Jacobin History: Charlotte Smith's Old Manor House and the French Revolution Debate

Abstract

Given the fundamental importance of history to the disputes which raged in the 1790s about questions of tradition, authority and social change, and the meaning of the British national past, it is perhaps unsurprising that both radical and anti-Jacobin novelists employed forms of fictional historical narrative to intervene in the French Revolution debate. During the ‘war of ideas’, writers clearly conceived of an active political purpose for the historical novel, and these texts appear as a vital element within the wider response of the British novel to the crisis engendered by the French Revolution. While conservative authors such as Clara Reeve, George Walker and Jane West relied on the genre to counter the threat of revolution, echoing Edmund Burke’s appeal to history to defend the eighteenth-century British political and institutional structure against the encroaches of radical reformers unversed in the lessons of history and experience, a turn to historical fiction simultaneously permitted radical novelists such as William Godwin and Charlotte Smith to extend the pervasive social and cultural analysis of the Jacobin novel into the theatre of history, and promote a spirit of political enquiry and reflection through the medium of the historical. Published during the early years of the pamphlet war, Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793) appears as a key instance of the intersection of the genre of historical fiction with the political and historical dialogue generated by the French Revolution controversy. As Godwin would do at the close of the revolutionary decade in St Leon (1799), Smith employed imaginative historical narrative to issue a direct challenge to the historical view of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), presenting readers with a complex narrative meditation on the American and French Revolutions, and the ongoing debate surrounding the political settlement that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The use of history to comment on contemporary politics was a well-established practice by the eighteenth century, and, in The Old Manor House, Smith undoubtedly drew on the 1770s as a means of offering a displaced mode of political critique in the reactionary climate of the 1790s. The composite historical agenda of the text indicates, however, that Smith’s narrative intentions extended beyond veiled political expression. Composed in a moment marked by the intensifying violence of the French Revolution, the return of The Old Manor House to the period of the American Revolution facilitated a celebration of their shared ideals, allowing Smith ‘to remind her readers of a fact that had slipped from the