Novel and History in Anti-Jacobin Satire

Abstract

'I might observe with the late Lord Orford', writes George Walker in the dedication to his anti-Jacobin novel, The Vagabond, 'that Romances are only Histories which we do not believe to be true, and Histories are Romances we do believe to be true'.[1] The potential convergence here of the normally opposed terms of history and romance originates in a politics of reading to which Walker and his contemporaries were especially alert.[2] For conservatives in the 1790s, the existence of an impressionable and newly enlarged reading public made crucially important the resolution of the epistemological problems that are raised in Walker's reflections on genre. More particularly, the anti-Jacobins condemned radical adaptations of romance structures (in political treatises, as well as novels) for what they saw as their utopian future-mindedness and their blurring of the customary distinctions between the private and the social. When radical writers such as William Godwin considered as a serious theoretical proposition the higher truth value of romance over history, in other words, the conservatives grasped immediately that such speculations privileged individual desire and institutional change over compliance with established hierarchies.[3] But if they were to disable the conjectural impulses of political romance and confirm the determining influence of history, the anti-Jacobins needed to broaden their constituency. When Thomas Mathias writes in 1794 that 'Government and Literature are now more than ever intimately connected', he speaks to the recognition that a new discursive strategy was necessary, one capable of capturing the loyalty of readers and, through them, securing the authority of the state.[4] Anti-Jacobin authors developed that strategy by integrating the formal and thematic conventions of satire with those of the novel.[5] Satire seemed to provide them with the means to mark out a discursive space in which history as public event could be constructively marshalled into imaginative form. Satire, with its classical pedigree, its inductive logic, its assumptions about the knowability of the reader, and its corrective impulse, becomes the agent for this vindication of conservative principles; it serves, Thomas Mathias contends, as the ' great engine' through which romance can be relegated to the radical 'metaphysical jargonists' and history made the province of the conservatives.[6] This alliance of satire and history within the framework of the anti-Jacobin novel was, however, only briefly sustained. Michael McKeon argues that the 'ideological status of genre, like that of all conceptual categories, lies in its explanatory and problem-solving capacities'.[7] But the problem that the conservative novel was attempting to solve, how to defeat radicalism by subverting political romance while affirming the importance of historical precedent, finally proved extraneous to the changing concerns of eighteenth-century readers. Defining the grounds of its failure allows us to understand the early-nineteenth-century reader's preference for alternative ways of representing time, such as those offered in the historical novel, and in the more private historiographical forms of biography and autobiography. The anti-Jacobin attack on radical writing assumes that credulous and ill-educated readers are beguiled by its two most distinctive characteristics: mere self-referentiality and a preoccupation with the fantastic. George Walker's preface to The Vagabond, for example, denounces the self-important reformers of mankind who, having heated their imaginations, sit down to write political romances, which never were, and never will be practical; but which, coming into the hands of persons as little acquainted with human nature, the history of mankind, and the proofs of religious authenticity, as themselves, hurry the mind away from common life, into dreams of ideal felicity, or, by breaking every moral tie (while they declaim about morals) turn loose their disciples upon the world, to root up and overthrow every thing which has received the sanction of ages, and been held sacred by men of real genius and erudition. …