This essay examines the alterations made by George Colman the Younger in adapting William Godwin’s tragic novel, Caleb Williams (1794), for the stage, as the three act musical comedy, The Iron Chest (1796). Colman’s extensive modifications were of both a political kind, to satisfy the Examiner of Plays, and of a dramaturgical kind to satisfy the expectations and interests of playhouse audiences. Paying particular attention to the ways in which Colman’s choices open up our understanding of the distinctions and differences between the narratological and the dramaturgical, the essay illustrates why Colman could expect any political content to be overlooked in the play’s performance and reception, even if he retained some elements of the political critique embedded in Godwin’s novel. In this manner, the essay both illuminates the formal affordances and constraints that regulated representation on the late eighteenth-century stage and makes a case for why performance conventions, and not just printed play texts, should be taken into consideration in our assessments of the politics of popular plays in the period.

This essay considers the impact of censorship on Holcroft’s career as a whole, not simply his experiences under the Examiner but the wider public condemnation of some of his work. Identifying Knave or Not? and He’s to Blame, both staged in early 1798, as the pivotal point in his writing career, the essay shows how the public opprobrium unfairly received by Holcroft coloured his later career. Paying careful attention to the language of the plays, in a decade when the meanings of words were under heated dispute, the essay showcases Holcroft’s political courage compared to contemporaries. It argues that Holcroft deliberately reduces comedic options in order to strengthen the force of his political principles, a move that remains underappreciated today, and paid a considerable price for his resolve not to fuel wit through displays of people’s suffering.

This chapter shows how the new demands of a growing market shaped the development of 1790s political novels. In the wake of the French revolution, the proliferation of English fiction began to strike many observers as particularly dangerous – critics feared that novels might be the vehicle of threateningly radical and immoral ideas, while many authors expressed anxieties about where and by whom their works would be read. Examining novels by writers including Eliza Parsons, William Godwin, and Robert Bage, this chapter argues that political ideas across the spectrum were often conceived and expressed as functions of multiplicity: How many readers, how many epistolary voices, how many viewpoints, how many ideological challenges could one novel handle? Focusing first on the proliferation of voices that a long novel allows, and then on concerns about the alarmingly wide and indiscriminate spread of fiction to its readers, this chapter considers how these two ways of thinking about fiction’s function tie narrative style to the decade’s radical political debates.

Chapter 4 interprets Austen’s beloved comedy of marriage in dialogue with Cavell’s philosophy of comic remarriage. In its first half I consider the charismatic art of Pride and Prejudice as a form of the conversational “sequel,” as Pride and Prejudice the cultural phenomenon comprises an unbounded event of uncontainable circulation and exchange. The chapter’s second half gives visibility to Cavell’s omission of the genealogy of the European concept of perfectibility from his Emersonian inflection of moral perfectionism. Cavell has never explicitly laid out or paid homage to the trajectory, tensions, and implications of perfectibility as a concept found in European philosophy and literature of the Enlightenment. The omission impacts a Cavellian reading of Pride and Prejudice by laying new stress on how Austen uses comic style to articulate her own fictional stance against the disembodiment and rhetorical rigidity of much thinking on “perfectibility” – especially Godwin’s. At the center of Jane Austen and Other Minds, the chapter enacts a hinge-movement regarding philosophy’s historical and material conditions and gender as topics of emergent interest in late Cavell.

The deliberative style of radicals around Godwin and Holcroft was driven by a belief in truth and candour and it was one which was especially prized in its binary form, in contrast to the tendency of public meetings and political associations to fall back on rhetoric. It was a discourse that insisted on deliberative equality, but did so in a powerfully hierarchical society, divided on lines of class, status and gender.Godwin and others were often successful in drawing young men into their circles and engaging in this deliberative practice; but it was much more challenging to do so with women.This chapter examines how a number of women sought to resist and negotiate Godwin’s deliberative dominance using a range of strategies to discomfit him, to challenge his intellectualism and to claim a position of equality.

Godwin’s relatively new experience with women following the publication of Political Justice opened him up to a wider range of discursive and deliberative styles and helped lay the ground for his subsequent relationship with Wollstonecraft.In a society of stark gender inequality, it was a relationship in which something like equality was achieved, even if that was painfully won and remained fragile.Following Wollstonecraft’s death, a new set of imperatives faced Godwin which led him into a series of relationships in which he resorted to older and more traditional patterns of communication and with more traditional expectations.For all their egalitarianism, it is clear that class and gender inequality were far more deeply engrained than many of the radicals had assumed.

How did people understand those with whom they disagreed? How was that disagreement handled?And how was that process affected by the heightened political climate of the 1790s? More especially, how did literary radicals such as Godwin, who believed in the communicability of truth, understand his developing disagreements with a range of men who, by the end of the decade, were willing to denounce his ideas from the lectern and pulpit? This chapter charts the breakdown of several of Godwin’s friendships, including Samul Parr, James Mackintosh and Francis Burdett, and looks at the wider problems faced for his understanding of his deliberative aspirations as repression and financial hardship increasingly undermined the social world he had been able to take for granted earlier in the decade.It also looks at evidence of decreasing confidence among radicals, and others, in the light of this reaction and the intrusion of loyalism into people’s sense of their private concerns.

William Godwin’s condemnation of all law in Political Justice is explored through his novel Things As They Are; or Caleb Williams. Caleb’s failure to hate the law reasonably and well is his very point—as a character. Lawyer-reviewers of the novel were more than unkind about Godwin’s knowledge and understanding of the law; Godwin had the troubles that most historians experience with the law.

In the 1790s Godwin was implacable in his dislike of the law; thirty years on, as a historian rather than a political philosopher, he fell a little bit in love with it as he described the law projects and reforms of the Commonwealth period. His approbation grew thought the four volumes of his History of the Commonwealth of England. The chapter traces his journey from hatred to love. It also consider Godwin’s theoretical piece on ‘History and Romance’ (1797) in order to draw together the discussion of history-writing that runs through the book.

The conclusion moves beyond Richardson, Burney, Austen, and Edgeworth to demonstrate the wide-ranging ramifications of networked authorship for other authors during the period.It was not necessary to be a member of an underprivileged group in order to be situated within an authorship network.Three of their well-educated male contemporaries were influenced by literary networks that inspired significant revisions to their most famous novels: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794).The case studies of these three novels show that revision was a major tool of eighteenth-century composition practices and was linked to networked authorship, overturning spontaneous, individual conceptions of literary production during the period.The larger consequences of this study are for the categories of novel and author: by concentrating on revision, we can understand the mutability of the novel form and the networked nature of authorship.