Jacobin novel information

Jacobin novels were written between 1780 and 1805 by British radicals who supported the ideals of the French Revolution. 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. Canning chose to tar British reformers with the French term for the most radical revolutionaries: Jacobin. Among the Jacobin novelists were William Godwin, Robert Bage, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Charlotte Turner Smith.^[1]

The genre began in an attempt to make revolutionary thought more entertaining and easier to comprehend for the lower order. On the midst of the French Revolution, literacy was growing amongst the lower classes, the mass behind the revolutionaries. “A reading public had become a revolutionary public.”^[2]

The Jacobin novelists used this literacy to swell their radical beliefs throughout the lower classes. The Jacobin novelists adapted the romance novel structure into radical political subjects. The Jacobins cleverly blended their revolutionary principles into engaging, fantastical tales of honor, cruelty, and power. The Jacobin novelists were able to reach a massive non-intellectual demographic, which was generally apolitical, through this new genre.

The Jacobin novel, most quintessentially represented in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), attacked the established social and political order. Along with William Godwin, some of the major Jacobin novelists include Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, and the earliest, Robert Bage. Of all these authors, Godwin was the most effective and outstanding. Almost all of the Jacobin novels reflect theories and principles of Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Although it is not a novel, it is the foundation that the goals of the Jacobin novelists’ are based upon.

In Godwin's novel, Caleb Williams, the protagonist is a devoutly honorable man who is cast into a “theater of calamity” by unforeseen circumstances. Throughout Caleb's entire journey, whenever he comes in contact with any forms of government or institutions of law he is cruelly and wrongfully castigated. Godwin's novel is an illustration of the effects of an abusive and tyrannical government, it reveals the devastating effects that established power can result in.

The Jacobin novel was especially significant because its audience was the masses. The Jacobins’ message, although superficially simple, was very complex, and in the opinion of the conservatives, too complex for the lower order to understand. 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. The Jacobin novel led to a great anxiety by the government and the middle and upper classes. At one point there was even a suggestion to create a new tax on books in order to discourage literacy among the poor. In order to defend against these revolutionaries another genre was born, the anti-Jacobin novel.