The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790–1814 by Morgan Rooney (review)

Edmund Burke’s response to Richard Price’s Discourse on the Love of Our Country began a debate on the significance of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Morgan Rooney argues that, in the pamphlet war that Burke’s Reflections instigated, the debate rapidly became one in which each of two rival ideologies might properly claim to have history on its side. Rooney supports his argument by examining a “representative” selection of texts. Since a text is identified as representative only if it accommodates “a sustained engagement with the period’s historical discourses” (4), the argument is circular, but this is not a matter of great concern because the contention will strike most students of the period as pretty much self-evident. Rooney’s first two chapters set out this argument with admirable concision and clarity. His originality lies in his insistence that the debate was asymmetrical. It was a contest in which Burke emerged as the victor. This was not necessarily because, as earlier conservative historians have argued, events—the guillotining of Louis xvi and Marie-Antoinette, the Terror, the outbreak of war between Britain and Revolutionary France—proved Burke right (although Rooney has some sympathy with this view), but because Burke was able to enlist in his support a trope more powerful than any that his opponents could muster. The freedoms that the British enjoyed were not natural rights but came to them as an inheritance, bequeathed to them by their ancestors. The constitution resembled one of Britain’s great estates: the present owners were custodians, whose duty was to pass on the estate, undiminished and, if possible, improved, to the next generation. For the radical reformers, by contrast, historical development was a competitive process in which ideas were contested, and either refuted or confirmed. The great engine of this process was the printing press, and the press also serves as the most powerful symbol of the process (52–53), but it did not prove powerful enough to counter Burke’s vision of a historical development secured by a process of legitimate inheritance.

Not all Rooney’s readers will accept that Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, James Mackintosh, and William Godwin were so clearly bested in argument, but for Rooney the compelling evidence is supplied by the history of the English novel in the two decades that followed the pamphlet war. The anti-Jacobin novelists constructed fictions in which threats to legitimate inheritance are averted, and the reforming novelists responded by accepting the primacy of Burke’s metaphor. Their plots also hinge on inheritance, but subject the heritable principle to a sceptical scrutiny. This is the argument pursued in Rooney’s third and fourth chapters, which are valuable because Rooney grants equal representation to anti-Jacobin and Jacobin fiction, challenging a critical consensus that has until now privileged the voice of the reformers. His choice of representative novels is odd though. The anti-Jacobins are represented by George Walker’s The Vagabond, Jane West’s A Tale of the Times, and Robert Bisset’s Douglas. The novel of reform is represented by Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House, Godwin’s St Leon, and Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. It is an asymmetrical selection, but not in the sense that Rooney proposes. The Old Manor House and Castle Rackrent were successful novels. Bisset’s Douglas, to take the most extreme example, attracted little notice when it was published in 1800 and disappeared into oblivion until its reissue in 2005 as one of a selection of anti-Jacobin novels. Rooney’s case, I suppose, is that Smith and Edgeworth, by their use of plots that centre on inheritance, attest to the power of the Burkean trope. But before the pamphlet war just as much as afterwards novels very often centred on problems of inheritance: Tom Jones, The Castle of Otranto, The Romance of the Forest. Rooney invokes the notion of “reframing” to...