Fighting for Reform

Fighting for Reform The politicisation of the Monthly Review in the aftermath of the French Revolution, 1791 – 1802 Johanne Kristiansen Master's thesis in English literature Department of Modern Foreign Languages NTNU Trondheim, spring 2013 Cover image: 'The Tree of LIBERTY, - with the Devil tempting John Bull' Satirical print by James Gillray (1798) Courtesy of © The Trustees of the British Museum. 1 2 Acknowledgements Spending a whole year cooped up at my reading desk for hours on end, whilst frustratingly trying to piece together the fragments of a master's thesis, was a prospect which I had not been looking particularly forward to. Fortunately, the process of writing my thesis turned out to be quite different from what I had expected. There have certainly been some ups and downs along the way, but, all in all, I have genuinely enjoyed both researching and writing my dissertation. This is partly due to the support and encouragement I have received from the people around me, and I would like to take the following opportunity to thank some of them. First and foremost, I am greatly indebted to my supervisor Paul Goring. You have posed critical questions when they were needed, and guided me in the right direction throughout this whole process. I am truly grateful for your invaluable advice and encouragement along the way. I would furthermore like to thank Professor Harriet Guest at the University of York for initial inspiration. Through her teaching of the module 'Femininity and Literary Culture' in the spring of 2012, I became interested in British politics and society in the 1790s. I would also like to thank Siv-Gøril Brandtzæg for taking the time to discuss my project early in the process, and for directing me to relevant literature on review journalism. Spending all those hours on my thesis would have been much less inspiring if it were not for my friends and my loyal lunch crew. Elisabeth, Terje, Anne Lene, Susann, Atle and Silje: thank you for the countless hours spent procrastinating in the cafeteria. Our lunch breaks were definitely the highlight of my day. A special thank you to Steffen for academic input and for your attentive proofreading of my text. I would also like to thank Lina and Ingeborg for our lovely trip to York. Watching Miss Marple in my pyjamas simply isn't the same without you guys. I am especially indebted to Ingeborg for invaluable moral support, and for patiently listening to the sometimes quite elaborate details of my thesis. I promise to never again mention Thomas Holcroft in your presence. I owe a special thank you to my family for their constant love and support, and for raising me to appreciate the value of literature and language. Last but not least, to Martin, who is always there for me. You are thoroughly awesome, and I love you to pieces. Johanne Kristiansen Trondheim, May 2013 3 4 Table of Contents Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................... 3 Table of Contents.......................................................................................................................... 5 Note............................................................................................................................................... 7 Introduction................................................................................................................................. 9 1.1 Topic & thesis argument.............................................................................................. 9 1.2 Critical practice and method....................................................................................... 12 1.3 The critical field.......................................................................................................... 14 1.4 Thesis outline.............................................................................................................. 18 Chapter 1 Reviewing after the French Revolution: The belletristic approach and the turn to politics, 1791-1793 1.1 The function of the review journal: The belletristic approach to fiction...................................................... 21 1.2 An increased attention to politics: Thomas Holcroft and William Enfield................................................ 25 Chapter 2 The politicisation of the Monthly Review: The fight for reform, 1793-1798 2.1 Debates and political clamour: The aftermath of the French Revolution.............................................. 35 2.2 The 'New Code' of distance: The controversial Thomas Holcroft, and the links to radicalism......... 41 2.3 Defining a political position: 'We are no friends to the sanguinary democrats of France'.................. 52 Chapter 3 A return to the belletristic mode: The abandonment of liberal reform, 1799-1802 3.1 The stifling of liberal reform: the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine....................................................................................... 63 3.2 The importance of the contributors: The withdrawal of Enfield, Aikin and Taylor....................................... 70 3.3 Responding to conservative fiction: The challenge of anti-Jacobin novels................................................... 74 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................... 81 Appendix A: List of contributors to the novel section in the 1790s, and the amount of novels they reviewed............................................................................................. 85 Appendix B: List of reviews with significant political focus in the period 1791-1802.............. 89 Bibliography................................................................................................................................. 93 5 6 Note 1. Reviews of novels by the Monthly Review in the period 1791 – 1802 constitute the empirical foundation for this project. I have compiled this primary material from an online database, namely ProQuest's British Periodicals Collection, which I gained access to as an exchange student at the University of York in the spring of 2012. 2. Throughout the following pages 'Review' indicates a periodical, 'review' an article. 3. The illustrations in this thesis are reproduced by kind permission of © The Trustees of the British Museum. 7 8 Introduction 1.1 Topic & thesis argument This study explores the politicisation of the Monthly Review's novel section as an expression of the democratic potential of review journalism, in the politically significant decade following the outbreak of the French Revolution. The political issues of relevance to this thesis are connected to the moderate reformist claims of religious dissenters, who had been fighting for constitutional reform ever since the outbreak of the American Revolution, and to the radical political movement known as the new philosophers, who sought a drastic social and political reorganization of contemporary society.1 Whereas a second revolution had inspired the religious dissenters into renewed action, the new philosophers were pioneers whose political ambitions were born with the French Revolution. The Monthly Review was the leading book-review periodical of the late eighteenth century, and it is the intention of this thesis to highlight this particular publication as an important resource for politically marginal groups in contemporary British society. Due to their restricted access to powerful positions, religious and political dissenters were forced to make use of other channels in order to promote their civic interests. While numerous histories have been written about the political turmoil of the 1790s in British politics, not all of them, however, point out the importance of print in the ongoing debates. Historians have, nevertheless, over the past twenty years become increasingly preoccupied with not only the nature of the debates themselves, but also the different modes of communication they involved.2 One way of communicating ideas to a wider public was through print, which presented an opportunity for a larger segment of the population to voice opinions that would otherwise have been stifled by the ruling religious and political sentiment. Thus, print culture had intrinsic democratic potential. The main goal of this thesis will be to explore this democratic potential. By arguing for the growing political intervention of the Monthly Review, I suggest that not only was the reviewing format transformed by public debate during the political ferment of the 1790s – public debate was in turn influenced by the contributions of the dissenting Monthly Review. There are many literary genres to choose from when investigating the democratic role of print culture in late eighteenth-century Britain. This thesis focuses on the field of review 1 The new philosophers, or British Jacobins, were notorious for being extreme in methods and ambitions. They were connected to the circle around William Godwin and his wife Mary Wollstonecraft. 2 Chris Evans, Debating the Revolution – Britain in the 1790s (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 2. 9 journalism.3 The main reason for this is that reviewers played a central role in the debates of the 1790s. As H. T. Dickinson and Ulrich Broich argue, '[t]here was an ongoing and heated discussion of the nature and function of literature' in the 1790s, and 'above all in the literary journals of the period'.4 The significance of the Reviews in these debates is partly based on their

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