The Anti‐Jacobin Novel: British Fiction, British Conservatism and the Revolution in France

Abstract

Despite much recent interest in the culture of conservatism and loyalism in late eighteenth‐century Britain, little attention has been paid to the highly conservative fiction of the decade or so either side of 1800. After considering why this has been the case, this article reveals that there were many more of these ‘anti‐Jacobin’ novels than has previously been thought. It then surveys the major themes which run through the novels, binding them together into a coherent literary–political genre. When taken as a whole, rather than as the work of many individual authors, these novels reveal much about the society which bought and borrowed them. As a commodity in a competitive market, rather than as deliberate propaganda, they evolved according to the values and opinions of that readership which, in effect, commissioned them. The way in which they comprehend and portray Jacobinism elucidates how the threat posed to Britain by the French Revolution was actually perceived and understood by a large section of the British population, and the consistent themes of the novels emphasize the points around which the popular conservative campaign was organized in the aftermath of the revolution. Jacobinism emerges as many things, but never as a purely philosophical or political danger. A list of the major anti‐Jacobin novels is appended.