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ANTI-JACOBIN NOVELS
Anti-Jacobin v7.book Page i Thursday, August 25, 2005 2:54 PM
General Editor
W. M . Ve r h o e v e n
Consulting Editor
Claudia L. Johnson
Volume Editors
Philip Cox
Adriana Craciun
Richard Cronin
Amanda Gilroy
M. O. Grenby
Robert Miles
Mary Peace
Nicola Trott
W. M . Ve r h o e v e n
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ANTI-JACOBIN NOVELS
General Editor
W. M. Verhoeven
VOLUME 7
Jane West, A Tale of the Times (1799)
Edited by
Amanda Gilroy
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© Introduction and endnotes Amanda Gilroy 2005
Facsimile title pages by permission of the British Library
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First published 2005 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
Published 201 by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
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© Taylor & Francis 2005
X
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OXX 1X 4 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Anti-Jacobin novels
Vols. 6–10
1. English fiction – 18th century 2. Political fiction, English
I. Verhoeven, W. M. II. Johnson, Claudia L.
823.6'080358[F]
Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
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Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered tradem arks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages.
No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form
or by any electronic, mechanical, or othe r means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
ISBN-13: 978-1-85196-781-0 (set)
v
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Note on the Text xxix
Bibliography xxxi
Chronology xxxiii
Jane West, A Tale of the Times (1799)
Vo lu me I 1
Volume II 107
Volume III 211
Editorial Notes 335
Silent Corrections 387
Contemporary Reviews 389
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vii
INTRODUCTION
[I]t may be said, that the Author is less disposed to expatiate on
excellence than error: but the office of the historian of human man-
ners is not panegyric, but delineation.1
Moral Fictions/National Tales
Jane West’s third novel, A Tale of the Times, had readers queuing up to get
hold of it, as Bishop Percy observes in a letter written to West from
Brighton in 1800:
As for your excellent moral fictions, I have been reading them with no
common interest. They have the entire possession of this first of
watering-places. Here are three circulating libraries, and the demand
for your novels is very great in them all. In the shop where I have been
waiting for my turn in your ‘Tale of the Times,’ I was told there were
three sets; nor was it till last night that I could procure the first vol-
ume of one of them, although the season is scarce here begun.2
Longman and Rees had printed 1,000 copies of the novel in January 1799,
and issued a second edition in the same year. West received £90 for the
novel, an above-average payment at a time when many novelists were
willing to accept figures as low as William Lane’s starting price of five
guineas. She was one of the most prominent anti-Jacobin novelists, and
readers appreciated her potent mixture of anti-Jacobinism and didactic
moralizing, and her valorization of family life and religious sentiment. Like
Edmund Burke, to whom she paid tribute in An Elegy on the Death of the
Right Honourable Edmund Burke in 1797, and Hannah More, with whom
she hoped to be compared, West enlisted her talents in the cause of social
preservation, writing, in 1801, that ‘Our task is, not to acquire, but to
maintain; to preserve, not to erect’.3 She put aside her cultural anxieties
about the deleterious effects of novel reading on impressionable readers,
recognized the power of popularity and aimed to produce novels that
would ‘rous[e] the stronger energies of the mind’ (p. 333) in order to pro-
tect and preserve traditional moral structures.4 In A Tale of the Times, as
well as in other novels and conduct literature, West attacks pernicious
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French influences on English politics, literature, fashion and manners, and
demonizes those ‘philosophers’ and ‘democrats’ whose ‘systems’ assail the
female virtue and class boundaries that constitute the fabric of British
society. A Tale of the Times dramatizes the threat to the nation in terms of
the destruction of a marriage through the intervention of a philosopher-
villain, based on William Godwin. West shares the same philosophical tar-
gets as many other anti-Jacobin novelists, but where they are generally
comic, parodic or satirical, she is deadly serious. Her particular concern is
female conduct and its effects on the moral health and prosperity of the
nation; thus her cautionary tale offers a view of what England could
become if Jacobin principles prevailed. West makes it clear that it is the
relaxation of ‘principles’ not politics that would lead to the fall of the
nation; or, to put this another way, principles are political in her novel.
The sanctity of the home, of ‘private worth’ and ‘domestic confidence’, is
all that stands between England and ‘universal confusion’ (p. 199). The
message of A Tale of the Times is that the ‘Daughters of Britain’, who wept
at the death of Edmund Burke, need to remain vigilant in ‘resisting the
corruption of the times’.5
A crucial ingredient in West’s brand of fiction is her narrator Prudentia
Homespun, who appeared in her two previous novels, The Advantages of
Education: or, The History of Maria Williams (1793) and A Gossip’s Story
(1796). Prudentia is the nominal ‘author’ of The Advantages of Education;
later novels, such as A Tale of the Times, are published anonymously but
capitalize on the popularity of West’s first novels (the present novel’s title
page proclaims that it is ‘By the Author of A Gossip’s Story’). Prudentia
offered a way of codifying West’s moral voice. She is a self-described old
maid who lives in a market-town in the north of England (called ‘Dan-
bury’), on an annuity of one hundred pounds a year, along with a female
servant and a cat. Because she is unfettered by domestic obligations, Pru-
dentia has a far more extensive sphere of action than would be afforded to
those wives and mothers so valorized in West’s novels.6 As West notes in
the preface to The Advantages of Education, she is indebted for the name
‘Homespun’ to Henry Mackenzie’s journal The Mirror, which featured a
story about a plain country gentleman called John Homespun and his
efforts to preserve his family from aristocratic corruptions. Prudentia
Homespun’s names foreground the qualities that make her a mentor for
her young female readers and associate her with a specifically English
mode of knowledge, that is, common sense as opposed to French ‘theory’.
Prudentia constantly entreats her readers not ‘to expect extravagence of
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Introduction
ix
character, or variety of incident’; in the introduction to A Gossip’s Story,
she claims that her first novel ‘had no splendour of language … nothing of
the marvellous, or the enigmatical, no sudden elevation, and no astonish-
ing depression. It merely spoke of human life as it is.’7 She reveals her
‘intentions’ early in the novels, ‘that the lover of the wonderful, and the
admirer of the horrific, may not complain of having been cheated into the
perusal of a performance that has not only a plan for its conduct, but also
a moral tendency in its design’ (p. 6). She invokes ‘the shades of Addison,
Goldsmith, and Fielding’ to combat the meaningless sensationalism of
Gothic fiction (p. 60). In The Infidel Father (1802), she discloses: ‘My plan
has ever been to seize on some important moral truth, and then to fabri-
cate a story to illustrate it’; in A Tale of the Times also, narrative, character
and plot are subordinated to the demands of instruction.8 As well as
objecting to all things French, Prudentia wants to warn her young female
readers against the risks of romantic reading, and especially to disabuse
them of the rosy views of married life that saturate circulating library nov-
els. Instead of extravagance of any sort, Prudentia offers her pedagogic
observations on common life. West establishes an effective disciplinary
circuit that links Prudentia, the female spectator of social life, her dutiful
female characters, and her implied female readers, who, in the act of read-
ing the novels, are urged to submit to the same mode of ‘tender repression’
as the characters,9 and, indeed, the novelist herself, who must obey the
‘hard laws’ of realistic fiction (p. 38).
A brief plot summary of the first two ‘Prudentia’ novels will help to
clarify West’s prescriptive project, and provide a context for discussing A
Tale of the Times, which both complements and differs from its predeces-
sors. In The Advantages of Education, Maria Williams listens to the gentle
advice of her widowed mother, avoids the advances of a libertine suitor
and is rewarded with marriage to the eminently suitable Edmund Herbert.
Her rich and indulged friend, Charlotte Raby, on the other hand, follows
her passions, suffers an unhappy marriage and ends up ostracized by her
rural community. In A Gossip’s Story, West’s heroines are sisters, the sensi-
ble Louisa Dudley, brought up by her father and a model of filial
obedience, and the younger Marianne, brought up by her doting grand-
mother, and allowed to cultivate the soft feelings of the heroines in the
memoirs and adventures she so avidly consumes. She rejects her father’s
choice of a husband for her because he does not live up to her romantic
expectations, and makes a disastrous marriage to the seemingly romantic
Lord Clermont. Louisa demonstrates her moral regularity by submitting to
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x
paternal authority, even consenting to marry a disagreeable suitor. After
the death of her father, whom she has nursed assiduously, Louisa’s solid
virtues secure her marriage to the benevolent Evangelical Pelham, who
had been rejected by Marianne. Both early heroines fulfil Hannah More’s
demand that ‘An early habitual restraint is peculiarly important to the
future character and happiness of women’.10 West’s reviewers had no
problems recognizing her virtues: ‘A substantial wholesome cold collation
has been provided for [readers of Novels] by the sensible and correct
author of “A Gossip’s Story”’.11 West would have been satisfied with the
terms attached to her name and her novel.
The ubiquitous paired heroines in
A Tale of the Times
are Geraldine Pow-
erscourt (Monteith) and Lucy Evans. If Geraldine has a romantic glamour
and a romantic disposition that distinguishes her from her less beautiful
and more retiring friend, she is no flighty self-indulgent Charlotte or Mari-
anne. Both Lucy and Geraldine benefit from the sage advice of Lucy’s
mother, Mrs Evans; long before the death of her ‘sickly petulant parent’,
Geraldine considered ‘Mrs. Evans as more truly fulfilling the maternal
character; and she felt for her judicious, firm, but affectionate reproofs,
that filial deference which the eternal whine of her mother’s complaining
censures failed to inspire’ (p. 38). Though they share a mother, so to speak,
they have different paternal inheritances, with Lucy’s clergyman father
nurturing restraint and religious principles, while Geraldine’s benevolent
father is ‘enraptured by … his enchanting daughter’ (p. 35). The differ-
ences between the two heroines are more nuanced than in West’s previous
novels. Characteristically, while Geraldine gives a dazzling performance at
the harp, ‘Lucy sat quietly at her plain work in a corner of the room, and
enjoyed the applause which her friend’s masterly performance ever excited’
(p. 40). But she has her own special ‘lustre’; ‘She had read much, she had
thought more; her leisure for study and reflection was greater than her
friend’s, and her mind imperceptibly acquired superior energy’ (p. 40).
Henry Powerscourt, Geraldine’s cousin and the man her father wants her
to marry, takes on the Pelham/Herbert role in this novel; from the begin-
ning, he appears as a model of sensitive masculinity. He is not handsome,
not fashionable, not witty, but is almost universally valued for his reserved
moral integrity and generous heart; foreign travels later add ‘grace’ and
‘elegance’ to his character (p. 131). Like West’s earlier virtuous characters,
Lucy and Henry display recognizably English virtues: Lucy represses her
feelings for Henry through much of the novel, while he represses his feel-
ings for Geraldine. With so much wholesome self-discipline going on, any
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xi
diligent reader will figure out that Lucy and Henry are destined for each
other, long before the two characters acknowledge it to themselves or to
each other. Finally observing Lucy’s preference for him, Henry discovers
‘that reciprocal affection which her unassuming virtues had awakened in
his heart’ (p. 233). Their marriage privileges the model of domesticity val-
orized in West’s earlier novels, in which marriage is ‘friendship in its most
lively, extensive, and exalted sense’.
12
The threat to the nation in the last years of the decade transforms Pru-
dentia from a gossip to ‘novelistic spy upon human hearts’.13 In A Tale of
the Times, West’s rhetoric is apocalyptic: ‘I feel stimulated’, Prudentia
declares, ‘by an ardent, though perhaps injudicious zeal, to lend my feeble
aid to stop the torrent of enthusiastic sentiment which daringly menaces
that heaven-erected edifice that is predicted to survive the wreck of
worlds’ (p. 111). Hannah More, too, recognized the demands of 1798–9:
‘At this period … our country can only hope to stand by opposing a bold
and noble unanimity to the most tremendous confederacies against reli-
gion and order, and governments, which the world ever saw’.14 Wes t’ s
novel is best read as a fictional counterpart to Hannah More’s contempo-
raneous didactic text, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education,
which went through seven editions in 1799 alone. Both writers see them-
selves as engaged in a war against pernicious principles. Writing in a
historical ‘moment of alarm and peril’, More calls on women with a ‘warn-
ing voice’ to ‘kindle every slumbering energy in their hearts’ and to ‘re-
animate’ public morals.15 Similarly, West’s novel is saturated with the
vocabulary of warfare: The novelist sees herself as repelling ‘the enemy’s
insidious attacks with similar weapons’ (p. 333), while Henry Powerscourt
and the villain, Fitzosborne, are ‘combatants’ fighting for Geraldine’s body
and soul, and the language of attack and defence defines their manoeu-
vres (p. 251). The dangers are exacerbated because Fitzosborne wages a
‘covert war’, deploying opportunistic guerrilla tactics that are more diffi-
cult to recognize and repel than more direct anti-British sentiments
(p. 159). Echoing More, Henry wishes for the ‘“warning voice” which
might arouse them [Geraldine and Monteith] to a consciousness of their
danger’ (p. 258). More argues that women are the foundation of civil soci-
ety and thus the primary targets of Jacobin attacks:
The general state of civilized society depends more than those are
aware, who are not accustomed to scrutinize into the springs of
human action, on the prevailing sentiments and habits of women, and
on the nature and degree of the estimation in which they are held …
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Anti-Jacobin Novels: Volume 7
xii
I assert that the attacks of infidelity in Great Britain are at this
moment principally directed against the female breast. Conscious of
the influence of women in civil society, conscious of the effect which
female infidelity produced in France, they attribute the ill success of
their attempts in this country to their having been hitherto chiefly
addressed to the male sex. They are now sedulously labouring to
destroy the religious principles of women, and in too many instances
they have fatally succeeded.16
In her own writings, West returns again and again to the national signifi-
cance of female conduct; thus in Letters to a Young Lady, she observes that
the ‘rank which Britain now holds among the nations of the earth’ can
only be retained if female virtue is not ‘degraded’, and that ‘No nation has
preserved its political independence for any long period after its women
become dissipated and licentious. When the hallowed graces of the chaste
matron have given place to the bold allurements of the courtezan, the ris-
ing generation always proclaims its base origin.’ Along with Burke and
More, West ascribes the ‘fall’ of France to the ‘loose morals of its
women’.17 Seen in these terms, A Tale of the Times is a national tale, with
Geraldine an allegorical figure for Britain itself.18 This allegorical reading
is emphasized by Lucy’s comments following Geraldine’s safe delivery of a
daughter: ‘Your useful life is spared to your husband, your infant, your
father, your friends, your country. It is a general, a public benefit’
(pp. 123–4). As the repetitive rhetorical structure makes clear, Geral-
dine’s roles as wife, mother, daughter and friend are indissolubly
connected to the life of her nation. The historical dating of the plot
enforces West’s point about the danger to the nation, for Geraldine is first
introduced to the reader in the inauspicious year 1789, while the bulk of
the novel, which focuses on her disastrous ‘fall’ and ultimate demise, coin-
cides with the height of the ‘Terror’ in 1793–4.
Recognizing Prudentia’s ‘zeal’ and the melodramatic scenarios it engen-
ders, Nicola Watson calls A Tale of the Times ‘West’s most hysterically anti-
Jacobin novel’.19 However, while the novel is energetic in the anti-Jacobin
cause, it cannot be wholly assimilated to a simple reactionary model.
Indeed, it is interesting today precisely because of the complicated con-
servatism it purveys, and because of the tensions it reveals between its
ethical/political and aesthetic/emotional agendas. If the novel is read
intertextually with More’s Strictures, as its first readers would likely have
done, then the critique of Geraldine as a warning to other women is evi-
dent, and Prudentia, of course, helps by pointing out signs we may have
missed. But the reader must be acutely sensitive to small signs to register
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Introduction
xiii
Geraldine’s errors, and the possibility of a resisting reading is always
present. The charming heroine, as well as the charismatic villain, have a
cultural complexity that exceeds West’s didactic intentions. It is perhaps
worth noting here other revealing ways in which the novel in circulation
complicated or counteracted its own message: thus, for example, Pruden-
tia inveighs against circulating library fiction, but the novel itself was
staple circulating library fare. Furthermore, West’s control of Prudentia’s
lineage is not absolute – though she wants to claim affiliation with Henry
Mackenzie, her first readers might also have caught an allusion to the silly,
sentimental Harriet Homespun of Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Pupil of Pleasure
(1776), a character who is a victim of her penchant for trashy novels.20
Dangerous Intimacies
We first meet Geraldine when she is seventeen, the epitome of loveliness
and affability. Geraldine picks the wrong husband, smitten by the hand-
some Monteith at Chester raceball.21 As Mrs Evans later observes, ‘What
very amiable qualities could she discover in a ball-room?’ (p. 54).22 Fanta-
sizing about Monteith in his absence, ‘like Pygmalion, [she] became
deeply enamoured with the creature of her own imagination’ (p. 43); this
romantic tendency is more dangerously reprised in her relationship with
the villain Fitzosborne, whom she generously endows with all sorts of
imagined virtues and talents. A brief history of the Monteith family early
in the novel suggests that Monteith’s inheritance is morally tainted (‘the
pale orgies of dissipation’ ultimately kill his mother, while his father dies in
a scandalous duel (p. 11)). Monteith’s whole family seem to have faulty
moral genes, which are exacerbated by faulty educations. His sister, Lady
Arabella, whose on-again, off-again relationship with Fitzosborne helps to
promote the latter’s designs on Geraldine, is an anti-conduct book figure:
‘The plan of her education consisted in avoiding whatever was bad for the
eyes, bad for the shape, and bad for the complexion’ and acquiring only
fashionable accomplishments (p. 89). His aunt, Lady Madelina, is haughty
and vain, indulgent to Arabella and unkind to Geraldine, concerned with
the honour of the house of Monteith as visible prestige rather than inte-
gral worth. The narrator is at pains to tell the reader that, while Monteith
is generally good-natured, crucially he lacks any self-discipline, his ‘strong
passions … [are] inflamed by the seductions of affluence’ (p. 174); he is
habitually self-indulgent and oblivious to the ‘serious duties imposed by
the character of a husband’ (p. 71).
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Anti-Jacobin Novels: Volume 7
xiv
Geraldine, in contrast, goes to the altar thoroughly suffused in the glow
of Burkean hierarchies:
The more correct principles and refined imagination of lady Monteith
taught her to consider the man whom she vowed to love, honour, and
obey, as the partner of all her joys and sorrows, the lord of her destiny,
the guardian of her character, and the guide of her conduct. (p. 71)
Like an aspiring conduct book heroine, Geraldine ‘determined to study his
disposition with the most assiduous care, to comply with his peculiarities,
and by imperceptible, because, gentle, means, gradually to inspire that
delicacy of taste and sentiment which even her partial judgement discov-
ered to be wanting in his character’ (p. 71). Her principles are quickly
tested by her husband’s desire to return to London before the festivities at
Powerscourt are finished, and by his refusal to attend a country ball given
in their honour, at which Geraldine has the mortifying task of apologizing
for his ‘moral impropriety’ (p. 74). If marriage is not as idyllic as she had
expected, Geraldine nevertheless behaves in ways that would be com-
mended by conduct book writers in her attempts to influence Lord
Monteith’s taste. Contrary to her own mother’s frivolous and uncomforta-
ble ‘improvements’ at Powerscourt, Geraldine turns Monteith Castle into
a haven of elegant hospitality; most importantly, she establishes ‘a neat lit-
tle village’ of white houses for the estate’s tenants and institutions which
offer vocational training for the village girls and boys (p. 112). Geraldine’s
charitable works seem to be models of good conservative practice, ena-
bling the working people to enjoy the fruits of their own labour rather
than making them dependent on financial hand-outs, and establishing an
institutional infrastructure to support their efforts, while all the time pre-
serving time-honoured class hierarchies. She devotes time to the village
school, takes regular walks among the cottages of her domain, which alert
her to her ‘colony’s’ needs, and organizes occasional celebrations at Mon-
teith Castle, all activities recommended by Hannah More.23 Geraldine
follows, too, in the footsteps of Louisa Dudley, the heroine of A Gossip’s
Story, who ‘visited the sick, consoled the afflicted, instructed the ignorant,
and reproved the idle’.24 Geraldine does not need what More calls a ‘stage
effect’ to prompt her charity,25 and perseveres in her designs even though
the rural poor mix their gratitude with petty dissatisfactions that she has
to sort out.
Geraldine concentrates on her own duty as a wife rather than Mon-
teith’s defects and his evident preference for hunting, shooting, fishing,
bowling, cricket and public dinners over any more useful or thoughtful
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xv
pursuits. She spends a lot of time recollecting Mrs Evans’s useful precepts
rather than complaining. However, her ‘ruling foible’, as Fitzosborne sur-
mises, and Arabella confirms, is ‘vanity’ (p. 151).26 She is not vain about
her personal beauty but about her reputation or ‘fame’, a word which
becomes a mantra in the novel, repeated dozens of times; she wants public
recognition of her good works, especially the benevolent colonialism by
which she manages her village, ‘James-town’ (which the novel denomi-
nates as her ‘colony’). More’s Strictures could have been written for
Geraldine: ‘Vanity insinuates itself into the female heart under a variety of
unsuspected forms, and seizes on many a little pass which was not thought
worth guarding’.27
Fitzosborne does not make his appearance until halfway through the
novel. He returns to England from Paris, where he had been ‘contemplat-
ing the sublime spectacle’ of the Revolution. As the narrator observes,
‘the coercive measures which democracy was compelled to adopt obliged
even the lovers of freedom to take shelter in the legal despotism of Old
England’ (p. 141). He narrowly escapes the guillotine and has a wretched
trip home in a fishing boat. Prudentia’s ironic references to French
‘democracy’ and English ‘despotism’ alert her readers to the political tenor
of Fitzosborne’s Parisian tour, and she pointedly codifies his vices as ‘sys-
tematic’ (p. 159), adapting the conservative keyword, ‘system’, which
comprehended all that was wrong in new philosophical doctrines. Fitzos-
borne’s ‘philosophic mind’, to which the narrator alludes when
Fitzosborne first sees the apparently happy Monteiths, is similarly
weighted with political meaning. In the ‘Advertisement’ to the novel,
West makes reference to Sophia King’s Waldorf; or, The Dangers of Philoso-
phy, whose heroine is deluded by the revolutionary rhetoric of reason and
individual happiness. West claims not to have seen the novel itself, but
like King, she perceives ‘philosophy’ through Edmund Burke’s negative
lens:
On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of
cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid
wisdom, as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be sup-
ported only by their own terrors, and by the concern, which each
individual may find in them, from his own private speculations, or can
spare to them from his own private interests.28
All the usual political suspects of the anti-Jacobin novel speak through
Fitzosborne, though he most often parrots Godwinian theories and rheto-
ric. He is the missionary of what the text calls those ‘monstrous doctrines,
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xvi
that “whatever is profitable is right,” that “the end sanctifies the means,”
and that “human actions ought to be free”’ (p. 198). He believes that
property is best transferred from ‘an indolent sensualist’, like Monteith, to
an ‘enterprising citizen’, like himself (p. 204). He advocates relaxing the
system of divorce, as a means of improving the happiness of women
(p. 218). His last letter to Geraldine describes ‘Marriage, [as] being merely
a civil engagement, [that] cannot invalidate the great laws of Nature’ and
he concurs with ‘The most enlightened literati of the age [who] have
proved, that chastity consists in the individuality of affection’ (p. 302). He
upholds ‘natural rights’ (p. 302), in contradistinction to the Burkean
model that people relinquish these rights in exchange for the protection of
civil society, and he argues, following Rousseau, that children should be
educated by following their own inclinations (p. 261). He professes deistic
principles, though these turn out to be a cover for the more subversive
doctrine of atheism. He is not, however, licentious, and the ‘strenuous
seduction schedule’, as Nicola Watson phrases it, of most anti-Jacobin vil-
lains is reconfigured in this novel. It is notable that, while Monteith’s
weakness is sex, supplemented by gambling and drinking, Fitzosborne’s
desires are altogether colder and more Machiavellian (or ‘frigid’ as the
novel puts it (p. 159)): he pursues a two-pronged attack of seducing the
husband into vice while soothing the injured wife with his sympathetic
tenderness.29 Far more than her sexual ruin, Fitzosborne wants to destroy
Geraldine’s principles and her faith in salvation.
Geraldine is not well-armed against the threat of the ‘French’ theories
that Fitzosborne brings over to England, and she contracts with him pre-
cisely the type of ‘dangerous intimac[y]’ which lessens her attachment to
her husband, against which Mrs Evans had so presciently cautioned her
(p. 83). If it seems unimaginable that this heroine, ‘Adorned with every
natural and acquired accomplishment; “chaste as the isicle on Dian’s tem-
ple;” attached to her husband; the fondest of mothers; domestic, prudent,
and religious’ (p. 157) could fall, we should remember that Fitzosborne
does not demonstrate the ‘unalluring scepticism’30 of unadulterated God-
winianism: his principles are not fully revealed to Geraldine and are
packaged in an appealing veneer of refinement, disinterest and deep feel-
ing. In addition, West associates Fitzosborne with a catalogue of English
literary villains: he is variously Milton’s devil, envying the happiness of the
Edenic couple, Shakespeare’s Iago, Richardson’s Lovelace and so on;
these allusions expose his dark designs to the reader but, at the same time,
Fitzosborne accrues the undeniable glamour of these complex figures.
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xvii
Moreover, in a version of West’s own ‘strategic novelism’, the whole reper-
toire of British and European literature seems available for Fitzosborne’s
use: at one point, he tempts Geraldine into the garden at night with a
quotation from Comus (p. 270), while Wieland’s work forms a prelude to
the walk on which Geraldine discovers her husband’s apparent elopement
with Pattie Thompson (pp. 282–3). As Geraldine, and almost everyone
around her, observes, Fitzosborne forms a stark contrast with her ‘incon-
sistent, uninformed … [and] cruel’ husband (p. 263). Fitzosborne treats
the Monteiths’ home like a theatre, staging scenes that will enforce the
contrast between him and Monteith, most notably when Geraldine finds
him in the library quietly reading against the backdrop of Monteith’s noisy
and drunken revelry in the banqueting room. Though Geraldine does not
know that Fitzosborne is faking his virtues, the vices of her increasingly
violent, drunken and dissipated husband are energetically displayed; it
becomes easy to sympathize with the heroine’s predicament. The narra-
tor’s assurance that ‘The reader will not partake in [Geraldine’s] feelings’
about Fitzosborne (p. 278) is in itself evidence of the contrary possibility.
We can trace the progress of Geraldine’s alienation from Monteith and
the trajectory of her fall through a series of increasingly significant
cultural encounters that mark Fitzosborne’s covert attack on Geraldine’s
principles. Three episodes involving performance of one sort or another
lead Geraldine into a realm where authenticity is destabilized; as Henry
notes late in the novel, she is under the influence of ‘a fatal delusion’
(p. 266). Early in their relationship, Fitzosborne weeps silently with emo-
tion at Geraldine’s harp-playing and singing: their eyes meet in a
melodramatic moment, after which demonstration of Fitzosborne’s aes-
thetic sensibilities, Geraldine avers, untruthfully, that her husband is
‘[p]assionately’ fond of music (p. 155). At the opera, Fitzosborne exploits
Geraldine’s intimacy with him to foster public calumny of her virtue and
to nurture Monteith’s anxieties about the impropriety of her behaviour to
a libertine who joins her box (pp. 180–6). Most significantly, Geraldine
attends a private masquerade in the costume of Shakespeare’s Perdita,
accompanied by Fitzosborne as Florizel, who at the last moment substi-
tutes for her absent husband (p. 189). Contemporary readers would have
caught the allusion to the actress and author Mary Robinson, whose per-
formance as Perdita at Drury Lane in 1779 enchanted the Prince of
Wales. The ensuing romance of the already-married Perdita and Florizel,
as the love-struck couple would come to be designated in pamphlets, car-
icatures and satirical narratives, earned the actress a starring role in the
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Anti-Jacobin Novels: Volume 7
xviii
records of public scandal. Paintings of Robinson by the major artists of the
day, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and Thomas Gains-
borough (who painted her as Perdita), represented her as woman of the
demi-monde and kept her in the public eye.31 West’s Perdita and Florizel
immediately attract attention, and the potential scandal of their relation-
ship is both confirmed and exacerbated when they are discovered alone in
the orangery, apparently admiring a Jacobea lily and the stars in the night
sky. The whole episode is framed within the context of other ‘immoral’
texts: thus, one lady speculates ‘that the adventures of the third Eloisa
would soon be published’, linking Geraldine with the heroine most
beloved of Jacobin writers, Rousseau’s Julie; another declares that the
book will be called ‘Werter the Second’, asserting a connection with
Goethe’s tale of impassioned love and suicide and recalling Godwin’s
description of Mary Wollstonecraft as ‘a female Werter’ in his controver-
sial Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published
just one year before A Tale of the Times;32 a third lady ‘wished to read the
Chapter on Botany’, a comment that alludes to contemporary attacks on
botany as a fashionable female pursuit, notably in Richard Polwhele’s
satiric poem, The Unsex’d Females (1798), one of the females in question
being Mary Robinson.33 To her distress, Geraldine’s ‘character’ is put into
circulation and she becomes the defamed heroine of malicious gossip.
In this most intertextual of novels, novels themselves propel the plot in
two crucial scenes. While reading Rasselas, Geraldine attempts to defend
the quintessentially English writer Samuel Johnson against Fitzosborne’s
aspersions before coming to discover those faults in her favourite writer
that Fitzosborne had observed. Later, Fitzosborne sends Geraldine to fetch
a volume of Rousseau from her husband’s dressing room, knowing that
she will simultaneously discover a strategically-placed letter from his mis-
tress. Traumatized and ‘impassioned’ by this discovery, Geraldine is
‘unconscious’ of the impropriety of Fitzosborne grasping her hand and
their whole discussion of her husband’s affair (pp. 224–8). The narrator
alerts the reader to the erosion of moral vigilance that compromises the
heroine’s status: ‘Her delicacy was no longer startled by his passionate
manner: the warm interest which he took in her cause no longer awak-
ened the apprehension of unwarrantable designs’ (p. 229). In implicating
Rousseau in this process of moral slippage, West marks her allegiance to
Burke, and reminds us again of the dire consequences of Geraldine’s love
of fame, for Burke’s Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) had
denounced Rousseau as ‘the great professor and founder of the philosophy
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Introduction
xix
of vanity’.34 Indeed, Burke had played a crucial role in representing Rous-
seau’s personal life, as revealed in the latter’s Confessions, as the key to
understanding the French Revolution. His Letter is a sustained attack on
Rousseau, in which the former hero of sensibility is reduced to a common
sensualist who promotes the seduction of aristocratic women by their
servants.
Geraldine’s most dangerous act is that she starts to correspond with
Fitzosborne, albeit about the moral rescue of her husband. As Lucy anx-
iously observes, Geraldine values Fitzosborne’s letters above those of her
husband, and she reads them in private (unlike the letters which circu-
lated between Geraldine and Henry, all of which, in a spirit of wishful
thinking, were communicated to her husband for his advice); ‘Do women
of fashion’, asks Lucy, ‘countenance one another in the custom of having
male confidants as well as male attendants?’ (p. 244). In A Gossip’s Story, a
wife’s private correspondence catalyses the decline of her marriage, while
countless other literary heroines, from Richardson’s beleaguered Clarissa
onwards, were propelled to their deaths by illicit correspondence. Moreo-
ver, the conspiracy theories of the 1790s asked the British public to
imagine letters as envoys of sedition, as the expression of threatening indi-
vidual desires.35 For readers in 1799, the correspondence of Geraldine and
Fitzosborne would be glaringly imbricated in these interlocking cultural
narratives of seduction and sedition.
Geraldine is ultimately drugged, abducted and presumably raped,
though the novel is reticent on this point;36 abandoned in a roadside inn,
she is discovered by her impassioned husband and subjected to his
violence. Thereafter, like Richardson’s Clarissa, she fades into death,
though with significantly more speed that the protracted demise of her
famous predecessor (abducted at the end of chapter 40, she expires in
chapter 44). In the novel’s final pages, poetic justice is meted out to all
the remaining characters: Lucy and Henry live happily and usefully at
Powerscourt, the affectionate guardians of Geraldine’s children; Mr Evans
enjoys ‘a serene old age’ at the rectory (p. 331); Lady Arabella remains
unmarried and Monteith ‘continues to drag a miserable existence’ of
intemperance, declining health and gambling debts (p. 331). Fitzosborne’s
death offers a satisfying formal closure, that once again reminds the reader
of the novel’s historical context: he ends up back in France to escape
prosecution in England, and, ironically, is promptly imprisoned because he
is an Englishman and a gentleman. In a last act of religious infidelity, he
takes his own life to cheat the guillotine; his death throes are exacerbated
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Anti-Jacobin Novels: Volume 7
xx
by the arrival of a communication from Robespierre that would have lib-
erated him and given him employment with the French dictator.
The novel must have what West calls ‘a melancholy termination’ if it is
to fulfil her didactic brief ‘to condemn what was wrong’.37 West glosses the
trajectory of a woman’s fall from virtue in Letters to a Young Lady,
A slight indiscretion, which scarcely alarms the most scrupulous con-
science, if suffered to pass without observation, prepares the mind for
a serious error; error delivers it over to crime; and crime, when often
repeated, petrifies the moral feelings into insensible depravity.38
But Geraldine does not really live up to, or down to, this paradigm; her
indiscretions are very low on a sliding scale of sin. She does not fall into
sexual or political criminality, nor are her moral feelings petrified; she
never has moments like Sophia King’s heroine, who revels in knowledge
as power. She is ‘guiltless’, as Lucy points out, ‘of the smallest intentional
fault’ (p. 272). What Geraldine fails to do is fully to interrogate her own
behaviour, especially to correlate her internal conscience with the dictates
of the social world around her. Unlike Lucy, who is always retrospectively
examining her behaviour, ‘distress had for some time prevented [Geral-
dine] from her customary duty of self-examination’ (pp. 242–3).
Geraldine herself points out the moral of her history in relation to Lucy’s:
‘Your virtues shunned observation, and only courted the silent plaudit of
conscience’; she acknowledges her fault as a love of fame and observes
that ‘Our history is a comment upon the comparative tendency of these
governing principles’ (p. 315). Unlike More’s ideal woman, Geraldine
does not ‘distrust [her] own judgment’, and she constantly justifies herself
to Lucy rather than acknowledging her as the ‘friend, who, valuing [her]
soul’s health above [her] immediate comfort, will rouse [her] from torpid
indulgence to animation, vigilance, and virtue’.39 But the novel also offers
a critique of masculinity that somewhat mitigates its plot of female fallibil-
ity, for Monteith fails spectacularly to provide ‘the firm judgement, the
manly tenderness, which should guide and direct this attracting woman
through the thorny maze of public life’ (p. 299).
The Feelings of a Candid and Humane Reader
The reception of A Tale of the Times in the literary periodicals was mixed,
and these reviews offer a fascinating glimpse of the cultural climate of
1799, and especially of the dangers of sentimental didacticism. West’s first
novels had been well received; most commentators on A Tale of the Times
begin by praising her former productions, and accept that the present one
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Introduction
xxi
is aimed as ‘an attack upon the new philosophism’.40 The New London
Review vaunts West as ‘a female champion’ vindicating ‘the rights of pure
faith, and salutary morality, against the machinations of certain foes to
social order’, and claims that Prudentia Homespun achieves this task not
‘by cold precept’ but ‘through the medium of an interesting narrative’
with ‘striking characters’.41 The Gentleman’s Magazine extols the novel’s
moral message: ‘The story is sufficiently interesting to engage the mere
lover of amusement; but all who read with a nobler design will thank the
author for the energetic manner in which she enforces its moral tendency.
There are no episodes, and but little extraneous matter.’42 Contrarily,
other reviewers, judging the novel by the emerging standards of aesthetic
and generic unity, found too much extraneous matter: ‘[S]ome part of the
design does not happily assimilate with a work of fancy. In order to contro-
vert principles and systems, which she conceives dangerous to society, she
is obliged to enter a little into discussions, which we should always desire
to exclude from performances of this nature’; ‘This work is interesting,
though too diffuse in its narration, and though it is rendered too prolix by
the multiplicity of its reflections’.43
Most provocative are the reviewers’ comments on Geraldine Monteith.
The Monthly Review lamented,
We cannot but think that distributive justice might have dispensed
with the death of the lovely Lady Monteith, as her misfortunes and
misbehaviour were occasioned by the infamous plots and diabolical
conduct of the ravisher Fitzosborne. Her repentance and reformation
might have reconciled her to her husband; and the story, without
being less instructive, would have been more in unison with the feel-
ings of a candid and humane reader.44
Most modern readers will be similarly inclined to think that Geraldine’s
sufferings are disproportionate to her sins, the single moral weakness of
vanity being far outweighed by her many virtues. Indeed, her death seems
wilful, even perverse, given the willingness of her husband and friends to
‘forgive’ her. That Geraldine’s reintegration into the community in the
novel would be sympathetically viewed by readers of the novel suggests
how bonds of sympathy could reconfigure traditional moral paradigms.
The Monthly Review’s compassionate stance is close to Adam Smith’s
influential notion of sympathy in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, which
occurs only when one is able to imagine taking another’s place in order to
feel his or her part. On the other hand, this empathetic response was also
the subject of moral critique: the two reviews that are overtly critical of
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Anti-Jacobin Novels: Volume 7
xxii
West’s characterization of Geraldine respond precisely to the dangers of
the readers’ sentimental or pathological identification with the heroine.
The Lady’s Monthly Museum worries about the novel’s effect in increasing
women’s nervous ailments:
A tone of distress and dissatisfaction is … so wantonly assumed every
where, that the most obvious effect of all its evolutions and incidents
is to depress the feeling mind. And were it the most moral book in the
language, this quality, in our opinion, renders it more pernicious to
the sex than almost any other … Impressions of this sort are much
deepened by these volumes, from the dreadful series of calamities in
which the author incessantly plunges the most deserving of her dra-
matis personae. All, or most of, our tragical inventions, from Clarissa
Harlowe to The Tale of the Times, are degraded by this detestable
bias.45
In this reading, a novel intended to protect the English nation by protect-
ing the morals and bodies of its women ironically renders these bodies
more vulnerable, if only to debilitating distempers rather than seductive
systems. The Analytical Review provides the most acerbic take on Geral-
dine’s behaviour and appeal to readers, claiming that, although West
attempts to combat a system, young women, and especially female novel
readers, ‘are more acted upon by passion and example than by system, and
to such, the example of the heroine, and the dazzling brilliance with
which she is adorned, will be more dangerous, than the fallacious, and
unalluring scepticism of what she calls her “complete villain”’. The reviewer
goes on to detail all sorts of episodes in which the author’s claims that
Geraldine is ‘admirable’ are seemingly controverted by the ‘facts’ of her
behaviour (notably the scene in which Geraldine and Fitzosborne, alone
and in her bedroom, discuss how to best to obviate scandalous gossip
about them until 5 o’clock in the morning). The ‘morals of our fair read-
ers’, according to the reviewer, thus can be guarded by exposing these
contradictions ‘which give the whole history of Lady Monteith the air of a
studied palliation of the conduct of some actual demirep, rather than of a
novel, where the incidents, as well as the sentiments, are at the command
of the author’.46 For the Analytical Review, West is far too close to the likes
of Mary Robinson for comfort.
* * *
‘Mrs. Prudentia Homespun … is dead and buried’ wrote Jane West to
Bishop Percy in 1811.47 She does not explain why she killed off her most
successful creation, and we can only speculate about Prudentia’s demise.
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Introduction
xxiii
West’s post-Prudentia novels turned to tales of others times for their set-
tings; in other words, she looked to history to find analogies that would
enforce her didactic, loyalist, conservative message. The Loyalists (1812) is
set in the seventeenth century, during the English civil war and interreg-
num, with obvious revolutionary parallels; Alicia de Lacy: An Historical
Romance, published in 1814, the same year as Walter Scott’s Wa ver l ey, is
set in fourteenth-century England and features a ‘militant’ Christian
heroine who literalizes the tenets of nineteenth-century British Evangeli-
calism. Thus West took a part in the generic shift towards historical fiction
that characterized the second decade of the nineteenth century, beginning
with the success of Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810). The defeat of
Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, and the end of the long revolutionary wars,
meant that there was less demand for explicit political tales. Prudentia last
appears, briefly, in the opening pages of The Refusal (1810): the ‘Editor’ of
this narrative, one Eleanor Singleton, offers a mixed ‘tribute … [to] the
late Mrs. Prudentia Homespun’ in a revealing ‘Introduction’. Eleanor
claims that Prudentia’s novels are romans-à-clef, less moralized fictions
than secret histories that draw on Prudentia’s taste for scandal and gossip:
In these delectable tales, truth and falsehood, calumny and flattery,
are blended with such enchanting confusion, that all the world is at
once enjoying the exquisite delight of finding out secrets, and hearing
scandal, without undergoing the fatique of morning visits, or evening
dissipation.48
Thus, West seems to have recognized herself how difficult it was to con-
trol the meaning of her openly didactic fiction, and how easily her
addressees could read against the grain of the text. Though it was
reported that Queen Victoria read her novels,49 West’s favourite genre
was not the favourite reading matter of new generations of readers, and
she faded from public view long before her death in 1852. Her earliest
novels kept her name alive in the twentieth century, when critics investi-
gated West’s influence on Jane Austen, especially the similarities between
A Gossip’s Story and Sense and Sensibility. But renewed interest in conserv-
ative and anti-Jacobin writing of the 1790s allows her once more to take
her rightful place as a significant commentator on national affairs. If
present-day readers are likely to appreciate the cultural waywardness of
her narrative material more than her didactic intentions, it is nonetheless
the novel’s ethical tensions that allow us to glimpse something of the cul-
tural specificity of female literary patriotism at the end of the eighteenth
century.
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Anti-Jacobin Novels: Volume 7
xxiv
NOTES
1. Hannah More, selections from Strictures on the Modern System of Female Edu-
cation. With a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of
Rank and Fortune (1799) in Selected Writings of Hannah More, ed. Robert Hole
(London, Pickering & Chatto, 1996), p. 122.
2. Bishop Percy, West’s patron and friend, the author of Reliques of Ancient Eng-
lish Poetry (1763), which helped to establish the Romantic interest in all
things medieval; quotation from ‘Obituary. – Mrs. West’, Gentleman’s Maga-
zine, 2nd series, 38 (July 1852), p. 100.
3. Letters Addressed to a Young Man On His First Entrance Into Life, and Adapted to
the Peculiar Circumstances of the Present Times (1801), 2nd edn, 3 vols (Lon-
don, Longman and Rees, 1806), Vol. 1, p. 145.
4. West returns to her reservations about the novel genre elsewhere; thus, in The
Infidel Father, she writes: ‘The rage for novels does not decrease; and, though I
by no means think them the best vehicles for “the words of sound doctrine”;
yet, while the enemies of our church and state continue to pour their poison
into unwary ears through this channel, it behoves the friends of our establish-
ments to convey an antidote by the same course; especially as those who are
most likely to be infected by false principles, will not search for a refutation of
them in profound and scientific compositions’ (The Infidel Father, 3 vols (Lon-
don, Longman and Rees, 1802), Vol. 1, p. 6).
5. An Elegy on the Death of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London, Long-
man, 1797), p. 15; Letters to a Young Lady, in Which the Duties and Character of
Women Are Considered, 3 vols (1806; New York, Garland, 1974), Vol. 1, p. 59.
6. It is perhaps worth noting that West herself, despite her prolific literary activi-
ties, was engaged in domestic cares and duties, being married to a yeoman
farmer and the mother of three sons. Her obituary in the Gentleman’s Maga-
zine quotes from a letter written in 1800 in which she states: ‘My needle
always claims the pre-eminence of my pen. I hate the name of “rhyming slat-
tern”’ (p. 99). Her comments may have more to do with the cultivation of an
acceptable public image than with any private reality.
7. The Advantages of Education; or, The History of Maria Williams, 2 vols (Lon-
don, Lane, 1793), Vol. 1, Preface; A Gossip’s Story, and A Legendary Tale, 2
vols (1796; New York, Garland, 1974), Vol. 1, xi–xii.
8. The Infidel Father, Vol. 1, p. 7; see the statement at the end of A Tale of the
Times: ‘The Author’s intention of enforcing some moral truths by an appro-
priate narrative is now complete’ (p. 332). Interestingly, here, West drops the
fiction of Prudentia to appear in her own right as the author.
9. I borrow this phrase from the final chapter’s disquisition on the care of chil-
dren, whose ‘little foibles require calm correction’ and whose ‘wild luxuriance
must be tenderly repressed’ (pp. 329–30).
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Introduction
xxv
10. More, Strictures, ed. Hole, p. 162.
11. Monthly Magazine, 4 (1797), p. 121.
12. A Gossip’s Story, Vol. 2, p. 27.
13. April London, Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cam-
bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 191.
14. More, Strictures, ed. Hole, pp. 125–6.
15. Ibid., p. 125. Jane West returns to the importance of domesticity and feminin-
ity in ‘seasons of national alarm’ in 1812, during a period of war and working-
class agitation: the ‘domestic hearth’ is the prophylactic against ‘the wildest
theories of democracy’ (The Loyalists: An Historical Novel, 3 vols (London,
Longman and Rees, 1812), Vol. 1, pp. 7, 8).
16. More, Strictures, ed. Hole, pp. 124, 139. Like West at the end of A Tale of the
Times, More argues that ‘novels and romances have been made the vehicles of
vice and infidelity’ (Strictures, ed. Hole, p. 139).
17. Letters to a Young Lady, Vol. 1, pp. 42, 56–7, 58.
18. On Geraldine as an allegorical figure, see: Eleanor Ty, Empowering the Femi-
nine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812
(Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1998), p. 102; April London argues that,
while the novel is not an allegory, Geraldine may be read ‘as a figure for Brit-
ain itself’ (Women and Property, p. 199).
19. Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825:
Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994),
p. 76.
20. For further information on Prudentia Homespun’s lineage, see editorial note 7
and also London, Women and Property, p. 187.
21. The site of this first meeting is inauspicious, for readers will remember that
Geraldine’s mother contracted her fatal illness at the Chester races.
22. Geraldine makes the same mistake as those fashionable men, against whom
More inveighs, who select their wives at ballrooms, just as if they were select-
ing a picture at an exhibition room: ‘But, inasmuch as women are not mere
portraits, their value not being determinable by a glance of the eye, it follows
that a different mode of appreciating their value, and a different place for
viewing them antecedent to their being individually selected, is desirable’
(Strictures, ed. Hole, p. 229).
23. More argues that ‘Pleasurable activities of this kind would serve to combine in
the mind of the poor two ideas, which ought never to be separated, but which
they are not very forward to unite, – that the great wish is to make them happy
as well as good. Occasional approximations of the rich and poor, for the pur-
pose of relief and instruction, and annual meetings for the purpose of
innocent pleasure, would do much towards wearing away discontent, and
contribute to reconcile the lower class to that state in which it has pleased
God to place them’ (Strictures, ed. Hole, pp. 221–2).
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Anti-Jacobin Novels: Volume 7
xxvi
24. A Gossip’s Story, Vol. 2, p. 62; on the significance of Louisa’s ‘georgic industry’,
see London, Women and Property, p. 197.
25. More, Strictures, ed. Hole, p. 206.
26. Though most people are captivated by Geraldine, we are given a hint of
things to come early in the novel when Prudentia informs us that ‘fastidious
observers’ point out ‘some shades’ in her character, especially that ‘her eye
was on the watch for adulation’ (p. 39).
27. More, Strictures, ed. Hole, p. 198.
28. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell
(1790; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 77.
29. Watson, Revolution, p. 71. The classic seduction strategy of the anti-Jacobin
novel is the ideological seduction of a male figure and sexual seduction of a
female one (as in Sophia King’s Waldorf; see Vol. 9 of this edition).
30. See Analytical Review, n.s. 1 (June 1799), pp. 603–6; p. 604. See this volume,
p. 395.
31. Robinson went on to establish herself as a successful poet and novelist;
through the 1790s she published novels that were diametrically opposed to
West’s conservative concoctions. Her novels include: Walsingham; or, The
Pupil of Nature (1797), which features a cross-dressed heroine, and The Natu-
ral Daughter, published in the same year as A Tale of the Times, which features
a Wollstonecraftian unmarried mother, who becomes a successful actress, and
a working heroine, Martha Morley, who adopts a child, becomes an actress
and a teacher, is imprisoned in a madhouse and finally marries a rich and wor-
thy aristocrat. Thomas Mathias complained that there was too much ‘frisking’
in her novels, so that ‘our girls’ heads turn wild with impossible adventures,
and are now and then tainted with democracy’ (Pursuits of Literature (Lon-
don, T. Becket, 1805), pp. 56–8). Interestingly, Robinson was educated at
Hannah More’s school in Bristol.
32. Hannah More also notes Godwin’s allusion in her Strictures on Female Educa-
tion (see Strictures, ed. Hole, p. 140).
33. At the end of the novel, in her long attack on contemporary generic hybridity,
West returns to ‘Compilers of natural history [who] debase their pages with
descriptions which modesty cannot peruse’ (p. 333).
34. Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly 1791 in Reflections
on the Revolution in France, ed. Mitchell, p. 270.
35. As part of the restriction or suspension of civil rights in the 1790s, the Traitor-
ous Correspondence Bill of March 1793 valued homeland security over
individual rights and privacy.
36. Fitzosborne can only gain possession of Geraldine through a complicated plot
involving bribed servants, a fake plan to pursue her errant husband and the
use of ‘infernal potions’.
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xxvii
37. Quoted in John Bowyer Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eight-
eenth Century, 8 vols (London, J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1817–58), Vol. 8, p.
425.
38. Letters to a Young Lady, Vol. 1, p. 263.
39. More, Strictures, ed. Hole, pp. 162, 205.
40. Monthly Magazine, 7 (1799), p. 542; see this volume, p. 398.
41. New London Review, 1 (January 1799), p. 92; see this volume, p. 389.
42. Gentleman’s Magazine, 69 (February 1799), pp. 138–9; p. 139. See this vol-
ume, p. 391.
43. Monthly Mirror, 7 (March 1799), p. 167; Monthly Review, n.s. 29 (May 1799),
pp. 90–1; p. 90. See this volume, p. 393. The Analytical Review also strongly
objected to the novel’s diffuseness and to the injury done to the narrative by
the inappropriate and ‘perpetual quotations’ (p. 603; see this volume, p. 394).
44. Monthly Review, pp. 90–1; see this volume, p. 394.
45. Lady’s Monthly Museum, n.s. 2 (February 1799), pp. 152–4; p. 153. See this
volume, p. 392
46. Analytical Review, pp. 604, 605; see this volume, pp. 395–7.
47. Quoted in ‘Obituary. – Mrs. West’, p. 100.
48. The Refusal, 3 vols (London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1819), Vol. 1,
p. 10.
49. Letters to a Young Lady was dedicated to Princess Victoria.
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xxix
NOTE ON THE TEXT
The present volume reproduces the first edition of A Tale of the Times. By
the Author of A Gossip’s Story, which appeared in 3 volumes, printed by A.
Strahan for T. N. Longman and O. Rees, Paternoster-Row, in 1799. The
copy text is held by the Stirling Memorial Library at Yale University
(Shelfmark Im.W520.799t). 1,000 copies were printed. A second edition
from the same publishers appeared in the same year. A two-volume
edition was printed in Dublin by William Porter, also in 1799. The three-
volume third edition was printed in London by A. Strahan for T. N.
Longman and O. Rees in 1803. The Nineteenth-Century Short-Title Cata-
logue also lists an edition in 1801. A French translation appeared in Paris
in 1800 (Histoire du temps ou les méurs écossaises). In addition to Yale Uni-
versity, copies of the first edition of the novel are held at: the British
Library, London; Cambridge University Library; the Bodleian Library,
Oxford; the Library of Congress, Washington DC; University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign; Houghton Library, Harvard University; Princeton
University; Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas, Austin;
University of Virginia; Corvey Library.
The present volume has been minimally corrected; the text’s original
spelling, punctuation and capitalization have been retained, even where
these are inconsistent or idiosyncratic. Corrections have been inserted
only in cases where confusion might otherwise arise; all such corrections
are recorded below in the list of ‘Silent Corrections’. However, the text
follows modern usage for quotation marks (using a single set of opening
and closing quotation marks), and the eighteenth-century long S has
been replaced by the modern s. Square brackets mark any editorial inser-
tions. Literary allusions, historical references and foreign or unfamiliar
words are annotated in the endnotes.
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xxxi
JANE WEST: BIBLIOGRAPHY
Publications by West (First Editions)
1786 Miscellaneous Poetry. Written at an Early Period of Life (London).
1788 The Humours of Brighthelmstone. A Poem (London, Printed for the
author; and sold by Scatcherd and Whitaker; T. Hookham; J. Stra-
han; W. Richardson; and by A. Crawford, at Brighthelmstone).
1791 Miscellaneous Poems, and A Tragedy (York, Printed by W. Blanchard;
London, R. Faulder).
1793 The Advantages of Education; or, The History of Maria Williams, A Tale
for Misses and their Mammas, by Prudentia Homespun, 2 vols (Lon-
don, Printed for William Lane at the Minerva Press).
1796 A Gossip’s Story, and A Legendary Tale. By the author of Advantages of
Education, 2 vols (London, Printed for T. N. Longman).
1797 An Elegy on the Death of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London).
1799 Poems and Plays, 2 vols (London, Printed by C. Whittingham for T. N.
Longman and O. Rees), Vols 1 and 2.
1799 A Tale of the Times, 3 vols (London, Printed for T. N. Longman and O.
Rees).
1801 Letters Addressed to a Young Man, on his First Entrance into Life, and
Adapted to the Peculiar Circumstances of the Present Times, 3 vols
(London, Printed by A. Strahan for T. N. Longman and O. Rees).
1802 The Infidel Father, 3 vols (London, Printed by A. Strahan for T. N.
Longman and O. Rees).
1802 The Sorrows of Selfishness; or, The History of Miss Richmore (London,
Printed by H. Bryer for T. N. Longman and O. Rees, and J. Harris,
successor to E. Newbery).
1805 Poems and Plays, 2 vols (London, Printed by C. Whittingham for T. N.
Longman and O. Rees), Vols 3 and 4.
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Selected Secondary Critical and Biographical Material
Ford, Susan Allen, ‘Tales of the Times: Family and Nation in Charlotte Smith
and Jane West’ in Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Elizabeth Mahn Nollen and Sheila
Reitzel Foor (eds), Family Matters in the British and American Novel (Bowling
Green, OH, Popular Press, 1997), pp. 15–29.
London, April, Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cam-
bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Ty, Eleanor, Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West,
and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812 (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998).
Wood, Lisa, Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism, and the Novel after the
French Revolution (Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press; London, Associated
University Presses, 2003).
1806 Letters to a Young Lady, in which the Duties and Character of Women are
Considered, Chiefly with a Reference to Prevailing Opinions, 3 vols
(London, Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme).
1809 The Mother: A Poem, in Five Books (London, Longman, Hurst and Co.).
1810 The Refusal, 3 vols (London, Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees and
Orme).
1812 The Loyalists: An Historical Novel, 3 vols (London, Printed by Strahan
and Preston for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown).
1812 Select Translation of the Beauties of Massillon (Dublin, Printed by John
Jones).
1814 Alicia de Lacy: An Historical Romance (London, Printed for Longman,
Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown).
1816 Scriptural Essays, Adapted to the Holy Days of the Church of England, with
Meditations on the Prescribed Services (London, Longman, Hurst,
Rees, Orme, and Brown).
1827 Ringrove; or, Old Fashioned Notions, 2 vols (London, Printed for Long-
man, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green).
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xxxiii
JANE WEST: CHRONOLOGY
1758 Born in London on 30 April in a building which later became St
Paul’s Coffee House; only child of Jane and John Iliffe.
1769 Family moved to Desborough in Northamptonshire.
c. 1783 Married Thomas West, a yeoman farmer from Little Bowden,
Leicestershire.
1783 Birth of first son, Thomas (d. 1843).
1786 Publishes Miscellaneous Poetry, Written at an Early Period of Life.
1787 Birth of second son, John.
1788 Publishes The Humours of Brighthelmstone. A Poem.
1794 Birth of third son, Edward (d. 1821).
1791 Publishes Miscellaneous Poems, and A Tragedy (including ‘Edmund
surnamed Ironside’).
1793 Publishes The Advantages of Education; or, The History of Maria
Williams, A Tale for Misses and their Mammas, by Prudentia
Homespun.
1796 Publishes A Gossip’s Story, and A Legendary Tale.
1797 Publishes An Elegy on the Death of the Right Honourable Edmund
Burke.
1799 Publishes A Tale of the Times and Poems and Plays, Vols 1 and 2
(including ‘Adela, or, The Barons of Old: A Tragedy’ and ‘How
Will It End: A Comedy’).
1801 Publishes Letters Addressed to a Young Man, on his First Entrance
into Life, and Adapted to the Peculiar Circumstances of the Present
Times. Addressed to her son Thomas and dedicated to Bishop
Percy, the book went through six editions by 1818.
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Anti-Jacobin Novels: Volume 7
xxxiv
1802 Publishes The Infidel Father and The Sorrows of Selfishness; or, The
History of Miss Richmore (a children’s story).
1805 Publishes Poems and Plays, Vols 3 and 4.
Inherits land as her father’s social beneficiary.
1806 Publishes Letters to a Young Lady, in which the Duties and Character
of Women are Considered, Chiefly with a Reference to Prevailing
Opinions, dedicated to Princess Victoria and addressed to Miss
Maunsell, who died in 1808.
1809 Publishes The Mother: A Poem in Five Books.
1810 Visits Bishop Percy at Dromore in Ireland.
Publishes The Refusal.
1812 Publishes Select Translations of the Beauties of Massillon and The
Loyalists: An Historical Novel, credited as an influence on Walter
Scott’s first novel, Waverley.
Sells inherited property for £3,000.
1814 Publishes Alicia de Lacey: An Historical Romance.
1816 Publishes Scriptural Essays, Adapted to the Holy Days of the Church
of England, with Meditations on the Prescribed Services.
1821 Death of son, Edward.
1823 Death of husband, Thomas West, in January.
1827 Publishes Ringrove; or, Old Fashioned Notions.
1843 Death of son, Thomas.
1852 Dies on 25 March at Little Bowden, aged ninety-four; buried at St
Nicholas’s Church, Little Bowden. Estate divided among her six
grandchildren.
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1
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3
ADVERTISEMENT.
SOME recent publications may, perhaps, make it necessary for the Author
of the subsequent Work, in order to evade the censure of plagiarism, to
state, that she could, if necessary, produce the testimony of several
respectable witnesses, to prove that the entire plot of the following story,
and nearly three parts of the writing, were finished previously to the
appearance of the play called ‘The Stranger’ at Drury-lane Theatre;3 and
that she is not conscious of having borrowed one idea from that much-
admired performance.
She has seen two works advertised, which she has been informed bear a
resemblance to her own plan: ‘Letters from an Hindoo Rajah;’ and / ‘Wal-
dorf; or, the Dangers of Philosophy.’4 As she has never met with either, she
cannot tell how far her sentiments may be similar to theirs.
There is a class of writers to whom she owns herself under some obliga-
tions, as they not only suggested to her the portrait of her complete
villain, but also furnished her with several specious passages, which she
has appropriated, unaltered, to the character of Fitzosborne. She could
specify the quotations, with the names of the authors; but perhaps their
liberality will be better pleased with a general acknowledgment.5 /
[iii/iv]
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5
A
TALE OF THE TIMES.
CHAP. I.
Forth steps the spruce philosopher, and tells
Of homogeneal and discordant springs
And principles; of causes, how they work
By necessary laws their sure effects;
Of action and reaction. He has found
The source of the disease that nature feels,
And bids the world take heart, and banish fear.
COWPER.6
MRS. PRUDENTIA HOMESPUN7 again begs leave to return thanks to the
world for its very favourable reception of her lucubrations. She is now
firmly convinced, that the clamours which are circulated against the
injustice and bad taste of the times, may be considered / either as the dec-
lamations of disappointed ambition, or the ebullitions of malevolent
spleen, soured by the success of some happier rival. She conceives herself
to be particularly fortunate in existing at a period more favourable to
mental exertions than those which have been commonly deemed the
golden ages of literature. Contemplating from her easy chair the vast
extent of modern discoveries, not only in the sciences, but in morals and
government, and extending her meditations from reflection on what her
learned co-adjutors have done, to speculation on what they propose
doing, she is compelled to acknowledge, that the close of the eighteenth
century claims distinguished pre-eminence for those indubitable marks of
genius, originality in enterprise, and boldness of invention, over the colder
eras of Pericles, Augustus, and the / Medici.8 Nay, she will go so far as to
affirm, that the labours of the ‘New Philosophy’9 will be remembered by
their effects, when the theories of all former schools shall be forgotten.
[1/3]
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Anti-Jacobin Novels: Volume 7
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It must be very gratifying to a retired old woman, to consider that her
productions may sail down this swelling stream of fame with those of her
immortal contemporaries. She confesses that her ideas differ in some
respects from theirs; but as every one professes the same end, namely, the
improvement of the universe, she rejoices that she is permitted, by the
liberality of the times, to disseminate her own peculiar sentiments. If she
be of opinion, that Morality appeared to better advantage when she was
contented to be the handmaid of Piety, than since she has set up for an
independent character; if she be convinced, that the abilities and attain-
ments of man are in / this life so limited, that he will never be able to
‘wield these elements,’10 to endow a machine with intellectual powers, or
to array himself with a self-invested immortality; if she be persuaded, that
the filial and conjugal ties are no remnants of feudal barbarism, but happy
institutions, calculated to promote domestic peace; if she has been taught,
that religion is more than sentiment, and female virtue something
stronger than exterior decorum; if she shudder at the eloquence which
extenuates impiety, terms seduction an amiable frailty, and gaming an ele-
gant amusement condemned by the insane morality of the law: surely she
may hope for that celebrity which a bold opposition to received opinions
generally ensures. Nay, should she even prefer the Gothic ruff and pinner,
as better adapted to British wives and mothers than the loose drapery of
Grecian / Bacchanals,11 or the more offensive appearance of uncivilized
savages, though recommended by the sanction of Parisian enthusiasts,
when, with more than Pagan infatuation or cannibal insensibility, they
meet to commemorate in their festive dances – not the triumphs of their
Gods, nor the death of their enemies – but the murder of their parents,
their husbands, and their children;12 may she not plead a close attention
to the costume of manners, and reproach the sensual copyists of a Cleo-
patra or an Aspasia13 with want of energy, who adopt all the
characteristics of the archetype, of which they exhibit a degrading model?
Her intention in resuming the pen is to enforce her opinions by argu-
ment, and to illustrate them by example; and she reveals those intentions
thus early, that the lover of the wonderful, and the admirer of the horrific,
may not complain / of having been cheated into the perusal of a perform-
ance that has not only a plan for its conduct, but also a moral tendency in
its design. Mrs. Prudentia intends to lead her readers through no other
labyrinth than the wiles of systematic depravity, nor to present any object
more soul-harrowing than a deceived and entangled, but ultimately peni-
tent heart.
[3/6]
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A Tale of the Times – Volume I
7
While she confesses that the groundwork of her story has a remote
analogy to some well-known facts, she strongly reprobates the idea of per-
sonality. The incidents are all her own, and it is only in one portrait that
she has attempted to sketch a likeness from nature. She assures the censo-
rious, that, even in that portrait, she has so adjusted the drapery and
varied the colours, that it will be impossible for the most curious eye to
discover who sat for the outline.14 /
Though regardless whether the fashionable instructors of the day
record her as one of their kindred spirits, or condemn her for being a ser-
vile admirer of prescribed forms and reprobated restrictions, there is a
numerous class of readers, whose favour Mrs. Prudentia is anxiously solic-
itous to obtain – the truly liberal, and the sincerely good. With candour to
forgive small faults, they unite discernment to discover good intentions,
and courage to defend the cause of principle against the sarcasms of wit,
and the cool contempt of piqued infidelity. To such readers, and such crit-
ics, she submits the following pages; and as a proper representative of the
illustrious order, she intreats
MRS. CARTER15
to accept her public thanks for the invaluable honour of her approbation
of / the Writer’s former efforts, and her permission to inscribe these pages
with her respected name. If the present attempt should appear favourable
to the cause of morality and religion, she humbly hopes, that the lenity
inseparable from superior talents will pardon those errors in the composi-
tion, which an accurate taste must discover and disapprove. /
[6/8]
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8
CHAP. II.
The fairest ancestry on earth,
Without desert, is poor;
And every deed of lofty worth
Is but a claim for more.
SIR ELDRED OF THE BOWER.16
SOME reasons, which are not necessary to be developed in the following
pages, made me wish to take a little excursion from Danbury in the course
of last autumn. A generous Public having supplied the means, I hired a
one-horse chaise, and taking with me my whole family, consisting of my
maid Betty and my favourite old tabby cat, set out for Brighton.17 I there
heard a narrative which made a very deep impression upon my mind; and,
as the communicativeness of my disposition will not allow me to conceal
any thing which I imagine capable / of conveying instruction, or even
innocent amusement, to that worthy set of beings, whom, in common
with my sister authors, I term candid readers, I have determined to prefer
publishing the History of the Countess of Monteith to a particular
description of my own travels. To this resolution I may, perhaps, have
been influenced by a culpable degree of modesty. The public, no doubt,
are very anxious to know how many miles a day Betty and I journeyed; at
what inns we stopped, and what we had for supper. Could not a florid
description bestow some springs of fame on the chalky cliffs of Dunstable?
Might not the horrors of Woburn sands be rendered more gloomy by a
convenient whirlwind, hurrying into the air the arid soil? Is there no old
decayed manor house, where I could call forth the ‘sheeted dead to
squeak and gibber;’ or, supposing we / were benighted on Finchley-com-
mon, could either Rhætian or Carpathian Alps fix a more appropriate
station for the haunts of a banditti? Though in a former publication I have
unwarily announced my age and order, Betty, for aught the world knows,
may be young and beautiful; nay, she may be an orphan foundling, the
heiress of some distinguished family; and I may, if I chuse, after a long
series of adventures, unite her in the hymeneal bond with some all-
accomplished youth, who had previously rescued us from the robbers after
a most bloody engagement. I begin to suspect that I have chosen the less
[9/11]
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A Tale of the Times – Volume I
9
promising, or rather the less lucrative plan; but I entreat my readers to
believe, that it is not because I want powers for the terrific and the roman-
tic, that I continue to pursue the moral and the probable.18 Something
must be allowed to my desire / of supporting that character of firmness
ascribed to my sisterhood, and which, though it simply consists in chusing
to have our own way, the wits are apt to call pertinacity. I will also can-
didly own, that, since the superior station in this walk is already occupied
by real genius, I have too much prudence to enter into a competition,
where I shall be sure to meet with a defeat; and too much pride to enlist
among a herd of servile imitators, who mistake confusion for description,
and fancy that what is horribly impossible, must be interesting and grand.
But, as my days of dotage are not far distant, if lady Monteith should be
unfortunate in her appeal for attention, I and Betty may appear upon the
scene; even my cat too may be introduced in an episode. I have seen a
subject equally unpromising worked up to an astonishing effect, and really
admired by readers / who had been some years out of the nursery: – But,
instead of terrifying the world with a denunciation of what I may do, let
me hasten to fulfil my present promise.
IT is now more than ten years since Powerscourt House exhibited a
scene of festivity and hospitality unrivalled in modern times, and which
might serve to recal to the mind of the spectator the splendid fêtes of
Kenilworth, where the lady of the lake welcomed the approach of majesty,
and the cruel dissolute earl of Leicester sought to divert general attention
from his vices by a captivating display of elegance and amusement.19 The
motives of the venerable baronet who inhabited Powerscourt were widely
different from those of the haughty favourite of Elizabeth. His wife was
too inoffensive to fear censure; his heart never panted for court-favour;
and the praise / of magnificence or refined taste presented no attractions
to his unobtrusive and benevolent mind. He called all the country
together, and strove to make them very happy, because he was very happy
himself; and the occasion of this exuberant joy was the union of his only
daughter and heiress, Geraldine Powerscourt, with James earl of Mon-
teith, a young Nobleman who had just attained complete majority, and
acceded to all the splendid titles and fortune of the house of Macdonald.
Beside all the beauty and fashion of North Wales, these distinguished
nuptials were honoured by the presence of two deities, generally supposed
to be absolutely inimical to each other. Cupid and Plutus, forgetting
ancient enmity, agreed jointly to light the Hymeneal torch.20 It was impos-
sible to suppose a union contracted under a more perfect / coincidence of
[11/15]
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