Representing revolution was the most straightforward means of infusing an ideological purpose into fiction. That we tend to think of the ideological novel of the 1790s as a novel of ideas is simply the residue of the over-emphasis on Jacobin novels in the literary response to the Revolution. When Edmund Burke wished to execrate recent events in France, even before events there turned irredeemably vicious, he chose a pseudo-fictional form which, in large part, depicted, rather than reasoned, the Revolution. It was a decision for which he was roundly ridiculed by his opponents, but the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was nevertheless hugely popular, as well as successful in its polemical aims, and it certainly influenced numerous novelists.