M. O. Grenby. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-80351-9. Price: US$65.00.

Anti-Jacobin fiction constitutes a fairly narrow slice of literary history—M. O. Grenby’s survey, easily the most comprehensive to date, includes roughly sixty novels and tales—and one that is, as Grenby himself notes (xii), not particularly distinguished by the literary merit of the works that comprise it. So the task that this study undertakes of demonstrating the historical importance of this mode of fiction is by no means an easy one. In its first objective, simply to provide an attentive account of this largely neglected material, The Anti-Jacobin Novel succeeds quite admirably. But it is at its critical best when it looks beyond this narrow frame to explore the role of anti-Jacobin fiction with respect to the history of the novel as a whole. The argument in The Anti-Jacobin Novel is distinguished by both clarity and coherence, and rests upon four interconnected propositions. Grenby claims first that anti-Jacobin fiction is a distinctive and cohesive literary mode, defined by an identifiable set of narrative strategies as well as by consistent ideological concerns. Second, Grenby contends that although these novels were aligned with anti-Jacobin political discourse, they are distinguishable from it by their use of literary forms; writing politics as fiction, that is, fostered particular rhetorical tendencies and particular inflections of a more general ideological discourse. Grenby’s third point is that anti-Jacobin fiction, although historically specific to the post-Revolutionary era (almost all of the novels here were published between 1794 and 1807), this narrative mode proved popular and successful because it grafted its political purposes on to pre-existing, well-established narrative conventions. And finally, he argues that as anti-Jacobin fiction drew upon the literary past, it also pointed toward the future of the novel in two specific ways. Its politicizing of fiction contributed to widening the scope of the novel’s concerns, and its incorporation of orthodox political opinions into the novel helped to still concerns about the general moral effects of reading fiction, and thus to legitimize the novel as a genre. “Those who had first commandeered the novel for anti-Jacobinism, insisting that the political novel must be a lawful instrument in such a time of danger…had redeemed the novel in the eyes of many of its most inflexible assailants” (208). The impact of anti-Jacobin fiction was thus historically ironic; it strengthened some of the same cultural tendencies that many anti-Jacobin writers themselves deplored. Grenby tells us at the start that his goal is to use anti-Jacobin fiction to “help clarify the nature of conservatism as a whole in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,” and he does make some helpful points in this regard. He stresses, for instance, the belated nature of the anti-Jacobin campaign—that its virulence and visible urgency had little to do with the political reality of radicalism in Britain. Yet most of what he argues about political history is not particularly new (if overlooked, perhaps, by those inclined to make more of British radicalism than was actually there). As he notes, “Radicalism, it is now generally recognized, only ever appealed to a relatively small section of society, and, in its appeal to a mass constituency in mainland Britain, was a transitory phenomenon” (5). So what Grenby has to say about the content of conservative principles or the tenor of conservative arguments is familiar ground, as are the specific narrative strategies around which he organizes his individual chapters—the negative representations of revolutionary events, the caricatures of the new philosophy, and the portrayal of Jacobinism as both hypocritically self-interested and deeply dangerous to established social hierarchies. The deeper merit of this study, then, lies in its contributions not to …