Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 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 defence of hierarchy
- 6 The creation of orthodoxy: constructing the anti-Jacobin novel
- 7 Conclusion
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 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 defence of hierarchy
- 6 The creation of orthodoxy: constructing the anti-Jacobin novel
- 7 Conclusion
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
I beg Pardon for being so prolix; but as I have the Subject very much at Heart, I know you will excuse this Effusion of Loyalty
Ann Thomas, Adolphus de Biron. A Novel (1795?)Between 1791 and 1805 as many as fifty overtly conservative novels were published in Britain. Others contained distinctly conservative elements. These were the anti-Jacobin novels. They were written in opposition to what their authors believed, or perhaps affected to believe, were the principles of the French Revolution. The implicit assumption behind these books was that these Jacobin principles were establishing themselves in Britain where they threatened to undermine all that had enabled Britain to flourish and thrive. Some of the novels may certainly be considered propaganda. What is perhaps most revealing though is that others lacked an explicitly didactic intent. They seem to have absorbed and recapitulated conservative sentiments almost by default. How and why this happened is one of the subjects of this book. But however it was that so much fiction became aligned with a conservative agenda, these novels provide a very valuable insight into the society which created, commissioned and consumed them. Each novel is interesting in itself, but when read in aggregate, as if they constituted one single text, they take on a greater historical significance as a very direct manifestation of the British response to the French Revolution.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Anti-Jacobin NovelBritish Conservatism and the French Revolution, pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001