Anti-Jacobin Novels
2006; Temple University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2640-7310
Autores Tópico(s)Scottish History and National Identity
ResumoW. M. Verhoeven, General Ed., Claudia L. Johnson, Consulting Ed., Anti-Jacobin Novels (Pickering and Chatto 2005) 5 vols. 2144. $750 Vol. VI Anonymous, Berkeley Hall; or, The Pupil of Experience, ed. W. M. Verhoeven Vol. VII Jane West, Tale of Times, ed. Amanda Gilroy Vol. VIII Isaac D'Israeli, Vaurien: or, Sketches of Times, ed. Nicola Trott Vol. IX Sophia King, Waldorf; or, The Dangers of ed. Adriana Craciun Edward Dubois, St. Godwin: Tale of Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Robert Miles Vol. X Charles Lucas, The Infernal Quixote: Tale of Day, ed. Mary Peace Godwin's person is not known, wrote William Hazlitt in 1825, is not pointed out in street, his conversation is not courted, his opinions are not asked. Twenty-five years earlier situation could hardly have been more different. As leading exponent of New Philosophy, Godwin blazed as a sun in radical firmament. No one more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, Hazlitt enthused. And one, he might have added, was more reviled. Conservatives saw him as a corrosive threat to established order, and they affixed his name to everything from political treachery to sexual mania. Anti-Jacobins novelists were at forefront of these campaigns, lampooning or deploring him with a vigor that often blissfully unaware of what he actually wrote and said. This edition of conservative novels, now complete in ten volumes, features composites and caricatures of Godwin that range from inspired to petty, and reveals ways in which key Anti-Jacobin novelists sought to remove creeping Godwinian infection from England's vulnerable body politic. In Vaurien: or, Sketches of Times (1797), Isaac D'Israeli focuses London but effectively surveys ideas and personalities that were defining 1790s Britain. Fast-paced and loosely-structured, novel is stuffed with gossip, erudition, and spoof. typical chapter contains A Committee of Public Safety. Massacre. An universal Peace. Grammar and Reason (8: 204). At center of action is English Everyman, Charles Hamilton, son of a pious country clergyman, who visits London and places himself under patronage of Lord Belfield, one of wealthiest men in England but also one of most deluded, for he listens closely to sirens of modern philosophy. Godwin is featured in novel as great metaphysician Mr. Subtile. potted biography sketches in popular perception. Subtile exulted that he sprang from dregs of people. He no idler and populated his imagination with romances. Leaving home without affection of a son, he soon addicted himself to literary pursuits, the enjoyment of opulence, and the wealth of poverty. Ten years consumed in a solitary garret, where he learnt to reason, but he forgot to feel (8: 31-3). At one point French emigre and villain Vaurien debates with Subtile: You ... prove that man is a stone, and then, that a stone is not a man, Vaurien inquires, to which Subtile proudly replies, I can (8: 211). Eventually Vaurien is deported and sails for Holland, accompanied by or three philosophers ... whom o'erpressed stomach of England had disgorged with a violent, but a salutary effort (8: 228). Godwin's pernicious notions on marriages, promises, free-will, and many other subjects shape some main distresses in novel, and in end he must be expelled (8: 302). Jane West's Tale of Times (1799) takes place in England in 1793-94, during Robespierre's Reign of Terror in France, and, as in Vaurien, there is a good deal of traffic between two countries. The narrator, Prudentia Homespun, reach near hysteria topic of noxious revolutionary sentiment, particularly as it relates to female conduct and decline of England's morals. …
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