly Primrose, a young chambermaid just in from the country, to dissipated society types given names drawn from gaming terminology such as “Mr. Sharply,” “Lady Rouleau,” “Lady Farrow,” “Lady Squander,” “Lady Paroli,” and “Miss Cassino.”27 The vitriol of Robinson’s attack on “faro’s daughters” reaches a climax in an episode in which the play’s heroine, Lady Languid, responds to the criticism of the moralistic Sir Henry Rightly with an impassioned explanation of the lure of the gaming table. When Sir Henry avows that “a beautiful hand never appears to such disadvantage, as when it shakes a Dice:Box,” Lady Languid defends those of her friends who

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are regularly at play.28 “They know so well how to live!” she exclaims, “—oh! the delights of vingt un—the solicitudes of Rouge and Noir— the trembling hopes and fears that hang about a Dice Box!” (33).29 Lady Languid’s paean continues as she paints a vision of “the fritting, frowning, beauteous Circle!—bending over pyramids of Rouleaus—To behold their delicious agonies!—their charming anxieties—their laughable vexations, and provoking Triumphs!—and if we lose, to have the bliss of seeing others as wretched as our:selves! —Where else can a Woman of Fashion be happy?” (34). At the play’s climax, Lady Languid loses 9,000 guineas to Sir Henry, who nobly forgives the debt because he “will not distress an amiable, tho’ misguided woman” (48). Although Robinson was delighted when Richard Brinsley Sheridan chose to produce Nobody at Drury Lane in November 1794, the opening coincided with the opening of the faro season at fashionable houses around London, and certain socialites were determined to see it fail. At its first performance, the audience rioted during the second act, disconcerting the actors and effectively ending the show. Despite Robinson’s attempt to improve its reception by making revisions, the play was withdrawn after only a few performances.30 Inchbald experienced a less disastrous response to portraying female gamesters in her 1797 play Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are, no doubt because her treatment of lady gamblers is considerably milder than Robinson’s had been. In this play, the young, unmarried Miss Maria Dorrillon and Lady Mary Raffle are highly devoted to fashionable life, and both develop a strong taste for gaming. Of her compulsion, the headstrong but amiable Miss Dorrillon, whom Inchbald herself recognized as a recasting of her famously willful Miss Milner of A Simple Story, announces that “I love to part with my money; for I know with what pleasure I receive it myself, and I like to see that joy sparkle in another’s eye, which has so often brightened my own.”31 At the play’s climax, both Miss Dorrillon and Lady Mary lose everything they have at play, and, having formerly run through a list of their closest male associates for bail, both are arrested and thrown into prison. When Miss Dorrillon’s father expresses his shock at this incident, the bailiff assures him that “there are as many ladies who will run into tradesmen’s books, as there are gentlemen; and when one goes to take the ladies, they are a thousand times more slippery to catch than the men” (II:66). Predictably, at the end of the play, both women happily embrace marriage as a means of escaping their current predicament. As in Nobody, Inchbald mollifies the play’s social criticism with a conventionally comic ending, perhaps in an effort to ensure its success on the stage. Nevertheless, her moral concerning


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the deleterious effects of women’s involvement in gaming is made perfectly clear. A long-forgotten novel of the period that illustrates how gambling can lead to both suicide and dueling is William Frederick Williams’s Sketches of Modern Life; or, Man As He Ought Not To Be, published in 1799. Williams’s title suggests a relationship between his novel and those of Bage and thus suggests ties to reformist concerns; nevertheless, the book reads more as a sentimental romance than a political work. In Sketches of Modern Life, the protagonist Reginald Forester visits Lady Fazakerly’s home, known as “the abode of the goddess Fortune” and containing the altar “where estates are sacrificed to Faro, Rouge et Noir, and other illicit games.”32 Reginald voices his disapproval of such games, asking an avid card player who labels his pastime an amusement, “Do you call amusement what ought rather to be termed frenzy? How can any who boast the possession of common sense waste their time, destroy their health, narrow the heart, and entail poverty on their posterity, for the satisfaction of contemplating a red ace, or a turn of a die?” (I:72). Williams illustrates the potentially tragic results of excessive gambling in the story of the noble Mr. Hartlebury, who, as a reviewer in the Monthly Review explains it, “indulges himself in the practice of gaming; not from a motive of avarice, but to supply a fund for relieving distress.”33 Hartlebury plans to use his winnings at gaming to relieve honest debtors “from the horrors of a prison” (II:125). Nevertheless, he abandons gaming and leaves London after learning that his winning five hundred pounds from the young heir of a reputedly large estate had resulted in the boy’s suicide. The critic in the Monthly Review praises this novel’s exposure of the “fatal consequences” and “dreadful effects” of “gaming, dueling, coquetry, and illicit love.”34 What the novel demonstrates most clearly is that excessive gambling always leads to tragedy, regardless of one’s intentions in playing or in using one’s winnings benevolently. Sketches of Modern Life is typical in its dark depiction of the disasters that can stem from the vice of gaming. Certainly the most extended psychological treatment of the topic, however, can be found in Godwin’s St Leon, in which Godwin analyzes the addictive personality in astonishing detail. In detailing the story of his fall into gaming, St Leon first provides a diatribe against it: I have often thought that I could better understand how a man of honour could reconcile himself to the accursed and murderous trade of war, than to the system of the gaming table. In war, he fights with a stranger, a man with whom he has no habits of kindness, and who is

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fairly apprised that he comes against him with ruinous intent. But in play, he robs, perhaps, his brother, his friend, the partner of his bosom; or, in every event, a man seduced into the snare with all the arts of courtesy, and whom he smiles upon, even while he stabs. (IV:35)

Such a comment makes it clear that St Leon’s perspective is that of a nobleman who has been bred to embrace the nobility of battle on behalf of his king. St Leon had, in fact, enjoyed a glorious military career as a young man in the service of King Francis I and fought with the king at the famous siege of Pavia in 1524–25. St Leon describes his early indulgence in gaming as a fashionable habit and one to which he committed himself in a carefree manner, “laughing alike at the favours of fortune and her frowns.” Nevertheless, he reports, “I found myself deceived. The fickle goddess sufficiently proved that she had the power of making me serious” (IV:36). It is significant that he points out that his developing passion for gaming did nothing to tarnish his social reputation, despite enormous financial losses. “My excesses were regarded by some as ornamental and becoming,” he says. “I was universally ranked among the most promising and honourable of the young noblemen of France” (IV:37). Justine Crump describes how Godwin’s novel illustrates that after such defeats of the age of chivalry as that at Pavia, the aristocracy must reassert its power, and gambling provides one means of doing so. “The fashion for deep play,” Crump writes, “is explicitly derived from a baffled ambition for honour and glory.”35 Indeed, St Leon himself suggests that “the nobility of France exchanged the activity of the field for the indulgences of the table” (IV:33). “That concentrated spirit which had sought to expand itself upon the widest stage,” he explains, “now found vent in the exhibition of individual expense: and, above all, the sordid and inglorious passion for gaming” (IV:33). Thus Godwin makes it clear that St Leon’s gaming habit is at least in part explained by his inability to capture the excitement of military glory in a retirement to high society life. Crump writes that aristocrats in the late eighteenth century also struggled against the rapid advance of commerce and an increasingly wealthy middle class by evolving “compensatory activities designed to reproduce the danger and glory of battle, in which they could assert their aristocratic identity.”36 Gambling, and dueling too, thus “affirmed their willingness to confront risk with equanimity.”37 St Leon verifies the psychological appeal of gambling to the aristocrat by describing how it “appeared to my distempered apprehension to be only a mode in


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which for a man to display his fortitude and philosophy. I was flattered with the practice of gaming, because I saw in it, when gracefully pursued, the magnanimity of the stoic, combined with the manners of a man of the world” (IV:36). Despite recurrent attempts to give up gambling, St Leon continues to find its lure impossible to resist, and Godwin carefully anatomizes the mental and emotional changes his confessional narrator experiences as his resistance to the desire to gamble gradually breaks down. After one considerable win, St Leon describes the “tumult and agitation” he experiences (IV:53). A few losses, however, cost him dearly and keep him going back to play more in a fruitless attempt to replenish his purse despite a “nearly regular alternation of gain and loss” and an increasingly desperate mental state (IV:55). “No man who has not felt,” he asserts, “can possibly imagine to himself the tortures of a gamester, of a gamester like me, who played for the improvement of his fortune, who played with the recollection of his wife and children . . . who might be said . . . to make these relations the stake for which he threw, who saw all my own happiness and all theirs through the long vista of life, depending on the turn of a card!” (IV:56). St Leon’s detailed depiction of the psychological effects of this “demon that poisoned all my joys” provides a strikingly modern and realistic analysis of the addictive personality (IV:65). As the novel progresses, Godwin links St Leon’s addiction to gambling to the difficulties he faces in properly handling the knowledge he gains as an alchemist. As Crump has argued, Godwin’s exploration of the psychological motivations of the alchemist and the gambler suggest that they are essentially the same in their quest “to create wealth out of nothing.”38 Subtly couched in a sixteenth-century setting, Godwin’s portrait of the gambler in Reginald de St Leon clearly illustrates the struggle of a dying aristocracy to resist massive cultural changes that reached a crescendo with the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Kate Ferguson Ellis has argued that the tragedy of St Leon’s situation stems from his mother’s obsession with honor and her instilling in him an age-old code of conduct “in which a man’s honor and fame count for everything.”39 St Leon’s obsessions with gambling and later with alchemy reflect a devotion to chance and to money as means of obtaining happiness and fulfillment that he is never able to overcome. Gary Handwerk has extended this idea, explaining that St Leon ultimately fails to overcome the “historical prejudices” with which his mother had instilled him, “for those prejudices are as deeply rooted in himself as in the environment, a fact that often makes him blind to their transformed re-emergence.”40 According to Handwerk,

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St Leon is “an unwitting and seemingly unconscious accomplice in perpetuating his era’s characteristic ideology.”41 St Leon’s idealized wife, Marguerite, on the other hand, speaks as a modern-day reformist when she attempts to persuade her husband that “a generous spirit . . . delights to live upon equal terms with his associates and fellows. He would disdain, when offered to him, excessive and clandestine advantages. Equality is the soul of real and cordial society” (IV:176). Clearly Godwin’s mouthpiece, Marguerite recognizes St Leon’s loss of fortune as a benefit, believing as she does that “the splendour in which we lately lived had its basis in oppression; and that the superfluities of the rich are a boon extorted from the hunger and misery of the poor!” (IV:78). Even the more conservative reviewers approved of Godwin’s unusually strong depiction of gambling in St Leon. A critic in the Monthly Mirror, for example, wrote that “we have no recollection of any work in which gaming has been exhibited in a more detestable point of view, or in which the agonies of a gamester have been more forcibly depicted.”42 The reviewer in the Monthly Magazine concurred with this judgment, stating that “it is not new to describe the evils attending gaming; but we never recollect to have seen its pernicious effects exemplified in so striking and so masterly a manner as in this novel.”43 Even the rabidly conservative Antijacobin Review and Magazine published a surprisingly mild review of the novel, remarking that on the “degrading vice” of gaming, “there is much shrewd and pertinent observation.”44 This reviewer praises Godwin’s focus on the emotional effects of gambling, writing of the stages in which St Leon loses his fortune that “the contentions in his mind, in the course of this progress, are extremely well worked.”45 Such affirming statements indicate how closely aligned reformist and conservative views of gambling could be despite the fact that reformists critiqued the practice with a distinctly radical purpose in mind. A novel that follows St Leon in carefully detailing the stages by which gambling can become habitual and highly destructive both personally and socially is Holcroft’s 1805 Memoirs of Bryan Perdue. In his final novel, Holcroft wished to expose the evil inherent in capital punishment and to demonstrate “how possible it is for one, who may have been highly criminal, to become still more highly useful” as a productive member of society (IV:225). To make this point, Holcroft attempted to create an amiable confessional narrator closely modeled on the example of the narrator of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), a narrator whose charm and appeal he hoped would override the reader’s prejudice when he reveals that


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he once committed the capital crime of forgery and had been tried and acquitted for that offense. Holcroft slowly and carefully develops the story of Bryan Perdue’s early life. Bryan loses his mother early in life, and he suffers from the harmful influence of a dissolute father who is an infamous gambler and cardsharp and who instructs his son in the arts of gaming and cheating. Even after Bryan’s father is killed in a duel after a gaming dispute, his influence on his vulnerable son is indelible. Despite Bryan’s finer qualities, he finds it difficult to avoid the lure of winning large sums of money by cheating at play. When his father’s reputation and his own poverty result in his ostracism from English society, Bryan embraces the life of a gambler with gusto, both to supply himself with ready cash and to lash out against a society that has rejected him. In narrating his involvement in the seediest circles of London’s gamesters, Bryan offers a window into the practice during the period, describing the tricks and arts of gamesters in detail, offering examples of their cant and vocabulary, and explaining how they identify and ensnare “well-feathered pigeons” for “plucking” (IV:183). Holcroft devotes an entire chapter to explaining the complicated schemes by which sharps or “rooks” work in league with each other to lure unsuspecting “flats” into betting on card games, billiards, and even tennis and to cheat them of great sums of money. Holcroft takes pains to point out how such deceit results in gamesters’ inability to trust even their closest associates. “If men could be made sensible of the mad risk they run,” Bryan states, “when they encourage a spirit of gaming, if they were not blind to the narrow selfishness, the odious passions to which it gives birth, the desire of gaining that which may be, and often is, the destruction of families, the hazard of being exposed to equal destruction themselves, and the contemptible and disgusting nature of such covetousness, . . . there would soon be no gamblers” (IV:185). As in the case of St Leon, many of the reviewers of Bryan Perdue found little to condemn in Holcroft’s politics, perhaps because they tended to overlook the novel’s chief attack on capital punishment in their enthusiasm over Holcroft’s diatribes against the evils of gaming. A critic in the Monthly Review, for example, writes that “against the vice of gambling in particular, it furnishes many striking admonitions,”46 and a writer in the Annual Review states that “a more fertile theme could not have been chosen.”47 “Here it is unnecessary to describe imaginary horrors,” this reviewer continues, “or even to give an artificial glow of colouring to the real ones which are produced by indulgence in this seducing vice.”48 Even a reviewer in the conservative British Critic, who disparages a number of aspects

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of the novel, nevertheless concedes that “the miseries of gaming are exhibited in the colours which they justly merit,”49 confirming again that this was one topic on which conservatives and liberals agreed, if for different reasons. In gambling, reformists had clearly identified a tool for exposing the graft of the aristocracy that would meet with approval in both liberal and conservative camps. Unfortunately, even as they warmly praised attacks on a popular social vice that they also wished to see abolished, it appears that conservative readers often missed these writers’ efforts to promote a leveling point of view.

H o no r at the Po int of a S word Although gambling and dueling may strike the modern reader as having little in common, Britons living in the late eighteenth century often linked them as aristocratic vices. Historically, the practice of dueling in Europe stems from the trial by combat of the early Middle Ages, and by the time of the Renaissance it had become a common means among the aristocracy for settling matters of honor, that is, a socially acceptable method for exacting revenge in response to slander, adultery, or some other insult. Some scholars link the practice to the feudal expectation that noblemen should be prepared to shed blood in defending their king and argue that dueling became a symbolic means of reproducing the glory of battle in a later age, the same explanation St Leon offers to account for aristocrats’ passion for gambling.50 Thus, from its origins, dueling was practiced almost entirely by the elite. When challenged to fight “at sword’s point,” Tobias Smollett’s humble Humphry Clinker makes this distinction clear when he avows that “it doth not become servants to use those weapons, or to claim the privilege of gentlemen to kill one another when they fall out.”51 The fiction of the late eighteenth century contains countless examples that confirm that aristocrats regarded dueling as a practice reserved for their class alone. When Orlando Somerive is challenged to a duel in Smith’s The Old Manor House, for example, his self-important patron Mrs. Rayland begins “piquing herself on the supposition that in him had revived a spark of that martial and dauntless spirit which she had been taught to believe characterized the men of her family” (VI:114). To Orlando’s father’s expression of alarm at the impending duel, Mrs. Rayland “hinted, in no very equivocal terms, that this timidity was the effect of that mixture of plebeian blood, from the alloy of which only Orlando, of all the family, seemed exempt” (VI:114). Reformist novelists often demonstrate how late eighteenth century aristocrats were becoming increasingly concerned with preventing members of the


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lower classes from partaking in their rituals. In Bage’s Hermsprong, for example, the ridiculously proud Sir Philip Chestrum considers challenging the hero, Charles Hermsprong, to a duel when Hermsprong offends him, but he ultimately declines “calling him out” when he cannot determine whether or not Hermsprong is to be considered a gentleman (260). When Godwin’s Falkland of Caleb Williams tells the vicious Barnabas Tyrrel that he has been refused admission to a public assembly house due to his egregious abuse of his kinswoman Emily Melville, Tyrrel angrily challenges Falkland, telling him that “if you have any thing to say to me, choose a proper time and place” (III:83). Acutely sensitive to his honor and his social standing, Falkland quickly retorts that “this public scene is the only place where I can have any thing to say to you,” a clear indication that Tyrrel’s behavior has excluded him from high society and its conventions (III:83). A similar attitude is expressed in George Walker’s Theodore Cyphon when one character attempts to stop another from making a challenge by asking whether it is reasonable “to put in the power of chance a life so valuable, and that against a villain, who is unworthy honourable treatment.” (III:184). While judicial or chivalric duels were often fought in early modern England to establish the guilt of an accused party, English law never sanctioned the “duel of honour”; thus duels were always arranged in a clandestine manner.52 In his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), William Blackstone argued that perpetrators should be tried for murder. In fact, no distinction was ever made in English law between killing an opponent in a duel and premeditated murder, but its aristocratic defenders characteristically insisted that, as in combat, the outcome of a duel was dependent upon divine providence.53 Aristocrats who were tried for the crime typically pleaded their honor as the motivation of their actions. Those found guilty were often sentenced to death, although it was common for such a sentence to be reduced to a short prison term after the fact. Because aristocrats guilty of dueling were not always prosecuted and because those who were tried were rarely punished even when convicted of murder, the lower and middle classes held a particular disdain for the practice.54 By the late eighteenth century, the working classes saw dueling as a public demonstration that aristocrats’ devotion to class outweighed all other considerations. Noblemen spoke of “being out” when fighting a duel, indicating their comfort with breaking the law in this particular manner.55 Many argued that such blatant disrespect for the law threatened to undermine the stability of the state. Jeremy Bentham, for example, claimed in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and

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Legislation (1789) that dueling stemmed from placing a disproportionate value on one’s personal reputation. Bentham also proposed that growing numbers of duels late in the century resulted from an increasing indulgence in high sensibility among members of the aristocracy.56 In A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians (1797), William Wilberforce dismissed the idea that the aristocrat was driven to duel merely to preserve his honor and attributed the practice to a base desire for wealth, another claim that linked it to gaming. In his study of the duel in European history, V. G. Kiernan supports the interpretation of the practice as “a vestigial survival of the early feudal right of private warfare” and writes that, as the Enlightenment unfolded, dueling, like gambling, provided “a warrant of aristocratic breeding” as aristocrats began to feel increasingly more vulnerable as a class.57 Kiernan argues that the duel gradually became an ever more important “acid test of the self-made gentlemen” or even a right of initiation in society’s upper ranks.58 Loraine Fletcher has pointed out that dueling allowed men of the lower classes to increase their social prestige, citing the Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s experience as an example of a man who, although he lost a duel, was elevated in public opinion by his willingness to accept a challenge.59 Smith satirizes commoners who attempted social climbing in such a manner in Emmeline when the comic Mr. Elkerton shamelessly submits an exaggerated account of his winning a duel with Frederic Delamere to a newspaper despite the fact that the duel had never actually taken place. Kiernan argues that the French Revolution engendered a new surge in dueling in the final years of the eighteenth century when aristocrats throughout Europe felt their social status and their lifestyle to be under threat.60 Consequently, by the end of the century, the practice had become more controversial than ever before.61 Religious leaders argued that duelists were presumptuously taking over God’s role in determining matters of life and death. As time went by, conservatives and liberals alike came to see it as an affront to reason.62 In A Discourse Against the Fatal Practice of Duelling (1783), John Bennett blamed the practice on the corrupting influence of the “frivolous” French, calling it “a custom, which is founded in Gothic ignorance and barbarism, —originated, principally, in the ridiculous, and now justly exploded notions of chivalry and romance, and is unworthy of a man, not only as he is a christian, but as making the most distant claim to elegance and refinement.”63 Similarly, in A Dissertation on Duelling (1784), Richard Hey feared that contemporary culture was relapsing into a state of morality that typified European


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culture centuries before. As with attacks on gambling, a wide range of both liberal and conservative voices agreed that the practice was irrational and harmful and that it should be eradicated once and for all. For reformists who wished to push a leveling social agenda, however, the argument against dueling had the potential of illustrating the irrational and destructive behavior of the aristocracy at its very worst.64 In several reformist novels of the 1790s, dueling is represented as the direct result of a gambling loss—a “debt of honour” leading directly to the “field of honour”—due either to a loser’s inability to pay a debt or to his suspicion that he has been cheated. In the anonymously authored novel The Female Gamester; or, The Pupil of Fashion (1796), for example, the flamboyant Polyxena, Duchess of Wolsingham, gradually squanders her wealthy husband’s fortune and brings ruin to her family. The novel concludes with a melodramatic duel in which the duchess’s son is killed by a rakish creditor who has been blackmailing his mother. In other cases duels were common in cases of adultery or suspected adultery. In Inchbald’s A Simple Story, for example, the hero Mr. Dorriforth is deeply disturbed when a neighboring aristocrat, Lord Frederick Lawnly, begins to express his affections for his ward, Miss Milner. When Lawnly makes an inappropriate gesture of affection toward Miss Milner, Dorriforth strikes him, and predictably, Dorriforth awakens the next morning to find himself challenged. As a Catholic priest, Dorriforth struggles to determine how he should proceed; but “not having had the forbearance to avoid an offence,” he says, “I have no right to a privilege that would only indemnify me from making reparation.”65 Dorriforth’s confessor, Sandford, pours “a torrent of rebukes” upon him for accepting the challenge, but his arguments against the immorality of dueling are fruitless (65). Although he is shaken by Sandford’s arguments and his conscience testifies “that he was bound by ties more sacred than worldly honour,” Dorriforth ultimately privileges his “duty” as a gentleman over his duty to the church (65).66 In 1790 Amelia Opie devoted an entire novel to the inevitability of dueling as a means of defending the honor of a lady. In Dangers of Coquetry the beautiful Louisa Connolly is represented as an ideal young woman, but with one exception: she lacks the willpower to abandon her penchant for coquettishness, even after her marriage to model gentleman Harry Mortimer. When Louisa is denounced in public, Mortimer is bound by his sense of personal and family honor to avenge himself. His bloody death is followed by the miserable miscarriage and death of his remorseful wife. Despite the melodrama, Opie’s moral parallels that of many of the reformists of the decade

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when she points out that “indiscretions may produce as fatal effects as ACTUAL GUILT, and that even the appearance of impropriety cannot be too carefully avoided.”67 Beyond merely displaying the potential evils of dueling, however, many reformist novelists went further in modeling characters who are bold enough to speak out against the barbarity of the practice. Certainly many were influenced by eloquent statements against the practice made by contemporary thinkers. Rousseau, for example, makes such a statement in the voice of the heroine of Julie. When Julie learns that her lover St Preux has become involved in an affair of honor over a derogatory remark made about her, she writes to St Preux to admonish him. “What does the glory of slitting a man’s throat have in common with the assurance of moral rectitude,” she asks, “and what purpose can the vain opinion of others have on the genuine honor, the roots of which all lie deep in the heart? Do the virtues one really possesses perish beneath the lies of a slanderer?”68 “The honor of a man like you,” Julie continues, “lies not within another’s power, it lies in itself and not in the opinion of the populace; it is defended by neither sword nor shield, but by an upright and irreproachable life, and that combat is just as good as the other as far as courage is concerned” (VI:129). Beautifully articulating the contemporary argument against dueling, Julie boldly asserts that “a man of courage eschews the duel, and the man of honor abhors it” (VI:130). Godwin also eloquently attacks what he terms the “despicable practice” of dueling in an appendix devoted entirely to the topic in the 1796 edition of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.69 For Godwin, “useful lives are not to be hazarded, from a view to the partial and contemptible obloquy that may be annexed to the refusal of such a duel, that is, to an act of virtue” (IV:69). Therefore anyone who fights a duel and who thus subscribes to the supposition that human lives are worthless “deserts the ground of vindicating his injured honour, and shows that his conduct is that of a vindictive and brutalised savage” (IV:69). Godwin insists that challenges can be declined with courage and sincerity, while simultaneously avoiding a blow to one’s reputation. “He, that would break through a received custom because he believes it to be wrong, must no doubt arm himself with fortitude,” he boldly assures the reader; but “he . . . who expresses, with the simplicity and firmness which conviction never fails to inspire, the views with which he is impressed, is in no danger of being mistaken for a coward.”70 Early in Caleb Williams, Godwin demonstrates this conviction by illustrating how the honorable Mr. Falkland manages to circumvent


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the rage of an impetuous Italian count who suspects Falkland of an indiscretion with his lover. At the time appointed for the duel, Falkland orchestrates a reunion between the count and his mistress, he takes his share of blame for the misunderstanding, and he prides himself on finding a peaceful means of diffusing a potentially tragic situation.71 It is worth noting, however, that Falkland admits that he was able to act in such a way only because the challenge had not be made publicly. “If the challenge had been made public,” he tells the count, “the proofs I had formerly given of my courage would not have excused my present moderation; and, though desirous to have avoided the combat, it would not have been in my power” (III:15). Here Godwin highlights Falkland’s greatest weakness in his excessive devotion to personal honor. Other reformist novels also devoted themselves to modeling for the reader how to reject and avoid a duel. Holcroft’s Frank Henley of Anna St Ives, for example, perfectly epitomizes such an objective. Early in the novel, while traveling in France, Frank intercedes in a duel between Coke Clifton and a French nobleman only to find that Clifton is nearly overcome by anger at his intrusion.72 “He held up his sword,” Frank relates, “as if to strike with it, and with great haughtiness and passion . . . bade me begone” (II:66). When the combatants agree to leave the scene, Frank threatens to follow them, promising that “men shall not assassinate each other, if I can prevent it” (II:66). Clifton’s fury and astonishment illustrates the aristocrat’s devotion to dueling as a display of his unimpeachable honor. He reports to a friend that he left the scene “cursing the insolence of the English youth, who seemed to disregard my anger, and to be happy that he had prevented the spilling of blood” (II:73). Later, when Clifton suspects Frank as his rival for Anna’s hand, he insults, strikes, and challenges Frank, and he is even more astonished when Frank refuses to meet him in the field. “No man can be degraded by another,” Henley writes in a letter declining the challenge; “it must be his own act: and you have degraded yourself, not me. . . . Cowardice might make me kill you; but true courage will teach me calmly to hear the world call me coward, rather than commit an act so wicked, so abhorred, as that of taking or of throwing away life” (II:126).73 In the face of such a rational statement on the prospect of dueling, Clifton is at a loss to know how to respond. Like Holcroft, Bage also illustrates how a rational man might avoid the challenge of a duel. Bage’s aristocratic protagonist of Man As He Is, Sir George Paradyne, engages in several duels over the course of the novel but is ultimately influenced by the teachings of his

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freethinking tutor, Mr. Lindsay. In one episode, Sir George defends the honor of his beloved Miss Coleraine against the insulting overtures of another gentleman, and he prepares himself to receive a challenge. When Lindsay begs him to decline an invitation to the field, George refuses and points out the hypocrisy of public opinion concerning the convention: “Duellists are said to act against divine and human laws; but juries feel the sense of injured honour, and human laws sleep, or become harmless; nor is it probable that heaven will punish this noble feeling very severely” (I:223). Reasoning in a manner typical of an aristocrat of the day, George avows, “till I find [dueling] no longer the indelible attribute of a gentleman, I must go with the current” (I:225). The reformist Lindsay, however, offers George an alternative view and suggests that the sense of honor on which dueling is based represents merely one way of thinking. Like Godwin, Lindsay argues that the practice can easily be changed merely by changing current habits of thought. “Were it the fashion to mark the aggressor with contempt,” Lindsay argues, “indecency of behaviour would be destroyed. If every small, as well as every large society, would but consider such an offence against an individual, as one against itself— farewell duelling. But valour, like charity, covers a multitude of sins” (I:227).74 Significantly, as he lays out his argument, Lindsay teaches the reader alongside his pupil. Bage’s Charles Hermsprong voices a very similar view and, like Frank Henley, embodies the modern, rational man who refuses to take part in dueling. When Hermsprong is challenged by the foppish Mr. Fillygrove early in the novel, Hermsprong playfully defuses the tension of the situation, remarking that “we had better leave this species of folly to gentlemen born; if it gets among gentlemen by assumption, where will it stop?” (126). In a later episode when the dandy Sir Philip Chestrum threatens to challenge Hermsprong over the attentions of the novel’s heroine, Hermsprong physically lifts Chestrum into the air and sets him down on the other side of a fence. “Friend,” Hermsprong tells him, “I have no quarrel with you—keep yourself out of harm’s way” (232). Such a demonstration of cool self-possession and manly physical strength is rare indeed for the period. Finally, Gilbert Imlay makes dueling a major concern in The Emigrants, or The History of an Expatriated Family (1793), in which he develops a character like Hermsprong and Frank Henley whose common sense will not allow him to accept a challenge. In the words of this character, referred to as Captain C——, dueling proves merely that a man “is either a brute, a fool, or has been in bad company; and whether it was by chance he was thrown into the society of ruffians


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signifies not in the least, as a quarrel with such creatures is equally an impeachment upon a man’s understanding.”75 When Captain C—— himself is challenged in the novel, he plans to defuse his opponent’s anger by placing dueling “in so ridiculous a point of view, that the greatest advocates for that unmanly and barbarous custom, would appear equally as much ashamed of their opinions, as [his opponent] was of his conduct” (11). The captain answers the challenge by writing that he will fight, but only if his opponent agrees to fight by the original standards of dueling—on horseback and “armed at all points,” for “none but villains fought on foot” (13). Fortunately, his opponent is so impressed with the captain’s good sense and his own foolishness “that he went instantly to thank him for thus having rallied him out of his false and ridiculous opinions” (14). Thus Godwin, Holcroft, Bage, and Imlay all work to convert their readers to the conviction that dueling is not only unethical and destructive but foolish and unmanly as well. In making such an argument, these writers offer what Shawn Lisa Maurer has called “an alternative form of heroism, one manifested in humility, charity, and benevolence as well as in the particularly commercial values of honesty and credibility.”76 To such figures as these, the inequity and graft of the aristocratic social code had long since become obsolete, and the future health of the nation lay in the middle class values that must now replace that code. Clearly, illustrations of dueling and of avoiding dueling became a perfect means of exemplifying how one destructive aspect of the age-old code might gradually be replaced. As Maurer writes, such reformist novels as those discussed here “challenged the belief that aristocratic birth entails noble behavior, as well as the view that the well-born are the only people capable of virtuous thought and action.”77 In fact, such writers went so far as to demand that the concept of “virtuous thought and action” be redefined for the new era that had begun to emerge.

Th e Link s between G ambli ng and Dueli ng For reformist novelists of the late eighteenth century, two considerations link the aristocracy’s obsessions with gambling and dueling. First, both practices are rooted in chance. Some scholars argue that because aristocrats had derived their status entirely by virtue of their birth, they also embraced practices that depended upon chance, such as the battlefield, the gaming table, and the field of honor.78 Kiernan uses this theory to explain the aristocrat’s insistence on demonstrating that he was strong enough to keep a cool head in the face of high

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stakes and swings of fortune.79 “A man had to be able to hazard his fortune on a turn of the cards as coolly as his forefathers risked their lives on the luck of battle” Kiernan writes, calling card tables “a new tournament ground for blood to show its quality.”80 Second, and more significantly, both gambling and dueling were perpetuated by intense peer pressure among aristocrats. Aristocrats tenaciously worked to maintain these practices in order to demonstrate to the world that their way of life would survive the massive political changes currently taking place in America and in Europe. Kiernan calls this “moral” pressure “the most insistent binding force” of the aristocracy.81 Consequently, reformist novelists of the period consistently worked to expose these assumptions and to depict the extreme pressure aristocrats put on each other to gamble for high stakes, not merely to replenish their own lagging financial wealth by taking it from others, but also to display a conspicuous nonchalance about money to show that their way of life was so well deserved and so deeply entrenched that it would remain invulnerable to social change. The powerful peer pressure exercised on men to preserve their sense of honor in the “field of honor” likewise functioned as a public demonstration that the aristocracy’s ancient code of honor would continue to supersede modern civil law. Moreover, the persistence of dueling in the face of the laws forbidding it clearly signifies that members of the aristocracy continued to consider themselves beyond the reach of civil law. For reformist writers, this practice offered a perfect example of the degree to which the current social conventions of the haut ton originated in and perpetuated the worst excesses of the age of chivalry. In their eyes, the powerful peer pressure that sustained both gambling and dueling in these years was the desperate survival strategy of an embattled upper class, a class frantically attempting to stem the tide of social change that was rapidly transforming a social order that had always provided them with every conceivable advantage. For reformists, the time had come to convert the middle and lower classes to a better understanding of the promise of social reform. The following chapter will explore how several such writers attacked the class structure in Britain by utilizing the age-old genre of the romance—a genre less concerned with realism and thus one that allowed them to use both allegory and a range of utopian conventions to envision new states altogether free from systems of class hierarchy.

4

Chapter 5

The D U LC I with the U T I L E A l l ego r ical and Uto pi a n Ro ma nc e

H

idden today in bibliographies of the early 1790s are two littleknown romances that reveal a distinctly creative approach to using the forms of popular fiction to promote the ideals of the radical English reform movement. The first of these, the anonymously authored The Excursion of Osman, the Son of Abdallah, Lord of the Vallies; A Political Romance, was published in Liverpool in 1792. The Excursion of Osman introduces an Oriental prince who travels to a thinly disguised Europe, here called “Slavonia,” and witnesses a variety of peculiar allegorical situations that offer a unique view of one reformist’s opinions on the political situation of the day. Dramatically changing its generic character in its second half, The Exursion of Osman moves from political allegory to sentimental abolitionist tale as it alters its focus to the tragic story of an African slave named “Alla-moor” and her sufferings both in Africa and in America. The author explains his goals: In the first place, I have laboured for thy entertainment—In the second place, for thy information, and in both, for thy benefit, as well as my own. Thou wilt therefore be candid in judging how well I may have succeeded: But I shall not be satisfied with thy candour only: For, in thus blending, or endeavouring to blend, the dulci with the utile, there ariseth a little claim upon thy indulgence; seeing, that thou canst not, in reason, expect so great a portion of the useful, as if it were all useful; nor of the entertaining, as if it were all of that quality.1

The Excursion of Osman was followed three years later by a work entitled Memoirs of Planetes, or a Sketch of the Laws and Manners of

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Makar, by chemist, geologist, and early archaeologist Thomas Northmore (1766–1851), who published this work under the pen name “Phileleutherus Devoniensis,” or “devoted lover of freedom.” Memoirs of Planetes is a brief, readable work that borrows its premise from such works as Thomas More’s Utopia and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels but depicts a new vision of a utopian civilization based almost entirely upon the principles of William Godwin’s Political Justice, which had first appeared in print just two years earlier. Coincidentally, the authors of both of these works use the term utile dulci to describe their blending of fiction and politics,2 and both cite an English proverb that “truth must not be spoken at all times” as a means of illustrating one aspect of what is wrong with modern culture.3 Although the terms “romance” and “novel” were often used interchangeably during the eighteenth century, the distinction between the two genres became more significant as the century passed and as debates about the moral effects of the novel became ever more impassioned. In The Progress of Romance through Times, Countries, and Manners (1785), novelist Clara Reeve attempted to revive an interest in the romance by distinguishing it from the realistic novel and by defending it as a great tool for teaching human virtue.4 Reeve clarifies the terminology by defining romances as “stories that are built upon fiction, and have no foundation in truth,” and cites Samuel Johnson’s definition of “tale[s] of wild adventures of war and love.”5 She distinguishes the romance as “an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things,” whereas she defines the novel as “a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written” (I:111). The novel, she writes, “gives a familiar relation to such things, as pass every day before our eyes,” and its goal is “to deceive us into a persuasion . . . that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own” (I:111). Throughout The Progress of Romance Reeve worries about the potential of the novel to mislead impressionable young readers by presenting characters who are unfit to serve as moral role models, and she provides a lengthy list of works of fiction that she finds inappropriate for children and young ladies. She heartily approves of the romance, however, because while ancient and modern romances all have “their peculiar ton, their affectation, their absurdities,” they nevertheless tend to work to inspire “virtue and honour” by presenting highly idealized, if unrealistic, heroes and heroines (I:67). Reeve supports her argument by quoting Dr. John Gregory, who writes in his A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man, with those of the Animal World (1766) that “notwithstanding the absurdities of

The DULCI with the UTILE

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the old Romance, it seems calculated to produce more favorable morals than our modern Novels.”6 If romances “did not represent men as they really are,” Gregory argues, “it represented them better” (138). Rather than run the risk of having the moral and tendency of their works questioned as novels commonly were, the authors of The Excursion of Osman and Memoirs of Planetes may have chosen to disseminate their political agenda through the romance because of its reputation for presenting heroes who were “patterns of courage, truth, generosity, humanity, and the most exalted virtues” and heroines known for their “modesty, delicacy, and the utmost dignity of manners,” as Gregory describes them (138). Northmore and the author of Osman may have hoped that the romance’s reputation as a vehicle for virtuous models of truth and humanity would make their readers particularly receptive to the politics imbedded in their works.

Po l itic al Al l eg ory i n THE EXCURSION OF OSMAN Labeled by its author as a “political romance,” The Excursion of Osman establishes its politics immediately with a bold dedication “To the Right Honourable Charles James Fox” on its opening page. “Sir,” the dedication begins, “I am informed, that you are the friend of liberty, and humanity: I believe it” (v). The dedication to Fox prepares the reader for a text that is firmly grounded in Whiggish politics. Despite his aristocratic background and the influential mentorship of Edmund Burke, Fox (1749–1806) became one of the most vocal members of Parliament in the late eighteenth century for parliamentary reform favoring the rights of the people. Indeed, Fox’s support of the ideals of the American revolutionaries and his defense of the rights of slaves and religious dissenters earned him the popular title “Man of the People”; his many political followers referred to themselves as “Foxites.” Always a professed Francophile, Fox warmly praised the French revolutionaries in the early 1790s, seeing great promise in the French people’s initial attempt to replace their monarchy with a constitutional government. After this dedication, the author of Osman next launches into a lengthy preface addressing the reader and explaining the book’s aim to entertain and to instruct. “Though the age of chivalry is no more,” the author writes, “yet, I make bold to present thee with a Romance; in doing which, I may be said to have consulted thy entertainment. But as, in these anti-romantic days, something more than mere entertainment is looked for, I have taken especial care, that nothing, but truth,

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should gain admission into the following work” (vii). The author then explains that the work is an allegory and nevertheless, with a little flourish of regret that the chief object of the satire cannot be indicated outright, makes it clear that Spain is the country under attack. The preface then presents the reader with a long list of newly invented names for particular countries and peoples of contemporary Europe with a key to each entry. In this list “Gullandicum” represents Spain, and “Slavonia” is Europe. The majority of the entries, however, require some guesswork on the part of the reader because the clues are partially obscured. “Novolonia,” for example, is defined merely as “A——a” (America), and “Jowler” represents “the T———n U——d S——s” (the Thirteen United States). By studying this key, the reader can surmise that Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the United Provinces are renamed “Podgeland,” “Gloriana,” “Scandinavium,” and “Little Belgicum,” respectively, and that France, appropriately, is renamed “The Land of Liberty.” Particular aspects of Spanish politics are also treated allegorically. “Actaeon” is the name given “the Kingship of Spain,” and the mythological allusion is clearly intended to recall the hunter devoured by his own dogs. “Pug” represents the Spanish aristocracy, “Primus” the king’s administration, the “Interloper” the Spanish Inquisition, and the “Sphinxes” are the “Rapacity of the Spanish Law.” The “Mob,” that is, the people of Spain, is represented by the sorely downtrodden “Bruin,” while “Bruin’s jacket” represents the Spanish Constitution, and the ring in Bruin’s nose symbolizes the Spanish government. The complexity of this list of figures and the partially encrypted key place a great burden on the reader to decipher the allegory. Indeed, a contemporary reviewer of the work chose to leave it to his readers “to puzzle out the meaning,” stating that “the writer appears to possess a ready invention; but with respect to the ‘argument,’ as we do not well understand it, we cannot pretend to say there is ‘no offence in it.’”7 For the most part, however, the allegory involves episodes of Bruin’s situation and mistreatment. When Bruin’s sparse jacket is stripped ever more bare and when he is led about by the ring in his nose, for example, the author demonstrates how the Spanish people are gulled and manipulated by those in power and how their constitutional rights are gradually whittled away. It is important to consider the author’s reasons for choosing to attack Spain specifically, particularly in an English reformist allegory in which Great Britain itself seems to play practically no part whatsoever. Published in 1793, The Excursion of Osman was written when the Nootka Sound controversy between Spain and England was still


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relatively fresh in the minds of the British. In April 1790, Spanish coastguards arrested British merchant ships in Nootka Sound off of Vancouver Island in the northern Pacific, claiming that the entire west coast of North America was the rightful property of Spain. The British refused to acknowledge this claim and began to marshal its forces for war. Spain was forced to back down when it failed to win France’s support by invoking the “Family Compact.” Although Louis XVI and his administration wished to help the Spanish, the French revolutionaries chose not to recognize royal family ties as a valid cause for political action.8 In October of that year, Spain was forced to restore the captured ships and to pay compensation to the ships’ owners. In a larger sense, the perspective of the author of Osman is typical of that of British reformists who celebrated the promise and potential of the early years of the French Revolution. To those who applauded the early successes of the French revolutionaries to rid themselves of an antiquated and oppressive monarchy and aristocracy, Spain provided a distinct contrast. Despite the administrative reforms of the enlightened Charles III of Spain, his son Charles IV, who assumed the throne in 1788, proved an extremely weak ruler. By 1792 this new king had virtually consigned control of the government to his minister Manuel de Godoy, the lover of his queen, María Luisa. Charles IV and his ministers were alarmed by the earliest stages of the French Revolution, and they turned to the Inquisition for assistance. In the summer of 1789, the minister Conde de Floridablanca attempted to keep news of the fall of the Bastille from the Spanish people, and in September of that year he authorized the Inquisition to suppress all writings sympathizing with the revolution, which it did with great success.9 On January 1, 1790, a royal order prohibited the circulation of all books, papers, and printed materials of any sort that referred to the revolution. The panic of the Spanish government continued to rise when a Frenchman living in Spain attempted to assassinate Floridablanca in June 1790. In 1791 the Spanish borders were sealed and troops were positioned along the French border.10 All foreign residents in Spain were required to register with the appropriate authorities, and all French refugees who crossed into Spain, thousands of whom were priests, were forced to swear their allegiance to the king and the laws of Spain and not to speak of current events in France.11 Spain’s efforts to raise money to strengthen its army and navy in case of war with France, and the financial support it provided to French aristocrats who had fled France to plot counterrevolutionary reprisals, would have appeared to British reformists as desperate attempts to protect Europe’s ancien régime.12 Finally, the author’s

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strong abolitionist sentiments would suggest that Spain is also under attack for its historical and continuing role in the slave trade. Another closely contemporary view of Spain can be glimpsed in Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793), in which one of Imlay’s forward-thinking characters, Mr. G. Il—ray, contrasts “the deserts of Spain” with the utopian view of the New World that the novel offers in the American West. Contemporary Spain “contains citizens without society,” Il—ray writes, “supports a religion without reason, and a government without wisdom” (230). Commenting on the Inquisition and its political ties to the crown, Il—ray complains of “the influence of despotism, and the fetters of a superstition, which nothing but time will be able to burst asunder, as they are fastened upon the mind, while a most infernal policy coerces the restraint, and shuts out every ray of light that might be shot to illumine their ignorant minds” (230). The fact that Matthew Lewis chose Madrid for the setting of his outrageous indictment of Roman Catholicism in The Monk in 1796 is also worth considering in assessing contemporary British attitudes toward Spain and the Spanish. The Excursion of Osman opens with the introduction of the narrator, Osman, an Oriental prince modeled on the hero of Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759). Imitations of Rasselas that responded to a growing fascination with Eastern tales were common in the late eighteenth century.13 Unlike Rasselas, however, who must plot for months to find a way to escape the idyllic valley where he has been raised, Osman is content with his life, which is mainly spent hunting wild beasts in his father’s valleys. It is Osman’s father who determines that the time has come for his son to see the world, so that Osman might “become acquainted with thy own species” (2). “Thy ignorance,” his father says, “else will perpetually lay thee open to their artifices. Amongst them thou wilt find pride, envy, malice, cruelty, deceit, and a thousand other detestable qualities, more fell than the savage beasts thou has been accustomed to encounter. Thou wilt find the weak a prey to the strong; the simple to the crafty, and the good to the bad” (2). To learn about his fellow man, Osman travels to Gullandicum, or Spain, and meets there a fellow countryman by the name of Abraddin who proceeds to educate him on the state of contemporary Slavonia (Europe) by showing him a variety of sights. The name “Slavonia” has been derived “from the base condition of its inhabitants,” Abraddin explains, “who are all in a state of the most abject slavery” (5). Abraddin tells Osman that the Slavonians pride themselves in “their deep knowledge in the arts and sciences—their exquisite


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manufactures—their civilized manners, and above all in their laws and customs, which, they will tell you, have excited the admiration and envy of the world” (6). “With what justice they assume this preeminence,” Abraddin states, “must be left to the decision of your own observation and judgment” (6). Throughout the first half of the work, the allegory focuses mainly on Osman’s contact with the figure of “Bruin,” or the people. Like the bear he is named for, Bruin is an uncultured brute who is constantly abused by fellow characters who lead him by the ring in his nose. He is beset by bills from the doctor, the butcher, the baker, and other creditors, and according to Abbradin, he “lives only from hand to mouth, all the time he lies by he runs himself in debt” (33). When Osman asks how Bruin manages to pay his debts, Abraddin explains that he gives over his children to the king’s administration to serve as slaves, and the administration “makes occasional presents to the creditor, but never pays the debt, lest his interference should be rendered unnecessary” (34). In addition, Abraddin continues, Bruin “consents that some of the clerk’s domestics shall have the liberty of breaking into his house at all hours, and taking so much of his property as will make good the deficiency” (34). In one chapter, Bruin is forced to sign a parchment attesting to further debts; “Primus,” the king’s administration, puts a golden padlock on Bruin’s lips to ensure his compliance, and Primus bribes “Pug,” the aristocracy, to endorse the agreement by showering him with blue ribands, Pug being “too violently addicted to dress, to decline these . . . honors” (37). Why does Bruin suffer himself to be so abused? Osman asks. “Custom,” Abraddin tellingly replies. “He has long been in the habit of submitting to these evils, and by the insinuations of Primus, who never fails to flatter him on the occasion, he is even led to believe them blessings” (37). In a later chapter, Bruin is accused of libel against those in power, and he is led into court. Blindfolded, bound, and gagged, Bruin is unable to make any defense as the “Sphinxes,” or lawyers, rail against him. When he is found guilty of shameful conduct, the “Fat Sphinx,” or judge, a toady of the king’s administration, pronounces that Bruin’s ears are to be cut off and his front teeth pulled out for punishment. In another chapter focusing more directly on Catholicism, it is explained that Bruin is obliged by law to say grace before eating a meal in his home and to do so while wearing blue sleeves. On one occasion when Bruin unfortunately forgets to put on these sleeves, the “Interloper,” representing the Inquisition, bursts into Bruin’s house, eyes “flaming with rage” (49). The Interloper brutally slashes Bruin from shoulder to heel with his claws, pillages everything that had been left in the

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house by the lawyer Sphinxes, and threatens “to burn his house to the ground, and his family in it, if ever he should be guilty of the like offence again” (50). Bruin’s troubles are never at an end, and he suffers his greatest tragedy when his son Nauticus is brutally murdered and his young family is left to starve when the king’s administration attempts to have him impressed into Gullandicum’s navy. Osman soon turns his attention to Novolonia, or North America, and learns of the recent history of this part of the world. Bruin’s illegitimate son Jowler (the United States) had rebelled against another arbitrary demand imposed on him by Primus, and Primus had retaliated by forcing Bruin to fight his own son. Here Bruin represents not only the Spanish people but the British as well. Thanks to the efforts of one “Fabius, since called Salvator” (62), whom the preface indicates represents George Washington, Jowler’s independence from Gullandicum was ultimately recognized, and a battered Bruin stumbles home “with thirteen broken ribs” (64). A subsequent chapter entitled “The Augean Stable,” which the preface indicates is code for the Court of Spain, provides a novel point of view on British reactions to the French Revolution. Osman describes the overwhelming stench emanating from this stable and its inhabitants: “the weasel-eyed monster Craft,” “mean Self-love,” “iron hearted Despotism” with his foot on the neck of Humanity, and “haughty Wealth,” as well as Idleness, the Vices, Ignorance, and “gaping Credulity” (69). In this filthy setting Bruin is led by Primus, Pug, the Interloper, and Actaeon (the king), who abuse him with a golden currycomb with a thousand teeth “sharp as the gripe of oppression which wrings the hard-earned morsel from the mouth of poverty” (70). As Bruin is being tortured, Floriville, a character representing the people of France, looks into the window, observes what is going on, and shakes his head in disgust. Floriville had been introduced in an earlier chapter as a man who had been long abused by having been forced to wear the same garment for ages and to pay endless fees to the same tailor for the constant altering and mending of the garment. One day in a rage, Floriville tore off the garment and devised a new, splendid robe for himself, which would require no mending or alteration. Thus the France that had formerly been called the “Land of Prodigality and Despotism” became “the Land of Liberty” (10–13). The description of what happens when Floriville peers into the Augean Stable and expresses his disgust is well worth quoting for the contemporary reaction it provides to both Burke, described below as a “Spectre,” and Thomas Paine, referred to as “Benevolus, the oculist.”


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In response to Floriville’s disapproval, aristocratic Pug stamps his feet, and when he does so, a Spectre gradually rose out of the filth, sitting upon a mule. It had a copper-pot on its head, by way of helmet, and in its hand it held a lance full three hundred and fifty six inches long, which ever and anon it brandished with a most envious and infernal grin. After making its profound obeisance to Pug, and kissing the Interloper with great fervour, it cast a furious look at Floriville; and, without further ceremony, darted at him its enormous lance. But its length and shape was all it had to boast of; for, being headed with pewter, the robe repelled it without injury, and it fell harmless to the ground. This attack was no sooner made, than two godlike figures descended from above, and placed themselves in opposition to the Spectre. These were Liberty and Common-sense. They had both open, commanding and beautiful countenances; but the noxious particles with which the air was impregnated, visibly affected the former, and her looks afterwards became pale, languid, and sickly. Upon a signal from Liberty, Common-sense disappeared, but, shortly afterwards returned, leading in Benevolus the oculist. He is so stiled from his skill in opening the eyes of the blind; and is called Benevolus, because he performs his cures gratis; of which, Jowler,14 whom he lately restored to sight, is a living instance. In one hand he held two lances, and the shovel of Hercules in the other.15 As he advanced the Spectre eyed him askaunce, and, wan and meagre as it was, I could perceive it sicken at the sight. Nor were its fears vain; for, without preface or apology, Benevolus aimed one of his lances at its head. The weapon sung as it flew; and, being headed with the purest steel, it shivered the old copper-kettle into a thousand pieces; and exposed to view the Spectre’s bare knob, full of ribands, rattles, and maggots. The second did, if possible, more effectual execution; for, being better tempered, it passed through the Spectre, Pug and Primus; and even reached Actaeon. While they were wringing to and fro with extreme pain, Benevolus stept forward, and was about to present the shovel of Hercules to Bruin; when Primus, dreading the consequences, clapt his juggling-glass before it, which magnified and multiplied to such a degree, that Bruin’s eyes were instantaneously dazzled with the sight of ten thousand enormous currycombs, capable, at a single stroke, of tearing him limb from limb. He accordingly spurned at the shovel with horror; and Benevolus, Common-sense, and Liberty quitted the stable in disgust. (71–73)

So much for Paine’s influence on the Spanish. After the retreat of Benevolus from the Augean Stable, the injured Spectre, Actaeon, Pug, and Primus unanimously resolve that “as no precedent could

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be found that the stable had ever been cleansed, it was against all principles of justice, and equity, to attempt it now” (73–74). Thus the failure of the Spanish to resist perpetuating a treacherous monarchical government is sharply contrasted with the successes of the Americans and the French. Osman’s adventures in Gullandicum end with his exposure to the family of “Infortunus,” who is explained in the key as a representation of “the Laws respecting Game, Deodands and Heriots,” various forms of tributes required by the state (x).16 When Infortunus destroys the vermin on his own property, he incurs the wrath of Pug (the aristocracy), who had enjoyed “the exclusive privilege of destroying vermin” in the country (75). Pug has the property and home of Infortunus seized and leaves him and his family to starve. Finally, Osman is shown a variety of huge “grated buildings” that represent debtor’s prisons, and he sees “Pauperus,” a miserable old man who has been imprisoned for nearly sixty years for a debt of five sequins, amounting, the author tells us in a footnote, to around forty-five shillings in English money. Abraddin reminds Osman that he has seen only the “unfavourable” side of Gullandicum, “and even this would disappear,” he says, were Bruin merely able “to get full possession of his countinghouse; for he is by nature, hospitable, generous, and humane, as well as courageous” (80). The second half of The Excursion of Osman strikes off in a distinctly different direction as Osman travels west to Novolonia, or North America, to rescue his beloved Sylvia, the beautiful daughter of Bruin. Bruin had sent Sylvia to the evil Alaric, whom the key identifies as the oppressor of Isidorus and his daughters Euphemia and Flora, the Native Americans. Alaric is also the oppressor of Alla-moor, an “exquisitely beautiful and admirably proportioned” slave whom Osman discovers trapped in a dark cave amid “chains, and whips, and various instruments of torture” (84). From this point forward, the work shifts dramatically in tone from political allegory to sentimental romance. Osman rescues Alla-moor from her cruel tormenters by attacking and killing them and then listens to the story of her early life and misfortunes. In a series of chapters devoted to her own captivity narrative, Allamoor begins by describing her idyllic childhood in a distant valley meant to represent Africa. Alla-moor recounts meeting and falling in love with a prince of the mountains named “Oronoque,” a name that recalls the hero of Aphra Behn’s tragic antislavery narrative Oroonoko; or, The History of the Royal Slave (1688).17 In one episode the heroic Oronoque rescues the survivor of a foundered ship who is spotted


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struggling with the waves just off the shore. This stranger insinuates himself into the family’s affections and endears himself to Alla-moor’s sister Jessica despite Oronoque’s growing concerns about his character. Soon other ships appear in the harbor bearing more of the stranger’s countrymen, and Alla-moor and Jessica are awakened one night to find their home in flames around them. Their home is destroyed, their parents and a younger child are killed, and the two young women are taken aboard the ship. The author then describes in astonishing detail the brutal treatment the two sisters suffer at the hands of their captors. When Jessica shrinks from the captain’s advances, she is stripped naked and hung by the wrists on the ship’s deck, where she is forced to watch the crew members rape Alla-moor repeatedly. Afterward, Alla-moor states that “every cruelty, and indecency was practiced upon the poor girl,” resulting in a state of shock that leads to Jessica’s death (116). Alla-moor begs Osman not to “think meanly” of her for surviving her family and her honor; “no power could have induced me to do it,” she explains, “but the hope of once more seeing my muchloved and long-lamented Oronoque” (119). The Excursion of Osman concludes with Osman’s attack on Alaric, to whom Alla-moor had been sold by her captors. By killing Alaric, Osman also manages to rescue Bruin’s daughter Sylvia. Osman then discovers that Alaric had caught and tortured Oronoque to death when Oronoque attempted a rescue of Alla-moor. When they find Oronoque’s grave, Alla-moor dramatically snatches Osman’s dagger and plunges it into her breast. The story draws to a close with a sentimental poem written by Alla-moor to bid farewell to her native land and with a representation of the stone marking the shared grave of Alla-moor and her heroic lover. In a faint echo of the conclusion of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Sylvia entwines her arm in Osman’s, and he states that “with heavy hearts, we set out for the vallies of Abradore,” his home (144). The tale of Alla-moor is intriguing for the degree to which it represents the author’s nearly complete distraction from the complicated political allegory of the first half of the work. In the preface, the author writes of Alla-moor’s story that “in regard to the little tale at the end, it has nothing to recommend it, but plain truth” (xi). “As to its connexion with the political part of the business,” the author explains, “I can only say, that, to the disgrace of human nature—of the age we live in—of the country which commits—and of the government which tolerates them—Facts, of a similar nature, and equal in atrocity, happen every year” (xi). Ultimately, The Excursion of Osman rewards a reading today because it illustrates a truly unique literary experiment

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on the part of a reformer who, like many writers in the 1790s, wished to expose an extremely wide array of contemporary evils, from the oppressive abuses of the European class system, to the abuses of the Native Americans and the evils of slavery. “Some weak people,” the author asserts, “who conceit themselves that they have the honor and the interest of their country at heart,” believe that “the continuation of such enormities is, at least, derogatory to the one, if not inimical to the other” (xi). “But they do not stop here,” the author continues, “for, taking into consideration the many abuses, which are suffered to exist in the state for the benefit of a few unprincipled men, they have also ventured to assert, that there is some imperfection in this same Spanish Government, destructive of the constitution (if they have one) and of the country’s good; and that, to preserve the former, and ensure the latter, a little alteration would not be amiss; provided the few unprincipled men before-mentioned, could be prevailed upon to let it take place” (xi–xii). Rather than attack those “unprincipled men,” however, the author instead focuses his or her wrath on those who recognize the need for political change but who choose not to challenge the status quo. As in the work’s account of Bruin’s involvement in the American Revolution, the association of Spain with Great Britain in this particular attack is not a difficult one to make. Although generically disparate, the two distinctive sections of allegorical and sentimental romance in The Excursion of Osman are unified by the author’s passionate intention to expose the degree to which public opinion and a conservative devotion to the status quo in contemporary Europe had led directly to the extreme abuseof the lower classes in Europe and of the native peoples of other lands in Africa, America, and the West Indies.

Th o ma s N o rthmo re’s Godw i ni an Utopia Rather than focusing directly on the political and social abuses of the present day, Northmore would take a distinctly different approach in utilizing the romance by envisioning a highly idyllic, utopian world free from the corruption depicted by the author of The Excursion of Osman. While works of utopian literature appeared frequently in Britain throughout the eighteenth century, the genre reached a zenith in the 1790s, fueled by what many reformist thinkers saw as the realization of a utopian ideal in the early stages of the new French Republic.18 In his 1795 publication of the Memoirs of Planetes, however, Northmore would take the unique approach of envisioning a utopia specifically founded on the philosophical tenets of Godwin and those


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of his circle in the early 1790s.19 In his preface to the work, Northmore allows that despite his own partiality for the ideal form of government he outlines in the Memoirs of Planetes, “philosophy has yet much to do to prepare the minds of men to receive it” (v). “The great mass of vice and misery which pervade the lower classes of people throughout most of the countries of Europe,” he continues, with a reference to recent events in France, “must without doubt be diminished before any change of government can be so introduced as not to bring with it the evils of tumult and massacre” (vi). For Northmore, “every true Briton, every real friend of his country, must be anxious for such a reformation in the commons house of parliament as will restore to the people their just weight and power in the constitution” (vi). Northmore grounds his endeavor in Godwin’s political philosophy from the very beginning, quoting the final paragraph of Political Justice: “‘It is a well-known principle of morality, says Mr. Godwin, that he who proposes perfection to himself, though he will inevitably fall short of what he pursues, will make a more rapid progress than he who is contented to aim only at what is imperfect’” (vii).20 Northmore concludes his preface by writing that “it is unknown to how great a degree of happiness mankind may approximate, when the exactions and oppressions under which they now labour are pruned away, and when governors have no temptation to consult their own interest in preference to that of the governed” (viii). Northmore thus foregrounds the Godwinian conviction that humanity is perfectible, clearly one of the main convictions he wishes his reader to grasp. In addition to its foundation in Godwin’s philosophical principles, Northmore’s approach to the utopian novel draws heavily on earlier works in the genre, most obviously the Republic of Plato and More’s Utopia. Additionally, the opening passages are closely patterned after Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.21 Like Gulliver, Northmore’s “Planetes,” whose name is derived from the Greek word for “wanderer,” details the history of a disastrous voyage in the Pacific. Stressed by repeated squalls and struggles navigating ice floes near the Cape of Good Hope, Planetes’s grumbling crew finally mutinies and abandons him and his crewmate Lawrence when the two leave the ship to explore a small uncharted island. Thus Planetes, like Gulliver, leaves a situation in which the struggle for power and control presents a microcosm of the larger evils implicit in his native world. From this experience Planetes affirms that he has learned a valuable lesson. “The complaints of the lower classes of people should always be listened to at their outset,” he writes (4). “If I had . . . permitted them to depute one of their number

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to lay their grievances before me, I should have been adored as their friend and benefactor” (4). Northmore does not waste an opportunity for further social criticism. Planetes and Lawrence assume that the mutiny was caused by the rascal Jack Ratlin, a recently escaped convict. “Our gaols,” Lawrence laments, “instead of being seminaries of repentance for the past, and amendment for the future, generally dismiss their wretched inhabitants in a tenfold degree more depraved than they found them” (5–6). In true Godwinian style, Northmore provides a footnote directing interested readers to George Dyer’s The Complaints of the Poor (1793) for more on this particular topic. When Planetes and Lawrence explore the island, they discover a simple native family who exhibit the best qualities of the Rousseauvian noble savage, and through this family they are introduced to a group of white traders from the land of Makar who regularly visit the island. Planetes and Lawrence accept an invitation to visit Makar, its name derived from a Greek word meaning “blessed” and perhaps inspired by More’s “Macarians,” who live near Utopia and who are ruled by a king who values the wealth of his people more than his own.22 Before their voyage, Planetes dreams that he is in a rich, exotic garden and that he is collecting roots and seeds to transplant once he returns home. He is surprised to find that the most brilliant flower in the garden is surrounded with “innumerable thistles that seem to have been set by the hand of art” (26). Thus Northmore foreshadows what Planetes will find as he confronts a society that is radically different from his own. Like Gulliver, Planetes describes his efforts to learn the language of the Makarians so that he can communicate with them and study their culture. Indeed, the access of language plays an integral role in Northmore’s reformist vision. Planetes is delighted to learn that all nations who trade with the Makarians raise their children to speak the Makarian tongue as well as their own. “We are always complaining of the want of an universal medium,” Planetes remarks of his fellow “tardy Europeans,” “but have not spirit enough to put it into execution” (39). Planetes later discovers that the establishment of a universal language is mandated in the Makarian constitution, a fact that signifies the country’s dedication to the equal status of all cultures and peoples. Planetes is quickly astonished by the achievements of the Makarians. He finds it a place where all are happy and where there is an “almost total extinction of poverty, beggary, and vice” (35). The Makarians have a lenient penal code and no death penalty, education is available to all citizens, and clothing and provisions are accessible


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and affordable. Planetes vows to obtain as much knowledge as possible of “that government from which such innumerable blessings could be derived” (36). To gratify this wish, his host introduces him to Euthus, a name that in Greek means “straightforward,” “direct,” and “honest.” The remainder of the Memoirs is comprised of a dialogue between Planetes and Euthus on the characteristics of modern England in contrast to the innovative developments of Makar. From his first introduction Euthus proves to be another mouthpiece of Godwinian political philosophy. When Planetes worries about describing his own culture to Euthus, the old man assures him to have no fear, that progress is a gradual process and that “nothing is stable that does not approach gradually to its consummation” (43). The purpose before them both, Euthus explains, is “to glean the virtues” of all governmental systems “and by applying them to our own country, endeavour thereby to remedy its defects and increase its welfare” (44). As Gulliver describes England’s history and government to his Houyhnhnm host, so Planetes launches into a lengthy disquisition on English culture, beginning with a detailed account of the history of the monarchy, which he concludes with a cryptic remark on George III, “the great patriot who now fills the throne” (47). Planetes speaks of his pride in the benevolence of the British and sarcastically describes one aspect of Prime Minister William Pitt’s contemporary approach to foreign policy by referring to England’s “patriotic donations” to its allies Poland and Prussia (47). He attributes these donations to the “eminent trait of benevolence, and high sense of honour that pervade all ranks of British subjects” and explains that “we voluntarily paid kings for defending their own dominions, that we had thereby incurred immense debt that we should never be enabled to discharge, and that nations borrowed of us that had no idea of refunding” (47). Planetes includes a comment on the “just and necessary war” in which England was then engaged with France, calling it “a war of reason against insanity, of virtue against vice, of religion against atheism” and heaping insult upon insult in a lengthy invective on France’s “complicated masses of deformity, depravity and sin” (47–48). Reading the Memoirs of Planetes alongside The Excursion of Osman, published only three years earlier, makes it clear just how dramatically English reformists’ initial support of the French revolutionaries was altered by their shock at the excesses of the Reign of Terror as of 1793 and afterward. Planetes next describes English law and government to Euthus, providing details on the nearly two hundred capital crimes on the

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English books as well as the growing problems concerning the lengthy duration of court cases. Planetes worries as he progresses into an explanation of the English constitution, which he knows stands “in need of reformation, and consequently in all probability was somewhat defective” (54). Not wishing to dwell on its defects, however, he describes the roles and functions of the king, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, leaving it to Euthus to detect any defects on his own. His pride in his homeland increasing as he continues, Planetes ends by stating proudly that each political party in England “has no other view in its debates and disputations than the good of its country” and by praising the supreme power of the English parliament, which is truly capable of everything “except making a man a woman, or a woman a man” (58). When Planetes concludes his paean to British culture, he is deeply offended to find Euthus unimpressed. Euthus believes it “morally impossible that a government consisting of three equal and distinct parts ever did, or ever can exist” (63) and deftly points out flaws in the system by which the lords are created and in the party politics of the House of Commons. As is common in utopian literature, the Memoirs of Planetes is constructed so that the features of the idealized civilization of Makar can be described in detail. Euthus begins the description of his country by explaining its history as a dominion of kings known as “Schums” and their evil advisers, the “Schumalahs,” who consistently embroiled the Makarians in wars with foreign enemies to distract their attention from domestic problems. Euthus describes the martyrdom of various political writers and explains his own early life as an outspoken reformist. In an episode that closely parallels the British treason trials of 1794 that involved Thomas Holcroft and other members of the Jacobin circle, Euthus is tried and imprisoned on the charge that he “did compass and imagine the death of my sovereign the Schum; and secondly, that I had levyed war against my sovereign the Schum in his realm, by an attempt by intimidation and violence to force the repeal of law” (77). A much mollified version of recent events in France follows in Euthus’s description of a bloodless revolution during which the Makarian monarchy is overthrown. Before forming a new government, the Makarians debate the merits of a limited monarchy and a representative republic before deciding to pursue the latter. In describing the people’s reasons for choosing a republic, Northmore cites Political Justice repeatedly in stating that war is incompatible with the nature of republics (85); that monarchies encourage individuals to develop their own interest in alignment with those in power (86–87); that a


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broad range of unbiased representatives “certainly must have better information to proceed upon than a prejudiced and interested ministry” (88); and, perhaps most importantly, that a republic would foster the perfectibility of the society, would encourage men to learn to love truth, and would teach them “to know and value themselves” as well as their country (90). As Godwin would have had it, the Makarians draft a constitution for their new republic that recognizes that “all governments were more or less usurpations upon the rights and liberties of mankind,” and one that demands its own regular review and reformation, so that obsolete laws and regulations can be periodically removed as Makar continues to become a more perfect state (91–92). Such an emphasis on the gradual removal of law from the ideal community also reflects the Socratic ideal of the “just city” as being free from law altogether, as described in Book IV of Plato’s Republic. Euthus then describes the Makarian constitution in detail, including its foundation of rotating political leadership and its assurance of religious freedom, freedom of the press, access to education for all individuals, and the abolition of oaths, another Godwinian ideal. Moreover, the constitution prohibits capital punishment altogether. As Godwin and Holcroft argued, Northmore agrees that the evil of capital punishment lies in the fact that it precludes the criminal’s opportunity to be reformed and thus denies society of any potential contributions he or she may make in the future. The Makarian constitution also abolishes laws of primogeniture and entail as institutions that engender poverty. Finally, to prevent adultery, it decrees that marriages may be “disunited by mutual consent of half a year’s continuance” (104), echoing Godwin’s infamous and controversial argument against marriage as the “most odious of all monopolies.”23 When Euthus takes Planetes into one of Makar’s cities to witness life there, Planetes learns more concerning the Makarian’s simple diets and lifestyles; their freedom from taxes, press-gangs, and all forms of cards and gaming; the absence of religious creeds, priests, and bishops; and the virtual absence of crime. “If any man were so unprincipled as to commit an act of injustice,” Euthus explains, “he would meet with a monitor in every person he saw” (115). Northmore once again cites a passage in Political Justice to support this claim.24 Because of their devotion to diminishing “accumulated property,” the Makarians are able to stay safely out of all wars, because “wars originate in the sway which the few have over the many by the influence of accumulated property over accumulated misery” (127). Although Northmore again cites Godwin on this topic, this aspect of his ideal society owes

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a great deal to More, whose Utopia was also able to diminish war and crime by dissolving the system of private property.25 Because all property in Utopia is communal and none of it, even individual houses, is considered private space, all citizens share an equal concern for the welfare of all.26 Planetes learns that Makar is “divided into thousands of small freeholds” and thus “supports millions” equally (112). Makar likewise bears a close resemblance to More’s Utopia in its abhorrence of capital punishment, its peaceful approach to foreign affairs, and its freedom of religion. The Makarians, like the Utopians, also have access to universal education—available to both men and women.27 Finally, unencumbered by a hierarchy of social class, all enjoy a simple laboring lifestyle. At the end of the Memoirs, Lawrence chooses to marry and stay in the paradise of Makar, while Planetes commits himself to return home to share what he has learned with his fellow Englishmen. He laments his task, however, worrying that “I shall be branded with the titles of visionary, and theorist, a disturber of the public peace, a Jacobin, a democrat, and I know not what; perhaps I may be sent to a lunatic hospital, and ranked among the incurables” (128). Despite its many parallels to Gulliver’s Travels, Memoirs of Planetes rarely shares Swift’s dark sarcasm. Rather, Northmore’s work is an enthusiastic early response to the basic arguments of Godwin’s Political Justice. The work was clearly composed in the earnest belief that society might be improved by a literary vision of a more perfect world founded upon a blending of principles derived from Godwin, More, and Plato. Northmore’s passion for reform and his particular bent as a scientist are also revealed in his frequent tangents involving a miscellany of scientific and technological developments that he wishes to present before the public. At various points in the Memoirs, he breaks from his narrative to promote personal hobbyhorses, including proposals for the use of shorter and lighter masts on ships, for an improved system of transporting stock by smaller barges, and even for renaming the muscles and bones of the body, since most of the population is inhibited, he argues, by unnecessarily complicated Greek and Latin anatomical terminology.28 Both quirky and profoundly hopeful, Memoirs of Planetes is the work of an optimist who clearly saw the romance as a means of promoting dramatic social and cultural progress by making the fabulous seem feasible.


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The Refor mist Novel and th e P ro mise o f New Wor lds Although the Memoirs of Planetes is distinctive for its particular relationship to English Jacobin politics, it was nevertheless accompanied by a host of other utopian pamphlets and tracts throughout the 1790s.29 The anonymously authored A True and Faithful Account of the Island of Veritas, for example, appeared in 1790. Published under the pseudonym of “Jasper Richardson,” this work includes a special focus on the religious opinions and liturgical practices of the “Veritasians.” In 1793 a peculiar text entitled A Voyage to the Moon Strongly Recommended to All Lovers of Real Freedom, by Aratus appeared, in which the narrator describes his journey in a hot air balloon to an island community of snakes on the moon known as “Barsilia.”30 William Hodgson published his projection of the ideal state in his Commonwealth of Reason in 1795, and in 1798 the anonymously authored Human Vicissitudes; or, Travels into Unexplored Regions detailed the narrator’s journey to and experiences in the land of “Afganjen.” In 1802 John Lithgow published in Philadelphia his description of the idyllic “Lithconia” in Equality—A Political Romance. Some authors deliberately linked their works to earlier traditions by picking up where their predecessors had left off. Ellis Cornelia Knight, for example, published the critically praised Dinarbas; A Tale: Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia in 1790. In 1796 another sequel appeared under the title Modern Gulliver’s Travels. Lilliput: Being a New Journey to that Celebrated Island and under the authorship of none other than “Lemuel Gulliver, Jun.”31 A highly satirical attack on the state of contemporary Europe rather than a vision of a more perfect civilization, this work includes a mocking portrait of Burke in the character of “Pekrub,” much as the author of A Voyage to the Moon parodies Burke in the character of “Edmuldus Barkwell,” a snake and a literary hack who will write in favor of any cause.32 These works exhibit an exceptionally wide range of particular political interests and concerns; and, as Gregory Claeys has pointed out, they exhibit the truth of the fact that “the utopian form masks far more extreme proposals for social and political change than most of those espoused in mainstream literature.”33 The romance thus proved to be the perfect genre for imaginative revisionings of human societies. Claeys has enumerated important factors that underlie most utopian works in the late eighteenth century, including the growing trends in travel writing, increasing interest in scientific and technological developments, mounting anxieties about political corruption and growing

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rates of poverty and social dislocation, the increasing popularity of the idea of social progress, and the promise of political reform, which culminated with the outbreak of the French Revolution. Claeys cites two strains of Enlightenment utopianism: satirical attacks on contemporary political corruption in the mode of Gulliver’s Travels, as in Modern Gulliver’s Travels, and the “individualist” fantasy of a new society established in a return to nature and in isolation from the rest of the world, patterned on the example of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, as in Memoirs of Planetes.34 Claeys also points out the degree to which eighteenth-century utopian works tend to move beyond issues of party politics to imagine reform in terms of the rights of women, colonized peoples, and slaves; universal suffrage; religious toleration; capital punishment; education; animal rights and vegetarianism; and the excesses of widespread gambling, prostitution, and other controversial “public amusements.”35 In the wake of so many explicitly utopian romances, a number of reformist novelists in the 1790s began to borrow and incorporate elements of the genre, most commonly in depicting idyllic American settings that invite comparisons to contemporary Britain. What links most of the alternative worlds these novelists imagine is an emphasis on the absence of a traditional class hierarchy and a creative approach to a more equitable distribution of personal property. The anonymously authored Henry Willoughby (1798), for example, a first-person picaresque narrative influenced by both Godwin’s and Holcroft’s novels, experiments with utopian conventions in its closing chapters. Like many reformist novelists of the day, the author of Henry Willoughby initially begins by illustrating in detail the abuses of contemporary Britain. As George Walker had split a Caleb Williams–inspired narrative of escape and pursuit into two tales of adventure and survival in Theodore Cyphon, the author of Henry Willoughby replicates this model three times.36 The main narrator, Henry, describes his efforts to escape the horrors of life as a sailor after being captured by a pressgang and his later attempts to earn a living in a corrupt London. In addition, Henry’s benefactor Launcey recounts a life story that closely parallels that of both Caleb Williams and Theodore Cyphon: when he is disowned by his irrational father, Launcey is hounded by his father and brothers, who blast his name by spreading false tales of his involvement in criminal activities. Ultimately Launcey transforms himself into a philanthropist whose visits to the poor in the London prisons led a reviewer to associate him with John Howard, reformist author of The State of the Prisons (1777).37 Finally, Henry’s friend Mark Monthermer narrates a tale that, like Henry’s, includes


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his subjection to a press-gang and an ultimate escape to the idyllic Quaker community of “Anachoropolis,” located two miles from the Mississippi River and nine miles from the Falls of St. Anthony, a possible reference to the falls of the same name located in modern Minneapolis, Minnesota. In his constant quest to make an honest living without money and without a character reference, the orphaned Henry’s tale includes a critique of the professions that closely parallels that of Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor, the final volumes of which had been published the year before in 1797. Henry begins his career as a secretary to his parson uncle, which, as in the case of Hugh Trevor, allows the author to satirize the hypocrisy of church politics. Henry’s dour uncle is unremitting in his drive to collect tithes on the produce of all of his parishioners, leading to a maniacal law suit against a farmer who refuses to pay a tithe on turnips and potatoes. One of the novel’s most comic scenes unfolds when the parson is accused by his archdeacon of laxity in his duty to attend to the funerals of his parishioners. A physical brawl ensues in which one lobs his copy of “Bedford’s Scripture Chronology” and “Gill’s Exposition of the Bible” at the other, only to be assaulted in return with “Kennicot’s Hebrew Bible” and “Cruden’s Concordance,” a delightful send-up of the prolixity of contemporary religious commentaries.38 After his uncle’s death, Henry is employed as clerk in the pawnbroker’s shop of Mr. Nehemia Lamesly, who buys stolen goods from criminals and marks them up for quick sale to settlers in the colonies, offering the sort of attack on the commercial world of contemporary London that Holcroft would later pursue in Memoirs of Bryan Perdue. Henry’s life is turned upside down when Mrs. Lamesly attempts to seduce him, and, when rebuffed, she angrily calls a press-gang to abduct the boy. Henry’s description of this experience follows Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) as it offers a rare look at the reality of what impressed sailors endured.39 In describing the hold of the tender on which he is taken to await his assignment to a man-of-war, for example, Henry states that “poets have long ransacked their stores of invention to paint the condition and sufferings of the damned; yet, I am of opinion, had they ever visited an English tender’s hold, their descriptions would have been more terrific, more truly diabolical” (I:134). Henry likewise describes his quarters on a man-of-war commanded by the oppressive Captain Neptune Namur, whose insistence on keeping all the portholes secured at night deprives the sailors of sufficient air and subjects them to intense heat and to the ravages of mosquitoes, ultimately causing the deaths of nearly a third

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of the crew. After a period of illness contracted in Jamaica, Henry escapes his hospital room in the suspenseful style of Caleb Williams’s prison breaks, and he returns to England, finished with the nautical profession, “to which,” he says, “the boisterous element of the ocean is the very least objection, and when compared with the other evils that attend it, scarcely even in any degree to be accounted an objection” (I:204).40 Back in London, Henry finds it nearly impossible to find employment. “Poverty in civilized countries,” he explains, “is treated as a crime of the blackest die, inexpiable by a life spent in integrity and virtue, to be atoned for by no excellencies or endowments, and against which wealth and power wage eternal hostilities and persecutions with unrelenting hate” (I:212–13). For a short time Henry takes on a position as servant to the Creole Hector McFraser, and when McFraser loses his fortune, the two reside together and struggle to make ends meet by writing and publishing essays and stories in the popular magazines, learning from the counsel of one editor that only stock characters embroiled in stock plots of “scandal and romance” are what will sell nowadays (I:262).41 In London Henry continues to be beset by a host of misfortunes; he is accused of counterfeiting coins, victimized by a villainous landlord, and injured in a violent street brawl before deciding to leave England once and for all. Just before Henry embarks upon a ship bound for France, he meets his old friend Mark Monthermer, who convinces him to join him on a journey to a new life in Anachoropolis, or the “town of retirement” (II:226). Mark narrates a recent history that indicates that he too has been scarred by the corruption of modern British culture. Like Henry, he escapes from Namur’s man-of-war in Jamaica, and what he witnesses of life in the West Indies offers the reader an indelible view of another side of the abuses of modern British culture. When he is overcome by a fever, Mark is rescued by a generous old slave woman named Galla, who gives him her meager allotment of food and nurses him in her hut through a ten-day illness. Mark later protects Galla when her master beats her for helping him, and he attacks and beats the master in turn. “It is a maxim with a very considerable portion of mankind,” Mark pronounces, “to despise the children of adversity, and admire the offspring of prosperity. By this axiom all their opinions are regulated. The fiat which decrees the inequality of mankind is confirmed by its doctrine, and its mandates have legislated slavery for one half the inhabitants of the globe!” (II:208).42 In a rather unlikely scene in which Mark escorts the master he has beaten back to his plantation house, Mark lectures him at length on the reasons


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why slave masters are far more degraded than the slaves they abuse. The knowledge of the misery that the slave master imposes upon his slaves, Mark argues, “must secretly corrode his happiness, and blast the enjoyment of his wealth and power” (II:208). The author of Henry Willoughby concludes the novel by allowing these two damaged victims of contemporary British culture to escape the vice of Britain for the promise of a new life in the New World. The tone of the work thus shifts dramatically from confessional narrative to utopian romance in its final four chapters as Mark describes life in Anachoropolis. Mark’s depiction of this ideal community draws on elements common to a number of utopian worlds described in works of the late eighteenth century, perhaps most notably in the fact that the community has no private property, and all land and resources are shared communally. In addition, as in More’s Utopia and Northmore’s Makar, while superstition is unknown, any and all religious practices are accepted, and crime in the community is virtually nonexistent. There is not, in fact, any gradation of crimes or offenses in Anachoropolis. In contrast to the extremely complicated system of English law, all offenses in this community are simply labeled as “dishonesty” (II:242). Due to the richness of the local soil, the inhabitants of Anachoropolis are almost entirely vegetarian, and they enjoy a quality of local tea that is better even than “the monopolized plant of China” (II:228). The flavor of the early American tall tale is present in Mark’s claim that the soil is so rich that farmers need only work for one hour a day and thus have twenty-three hours left over for rest and recreation. In keeping with the novel’s devotion to abolition, the Anachoropolites use maple syrup as a sweetener and find it far preferable to the sugar obtained from slave labor. The community does not engage in trade and commerce, and while athletics are encouraged, there are no games of chance. Mark also describes ways in which the Anachoropolites have learned to heighten each of their senses by practice and concentration; like the Native Americans, they have learned this skill by observing the wildlife of North America. The most detailed section in Mark’s description of Anachoropolis is that in which he explains the community’s system of education, which is divided into five periods, the first four of which are devoted to particular stages in the life of a child and are clearly based on the stages of development espoused by Rousseau in Émile (1762). The fifth stage begins at age nineteen and lasts for the rest of an individual’s life. Each member of the community is expected to continue to be an active learner throughout his or her life and to use his or her

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learning and experience for the good of the community as a whole. When Mark becomes a teacher to the local children, he teaches them about his life before emigrating to the American West. He describes to Henry how these children “shudder at the vices of the civilized portion of the globe” (II:274). Clearly the fundamental principles upon which Anachoropolis is founded are closely aligned to those of the Society of Friends, particularly in the value the community places on individual equality and responsibility, individual interpretations of religious beliefs, and peace, education, and simple living. The Quakers’ emphasis on simplicity also parallels other utopian works of the period in which materialism and luxury are identified as major factors leading to social and political corruption.43 Henry Willoughby’s marriage of the novel and the romance was not greeted entirely as a success by contemporary critics, several of whom objected to the novel’s social criticism and its optimistic view of emigration. For example, Christopher Lake Moody, the reviewer in the Monthly Review, criticizes the author’s dark picture of contemporary society, writing that “he sees the world through the most gloomy optics, and finds in civil society nothing but vice and misery” (233). Moody points out that “the Devil . . . is often painted blacker than he really is” and that “there are many vices and evils to cure among us; yet not enough to make it necessary, in order to the enjoyment of happiness, that we should abandon our country for the deserts and savannahs of America” (233). Of the reformist objective behind Henry Willoughby, Moody complains that “novels have lately been the vehicles of certain speculative principles, in which these are artfully exhibited as established truths, essential to the improvement and happiness of man; and human nature in her present state is blackened beyond reality, in order to give them effect. We protest against this as an unfair proceeding; and no system can be good that wants such aid” (233).44 The American wilderness also provides the setting of a new utopia in Imlay’s The Emigrants. Like such writers as Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft who experimented with the novel after publishing nonfiction political works, Imlay published The Emigrants a year after the appearance of his widely read travel narrative, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792). Both Imlay’s Topographical Description and his novel were intended to promote emigration. In the preface to his novel, Imlay makes it clear that his depiction of the American West is based on facts. “I was only induced to give the work in the style of a novel,” he writes, “from believing it would prove more acceptable to the generality of readers”


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(1). “Perhaps [the novel] is the most effectual way of communicating moral instruction,” Imlay continues, “for when the vices and follies of the world are held up to us, so connectedly with incidents which are interesting, it is most likely they will leave a more lasting impression than when given in a dull narrative” (1). Imlay’s stated object is to ask his British readers to reconsider their claim of being “the only country upon the earth where the advantages of freedom have been properly ascertained,” and “to place a mirror to their view, that they may behold the decay of those features, which once were so lovely” (2–3). In Imlay’s novel, the emigrant “Mr. Il—ray” travels back to Europe from America and, like the child of nature figures discussed in Chapter 1, is shocked by the flattery and deception that has become commonplace in European culture, so much so that “to be open and candid is considered as a violation of good manners” (221). Building on Rousseau’s criticism of modern culture and paralleling the emphasis Godwin would place in Political Justice on the importance of sincerity in all human relations, Mr. Il—ray complains that “while candour has been considered as rudeness, and honesty as dullness, insincerity has laid the foundation of a general depravity” (222). For Il—ray, Europe’s accumulation of “artificial wants” and “a general commercial spirit” have bred degeneracy “through all orders of society” (223). Moreover, “the accumulation of laws and multifarious distinctions” has managed to “bewilder the understanding of the most learned,” causing the honest citizen to become “the prey of the licentious villain and wealthy miser” alike (252–53). The solution Imlay offers is an escape from the degeneracy of European culture to a simpler life in the American wilderness west of the Alleghenies, in the Ohio River Valley.45 Here Imlay’s characters Captain James Arl—ton and his wife, Caroline, work to establish “a system conformable to reason and humanity,” and one that would “extend the blessings of civilization to all orders of men” (233). In Arl—ton’s model society, which he names “Bellefont,” land will be parceled out in equal shares to be governed by a representative body that will meet every Sunday to discuss “agriculture and all useful arts” and “the science of government and jurisprudence” (233). For Imlay, “small societies of this kind established throughout a great community would help to soften the manners of the vulgar, correct their idle and vicious habits—extend their knowledge—ameliorate their judgment—and afford an opportunity to every genius or man of sense of becoming useful to his country” (235).46

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One of the virtues Imlay most strongly promotes in his depiction of the New World is the reform of antiquated laws relating to marriage and divorce.47 The Emigrants includes three subplots designed specifically to illustrate worst-case scenarios of the mistreatment of English women at the hands of their husbands. In one scenario, the dissolute Mr. S— tricks Miss Laura R— into marrying him by making her believe that he has provided a great sum of money to relieve her father of his debts. When Mr. S— later drinks himself to death, his diary reveals not only this scheme but many others of his “maxims for tricking” (207). Second, Caroline Arl—ton’s uncle P. P—— narrates the sad tale of Lady Juliana B—, who struggles to contend with her husband’s increasing abuse of alcohol and the physical and sexual violence resulting from his bouts of intoxication. When P. P—— attempts to befriend Juliana, he quickly finds himself entrapped in Lord B—’s plot to divorce Lady Juliana. Trumping up charges of “crim. con,” or criminal conversation, Lord B— divorces Lady Juliana and sues P. P—— for adultery with his wife. Although Juliana and P. P—— are then free to marry, they must serve nine years in prison while Lord B—’s fortune is squandered by a new wife.48 In a third subplot, Caroline Arl—ton’s sister Eliza F—— experiences the worst scenario of spousal abuse when her libertine husband gambles away all their money and then proposes to sell his wife’s sexual favors as a means of clearing his debt, a parallel to the shocking situations of Charlotte Smith’s Geraldine Verney of Desmond and Wollstonecraft’s Maria Venables of The Wrongs of Woman. Imlay makes it perfectly clear how few options Eliza has for handling this dilemma. As the legal property of her husband, a woman was prohibited from suing for divorce under English law unless she could prove the impotence or debilitation of her husband, something no woman of modesty would be able to imagine attempting. Mr. F——’s eventual suicide ultimately frees Eliza from her degraded situation, however, and allows her to join her family in Kentucky. Although Imlay makes no particular gesture toward equal rights for women in imagining his idealized Bellefont, his emphasis on the reform of marriage and divorce law suggests some intriguing parallels to the works of Wollstonecraft and Godwin.49 Imlay’s depiction of America as the “land of freedom and love” (248) aligns his novel with two other contemporary reformist works, Robert Bage’s Hermsprong and Smith’s The Young Philosopher. Like Imlay’s Mr. Il—ray, the freethinking Hermsprong struggles with his life among the British because they appear to believe that “the only


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good principle of action is to do as others do,” and they characteristically “allow fashion to be often folly” (327). Hermsprong idealizes America’s fundamental toleration of religious diversity, which in his eyes has engendered a government that “embraces all sects, and persecutes none” (328). “Before you can set up an undisputed title to an amiable people,” he tells his English friends, “you must first learn to agree to differ” (327–28). Hermsprong dreams of establishing a “society of friends within a two mile ring” on sixty thousand acres of land he has purchased along the Potomac River. “In this, it is possible I may not reach the point I desire,” he allows, “but with common prudence, we cannot fail of plenty, and in time of affluence” (329). Like Elizabeth Inchbald’s Henry Norwynne of Nature and Art, Hermsprong recognizes that the simpler and nobler savages of the “uncivilized” world enjoy a much higher degree of happiness than do Europeans. Having been raised among Native Americans, he points out that these peoples live “unoppressed by labour or poverty” and unencumbered by the “disease” that causes the European to crave an endless variety of entertainments and “pleasurable sensations” (159). “You labour incessantly for happiness,” Hermsprong tells the English, “if you find it, it is well. But savages, like me, have no idea of the happiness of incessant labour” (210). Nancy Johnson has called Charles Hermsprong “a cheerful embodiment of property,” “sprung” from Hermes, the god of commerce, and “a celebration of [the] abundance” of the New World.50 Johnson effectively contrasts Hermsprong’s representation of the promise of America with the counterbalancing figure of the novel’s narrator, Gregory Glen, the disenfranchised illegitimate son of a squire and a country maiden and thus a “son of nobody” (58) who represents the worst effects of the British system of property in which such individuals are considered the “less-than-human property of others.”51 It is true that the revelation that Hermsprong is in fact a member of the British aristocracy at the novel’s close undercuts the force of Bage’s social critique; nevertheless, the idealized community that Hermsprong forms with his new wife and a circle of freethinking friends in England can be seen as a miniature utopia established within and in resistance to the society around them. Rather than to encourage his readers to flee Britain for the American wilderness, Bage clearly seeks to convince them that it is possible to live the life of an independent freethinker within one’s own country. In her final novel, The Young Philosopher, however, Smith would take a darker view of the feasibility of surviving as a freethinker in contemporary Britain.52 After a series of disastrous episodes of theft and

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abduction in which both strangers and family members attempt to take control over their property in Scotland, Smith’s characters Glenmorris and his wife, Laura, leave Britain to establish a new life for themselves as farmers in America. Explaining his distaste for British culture, Glenmorris defends this choice in words that recall Hermsprong’s description of the lives of the Native Americans: I do not love to be in a country where I am made to pay very dear for advantages which exist not but in idea. I do not love to live where I see a frightful contrast between luxury and wretchedness; where I must daily witness injustice I cannot repress, and misery I cannot relieve. In America, you say, I must abandon society, and starve my understanding. I deny it, however. The great book of nature is open before me, and poor must be his taste who cannot find in it a more noble study than that of sophisticated minds, which we call society here, where at every step we take something appears to shock or disgust us; where all greatness of character seems to be lost. (X:431)

“Can I love to live in such a country only because I drew my first breath in a remote corner of it?” Glenmorris asks his friends, affirming that “wherever a thinking man enjoys the most uninterrupted domestic felicity, and sees his species the most content, that is his country” (X:432).53 It is noteworthy that despite the fact that Glenmorris was first exposed to America when he was abducted and forced there by a band of privateers, he nevertheless has come to idealize America as an escape from the restraints of property that have tormented him and his family in Britain. To him, America represents a culture where hypocrisy and artifice can be avoided and where universal benevolence can be put into practice. As Glenmorris vows, articulating a purely Godwinian sentiment, “true philanthropy does not consist in loving John, and Thomas, and George, and James, . . . but in benevolence to the whole human race” (X:432). Despite their having established a new life in this idyllic vision of America, however, the Glenmorrises bring disaster upon themselves when they attempt to recover Laura’s inheritance from her estranged aristocratic parents for the sake of their daughter, Medora. As she had done in The Old Manor House, Smith focuses here on the ease with which the very wealthy can manipulate British inheritance laws to favor or punish a particular child. The Glenmorrises’ return to England unleashes a chain of events that includes periods of great stress, deprivation, abduction, and incarceration. Medora is kidnapped and is nearly forced into an unwanted marriage, and Laura’s distress leads her


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mother to proclaim her delirious and to lock her up in a madhouse, illustrating once again Mary Robinson’s depiction of the “mind-mill” as a common resort for families wishing to dispose of an unwanted female relative. Finally, when Glenmorris attempts to come to the aid of his wife and daughter, he is arrested and imprisoned for debts. Of course, Smith liberates and reunites the Glenmorris family by the end of the novel. Nevertheless, the damage of their experiences is made perfectly clear. Laura’s fear for her daughter’s safety and her own experience of captivity leave her spirit broken and her mind disordered, and the reader is left merely with the hope that time and rest will restore her to her former state of mental and physical health. Thus Smith closes her final novel with a profoundly dark picture of contemporary England. The fate of the Glenmorrises illustrates the difficulty that even the most independent freethinkers have in fully extricating themselves from the financial fetters of British culture. Smith’s reader comes to recognize, along with the Glenmorrises, that to demand justice in Britain in a case involving the distribution of wealth and property is to court danger and potential disaster. For the Glenmorrises, the only chance of a happy future lies in the New World—in an America that Smith depicts as yet untainted by the greed and corruption of British culture. As the novel closes, Medora Glenmorris agrees to marry Smith’s “almost faultless” young philosopher, George Delmont (X:433), and the couple plans to join Medora’s parents in America, sharing their renewed objective to live out their lives in a small circle of like minds similar to the community Bage describes at the end of Hermsprong. As critics have suggested, The Young Philosopher marks a distinct shift in the progress of Smith’s political thinking over the course of the 1790s. By 1798, constantly changing political events in France and the ever more conservative reactions to those changes in Britain may have led her to regard emigration to the New World as a more viable option than reform.54 At the very least, the contrast she draws between a despoiled Britain and a highly idealized, utopian America must have made a profound impression on her readers. Certainly several reviewers took umbrage at the suggestion that the best way to cope with contemporary Britain was to leave it. A reviewer in the Antijacobin Review and Magazine complains of Smith that “she continues to abuse England” in this novel “and attempts to prove, as she cannot now say much for the happiness of France, that the only place of comfortable abode is America.”55 Similarly, a reviewer in the Critical Review singles out Glenmorris’s comments on America quoted above in objecting to Smith’s intrusion of her political philosophy into the novel.56

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April London has explained that utopian works “concentrate initially on subjective responses to social iniquities” and finally “plot the ultimate acceptance of the ideal order as a conversion experience with which individual readers are encouraged to identify.”57 The participation of the reader in such a conversion experience is integral to the objectives of the genre, and the same can be said for a great variety of the political fiction published in Britain in the 1790s. Beneath the social criticism of such romances as The Excursion of Osman and Memoirs of Planetes and beneath the utopianism of such novels as Henry Willoughby and The Young Philosopher lies a profound optimism—a faith in the ability of the individual reader to recognize what is corrupt in contemporary society and to envision a culture that is free from such corruption. The authors of these romances and novels joined other reformists of the 1790s in blending the utile with the dulci in the hope of opening their readers’ eyes to a new understanding of the problems of the modern world and of giving them a renewed faith in the potential of social and political reform.

Notes

I ntro ducti on 1. Carl B. Cone, The English Jacobins: Reformers in Late 18th Century England (New York: Scribner’s, 1968), iii. For two comprehensive definitions of the origin and implications of the terms “Jacobin” and “Jacobinism” in the 1790s, see H. T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 1–24; and Michael Scrivener, Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001), 21–30. 2. Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 1–8. See also Nancy Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the Law: Critiquing the Contract (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 5–8. 3. Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, 25–27. 4. Cone, The English Jacobins, v. 5. Robert Bage, Man As He Is, ed. Ronald Paulson (New York and London: Garland, 1979), I:i. 6. William Godwin, preface to the “Standard Novels” edition of Fleetwood (London: Richard Bentley, 1832); reprinted in Caleb Williams, ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001), 448. 7. See Kelly, English Jacobin Novel, and “Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790s,” in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 285–306; and Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). 8. Kelly, English Jacobin Novel, 7; see also Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 33. 9. Kelly, English Jacobin Novel, 14–17, 118. Patricia Meyer Spacks develops some of these characteristics in “Novels of the 1790s: Action and Impasse,” in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 264–65. In “Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790s,” Kelly also describes these novelists’ shared interest in exploring the experience of the individual as a representative of humanity and in illustrating how the human character is formed

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10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

Notes by external circumstances, by one’s domestic experience, and by reading and education (286–88). Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 55. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 55. “Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790s,” 291–92. Butler goes so far as to say that the strongest influence on English intellectual life during this period was not the French Revolution, “but the rise to a far greater share of economic, social, and political influence” of the English middle class. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 45. Claudia Johnson warns against the misleading aspects of the categories of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin in Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xxi. Pamela Clemit, ed. Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), V:139. Godwin’s account of the composition of Caleb Williams published as the Preface to the “Standard Novels” edition of Fleetwood (London: Richard Bentley, 1832); reprinted in Caleb Williams, 447. As Scrivener has written, “a major thrust of Jacobin culture was popularization, making texts wholely or partly accessible to a popular audience that ordinarily would never read such things because of their constrained opportunities for learning.” Seditious Allegories, 12. Caleb Williams, 55. British Critic 6 (July 1795): 94; reprinted in Caleb Williams, 451. Ibid., 451. Preface to Memoirs of Bryan Perdue, ed. A. A. Markley, The Novels and Selected Plays of Thomas Holcroft, gen. ed. W. M. Verhoeven (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), IV:4. Review of The Castle of St. Vallery, an Ancient Story, Monthly Review, ns 9 (November 1792): 337. Memoirs of Emma Courtney, ed. Marilyn L. Brooks (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000), 36; quoted by Spacks, “Novels of the 1790s,” 248. Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), 33–34. Ibid., 34. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 32. “Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790s,” 287. April London argues a similar point in Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 156. English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789–1830 (London: Longman, 1988), 28. Kelly, “Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790s,” 298. The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (1932; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 311. Kelly has noted that elements of

Notes

30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

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the Jacobins’ social criticism can be seen in the works of a wide range of novelists of the period, and he lists Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, Charles Lamb, and Isaac D’Israeli as examples. English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 26. “Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790s,” 300. A Tale of the Times (1799; repr., New York and London: Garland, 1974), III:387–88; quoted by Eleanor Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 15, and Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 101. For a thorough assessment of Robinson’s contributions to radical politics of the 1790s, see Adriana Craciun, ed., British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 60–94. See The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 33–34, 40–41, 48, 121–22, 221n36; and Grenby’s bibliography of Anti-Jacobin Novels and Tales, 243–46. To his credit, Grenby does acknowledge the political complexity of these works. For Grenby’s fully developed discussion of The Banished Man in terms of liberal and conservative politics, see the introduction to his edition of the novel, The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. Stuart Curran (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), VII:xxviii–xxxiii. Hubert de Sevrac, A Romance, of the Eighteenth Century (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1796), III, 316. The Anti-Jacobin Novel, 89. Grenby’s categories and lists of both Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novels are found in “Politicised Fiction in Britain 1790– 1810: An Annotated Checklist,” The European English Messenger 9, no. 2 (Autumn 2000): 51. Roxanne Eberle provides an overview of the critical assessments that have labeled Opie’s novel as either conservative or progressive in “Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray: Diverting the Libertine Gaze; or, the Vindication of a Fallen Woman,” Studies in the Novel 26, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 124–26; reprinted in Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1792–1897: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 106–35. Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 29. Similarly, in “Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray,” Eberle reads the novel not as a critique of Wollstonecraft, but as a critique of the gendered assumptions that limit Godwinian political theory, 126–46. Dale Spender discusses Adeline’s marital status as the reason for her ostracism in Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Writers Before Jane Austen (London and New York: Pandora, 1986), 321–23. For Spender, Opie’s novel reveals her admiration of Wollstonecraft in her exploration of whether marriage is good or bad for women. On Mrs. Mowbray’s yielding to

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39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

Notes traditional notions of right and wrong despite her new philosophical principles, see Ty, Empowering the Feminine, 151. For other readings that validate Opie’s conflicted and complicated response to Wollstonecraft and Godwin and that move beyond simply labeling her as an antiJacobin, see Anjana Sharma, The Autobiography of Desire: English Jacobin Women Novelists of the 1790s (New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2004), 234–38; and Adriana Craciun, ed., British Women Writers and the French Revolution, 51–53. Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 29–30. Kelly interprets this aspect of the novel as the opportunity for readers to see a subversive “unofficial” text beneath the official one in “Amelia Opie, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Maria Edgeworth: Official and Unofficial Ideology,” ARIEL 12, no. 4 (October 1981): 8–11. See also Katharine Rogers, Feminism in EighteenthCentury England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 219; Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, 22–23; Eberle, “Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray,” 136–41; and Christine M. Cooper, “Reading Otherwise: The Abortive Politics of Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter,” European Romantic Review 12, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 27–28. See the introduction to Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 15; and Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the Law, 129–39. Tompkins calls Walker a reformist, albeit one who stopped well short of subscribing to Godwin’s notion of perfectibility. The Popular Novel in England, 321–22. Marilyn Butler interprets the differences between Theodore Cyphon and The Vagabond as evidence of a shift in Walker’s political values, based at least in part on Walker’s knowledge as a bookseller of the quickly growing market for anti-Jacobin fiction by the late 1790s. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 110–11. Following Butler, Grenby, in The Anti-Jacobin Novel, also provides a convincing argument that mercenary reasons explain this ostensible change in Walker’s objective in writing political fiction (200–201) and argues that in Theodore Cyphon Walker objects to the Jacobin tenet of reason over emotion (79). Walker, Preface to Theodore Cyphon: or, The Benevolent Jew (London: B. Crosby, 1796), I:vii. For readings of Belinda as the work of a conservative, see Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1992), 390–93; and Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 68, 115–19. Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 20–21. In reference to Belinda, Claudia Johnson similarly calls Edgeworth an author who is “not specifically reformist, but [who is] nevertheless skeptical of conservative ideology.” Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, 24. Mitzi Myers reads Edgeworth’s writings for girls as reformist works in “The Dilemmas of Gender as Double-Voiced Narrative; or, Maria Edgeworth Mothers the

Notes

45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

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Bildungsroman,” in The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert W. Uphaus (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues, 1988), 67–96. As Barker-Benfield has written, Wollstonecraft too wished to distinguish between “sensibility combined with reason, and the entirely ungoverned and emotional kind characterizing the fashionable, conventional rearing of females.” The Culture of Sensibility, 281. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 124. Butler attributes Edgeworth’s long popular and critical acceptance to “the safety of her tone” and a “literal, naturalistic treatment of the economic and social world” that seemed to encourage her reader “to accept the existing order of things,” 155, 157. “Amelia Opie, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Maria Edgeworth,” 20. In “Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790s,” Kelly calls Edgeworth a liberal writer who “attempted to formulate a compromise between gentry and middle-class ideologies,” 301. “Class, Gender, Nation, and Empire: Money and Merit in the Writing of the Edgeworths,” The Wordsworth Circle 25 (1994): 92–93. See also Kelly’s discussion of Edgeworth’s “comprehensive program of political, social, and cultural reform” in “Women Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelizing the Revolution/Revolutionizing the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6, no. 4 (July 1994): 382–83. See W. M. Verhoeven and Amanda Gilroy, introduction to The Emigrants (New York: Penguin, 1998), xxxi. See Kelly, English Jacobin Novel, 93. Kelly calls Jacobin fiction “a kind of trojan horse for social and political propaganda” and notes that the reformist novelists risked “being imprisoned in the belly of their vehicle” because the horse was “an engine of assault, not construction,” 112. The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 70. Jonathan Grossman develops this argument in The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) 37–61, building on Kenneth Graham’s discussion of Caleb as an embodiment of contemporary ideology and false opinions in “Narrative and Ideology in Caleb Williams,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2, no. 3 (1990): 225–28. Related arguments can be found in Gary Handwerk, “Historical Trauma: Political Theory and Novelistic Practice in William Godwin’s Fiction,” Comparative Criticism 16 (1994): 77–80; Spacks, “Novels of the 1790s,” 268–71, and Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 222–31; and Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 71–82. For varying interpretations of the novel’s two endings, see D. Gilbert Dumas, “Things As They Were: The Original Ending of Caleb Williams,” SEL 6 (1966): 584; Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 94; Butler, Jane

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54. 55.

56. 57.

Notes Austen and the War of Ideas, 67–68; C. R. Kropf, “Caleb Williams and the Attack on Romance,” Studies in the Novel 8 (1976): 85–86; Kelly, English Jacobin Novel, 184–98, and “‘Intellectual Physicks’: Necessity and the English Jacobin Novel,” Etudes Anglaises 31 (1978): 174–75; Kenneth Graham, “The Gothic Unity of Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” Papers on Language and Literature 20, no. 1 (1984): 47–59, and “Narrative Ideology in Caleb Williams,” 215–28; Mona Scheuermann, Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 165–7; Tilottama Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,” Studies in Romanticism 27 (1988): 240–51; Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 160; Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990), 74–75; Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 64–69; Gerard A. Barker, “The Narrative Mode of Caleb Williams: Problems and Resolutions,” Studies in the Novel 25 (1993): 8–12; Gary Handwerk, “Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams,” ELH 60 (1993): 939–60; Ian Balfour, “Promises, Promises: Social and Other Contracts in the English Jacobins (Godwin/Inchbald),” in New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice, ed. David Clark and Donald Goellnicht (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 237–38; Eric Daffron, “Magnetical Sympathy: Strategies of Power and Resistance in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” Criticism 37, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 213–32; Glynis Ridley, “Injustice in the Works of Godwin and Wollstonecraft,” in Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 79–82; David Collings, “The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason,” ELH 70 (2003): 856–63; and R. S. White, Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 106–9. William Godwin as Novelist (London: Athlone, 1981), 39. “Godwin’s Changing Conception of Caleb Williams,” SEL 12 (1972): 627. For Myers, Godwin’s “infrequent philosophic inconsistencies” in his struggle to represent the conflict between free will and necessity “suggest his awareness of the complexity of human motivation,” 628. “Narrative and Ideology in Caleb Williams,” 223. “Pursuing Conversations: Caleb Williams and the Romantic Construction of the Reader,” Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994): 599. Similarly, Gary Handwerk has written that Godwin “would ultimately have us read past the ending and take the apparent pessimism of the narratives themselves as a provocation rather than an endpoint.” “History, Trauma, and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination: William Godwin’s Historical

Notes

58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

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Fiction,” in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Reforming Literature 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 82. “Pursuing Conversations,” 599. See Kelly’s discussion of the ending of Hugh Trevor in English Jacobin Novel, 165–66; as well as Scheuermann, Social Protest, 138–41; London, Women and Property, 167–68; and Jones, Radical Sensibility, 77. For Pam Perkins, Hermsprong “is both too political simply to amuse and too intent on amusing to be whole-heartedly political.” “Playfulness of the Pen: Bage and the Politics of Comedy,” Journal of Narrative Technique 26, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 43. Perkins argues that Bage might be suggesting “that despite the assumptions of his fellow jacobins the untidy complexities of political ideology cannot be satisfactorily resolved within the necessarily formulaic discourse of fiction,” 44. Scheuermann similarly criticizes the novel’s ending in Social Protest, 226–27. For assessments of Bage’s achievement despite the ending, see Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 75–87; Spacks, “Novels of the 1790s,” 257, and Novel Beginnings, 238–41; and Nancy Johnson, “‘Seated on Her Bags of Dollars’: Representations of America in the English Jacobin Novel,” The Dalhousie Review 82, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 423–39. Ty makes this comparison in Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 112–14. Elizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art, ed. Shawn Lisa Maurer (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005), 153. Scheuermann sees the ending of Nature and Art as “a failure not only of social but of artistic vision” in Social Protest, 200; and Shawn Lisa Maurer criticizes it as unrealistic in “Masculinity and Morality in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art,” in Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, ed. Linda LangPeralta (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 171–73. For defenses of Inchbald’s conclusion, see Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 112–14; and Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the Law, 83–84, 93, although Johnson agrees with Kelly that the conclusion suggests a modification in Inchbald’s radicalism by 1796 (English Jacobin Novel, 113). Eberle discusses this unconventional female family in “Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray,” 145–46. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman: Or, Maria, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto; New York: New York University Press, 1989), I:184. Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 95–96. Novel Beginnings, 253. Ibid., 231. Ibid., 253. Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice, ed. Eleanor Ty (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1994), 174.

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70. For an insightful discussion of Hays’s use of emotional experiences from her own life to shape the life of her reader, see Tilottama Rajan, “Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney,” Studies in Romanticism 32, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 149–76; reprinted in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 213–39. 71. Anna St Ives, in The Novels and Selected Plays of Thomas Holcroft, ed. W. M. Verhoeven (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), II:419. 72. Novel Beginnings, 234. 73. The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, in The Novels and Selected Plays of Thomas Holcroft, ed. W. M. Verhoeven (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), III:433. 74. Women and Property, 166. John Thelwall includes a similar conversion in The Daughter of Adoption, transforming the evil West Indian planter Lucius Moroon from a rake into a Moravian minister driven to work as a Christian missionary to the slaves. For two deathbed conversions of antagonists in reformist novels, see Lord Grondale of Bage’s Hermsprong and Morley of Robinson’s The Natural Daughter. 75. On the reformations of Lady Delacour and Clarence Hervey, see Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 41–44. 76. For a discussion of these novels as forerunners of political fiction in the nineteenth century, see Scheuermann, Social Protest, 7, 231–41. Of course, other subgenres of the novel also contributed to this development. Markman Ellis argues that the eighteenth-century novel of sensibility became a critical site for political debate in The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). In addition, Grenby has analyzed the contributions of the anti-Jacobin novel to the development of political fiction in The Anti-Jacobin Novel.

Chapter 1 1. In Grandison’s Heirs: The Paragon’s Progress in the Late Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), Gerard A. Barker argues for the influence of Charles Grandison on a variety of heroes in late eighteenth-century fiction, including Orlando Faulkland of Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), Burney’s Lord Orville of Evelina (1778), Inchbald’s Dorriforth/Elmwood of A Simple Story, Holcroft’s Frank Henley of Anna St Ives, Godwin’s Falkland of Caleb Williams, and Austen’s Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice (1813). 2. See Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in

Notes

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

189

the 1790s (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); and Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For other discussions of the history and philosophical significance of sensibility and the degree to which it became a hotly contested concept by the end of the century see R. S. Crane, “Suggestions toward a Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling,’” ELH 1, no. 3 (December 1934): 205–30, reprinted in The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical and Historical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), I:188–213; R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan and New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 7–28; Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986); John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 1–56; Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 114–46; Chris Jones, “Radical Sensibility in the 1790s,” in Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism, ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 68–82; Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800 (London: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 154–86; Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1–45; R. S. White, Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005), 41–76; and Patricia Meyer Spacks, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 127–59. Jones, Radical Sensibility, 2. Similarly, Janet Todd has described the novel of sensibility as “a course in the development of emotional response.” Sensibility, 93. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), II:258; quoted in Todd, Sensibility, 77. Letter 218, To Mrs. William James, 12 November 1767, Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. L. P. Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 401; cited by Todd, Sensibility, 91. Radical Sensibility, 183. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 225. For Barker-Benfield’s discussion of the reformation of male manners, see especially chapters 2 and 5. Barker-Benfield in The Culture of Sensibility discusses the way this aspect of sentimental fiction is illustrated in Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, Holcroft’s Anna St Ives, Inchbald’s A Simple Story, and Edgeworth’s

190

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

Notes Belinda (250–58). He also examines Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on the potential of the role of women in this regard (279–86). Radical Sensibility, 13. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 262–63. See also Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xxii–xxiii; and Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, 190–221. Radical Sensibility, 16. Sensibility, 130–32. See R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, 62–64. See Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 227. Radical Sensibility, 3. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 135. Jones cites Godwin’s St Leon as an illustration of “how an élitist paternalism which had ideals of public service could develop into an individualistic pursuit of private gain” (135). Ibid., 64. Jones also addresses Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s critiques of sensibility in “Radical Sensibility in the 1790s,” 68–82. For more on Godwin’s views of sensibility see Todd, Sensibility, 139–40. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 360. See also Todd’s discussion of the “attack on sensibility” in Sensibility, 129–46. Todd, Sensibility, 141–42. Ibid., 134–35. Some reformist novelists focused on the dangerous effects of an overdeveloped sensibility in women, as in Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria. See Todd, Sensibility, 110–28. For more on the rake in the sentimental novel, see Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 231–47. See Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 33; Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 34–36; and Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, 214–20. Julia, A Novel, ed. Gina Luria (New York and London: Garland, 1974), I:iii. In her devotion to public service, Julia bears a strong resemblance, for example, to the heroine of Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction, which had been published two years earlier. For more on the significance of Werther in this novel see Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, 219–20. In interpreting this episode as an act of masturbation, Jack Fruchtman reads it as a measure of Frederick’s lack of self-control. Fruchtman also compares the characters in Julia to Williams’s depictions of such figures as Madame Roland, Robespierre, and Marat in her Letters Written in

Notes

29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

191

France and explores the political implications of her depictions of sensibility in the novel. “The Politics of Sensibility: Helen Maria Williams’s Julia and the Terror in France,” in Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in Their Lives, Work, and Culture, ed. Linda V. Troost (New York: AMS Press, 2001), I:185–202. Byron, Don Juan, Canto I, cxciv, lines 1545–46. See Eleanor Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 73–84; Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 46–48; and Fruchtman, “The Politics of Sensibility,” 201. Ty also points out how Julia defies masculine power in alleviating the problems of her friend Mrs. Meynell by finding a post abroad for Mrs. Meynell’s husband and then by inviting Mrs. Meynell to share her home. Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 82–83. Deborah Kennedy argues for the thematic connection of this poem and the novel’s conclusion in “Responding to the French Revolution: Williams’s Julia and Burney’s The Wanderer,” in Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters, ed. Laura Dabundo (Landham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), 8–9. See also Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 36; and Vivien Jones, “Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams,” in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780–1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 178, 197. Cited by April London, Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 145. Joseph Rosenblum analyzes the ways in which Smith’s male and female characters embody sense and sensibility in “The Treatment of Women in the Novels of Charlotte Turner Smith,” in Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters, ed. Laura Dabundo (Landham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), 45–51. See also Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 76–98; Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1998), 35–50; Pat Elliott, “Charlotte Smith’s Feminism: A Study of Emmeline and Desmond,” in Living By the Pen: Early British Women Writers, ed. Dale Spender (New York: Teachers College Press of Columbia University, 1992), 100–105; Katharine Rogers, “Romantic Aspirations, Restricted Possibilities: The Novels of Charlotte Smith,” in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 86; and Joan Forbes, “Anti-Romantic Discourse as Resistance: Women’s Fiction 1775–1820,” in Romance Revisited, ed. Lynne Pearce and Jackie Stacey (New York: New York University Press, 1995),

192

34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

Notes 297–304. For the influence of Burney’s works on the novel, see Loraine Fletcher’s introduction to her edition of Emmeline (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003), 9–35. Emmeline, ed. Judith Stanton, The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. Stuart Curran (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), II:27–28. Eleanor Ty discusses Smith’s uses of Gothic conventions in the episodes of Emmeline’s flight from Delamere in the castle in which she had grown up in Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 115–29. Ty also analyzes the roles of Mrs. Stafford and Lady Adelina as women whose life experiences are joined with Emmeline’s in Smith’s critique of patriarchy. See also Eva Figes, Sex and Subterfuge: Women Writers to 1850 (New York: Persea Books, 1988), 62–68; Ellis, The Contested Castle, 76–92; and Elliott, “Charlotte Smith’s Feminism,” 91–112. The fact that this particular duel is fought at night and with swords allows Smith to emphasize that the social practice of dueling is archaic and should be obsolete, a topic that will be explored in detail in Chapter 4. See Fletcher, introduction to Emmeline, 21. Hoeveler discusses Smith’s depiction of Godolphin as an idealized, “sentimentally feminized man” in Gothic Feminism, 47. For a more general discussion of Smith’s blending of masculine and feminine characteristics in both her heroines and her heroes, see Joseph Rosenblum, “The Treatment of Women in the Novels of Charlotte Turner Smith,” 45–51. See Fletcher’s introduction to Emmeline, 27. Nicola Trott, “Too Good for Them” (a review of Judith Phillips Stanton, ed., The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, Judith Wilson, ed., Selected Poems, Loraine Fletcher, ed., Emmeline, and Jacqueline Labbe, Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender), Times Literary Supplement, June 18, 2004, 3–4. See also Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism 42–47, for whom Emmeline and Godolphin embody an idealized picture of emerging middle-class values in their careful control of their passions as compared to the other characters in the novel. Ellis, The Contested Castle, 92. Fleetwood, ed. Pamela Clemit, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, 1992), V:13. William Godwin as Novelist (London: Athlone, 1981), 104. See the introduction to Fleetwood: or, the New Man of Feeling, ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001), 26–27. Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 243–44. Rousseau develops this argument in his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750) and in his Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1755). “Mapping Misogyny: Godwin’s Fleetwood and the Staging of Rousseauvian Education,” Studies in Romanticism 41 (Fall 2002): 375–98. For another persuasive assessment of Godwin’s response to Rousseau in

Notes

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

193

this novel see Anne Chandler, “‘A Tissue of Fables’: Rousseau, Gender, and Textuality in Godwin’s Fleetwood,” Keats-Shelley Journal 53 (2004): 39–60. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto; New York: New York University Press, 1989), V:211. Radical Sensibility, 68. See Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 249. Ibid., 249. See Todd, Sensibility, 120. The rescue episode motif also indicates these novels’ debts to Sir Charles Grandison. See Kelly, English Jacobin Novel, 148–50. For the influence of picaresque conventions on Hugh Trevor see Rodney Baine, Thomas Holcroft and the Revolutionary Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1965) 73–95; and April London, who notes the particular influence of Tom Jones. Women and Property, 165. An annoyed reviewer in the Monthly Review singled out this aspect of the novel for criticism, asking “was in not possible for the author to afford Trevor other occasions of displaying his zeal in the service of his mistress, than by employing him three times, in the course of the novel, in rescuing her from personal danger?” Review of The Adventures of Hugh Trevor by Thomas Holcroft, Monthly Review ns 23 (July 1797): 283. See Baine, Thomas Holcroft and the Revolutionary Novel, 109. Kelly, English Jacobin Novel, 152–53. See also Scheuermann’s discussion of Turl and Evelyn in Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 133–34. Robert Bage’s George Paradyne of Man As He Is (1792) is a similar reformist hero who is instructed alongside the reader by his reformist tutor Mr. Lindsay. In this novel Bage’s reformist objective takes shape in his characters’ debates on such issues as the rights of man and the justification for revolution, the separation of church and state, the corruption inherent to political parties, the arbitrariness of hereditary rights and property, the exploitation of the laboring class, racial injustice, the vanity of fashion, the evils of gambling and dueling, and the need for divorce laws. English Jacobin Novel, 155. Ibid., 156. For a more extensive analysis of Holcroft’s social criticism in this novel see Scheuermann, Social Protest, 119–42. Walsingham, ed. Julie A. Shaffer (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002), 64. Review of Walsingham, by Mary Robinson, British Critic 12 (1798): 610–12; reprinted in Robinson, Walsingham, ed. Julie A. Shaffer (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002), 510.

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62. Chris Cullens argues this point in “Mrs. Robinson and the Masquerade of Womanliness,” in Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mücke (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 274. 63. “Cross-Dressing and the Nature of Gender in Mary Robinson’s Walsingham,” in Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Chris Mounsey (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 138. Cullens insightfully notes that in this novel women are portrayed as “more masculinely rakish than men” (278). For other studies of gender and cross-dressing in Walsingham see Sharon Setzer, “The Dying Game: Cross-dressing in Mary Robinson’s Walsingham,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22, no. 3 (2000): 305–28; and Julie Shaffer, “Walsingham: Gender, Pain, Knowledge,” Women’s Writing 9, no. 1 (2002): 69–85. 64. “Cross-Dressing and the Nature of Gender,” 160. 65. Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 55–56. 66. “Mrs. Robinson,” 285. 67. Ibid., 285. 68. Ibid., 276–78. See also Ellen Arnold, “Genre, Gender, and CrossDressing in Mary Robinson’s Walsingham,” Postscript. Publication of the Philological Association of the Carolinas 16 (1999): 57–68. For a comprehensive treatment of the masquerade in the period see Terry Castle’s landmark Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in EighteenthCentury English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). 69. “Mrs. Robinson,” 275–76. 70. See Ellis’s discussion of these novels in The Politics of Sensibility, 129–34. 71. At least two contemporary reviewers recognized the relationship between Hermsprong and Voltaire’s Huron. See the Monthly Review ns 21 (September 1796): 21–24, and the review published by Mary Wollstonecraft in the Analytical Review 24 (December 1796): 608–9. H. N. Fairchild discusses Hermsprong and other reformist heroes, including Godwin’s Fleetwood and Holcroft’s Frank Henley, as types of the noble savage in The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York: Russell and Russell, 1958), 140–71. For a thorough assessment of Hermsprong’s character see also Spacks, Novel Beginnings, 238–41. 72. The Spectator, vol. I, no. 1 (March 1, 1711), Addison and Steele, et al., The Spectator, ed. Gregory Smith (London and New York: Everyman’s Library, 1967), I:3. Cited in Bage, Hermsprong, ed. Pamela Perkins (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002), 57. 73. See Nancy Johnson, “Seated on Her Bags of Dollars,” 430; Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven, CT: Yale

Notes

74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

80.

81.

195

University Press, 1983), 237–38; and London, Women and Property, 152. See Kelly, English Jacobin Novel, 133, and “Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790s,” 292. Review of Anna St Ives, by Thomas Holcroft, Critical Review ns 4 (April 1792): 460. Scheuermann provides a thorough analysis of Frank’s and Anna’s relationship in Social Protest, 89–118. See also Baine, Thomas Holcroft and the Revolutionary Novel, 20–42; and Kelly, English Jacobin Novel, 114–45. The English Novel: A Panorama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 168. Similarly, in Grandison’s Heirs, Barker acknowledges that Frank shares Holcroft’s and Godwin’s beliefs concerning human perfectibility and calls him “the first important, truly lower-class, exemplary hero in eighteenth-century English fiction” (111). Barker concludes his discussion with a comparison of Henley to Smith’s Lionel Desmond (123–24). Barker recognizes Holcroft’s rescue episodes as a clear link between Frank and Sir Charles Grandison in Grandison’s Heirs, 105–26. The parallel between these two characters was first recognized by William Hazlitt in Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), II:114. On Frank’s character and feats of rescue see also Virgil Stallbaumer, “Thomas Holcroft as Novelist,” ELH 15, no. 3 (September 1948): 204–5. Scheuermann discusses Holcroft’s aim to illustrate that “such characteristics as intelligence, courage, benevolence, and even physical strength are not the province of one or the other sex” in Social Protest, 113. Scheuermann also discusses Holcroft’s representation of Anna as the Jacobin ideal of woman in Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money, and Society from Defoe to Austen (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 134–44. See also Nancy Johnson’s discussion of the manner in which Holcroft “burdens heroic behavior with the duties of reform” in The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the Law: Critiquing the Contract (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 64. The Young Philosopher, ed. A. A. Markley, The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. Stuart Curran (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), X:433. For Rousseau’s influence on The Young Philosopher, see Katharine Rogers, “Romantic Aspirations,” 81–83; Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 58; Carrol Fry, Charlotte Smith (New York: Twayne, 1996), 104; and Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 103. Ty discusses the antipatriarchal aspects of George’s personality in Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 145–46. For an interpretation of George’s physical appearance see Elizabeth Kraft, “Encyclopedic Libertinism and 1798:

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Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher,” Eighteenth-Century Novel 2 (2002): 257–58. 82. Joseph Rosenblum discusses the significance of the fact that George’s early education is provided by his mother in “The Treatment of Women in the Novels of Charlotte Turner Smith,” 47–48. See also Chris Jones on George’s personality and philosophy, Radical Sensibility, 177–80; and Anjana Sharma, The Autobiography of Desire: English Jacobin Women Novelists of the 1790s (New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2004), 186–200.

C hapter 2 1. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto; New York: New York University Press, 1989), V:211. 2. [Mary Hays], Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in behalf of Women (London: J. Johnson and J. Bell, 1798), 28. 3. “The Gothic Novel, 1764–1824,” in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 245. See also George Haggerty’s Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1989). Similarly Kate Ferguson Ellis discusses a variety of Gothic texts as “site[s] of resistance to ideological positions as well as a means of propagating them.” The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), xii). 4. See Eva Figes, Sex and Subterfuge: Women Writers to 1850 (New York: Persea Books, 1988), 56–57. 5. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1998), 4. 6. For readings of Caleb Williams as a Gothic novel, see Kenneth Graham, “The Gothic Unity of Caleb Williams,” Papers on Language and Literature 20, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 57–59; Donald R. Wehrs, “Rhetoric, History, Rebellion: Caleb Williams and the Subversion of EighteenthCentury Fiction,” Studies in English Literature 24 (1988): 497–511; Betty Rizzo, “The Gothic Caleb Williams,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 305 (1992): 1387–89; Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 54–56; Barbara M. Benedict, “Radcliffe, Godwin, and Self-Possession in the 1790s,” in Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 89–110; and Marshall Brown, The Gothic Text (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 149–58. Marilyn Butler examines the limits of this mode of approaching the novel in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 57–75. For a full discussion of Caleb Williams and The Wrongs of Woman

Notes

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

197

in the context of Gothic fiction, see Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 47–95. For Emily Melville’s role as a sexual victim, see Kenneth Graham, The Politics of Narrative: Ideology and Social Change in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 16–22. Mona Scheuermann also analyzes Emily’s role in the novel in Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money, and Society from Defoe to Austen (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 144–48, as does Nancy Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the Law: Critiquing the Contract (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 117–20. Godwin himself acknowledged this alteration of the tradition in relating his plot to the fairy tale of “Bluebeard”. See his preface to the “Standard Novels” edition of Fleetwood in 1832, reprinted in Caleb Williams, ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000), 443–50. For the symbolic implications of Caleb’s assumption of the role of the victimized heroine, see Alex Gold, Jr., “It’s Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 19 (1977): 135–60; Mona Scheuermann, Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 153–54, 165; Ellis, The Contested Castle, 151–60; Robert J. Corber, “Representing the ‘Unspeakable’: William Godwin and the Politics of Homophobia,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990): 85–101; Barbara Benedict, “Radcliffe, Godwin, and Self-Possession in the 1790s,” 89–110; Eric Daffron, “‘Magnetical Sympathy’: Strategies of Power and Resistance in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” Criticism 37, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 225–26; Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the Law, 124–25; Gavin Edwards, “William Godwin’s Foreign Language: Stories and Families in Caleb Williams and Political Justice,” Studies in Romanticism 39 (Winter 2000): 550–51; and A. A. Markley, “The Success of Gentleness: Homosocial Desire and the Homosexual Personality in the Novels of William Godwin,” Romanticism on the Net 36–37 (November 2004–February 2005), http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2004/v/n36–37/011139ar.html. The Contested Castle, 159. For more on Godwin’s uses of Howard, see Scheuermann, Social Protest, 143–68. Godwin’s allusions to John Howard’s work may have been influenced by Elizabeth Inchbald, who used Howard as the model for Haswell, the hero of her 1787 play Such Things Are (published 1788). Mary, A Fiction, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto; New York: New York University Press, 1989), I:5. For an analysis of Wollstonecraft’s exploration of sensibility in this work see Gary Kelly, “Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Rousseau,” Women and Literature 3, no. 2 (1975): 22.

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12. For readings of the novel as an extension of Wollstonecraft’s agenda in the Vindication, see Mitzi Myers, “Unfinished Business: Wollstonecraft’s Maria,” The Wordsworth Circle 11 (1980): 107–14; Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 94–113; Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789–1830 (London: Longman, 1988), 38–42; Marilyn Butler, general introduction to The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto; New York: New York University Press, 1989), I:27; Anne K. Mellor, “Righting the Wrongs of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria,” NineteenthCentury Contexts 19, no. 4 (1996): 413–24; Elaine Jordan, “Criminal Conversation: Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman,” Women’s Writing 4, no. 2 (1997): 221–34; Susan C. Greenfield, Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney to Jane Austen (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 94–102; Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the Law, 140–44; and R. S. White, Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 109–16. For Wollstonecraft’s uses of Gothic conventions in The Wrongs of Woman, see Ellis, The Contested Castle, 92–98; E. J. Clery, “The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s,” in Reviewing Romanticism, ed. Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis (London: Macmillan, 1992), 69–85; Eleanor Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 33–35; and Anna Neill, “Civilization and the Rights of Woman: Liberty and Captivity in the Work of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Women’s Writing 8, no. 1 (2001): 109–10. Miranda Burgess discusses the novel as an amalgamation of differing genres in British Fiction and the Production of Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 142–49. 13. William Godwin, preface to The Wrongs of Woman: Or, Maria, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto; New York: New York University Press, 1989), I:81. 14. See Myers, “Unfinished Business,” 109–10. 15. Ralph Wardle, ed., Godwin & Mary: Letters of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), Letter 31, 27–28. 16. See Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, 75. For assessments of Wollstonecraft’s balance of politics and sentiment in The Wrongs of Woman, see Janet Todd, “Reason and Sensibility in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman,” Frontiers 5, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 17–20; Poovey, The Proper Lady, 105–6; Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 31–45; and Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 47–69.

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17. Maggie Kilgour discusses this passage as “an invocation and then exorcism of conventions” (The Rise of the Gothic Novel, 81–82). 18. Walsingham and The Wrongs of Woman share another detail in common in their attention to the plight of contemporary women. Chapter 74 of Walsingham details the story of an old beggar who was caught and conscripted by a press-gang while traveling to find his beloved Peggy in London. This episode parallels that of Wollstonecraft’s Peggy, who likewise loses her lover when he is conscripted by a press-gang and dies at sea in Chapter 7 of The Wrongs of Woman. Robinson also uses a madhouse episode in The Natural Daughter (1799), in which her heroine is kidnapped and imprisoned and manages to escape only when the building catches fire and burns to the ground. 19. For discussions of the relationship between the two novels see Tilottama Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,” Studies in Romanticism 27, no. 2 (1988): 221–51; Scheuermann, Her Bread to Earn, 175–76; Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, 75–95; and Gavin Edwards, Narrative Order, 1789–1819: Life and Story in an Age of Revolution (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 139–58. Kilgour calls the stories in Caleb Williams and The Wrongs of Woman “obsessive repetitions of a single one: variations on the Rousseauian pattern in which, because of the corruption of the social system, people develop into . . . social outcasts” (The Rise of the Gothic Novel, 84). 20. Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin,” 239. 21. For assessments of Wollstonecraft’s notes for the novel’s ending and the implications of Godwin’s editing of those notes see Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, 91–95; Mellor, “Righting the Wrongs of Woman,” 420; Daniel O’Quinn, “Trembling: Wollstonecraft, Godwin and the Resistance to Literature,” ELH 64 (1997): 761–88; and Tilottama Rajan, “Framing the Corpus: Godwin’s Editing of Wollstonecraft in 1798,” Studies in Romanticism 39, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 511–31. 22. Kelly, “Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Rousseau,” 22. 23. Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin,” 229–30. Nicola Watson also reads the novel as a response to Rousseau in Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 51–57. 24. For Poovey, this defiance renders Maria unable to transcend her own feelings and unable to persuade the court by appealing to their feelings. The Proper Lady, 108. 25. “Reason and Sensibility,” 18. See also Scheuermann’s analysis of the novel’s ending in Her Bread to Earn, 196–98. 26. See Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 40–42; Scheuermann, Her Bread to Earn, 177; Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 60–61; and Mellor, “Righting the Wrongs of Woman,” 414.

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27. Claudia Johnson discusses Jemima’s significance in the novel in “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Novels,” in Equivocal Beings, 66–69, and in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 204–207. See also Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989), 247–52, and Roxanne Eberle, Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1792–1897: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 21–54. Vivien Jones analyzes Jemima and her narrative alongside the “fallen” heroines of Inchbald’s Nature and Art and Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice in “Placing Jemima: Women Writers of the 1790s and the Eighteenth-Century Prostitution Narrative,” Women’s Writing 4, no. 2 (1997): 201–20. 28. For interpretations of The Victim of Prejudice, see Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 118–25; Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 60–72, and “The Imprisoned Female Body in Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice,” in Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 133–53; Terence A. Hoagwood, Politics, Philosophy, and the Production of Romantic Texts (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 122–39; Julie Shaffer, “Ruined Women and Illegitimate Daughters: Revolution and Female Sexuality,” in Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Katharine Kittredge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 302–5; Anjana Sharma, The Autobiography of Desire: English Jacobin Women Novelists of the 1790s (New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2004), 168–72; White, Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism, 163–67; and Patricia Meyer Spacks, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 251–53. For the novel’s similarity of purpose to The Wrongs of Woman, see Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 130–37, and “‘Of Use to Her Daughter’: Maternal Authority and Early Women Novelists,” in Living By the Pen: Early British Women Writers, ed. Dale Spender (New York and London: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1992), 207–8; Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 49–51; and Tilottama Rajan, “Disfiguring Reproduction: Natural History, Community, and the 1790s Novel,” The New Centennial Review 2, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 211–52. 29. See Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 71. 30. A Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter, ed. Sharon M. Setzer (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003), 93. Ty discusses how Robinson contrasts Martha and Julia as distinctly different embodiments of sensibility in Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812 (Toronto:

Notes

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32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

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University of Toronto Press, 1998), 72–84. Ty argues that in Martha’s example, Robinson attempts to counter anti-Jacobins’ refusal to recognize sensibility as a potentially constructive human attribute. See Sharon Setzer, “Romancing the Reign of Terror: Sexual Politics in Mary Robinson’s Natural Daughter,” Criticism 39, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 535; and Julie Shaffer, “Ruined Women,” 309–10. See Setzer, “Romancing the Reign of Terror,” 536. The European Magazine 37 (1800): 138; reprinted in Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter, ed. Sharon Setzer (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003), 329. The British Critic 16 (1800): 320; reprinted in Robinson, The Natural Daughter, 327–28. The heroine of Emmeline, for example, is doubled by Lady Adelina Trelawny, and Geraldine Verney of Desmond is doubled by the French Josephine de Boisbelle. Setzer discusses Martha and Mrs. Sedgley/Lady Susan as doubles in “Romancing the Reign of Terror,” 540–42. See also Ty, Empowering the Feminine, 80–82; Shaffer, “Ruined Women,” 292–96, 306–7; and Anne Close, “Into the Public: The Sexual Heroine in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy and Mary Robinson’s The Natural Daughter,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17, no. 1 (2004): 35–52. Another parallel involves the fact that when Martha leaves home and attempts to earn a living for herself, she adopts the name “Mrs. Denison,” a possible reference to Laura Denison of the third volume of Caleb Williams. Godwin added this character to Caleb’s story in the third edition, published in 1797. This poem may have been inspired by Perdita’s lines when she is spurned by the king of Bohemia in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “I was about to speak and tell him plainly/The selfsame sun that shines upon his court/Hides not his visage from our cottage, but/Looks on alike” (IV. iv.443–46). Robinson was famous for her portrayal of Perdita on the stage and was often referred to by this name. Introduction to A Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter, 31. The British Critic 16 (1800): 321, reprinted The Natural Daughter, 328. Setzer provides a thorough discussion of the revolutionary politics at play in the novel in “Romancing the Reign of Terror,” 531–55, as does Julie Shaffer, “Ruined Women,” 283–310. Desmond, in The Works of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), V:165. Review of Desmond, by Charlotte Smith, Critical Review ns 6 (September 1792): 100. For discussions of the politics of Desmond, see Diana Bowstead, “Charlotte Smith’s Desmond: The Epistolary Novel as Ideological Argument,” in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne

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Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 237–63; Pat Elliott, “Charlotte Smith’s Feminism,” 105–12; Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 163–67; Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 36–39; Carrol Fry, Charlotte Smith (New York: Twayne, 1996), 64–80; Eleanor Wikborg, “Political Discourse versus Sentimental Romance: Ideology and Genre in Charlotte Smith’s Desmond,” English Studies 78, no. 6 (November 1997): 522–31; Katherine Binhammer, “Revolutionary Domesticity in Charlotte Smith’s Desmond,” in Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, ed. Linda LangPeralta (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 25–46; Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 106–21; and Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the Law, 71–83. 44. Review of Desmond, 100. As Smith continued to launch such attacks in her works that were clearly based on her own experiences, reviewers gradually became less forgiving. In a review of The Young Philosopher published in the Critical Review, for example, the critic disapproves of Smith’s attack on law and on lawyers, regretting that she “should degrade her productions by personal satire” composed “under the influence of resentment” (ns 24 [September 1798]: 82). A reviewer in the Monthly Review likewise objects to Smith’s attack on lawyers in The Young Philosopher (ns 28 [March 1799]: 346–47). 45. Nancy Johnson discusses Desmond as an ideal and altruistic hero in contrast to Verney in The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the Law, 71–83. Allison Conway considers his role as a sentimental hero in “Nationalism, Revolution and the Female Body: Charlotte Smith’s Desmond,” Women’s Studies 24, no. 5 (1995): 395–409. See also Jones, Radical Sensibility, 163–67, and Katharine Rogers, “Romantic Aspirations, Restricted Possibilities: The Novels of Charlotte Smith,” In ReVisioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, edited by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 76–77. 46. For a discussion of this aspect of the novel’s ending see Bowstead, “Charlotte Smith’s Desmond,” 247–52; Elliott, “Charlotte Smith’s Feminism,” 110; Fry, Charlotte Smith, 78–80; and Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1998), 150–51. Stuart Curran discusses contemporary reviewers’ reactions to this aspect of the novel in the introduction to his edition of Desmond, Works of Charlotte Smith, V:xv–xvi. For Josephine de Boisbelle as Geraldine’s double, see Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries, 140–42; Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 38–39; Binhammer, “Revolutionary Domesticity,” 35–37; Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, 117–18; and Sharma, The Autobiography of Desire, 183–84.

Notes

47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

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Allison Conway analyzes the darker nuances of these parallels in her essay “Nationalism, Revolution and the Female Body,” as does Angela Keane in Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86–90. See Elliott, “Charlotte Smith’s Feminism,” 110–11; Susan Allen Ford, “Tales of the Times: Family and Nation in Charlotte Smith and Jane West,” in Family Matters in the British and American Novel, ed. Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Elizabeth Mahn Nollen, and Sheila Reitzel Foor (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1997), 24–25; and Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, 118–21. “Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism,” South Central Review 11, no. 2 (1994): 70. Introduction to Desmond, Works of Charlotte Smith, V:vii–xi. For more on the significance of Smith’s use of the epistolary format, see Bowstead, “Charlotte Smith’s Desmond.” “Metaphoricity and the Romance of Property in The Old Manor House,” Novel 34, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 229. In this essay, Labbe credits Smith with the development of a new genre, the “romance of property.” The Old Manor House, ed. Ina Ferris, in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. Stuart Curran (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), VI:410. Introduction to Desmond, in The Works of Charlotte Smith, V:xvi–xvii. Smith’s footnote on this issue reads as follows: “It has lately been alledged in defence of the Slave Trade, that Negroes on board Guineamen are allowed almost as much room as a Soldier in a Transport.—Excellent reasoning!” (VI:298). Eamon Wright discusses this passage and others like it in British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818: Narrations of Modernity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 73–74. For a discussion of Smith’s manipulation of the romance tradition in this novel see Joseph F. Bartolomeo, “Subversion of Romance in The Old Manor House,” SEL 33 (1993): 645–57; Jones, Radical Sensibility, 167–70; and Miranda J. Burgess, “Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House,” in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 122–29. Angela Keane provides an insightful interpretation of the role of many of the novel’s disenfranchised minor characters in Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s, 96–102. Ferris, introduction to The Old Manor House, Works of Charlotte Smith, VI:xii, xix. For more on Smith’s uses of Gothic conventions see Fry, Charlotte Smith, 54–59, 108–11. Similarly, Jones analyzes Smith’s uses and revisions of the novel of sentiment in Radical Sensibility, 177–84. Julia M. Wright discusses Secresy as a “mosaic of the gothic, the romantic, the libertinist, and the didactic (of various ideological stripes) under the general generic rubric of the epistolary” in “‘I Am Ill Fitted’: Conflicts of Genre in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy,” in Romanticism, History and the

204

58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

Notes Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature, 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 153. See also Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 44; Isobel Grundy, introduction to Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock, ed. Isobel Grundy (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1998), 25–30; Rajan, “Disfiguring Reproduction,” 225–31; Close, “Into the Public,” 41–45; and Spacks, Novel Beginnings, 188–90, 218–21. Political Justice (1796 edition), Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), IV:161. England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 4. See Sarah Emsley, “Radical Marriage,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11, no. 4 (July 1999): 477–98. Secresy, ed. Grundy, 74. Malinda Snow develops a related interpretation of Secresy in light of England’s growing imperialistic agenda in India in “Habits of Empire and Domination in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14, no. 2 (January 2002): 159–75. For a discussion of Bage’s deliberate links between Lord Grondale and the French monarchy, see Pamela Perkins’s introduction to her edition of Hermsprong (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002), 27. Mona Scheuermann explores the issue of filial duty in Hermsprong at length in Social Protest, 220–24, and Her Bread to Earn, 155–66; see also Pam Perkins, “Playfulness of the Pen: Bage and the Politics of Comedy,” Journal of Narrative Technique 26, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 38–39; April London, Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 150–53; and Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the Law, 100–102. See Scheuermann’s analysis of Maria Fluart’s character, Her Bread to Earn, 152–55, 166–68; Perkins, “Playfulness of the Pen,” 39–40; and London, Women and Property, 151. Both Perkins and London identify Clarissa’s friend and correspondent Anna Howe of Richardson’s Clarissa as a forerunner of the outspoken Miss Fluart. Colin B. and Jo Atkinson enumerate the novel’s parallels to Evelina in “Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, and Women’s Rights,” Eire–Ireland 19, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 97–98. For more on Burney’s influence on Belinda see Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 308–11, and Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 140–44. This subplot was partly based on a similar scheme practiced by Edgeworth’s father’s friend, the poet Thomas Day, with the young Sabrina Sidney. Edgeworth also borrowed from Inchbald’s 1788 play The Child of Nature, a translation of Zélie ou l’ingénue, by Stéphanie de Genlis.

Notes

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69. 70. 71.

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See Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 243. For critical interpretations, see Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist, 161–62; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 391; Julie Shaffer, “Not Subordinate: Empowering Women in the Marriage Plot—the Novels of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen,” Criticism 34, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 61–64; Susan Greenfield, “‘Abroad and at Home’: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda,” PMLA 112, no. 2 (March 1997): 222–24, and Mothering Daughters, 119–23; Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 203–4; Mitzi Myers, “My Art belongs to Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth and the Pretexts of Belinda: Women Writers and Patriarchal Authority,” in Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century ‘Women’s Fiction’ and Social Engagement, ed. Paula Backscheider (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 104–46; Catherine Toal, “Control Experiment: Edgeworth’s Critique of Rousseau’s Educational Theory,” in An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, ed. Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 212–31; Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), 37–47; and Joanne Cordon, “Revising Stereotypes of Nationality and Gender: Why Maria Edgeworth Did Not Write Castle Belinda,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie Nash (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 147–56. Edgeworth, Original Sketch of Belinda, from Frances Edgeworth’s Memoir of Maria Edgeworth, with a selection from her letters (1867), in Belinda, ed. Siobhán Kilfeather, The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, gen. ed. Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), II:439. Original Sketch of Belinda, in The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, II:441. Belinda, in The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, II:179. For analyses of Harriet Freke and her role in the novel, see Colin B. and Jo Atkinson’s reading of her as an expression of Edgeworth’s views on women’s rights in “Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, and Women’s Rights,” 94–118. Barker-Benfield reads Freke as an attack on Wollstonecraftian feminism in The Culture of Sensibility, 388–91. For additional readings, see Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 18–21; Darryl Jones, “Frekes, Monsters and the Ladies: Attitudes to Female Sexuality in the 1790s,” Literature and History 4, no. 2 (Autumn 1995): 15–18; Greenfield, “Abroad and at Home,” 217–18; Lisa Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 75–108; McCann, Cultural Politics

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in the 1790s, 184–92; Toal, “Control Experiment,” 225–26; and Alison Harvey, “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie Nash (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 1–29. 72. For Edgeworth’s original plan to have Lady Delacour die of her breast cancer, see her Original Sketch of Belinda, in Works of Maria Edgeworth, II:440. 73. For interpretations of Lady Delacour’s role in the novel see Figes, Sex and Subterfuge, 87–88; Beth Kowaleski–Wallace, “Home Economics: Domestic Ideology in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29. no. 3 (Fall 1988): 242–62; Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 257–58, 386–92; Heather MacFadyen, “Lady Delacour’s Library: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Fashionable Reading,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 48, no. 4 (March 1994): 423–39; Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 190– 94;Greenfield, “Abroad and at Home,” 216–24, and Mothering Daughters, 111–16; Nicholas Mason, “Class, Gender, and Domesticity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” The Eighteenth-Century Novel 1 (2001): 271–85; Jordana Rosenberg, “The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth’s Belinda,” ELH 70 (2003): 575–96; Jennie Batchelor, Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 151–77; and Patricia Matthew, “Corporeal Lessons and Genre Shifts in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4, no.1 (Spring 2007), http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue42/matthew.htm. 74. Smith, The Young Philosopher, X, 4.

C hapter 3 1. Rambles Farther: A Continuation of Rural Walks: In Dialogues. Intended for the Use of Young Persons, ed. Elizabeth Dolan, The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. Stuart Curran (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), XII:124. 2. Some scholars question the sincerity of any abolitionist bent in Smith’s work due to her tireless attempts to obtain a favorable judgment concerning her children’s rights to inherit her father-in-law Richard Smith’s estate, an estate that included Gay’s plantation in Barbados. Three letters survive in which Smith harangues her addressees about the value of this estate, which included several slaves (see Judith Phillips Stanton, ed., The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003], 282, 343, 353). Although the tone of these letters is indeed mercenary, it is important to place them in the context of the body of Smith’s correspondence, the great majority

Notes

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4.

5.

6. 7.

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of which consists of desperate pleas for money to assist in feeding her nine children. In addition, as Loraine Fletcher has pointed out, while these letters “never express regret about the source of the money she claimed for her children,” Smith as a businesswoman “was of course dealing with people who would regard such regret as a sign of insanity” (Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1998), 291). While modern readers may find it difficult to accept what may appear today as callous references to those suffering under slavery, it is also important to acknowledge the degree to which slavery was an inextricable component of the British economy in the late eighteenth century. Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 2. G. J. Barker-Benfield discusses the link between sensibility and the antislavery movement, as well as the work of such figures as prison reformist John Howard, in The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 224–25. See also Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 49–128, and Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 46–72. Carey traces abolitionist discourse in sentimental novels written earlier in the eighteenth century, including Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné (1777), and Thomas Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–89). Finally, Moira Ferguson analyzes the relationship between the abolitionist and feminist movements in Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). Angelo Costanzo provides an overview of this movement in his introduction to The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2001, 2004), 21–26. See also Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1969), 1–24; and Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, 49–55. See Costanzo, introduction to The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 21; and Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 11. See Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, 117–18. See Anne K. Mellor, “‘Am I Not a Woman, and a Sister?’: Slavery, Romanticism, and Gender,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture: 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 311–12.

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8. See Alan Richardson, “Slavery and Romantic Writing,” in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 463. 9. British slaves were still required to complete a four-year apprenticeship period after their emancipation in 1833. For thorough histories of slavery and the abolitionist movement in England, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); Claire Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); and Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). 10. See The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in EighteenthCentury British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 287. To support her claim, Wheeler cites significant changes in the definition of the word “race” found in the 1771, 1781, and 1797 editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. See also the work of Felicity Nussbaum, especially “Women and Race: ‘A Difference of Complexion,’” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 69–88, and The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–20. For a thorough analysis of the geohumoral foundations of British attitudes about race, particularly during the English Renaissance, see Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 11. Other examples include William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” (1789), Robert Burns’s “The Slave’s Lament” (1792), William Lisle Bowles’s “The African” (1794), and Robert Southey’s “The Sailor Who Had Served in the Slave-Trade” (1798). 12. See Stephen F. Wolfe, “‘The Bloody Writing is for ever torn’: Inscribing Slavery in the 1790s,” in Revolutions and Watersheds: Transatlantic Dialogues 1775–1815, ed. W. M. Verhoeven and Beth Dolan Kautz (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), 169; and Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination, 14–15. In Bury the Chains, Hochschild analyzes Clarkson’s work at length, as well as other abolitionists such as Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, and John Newton. 13. For an extensive collection of abolitionist writings from the period, including tracts, fiction, poetry and drama, see Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, 8 vols., gen eds. Peter J. Kitson and Debbie Lee (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999). 14. See John Bugg, “The Other Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano’s Public Book Tour,” PMLA 121, no. 5 (October 2006): 1424–42. 15. Moira Ferguson discusses the influence of the Falconbridges’ work in Subject to Others, 198–208.

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16. Earle’s narrative was drawn from Benjamin Moseley’s brief synopsis of Mansong’s life in his 1799 A Treatise on Sugar. For more information on Obi and the other works it inspired in 1800 and afterward, see Charles Rzepka’s introduction to Obi: A Romantic Circles Praxis Volume, ed. Charles Rzepka, August 2002, http: //www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/obi. 17. Obi; or, the History of Three-fingered Jack. In a Series of Letters from a Resident in Jamaica to his Friend in England (London: printed for Earle and Hemet, 1800), 11. 18. See Rzepka, introduction to Obi: A Romantic Circles Praxis Volume, para. 6. 19. J. M. S. Tompkins compares the noble savage motif in this novel to Inchbald’s Nature and Art and Bage’s Hermsprong in The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800 (London: Constable and Co., 1932; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 311–12. 20. For a catalogue of such accounts see Wylie Sypher, “The African Prince in London,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 2 (April 1941): 237–47, and Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain 1555–1833 (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 45–66. An example contemporaneous with the publication of Mackenzie’s novel can be found in the anonymous tract entitled The Black Prince. A True Story: Being An Account of the Life and Death of Naimbana, An African King’s Son, Who arrived in England in the Year 1791, and set sail on his Return in June, 1793 (London: Howard & Evans, n.d.). See Ferguson, Subject to Others, 220–28. For Sypher’s assessment of Mackenzie’s novel, see Guinea’s Captive Kings, 287–89. 21. For accounts of this incident, see The Gentleman’s Magazine XIX (1749): 89–90, and The London Magazine XVIII (1749): 94, cited by Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 46. See also Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human, 189–90. 22. Slavery: Or, The Times, 2 vols. (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinsons and J. Dennis, 1792), I:190. 23. For M. O. Grenby’s classification of Slavery: or, The Times as an antiJacobin work due to Mackenzie’s treatment of contemporary France, see The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 221n36. 24. Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter, ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1999), 138. 25. Anne Mellor discusses the significance of Savanna’s role as a mother figure to Adeline in “Am I Not a Woman, and a Sister?,” 322–23, and Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 105. See also Susan Greenfield’s insightful analysis of Savanna’s role as an agent of exchange and mediation between Adeline and her mother in Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney to Jane Austen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 134–44.

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26. “‘The Story of the Pineapple’: Sentimental Abolitionism and Moral Motherhood in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray,” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 356. Ellis discusses parallels between slavery and the “‘bonds’ of love and marriage’ in The Politics of Sensibility, 55. 27. “Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray: Diverting the Libertine Gaze; or, the Vindication of a Fallen Woman,” Studies in the Novel 26, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 142. 28. For more on Wollstonecraft and slavery, see Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Moi Rickman, “‘Tied To Their Species By The Strongest of All Relations’: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rewriting of Race as Sensibility,” in British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 140–57. 29. While discussions of race in St Leon are rare, Stephen F. Wolfe addresses Godwin’s oblique treatment of slavery and contemporary abolitionist concerns in Caleb Williams in his reference to Falkland’s West Indian estate and its management by Caleb’s friend Mr. Collins. See “‘The Bloody Writing is for ever torn’: Inscribing Slavery in the 1790s,” in Revolutions and Watersheds: Transatlantic Dialogues 1775–1815, ed. W. M. Verhoeven and Beth Dolan Kautz (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), 177–79, and “‘Are Such Things Done on Albion’s Shore?’ The Discourses of Slavery in the Rhetoric of English Jacobin Writers,” Nordlit 6 (1999): 169. 30. For an insightful analysis of Marguerite’s depiction as a modern “Jacobin” woman, see Mona Scheuermann, Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money, and Society from Defoe to Austen (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 148–52. 31. St Leon, ed. Pamela Clemit, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering, 1992), IV:194. 32. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), III:421. 33. See Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 167. Historians have recorded as many as 128 such gradations to describe individuals of mixed race. See Charles Wagley and Marvin Harris, Minorities in the New World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 106–7, and Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York: Walker, 1964), 54–62; both cited by Brathwaite, Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770– 1820, 167n. 34. Henry Willoughby (London: G. Kearsley, 1798), I:218. 35. The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times (London: R. Phillips, 1801), I:274.

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36. The West Indian: A Comedy (London: W. Griffin, 1771). Reprinted in facsimile in The Plays of Richard Cumberland, ed. Roberta F. S. Borkat (New York: Garland, 1982), I:4. 37. “Epistle to William Wilberforce,” lines 47–50, in The Poems of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 116; cited by Wylie Sypher, “The West-Indian as a ‘Character’ in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in Philology 36 (1939): 518. 38. Julia de Roubigné (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777; repr. New York and London: Garland, 1979), II:42–43. 39. The Banished Man and The Wanderings of Warwick, ed. M. O. Grenby, The Works of Charlotte Smith, VII:38. 40. For discussions of Smith’s treatment of slavery in this novel see Carrol Fry, Charlotte Smith (New York: Twayne, 1996), 96–100; and M. O. Grenby, introduction to The Banished Man and The Wanderings of Warwick, The Works of Charlotte Smith, VII:xiii–xvi. Grenby points out that Smith’s treatment of life in the West Indies was greatly influenced by her friend Bryan Edwards, who published The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies in 1793. 41. The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, ed. David Lorne Macdonald, The Works of Charlotte Smith, XI:119. 42. Mitzi Myers also cites the influence of Thomas Day’s bad Creole boy Tommy Merton of The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–89) on Mr. Vincent in “My Art belongs to Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth and the Pre-texts of Belinda: Women Writers and Patriarchal Authority,” in Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century ‘Women’s Fiction’ and Social Engagement, ed. Paula Backscheider (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 105. 43. Jessica Richard discusses the significance of Mr. Vincent’s penchant for gambling as a defect of his character in “‘Games of Chance’: Belinda, Education and Empire,” in An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, ed. Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 192–211. 44. “‘Abroad and at Home’: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda,” PMLA 112, no. 2 (March 1997): 222. Greenfield argues that Edgeworth intends her readers to associate aspects of Mr. Vincent’s personality with stereotypical characteristics of Africans to indicate his unsuitability as a suitor to an English woman. See also Greenfield, Mothering Daughters, 116–23. For another discussion of Mr. Vincent and race, see Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 21–26. In changes she made to Belinda for a new edition in 1810, Edgeworth responded to criticism by dramatically altering Belinda’s expressions of interest in Mr. Vincent and by removing her promise to marry him. See Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary

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45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

Notes Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 494–95; Perera, Reaches of Empire, 15–34; and Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s analysis of Edgeworth’s excisions and alterations in “‘Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject’: West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5, no. 4 (July 1993): 331–48. Finally, Alison Harvey offers a particularly provocative reading of the intersections of colonialism, gender, and race in the novel in “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie Nash (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 1–29. Kathryn Kirkpatrick contrasts Lady Delacour’s role in the novel with that of the initially more idealized Lady Anne Percival, arguing that the Percivals’ connection to Mr. Vincent and the imputed association of their having gained their wealth in the West Indies call into question Lady Anne’s suitability as a role model for Belinda. See “The Limits of Liberal Feminism in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” in Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters, ed. Laura Dabundo (Landham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), 73–82. “Abroad and at Home,” 220. Here Greenfield also points out the symbolic significance of Mr. Vincent’s later attempt to shoot himself in the head, like the speaker in Day’s poem, when he realizes that he has lost Belinda. Perera calls the reference to Day’s poem “one of a series of thwarted pairings between European and colonial alien” in the novel (Reaches of Empire, 31). See also Frances R. Botkin, “Questioning the ‘Necessary Order of Things’: Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Grateful Negro,’ Plantation Slavery, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 197–98. For an analysis of the theoretical implications of Edgeworth’s treatment of Africans and slavery in Belinda see Andrew McCann, “Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: The Colonial Context of Non-Identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Novel 30, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 56–77, reprinted in Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 181–206. See Greenfield’s discussion of Juba’s role in Belinda in “Abroad and at Home,” 220–24. For Greenfield, Juba’s presence in the novel strengthens Mr. Vincent’s association with Africans. The Limits of the Human, 242. See Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 494–95, and Perera, Reaches of Empire, 15–34. Kathryn Kirkpatrick compares the two editions and assesses Edgeworth’s changes in “‘Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject,’” 331–48. The Limits of the Human, 19.

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51. Michael Scrivener has pointed out that the pseudonym alludes to the lecture hall where Thelwall often lectured to enormous audiences at No. 2 Beaufort Buildings, Strand (Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing [University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001], 240). See also Gregory Claeys, ed., The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995), xx, xxxiv. 52. For assessments of Thelwall’s prolific career as a reformist writer and lecturer, see E. P. Thompson, “Hunting the Jacobin Fox,” Past and Present 142 (February 1994): 94–140; Claeys’s introduction to The Politics of English Jacobinism, xiii–lviii; and Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, 1–17. The Gillray cartoon on the front cover of this volume illustrates one of Thelwall’s performances at a political rally. 53. The Daughter of Adoption, I:67. 54. Scrivener discusses this episode in Seditious Allegories, 274. 55. See Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society, 248–51, and Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, 240–41. 56. See Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, 241–42. Scrivener suggests that Parkinson may be named for physician, writer, and London Corresponding Society member James Parkinson (1755–1824). 57. Review of The Daughter of Adoption, by John Beaufort [John Thelwall], Monthly Review ns 35 (August 1801): 356. 58. Table Talk (entry dated 24 July 1830), ed. Carl Woodring, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), XIV, part 1, 180–81 and 180n6. Among those who have noted this parallel are Peter Kitson, “Coleridge’s Anecdote of John Thelwall,” Notes and Queries ns 32, no. 3 (September 1985): 345; E. P. Thompson, “Hunting the Jacobin Fox,” 108 n58; and Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, 242. 59. Seditious Allegories, 244. 60. Review of The Daughter of Adoption, by John Beaufort [John Thelwall], Monthly Review ns 35 (August 1801): 356, 357. 61. Review of The Daughter of Adoption, by John Beaufort [John Thelwall], Critical Review ns 31 (February 1801): 234–35. 62. Scrivener discusses the strikingly reformist aspects of Seraphina’s and Henry’s marriage in the context of Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s work in Seditious Allegories, 242–43. 63. See Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 41–46. 64. Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 3–4. 65. See Neville Hoad, “Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington: The Price of Sympathetic Representation,” in British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature, ed. Sheila A. Spector (Basingstoke and New York:

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66.

67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80.

81.

Notes Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 125; and Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660– 1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 188–89. Sheila A. Spector, “The Other’s Other: The Function of the Jew in Maria Edgeworth’s Fiction,” European Romantic Review 10, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 333. Spector discusses this topic in her introduction to British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 2. For an analysis of Levi’s work see Michael Scrivener, “British-Jewish Writing of the Romantic Era and the Problem of Modernity: The Example of David Levi,” in British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature, ed. Sheila A. Spector (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 159–77. See David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 316. Ibid., 317–20. “The Other’s Other,” 310. Spector’s categories build on the work of Edgar Rosenberg in From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960), 206–33. See also Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 41–77. Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 106. The Merchant of Venice III.i.58–73. See, for example, the reviews of the novel in the Critical Review ns 17 (June 1796): 238, and in the Monthly Review ns 20 (August 1796): 477. Walker’s characterization of Bensadi may also owe a debt to Smollett’s Joshua Manasseh of The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) and to Gotthold Lessing’s influential play Nathan der Weise. The Plays of Richard Cumberland, ed. Borkat, V:21. Imperfect Sympathies, 34. “Jews and Other ‘Outlandish Englishmen’: Ethnic Performance and the Invention of British Identity under the Georges,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 791–92. Monthly Review ns 20 (August 1796): 476. Spector discusses this episode and argues that Edgeworth’s treatment of minority figures reflects her own status as an Anglo-Irish “other” in “The Other’s Other,” 321–22. See also Eamon Wright, British Women Writers and Race, 1788–1818: Narrations of Modernity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 80–81. Rachel Mordecai, Letter to Maria Edgeworth, 7 August 1815, published in Harrington, ed. Susan Manly (Peterborough. Ont.: Broadview Press, 2004), 298. Harrington, 298.

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82. For critical analyses of Harrington, see Edgar Rosenberg’s treatment of the novel alongside Cumberland’s The Jew in From Shylock to Svengali, 60–70, and Neville Hoad, “Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington,” 121–38. Michael Ragussis provides an insightful psychoanalytic analysis of the novel and calls it “the first work in English to inquire into the nature of the representation of Jewish identity” (113; 57) in “Representation, Conversion, and Literary Form: Harrington and the Novel of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 1 (Autumn 1989): 113–43, and Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” & English National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 57–88. For the particular influence of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn on Harrington, see Susan Manly, “Harrington and Anti-Semitism: Mendelssohn’s Invisible Agency,” in An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, ed. Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 235–49. Related studies also include Silvia Mergenthal, “The Shadow of Shylock: Scott’s Ivanhoe and Edgeworth’s Harrington,” in Scott in Carnival, ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1993), 320–31, and John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 43–75. 83. Harrington, ed. Marilyn Butler and Susan Manly, The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, gen. ed. Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto: 1999), III:286. 84. See her letter to Edgeworth dated 28 October 1817, in Harrington, 301. 85. See Spector, “The Other’s Other,” 332. For another discussion of Harrington’s controversial ending, see Twila Yates Papay, “A Near-Miss on the Psychological Novel: Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington,” in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 359–69. Page discusses Edgeworth’s possible intentions in “Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington: From Shylock to Shadowy Peddlers,” The Wordsworth Circle 32, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 12–13, and Edgeworth’s own disappointment with the novel’s ending and its reception in Imperfect Sympathies, 156–58. Rosenberg points out that George Eliot would reverse the situation in Daniel Deronda (1876), making her Gentile hero free to marry a Jewish bride only when he can prove himself a Jew (From Shylock to Svengali, 65–67; for more on this topic see also Ragussis, “Representation, Conversion, and Literary Form,” 142, and Figures of Conversion, 86). Ragussis interprets the conclusion as a variation on the conversion motif and argues that Berenice’s “conversion” be read in light of her father’s textual analysis of The Merchant of Venice, in which he points out that the original source for Shakespeare’s Shylock was a Christian character (“Representation, Conversion, and Literary Form,” 132–43, and Figures of Conversion, 77–88).

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86. Marcus Wood analyzes other political works in which Thelwall focuses on the plight of English labourers and African slaves in “William Cobbett, John Thelwall, Radicalism, Racism and Slavery: A Study in Burkean Parodics,” Romanticism On the Net 15 (August 1999), http://users .ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/thelwall.html. 87. Imperfect Sympathies, 3.

C hapter 4 1. Such Follies Are: A Novel (London: printed for William Lane at the Minerva Press, 1795), I:1. 2. Review of Such Follies Are: A Novel, British Critic 6 (September 1795): 189. 3. For a thorough analysis of Holcroft’s social criticism in this novel, see Mona Scheuermann, Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 119–42. 4. Gary Kelly discusses this aspect of Inchbald’s social criticism in Nature and Art in The English Jacobin Novel 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 102–3. 5. Phyllis Deutsch addresses the topic of gambling in detail and focuses largely on the careers of noted gamesters Charles James Fox and the Duchess of Devonshire in “Moral Trespass in Georgian London: Gaming, Gender, and Electoral Politics in the Age of George III,” The Historical Journal 39, no. 3 (September 1996): 637–56. For an overview of gambling in Britain in the late eighteenth century and afterward, see David G. Schwartz, Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling (New York: Gotham, 2006), 158–80. 6. See Gerda Reith, The Age of Chance: Gambling and Western Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 65. 7. Ibid. 8. Gillian Russell, “Faro’s Daughters: Female Gamesters, Politics, and the Discourse of Finance in 1790s Britain,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 4 (2000): 481. 9. Reith, The Age of Chance, 66. 10. Thomas Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 38. 11. Ibid., 41. 12. Ibid., x. 13. Ibid., x. 14. Ibid., 249. 15. Ibid., 41; see also William D. Brewer, “Mary Robinson as Dramatist: The Nobody Catastrophe,” European Romantic Review 17, no. 3 (July 2006): 271.

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16. “Faro’s Daughters,” 481. 17. Cited by Russell, “Faro’s Daughters,” 500n2. “Hazard” is a dice game and an early version of craps; “E-O” (“even-odd”), an early version of roulette, is a game of chance in which the appropriation of the stakes is determined by whether a ball falls into one of several niches on a wheel marked “E” or “O.” (A woman in the foreground of Gillray’s etching on the front cover of this book is spinning an “E-O” wheel.) “Faro” was an especially popular card game in the late eighteenth century in which players bet against a banker, or dealer, on the order certain cards will appear when taken from the top of the deck. The game seems to have derived its name from the fact that certain cards once depicted the image of a pharaoh (OED). Russell points out that a faro banker stood to win great sums because he or she would win in the case of a tie or “anomalous outcomes” (486). 18. See Deutsch, “Moral Trespass,” 640. 19. Reith, The Age of Chance, 70. 20. Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance, 35. 21. Ibid., 61. 22. Russell, “Faro’s Daughters,” 484, 501n11. 23. In “Faro’s Daughters,” Russell discusses the evidence for women’s participation in gaming, including the Lord Chief Justice Kenyon’s attempts to crack down on this practice and James Gillray’s caricatures of women gamesters (482–500). In “Moral Trespass,” Deutsch also discusses the common conception that gaming could serve to masculinize women and feminize men (647–55). 24. See Deutsch, “Moral Trespass,” 647–48. 25. “Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England,” Monthly Magazine (September 1800): 138–40; repr. in PMLA 119, no. 1 (January 2004): 113. 26. See Robert D. Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (New York: Henry Holt, 1957; repr. Orangeburg, SC: Sandlapper Publishing, 1973), 332–33. 27. A “rouleau” is a roll of coins. In faro and other card games, “paroli” refers to “the leaving of the money staked and the money won as a further stake, or the staking of double the sum before staked.” When used as a verb, “paroli” means “to stake one’s money over again, plus that gained by it” (OED). 28. Nobody, A Comedy in 2 Acts, Larpent Licensing manuscript LA1046 (application for license dated November 27, 1794); microfiche copy of the Henry E. Huntington Library (San Marino, CA) manuscript, Three Centuries of Drama; Plays Submitted to the Lord Chamberlain; English, 1731–1800, Three Centuries of English and American Plays, 1500–1830 (New Canaan, CT: Readex, 1989), Act II, p. 32. 29. “Vingt-un” or “vingt-et-un” is the French name for the card game known as “Twenty-one;” “Rouge-et-Noir” is a card game played on a

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30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

Notes table with two red and two black diamond-shaped sections, upon which players place their stakes according to the color upon which they wish to bet (OED). For accounts of the Nobody disaster, see Bass, The Green Dragoon, 346–48; M. J. Levy, ed., Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson (London: Peter Owen, 1994), 142–43; Paula Byrne, Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson (New York: Random House, 2004), 305–13; and Brewer, “Mary Robinson as Dramatist,” 265–73. Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are, The Plays of Elizabeth Inchbald, ed. Paula Backscheider (New York and London: Garland, 1980), II:12. Inchbald wrote that Miss Dorrillon “appears to have been formed of the same matter and spirit as compose the body and mind of the heroine of the ‘Simple Story’—A woman of fashion with a heart—A lively comprehension, and no reflection:—an understanding, but no thought—Virtues abounding from disposition, education, feeling:—Vices obtruding from habit and example.” The British Theatre; or, A Collection of Plays, Which Are Acted at the Theatres Royal, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket, with Biographical and Critical Remarks, by Mrs. Inchbald (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), XXIII:2; quoted by Annibel Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 416–17. Sketches of Modern Life; or, Man As He Ought Not To Be (London: W. Miller, 1799), I:72. Review of Sketches of Modern Life, by William Frederick Williams, Monthly Review ns 30 (September 1799): 95. Ibid. “Gambling, History, and Godwin’s St. Leon,” European Romantic Review 11, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 397. Similarly, B. J. Tysdahl discusses the novel as a critique of Burke’s notion of chivalry in William Godwin as Novelist (London: Athlone, 1981), 77–96. Crump, “Gambling, History, and Godwin’s St. Leon,” 397. Ibid. Ibid., 402. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 162. Gary Handwerk, “Historical Trauma: Political Theory and Novelistic Practice in William Godwin’s Fiction,” Comparative Criticism 16 (1994): 82. Handwerk extends his analysis of the novel in “History, Trauma, and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination: William Godwin’s Historical Fiction” in arguing that St Leon’s reformist efforts are undercut by his inability to perceive historical repetition or “to acknowledge his complicity with his age.” Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75. Handwerk, “Historical Trauma,” 84–85.

Notes

219

42. Review of St. Leon, by William Godwin, Monthly Mirror 9 (January 1800): 29–30; cited by Crump, “Gambling, History, and Godwin’s St.Leon,” 397. 43. Review of St. Leon, by William Godwin, Monthly Magazine 8 (January 20, 1800): S1054. 44. Review of St. Leon, by William Godwin, The Antijacobin Review and Magazine 5 (January 1800): 25. 45. Ibid., 26. 46. Review of Memoirs of Bryan Perdue, by Thomas Holcroft, Monthly Review, ns 52 (February 1807): 216. 47. Review of Memoirs of Bryan Perdue, by Thomas Holcroft, Annual Review 4 (1805): 645. 48. Ibid. 49. Review of Memoirs of Bryan Perdue, by Thomas Holcroft, British Critic 27 (January 1806): 82. 50. Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance, 44. 51. Humphry Clinker, ed. James L. Thorson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983.), 195. It is true, however, that toward the end of the eighteenth century, tradesmen occasionally challenged aristocrats over unpaid bills. Although aristocrats usually rebuffed such challenges as being beneath their dignity, some duels were fought over such disputes. See Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-century England (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 146. 52. Donna T. Andrew, “The Code of Honor and its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700–1850,” Social History 5, no. 3 (October 1980): 410. 53. McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 141; 143–44. 54. Ibid., 147–48. 55. V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 153. 56. Ibid., 168–69. 57. Ibid., 53. 58. Ibid., 54. 59. Introduction to Emmeline, ed. Loraine Fletcher (Peterborough. Ont.: Broadview, 2003), 20. 60. Kiernan, The Duel in European History, 187–88. 61. See Andrew, “The Code of Honor,” 420–21. In The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) (80–81), G. J. Barker-Benfield relates this trend to the eighteenth century’s “campaign for the reformation of manners,” as discussed by Norbert Elias in The History of Manners (New York: Pantheon, 1982). 62. McLynn, Crime and Punishment, 143. 63. John Bennett, A Discourse Against the Fatal Practice of Duelling (Manchester: C. Wheeler, 1783), 8–9; cited by Andrew, “The Code of Honor,” 423.

220

Notes

64. For more discussion of the arguments against dueling, see François Billacois, The Duel: Its Rise and Fall in Early Modern France, ed. and trans. Trista Selous (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 129–43; Andrew, “The Code of Honor,” 409–34; and Kiernan, The Duel in European History, 192–93. An example of the religious argument against dueling can be found in Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians (London: Cadell and Davies, 1797). 65. A Simple Story, ed. Pamela Clemit (London: Penguin, 1996), 63. 66. For commentary on this episode, see Miriam Wallace, “Wit and Revolution: Cultural Resistance in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story,” European Romantic Review 12, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 106–7; and Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, 287. 67. Amelia Opie, The Father and Daughter with Dangers of Coquetry, ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003), 256. For a discussion of this novel, see Catherine H. Decker, “Women and Public Space in the Novel of the 1790s,” in Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 17–18. 68. Part I, Letter LVII, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise, translated and annotated by Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, gen eds. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), VI:125. 69. Edition of 1796, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), IV:69. 70. Edition of 1793, ibid., III:58. 71. Gerard Barker attributes this episode to the influence of Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison in Grandison’s Heirs: The Paragon’s Progress in the Late Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985), 131–32. 72. Coke Clifton’s emotional response to this incident would not have been an unusual reaction. In Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac (1796), for example, the aristocratic hero is assaulted by an unknown assailant in the dark, and becomes despondent and nearly goes mad when he realizes that he has no way to avenge his family name and honor by challenging the unknown perpetrator. 73. For a detailed analysis of Frank Henley’s highly idealized character see Barker, Grandison’s Heirs, 105–26. 74. Peter Faulkner discusses Bage’s treatment of dueling in Man As He Is in Robert Bage (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 115–17. 75. The Emigrants, ed. W. M. Verhoeven and Amanda Gilroy (New York: Penguin, 1998), 13. 76. Introduction to Nature and Art, ed. Shawn Lisa Maurer (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2005), 23.

Notes 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

221

Ibid. Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance, 249. Kiernan, The Duel in European History, 121. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 160.

C hapter 5 1. The Excursion of Osman, The Son of Abdallah, Lord of the Vallies; A Political Romance: Including Some Anecdotes Relative to a Great Northern Family (Liverpool: T. Schofield, 1792), xii. 2. Northmore writes in a footnote on ships that “this work is intended to blend together the utile dulci,” Memoirs of Planetes, or a Sketch of the Laws and Manners of Makar. By Phileleutherus Devoniensis (London: J. Johnson and J. Owen, 1795), 29n; repr. in Gregory Claeys, ed., Utopias of the British Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 137–98. 3. Wishing to avoid charges of libel, the author of The Excursion of Osman offers this widely received proverb as the reason why he has chosen not to reveal the key to his allegory on contemporary Europe (viii). By contrast, Northmore refers to it in his description of the Godwinian civilization “Makar,” writing that this particular proverb “found no receptacle there. If a man did wrong, he was sure to be told of it. Riches afforded no shelter to error” (130). 4. Michael Gamer discusses the distinctions that Reeve draws between the genres in “Maria Edgeworth and the Romance of Real Life,” Novel 34, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 240–41. 5. The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries, and Manners (Colchester: W. Keymer and London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1785; repr., New York: Garland, 1970), I:6, 12. 6. A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man, with those of the Animal World, 2nd ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1766), 138. Cited by Reeve, The Progress of Romance, II:86. 7. Review of The Excursion of Osman, Analytical Review 17 (October 1793): 203. 8. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 164–65. 9. Nigel Aston, The French Revolution, 1789–1804: Authority, Liberty, and the Search for Stability (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 224; see also Doyle, Oxford History, 172. 10. Doyle, Oxford History, 172. 11. Aston, French Revolution, 224; 242–43; Doyle, Oxford History, 172. 12. Aston, French Revolution, 228; Doyle, Oxford History, 304. 13. See, for example, John Hawkesworth, Almoran and Hamet: An Oriental Tale (1761); John Langhorne, Solyman and Almena (1762);

222

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

Notes Frances Sheridan, The History of Nourjahad (1767); and William Tooke, The Loves of Othniel and Achsah (1769), among many others. Jowler represents the United States of America. The cleaning of the filthy Augean stable was one of the famous labors of Heracles in ancient Greek myth. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “deodand” as “a thing forfeited or to be given to God” or “forfeited to the Crown to be applied to pious uses, e.g. to be distributed in alms.” A “heriot” is “a feudal service, originally consisting of weapons, horses, and other military equipments, restored to a lord on the death of his tenant; afterwards a render of the best live beast or dead chattel of a deceased tenant due by legal custom to the lord of whom he held.” Behn’s Oroonoko was dramatized by Thomas Southerne in 1695. Other influences of this story on The Excursion of Osman are noteworthy. Like Prince Oroonoko, for example, Alla-moor and her sister are captured when they are invited to a social occasion on board the slave ship that will ultimately carry them to North America. See Claeys, introduction to Utopias of the British Enlightenment, xxvi. For analyses of Memoirs of Planetes within the tradition of utopian literature, see Gregory Claeys, “Utopianism, Property and the French Revolution Debate in Britain,” in Utopias and the Millennium, ed. Krishan Kumar and Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion Books, 1993), 46–62; and April London, “Clock Time and Utopia’s Time in Novels of the 1790s,” Studies in English Literature 40, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 539–60. See Political Justice (1793 ed.), Book VIII, Chapter VIII, ed. Mark Philp, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), III:476. Memoirs of Planetes also parallels Gulliver’s Travels in its final chapter, in which Planetes is picked up and carried back to Europe by a Portuguese ship. It is noteworthy that the Portuguese sailors fear Planetes when he initially speaks French to them, because the French “had been represented to them by their priests as cannibals” (142)—a satirical reference to their government’s and the Inquisition’s efforts to discredit revolutionary France with their own people, as in Spain. The name also may have been inspired by a utopian work of 1641, Gabriel Plattes’s A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria. Political Justice; Political and Philosophical Writings, III:453. “The principal object of punishment is restraint upon a dangerous member of the community; and the end of this restraint would be answered, by the general inspection that is exercised by the members of a limited circle over the conduct of each other.” Political and Philosophical Writings, III:304. Claeys also cites Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1754) as an important influence on late eighteenth-century utopian works that

Notes

26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

223

advocated the abandonment of private property, introduction to Utopias of the British Enlightenment, xvii. More’s treatment of private property also shows the influence of the Republic of Plato. In Book III, for example, Plato’s “guardians” of the city are not allowed to own property or to accumulate wealth in order to assure that they remain unbiased in their rule over the “producer” class and that they avoid the temptation to accumulate more property or power. The availability of an education to both men and women is also a notable characteristic of Plato’s Republic, Book V. Northmore later published treatises on renaming the bones of the body in A Triplet of Inventions (1796) and in A Quadruplet of Inventions (1799). For thorough discussions of British utopian works of the late eighteenth century, see the works listed by Gregory Claeys and April London in the bibliography. Claeys’s introduction to Utopias of the British Enlightenment provides perhaps the most detailed overview of the genre during the period and includes a chronology of utopian texts from 1700 to 1802. In addition, Claeys’s essay “Utopianism, Property and the French Revolution Debate” provides a particularly insightful assessment of the degree to which utopian works in the 1790s respond to contemporary debates concerning republicanism and commerce, as well as the ways in which they draw upon or extend the ideas of Paine and Godwin. Claeys also acknowledges the contributions of these texts to the development of modern socialism. “Aratus” was a Greek poet (c. 315–240 BCE) who wrote an astronomical poem called the Phaenomena, later translated into Latin by Cicero. James Raven and Antonia Forster note that this work was sometimes attributed to an H. Whitmore. See The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, gen. eds. Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), I: 676. April London discusses these two works, among others, in “Clock Time and Utopia’s Time,” 540n6. London likewise assesses the utopian novel of the late eighteenth century and the ways in which a host of anti-Jacobin novels satirized the utopian strain in reformist works in “Radical Utopias: History and the Novel in the 1790s,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16, no. 4 (July 2004): 783–802. “Utopianism, Property and the French Revolution Debate,” 61. Introduction to Utopias of the British Enlightenment, xii. It is noteworthy that Reeve classes Robinson Crusoe as a work that gives an account of an “unknown” and “Ideal” country in The Progress of Romance, I:125. Introduction to Utopias of the British Enlightenment, xv–xvi.

224

Notes

36. Theodore Cyphon includes the escape and pursuit narrative in the stories of the hero Theodore and in that of his brother-in-law Jason Hanson, who is sold into service to the East India Company and is sent into the Raj. 37. Moody, Review of Henry Willoughby, Monthly Review ns 27 (October 1798): 233. 38. Henry Willoughby. A Novel. (London: G. Kearsley, 1798), I:58–59. 39. April London traces this source in “Radical Utopias,” 792. 40. The only information about himself that the author of Henry Willoughby provides in his brief preface to the novel is the statement that he has just come of age and that it has been twelve months since his return from the nautical profession, “a profession eminently hostile to the pursuits of literature, and the cultivation of the understanding” (I:i). 41. In “Radical Utopias,” London provides an insightful analysis of the symbolic importance of Henry’s involvement in print culture and the publishing industry as “a model for the iniquities of capital relations” (792). 42. Wylie Sypher comments on this novel’s treatment of slavery in Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1969), 309–10. 43. See Claeys, introduction to Utopias of the British Enlightenment, xviii. 44. A similarly piqued reviewer in the British Critic criticizes the novel’s “considerably overcharged” depiction of the abuses “on board our men of war,” as well as the “various exaggerations and misrepresentations of the conduct of the higher orders of the community, of the ministers of religion, and of religion itself.” Review of Henry Willoughby, British Critic 12 (October 1798): 426. 45. For a discussion of this novel in light of British attitudes toward emigration see Tilar J. Mazzeo, “The Impossibility of Being Anglo-American: The Rhetoric of Emigration and Transatlanticism in British Romantic Culture, 1791–1833,” European Romantic Review 16, no. 1 (January 2005): 59–78. 46. In the Introduction to their edition of The Emigrants, W. M. Verhoeven and Amanda Gilroy point out that the rights of women are left out of Imlay’s utopian vision. Imlay likewise has no place for the Native Americans in his plans, unless they choose to be assimilated into the white community (New York: Penguin, 1998), xl–xli. See also W. M. Verhoeven’s analysis of the novel and its relationship to both Henry Willoughby and to George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799) in “‘New Philosophers’ in the Backwoods: Romantic Primitivism in the 1790s’ Novel,” The Wordsworth Circle 32, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 130–33; and John Seelye’s assessment of the reformist aims of The Emigrants in “The Jacobin Mode in Early American Fiction: Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants,” Early American Literature 22 (1987): 204–11.

Notes

225

47. Amanda Gilroy discusses the ideological connection between relaxed divorce laws and late eighteenth-century Americans’ devotion to the ideal of freedom in “‘Espousing the Cause of Oppressed Women’: Cultural Captivities in Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants,” in Revolutions and Watersheds: Transatlantic Dialogues 1775–1815, ed. W. M. Verhoeven and Beth Dolan Kautz (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), 197. See also Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 137, cited by Gilroy, “‘Espousing the Cause of Oppressed Women,’”197. 48. Gilroy analyzes this episode, as well as the episode involving Caroline’s sister Eliza in “‘Espousing the Cause of Oppressed Women,’” 191–205. Gilroy insightfully points out ways in which the chivalric attitudes of Imlay’s male characters undercut the author’s attempts to represent the promise of America for female emancipation. 49. Anna Neill relates aspects of the novel to Wollstonecraft’s philosophy and writings in “Civilization and the Rights of Woman: Liberty and Captivity in the Work of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Women’s Writing 8, no. 1 (2001): 113–14, as does Mazzeo in “The Impossibility of Being Anglo-American,” 63–67. 50. “‘Seated on Her Bags of Dollars’: Representations of America in the English Jacobin Novel,” The Dalhousie Review 82, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 426. 51. Ibid., 427. 52. Johnson assesses Smith’s depiction of America in The Young Philosopher, its promise of freedom from property, and the contradictions inherent in this vision in “Seated on Her Bags of Dollars,” 434–39. See also William D. Brewer’s assessment of the influence of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Thomas Paine on the novel in “Charlotte Smith and the American Agrarian Ideal,” English Language Notes 40, no. 4 (June 2003): 51–61; and Elizabeth Kraft, “Encyclopedic Libertinism and 1798: Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher,” Eighteenth-Century Novel 2 (2002): 266–67. Leanne Maunu considers Smith’s utopian treatment of America in both The Young Philosopher and The Old Manor House in “Home is Where the Heart Is: National Identity and Expatriation in Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher,” European Romantic Review 15, no. 1 (March 2004): 51–71. 53. Chris Jones interprets Glenmorris’s loyalty to cause over country as a specific reference to Godwin’s Political Justice. “Radical Sensibility in the 1790s,” in Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism, ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 180. 54. For Nancy Johnson’s reading of the ending of The Young Philosopher as a comment on the state of reformist radicalism at the end of the century,

226

Notes

see The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the Law: Critiquing the Contract (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 167–69. It is true that Smith concludes The Banished Man (1794) with a similar group of like-minded friends settling together in Italy. Nevertheless, while the English Edward Ellesmere, like George Delmont, leaves England to escape the conservative values of his aristocratic family, the other characters in the novel settle in Italy to escape dramatic political turmoil in their home countries of France and Poland. 55. Review of The Young Philosopher, by Charlotte Smith, The Antijacobin Review and Magazine 1 (August 1798): 188. 56. Review of The Young Philosopher, by Charlotte Smith, Critical Review ns 24 (September 1798): 82–84. 57. “Radical Utopias,” 790.

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Index

abolitionist literature, 9, 13, 88–95, 102–3, 114, 208n13 Abolition of slavery and the slave trade, 3, 20, 88–91, 100, 107–8, 114, 151, 153, 156, 173, 203n53, 207n3, 207n9 Addison, Joseph The Spectator, 45, 47 Adventures of a Cork-Screw (Anonymous), 45 Adventures of a Hackney Coach (Anonymous), 45 Adventures of a Watch! (Anonymous), 45 Africans (treatment in fiction), 20, 77–78, 86, 87–100 alchemy, 97–98, 139 alcoholism, 131, 176 American Revolution, 1, 27, 54, 76–77, 81, 139, 153, 158, 160, 162 Analytical Review, 194n71, 221n7 Andrew, Donna T., 219n52, 219n61, 219n63, 219n64 Annual Review, 141 Anti-jacobin novel, 5, 184n41, 188n76, 223n32 Antijacobin Review and Magazine, 24, 140, 179 Anti-jacobins, 1, 3, 24–25, 182n14, 200n30 Aratus, 169, 223n30 Argentum, or Adventures of a Shilling (Anonymous), 45 Arnold, Ellen, 194n68

Ashton, Nigel, 221n9, 221n11, 221n12 Atkinson, Colin B., 204n66, 205n71 Atkinson, Jo, 204n66, 205n71 Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice, 188n1 Bage, Robert, 2, 3–4, 7, 15, 137, 149 Hermsprong; or Man As He Is Not, 4, 16, 46, 47–50, 53, 55, 70, 81–82, 85, 92, 112, 129–30, 143, 148, 176–79, 188n74, 209n19 Man As He Is, 2, 103, 147–48, 193n56 Baine, Rodney, 193n52, 193n54, 195n76 Balfour, Ian, 186n53 Baptists, 88 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 107 “Epistle to William Wilberforce,” 89–90, 102 Barker, Gerard A., 186n53, 188n1, 195n77, 195n78, 220n71, 220n73 Barker-Benfield, G. J., 12, 23–24, 184n43, 185n45, 188n2, 190n10, 190n14, 190n19, 190n23, 193n49, 193n50, 204n67, 205n71, 206n73, 207n3, 219n61 Bartolomeo, Joseph F., 203n54 Bass, Robert D., 217n26, 217n30

268

Index

Batchelor, Jennie, 206n73 Beaufort, John. See Thelwall, John Behn, Aphra Oroonoko; or, The History of the Royal Slave, 92, 160 Benedict, Barbara, 196n6, 197n8 Bennett, John, 144 Bentham, Jeremy, 143–44 Bicknell, John. See Day, Thomas bildungsroman (female), 12, 60, 184n44 Billacois, François, 219n64 Binhammer, Katherine, 202n43, 202n46 Black Prince, The. A True Story (Anonymous), 209n20 Blackstone, William, 143 Blake, William, “The Little Black Boy,” 208n11 “Bluebeard,” 197n8 Botkin, Frances R., 212n46 Bowles, William Lisle, “The African,” 208n11 Bowstead, Diana, 201n43, 202n46, 203n49, 203n52 Brathwaite, Edward, 210n33, 213n55 Brewer, William D., 216n15, 217n30, 225n52 Bridges, Thomas Adventures of a Bank-Note, 45 Brissenden, R. F., 189n2, 190n13 British Critic, 6, 42, 70–71, 128, 141–42, 201n34, 224n44 Brooke, Henry The Fool of Quality, 45 Brooks, Marilyn L., 184n40 Brooks’s (private club), 133 Brown, Marshall, 196n6 Bugg, John, 208n14 Burgess, Miranda J., 198n12, 203n54 Burke, Edmund, 1, 24, 153, 158–59, 169, 218n35

Reflections on the Revolution in France, 24, 73 Burney, Frances, 75, 183n29, 191n33, 204n66 Camilla, 83 Cecelia, 83 Evelina, 30, 83, 188n1, 204n66 Burns, Robert “The Slave’s Lament,” 208n11 Butler, Marilyn, 3–4, 7, 13, 181n7, 181n8, 182n13, 184n41, 185n46, 185n53, 187n60, 189n2, 196n6, 198n12, 204n66, 204n67, 211n44, 212n49 Byrne, Paula, 217n30 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 29 capital punishment (critiqued in fiction), 73, 140–41, 165, 167–68, 170 Carey, Brycchan, 189n2, 207n3 Carlson, Julie A., 79 Castle, Terry, 194n68 Chandler, Anne, 192n46 Charles III, King (Spain), 155 Charles IV, King (Spain), 155 “child of nature,” 44–50, 53, 55, 175 Claeys, Gregory, 169, 212n51, 212n52, 222n18, 222n19, 222n25, 223n29, 224n43 Clarkson, Thomas, 90, 208n12 Clemit, Pamela, 186n53, 196n6 Clery, E. J., 198n12 Close, Anne, 201n36, 203n57 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 89, 111–12 Collings, David, 186n53 Colquhoun, Patrick, 115 Cone, Carl B., 181n1, 181n4 confessional narrative, 4 Conway, Allison, 202n45, 202n46 Cooper, Christine M., 184n39 Corber, Robert J., 197n8

Index Cordon, Joanne, 205n67 Costanzo, Angelo, 207n4, 207n5 Coventry, Francis The History of Pompey the Little, 45 Cowper, William “The Negro’s Complaint” and “Pity for Poor Africans,” 89 Craciun, Adriana, 183n32, 184n38 Crane, R. S., 189n2 Creoles (treatment in fiction), 20, 100–114, 172 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St John de, 225n52 Critical Review, 50, 74, 113, 179, 201n42, 202n44, 214n74 Crump, Justine, 138–39, 218n42 Cugoano, Quobna Ottabah, 90 Cullens, Chris, 43, 193n62, 194n63 Cumberland, Richard The Jew, 118–21, 214n82 Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, 118 The West Indian, 101–2, 104–5 Curran, Stuart, 74–76, 202n46 Daffron, Eric, 186n53, 197n8 Davis, David Brion, 207n9 Day, Thomas, 204n67 The History of Sandford and Merton, 207n3, 211n42 and John Bicknell, “The Dying Negro,” 89, 105 Decker, Catherine H., 220n67 Defoe, Daniel Moll Flanders, 64 Robinson Crusoe, 170, 223n34 Deutsch, Phyllis, 216n5, 217n18, 217n23, 217n24 Devonshire, Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of, 216n5 Dickens, Charles Bleak House, 74 Dickinson, H. T., 181n1 D’Israeli, Isaac, 183n29

269

dissenters, 2, 153 divorce laws, 167, 175–76, 193n56 Doyle, William, 221n8, 221n9, 221n10, 221n11, 221n12 du Barry, Madame (Jeanne Bécu, comtesse du Barry), 115 dueling, 5, 20, 31–32, 36, 41, 52, 125–26, 131, 134, 138, 141, 142–50, 192n36, 193n56 Dumas, D. Gilbert, 185n53 Dyer, George, 164 Earle, William, Jr. Obi; or, The History of Threefingered Jack, 90–91, 103 East India Company, 12, 122, 223n36 Eberle, Roxanne, 96, 183n36, 183n37, 184n39, 187n63, 199n27 Edgeworth, Maria, 4, 12–13, 86, 185n46, 185n47, 185n48 The Absentee, 119 Belinda, 12–13, 19, 83–86, 104–6, 113, 115, 119, 189n8 Harrington, 119–21 educational reform, 82, 107, 110, 113, 168, 170, 173–74 Edwards, Bryan, 211n40 Edwards, Gavin, 197n8, 199n19 Elias, Norbert, 219n61 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) Daniel Deronda, 215n85 Elliott, Pat, 191n33, 192n35, 201n43, 202n46, 202n47 Ellis, Kate Ferguson, 60, 139, 186n53, 191n33, 192n35, 192n40, 196n3, 197n8, 197n9, 198n12 Ellis, Markman, 23, 188n76, 188n2, 190n10, 190n24, 190n27, 194n69, 207n3, 207n4, 207n6, 209n26 emigration, 17, 174–79

270

Index

Emsley, Sarah, 204n60 Encyclopedia Britannica, 208n10 Endelman, Todd, 213n63, 214n71 E-O, 133, 216n17 epistolary novel, 75, 91, 126, 203n57 Equiano, Olaudah The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 90 European Magazine, 201n33 The Excursion of Osman (Anonymous), 13, 151–62, 165, 180 Fairchild, Hoxie Neale, 194n71 Falconbridge, Alexander, 90 Falconbridge, Anna Maria, 90 faro, 133, 135–37, 217n27 Faulkner, Peter, 220n74 Faust, 115 Fawcett, James Obi, or, Three-fingered Jack, 91 Felsenstein, Frank, 213n65 Female Gamester; or The Pupil of Fashion, The (Anonymous), 145 Fenwick, Eliza Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock, 13, 26, 78–86 Ferguson, Moira, 207n3, 208n15, 209n20, 209n28 Ferris, Ina, 78, 203n56 Fielding, Henry The History of Tom Jones, 23, 36–37, 193n52 Fielding, Sarah The Adventures of David Simple, 45 The History of Ophelia, 45 Figes, Eva, 192n35, 196n4, 206n73 Fletcher, Loraine, 144, 191n33, 192n36, 192n38, 202n46, 206n2 Fliegelman, Jay, 225n47 Floridablanca, Don José Moñino y Redondo, conde de, 155

Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 208n10 Forbes, Joan, 191n33 Ford, Susan Allen, 202n47 Forster, Antonia, 223n31 Fox, Charles James, 68, 153, 216n5 Frailties of Fashion, or the Adventures of an Irish Smock, Interspersed with Whimsical Anecdotes of a Nankeen Pair of Breeches (Anonymous), 45 Francis I, King (France), 138 French Revolution, 1, 5, 19, 29, 54–55, 70–74, 81, 89, 95, 125, 139, 144, 153, 155, 158, 160, 162–63, 165, 170, 179, 182n13, 222n21 Fruchtman, Jack, 190n28, 191n30 Fry, Carrol L., 195n80, 201n43, 202n46, 203n56, 211n40 gambling, 5, 21, 36, 41, 71–72, 92–93, 105, 119, 125–26, 130–42, 144–45, 149–50, 167, 170, 173, 176, 193n56, 211n43 Gamer, Michael, 221n4 Genlis, Madame de (Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de St-Aubin, comtesse de Genlis), 204n67 Gentleman’s Magazine, 209n21 George III, King (England), 165 George IV, Prince of Wales and Prince Regent, later King (England), 68 Gillray, James, 213n52, 216n17, 217n23 Gilroy, Amanda, 185n49, 224n46, 224n47, 225n48 Godoy, Manuel de, 155 Godwin, Mary Jane, 78 Godwin, William, 2, 3–6, 8, 10–11, 16, 19, 24–25, 37, 39, 47, 53–54, 61–62, 66, 78–80, 112, 118, 148–49, 162–65, 167–68,

Index 170, 174, 176, 178, 182n16, 183n37, 184n38, 184n41, 186n55, 190n18, 195n77, 199n21, 213n62, 223n29 Caleb Williams (Things As They Are; or, the Adventures of), 4, 6, 10–12, 14–15, 26, 32, 41, 49, 59–60, 62, 63–64, 68–69, 116, 143, 146–47, 170, 172, 188n1, 201n37, 210n29 The Enquirer, 5 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1, 6, 14, 21, 38, 49, 60, 78–79, 89, 100, 146, 152, 163, 166–68, 175, 225n53 Fleetwood: or, The New Man of Feeling, 32–36, 40, 53, 194n71 Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 61, 64 St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, 32, 97–100, 105, 116, 122, 132, 137–42, 190n17 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 23, 26, 28, 31–32, 33, 190n27 Gold, Alex, Jr., 197n8 Gordon Riots, 120 Gothic novel, 38, 58–61, 70, 71–80, 103, 109, 111, 113 Graham, Kenneth, 15, 185n52, 186n53, 196n6, 196n7 Greenfield, Susan C., 105, 198n12, 204n67, 205n71, 206n73, 209n25, 212n47 Gregory, John, 28, 152 Grenby, M. O., 9, 183n33, 183n35, 184n41, 188n76, 209n23, 211n40

271

Grossman, Jonathan, 185n52 Grundy, Isobel, 203n57 Haggerty, George, 58–59, 196n3 Handwerk, Gary, 35, 139–40, 185n52, 186n53, 186n57, 192n43 Harris, Marvin, 210n33 Harvey, Alison, 205n71, 211n44 Hawkesworth, John, 221n13 Hays, Mary, 4, 7, 59, 85, 187n70 Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in behalf of Women, 57–58 Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 7, 11, 18, 190n22 The Victim of Prejudice, 18, 26, 64–68, 200n27 hazard, 130, 133 Hazlitt, William, 195n78 Henry Willoughby (Anonymous), 13, 101, 170–74, 180, 224n46 Hercules, 159 Hermes, 177 Hey, Richard, 134, 144–45 Hoad, Neville, 213n65, 214n82 Hoagwood, Terence A., 200n28 Hochschild, Adam, 207n9, 208n12 Hodgson, William, 169 Hoeveler, Diane Long, 59, 191n33, 192n37, 192n39 Holcroft, Thomas, 2, 3–4, 6–8, 19, 149, 166–67, 170 The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, 16, 19, 26, 36–40, 41, 44, 47, 112, 115, 129, 171 Anna St Ives, 18–19, 26, 50–52, 55, 82, 84, 93, 111, 147–48, 188n1, 189n8, 194n71 Memoirs of Bryan Perdue, 6–8, 26, 101, 140–42, 171 Review of The Castle of St Vallery, 7 Howard, Carol, 96 Howard, John, 60, 170, 197n10, 207n3

272

Index

Human Vicissitudes; or, Travels into Unexplored Regions (Anonymous), 169 Hunt, Lynn, 7 Imlay, Gilbert The Emigrants, 13, 148–49, 156, 174–76 A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, 174 imperialism, 12, 21, 121–24, 170, 204n62 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 2, 3–4, 187n62 The Child of Nature, 204n67 Nature and Art, 4, 16–17, 46–47, 50, 53, 55, 66, 70, 92, 130, 177, 200n27, 209n19 A Simple Story, 4, 136, 145, 188n1, 189n8, 218n31 Such Things Are, 126, 197n10 Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are, 136–37 Inquisition (Spanish), 116, 120, 155–57, 222n21 Jacobin novel, 3–5, 185n50 Jacobins, 1–3, 7, 24–25, 37, 54, 55, 168, 169, 181n1, 182n14, 182n29, 184n41 Jenkins, Annibel, 218n31, 220n66 Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), 115 Jewish Naturalization Bill (“Jew Bill”), 114 Jews (treatment in fiction), 3, 20, 86, 88, 114–21, 130 Johnson, Claudia, 182n14, 184n39, 184n44, 190n10, 198n16, 199n26, 199n27 Johnson, Nancy, 177, 181n2, 184n40, 187n60, 187n62, 194n73, 195n79, 197n7, 197n8, 198n12, 202n43,

202n45, 204n64, 225n52, 225n54 Johnson, Samuel, 152 The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, 156 Johnstone, Charles Chrysal; or, the Adventures of a Guinea, 45 Jones, Chris, 12, 23–25, 36, 88, 184n43, 187n59, 188–89n2, 190n17, 190n18, 195n82, 201n43, 202n45, 203n54, 203n56, 225n53 Jones, Darryl, 205n71 Jones, Vivien, 191n31, 200n27 Jordan, Elaine, 198n12 Katz, David S., 214n69, 214n70 Kavanagh, Thomas, 132, 216n10, 217n20, 217n21, 219n50, 220n78 Keane, Angela, 195n80, 202n46, 203n55 Kelly, Gary, 3–5, 7–8, 13, 38, 63, 181n2, 181n7, 181n8, 181n9, 182n13, 182n28, 182n29, 184n39, 185n50, 185n53, 187n59, 187n62, 190n24, 192n44, 193n52, 193n55, 194n74, 195n76, 197n11, 197n12, 199n22, 200n28, 216n4 Kennedy, Deborah, 191n31 Kenyon, Lloyd, first Baron (Lord Chief Justice), 217n23 Kiely, Robert, 185n53 Kiernan, V. G., 144, 149–50, 219n55, 219n56, 219n64 Kilgour, Maggie, 14, 196n6, 198n16, 198n17, 199n19, 199n21 Kirkpatrick, Kathryn, 211n44, 212n45, 212n49 Kitson, Peter J., 208n13, 213n58 Knight, Ellis Cornelia Dinarbas; A Tale, 169

Index Kowaleski-Wallace, Beth, 206n73 Kraft, Elizabeth, 195n81, 225n52 Kropf, C. R., 185n53 Labbe, Jacqueline, 75, 203n50 Laclos, Choderlos de, Les Liaisons dangereuses, 79 Lamb, Charles, 183n29 Langhorne, John, 221n13 Leaver, Kristen, 15 Lee, Debbie, 207n5, 208n12, 208n13 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Nathan der Weise, 120–21, 214n74 Levi, David, 115 Levy, M. J., 217n30 Lewis, Matthew, 183n29 The Monk, 156 Lithgow, John, 169 Locke, Don, 186n53 London, April, 19, 180, 182n26, 187n59, 191n32, 193n52, 194n73, 204n64, 204n65, 222n19, 223n29, 223n32, 224n39, 224n41 London Corresponding Society, 213n56 London Magazine, 209n21 Louis XIV, King (France), 132 Louis XVI, King (France), 155 Lyons, Israel, 120 MacFadyen, Heather, 206n73 Mackenzie, Anna Maria Slavery, Or: The Times, 9–10, 13, 91–95, 115 Mackenzie, Henry Julia de Roubigné, 35, 102–3, 207n3 The Man of Feeling, 26 Macklin, Charles, 120 Manly, Susan, 214n82 “man of feeling,” 20, 25, 33, 36–44, 55, 91, 93, 105

273

Mansfield, William Murray, 1st Earl of (Lord Chief Justice), 88 Marat, Jean-Paul, 70, 190n28 María Luisa, Queen (Spain), 155 Markley, A. A., 192n43, 197n8 Maroons, 103–4, 109 Mason, Nicholas, 206n73 masquerade, 43 Matthew, Patricia, 206n73 Maunu, Leanne, 225n52 Maurer, Shawn Lisa, 149, 187n62 Mazzeo, Tilar J., 224n45, 225n49 McCann, Andrew, 185n52, 205n67, 205n71, 212n46 McLynn, Frank, 219n51, 219n53, 219n54, 219n62 Mellor, Anne K., 188n75, 191n30, 198n12, 199n21, 199n26, 202n43, 202n46, 203n47, 207n7, 209n25 Memoirs and Adventures of a Flea (Anonymous), 45 Mendelssohn, Moses, 214n82 Mergenthal, Silvia, 215n82 Methodists, 88 Midgley, Claire, 207n9 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 161 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de, 54 miscegenation, 101, 106, 109, 121 Modern Gulliver’s Travels (Anonymous), 169–70 Monthly Magazine, 135, 140 Monthly Mirror, 140 Monthly Review, 112, 119, 137, 141, 174, 182n21, 193n53, 194n71, 202n44, 213n57, 214n74, 223n37 Moody, Christopher Lake, 174, 223n37 Moore, Charles, 134 Moore, Edward The Gamester, 135 Moore, Lisa, 205n71

274

Index

Mordecai, Rachel, 119, 121 More, Hannah “Slavery: A Poem” and “The Sorrows of Yamba,” 89 More, Thomas, Utopia, 152, 163–64, 168, 173 Moseley, Benjamin, 208n16 Mullan, John, 189n2 Myers, Mitzi, 14, 184n44, 186n55, 197n12, 198n14, 205n67, 211n42 Native Americans (treatment in fiction), 45, 47–48, 77–78, 87, 116, 160, 162, 173, 177–78, 224n46 Neill, Anna, 198n12, 225n49 “new philosophy,” 10, 38, 39, 52, 55, 113, 183n38 Newton, John, 208n12 “noble savage,” 16, 44, 164, 177, 194n71, 209n19 Nootka Sound controversy, 154–55 Northmore, Thomas Memoirs of Planetes, 13, 151–53, 162–68, 170, 173, 180 “novel of circulation.” See “object narrative” Nussbaum, Felicity, 106, 208n10, 209n21 “object narrative,” 45 Ó Gallchoir, Clíona, 205n67 Opie, Amelia Alderson, 4, 10, 13, 183n38 Adeline Mowbray, or the Mother and Daughter, 10–11, 17, 95–97, 100, 104 Dangers of Coquetry, 145–46 O’Quinn, Daniel, 199n21 Page, Judith, 114, 118, 124, 215n85 Paine, Thomas, 1, 115, 158–59, 223n29, 225n52 The Rights of Man, 49, 54

Papay, Twila Yates, 215n85 Parkinson, James, 213n56 “paroli,” 135 Paulson, Ronald, 194n73 Perera, Suvendrini, 205n71, 211n44, 212n46, 212n49 Perkins, Pam, 187n60, 204n63, 204n64, 204n65 picaresque novel, 16, 36, 38, 39, 58, 170, 193n52 Pitt, William, Prime Minister (England), 165 Plato Republic, 163, 167–68, 222n26, 222n27 Plattes, Gabriel, 222n22 Plotz, John, 215n82 Poovey, Mary, 197n12, 198n16, 199n24 press-gangs, 92, 158, 167, 170–71, 198–99n18 primogeniture (critique of), 113, 127, 167, 193n56 prison reform, 3, 60, 88, 164, 170 Quakers. See Society of Friends (Quakers) Radcliffe, Ann, 59, 73, 76, 80, 183n29 Ragussis, Michael, 118–19, 214n82, 215n85 Rajan, Tilottama, 186n53, 187n70, 199n19, 199n20, 199n21, 199n23, 200n28, 203n57 Raven, James, 223n31 Reeve, Clara The Progress of Romance, 152, 221n6, 223n34 Reith, Gerda, 216n6, 216n7, 216n9, 217n19 religious freedom, 167–68, 170, 173–74, 177 Richard I, King (England), 81 Richard, Jessica, 211n43

Index Richardson, Alan, 206n73, 207n8 Richardson, Samuel, 75 Clarissa, 7, 14, 25, 31, 50, 52, 65, 93, 189n8, 204n65 Pamela, 7, 65, 189n8 Sir Charles Grandison, 23–24, 188n1, 193n51, 195n78, 220n71 Rickman, Moi, 209n28 Ridley, Glynis, 186n53 Rizzo, Betty, 196n6 Robespierre, Maximilien, 70, 190n28 Robinson, Mary, 4, 9, 15, 86, 129, 179, 183n32 Hubert de Sevrac, 9–10, 220n72 A Letter to the Women of England, 9, 57 Memoirs of Mary Robinson, 217n30 “Modern Manners,” 135 The Natural Daughter, 9–10, 66–71, 73, 128, 130, 188n74, 199n18 “The Negro Girl,” 90 Nobody, 135–36 “Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England,” 134–35 Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature, 9, 40–44, 47, 62, 198n18 Rogers, Katharine, 184n39, 191n33, 195n80, 202n45 Roland, Madame (Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland de la Platière), 190n28 romance, 152–53, 180 Rosenberg, Edgar, 214n71, 214n82, 215n85 Rosenberg, Jordana, 206n73 Rosenblum, Joseph, 191n33, 192n37, 195n82 Rothschild, Lionel de, Baron de, 115

275

rouge-et-noir, 136–37 “rouleau,” 135 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 2, 16, 24, 33–35, 44, 53, 63, 75, 79, 83, 91, 164, 175, 192n46, 195n80, 199n19, 199n23 Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 192n45 Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, 192n45, 222n25 Émile, 34–35, 173 Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, 7, 13, 23, 26, 32, 33, 35, 52, 146 Les Confessions, 34 Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, 34 Russell, Gillian, 132–33, 217n22, 217n23 Rzepka, Charles, 91, 208n16 Sancho, Ignatius, 90 Scheuermann, Mona, 186n53, 187n59, 187n60, 187n62, 188n76, 193n55, 193n59, 195n76, 195n79, 197n7, 197n8, 197n10, 199n19, 199n25, 199n26, 204n64, 204n65, 210n30, 216n3 Schwartz, David G., 216n5 Scott, Helenus Adventures of a Rupee, 45 Scott, Sarah The History of Sir George Ellison, 103, 207n3 Scrivener, Michael, 112, 181n1, 181n3, 182n16, 212n51, 212n52, 213n54, 213n55, 213n56, 213n58, 213n62, 213n68 Seelye, John, 224n46 sensibility, 5, 11–12, 23–36, 42, 51, 53, 55, 107, 144, 185n45, 188n76, 188n2, 190n18, 191n33, 197n11, 200n30, 207n3

276

Index

sensibility, novel of (sentimental novel), 7, 17, 20, 23–25, 27, 58, 60, 67, 74, 88, 94, 189n3, 203n56, 207n3 Setzer, Sharon, 70, 194n63, 200n31, 200n32, 201n36, 201n40 Shaffer, Julie, 42, 194n63, 200n28, 200n31, 201n36, 201n40, 204n67 Shakespeare, William The Merchant of Venice, 114–15, 117, 120, 215n85 Othello, 35 The Winter’s Tale, 201n38 Sharma, Anjana, 184n38, 196n82, 200n28, 202n46 Sharp, Granville, 208n12 Sheridan, Frances The History of Nourjahad, 221n13 Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, 188n1 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 136, 144 Shyllon, Folarin, 209n20, 209n21 Sidney, Sabrina, 204n67 Skinner, Gillian, 189n2 slavery, 87–88, 108–9, 122, 160–62, 170, 172–73, 206n2, 207n9, 209n28 Smith, Benjamin, 71 Smith, Charlotte, 4, 9, 33, 59, 68, 80, 86, 129, 206n2 The Banished Man, 9, 16, 95, 183n33, 225n54 Desmond, 9, 17, 71–76, 78, 95, 131, 176, 195n77, 201n35 Emmeline, 9, 30–32, 35, 71, 128, 144, 201n35 The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (“The Story of Henrietta”), 103–4 The Old Manor House, 75–78, 95, 101, 142, 178, 225n52 Rambles Farther (“The Little West Indian”), 87–88

The Wanderings of Warwick, 103 The Young Philosopher, 9, 16–17, 52–55, 59, 71, 115, 176, 177–80, 202n44, 206n74 Smith, Richard, 206n2 Smollett, Tobias, 36 The Adventures of an Atom, 45 The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, 214n74 The Adventures of Roderick Random, 171 The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 36, 142 Snow, Malinda, 204n62 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 89 Society of Friends (Quakers), 10, 88, 171, 173 Somerset, James, 88 Southerne, Thomas, Oroonoko, 92, 222n17 Southey, Robert “The Sailor Who Had Served in the Slave-Trade,” 208n11 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 17, 19, 181n9, 182n22, 185n52, 187n60, 189n2, 194n71, 200n28, 203n57 Spain (critique of government), 154–60, 162 Spector, Sheila, 115, 213n66, 213n67, 214n79, 215n85 Spencer, Jane, 200n28, 204n67 Spender, Dale, 183n38 Stallbaumer, Virgil, 195n78 Steele, Sir Richard. See Addison, Joseph. Sterne, Laurence, 24 A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, 24, 26–27 Tristram Shandy, 27, 140 Stevenson, Lionel, 51 Such Follies Are (Anonymous), 13, 126–29 suicide, 133–35, 137

Index Swift, Jonathan Gulliver’s Travels, 152, 163–65, 168, 170, 222n21 Sypher, Wylie, 207n4, 209n20, 210n37, 224n42 Tarleton, Banastre, 68 Tell, William, 34 Thelwall, John, 106 The Daughter of Adoption, 13, 101, 106–14, 121–22, 188n74 Thompson, E. P., 212n52, 213n58 Times (London), 133 Toal, Catherine, 205n67, 205n71 Todd, Janet, 17, 24, 189n2, 189n3, 189n4, 189n5, 190n18, 190n19, 190n20, 190n21, 190n22, 193n51, 198n16, 199n25, 199n27 Tompkins, J. M. S., 8, 182n29, 184n41, 209n19 Tooke, William, 221n13 Tories, 133 Trott, Nicola, 32 True and Faithful Account of the Island of Veritas, A (Anonymous), 169 Ty, Eleanor, 10, 12, 43, 183n31, 184n38, 184n39, 187n61, 187n62, 191n30, 192n35, 195n81, 198n12, 199n26, 200n28, 200n29, 200n30, 201n36, 202n46 Tysdahl, B. J., 14, 33, 218n35 Unitarians, 88 universal language, 164 utopian novel, 21, 162–63, 166–68, 169–70, 173–74, 180 vegetarianism, 122, 170, 173 Verhoeven, W. M., 185n49, 224n46 vingt-un, vingt-et-un (“Twentyone”), 136

277

Voltaire, 91 Candide, 16 L’Ingénu, 45–46, 50, 94 Voyage to the Moon Strongly Recommended to All Lovers of Real Freedom, A (Anonymous), 169 Wagley, Charles, 210n33 Walker, George, 11, 13, 118, 184n41 The Haunted Castle, 118 Theodore Cyphon; or The Benevolent Jew, 11–12, 15, 117–19, 122–23, 143, 170 The Romance of the Cavern, 118 The Vagabond, 11–12, 118, 224n46 Wallace, Miriam L., 220n66 Wandering Jew, the (Ahasuerus), 115 war (critiqued in fiction), 77–78, 166–67 Washington, George, 158 Watson, Nicola J., 190n24, 191n31, 195n80, 199n23, 200n28, 201n43, 202n46, 203n57 Wehrs, Donald A., 196n6 West, Jane A Tale of the Times, 8 Wheeler, Roxann, 89 Whigs, 2, 133, 153 White, R. S., 116, 186n53, 189n2, 198n12, 200n28 White’s (private club), 133 Wikborg, Eleanor, 201n43 Wilberforce, William, 89, 144, 208n12, 219n64 Williams, Helen Maria, 33 Julia, A Novel, 13, 17, 26–30, 35, 70, 129 Letters Written in France, 75, 190n28 “A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade,” 89

278

Index

Williams, William Frederick, Sketches of Modern Life, 137 Wolfe, Stephen F., 208n12, 210n29 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 2, 4, 10–13, 17, 24–25, 49, 59, 66, 68, 78–79, 84–85, 118, 174, 176, 183n37, 183n38, 185n45, 189n8, 190n18, 194n71, 205n71, 209n28, 213n62 Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, 63 Mary, A Fiction, 60, 63, 190n26 Posthumous Works, 64

A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 89 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 9, 13, 36, 57–58, 60, 63, 82–83, 97 The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, 11, 17–18, 60–64, 72, 79, 110, 131, 176, 190n22, 200n28 women’s rights, 3, 20, 49, 57–59, 84, 96–97, 104, 170, 176, 224n46 Wood, Marcus, 215n86 Wright, Eamon, 203n53, 214n79 Wright, Julia M., 203n57

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