ClockTime and Utopia's Time in the Novels of the 1790s

7/28/2019 ClockTime and Utopia's Time in the Novels of the 1790s

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April London 539SEL 40, 3 (Summer 2000) 539ISSN 0039-3657

April London, Professor of English at the University of Ottawa in Canada, has recentlypublished Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel.

Clock Time and Utopias Timein Novels of the 1790s

APRIL LONDON

In his Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter ofthe Right Hon. Edmund Burke, To a Noble Lord (1796), the radical JohnThelwall argues that the integrity of the principles of equal rights, and equallaws must be respected despite the [e]xcesses and cruelties of the Ter-ror: Is time unsteady, because my watch goes wrong? Is it not noon whenthe sun is in the meridian, because the parish dial is out of repair? Canprin-

ciples, which are the sun of the intellectual universe, be changed in theirnature or their course by the vile actions of a few ruffians?1 Thelwalls privi-leging of a naturally replete order of time over its artificial measure is notsimply an occasional, if ingenious, metaphor.2 For him, as for many radical

writers of the period, natural and mechanical time had significant narra-tive correlatives. The only means of securing a future of exactly equalconditions, they believed, was through a revolution of opinions that

would effect a comprehensive shift of consciousness.3 Literary forms withthe expressive power to make principles appear as constant and self-evi-dent as steady time or the meridian sun would contribute to the achieve-ment of this goal. A radically different future would be made possible bypresent assertions of transcendent principles.

For numbers of late-eighteenth-century authors, utopian writing ap-peared the best qualified to elide present and future, to anticipate thatrenovation of the natural order of things, Thomas Paines counter-revo-lution, that would restore individuals inherent rights.4 The propaganda

wars of the period, however, ensured that the tropes of radical utopianismwould in turn be appropriated by loyalist writers who adapted them tocontrary ends. One effect of this engagement across the political spectrum

with the possibilities of alternate social orders and reconstructed individualrights was a significant extension of the genres scope. As traditional con-


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540 Novels of the 1790s

templative definitions came under increasing pressure from the contraryforces of a radical commitment to change and a reactionary anti-Jacobinism,utopias both enlarged their discursive range and actively petitioned read-ers sensibilities. The appeal to meditative detachment evident in JamesBurghs midcentury version of utopia as what a good man would wish anation to be, than the true account of the state of one really existing wasless often issued, and readers were instead invited to enact the new possi-bilities for individual and political virtue that texts such as ThomasNorthmoresMemoirs ofPlanetes make the natural consequence of repu-diating the determining influence of the past.5

As utopias began to relate such questions of inwardness and history toimagined social structures, neighboring genres (the novel and political dis-quisition most especially) in turn absorb utopian elements. These migrationsacross generic boundaries tend to follow paths determined by authorialpolitics. Radicals pursue their arguments with both history and historiog-raphy through romances, political inquiries, and novels that challenge therule of property as the foundation of civil society.6 Conservative polemi-cists, in treatises such as Robert Bissets Sketch of Democracy and romans

cleflike Elizabeth HamiltonsMemoirs of Modern Philosophers, counterwith satires that argue from the testimony of history, and the experienceof human nature the importance of social continuity.7

These generic transformations and exchanges at once confirm the po-tential agency literature exercises in the realm of politics and confute the

view of utopia as an essentially academic genre whose social force is limitedby the recognition [on the readers part] that, in terms of practical results, these

visions have been powerless and ineffectual.8 In the late eighteenth century,such readerly skepticism about utopias efficacy was clearly suspended.The symmetry between established conventions of utopian representa-tion and radical tenetsthe plain style, the opposition to nationalism, thefaith in reason and in the perfectibility of human natureafford one ex-

planation for the genres resurgence (and provide the contexts for conser-vative deconstruction).9 Paul Alkon and Darko Suvin have suggested thata literary climate of formal experimentation and larger cultural changes inthe perception of time encouraged by the new geology, theories of bibli-cal evolution, and the emergent industrial revolution were also determin-ing influences.10 My interest here, however, is less with the formal utopiasthat have been the primary focus of critical attention; I want instead to con-sider the significant number of late-century novels that incorporate uto-pian episodes into works otherwise shaped by realist conventions.11 Thesetexts range across the political spectrum and vary accordingly in their pre-scriptions: from defending the present constitution of things (Dorothea;


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or A Ray of the New Light, HamiltonsMemoirs of Modern Philosophers),through suggestions for amendments to the present order (Berkeley Hall;or, The Pupil of Experience, George Cumberlands Captive of the Castle ofSennaar, Clara Reeves Plans of Education, and F. C. Patricks The IrishHeiress), to arguments for substantial change (Henry Willoughby). In theirslippages from novelistic development of plot and character, to politicaldisquisition, to interrogations of historical method, these fictions stake anactive claim to participation in what Thelwall described as this busy, literary,disputatious age.12 Their utopian interludes appear in this context as highlyspecialized examples of a late-eighteenth-century generic indeterminacythat licensed fictions exercising of genuine authority in the formation ofpublic opinion. As Thelwalls phrase suggests, the disputatiousness of theage depended on an active readerly engagement with a much-expandedand unsettled literary domain.

Enlarging the definition of utopian literature to include these hybridtexts does more, however, than simply give us a fuller sense of the distinc-tiveness of the period. In this instance, recognition of normative featuresmakes apparent the significant continuities between representations of time

and history in the 1790s and in early-nineteenth-century fiction.13

The mod-ern tendency to read the brief efflorescence of utopian writing in the 1790sas completely tied to specific political conditions has fostered the miscon-ception that nothing of lasting narrative significance could have survivedthe revolutionary decade. In fact, as I will argue in the final section of thispaper, the frequent use of utopian themes and devices in late-eighteenth-century fiction plays an important role in the early-nineteenth-century for-mation of both the historical novel and the national tale. But first, in orderto place these hybrid fictions, I will consider Northmores Memoirs ofPlanetes, a text that exemplifies formal utopias in its pursuit of social analy-sis by way of a critique of language practices and of contemporary histori-ography.

I

In the opening address to the reader of Northmores Memoirs ofPlanetes, or a Sketch of the Laws and Manners of Makar(1795), the narratordeclares that his text will prepare the minds of men for the governmentbest calculated to ensure the happiness of mankind despite resistancefrom those who brand [him] with the titles of visionary and theorist. Butlet us allow them the use of this favourite weapon. Is theory to be despisedbecause not immediately reducible to practice? Reason, Newton, and phi-losophy answer in the negative; it is corruption and desperation only that


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vociferate the affirmative.14 Throughout theMemoirs of Planetes, this po-tential identification of the visionary and the theoretical with utopian writ-ing is realized in terms that overtly politicize many of the standard featuresof the genre. The entry into the imagined culture of Makar by way of anaccident that takes the travelers off course is entirely conventional, for in-stance. But in using the separation of the narrator Planetes and his com-panion Lawrence from their shipmates as the occasion for disquisitionson prison reform and the need to listen to the complaints of the lowerclasses of people, Northmore grafts onto the customary plot device argu-ments drawn directly from treatises such as William Godwins Enquiryconcerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness.15

The logic of such intertextuality is elaborated in the works ongoingconcern with issues relating to language. The Makarians commitment to[p]lain simple facts, and energetic reasoning in their literary works alignsthem with what Mary Wollstonecraft regards as the radical mandate tosimplif[y] the principles of social union, so as to render them easy to becomprehended by every sane and thinking being.16 In the service of thisideal, cross-generic quotation became normative, as radical writers, act-

ing on the conviction that it was impossible for the world to become gen-erally ignorant again, as it was before the art of printing, exploit that happyinvention to make political theory accessible by integrating it with fiction.17

TheMemoirs of Planetes thus typically draws on the ideas, narrative tech-niques, and specific social programs of writers such as Godwin, Paine, andThomas Holcroft. (Conversely, the Makarians reject the superfluous ar-gument and flowers of rhetorick that Burkes opponents deemed hisstylistic signature.)18 As in many radical texts, the advocacy here of unre-stricted access to knowledge shades into an argument for a standard lan-guage that effectively translates the impulse toward uniformity central tolate-century imperialism into the sphere of learning.19 When Planetes que-ries the bilingualism of the Makarian colonists, the guide figure Othono

informs him that every nation, whether black or white, that traffics withus, brings up some if not all of its children to speak the Makar tongue withits own, and indeed it is now become a sort of universal language. A mostexcellent institution, said I, I wish our tardy Europeans would do likewise.

We are always complaining of the want of an universal medium, but havenot spirit enough to put it into execution.20 Here and throughout theMem-oirs of Planetes, Planetes mediates between his own cultures deficienciesand Makarian achievements, drawing the readers attention to the ease with

which tardy Europeans could enter into a more rewarding present byadopting the radical program. As the experience of the colonized peoplesand of Planetes himself confirms, reformation is ideally a process as pain-


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less as learning a new language and as natural as adjusting social struc-tures to fit contemporary concerns.

Planetes assiduous efforts to acquire a decent vocabulary are di-rected by his sense that the knowledge of that government from whichsuch innumerable blessings could be derived, was of more value in myestimation than all the riches in the world.21 Othono agrees but sounds a

warning note about the impermanence even of achieved perfection: Theyare blessings indeed . . . and have not been acquired without tumult, but

we have now enjoyed them for so many years that the people think not oftheir value.22 Othonos words speak reassuringly to the ease with whichthe exceptional becomes normative, an issue of considerable moment tothe English given the disruptive force of the Terror in France. But they also

voice a complex awareness of the dangers of complacency that is consis-tent with the orientation toward individual sensibilities so distinctively afeature of 1790s utopias.23 That orientation seems, in turn, related to a moredeeply historicized understanding of politics than formerly encounteredin works of this genre. The conversational mode provides an appropri-ately dialogic model for conveying this sense of the variability of political

experience, as Planetes confers with Euthus, a great actor in the Revolu-tion who had once contributed to the extirpation of a system of tyranny.24

The past system of Makarian tyranny, in the careful layering of utopianand actual societies that this work establishes, corresponds to the presentstate of England. Since Planetes knew almost from [his] first arrival thatthe Makarians were nearly a century before us in civilization,25 he is reluc-tant to fulfill his interlocutors request for a full account of English society.In reassuring him, Euthus presents an evolutionary model of social devel-opment that tacitly answers the charges leveled by the anti-Jacobins of aradical inattention to historical precedent:

Be under no fear, young man; if you have not yet made such

progress in civilization as the Makarians, you should recollect thatwe are not arrived at perfection, but have several links in the greatchain of human happiness to fill up; nor ought we to repine at this,nothing is stable that does not approach gradually to its consum-mation; to build an edifice that will last for ages, it must be a workof time. Since then all governments are more or less imperfect, it isour duty to glean the virtues of each, and by applying them to ourown country, endeavour thereby to remedy its defects and in-crease its welfare.26


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The metaphor of links in the great chain gestures toward the very tradi-tional figure for reciprocal order articulated in Alexander PopesEssay onMan. But in making it descriptive of a projected, utopian state, Northmoreconverts the Augustan hierarchical model into a dynamic and generativeone. He also counters the charges of anti-Jacobin writers such as ThomasMathias and Bisset that the radicals cannot make use of the inductivemethod of writing history because they do not conceive of the past as aconnected narrative.27 From Euthuss point of view, in fact, meditation onthe past allows social construction to be a work of time that is both con-tinuous and organically coherent.

Euthuss adaptation of the chain of human happiness as a metaphorfor the continuity between past and present is contrasted with the terms ofclassical historiography that structure his description of prerevolutionaryMakar (the state that resembles present-day England). The old Makariankings, he tells Planetes, determined that constant warfare provided the mostefficient means of subduing the populace. Northmore annotates this com-ment with a quotation from the 1779Encyclopedia Britannica: Some ofmy readers may be surprised to hear that this was the dying injunction of

Henry IV. He advised his son, never to let the English people remain longin peace, which was apt to breed intestine commotions; but to employ theminforeign expeditions, by which the prince might acquire honour, thenobility insharing his dangers might attach themselves to his person, andall the restless spirits find occupation for their inquietude (p. 167). In therelation of text to commentary, the two Henrys are used to mark the be-ginning of a chronologically organized political history that extends fromthe fifteenth century through actual present-day England to imaginedprerevolutionary Makar. Conditions within contemporary Makar, however,demand a different narrative, one whose meanings are best understood asa displaced version of the English revolutionary debate of the 1790s.

The eclipse of the old Makarian order, Euthus recounts, began with an

alteration in the climate of public opinion as several patriotic writers ofabilities and virtues started freely to discuss the subject of government ingeneral (p. 168). Since it had ever been a favourite maxim with me, neverentirely nor at once to depart from antiquity, he had attempted withoutsuccess to give those in power every possible warning of its [an armedinsurrections] approach, that by timely reformation they might have pre-

vented it (p. 172). In the context of a utopian text designed to serve as justthis sort of timely warning to the English government, his failure to haltthe call to arms gives the imminent threat of revolutionary violence addi-tional weight. Ultimately the Makarian conflict, however, is resolvedthrough debate, as the citizens meet to consider the relative merits of a lim-


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ited monarchy and a representative republic. The advocates of the formersupport the argument for its utility by drawing on the anti-Jacobinpathologizing of radicals, including the often repeated accusation that theyare simply artful and designing men, who had no other object in view thanto work upon the passions of the people, and thereby make them a step-ladder to their own exaltation (p. 173).28 But the republican defense tri-umphs because of the ease with which its proponents dismantle each ofthe arguments advanced by the conservatives, proving finally that the bestgovernments contribute to their own dissolution by encouraging the in-nate perfectibility of man in the unregulated and perpetual practice ofjustice and truth (p. 177). The narrative model of negotiated public opin-ion, in other words, triumphs over that afforded by classical historiogra-phy, with its plots of [c]onquest and tyranny detailing the governmentof the sword and imposing the authority of the dead over the rights andfreedom of the living.29

The formal defense of the radical program in theMemoirs closely re-sembles that pursued in contemporary fiction. HolcroftsAnna St. Ives, forexample, uses a similar technique of diminishment by appropriation, em-

bodying the conservative position in the villain Coke Clifton in order byargument to discredit it. While the radicals share this strategy with the anti-Jacobins (who deploy it to great effect throughout the 1790s propagandawars), the alignments of style and politics differ. Radical texts tend to stagetheir diminishment of the conservatives through carefully orchestratedconversations in which their opponents voice opinions which are thenlogically disassembled in order to forward the revolutionary alternatives.The anti-Jacobins forgo this conversational mode for the more direct as-saults of parody, as evidenced in the characterization of BridgetinaBotherim, whose misconstructions of Godwinian doctrine in HamiltonsMemoirs of Modern Philosophers link radicalism with female imbecility.30

While there are significant family resemblances in the narrative strate-

gies adapted by both fictional and nonfictional radical texts, novelisticrepresentations display a specific interest in questions of inwardness. In atypical formal utopia such as Northmores Memoirs, inwardness is princi-pally of issue as it relates to a peoples historical memory, as in Euthusslament over the Makarians disregard for the lessons they should have re-tained from the prerevolutionary period. In the anonymous HenryWilloughby. A Novel(1798), in contrast, issues of individual character arecentral to the authors attempt to argue from a particular case the prospectsof social happiness.

The first volume ofHenry Willoughby traces the subjugation of theorphaned hero by the religious, legal, linguistic, and military tyrannies of


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the propertied. As in Godwins Caleb Williams (1794), institutional affilia-tion becomes a mark of corruption, while those of marginal status (smugglers,thieves, hack writers, magazine editors) have both an unstudied generos-ity of spirit and a shrewd sense of the ubiquity of injustice in a commodityculture. From a fellow sufferer with whom he was once press-ganged,Henry learns the alternative to things as they are as Monthermer describesAnachoropolis, or the town of retirement.31 This Mississippi settlementfulfills Godwins vision in Political Justice of a perfect future order: in theabsence of private property, labour becomes a pleasure rather than a task;by encouraging the utmost latitude of scepticism (2:238), the inhabitantshave vanquished the illusions of bigotry and ensured the equitableempire of philosophy and truth (2:2401); by enacting a systematicalcourse of education (2:246), they enable all citizens to appl[y their] knowl-edge to the advantage of the community (2:270). The orientation of learn-ing toward the collective good leads them to privilege the insights garneredfrom the philosophers of past ages; the page of history, in contrast, sup-plies only monitory instances of the vices and luxuries of Europe (2:268).Henry, convinced by this account to bid adieu to distress and despair,

decides to accompany Monthermer back to Anachoropolis and spend theremainder of his life in the enjoyment of ease and tranquillity (2:287).Anachoropolis will provide not only an escape from the historical certaintyof political injustice, but also a release into genuine self-knowledge withthe prospect of continued amelioration.

II

Anti-Jacobin novelists took full advantage of the satiric possibilitiesafforded by these radical representations of individual and social perfect-ibility. Since the conservatives understood their opponents idealizing faithas the product of metaphysical abstraction, their parodies of it frequently

turned on the discrepancy between the world experienced through litera-ture and through the agency of common sense, the antidote to theoreticalspeculation. In HamiltonsMemoirs of Modern Philosophers, for instance,Mr. Glib happens upon a lengthy account of the Hottentot in Francois Le

Vaillants Travels from the Cape of Good Hope into the Interior Parts ofAfrica (1790) and through quotation fromPolitical Justice proves that theyrepresent the achievement of the new order predicted by Godwin.

Vaillants narrative of the Gonoquais horde is read out to an enrapturedaudience of would-be revolutionaries whose interjected comments im-press on the reader how entirely the radicals responses are shaped not by


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the disinterested reason to which they lay claim, but by subjective and of-ten culpable desires.32

The technique of diminishment through appropriation, mentionedabove in relation to NorthmoresMemoirs and HolcroftsAnna St. Ives, isbrilliantly exploited in Hamiltons satire of utopian thought. In the circularletter that Citizen Myope composes to announce the Jacobins intendedemigration to Africa, Hamilton again includes extensive quotation fromPolitical Justice, Caleb Williams, and The Enquirerto underscore the denialof history implicit in the radicals equation of the Hottentot with utopianperfection. While Myope sees the Hottentot as an exalted race of mortals. . . who so far from having their minds cramped in the fetters of supersti-tion, and their energies restrained by the galling yoke of law, do not somuch as believe in a Supreme Being, and have neither any code of laws,nor any form of government, Hamilton establishes that the necessary cor-relative to this supposed mental freedom is the complete absence of anyof the normative signs of civility, material or spiritual.33 The indictment ofradicalism on the grounds of its shortsighted privileging of abstract quali-ties of mind over the actual conditions of social life is compounded by a

characteristic gendering of Jacobin thought that operates to the disadvan-tage of women. For men like Glib and Myope, the appeal of the Hottentotutopia is its promise of perpetual idleness and of complete sexual license.

Women who have come to believe in the intellectual integrity of the radi-cal cause through their reading of romancesincluding both the sentimen-tally rendered heroine Julia Delmond, and the Mary Hays caricatureBridgetina Botherimthus appear to be doubly betrayed by the certaintyof their sexual exploitation and by the impossibility of translating, withoutlabor, a theoretical construct into a workable society. In NorthmoresMem-oirs, the perfections of the imagined state are used to critique those cur-rent in England; in Hamiltons fiction the savage state of the projectedutopia confirms the civilized social and gender distinctions of the real

one. Anti-Jacobin fiction, in short, inverts the customary satiric orientationof radical 1790s utopias and then adds a sexual dimension to its politicalcharge by distinguishing male from female desire.

I mentioned earlier the relation of utopian writing to the emergenceof the historical novel and the national tale, and I would like now to developthis idea by considering the affinities between Hamiltons satiric represen-tation of the Hottentot and contemporary novels that define the savagein relation to domestic rather than exotic orders. The anti-Jacobin tendencytoward oppositional structures appears again in the parallels between thediscursive role of the Hottentot in HamiltonsMemoirsof Modern Philoso-


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phers and that of the traditional societies of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland inrepresentative works of the period such as the anonymousDorothea, or,a Ray of the New Light(1801), BissetsDouglas, or, The Highlander(1800),and Patricks The Irish Heiress (1797). In previous novels (Tobias SmollettsHumphry Clinker, for instance), depictions of Wales, Scotland, and Irelandmost often serve sentimental ends, functioning as spatial complements tothe works generational contrasts. But the pervasiveness of utopian thoughtin the literary culture of the 1790s gives an edge of politicized nationalismto what formerly took the shape of nostalgia. Comparison with HamiltonsMemoirs of Modern Philosophers reveals, in turn, the ideological uncer-tainties generated by the exchange of exotic African societies for relativelyfamiliar border ones. With metropolitan and marginal orders now repre-sented in reciprocally defining, rather than in purely contrastive terms, thepossibilities for arguing categorically the moral supremacy of the homeculture are restricted. Finally, the ambiguities fostered by a vantage thatstresses cultural continuities (rather than difference, as inMemoirs of Mod-ern Philosophers) are further compounded by the historical frameworkthrough which Englands relation to Wales, Ireland, and Scotland is un-

derstood. Hamiltons Hottentot satire depends on identifying the radicalsfacile theorizing about the future with the Cape Khoikhois nonexistenthistory. But Wales, Ireland, and Scotland were seen not only to have histo-ries, but, more significantly, to have histories defined by acts of rebellionand resistance that the authors of these novels wished to discount as po-tential models for the English Jacobins. The English perception of threat,of course, was not uniformly registered: Scotland most often appears in amidrange between the supposedly apolitical Welsh and the seditiousIrish.34 These historical differences help to clarify the distinctive meaningsattaching to the utopian constructs in Dorothea, Douglas, and The IrishHeiress.

Of these three novels, Dorothea most nearly reproduces the satiric

mode of Hamiltons Memoirs ofModern Philosophers, in part becauseDorotheas Welsh interlude fulfills a range of rhetorical purposes as re-stricted as those in Hamiltons Hottentot one. InDorothea, the credulousheroine has been set on the course of radicalism by her fashionable Londonparents who had never for a moment attempted to fetter the sublime as-pirations of her infant mind (1:3). Guided by her reading of

Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Holcroft, the adult Dorothea felt ever y in-stant inclined to assert her rights, and rise above her wrongs (1:14). Theresults are predictably disastrous: she alienates her loving husband, con-tributes to the death of her infant son, and still convinced that it is her moralduty to bring enlightenment to the masses, goes off to live in Wales: at


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perfect liberty to pursue whatever idle vagaries might arise in her mind,she determined to begin, by endeavouring to renew the golden age (3:45).Godwinian theory, however, destroys the actual innocence of the Welshcommunity by encouraging a pernicious individualism that ends in be-trayal and theft. At best, utopian thought is shallow romance mongering;

when put into practice its damage is at once personal and social. Dorotheaherself suffers the consequences of the discontent and rebellion (3:157)she has fomented, and only when she resolves to let the world go on in itsold course and confines her mind within the gentle bonds of domesticcares and pleasures (3:1578) is order restored.

Dorotheas contrast of London and Wales stages the exposure ofGodwinian pastoral in terms that render utopianism as juvenile fantasy.

Wales, in other words, like the Cape in Hamiltons novel, is conceived ofas little more than a place whose retarded development enables meta-physical theorists to project their baseless idylls of communitarian life.35

Bissets Douglas, in contrast, offers a culturally specific representation ofScotland that draws extensively on the models of Enlightenment histori-ography in order to suggest that alternatives to radical utopianism may be

discovered in Britains peripheries. For Bisset, the primitive virtues of theHighlanders confirm a stadial interpretation of progress in which Scotlandappears ideal in its preservation of a simplicity of manners that Englandhas sacrificed to the pursuit of luxury. Jacobinism, then, is merely the ex-treme sign of the inherent selfishness of commercial society, in which po-tentially, as Adam Ferguson notes, the individual is every thing, and thepublic nothing and the state is merely a combination of departments.36

But while conjectural historians like Ferguson refer to the condition ofnative Americans to gauge Britains progress, Bisset uses Scotland to mea-sure English degeneracy. The achievement of utopia, by his logic, wouldinvolve not the denial, but the recovery, of the past.

Patricks The Irish Heiress also attempts to counter radical utopianism

by extolling the alignment of present with past that the traditional valuesof border nations encourage. But her considerable sympathy for the po-litical aspirations of the Irish complicates the conservative attack on radi-cal versions of utopianism and leads her to suggest that the Irish supportfor the revolutionary cause has its origins in a struggle against injustice thatit shares with the French.37 Thus, while the heroines descriptions of Parisduring the Terror reveal the horrors of utopian theory realized, they arematched by equally graphic accounts of Irish poverty. As inDorothea, thenarrator declares that she does not meddle with politics, but in this in-stance the characterization of Ireland as an industrious, brave, oppressednation qualifies English claims to civility, even as it effectively forecasts


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(and comes close to justifying) the 1798 Rebellion. Such confounding ofseemingly straightforward political positions is not unusual in women-authored fiction of the 1790s. Clara Reeves Plans of Education, for ex-ample, embeds within its conservative politics a critique of things as theyare, that like The Irish Heiresss is profoundly radical in its implications.38

In Douglas, Dorothea, and The Irish Heiress, revolutionary Franceepitomizes the terrible consequences of enacting the utopian dream of aperfectible human nature. All three works align social conjecture with thedeceits of romance in order to affirm the authority of the past as a guide topresent action. In The Irish Heiress, Patricks sympathy for the plight of theIrish peasant makes her resist more than the other two novelists the incli-nation to represent a renovated English civility as the corrective to Frenchbarbarity. But all of them finally concur in the belief that regional traditionsencourage continuity and inhibit abrupt change. From the vantage of ge-neric innovation, then, another of the origins of the nineteenth-centurynational tale and regional novel appears here in the responses of theseconservative fictions to the political and literary challenge of radical uto-pias. In the final novel of the revolutionary decade to be discussed in this

essay,Berkeley Hall(1796), the binary England/France is displaced by thetriangulated England/France/America, and the novels exploration of al-ternative social and political orders accordingly develops through refer-ence to a different temporal perspective focused on an open future ratherthan a compromised past.

While Berkeley Hall is quintessentially late eighteenth century in itscomplex orchestration of genres and its attention to the ideological im-plications of narrative kinds, its apparently nonpartisan critique of conser-

vative satire and radical romance is unusual for the period. In an effort toexpose both as indefensible extremes, the author organizes the protago-nists adventures around a series of monologically rendered utopian in-terludes designed to underscore the futility of categorical thinking and to

endorse narrative modes that incorporate the insights of history, politics,and philosophy. By the end ofBerkeley Hall, the most inclusive and ac-commodating of these forms through which human frailties and potentialmay be recorded appears to be the novel itself.

The plot ofBerkeley Hallcentrally involves a generational divide, withthe younger generation (distinguished, according to class and race, as the heroTim and his beloved Laetitia, and their black servants Sancho and Barbara)enabling new modes of social understanding. But it is the individual ec-centricities of the older generation headed by the owner of Berkeley Hall,Tims grandfather Dr. Homily, that actually dominate the text. These corre-spond to the elders cherished political and philosophical hobbyhorses:


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variations on Burkean conservatism, Rousseauian primitivism, Painitecommercial humanism, Godwinian perfectibility, and Berkeleyan meta-physics.39 In order, presumably, to avoid the novels devolution into par-ticularized caricature, the author matches each of these private obsessionsto a utopian order that can be communally experienced. These utopiasrange from the actual, through the imagined, to the fantastic, and acquire

within the body of the novel a further dimension of coherence throughtheir participation in the works interlocking oppositions: nature and ci-

vility, America and England, slavery and freedom, pastoral and georgic,ease and industry, marine and terrestrial races, oral and written, landed andcommercial economies.40 But ultimately (and in keeping with its bias to-

ward pragmatism), the texts sophisticated play with the full register of uto-pian possibilities is designed not to endorse, but to undercut the value ofsuch conjectural visions.

The opening utopia appears in both oral and written forms, as Sanchofirst recites to the circle of friends who visit Dr. Homily at Berkeley Hall thestory of his father, Prince Pangoleen, alias George Silverheels, Heir Ap-parent to the Crown of Angola (1:186), and then produces a manuscript

version of the life transcribed by the parson of the parish at Bermudas . . .from my fathers mouth (1:243).41 Pangoleens adventures take him in andout of captivity and extend from a detailed account of his impressment in

Africa and slavery in the West Indies to a fantastic encounter with an aquaticrace whose state of pastoral ease he contrasts with the injunction to laborthat governs terrestrial life. As his interlocutor tells Pangoleen: Not there-fore being under the necessity, like you, to labour for support, for habita-tions, clothing, machines, carriages, or shipping, we have more leisure toimprove our minds and acquire knowledge; which is much facilitated byour having one language common to us all, the intercourse being so free, andseparated from no natural obstructions (1:235). Leisure, a single language,the unobstructed exchange of opinion: these, of course, are the ideals held

in common by utopian thinkers and radicals of the period. But as the marinemonarch continues with his description, he distinguishes aquatic from ter-restrial races in terms that disallow human emulation of this perfect soci-ety. The external signs of difference are clearly significantthe physicalneeds of this race of beings are effortlessly supplied as they move uncon-fined through their ocean domain. But qualities relating to inwardness finallydetermine the utter incompatibility of both peoples and political systems.Directed by the natural operations of instinct, the marine race lives fromgeneration to generation, entirely almost the same in comfort, peace, andhappiness . . . without your vices, guilt, and remorse (1:2389). The ab-sence of aspiration, of resistance to hierarchy, and of industriousness means


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that culturally, progress is impossible and individually, no person can bethe author of his own excellence (1:238). In a fantastic inversion of oneof the main tenets of Berkeleys idealist philosophy, marine individualslack internal consciousness and, as a result, like shoals of fish or birds ofpassage (1:239) remain perpetually the same.

Pangoleens story as told by Sancho provokes among its listeners awide-ranging debate on philosophical and political issues extending fromthe nature of happiness and the meaning of liberty to the relative merits ofdemocracies and mixed government. While the members of the circleagree that industriousness and knowledge enable human progress, theydiffer sharply on the means of defining and achieving such beneficial la-bor. Dr. Homily maintains that men cannot be kept in order . . . withoutcivil government, an established religion, and provisions for the education

of youth: without long-tried political usages and institutions recommendedby experience, a due subordination of ranks, and the firm execution oflaws (2:345). Dr. Sourby enunciates the radical counterposition in his con-

viction that law, religion, and formal education impede mans renewingthe golden age through the sweets of natural society (2:343). Typically,

the novel then subjects this speculative disquisition to the test of the char-acters experiences: the lovelorn Tim now leaves Berkeley Hall for a re-storative tour of America with Dr. Sourby, to whom his grandfather has longserved as patron despite their philosophical differences.

The ensuing tour takes the pair, accompanied by Sancho, to both ac-tual and imagined utopian settlements, including the Moravians religiousone at Bethlehem, an Iroquois village, Independent Hall, in the Pennsyl-

vanian interior (where Sourby disastrously attempts to enact Rousseausprecepts), and finally a centuries-old, ideal society of Welsh emigrants, hid-den deep within the Allegheny mountains, who came to America underthe command of a leader or prince, calledMadoc, the son ofGwnnedh, aforeign prince (3:391). This ancient Welsh order appears the terrestrial

complement to the aquatic one with which the novel began: the inhabit-ants of both have their physical needs effortlessly supplied and separatedfrom the contentions and vices of the world, they enjoy the most perfectharmony, plenty, and peace (3:392). The formal symmetry secured bybracketing the novel with these utopian idylls helps in turn to reinforcetheir shared basis in fantasy, a fantasy determined by their entire freedomfrom the restraints of time. More particularly, both the Welsh and the aquaticraces are not simply immune to, but actually exempt from, the possibilityof progress. Their achievement of an existence conducted entirely outsidethe bounds of history (defined here according to Whig notions of improve-ment) effectively undermines their usefulness as social models. Conversely,


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the utopian orders described in the body of the novelthe Moravian settle-ment, the Iroquois camp, and Independent Hallare marked by their in-habitants failure to adjust to altered circumstances, a peculiarity that elicitsdetailed commentary from Tim, Dr. Sourby, and Sancho. While this failureis treated comically in relation to Sourbys natural society at IndependentHall, the predicament of native Americans unable to accommodate them-selves to the improving forces of a commercial people like the British(3:192) provokes more compassionate and thoughtful discussion. Consid-ered together, the fantastic and the possible utopias of the novel thus de-scribe the disabling limitations of a social existence that excludes or resistsan awareness of historical change.

It is also possible to read these utopian interludes in metanarrationalterms, since each subscribes to the discursive conventions of a specificeighteenth-century genre: the imaginary voyage, natural history, spiritualbiography, or political economy. Their successive diminishment as ex-planatory models works to reinforce the authoritative status of the novel,

vindicated here on the grounds of its flexibility and inclusiveness. The con-versation that endsBerkeley Hallthen narrativizes these preferred terms.

Tim and Laetitia, along with their servants Sancho and Barbara, gather withthe reformed characters of the older generation at Dr. Homilys and to-gether outline their plans for a better future. The expressive potential ofthe novel as a forum for debate about the future aligns it with the alreadyestablished ideal of purposive political change thatBerkeley Hallthrough-out endorsed by questioning the older generations civil, religious, andcommercial theories. The monologism of utopian constructs, fully exposedby the conversational exchanges that the novel authorizes, finally yieldsto the communal acceptance of the progress enabled by compromise.

The utopian elements that occasion Berkeley Halls meditations ongenre, time, and audience, as the examples of Hamilton, Patrick, and Bissetconfirm, are a consistent feature of 1790s literature. As novels of the period

responded to the threat (or promise) posed by the revolutionary debate,they engaged to an unprecedented degree the terms of the neighboringgenres of politics, history, and social analysis. This essay has suggested thatin such a climate of formal innovation, utopian writing was especially fit-ted to pursue speculative inquiries into the relation between the key con-ceptual categories of history and fiction, real and imagined, and public andprivate.42 But despite this ability to foster comparative analysis, both for-mal utopias and their novelistic variants diminish in number after the turnof the century.

The reasons provided by critics for this turn away from utopian repre-sentations are drawn from a range of disciplinary vantages. Gregory Claeys


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locates the key challenge to the more stringent versions of radical republi-canism in the increasing acceptance and ubiquity of commerce in the pe-riod.43 Krishan Kumar suggests that the tendency to conceptualize historyin evolutionary terms made obsolete the utopian model of an achievedperfection.44 I would like, in closing, to consider the implications of thisgeneric eclipse for the novel, more specifically the ways in which the de-cline of utopianism is registered in changes in novel formation and the rep-resentations of time at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

We can see in works such asBerkeley Hallearly evidence of the qualifica-tions to which Claeys and Kumar point, as the ideal worlds of the ocean king-dom and the transplanted Welsh community are subjected to the critique oftheir mutual imperviousness to progress. To recall the terms of Thelwalls com-ment,Berkeley Hallfinally privileges the mechanical ordering of time (the timeof watches and parish dials that measure and objectify the relation of pastto present) over what the radicals deemed times natural order (in whichtruth becomes manifest in a fully potential future). As long as that natural or-der of time remained conceptually importantas it did throughout the 1790sradical texts, as we saw inHenry WilloughbyorMemoirs of Planetes, pursued

their revelation of truths and their argument for the possibility of a futureunconditioned by the past by drawing freely on the discursive conventions ofneighboring genres. Conservative novelists responded in kind by incorpo-rating material from political and natural histories, biographies, and economictreatises. But they carefully distinguished themselves from the radical insis-tence on a future configured according to the imperatives of natural time byadvancing representations of border places such as Ireland, Scotland, and

Wales, cultures in which the determining influence of the past was retained.Here the traditional manners of peoples unsullied by luxury, the conserva-tives claimed, had been preserved by their exemption from the massivechanges within English urban centers.

Radical utopianism, in short, subverted customary distinctions of genre

and of temporality. In resisting this universalizing project, conservativewriters retained the discursive scope of their opponents, assimilating totheir fictions the ideas of favored figures such as Burke and, by means ofparody, those of Godwin and Holcroft. But they insisted, in their represen-tations of time, on the preeminent value of what Thelwall designates themechanical mode of watches and parish dials. This temporal regula-tion is confirmed in a number of ways: by historiographical references rang-ing from Bacon to the Scottish Enlightenment, by novel plots that rely ongenerational patterns, and by the recurrent structural contrast between En-gland and those marginal places in which ancient . . . manners and cus-toms have been preserved.45


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The latter phrase appears in A Postscript, which should have been aPreface, Walter Scotts summary account in Waverley of the transforma-tion of Scotland since the 45. The shared vocabulary of 1790s loyalist fic-tion and the emergent early-nineteenth-century forms of historical novelis not arbitrary; rather, it points to a significant continuity of opposition tothe revolutionary decades utopianism. In late-eighteenth-century conser-

vative fiction, as we have seen, the sense that border cultures powerfullyconfirm the value of the mechanical ordering of time was used to counterthe radicals resistance to historical explanation. Novels like Waverley re-tain this connection between marginal place and mechanical time in orderto assert (confidently, rather than defensively, as in the 1790s) the deter-mining force of progress. Scotts work registers this quantifying impulsein its running title, Tis Sixty Years Since, and then thematizes the desirabil-ity of adapting to change through its contrast of romance and real history.The exemplary figures of romance, Flora and Fergus MacIvoragain toadapt Thelwalls phrasingallow principles to be the sun of [their] in-tellectual universe. Tis Sixty Years Since commemorates the triumph ofexpedience and compromise over such transcendent truths. The novel

invests in the mode of watches and parish dials by measuring the dif-ference between the present moment and the generational spans on bothsides of the 45, and then ratifying the social value of difference in the finaldivision of the domestic from the historical. From this vantage, the uto-pian argument for transcendent truths, for the elision of private and pub-lic, and for the unprecedented realization of principle can only appear asat once navely counterhistorical and antinovelistic.

NOTES

1John Thelwall, Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of theRight Hon. Edmund Burke, To A Noble Lord(1796), in The Politics of English Jacobinism:

Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ.Press, 1995), pp. 32987, 3656.2 Thelwalls binaries here mesh suggestively with Frank Kermodes distinction of

kairos from chronos, a narratological distinction elaborated in the work of GerardGenette and Paul Ricoeur. Stuart Sherman persuasively details the limitations of this lit-erary model and of those deployed by historians such as E. P. Thompson and MichelFoucault to analysis of eighteenth-century temporality in Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries,and English Diurnal Form, 16601785(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996). Late-eighteenth-century utopias express both politically and generically their resistance tothe placing of individuals in time that Sherman argues follows from the absorption intonarrative form of the kinds of time propounded by the new chronometry (p. 25).

3William Godwin,Enquiry concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Mor-als and Happiness, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 716.


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4Thomas Paine,Rights of Man, ed. Henry Collins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979),pp. 166, 183.

5James Burgh,An Account of the First Settlement, Laws, Form of Government, andPolice, of the Cessares, A People of South America: In Nine Letters, From Mr. VanderNeck, One of the Senators of that Nation, to His Friend in Holland(London, 1764), inUtopias of the British Enlightenment, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.Press, 1994), pp. 71136, 73.

6 This is not to suggest that radicals did not write satires. The anonymousModern

Gullivers Travels (1796), for instance, is an antigovernment satire told from the point ofview of one who is at least initially sympathetic to the corruptions of Pekrub [Burke]and his cronies. Similarly, Voyage to the Moon Strongly Recommended (1793) opens

with an ironic dedication To the Patrons of Liberty and again targets Burke, who ap-pears here as that abandoned reptile Edmuldus Barkwell, the exemplar of the baseprostitution of literary talents. For hire, he writes in favour of the most detestable of allcauses; which, now reason begins to be triumphant, is justly falling into decay, and uni-

versal contempt (Modern British Utopias, 17001850. Volume IV: 17781798, ed. Gre-gory Claeys [London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997], pp. 277319, 279, 308).

7 Robert Bisset, Sketch of Democracy (London, 1796), p. xix. Bissets advocacy ofthe shaping power of history is central to his confutation of radicalism. He asserts, forexample, that Godwins theories refer to a state [of nature] never realized in the histor yof man, and concerning which, consequently, we cannot reason, having neither factsnor principles. See The Life of Edmund Burke. Comprehending an Impartial Accountof his Literary and Political Efforts, and a Sketch of the Character and Conduct of his

most Eminent Associates, Coadjutors, and Opponents. The Second Edition, 2 vols. (Lon-don, 1800), 1:44.

8 Peter Ruppert, Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literar y Uto-pias (Athens and London: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986), p. 4.

9 Gregory Claeyss work as both editor and critic has documented the increases inpublication in the 1790s of formal utopias. Utopian writing offered solutions to many ofthe representational and conceptual problems that beset radical writers in their advocacyof massive reformation. Formally, it provided a powerful rhetorical means of counter-ing the charges leveled against them by their conservative opponents. The accusationof abstract speculation, for instance, might be answered through detailed descriptionsof the workings of model commonwealths such as those found in the work of WilliamHodgson, John Lithgow, or Thomas Spence. The radical assumption that such common-

wealths represent a simple extension of the inherent perfectibility of individuals intothe social sphere in turn undercuts the conservative argument that the institutional struc-

tures of the past exercise a determining influence on the present. With the displacementof the past by the plot of anticipated time, the radicals were also able to substantiatetheir claim for the imminent realization of their utopian orders.

10For a full discussion of the relation between these changes and the emergence offuturist fiction, see Paul K. Alkon, Origins of Futuristic Fiction (Athens and London: Univ.of Georgia Press, 1987) and Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On thePoetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979). For therelation of utopian writing to geographical exploration and mapping, see David Fausett,Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land(Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1993) and Chloe Chard, Introduction, in Transports:Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 16001830, ed. Chloe Chard and HelenLangdon (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 129.


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11For an exception to this focus on formal utopias, see the survey of contemporarynovels in Christine Rees, Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New

York and London: Longman, 1996).12Thelwall, p. 336.13Katie Trumpener refers briefly to the Jacobin commitment to the social function

of literature in order to argue that it is only in the early nineteenth century that a newScottish historical fiction and an Irish national fiction attempt, for the first time, a pan-oramic picture of the social changes of the past seventy-five years. But radical fiction is

not only concerned with contemporary political and economic life; the process ofmutual definition characteristic of radical and conservative fiction of the 1790s origi-nates in their common concern with representations of time, representations that arekey to the emergence of the forms of historical and regional fiction that Trumpener ana-lyzes (Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire [Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 1997], p. 20).

14Thomas Northmore,Memoirs of Planetes, or a Sketch of the Laws and Mannersof Makar. By Phileleutherus Devoniensis (1795), in Utopias of the British Enlightenment,ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 13797, 139. Somesubsequent references to Northmore will appear parenthetically in the text. Elsewhere,Claeys distinguishes between two dominant reformist strains in 1790s utopias: the po-litical reform advocated by Thomas Paine in Rights of Man, and the primitivist republi-canism that he sees as characteristic of Burghs Cessares and NorthmoresPlanetes. SeeClaeys, Utopianism, Property, and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, in Uto-pias and the Millennium, ed. Krishan Kumar and Stephen Bann (London: ReaktionBooks, 1993), pp. 4662, 50.

15Northmore, p. 142.16 Northmore, p. 192; Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the

Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), inMary Wollstonecraft: PoliticalWritings, ed. Janet Todd (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 285371, 289.

17Thomas Spence,Pigs Meat: The Selected Writings of Thomas Spence, Radical andPioneer Land Reformer, ed. G. I. Gallop (Nottingham: Spokesman Press, 1982), p. 72.

18 Northmore,Memoirs ofPlanetes, p. 192. For examples of ironic adaptations ofBurkean rhetoric in radical utopias, see the anonymous Voyage to the Moon StronglyRecommended To All Lovers of Real Freedom (1793) where Edmund Burke appears asEdmuldus Barkwell, and the anonymous 1796 satireModern Gullivers Travels, wherethe naf protagonist recognizes the true state of affairs in England and goes to take hisleave of Burke who, striking a pose, declaims:

And is it come to this! oh! then farewelThe paid-for pen! Farewell the phrase verbose!The spirit-stirring hope of great reward,

Which led me on to varnish monstrous vice,The royal rags, and all the tinsel glare,However base which onceBlefescu bore!Printers, and printers devils too, farewel!

And ye, ye pretty pensions which so longHave blessd my fingers for the venal song,Farewel! Old Pekrubs occupations gone;

And the sublime and beautifuls no more!

(Modern Gullivers Travels [1796], in Claeys, Modern British Utopias, 17781798, pp.321440, 420).


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19The anonymousBerkeley Hall; or, The Pupil of Experience, 3 vols. (London, 1796)advances a similar argument in its interpolated narrative, The History of PrincePangoleen (discussed below). The relation of language and education to an imperial-ism effected through intellectual rather than martial means is adjusted later in the novelin order to describe the particular conditions under which native Americans exist. Inthis later instance, commerce is invested with imperial agency, for, as Mr. Lumeire ex-plains, the British, should wish not to conquer, but civilize the globe. What a demand

would open for their commodities, if the immense nations who dwell, or might settle,

between us and the Pacific Ocean, were civilized, and used the various articles of Euro-pean consumption? (3:1923).

20 Northmore, p. 155. An alternate reading of the Makarian culture as one resistingnationalism (rather than endorsing imperialism) is also possible. The terms of Benedict

Andersons definition of the nation as an imagined political communityand imag-ined as both inherently limited and sovereign run counter to the radical arguments foruniversality, a universality whose linguistic dimension contravenes a key condition forthe emergence of the nation, that is, the demotion of Latin relative to the vernacular. SeeImagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Lon-don: Verso, 1983, rev. edn. 1991), p. 6.

21Northmore, p. 154.22 Ibid. Burgh incorporates a similar warning in his conclusion to Cessares. Mr.

Vander Neck ends his last letter from South America to Mr. Vander Zee, still in Holland:What alterations may hereafter be introduced among us, when the present generationis dead (who by their having lived in Europe, are thereby convinced of the great useand necessity of these regulations) I cannot say (p. 136).

23 See Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (Londonand New York: Routledge, 1993).

24 Northmore, p. 154.25 Northmore, p. 157.26 Ibid.27Bissets advocacy of Baconian methods of induction recurs throughout his works.

In his novel,Douglas, the hero brings the TEST OF INDUCTION to bear on the meta-physical jargonists, and finds them wanting; in his political treatise, Sketch of Democ-racy, he again advocates the test . . . of history and induction . . . Lord Bacon discoveredthe tendency and value of the hypothetical theories, which so long amused mankind.He saw they were Anticipations of mind, not interpretation of naturethat they werenot only individually erroneous, but that the causes which had produced them, if suf-fered to operate, must always produce error. To know either nature or man, as our great

philosopher perceived, we must investigate, we must resolutely reject hypothesis, andadhere to facts. We must not expatiate into the regions of conceived possibility. Tho-mas Mathias, too, declares that his disinterestedness is secured by his adherence to thegreatest masters of ancient and legitimate composition. The language of the market-place, conversely, describes opponents such as David Hume who has set up a kind ofslop-shop of morality in the suburbs of Atheism, where he trades along with Godwin,who sets up his trumpery-shop in the same quarter. See Bisset,Douglas, or, The High-lander, 3 vols. (London, 1800), 3:33; Bisset,Sketch Of Democracy, pp. 23; and ThomasMathias,Pursuits of Literature. A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues(London, 1800), pp.18, 3145.

28See, the comments made by the heroines father in the anonymousDorothea, or,A Ray of the New Light, 3 vols. (London, 1801): these fellows only strive to create a dis-turbance, that they may feather their nests in the scuffle; they would shake the political


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phial till the dregs rise; but once put them at the top of the tree, and woe to the poorbirds who would shelter near them (1:106). Further references will be indicated paren-thetically in the text by volume and page number.

29 Paine,Rights of Man, pp. 1834, 64.30 On the interrelations of conservative and radical fiction in the 1790s, see Gary

Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 17801805(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) and hisWomen, Writing, and Revolution, 17901827(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); PatriciaMeyer Spacks,Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century Novels (Chi-

cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990); Eleanor Ty, Unsexd Revolutionaries: Five WomenNovelists of the 1790s (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1993) and herEmpowering theFeminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 17961812(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1998); Nicola J. Watson,Revolution and the Form ofthe British Novel, 17901825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1994).

31Henry Willoughby. A Novel, 2 vols. (London: 1798), 2:227. Subsequent referenceswill appear parenthetically in the text.

32 Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 3 vols. (London, 1800),2:41. Anti-Jacobin novelists repeatedly charged that radicalism attracted the ill-informedand uneducated, and it is therefore significant that Glib reads Vaillants Travels in a trans-lation done by Elizabeth Helme, a Minerva Press author whose novels were influencedby Godwin. We are also told that Glib finds the sprightliness of the authors manner, hiszeal in the pursuit of natural history, [and] his unbounded philanthropy tedious; it isonly the account of the Hottentot in the second volume that made very ample amendsfor the time thrown away upon the first (1:320). On the discursive complexities of theHottentot in eighteenth-century culture, see Linda E. Merians, What They Are, Who

We Are: Representations of the Hottentot in Eighteenth-Century Britain,ECLife,n.s.,17, 3 (November 1993): 1439.

33 Hamilton, 2:39.34As Merians has detailed, the Irish were, in fact, often identified with the Hottentot.

See her Hottentot: The Emergence of an Early Modern Racist Epithet, ShakS26 (1998):12344.

35The representation of Ireland inDorotheais strikingly different from that of Wales.While the Welsh interlude is relatively benign in its exposure of the disabling abstract-ness of Godwins doctrine of perfectibility, the adventures of the Irish antihero of thenovels subplot, Thomas Williams, underscore the brutal violence that the author seesas the actual political consequence of enabling such a time-serving parasite (1:30) topursue his intent to rise on the neck of the people to the height of his ambition (3:116).

The author declares that the history of the rebellion, which broke out at this time, is asubject of too much importance to be treated at large in a work of this kind (3:1156),but Williamss activities clearly mark him out as a figure for Ireland.

36Adam Ferguson,An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Louis Schneider (NewBrunswick NJ: Transaction Publishing, 1980), p. 57.

37Burkes connection between the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland and Jacobinismin France is interesting in this context:

I think I can hardly overrate the malignancy of the principles of Protes-tant ascendancy, as they affect Ireland; or of Indianism as they affect thesecountries, and as they affect Asia; or of Jacobinism, as they affect all Eu-rope and the state of human society itself. The last is the greatest evil. Butit really combines with the others, and flows from them. Whatever breeds


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discontent at this time, will produce that great master-mischief most in-fallibly. Whatever tends to persuade the people, that thefew called by

whatever name you please, religious or political, are of opinion that theirinterest is not compatible with that of the many, is a great point gained to

Jacobinism.

This passage is quoted by Seamus Deane in support of his argument that Burkes politi-cal theory of the affections has its origins in Irish experience. See The French Revolu-

tion and Enlightenment in England, 17891832 (Cambridge MA and London: HarvardUniv. Press, 1988), p. 17.

38Clara ReevesPlans of Education. With Remarks on the Systems of Other Writers.In a Series of Letters between Mrs. Darnford and Her Friends (London, 1792) is the se-quel to The School for Widows (1791). Like Sarah Scotts Millenium Hall and Mary

WalkersMunster Village, the novels represent communities of women whose socialpractices are distinct from, but not finally imagined as actively challenging, customarymale structures. Thus, although their radical feminocentrism is utopian in impulse, thenovels do not advocate change.

39George Walkers The Vagabond(1799) also makes Berkeleyan metaphysics cen-tral to its satiric representation of a radical utopia set in America. Walkers novel, how-ever, is intractably anti-Jacobin in its politics.

40The novel thus describes the Moravian religious settlement in Bethlehem, Penn-sylvania, the natural society that Dr. Sourby institutes at Independent Hall, and thecontinent of Machaira at the South Pole that appears as one immense garden in whichthe inhabitants enjoy an even unbroken course of peace and social virtues (BerkeleyHall; or, The Pupil of Experience, 3 vols. [London: 1796], 1:286, 288). Subsequent refer-ences will appear parenthetically in the text.

41This glancing reference to the recurring eighteenth-century trope in which pos-session by a clergyman authenticates a manuscript (see, for example, MackenziesManof Feeling) typifies the dense allusiveness ofBerkeley Hall, a novel that provides an as-tonishing compendium of narrative devices.

42 Claeys cites as evidence that utopias confront the social and political transfor-mations of their own time, and often propose more dramatic solutions than the main-stream political literature, Humes Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, a work thatplaces him uncomfortably close to Harrington compared to his other works (Intro-duction, Utopias of the British Enlightenment, pp. ixx).

43See Claeys, Utopianism, Property, and the French Revolution Debate in England,pp. 4652.

44

Krishan Kumar, Utopianism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp.5961.

45Walter Scott, Waverley; or, Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Ox-ford Univ. Press, 1986), p. 340.

Documents

ClockTime and Utopia's Time in the Novels of the 1790s