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The upheavals which constituted the opening stages of the French Revolution coincided with centenary celebrations in Britain for the Glorious Revolution of 1688. To many it appeared that the French were now taking steps to reject absolutism and to establish both the kind of constitutional monarchy and the forms of personal 'liberty' which freeborn Englishmen had boasted as their birthright since the exile of the Stuart dynasty. Such perceptions were particularly appealing to political radicals and those of a liberal political inclination. For the young William Wordsworth it was 'bliss' to be alive; the MP Samuel Romilly 'rejoiced', perceived a 'very sincere and general joy' in Britain, and looked forward to 'the important consequences which must follow throughout Europe' [quoted in 4 pp. 39-40]. Among such liberal-minded individuals, especially Protestant Dissenters, there were those who considered that, good as the English system might appear, there were still abuses which needed to be ironed out. Dissenters and Catholics were debarred from political life, though it was possible for the former at least to take office by becoming 'occasional conformists', that is taking holy communion once a year in the established church. There had been applications to parliament by, and on behalf of, Protestant dissenters to repeal these Acts in March 1787 and May 1789; a third approach was made in March 1790. And while the agitation for parliamentary reform had subsided with the decline of the Association Movement of 1780 (see below p. 22), the reformist literature remained in circulation and reformist aspirations were still to be met.
It was against this background that, on 4 November 1789, Dr Richard Price, a dissenting minister well-known for his works on political economy and population, preached a sermon 'On the Love of our Country' to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution of 1688. Price stressed that the Revolution of 1688 had been based on three principles: liberty of
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conscience; the right to resist power when abused; and the right to choose and reject rulers. However, he believed that the business of 1688 had been left unfinished, and he went on to urge the abolition of the Test and Corporation Acts, which restricted the first of these principles, and a reform of the system of representation in parliament which was currently leading to 'government by corruption'. The events in France, following closely on the American Revolution, he believed, were the heralds of change across the world [Doc. 1]. It was this sermon which prompted Edmund Burke to write his powerful Reflections on the Revolution in France [1; Doc. 2].
Born in Dublin in 1729, the son of an Irish barrister, Edmund Burke had himself studied law. He entered parliament as an MP at the end of 1765; from then until the early 1780s he acted as a powerful spokesman for the Whigs in parliament. He had denounced misgovernment in the American colonies and was opposed to fighting the colonists in their war of independence. He had denounced the exploitation of India by the East India Company and had taken a leading role in launching the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the former Governor General of Bengal and, subsequently, of British India. He was sympathetic to religious toleration. But by the end of the 1780s Burke had become disillusioned with the Whig party, not least because of the stance taken by its leaders, notably Fox, during the Regency Crisis of 1788-89. He had supported 'economical reform', which he understood essentially as the removal of secret influence and corruption in government, but he always had his doubts about political reform. Suggestions that Britain might take a cue from events in France and embark on a series of constitutional changes, including parliamentary reform, incensed him. It seems too that he saw in the crowd action in Paris an echo of the Gordon Riots which had terrorised London in 1780, and thus, rather than an example to follow, France was providing a serious warning for Britain of things to avoid [43]. 'France', he proclaimed, 'has brought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessings! France has bought poverty by crime!' In sum, her example was 'an irreparable calamity... to mankind' (Burke, Reflections, Everyman Edition, pp. 35 and 36).
Initially there were few who shared Burke's fears, or at least few who were prepared to make any such concerns public. The Reflections prompted many critical replies. Perhaps the most astute and cogent was Vindiciae Gallicae, written by James Mackintosh, a young, unsuccessful Scottish doctor, who would soon change his profession and make a career as a successful lawyer and a liberal politician. Quite simply, Mackintosh explained, Burke had got it wrong. It was mistaken to imply any excellence to the old institutions of France; these had been inimicable to liberty. Drawing on the ideas of their ancestors and the experience of other countries, the French had every right to contemplate the general principles
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which regulated society and to reform their institutions accordingly. The validity of their actions should depend only upon subsequent approval. But while intellectually sound and highly regarded, especially among the Whigs, Vindiciae Gallicae was not written in a way that made it readily accessible to all readers. Tom Paine's The Rights of Man [7; Doc. 3] was quite different and it rapidly became the most popular
and influential response to Burke.
Paine had been born in Norfolk in 1737. He began life following his father's trade of staymaker; later he became an excise man, but was dismissed for writing a pamphlet demanding better pay. In 1774 he crossed to America where he played an influential role as a pamphleteer on the side of the colonists in the run up to and during the war of independence. He journeyed to France in 1787, crossing to England to promote an iron bridge which he had designed. Part One of The Rights of Man appeared in March 1791, and even before the appearance of Part Two early in the following year, the ideological debate had begun to polarise around the writings of Burke and Paine.
Burke's Reflections remains one of the most powerful statements in favour of political conservatism, yet he always saw himself as defending Whig principles, the constitutional monarchy, and the parliamentary system based on checks and balances. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, as interpreted by Burke, did not introduce new principles; it changed the monarch, but kept the principle of heredity. It was merely another reformation in a tradition, begun with the Magna Carta, of preserving constitutional inheritance and freedoms. In Burke's estimation, the best societies and political structures were organic; they grew and matured over centuries, constantly evolving and adapting themselves to the present. Political societies were partnerships between the dead, the living, and the as yet unborn, and the best arrangements were conventions sanctified by custom and tradition. Equality and abstract rights were chimeras; the much vaunted 'reason' of French philosophers was dangerous; and it was sheer folly, as the French were doing, to seek to rewrite constitutions from scratch on the basis of theory. Paine, in contrast, was not a great constitutional thinker but rather a populist with a racy style and a ready wit. He was also a republican. He urged that men had the right to decide for themselves on their form of government; this was not something that could be set by one generation for its successors, and there was no justification for heredity in any part of government. In the second part of his pamphlet he outlined plans for a root and branch reform in Britain, even advocating new forms of taxation and welfare provision [34].
The clash between Burke and Paine has come to crystallise the political argument which developed in Britain in the wake of the French Revolution. The argument was conducted at its primary level in pamphlet literature, but
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the ideas spread to a much wider audience through a variety of forms of media. Some of the pamphlets were edited and republished in popular cheap editions. In January 1792 in Sheffield, for example, there were 1,400 subscribers to a sixpenny
(2 1/2p) edition of Part One of The Rights of Man. The pamphlet debate was a reflection of the vibrant print culture of eighteenth-century Britain, of the spread of newspaper readership, and of the increasing importance of the press in politics. Newspapers themselves took sides in the arguments about reform and the events in France, and the audience of eighteenth-century newspapers went far beyond the individual purchasers of single copies. Purchased copies were commonly passed on from hand to hand to other readers. They were available in clubs and taverns, and could be read in print-shop windows; at each of these venues they were read aloud and discussed aloud. There were also broadsheets and ballads printed to announce or to comment upon particular events, such as the execution of Louis XVI. The caricatures published by men like Isaac Cruikshank, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson also commented upon current events and, like newspapers, could be viewed and discussed when displayed in print-shop windows. Political activists and sharp-eyed entrepreneurs developed other kinds of iconography as a kind of short- hand for the ideas and arguments. The images of a Cruikshank or a Gillray were reproduced on beakers, jugs, mugs, kerchiefs, medallions and tokens; Rowlandson's caricature The Contrast, which set the 'Religion, morality, loyalty, obedience to the laws, independence, personal security, justice, inheritance, protection of property, industry, national prosperity, happiness' of 'British Liberty' against the 'Atheism, perjury, rebellion, treason, anarchy, murder, equality, madness, cruelty, injustice, treachery, ingratitude, idleness, famine, national and private ruin, misery' of the French equivalent, appeared on a mug as well as at the head of a loyalist broad- sheet ballad, The New Hearts of Oak. Radicals made great play with Burke's unfortunate reference to 'the swinish multitude' in the Reflections, and made the pig an ironic emblem for the people. Loyalists played on the traditions of national stereotypes which celebrated the bluff, hearty English- man and denigrated the scrawny, poverty-stricken Frenchman; they also milked every ounce of sentimentality from images of Louis XVI's farewell to his family and every ounce of horror from revolutionary violence [147].
While, in the Reflections, Burke warned about the dangers and violence inherent in the Revolution and, in response, Paine jeered that he 'pities the plumage and forgets the dying bird', the primary intellectual arguments of the 1790s did not focus simply on the events of the Revolution and the extent to which the French people were justified in changing their constitutional structures. Questions were also posed about the nature of government in general. Did people have the right to resist their rulers? How had civil society first been established? Was it a contract between free
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individuals who exchanged natural rights for civil rights? Was it a contract between governors and governed, in which the only rights that ever existed were those granted by society? Participants in the debates returned to, and built upon, texts from the constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century. Liberals and radicals justified their claims for reform by appeals to, in particular, James Harrington and John Locke, who had commented upon and analysed, respectively, the constitutional upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s and the Revolution of 1688. Some looked back even further to a mythical Saxon golden age destroyed by conquest and the imposition of the 'Norman yoke'. They were also men of the Enlightenment who saw human beings as rational creatures, and creatures who had to be permitted to use their reason to change the unreasonable and hasten the perfectibility of society. Their conservative opponents, in contrast, urged that there was far more to human beings than simply their reason. Surely there were other facets of human nature that were significant to their actions and beliefs? Were not human beings as much creatures of passion as of reason? Were they not influenced by the climate and the social conditions in which they lived? And how could individuals be equal in property and rank when, manifestly, they were so unequal in strength of body and mind, and in terms of age and sex?
The debates were not infused with the same degree of religious fervour as many in the seventeenth century, yet the role of a supreme being or of a providential God figured prominently on both sides of the arguments. Religion remained a significant force in eighteenth-century Britain and, as
J.C.D. Clark has been at pains to emphasise, Britain's old regime remained at least formally a confessional state [15]. For some of the radicals, God was relegated to a prime mover. But for others, and for the conservatives, He remained active in human affairs. The magnitude of the upheaval in France, and subsequently the war and food shortages, excited elements of millenarianism. It appeared that the last days, as foretold in the Book of Revelation, were approaching. William Blake's paintings, such as Albion, his 'prophesies' America and Europe, and his poetic fragment, The French Revolution, while not always easily interpreted, provide some of the most striking examples of such millenarianism among one of the most radical artists of the day [152; 154]. And both radical and conservative camps contained those who understood the events heralded by the French Revolution as divine punishment and a warning of the need for a reformation of morals.
While the debates of the 1790s were sparked by the Revolution, they never became confined to arguments over the rights and wrongs of the event. As
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the Revolution moved on into war and terror, the intellectual ferment in Britain also moved on. Events in France, and then the war, continued to occupy some polemicists, but others, especially on the radical side, moved on to consider the future of society, the treatment of the poor, the rights of women, and to provide a rich legacy for the future.
Paine's own political polemics did not end with the Rights of Man and his departure for France in September 1792, just ahead of his conviction, in absentia, for seditious libel and a sentence of outlawry. While in France he wrote The Age of Reason, in which he outlined his creed as a Deist and condemned Christianity as a dangerous irrelevance whose textual authority, the Bible, was a compound of contradictory fables. The book was soon available in England where the radicals of the London Corresponding Society (hereafter LCS, and see below p. 30) sponsored a cheap edition, for which the publisher was prosecuted, and where Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, replied with a rather ineffectual Apology for the Bible. In 1797 Paine published Agrarian Justice in which, to solve the problem of poverty, he argued that landowners be required to pay into a national fund that could be used to provide first, a £15 bounty for every 21 year-old with which to start out in the world, and second, a £10 annual pension for everyone aged 50 and over.
Similar agrarian ideas were already being developed by Thomas Spence, an idiosyncratic Newcastle schoolmaster who had moved to London, probably in 1788, to eke out a precarious living as bookseller and writer on economic and social matters. Caught up with the excitement of the French Revolution and the growth of radical politics, Spence sold Paine's work alongside his own and, at different times, he was committed to prison for selling both. But Spence was critical of Paine's Agrarian Justice for not going back to the root cause of society's problems which, he considered, lay in the ownership of land and the power that derived from this. Any tax on landowners would merely cement the established system. Just as Paine had argued that one generation could not impose a political system on its successors, so Spence argued that no generation could impose a private distribution of landed property on its successors. There should be a universal right to landed property; it should be held in common by the population of the parish since the open access to land would guarantee employment and ensure fair and adequate wages. By permitting a few extremist members of the LCS to train with weapons on his premises in 1794, and even more by his 1795pamphlet The End of Oppression: 01; a Quartern Loaf for Two-pence, Spence showed that he was not averse to the use of physical force to achieve these ends [Doc. 22]. He does not appear to have been much involved with the revolutionary United Englishmen of the late 1790s, but by the turn of the century organised groups of Spenceans were to be found in the radical milieu. And if the violent element among the
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Spenceans disappeared at the end of the Regency, Spence's agrarian ideas fed into both Owenite radicalism and Chartism [5; 32].
John Thelwall was more genteel and probably less extreme than Spence, but he was equally suspect in the eyes of the authorities for his membership of the LCS, for his radical, and at times intemperate and violent, lectures, and for publicly glorying in the name of a sans-culotte. He was not a particularly original thinker, and much of his rhetoric centred on the rights of the people to discuss politics and to censure the behaviour of government, particularly with reference to the war and its expense. Nevertheless, Thelwall began to develop a radical version of natural rights theory moving in the same direction as some of Paine's ideas. In Thelwall's eyes society had a duty to help individuals and to ensure to the poor as a matter of natural right the redistribution of a surplus of historically produced labour. He also never ceased to praise the principles of the French Revolution in particular for emphasising that men had natural rights, that abuses did not become virtues because of their antiquity, and that the promotion of the happiness of humankind was the object of society [3; 37].
Thelwall was one of the radicals who stood with one foot among the radical artisans of the LCS and the other among the more well-to-do, intellectual grouping of generally young men, who were equally inspired by the Revolution. This group included the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, and also the political thinker William Godwin [148; 155]. The son of a dissenting minister, Godwin had himself begun his adult life as a minister. When the Revolution erupted, however, he was little concerned with religious matters, having moved to London during the 1780s and embarked on a literary career. The French Revolution inspired him to develop his ideas for the perfectibility of humankind. The Enquiry Concerning the Principle of Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness was begun in 1791 and published in two volumes in February 1793. Unlike most other political radicals, Godwin rejected the idea of natural rights. He saw the future perfectibility of humanity as emerging through the operation of what he called 'universal benevolence'. This was a moral obligation which, Godwin believed, rested on all men. No one had the right to dispose of his talents or wealth simply for his personal advantage or profit; and no one had the right to exercise power over anyone else. He was highly critical of the existing institutions of government, law and church, but he believed that these would wither away once universal benevolence began to function as it should. Godwin's criticisms were unsparing, but he escaped prosecution allegedly because, as Pitt is reported to have said, a book costing three guineas would be of little interest to radical artisans who could barely find three shillings. Probably the authorities also suspected that the complex, metaphysical arguments of
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Political Justice would create difficulties of understanding for radical artisans. Nevertheless there is evidence that the book was known among such audiences. Its greatest impact, however, was on the Romantic poets and among similar intellectual circles in the early nineteenth century.
Godwin's personal creed led him to oppose marriage, yet in 1797 he married his pregnant mistress, Mary Wollstonecraft. She shared Godwin's disapproval of marriage and had already borne an illegitimate daughter to an American gentleman with whom she had lived while in France. More significantly, she had herself engaged in the political debate sparked by the French Revolution and had taken up the cause of women's rights. At the end of 1790 she had hurriedly written A Vindication of the Rights of Men, an attack on Burke and a denunciation of the existing state of English society. This followed the fairly traditional line of defending the actions of the French against Burke's condemnation. However in 1792 she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a pamphlet which was to become a key document in the feminist canon in Britain, Europe and the United States. The title echoed that of Paine, and within the book Wollstonecraft stated that women should be represented in legislatures, equating their position with that of the unrepresented working men 'who pay for the support of royalty when they can scarcely stop their children's mouths with bread'. But her principle concern was education. Women and men were equally human and rational, yet women were kept in ignorance. Equal opportunities for all to acquire both information and rational skills would benefit all of humanity, destroying ignorance and oppressive government, and fostering the perfectibility of human nature [Doc. 5].
Wollstonecraft's feminist voice was relatively isolated, and in many respects it remained limited. Radical men in general had a masculine concept of citizenship; they commonly associated corruption and decadence with femininity, and they also tended to equate reason with masculinity and irrationality with femininity [14]. At the same time, both Wollstonecraft and the like-minded Mary Hays saw maternity and domestic concerns as women's duty and principal concerns; and it was much the same with those other women who participated in the debate on the Revolution and the subsequent war. While women seem to have engaged publicly in the political controversies of the 1790s to a much greater extent than ever before, their texts focused on education, morality, and religion - subjects considered as more 'acceptable' for women. Anna Laeticia Barbauld, for example, the wife of a Presbyterian minister, wrote powerfully against the barriers which inhibited the political participation of Dissenters, and she was highly critical of the war and the fast days decreed for the sake of British success. Barbauld's style and thinking were in a fairly traditional mould of reformist criticism, morality, and religion, and shared none of Wollstonecraft's precocious feminism. Yet, in many respects, the writings of
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Barbauld and Wollstonecraft were symptomatic of the different directions taken by the reformist and radical thought sparked by the Revolution.
As radical ideas diverged in different directions, so conservatives and loyalists continued to confront them. But much conservative and loyalist literature concentrated on the folly of the French and on the necessity of the war against them. Burke himself became more and more focused on the need to extirpate French principles. In August 1791 he published An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. He refuted the charge of political inconsistency levelled at him by former political allies and reiterated his belief that the theoretical principles which underpinned the activities of French revolutionaries were quite different from those which had inspired action in England a century before. Basing political structures on abstract notions of rights and the will of an untutored majority without any reference to duties and morality was, he reiterated, foolish in the extreme. Moreover, the line taken by his former colleagues would, he feared, lead to the dissemination in Britain of the dangerous principles of the French. When war came in early 1793 Burke saw it as a new kind of conflict and, in the four Letters on a Regicide Peace, penned between 1795 and 1797 and which constitute his last great political pamphlet, he warned against 'a Sansculottick peace', which would leave Jacobinism alive and a continuing threat to humanity.
While radical authors condemned the war as the sport of despots and the cause of food shortages, and while liberal reformers, styling themselves 'the Friends of Peace' (see below p. 34) condemned all war, and that against France particularly for being the cause of crippling taxation, a string of conservative polemicists followed Burke's lead on the conflict. John Bowles, for example, wrote a succession of pamphlets justifying the war and warning against any premature peace and concession to Jacobinism. Bowles was a barrister and an active magistrate in Surrey. He began to receive treasury money for writing conservative propaganda in 1792, the year in which he published A Protest against Thomas Paine's 'Rights of Man'; by the middle of the 1790s he had a string of lucrative government offices which enabled him to give up his legal career and devote a considerable amount of time to pamphleteering. Like several others, Bowles was not a mere slavish follower of Burke, but rather a kindred spirit. He had a sincere personal faith in the excellence of the English constitution which he regarded as under threat from French principles. He also saw the Revolution as a vast conspiracy directed against the established civil, political and religious institutions of Europe [94; 131]. This conspiracy theory of the Revolution found its first forceful statement in an essay by a
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French emigre priest, Augustin de Barruel, Memoires pour servir a l'histoire du jacobinisme (1797), and then, in the same year, in a pamphlet by John Robison, Professor of Natural Law at the University of Edinburgh, Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies.
Bowles and Robison were among the contributors to the Anti-Jacobin Review, a monthly journal which began in July 1798 as an organ of loyal and conservative propaganda; it continued until 1821. The Review was the direct successor to the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Political Examiner which, for just under a year, had set out to refute what it considered to be the dangerous doctrines of sedition being fervently circulated in the country by British 'Jacobins'. Both the weekly and the monthly benefited from ministerial involvement and patronage, but government involvement with the press was nothing new. In the early years of the French Revolution Pitt's government was subsidising parts of the press to the tune of £5,000 a year. From October 1792 it fostered a new newspaper, the daily Sun; and from January 1793 it financed the daily True Briton. Both of these papers were edited by the subsidised treasury author, John Heriot. At roughly the same time the government appears to have been involved with the creation of the Anglican periodical, the British Critic, a journal which owed its inspiration to the Revd William Jones of Nayland - a clergyman wracked by guilt because his ancestor, Colonel Jones, was Oliver Cromwell's brother-in-law and a regicide. In time Jones himself was also to become a contributor to the Anti-Jacobin Review [92].
Of course, the loyalist newspapers and journals, like the conservative authors in general, were less concerned with developing ideas about the social contract and the future development of society than they were with challenging the ideas put forward by radicals and restating neo-Burkean ideas of the constitution, of the importance of social morality and of revealed religion, of duty and subservience to church and king, and of respect for the existing social hierarchy and gender relations [39]. When individuals, even the most loyal, embarked on analysing and exploring the authority of the state, the results could be embarrassing. The most striking example of this was John Reeves's Thoughts on the English Government, which was published in the form of four 'letters' between 1795 and 1800. Reeves was an attorney with a long career of government service which had included acting as a commissioner of bankrupts, law clerk to the Board of Trade, drafting the aborted Police Bill of 1785, and, most famously, launching the loyalist Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers in November 1792 (see below pp. 31 and 42-4). Thoughts on the English Government displayed an unashamed reverence for the monarchy and stressed its importance within the
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constitutional structure; the two houses of parliament, in Reeves's estimation, were little more than glorious appendages [Doc. 21]. Parliament's response to the first letter, spurred by the opposition but also, probably for political expediency, backed by the government, was to charge Reeves with libel. He was acquitted, but did not change his views as the three subsequent letters containing his Thoughts were to show - two were published in 1799 and the last in 1800.. He never forgave Pitt for the prosecution and for not giving him any public recognition for founding the Association movement; but his access to government patronage and places never suffered - in 1797 he acquired the lucrative position of King's Printer, and between 1803 and 1804 he served as Superintendent of Aliens [85; 92].
Hannah More's thinking was far less contentious and, in the long term, probably far more influential. More had begun her literary career in the 1760s; mixing with the likes of David Garrick and Dr Johnson, she had produced plays and verses which, while relatively successful at the time, are little remembered. By the 1780s her work was taking a much more serious turn; she moved increasingly in evangelical Christian circles and addressed the importance of manners, morals and religion. In 1792 she published Village Politics, a well-regarded response to Paine, which was purportedly written by Will Chip, a country carpenter [Doc. 6a]. Within three years she had embarked on the project for which she is best remembered, the Cheap Repository Tracts. These tracts were inspired in part by concerns about Painite political material directed at the poorer classes, but the stories and verses were much more than a collection of homilies urging loyalty. The Cheap Repository Tracts were, Susan Pederson has convincingly argued, 'a broad evangelical assault on late eighteenth-century popular culture' [93 p. 87]. In contrast to the essentially escapist popular culture found in the chap books which had been sold by pedlars for a century and more, the tracts, while disguised in a popular format, stressed that idleness, intemperance, gambling, and unbelief led to perdition. They emphasised the need for order and hierarchy within families and society; they stressed the importance of marriage and family; and they urged the observance of the strict laws of God by all social classes. The continuation of the Repository by the publisher, when More relinquished her involvement in 1798, suggests that the tracts were, and continued to be, a profitable concern. At least some of the profit came from genteel interest; many respectable individuals appear to have been ready to purchase the tracts and circulate them free to the poor in the hopes of becoming the moral arbiters of popular culture. How many of the less well-to-do accepted, or were won over by, the moral messages, and how many saw them purely in terms of entertainment on the same lines as the chap books, must remain an open question [93; 94; Doc. 6b].
In addition to the political and philosophical pamphlets generated by
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the French Revolution, and More's tracts prompted by rather broader concerns, debate during the 1790s was also joined in sermons, in addresses made in the courts, and in novels. Price's 'On the Love of our Country' was a sermon; the political sermon had a long pedigree, and throughout the 1790s loyalist Anglican clergy preached warnings about the dangers of France, and the need for atonement, especially on the days of fast decreed, periodically, during the war. Some Dissenters, in turn, preached a more radical, reformist gospel [40; 41]. Again it was common for judges and senior magistrates to reflect on political affairs and celebrate the excellence of the British constitution and legal structure in their charges to grand juries at the opening of assizes or quarter sessions. During the 1790s, as before, the more striking of such charges were often printed and circulated for a wider audience [6; Doc. 14]. There were significant Jacobin novels, notably Thomas Holcroft's Anne St. Ives (1792), William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) and Robert Bage's Hermsprong (1796), each of which provided overt political and social criticism in the mouths and experiences of the central characters. These, in turn, were countered by more than forty anti- Jacobin novels, several of which were written by women determined to participate in the debate. A handful of the anti-Jacobin novels appeared in the early 1790s, and rather more in the period 1798-1805. They tended to understand and portray Jacobinism according to the perceived scale and size of the threat at any given time. Three main strands have been highlighted in their arguments: they appealed directly to the fears of people of property; they portrayed the Jacobin ideology as chimerical and evil; and they stressed the horrors and violence of the revolutionaries, which, in 1798, could also include the experience of the rising in Ireland [149; 151; 153].
Traditional Whig historiography implied that the radicals won the intellectual arguments of the 1790s, but that they were repressed by a British 'terror'. In the last twenty years or so, however, a new consensus has emerged, largely following the lead of H.T. Dickinson. This suggests that a strong faith in the virtues of the British constitution, together with a general resistance to change, meant that radical ideas were defeated as much, if not more so, by the appeal of an innate conservatism rather than by government-sponsored repression [21; 35; 44; 86]. There are difficulties with this new consensus, not the least being the extent to which it can be demonstrated that the arguments of one group were stronger than those of their opponents and the extent to which, during the period of the French Revolution, a new political consciousness was emerging among social groups hitherto excluded from the political nation [36]. Yet, as will become apparent from what follows, there can be little dispute about who were the political victors at least in the short term.