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Introduction Notes Introduction 1. William Godwin, “Essay against re-opening the war with France” (1793), quoted in Mark Philp, “Thompson, Godwin and the French Revolution”, History Workshop Journal 39 (1995), p. 95. 2. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 51. 3. Habermas, p. 56. For examples of feminist responses to Habermas see Nancy Frazer, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–42 and Joan B. Landes, “The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration”, in Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed. Johanna Meehan (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 91–116. Frazer argues that Habermas’s conception of a single public sphere con- sisting of bourgeois men ignores other, competing public spheres. Landes focuses on the way women’s participation in politics in pre-revolutionary and revolution- ary France contests Habermas’s claim for the marginalization of women in the public sphere of discourse. 4. Anne Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 3. 5. Ibid. 6. Thompson briefly acknowledges the political importance of both Wollstonecraft and More. He mentions “the intellectual tradition of Godwin and Mary Woll- stonecraft”, p. 179, as well as her writings on behalf of women’s rights (p. 94) but does not expand his discussion of her work beyond a few passing comments. Regarding More, he writes, “The sensibility of the Victorian middle class was nur- tured in the 1790s by frightened gentry who had seen miners, potters and cutlers reading [Paine’s] Rights of Man, and its foster-parents were William Wilberforce and Hannah More”, p. 57. Nonetheless, in spite of the prominence he assigns her, More and her writings are mentioned later only briefly, anecdotally, in passing. (Wilberforce is discussed more.) Goodwin’s references to Wollstonecraft and More are even briefer. He mentions Wollstonecraft only through her relationship to Godwin, and although he notes the importance of More’s Cheap Repository Tracts – they “outsold even Paine and long outlasted the Loyalist associations which had sponsored them” (p. 265) – that remark is the sole acknowledgement of her, or her work, in his book. Goodwin relates, in passing, to Anna Barbauld and Amelia Opie as members of the Norwich Dissenting circles, but does not discuss their writings. See E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966) and Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 7. Philp, “Thompson, Godwin and the French Revolution”, p. 90. See also Marilyn Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). As Butler writes, Thompson’s view “tends to obscure the 181 182 Notes role of the middle class writer, who ... often remained attached to radicalism until the end of 1796, or later”, p. 233, n. 8. It is significant that other historians, in their work to recover women’s past polit- ical presence, note the need to examine a variety of discursive genres but at the same time continue to overlook, or marginalize the radical group of women writers in the 1790s. For example, Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, in the introduc- tion to their collection of essays, Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) write that “the broadening of the concept of the political also calls for a reappraisal of the genres which might serve to constitute women’s political engagement”, p. 13. However, while their collection includes an essay on Hannah More, it does not include similar contributions on the women writing from the opposite side of the political spectrum. 9. Smith’s lifelong financial struggle is a major theme in her work, appearing in her literary texts themselves and in the prefaces that accompany them. Smith’s strug- gle to raise her large family and to receive her rightful share of her father-in-law’s inheritance has been well-documented. See Judith Phillips Stanton “Charlotte Smith’s ‘Literary Business’: Income, Patronage and Indigence”, The Age of John- son: A Scholarly Annual 1(1987) 375–400, and Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, A Critical Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). Smith’s letters relate her financial situation in meticulous detail, The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. Judith Phillips Stanton (Bloomington and Indianapo- lis: Indiana University Press, 2003). Robinson’s financial distress, resulting, in part, from the Prince of Wales’s delinquency in paying the annuity which he had promised her, is documented by Robinson herself in The Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written By Herself (London: R. Phillips, 1801). See also Judith Pascoe, Introduction, Mary Robinson, Selected Poems, ed. Pascoe (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), pp. 33–4, and Jan Fergus and Janice Farrar Thaddeus, “Women, Publishers and Money, 1790–1820”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Cul- ture 17 (1987), pp. 196–7. For accounts of Inchbald’s early poverty, see James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald: Including her Familiar Correspondence with the most distinguished persons of her time (London: Richard Bentley, 1833) and Annibel Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003). 10. Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 178. 11. Ibid., p. 180. 12. Ibid., pp. 182–92. 13. Influential works on this subject are Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), and Claudia Johnson’s response to Butler, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago and London: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1988). Other important studies of women’s writing in the 1790s include Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) and “Women Writers and the French Revolution Debate: Novelizing the Revolution/Revolutionizing the Novel”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6:4 (1994) 369–88, and Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning and Patriotism 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) for an impor- tant discussion which suggests the broader scope of women’s writing throughout Notes 183 the long eighteenth century. Two collections of essays likewise include important interventions: Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, eds. Adriana Craciun and Kari Lokke (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), and Women, Revolution and the Novels of the 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999). 14. Margaret Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 2. Although Ezell is primarily concerned with pre-1700 women’s writing, she reminds us of the importance of the self-reflexivity that must accompany the presentation of women’s literary history in any historical period in light of an emerging canon, and of the critical pressures that motivate, but also limit that presentation. 15. Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings,p.2. 16. For a comprehensive survey of anti-Jacobin literary works, including many by women, see M.O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The case for More as arguably “the most influential woman living in England during the Romantic period” is persuasively made by Mellor, Mothers of the Nation. See espe- cially Chapter One, “Hannah More, Revolutionary Reformer.” For a discussion that links the radical Helen Maria Williams and Mary Hays together with the loy- alist Elizabeth Hamilton as participants in the cultural revolution that detached the middle classes from the cultural and ideological domination of the aristocracy, see Gary Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution 1790–1827. 17. Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin, p. 150. 18. See, for example, West’s A Tale of the Times (London: Longman and Rees, 1799) and Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) ed. Claire Grogan (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000). A Tale of the Times tells the story of Geraldine Powerscourt, a young heiress who marries the selfish and spoiled Lord Monteith. After four years of relative tranquility, Geraldine meets the devious Fitzosborne, who has returned from France professing revolutionary ideals and a deist phi- losophy, and from the outset plots Geraldine’s seduction. Geraldine, who is also implicitly critiqued for succumbing, because of her own vanity, to Fitzosborne’s flattering advances, is eventually tricked into eloping with him. Soon abandoned, she realizes her errors, and dies of sorrow and remorse. Although West’s novel also puts some of the blame, as it were, on Geraldine, as well as on her ineffec- tual father and husband, the negative energy is firmly located in Fitzosborne and in his identification with reformist theories and ideals. A far less nuanced posi- tion appears in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, in which one of the central figures of the novel, Brigetina Botherim, is an outright caricature of Mary Hays. While Brigetina’s misadventures seem to provide, for Hamilton, some element of comedy (but also exhibit, in the repeated references to her awkward physical appearance and her various humiliations, a strong degree of cruelty) the main threat to social harmony appears in Vallaton, a man of obscure origin who has returned from France promoting republican ideals (as well as explicitly Godwinian beliefs) and plans the seduction of a naïve young woman, Julia Delmond.
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