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SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 40.3 (2000) 539-560



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Clock Time and Utopia's Time in Novels of the 1790s

April London


In his Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, To a Noble Lord (1796), the radical John Thelwall argues that the integrity of the principles of "equal rights, and equal laws" must be respected despite the "[e]xcesses and cruelties" of the Terror: "Is time unsteady, because my watch goes wrong? Is it not noon when the sun is in the meridian, because the parish dial is out of repair? Can principles, which are the sun of the intellectual universe, be changed in their nature or their course by the vile actions of a few ruffians?" 1 Thelwall's privileging of a naturally replete order of time over its artificial measure is not simply an occasional, if ingenious, metaphor. 2 For him, as for many radical writers of the period, natural and mechanical time had significant narrative correlatives. The "only means" of securing a future of exactly equal conditions, they believed, was through a "revolution of opinions" that would effect a comprehensive shift of consciousness. 3 Literary forms with the expressive power to make principles appear as constant and self-evident as 'steady' time or the meridian sun would contribute to the achievement of this goal. A radically different future would be made possible by present assertions of transcendent principles.

For numbers of late-eighteenth-century authors, utopian writing appeared the best qualified to elide present and future, to anticipate that "renovation of the natural order of things," Thomas Paine's "counter-revolution," that would restore individuals' inherent rights. 4 The propaganda wars of the period, however, ensured that the tropes of radical utopianism would in turn be appropriated by loyalist writers who adapted them to contrary ends. One effect of this engagement across the political spectrum with the possibilities of alternate social orders and reconstructed individual rights was a significant extension of the genre's scope. As traditional contemplative [End Page 539] definitions came under increasing pressure from the contrary forces of a radical commitment to change and a reactionary anti-Jacobinism, utopias both enlarged their discursive range and actively petitioned readers' sensibilities. The appeal to meditative detachment evident in James Burgh's midcentury version of utopia as "what a good man would wish a nation to be, than the true account of the state of one really existing" was less often issued, and readers were instead invited to enact the new possibilities for individual and political virtue that texts such as Thomas Northmore's Memoirs of Planetes make the natural consequence of repudiating the determining influence of the past. 5

As utopias began to relate such questions of inwardness and history to imagined social structures, neighboring genres (the novel and political disquisition most especially) in turn absorb utopian elements. These migrations across generic boundaries tend to follow paths determined by authorial politics. Radicals pursue their arguments with both history and historiography through romances, political inquiries, and novels that challenge the rule of property as the foundation of civil society. 6 Conservative polemicists, in treatises such as Robert Bisset's Sketch of Democracy and romans à clef like Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, counter with satires that argue from "the testimony of history, and the experience of human nature" the importance of social continuity. 7

These generic transformations and exchanges at once confirm the potential agency literature exercises in the realm of politics and confute the view of utopia as an essentially academic genre whose social force is limited by the "recognition [on the reader's part] that, in terms of practical results, these visions have been powerless and ineffectual." 8 In the late eighteenth century, such readerly skepticism about utopia's efficacy was clearly suspended. The symmetry between established conventions of utopian representation and radical tenets--the plain style, the opposition to nationalism, the faith in reason and in the perfectibility of human nature--afford one explanation for the...

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