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).
