The Anti-Jacobin Novel

The French Revolution sparked an ideological debate which also brought Britain to the brink of revolution in the 1790s. Just as radicals wrote ‘Jacobin’ fiction, so the fear of rebellion prompted conservatives to respond with novels of their own; indeed, these soon outnumbered the Jacobin novels. This is the first survey of the full range of conservative novels produced in Britain during the 1790s and early 1800s. M. O. Grenby examines the strategies used by conservatives in their fiction, thus shedding new light on how the anti-Jacobin campaign was understood and organised in Britain. Chapters cover the representation of revolution and rebellion, the attack on the ‘new philosophy’ of radicals such as Godwin and Wollstonecraft, and the way in which hierarchy is defended in these novels. Grenby’s book offers an insight into the society which produced and consumed anti-Jacobin novels, and presents a case for reexamining these neglected texts.

• First book devoted to the phenomenon of the anti-Jacobin novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries • Lists an unprecedented range of anti-Jacobin novels, with plot and publication information • Sheds new light on literary and political conservatism of the 1790s

Preface; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Novels reproved and reprieved; 2. Representing revolution; 3. The new philosophy; 4. The Vaurien and the hierarchy of Jacobinism; 5. Levellers, Nabobs and the manners of the great: the novel’s defense of hierarchy; 6. The creation of orthodoxy: constructing the anti-Jacobin novel; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

‘M. O. Grenby offers a beautifully written and illuminating account of a neglected but useful literary source for the British conservative response to the French Revolution and the ‘Revolution crisis’ in Britain … this is a thorough study, yet one written with pace, cogency and brio, enlivened by many apt excerpts from the pithy, sometimes enjoyably caustic summaries of Dr Grenby’s raw materials.’ History

‘Filling in a long-standing blank in our perception of the Romantic-era novel, The Anti-Jacobin Novel offers a valuable contribution to British literary history, as well as powerful arguments for revisiting the way in which literary criticism has tended to represent British politics and society of the 1790s in the last few decades. For these, and other reasons, Grenby has done the critical community a great service. … ground-breaking …‘. Romanticism