Jacobin novel

The term was coined by literary scholar Gary Kelly in The English Jacobin Novel 1780-1805 (1976) but drawn from the title of the Anti-Jacobin: or, Weekly Examiner, a conservative periodical founded by the Tory politician George Canning.

“A reading public had become a revolutionary public.”[2] The Jacobin novelists used this literacy to swell their radical beliefs throughout the lower classes.

Along with William Godwin, some of the major Jacobin novelists include Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, and the earliest, Robert Bage.

In Godwin's novel, Caleb Williams, the protagonist is a devoutly honorable man who is cast into a “theater of calamity” by unforeseen circumstances.

The reactionaries believed that the Jacobin novels were incredibly dangerous because they put ideas of revolution in the minds of those who couldn't fully understand the concept.

These reactionaries saw this blend of political thought into the fiction novel as radical, even anarchistic, propaganda that the Jacobins were tricking the non-intellectual lower order into supporting.

The novel includes numerous direct quotations of Godwin's doctrine and illustrates its application, with satirically dreadful results.

Along with Walker there were Elizabeth Hamilton, Robert Bisset, Henry James Pye, Charles Lloyd, Jane West, and Edward Dubois.

Simply put, the goal of the anti-Jacobins was to defeat radicalism by challenging the blend of political treatise and romance while maintaining the importance of truth and history.