Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s (review)

A.A. Markley's book is a testament to how far scholarship on late eighteenth-century political fiction has come. Markley provides a welcome overview of a pivotal period in the development of the novel and a coherent analysis of a wide variety of texts that advocate reform and strive to alter public opinion. The strength of this well-researched, lucidly written book lies in its range and cohesiveness. Markley's broad perspective rightfully blurs the borders of what has been traditionally called "English Jacobin" fiction and firmly integrates these reformist texts in the history of the novel in the long eighteenth century. The sheer number of novels included in this study impresses. While Markley's focus is on the 1790s, he includes texts published before and after this pivotal decade. Some of the novels are well known to readers of the 1790s: William Godwin's Caleb Williams, Thomas Holcroft's Hugh Trevor, and Mary Wollstonecraft's Wrongs of Woman. Others are far less familiar: Anna Maria Mackenzie's Slavery; or, The Times, George Walker's Theodore Cyphon; or, The Benevolent Jew, Thomas Northmore's Memoirs of Planetes, and the anonymous Excursion of Osman. Markley unifies his analysis of these diverse novels by organizing his readings around the authors' goals of reform and by establishing conceptual attributes common to each of the novels: "a commitment to the rights of the individual"; "a devotion to the idea that reason could and must triumph over convention"; and "a conviction that reform could best be achieved by working to alter 'the private and internal operations of the mind' of the individual" (3).

Markley argues that the novelists' method of "conversion" was to operate on the mind of the individual reader. The epigraph to the book—a quotation from Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1796 edition)—is a concise statement of just such a view. By 1796, after the French Reign of Terror, Godwin is quick to observe that a "revolution of opinions is the only means of attaining to this benefit"—that is, the benefit of social and political reform (xix). Markley's argument and Godwin's observation are pertinent reminders of how measured were British reform efforts, particularly in the latter part of the revolutionary decade in light of developments in France. This restrained and sober perspective also explains why reformers turned to the novel as a mechanism of reform. Markley's assertion that authors saw potential in the novel for "fostering a revolution of opinions one reader at a time" (5) is supported by ample textual evidence.

One of the advantages of Markley's focus on the novel's reformation of public opinion is that it allows him to address many subjects of reform—the status of women, slavery, race, aristocratic privilege—and to account for the subtle differences in approaches to reform. The first two chapters of the book draw on many of the now-canonical texts of the 1790s, such as Helen Maria Williams's Julia and Robert Bage's Hermsprong, to outline the multiple facets of the reformist hero: the figure of sensibility, the noble savage, and the young philosopher. The varying types of heroes found in these texts not only illustrate Markley's point that authors struggled to find the right balance of reason and sensibility in their reformist characters, but they also support Markley's contention that novels of the 1790s are complex and richly varied. The second chapter addresses the status of women, focusing on the motif of incarceration, which is indeed pervasive, and the use of the Gothic, which was also widespread in reformist fiction. In both chapters, Markley firmly embeds the reformist texts in the development of the novel through the eighteenth century, elucidating connections to Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne.

The last three chapters take the reader into less familiar terrain, looking at representations of African characters to examine...