The Novel Wars of 1790–1804

This chapter explores the novel in the period 1790–1804. The French Revolution profoundly shaped the English novel in the 1790s. Originally, the Revolution was welcomed by sections of the reading public, many of whom regarded it as bringing France into line with the liberty under law perceived as the British system of constitutional monarchy. Opinion began to change significantly after Edmund Burke's attack on the Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Accounts of the novels written in the decade after Burke's assault on the Revolution are now routinely organized around the two poles of ‘Jacobin’ and ‘Anti-Jacobin’ fiction. Certainly, the novel in this decade did find itself shaped by the ‘war of ideas’, but—like the pamphlet war itself—it was neither conducted as a straightforward exchange of fire between two distinct ideological camps, nor was it untouched by developments in the novel as a form.