On 13 April 1792, Anna Larpent, an avid reader whose diary happily survives, called the debate on the French Revolution ‘a controversy that I cannot in its full heat form a Judgement on’, adding ‘it is impossible in these prejudiced moments to determine who is right and wrong’. To help her form her judgement she had been reading political pamphlets, including Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791–2) and James Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae (1791). By August, though, it was through the lens of ‘a prettily wrought novel’ that she was viewing what she called the ‘french troubles in consequence of the Revolution’. The novel was Desmond, by Charlotte Smith, which had appeared a few weeks earlier in June. Although ‘an odd work’, ‘hurried' and ‘somewhat forced’, Larpent praised Smith for defending the Revolution ‘with the enthusiasm of a woman and a poetess'’ In the end, however, Smith's ‘fine imagination, & command of Language’ did not convert Larpent to her cause and she pronounced the author to be ‘a wild leveller’. Perhaps we might have predicted such a response from the affluent and urbane Larpent, daughter of the ambassador at Constantinople and wife of the Lord Chamberlain's inspector of plays, but what is remarkable is that she was gaining her political information, and shaping her political views, at least in part from fiction. In this she was not alone. During the 1790s and early 1800s dozens of ‘novels of opinion’ issued from British presses – so many indeed, that cultural historians are still rediscovering further examples. Even if, today, few of them are regarded as major literary achievements, they were, for certain sections of the population, probably as influential in moulding socio-political attitudes in late eighteenth-century Britain as any other form of cultural production discussed in this book.

Many of the most celebrated children's books have a famous origin story attached to them. Lewis Carroll made up 'the interminable fairy-tale of Alice's Adventures' (as he called it in his diary) while he was on a boat-trip with Alice, Lorina and Edith Liddell in 1862; Peter Pan grew out of J.M. Barrie's intense friendship with the five Llewelyn Davies boys; Salman Rushdie, following the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa, wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories for his son, Zafir, for Zafir, like Haroun, had helped his father recover the ability to tell stories. The veracity of these stories, and many others like them, is open to question. But their prevalence and endurance is nevertheless important. We seem to demand such originary myths for our children's classics. What we want, it appears, is the assurance that published children's books have emerged from particular, known circumstances, and, more specifically, from the story told by an individual adult to individual children. C. S. Lewis listed this as one of his 'good ways' of writing for children: 'The printed story grows out of a story told to a particular child with the living voice and perhaps ex tempore.' Such a creative method is an antidote to what Lewis thought the very worst way to write for children, striving to 'find out what they want and give them that, however little you like it yourself'.

One of the principal reasons for the attack on the novel in the late eighteenth century was that it was said to encourage equality. It is a proposition with which numerous twentieth-century scholars have agreed, contending that the eighteenth-century novel was somehow an intrinsically ‘bourgeois’, or at least ‘democratic’, form, insisting that it stressed the equality of man because every character possessed an equal capacity to feel, to fall prey to adventures, to become a protagonist. Contemporary critics of the novel, though, were worried less about the sudden elevation of a protagonist out of his or her social station, and more about the effect these texts were having on their readers, men and women who were, they feared, increasingly being recruited from the lower reaches of society. Such new readers were having aspirations implanted in their giddy heads, wholly out of keeping with their real stations in life.

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.

Anti-Jacobinism, insofar as it can be ascribed a coherent identity at all, was more propaganda than ideology. This, indeed, was its great tactical strength, for in defining itself purely in terms of what it was not, in terms of what it was opposed to, its protagonists evaded the necessity of having to formulate any doctrine of their own, a doctrine from which independently minded members of its potentially vast constituency might demur. Any attempt to assess anti-Jacobinism, then, immediately finds itself trying to define what that Jacobinism was that provoked anti-Jacobinism into being, or rather what conservatives thought it was. It is at this point that the seeming simplicity of the apparently polarised debate on the Revolution in France begins to dissolve.

Much has been written about radicalism in Britain in the 1790s, but this is not to say that a congruous ideology of radicalism has ever been discerned. Indeed, Jacobinism's heterogeneity is the most recurrent theme of those surveys which have been undertaken. Certainly, no single conception of Jacobinism has been found that might have been cheerfully subscribed to by both radicals and conservatives.

The most crucial point to be made about anti-Jacobin novels is that they appeared in much greater numbers than has previously been thought. There were in excess of fifty novels published between 1790 and 1805 which were suffused with anti-Jacobinism, with perhaps as many again which were anti-Jacobin in parts or to a limited extent.

Yet this is a finding that has raised several difficult questions. As soon as an attempt is made to count these fictions, for instance, the problem of definition has arisen.

Numerous novels appeared in Britain in the years after 1789 addressing the debate on the French Revolution and the ideas emanating from it. Some novels sympathising with the radical cause have received significant scholarly attention, but those which took a conservative line have so far escaped any sustained analysis. These were the anti-Jacobin novels.

Close to two hundred late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels have been consulted in my quest to identify the extent and varieties of the conservative fiction published in Britain in the decade or so on either side of 1800. Yet this survey still covers only a small fraction of the fiction produced in the period. There are, therefore, almost certainly many more anti-Jacobin novels, of varying degrees and types, which remain undetected. Finding those anti-Jacobin novels which do appear in the following pages has been essentially a three-stage process. First, there are several existing works of scholarship which, together, have discerned between fifteen and twenty anti-Jacobin novels, and these form the foundation of this research. These ‘tip-offs’ sometimes occur in unlikely places: in biographies of figures who were maligned by the anti-Jacobins, perhaps, or in studies of the early Evangelical movement. Second, and in the attempt to place this survey on the basis of at least a degree of nominal comprehensiveness, I have made a thorough search of the major periodicals of the age – the Monthly, the Critical and the Analytical Reviews, the British Critic and the Anti-Jacobin Review – all of which contain a mixture of reviews and short notices of recently published novels, and which have proved invaluable for pointing out previously unknown conservative fiction.

A rhetoric of opposition to the spread of reading, and to the educational and distributive processes that seemed to facilitate it, grew steadily throughout the eighteenth century. This was generally a rather petulant and sporadic resentment against the trickle down of a literary competence, but it occasionally found a tighter focus. Institutions which could be painted as inventions only of the present iniquitous age were seized upon as simultaneously causes and symptoms of the problem. Chief amongst these were the circulating library, the Sunday or charity school, and the novel. In the conservative imagination, the Sunday school taught the illiterate to read; the circulating library enabled them to do so affordbly; and the novel enticed into the habit those who previously been unwilling. What these institutions have in common is that they could all be arraigned for spreading the reading habit to new sections of society, to the lower orders, to women, to children. It was the spread of literature to these inexperienced and susceptible readers which was to be condemned, conservative commentators were careful to point out, not reading itself, which few Protestants, few believers in the past glories of English literature, and few who read themselves, would be prepared to do.