Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions

213 Pages·1994·3.245 MB·English

by  Nicola J. Watson

Title Pages
Revolution and the Form of the British Novel,
1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted
Seductions
Nicola J. Watson
Print publication date: 1994
Print ISBN-13: 9780198112976
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112976.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Revolution and the Form the British Novel, 1790–1825
(p.v) Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825
(p.vi)
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Title Pages
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© Nicola J. Watson 1994
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Jacket illustration: Le Coterie Debouché. Reproduced by kind
permission of the British Museum, London
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Epigraph
Revolution and the Form of the British Novel,
1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted
Seductions
Nicola J. Watson
Print publication date: 1994
Print ISBN-13: 9780198112976
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112976.001.0001
Epigraph
(p.ii) intercepted correspondence is the order of the day…
Maria Edgeworth, Leonora (1805)
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Illustration
Revolution and the Form of the British Novel,
1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted
Seductions
Nicola J. Watson
Print publication date: 1994
Print ISBN-13: 9780198112976
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112976.001.0001
Illustration
(p.iii) (p.iv)
LE COTERIE DEBOUCHE. Reproduced
by kind permission of the British
Museum, London.
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Dedication
Revolution and the Form of the British Novel,
1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted
Seductions
Nicola J. Watson
Print publication date: 1994
Print ISBN-13: 9780198112976
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112976.001.0001
Dedication
(p.vii) TO MICHAEL
letter-writer extraordinaire
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Acknowledgements
Revolution and the Form of the British Novel,
1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted
Seductions
Nicola J. Watson
Print publication date: 1994
Print ISBN-13: 9780198112976
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112976.001.0001

(p.viii) (p.ix) Acknowledgements
In the course of completing this book, I have worked for three successive
universities (Oxford, Harvard, and Northwestern), and have shuttled backwards
and forwards between England and America on a regular basis. I am therefore
especially grateful to those who, in spite of my multiple changes of address, have
been kind enough to read parts of this study and offer their advice for revisions
and improvements in person or through the mail, in particular Marilyn Butler
(King's College, Cambridge), who devoted a great deal of time, energy, and good
temper to this project in its earlier stages, but also Stephen Gill (Lincoln
College, Oxford), Rita Goldberg (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Larry
Lipking (Northwestern University), Ruth Perry (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology), Jane Spencer (Edinburgh University), Susan Staves (Brandeis
University), Janet Todd (University of East Anglia), and Jonathan Wordsworth (St
Catherine's College, Oxford). Thanks are due, too, to Mary Favret (Indiana
University) for many entertaining and stimulating conversations. I have also
been extremely fortunate in my editor at Oxford University Press, Andrew
Lockett, who has been notably efficient, supportive, and charming, and in my
OUP readers, who have been uniformly rigorous and helpful in their
commentary.
I am particularly delighted also to have the opportunity to make what payment I
can here of the great debt I owe to my parents, Peter and Elizabeth Watson, who
have provided not only consistent encouragement beyond all reasonable
expectation but also, even more valuably, a study and a garden to work in during
my all too short summers in England, not to mention a seemingly inexhaustible
flow of very happy and very welcome suppers when I found myself in the last
throes of preparing the manuscript. Finally, I should like to express my great and
enduring gratitude to Michael Dobson for his indefatigable and much-prized
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Acknowledgements
intellectual, editorial, and personal support, and to dedicate this book to him at
long last and with much affection.
N. J. W.
Lymington, Hampshire August 1992
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Introduction: Revolutionary Letters
Revolution and the Form of the British Novel,
1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted
Seductions
Nicola J. Watson
Print publication date: 1994
Print ISBN-13: 9780198112976
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112976.001.0001
Introduction: Revolutionary Letters
Nicola J. Watson
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112976.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This introductory chapter traces the ways in which the residue of the
sentimental novel was assimilated within the divergent strands of the novel
between 1790 and 1825, regarding these formal innovations as fictional
accommodations of the same cultural anxiety — that crystallized by the French
Revolution. In particular, it examines the fate of the letter within the novel as a
pointer to the changing concerns of literary-political discourse over the period,
thereby offering a coherent account of one neglected and especially pertinent
subgenre at a crucial moment in its evolution. An overview of subsequent
chapters is also presented.
Keywords:   sentimental novel, cultural anxiety, fiction, French Revolution
In a country where morals are on the decline, sentimental novels always
become dissolute. For it is their province to represent the prevalent
opinions; nay, to run forward and meet the coming vice, and to sketch it
with an exaggerating and prophetic pencil. Thus, long before France
arrived at her extreme vicious refinement, her novels had adopted that last
master-stroke of immorality, which wins by the chastest aphorisms, while it
corrupts, by the most alluring pictures of villainy.1
Eaton Stannard Barrett's description of the interconnection between the
‘dissolute’ discourse of the sentimental novel and the adoption of ‘vicious
refinement’—a term which here implies revolution in the State as well as
indiscipline in the family—displays in miniature the intimate relation between
sentimental fiction and radical politics that took on an unprecedented intensity
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Introduction: Revolutionary Letters
in the imagination of the British reading public during the years of the French
Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and their aftermath of social unrest. Barrett

goes on to imagine the fatal rescripting of domesticity by the sentimental plot—
exemplified here, as elsewhere, by Rousseau's epistolary novel La Nouvelle
Héloïse:
Rousseau…has undone many an imitating miss or wife, who began by
enduring the attempts of the libertine, that she might speak sentimentally,
and act virtuously; and who ended by falling a victim to them, because her
heart had become entangled, her head bewildered, and her principles
2
depraved…
(p.2) As the comments of the polemical writer Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins, made
in 1793 after the execution of the French king and at the height of the Terror in
France, would suggest, sentimental discourse could further be accused, by
extension, of complicity in a parallel scenario of seduction, namely full-blown
revolution; she remarks that ‘she who…will easily be persuaded to consider her
husband as an unauthorized tyrant’ is likely to be one ‘who has early imbibed an
aversion towards the kingly character’, an aversion which Hawkins argues is
related both to ‘the dominion allowed to the passions under the specious name
of sentiment’ and to its corollary, the ‘clamour for universal liberty’.3 By 1799,
when England was in the throes of war with France and under threat from both
rebellion in Ireland and ‘seditious’ societies at home, Jane West was even more
emphatic in her dramatization of the specifically political consequences of filial
and marital disobedience, eroticized and supposedly promulgated by the novel of
sensibility:
Should it…be told to future ages, that the capricious dissolubility (if not the
absolute nullity) of the nuptial tie and the annihilation of parental authority
are among the blasphemies uttered by the moral instructors of these
times…they will not ascribe the annihilation of thrones and altars to the
successful aims of France, but to those principles which, by dissolving
domestic confidence and undermining private worth, paved the way for
universal confusion.4
Taken together, these comments characterize the fiction of sentimental

seduction as at once fomenting revolution and perfectly figuring its logic—
seducing its readers into infidelity on all levels. This politicization of sentimental
discourse, on the part of radicals, liberals, and conservatives alike, generated a
range of new narrative models in response, models which it is the project of this
study to map in terms of their political valence. Some writers active during the
1790s following the euphoria engendered by the fall of the Bastille in 1789,
including the radical thinkers William Godwin, (p.3) Mary Hays, Charlotte
Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft, attempted to exploit the individualistic aspects
of the sentimental novel to underwrite their ‘Jacobinical’ anatomies of social ills.
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Introduction: Revolutionary Letters
Others, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Lady Sydney Morgan, and Sir Walter
Scott amongst them, responded to the pronounced conservative backlash that
accompanied domestic hardship and unrest, war with France, and the rise of
Napoleon by attempting to erase forms associated with the plot of sensibility
(notably the epistolary and the first-person memoir) in favour of narrative
strategies which highlighted the disciplining of individual desire by social
consensus to promote what Barrett describes, praising such new moral novels,
5
as ‘national virtue’. Yet others—Charles Maturin, William Hazlitt and James

Hogg among them—responded to Waterloo and Peterloo by producing counter-
fictions critical of conservative versions of social and national consensus.
Solipsistic, fragmentary, and determinedly illegible, these counter-fictions self-
consciously pushed sentimental paradigms to their furthest extreme in order to
fashion revolutionary subjectivities. In what follows, I shall be tracing the ways
in which the residue of the sentimental novel was assimilated within these
divergent strands of the novel between 1790 and 1825, regarding these formal
innovations as fictional accommodations of the same cultural anxiety—that
crystallized by the French Revolution. In particular I shall be examining the fate
of the letter within the novel as a pointer to the changing concerns of literary-
political discourse over the period, thereby offering a coherent account of one
neglected and especially pertinent sub-genre at a crucial moment in its

evolution. More generally, I hope thereby to provide a fresh perspective—
informed above all by contemporary politics—on the experiments in narrative
that characterize the closing years of the eighteenth century and the early
decades of the nineteenth, in order to illuminate the hitherto largely unexplained
transformation of the eighteenth-century novel into the forms more
characteristic of the nineteenth century.6
(p.4) I
The perhaps rather startling contention that revolutionary politics were
understood crucially in terms of sentimental fiction—and in particular the plot of
a single novel, La Nouvelle Héloïse—calls for some amplification; before going
any further, therefore, I want to detail some of the ways in which the logic of
Rousseau's plot came to inform much of the discourse stimulated by the
Revolution in England, to the point where even the most passing allusion to its
heroine, Julie, might operate as a convenient shorthand for multiple anxieties
surrounding female sexuality, national identity, and class mobility. The plot of
unfolding revolution was, as I have already suggested, commonly understood by
contemporaries as a plot of seduction (frequently across class lines);7 so it was
that the ‘novel of sensibility’ came to serve as such an important narrative
matrix in the period. While this is a notoriously slippery genre to pin down, it
can be said that for contemporaries the paradigmatic sentimental plot of
seduction, occasioning extravagant displays of feeling recorded at length in
impassioned correspondence, was descended in its mainstream on the one hand
from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa8 and on the other from its most influential
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