Abstract
A final scene of Charlotte Smith’s novel The Young Philosopher (1798) casts the sober, erudite Mr. Armitage (who bears a striking resemblance to William Godwin) in an intense discussion with a weary veteran of radicalism, Mr. Glenmorris, about the most effective way to live out one’s political convictions and promote the happiness of others. Both are familiar with the political, legal, and economic corruption in their contemporary England, and both are cognizant of power as a function of property. But they disagree about the remedy, about the most appropriate response to rampant injustice. Mr. Glenmorris is ready to embrace exile in America, where, he believes, he and his family could participate in the creation of a new society, while Mr. Armitage suggests that remaining in England is preferable because it is still possible to transform the nation. This philosophical exchange certainly provides Smith with a vehicle for censuring the “haughty mother country” (England) and the wretchedness and misery she has nurtured — an overriding concern in the novel. Yet it also points to the ambivalent state of radicalism at the end of the eighteenth century. The debate between these two formidable characters hovers around a common goal — to shape an equitable social contract — however, the proper means to that end is obscured by uncertainty.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The designation “English Jacobin” is a controversial one; however, I have chosen to use “English Jacobin” (or simply “Jacobin”) because it is a historically specific term and a customary (and therefore recognizable) name. In addition, I sometimes borrow Michael McKeon’s term “progressive narrative” because the texts challenge the constructions of status. See Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 21.
Among important and recent analyses of the English Jacobin novel are the following: Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and Form of the English Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
Mona Scheuermann, Her Bread to Earn (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993).
Eleanor Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).
Mona Scheuermann, Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985).
Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
The phrase, “things as they are”, is taken from the title of William Godwin’s novel Things As They Are: or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (London: B. Crosby, 1794).
The term “contractarianism” refers to the political theory of John Locke, John Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others. It conceives of political authority as derived from the consent of the people who have agreed to form a civil society. The governed and the governors are bound by a contract that is based on this consent. The campaign for the rights of man in the 1790s is the late eighteenth-century manifestation of contractarianism. See P.S. Atiyah, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 39–40.
Marilyn Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolutionary Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1–2.
William Godwin, Things As They Are: or; The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 3 of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 279. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically within the text.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, vol. 5 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 24.
David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1.
E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: The New Press, 1993), 34.
See also, Elizabeth Mensch, “The History of Mainstream Legal Thought”, in The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, ed. David Kairys (New York: Pantheon Press, 1982), 19, 21.
Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (London: John Toland, 1698; Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1990), 104.
James Harrington, A System of Politics, in The Political Works of fames Harrington, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 850.
The phrase “equivocal spirit of the law” is from Thomas Holcroft, A Narrative of Facts, relating to a Prosecution for High Treason (London: Symonds, 1795), 27.
The phrase “glorious uncertainty of the law” was a frequently repeated phrase in the eighteenth century. It was, for example, a toast offered to judges and counsel in Serjeant’s Hall at a dinner given in honour of Lord Mansfield when he was elevated to the peerage (as Baron Mansfield) and to the office of Lord Chief Justice in 1756. It was also used in numerous political tracts in the 1790s. See, for instance, Joseph Priestley, Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London: J. Johnson, 1791), 14.
Jeremy Bentham, A Comment on the Commentaries in Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (London: Athlone Press, 1977), 6, 58–59.
Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz, Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 2–22.
John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 137–40.
Barrell, 1. See also, Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 171–207.
James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 1–7.
Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 35–109.
Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism, and the Public Sphere (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 1–32.
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 1, 7.
E.P. Thompson notes the inappropriateness of the term “Jacobin” for British reformers; they much more closely resembled “the sans culottes of the Paris ‘sections’”, See E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 156. See also, Gary Kelly, English Jacobin Novel, 7.
Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (London: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 64–65.
M.O. Grenby notes the difficulty of defining “Jacobinism” from the perspective of the Anti-Jacobin movement. “Jacobinism”, he suggests, “was simply a label for all that conservatives found detestable within society”. See M.O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8.
Seamus Deane The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 162.
Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 6–12; Goodwin, 20–21.
Dr Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (London: Woodstock Books, 1992), 50.
Quoted in Carl B. Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the French Revolution (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1964), 301.
Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), 5.
Frans de Bruyn, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 6, 14.
Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative” in Narrative, Violence and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 95–96.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2004 Nancy E. Johnson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Johnson, N.E. (2004). Introduction. In: The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503380_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503380_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-51810-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-50338-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)