James Epstein and David Karr. British Jacobin Politics, Desires, and Aftermaths: Seditious Hearts.

Abstract

James Epstein and David Karr have over many years produced some of the finest analyses of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century British radical political culture, with an emphasis on the way such culture is manifested in performance, bodily gesture, and space. In British Jacobin Politics, Desires, and Aftermaths, they bring together much of that material, alongside several new essays, to offer a wide-ranging analysis of how we might “read the stirrings of the ‘Jacobin’ heart” (1), both in the reform debate of the 1790s and in its aftermath. Epstein and Karr do not interrogate the stated aims of the players in this debate. Instead, they analyze the concept of British Jacobinism by attending to the “effervescent sense of possibility” in the affective practices and proclamations of the reform movement (1). They note that “seditious desire was inchoate, half-formed, shouted across tavern tables, muttered in private conversations, chalked on walls” (1). Such practices pose a challenge to analysis, and Epstein and Karr “accept a certain provisionality as we try to get at that which is in excess of words” (5). But they respond to this challenge through a focus on performance and on space. They explore “Jacobin” engagement with what they term “serious play,” which was a response to government restriction and repression, but which also “involved creative experimentation in modes of political action and identification” (4). And in the book’s chapters, they trace such “play” through physical spaces, “sites of articulation and feeling—the club room, lecture hall, mass outdoor meeting, theater, tavern, coffeehouse, street, chapel, courtroom, prison, convict ship, as well as the imagined space of America … and the experience of exile in New South Wales” (5–6).