Kelly, Gary. The English Jacobin Novel 1780-1805. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976.

Grinnell library catalog page

Kelly first defines the English Jacobins as English liberals or radicals whose opponents labeled them and depicted them solely as supporters of the French Revolution. Political societies and informal circles connected English Jacobins, who, according to Kelly, opposed tyranny, detested violence and sought change through rational discussion, while distinguishing between principle and practice. Eventually, their cause came to be seen as too closely connected to the French Revolution, leading to their persecution by the government-led Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. With the failure of the Revolution and ensuing loss of faith in reason as an absolute and progressive power, according to Kelly, Jacobins backed off their rationalistic guns and appealed to concepts of sympathy and sensibility that they had previously spurned.

Kelly delves into themes in Robert Bage’s writing; Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story and Nature and Art; Thomas Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives, Hugh Trevor, and Bryan Perdue; and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, St. Leon, and Fleetwood. According to Kelly, the form as well as the content of these Jacobin novels is philosophical.

The book’s conclusion situates the English Jacobin novel as a subgenre of the novel and places it in relation to the Romantic movement. The novel, as a “domestic” form of literature and a “bourgeois reaction to the chivalric and romantic national literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance” (261-2), was the natural accompaniment to political and philosophical treatises, but these values also contradicted its call for universal humanism. The Jacobin novelists’ movement towards Romanticism, according to Kelly, reflects the influence of women who taught male Jacobins that rationality was not the only truth. Finally, Kelly concludes, “just as the French Revolution proclaimed itself to embody the Enlightenment at the same time that it inverted most of the principles of the Age of Reason, so Romanticism in England both absorbed and rejected English Jacobinism as the domestic manifestation of the Revolutionary spirit” (268-9).

Entered by Sara on 30 July 2004 at 5:16 PM.