This study examines how debates about history during the French
Revolution informed and changed the nature of the British novel
between 1790 and 1814. During these years, intersections between
history, political ideology, and fiction, as well as the various
meanings of the term "history" itself, were multiple and far
reaching. Morgan Rooney elucidates these subtleties clearly and
convincingly. While political writers of the 1790s-Burke, Price,
Mackintosh, Paine, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and others-debate the
historical meaning of the Glorious Revolution as a prelude to
broader ideological arguments about the significance of the past
for the present and future, novelists engage with this discourse by
representing moments of the past or otherwise vying to enlist the
authority of history to further a reformist or loyalist agenda.
Anti-Jacobin novelists such as Charles Walker, Robert Bisset, and
Jane West draw on Burkean historical discourse to characterize the
reform movement as ignorant of the complex operations of historical
accretion. For their part, reform-minded novelists such as
Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, and Maria Edgeworth travesty
Burke's tropes and arguments so as to undermine and then redefine
the category of history. As the Revolution crisis recedes, new
novel forms such as Edgeworth's regional novel, Lady Morgan's
national tale, and Jane Porter's early historical fiction emerge,
but historical representation-largely the legacy of the 1790s'
novel-remains an increasingly pronounced feature of the genre.
Whereas the representation of history in the novel, Rooney argues,
is initially used strategically by novelists involved in the
Revolution debate, it is appropriated in the early nineteenth
century by authors such as Edgeworth, Morgan, and Porter for other,
often related ideological purposes before ultimately developing
into a stable, nonpartisan, aestheticized feature of the form as
practiced by Walter Scott. The French Revolution Debate and the
British Novel, 1790-1814 demonstrates that the transformation of
the novel at this fascinating juncture of British political and
literary history contributes to the emergence of the historical
novel as it was first realized in Scott's Waverley (1814).
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