Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain 1790–1832 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain 1790–1832 M.O. Grenby (bio) Kevin Gilmartin. Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain 1790–1832 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). US$90. xii+316pp. ISBN 978-0521- 86113-7. The conservative culture of Romantic-era Britain is receiving more and more critical attention, and not simply from scholars who themselves subscribe to a conservative political world view, or who have chosen to investigate conservatism only to provide the backdrop for further research into radicalism. The Cheap Repository Tracts and the more overtly political pamphlets of the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers have been the subject of a growing number of articles and monographs. So too have the anti-Jacobin novels written in the 1790s and early 1800s, with some now available in both expensive, highly scholarly editions (from Pickering and Chatto) and as more affordable paperbacks for student use (by Broadview Press). Just at present, one is perhaps more likely to encounter new work on counterrevolutionary figures such as Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, and Elizabeth Hamilton, than on some of the more marginal “Jacobin” authors like Robert Bage, Thomas Holcroft, and Mary Hays. Similarly, the later careers of the first-generation Romantic poets are now attracting more unembarrassed scholarly attention, their much more conservative writing of this period being analysed on its own terms, rather than only because of its difference from, or betrayal of, a previous radicalism. Kevin Gilmartin, then, is not breaking entirely new ground by looking at the conservative side of the 1790s Revolution Debate in Britain and its long aftermath, but his Writing Against Revolution is certainly a [End Page 133] major contribution to this growing field. The book has a chapter on the pamphlet and tract publications of the loyalist associations in the 1790s; another on Hannah More’s Cheap Repository; a third—perhaps the most interesting—on literary reviews and “the function of criticism in the present crisis”; a fourth on counterrevolutionary novels; and a fifth on the conservatism of Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One of the most original aspects of the book is what Gilmartin has consciously left out: there is little on William Wordsworth to accompany the lengthy discussion of Southey and Coleridge, and Edmund Burke is studiously omitted. Gilmartin’s reasons for toppling Burke off the pedestal from which he has dominated almost all discussion of British conservatism are illuminating. Burke should not be allowed to define the counterrevolution, Gilmartin protests, being neither typical nor uncontroversial even among his allies. His achievement has tended to hide the fragmentary nature of British conservatism, Gilmartin explains, for there was as much internal division on the conservative side as scholars now recognize there was among the radicals. But, regardless of this conservative heterodoxy, the central argument of Writing Against Revolution is that the “counterrevolutionary” was a coherent political position, not just an anxious reflex reaction to events and ideas. From this conservative ideology sprang distinctive kinds of literature, Gilmartin insists, all interesting and innovative enough to be worthy of study. This worthiness, the book shows, is just as evident in what have usually been thought of as merely propagandist pamphlets and tracts, or in excitable, sometimes rather paranoid novels, as it is in the writings of Southey and Coleridge, who developed their conservative ideas at substantial length. “To read the Cheap Repository Tracts,” writes Gilmartin, “is to discover a project for social change as thoroughgoing and closely reasoned as anything in Jeremy Bentham or Robert Owen” (71), while he is impressed by the “narrative complexity” and literary experimentalism he finds in anti-Jacobin novels that other scholars have often considered one-dimensional (159). Overall, the case is convincing: we should regard British loyalism in the 1790s, and the conservatism that coalesced in the following decades, in much the same way as we see the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century, as a renewal not merely a response, “a feature of modernity as well as a reaction to it” (11). However, the counterrevolution was built upon a paradox, as Gilmartin recognizes. Britain, conservatives felt, had been set on a trajectory towards revolution...