When Charlotte Smith wrote to her publishers Cadell and Davies on 22 June 1797 to negotiate a contract for The Young Philosopher (1798), she projected that this new novel would be a distinct departure from her earlier works. Smith wrote that ‘some of the idea's that occurd to me both of character & incident were likely to be work'd up into a composition of some novelty & of more solidity than the usual croud of Novels’. Whatever her original ideas for the novel may have been are lost to us today, although The Young Philosopher is clearly more openly political than Smith had dared to be since publishing Desmond in 1792. As in Desmond, she makes her hero's reformist politics clear in The Young Philosopher from the very beginning, writing in the Preface that she had intended to depict a young man who is able to ‘preserve his equality of temper’ despite the injuries he receives from the fraud and folly of the aristocrats, attorneys, and social climbers around him.

George Delmont's political views are closely aligned to those of the Jacobin circle, particularly those that he shares with his friend Glenmorris and his mentor Armitage, a character who was unmistakably modelled on William Godwin. Such an openly expressed link to Godwin in 1798 might be seen as a rather astonishing move for Smith in an atmosphere in which the caustic anti-Jacobin novel had begun to multiply by leaps and bounds. And it is evident that Smith did worry about being associated too directly with Godwin's politics. She includes a disclaimer in the novel's preface, writing that ‘I declare … against the conclusion, that I think either like Glenmorris or Armitage, or any other of my personages’.

Smith and Godwin became friends in the late 1790s and their friendship clearly played a significant role in Smith's conception and design of The Young Philosopher. Smith moved to London in the summer of 1797 and lived there again from January 1798 through the spring of 1800.