Radical Utopias: History and the Novel in the 1790s April London In their highly speculative engagements with alternative forms, utopias deny the determining power of history in ways that often serve as a rich source for the study of historical consciousness in literature. This is especially true of utopias written in the 1790s, a decade in which the revolutionary crisis made the meaning and uses of history key subjects of debate, and the conversion of readers an issue of fundamental concern to both reformers and conservatives.1 Reformers ofdie period attempt to disavow the influence ofthe past by representing historical narrative not as transparent or disinterested , but instead as determined by partisan defence ofelite privilege. To convince their audience that a genuinely different future could be secured through social change, they embed this mistrust of history writing within texts that propose more discretionary and private models for interpreting the pastand anticipating the future.2 Utopian 1 On the intersections of politics and literature during the revolutionary crisis, and, in particular, on the contributions ofWilliam Godwin and Edmund Burke, see Marilyn Butler, "Introductory Essay," Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolutionary Controversy, ed. Marilyn Buder (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1984);SeamusDeane, TheFrench Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789-1832 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) ChrisJones, RadicalSensibility: Literature and Idea in the 179Os (London: Roudedge, 1993) Paul Keen, The Crisis ofLiterature in the 1 790s: Print Cultureand thePublicSphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); John Whale, Imagination under Pressure 1789-1832. Aesthetics, Politics and Utility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 2 In doing so, these Utopian novels could be seen to participate in the expansion of historiography to accommodate die private and social models of relationship analysed by Mark Salber Phillips in Society andSentiment: Genres ofHistorical Thought in Britain, 1740-1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION.Volume 16, Number 4,JuIy 2004 784 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION novels met the radicals' need for a form that could help them both to question the value ofhistory (as event and record) and to alleviate the problems they encountered in arguing the merits of the unknown over the familiar.' Despite such compelling reasons for its rapid development in the 1790s, radical Utopian fiction is very nearly a moribund form by decade's end. Both internal and extrinsic factors played a part in the brief efflorescence and decline of these Utopian novels. The internal factors relate to questions ofgenre, and in particular, to the difficulty of aligning quite different modes of writing: historiographical critique, advocacy of transhistorical utopias, and novelistic development ofplot and character. The extrinsic pressures on Utopian fiction were, in turn, supplied by the dynamics ofan expanding print culture. Alert to the ways in which print had been used by loyalists to subdue dissent, and convinced that the same means could be directed to the contrary end ofgalvanizing public opinion in favour ofrevolutionary change, the radical utopianists were at the same time distrustful ofthe passions excitedbyreading.4 Equivocal responses to readingaudiences, however, did not belong to the radicals alone. Their anxiety about the potentially corrupting agency ofprint overlaps with parallel, although The refinement of die dialogue form and the incorporation of short narratives within political pamphlets are comparable developments. See, for examplejames Parkinson, The VillageAssociation or ThePolitics ofEdley in Political Writings ofthe 1790s. Volume 4. Radicalism andReform, 1 793-1800, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: William Pickering, 1995), pp. 21-47. Claeys notes diat part ofdie pamphlet, entitled TheSoldier's Tale, was reprinted separately. Radical utopianists saw die plain style as a possible corrective to diis rousing ofdie passions. The narrator ofThomas Northmore's Memoirs ofPlanètes üius details how in die "literary works [ofdie ideal society ofthe Makarians] you will find no superfluous argument, and much less ofdie flowers of rhetorick, as diey are called, dian might have been expected. Plain, simple facts, and energetic reasoning are their predominant features. I am sure my countrymen will be overjoyed to hear diat some oftheir best works are comprized in one or two octavo volumes. Nay, I have frequendy seen a small duodecimo diat would have put Hoadly to die blush." [Thomas Noruimore,] Memoirs ofPlanètes, OrA Sketch oftheLaws and Manners ofMakar. by Phileleutherus Devoniensis (1795) in...
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Apr 1, 2008
Barry Keith Grant 
Open Access