By most accounts the Age of Enlightenment drew to a close with the unfolding of the Revolution in France, but reports of its extinction are sometimes exaggerated. If the movement fell victim to the cultural terrorism of the nineties, it went on to enjoy a long (and often suitably unorthodox) afterlife, perplexed by much shape-shifting. Though spurned in some quarters altogether, it found fresh heirs in the new century who were happy to advertise their enlightened descent, while many old hands changed tack significantly without wholly surrendering allegiance to it. This continuity has been masked, however, by a tendency among literary historians to polarize the period into the two camps of Jacobin and Anti-Jacobin, and to focus somewhat exclusively on the way a national mood of political reaction was fuelled by fears of domestic upheaval, and by the onset of war.

Austen criticism, in particular, has been prominent in explication of this sort. Marilyn Butler's famous study provided, when it appeared, a valuable corrective to views of tradition that were all but devoid of social content, and her ‘war of ideas’ has proved to be an asset to historiography of the nineteenth century ever since. But the ‘Anti-Jacobin’ label (all question of its applicability aside) is peculiarly unfortunate in the context of the times, for in the years that Austen came before her public the term received its colour chiefly from The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine (1798–1821), the angry follow-up to the organ founded by Canning.