As if the acceptably perverse effects on scholarship of political partisanship were not sufficient, the decade of the French revolutionary debate in Britain has remained contested political turf nearly continuously thereafter. To pin one's colors to Burke or Paine was a meaningful political statement long into the nineteenth century. Then came the Bolshevik Revolution, whose impact on the historiography of popular radicalism was dramatic and swift. And then, in the age in which the sheer volume of history writing became enormous, the cold war dominated the intellectual landscape. To embrace Burke was, perforce, to claim allegiance to Toryism (or in the U.S., conservatism); to defend Paine was to indicate sympathy with some form of pinko radicalism. (And beneath this lurks another disagreement, itself one of the chief causes of the establishment's hostility to the French Revolution, about the virtues of orthodox Christianity and dangers of infidelity to modernity.) This led to some still grosser perversions: conservatives defending “liberty” were compelled to attempt to tread in Burke's footsteps by vindicating the monarchical absolutism of ancien régime France, while denying the well-established and powerful role played by Paine in America's own revolution. Scholarship on the 1790s thus remained dominated by one's outlook on the basic social and political tendencies of the modern era, and one's enrollment in the ranks of reformers or reactionaries. Burkeans commingled on the high ground of intellectual superiority and at well-funded venues congratulated themselves on the prescience of their patron saint. Painites swilled ale at labor history meetings and took comfort from enthusiasm rather than numbers. Insults lobbed in trench warfare were the norm in rare meetings of both sides. So highly politicized a scholarly domain was bound to suffer, and it did. As the world moves on, however, so does scholarship, and recent decades have begun to witness a deepening and widening of interest and growing intellectual seriousness in what is now widely perceived as one of the most extraordinarily exciting periods of modern British history. At the same time, politics remain, as invariably they must where so many real life issues are intertwined, a source of much interpretative strategy in contemporary scholarship.

The main work under review here is John Barrell's magisterial Imagining the King's Death. Long in gestation, it is a meticulously painstaking, intellectually breathtaking account of the precise means by which the government mounted its chief offensive—the judicial—against the reformers from early 1792 onward, as a means of broadening the language and law of treason so widely as to construe casual innuendo and slurred pothouse mumble as fundamentally subversive of the monarchy, the Church of England, and social order. Barrell's is thus fundamentally a book about language and its elasticity when highly politicized, in the tradition of the account of newspeak in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Barrell's account begins with an analysis of the astonishing transformation in the language of politics in the 1790s, with the emergence or redefinition of a vast number of new terms (“Democrat,” “Loyalist,” “Painite,” “Jacobin,” etc.), the increasingly contested nature of others (“constitution” in particular), and the centrality of definition to the outcome of the political debate (here “equality” was the key concept). The debate of the early 1790s in particular, in his view, hinged on the ways in which contemporaries took words to be the consequences of imagining future scenarios and the manner in which heavy, often pointed, symbolism (John Thelwall cutting the froth off a mug of ale: the guillotine) belied serious intent. The government's case throughout the period of the treason trials required a heavy-handed reduction of such imaginative acts and speech acts to downright conspiracy and overt intent. But Burke, too, could be accused of having succumbed to flights of fancy, of jettisoning political rationalism in order to whip up the emotional enthusiasm required to enlist English protestants enamored of their constitutional liberty to draw swords on behalf of an Austrian princess who symbolized the corruption of the ancien régime. Seen from this perspective, the debate of the 1790s was less about political first principles and genuine differences about choices of regime than it was about overinflating the imputed consequences of sympathy for either side: to plump for reform was as such to desire revolution and a republic, to be a “Jacobin,” in the language most common after 1793; to be a “loyalist” was to wish to suspend the existing constitution, concentrate power in the monarch and government, and deprive freeborn Englishmen of their liberties. The imagination was father to the act, and to nip the idea in its pregnant, imagined state was to forestall the act itself.

Barrell develops this theme by concentrating on the language surrounding the application of the law of treason of 1351, 25 Edward III, one of whose central contentions, that treason was when someone did “compass or imagine the death of our lord the king” was repeatedly invoked during the treason trials in England and Scotland in 1794. The aim of the trials was, of course, simply to suppress the popular radical movement. But the stated aims of that movement were often couched in language used by earlier reformers, notably Whigs, but even by Pitt himself, with the duke of Richmond, in 1783. For the government's campaign to succeed such activities had manifestly to appear much more treasonous. Barrell commences by examining the way in which Louis XVI's execution was portrayed in Britain, for the parallel was an obvious and important one in the case law officers mounted against reformers. Part 2, “The Invention of Modern Treason,” then concentrates at length on the four main trials (there were over fifty more in the provinces) of the year 1794, notably of Skirving, Margarot, Sinclair, and Gerrald in Edinburgh, in which the government was successful, and of Hardy, Tooke, and Thelwall in London, where it failed. Part 3 then analyzes two incidents in 1794–95 in which it was felt the king's life had been threatened, the latter of which provided the pretext for that legislation (the “Two Acts”) that finally curtailed most of the radical movement. This is such a rich, intricately detailed, well-constructed narrative that it is difficult to praise it too highly. Our understanding of the 1794 trials, which remained a memorable date in radical consciousness for half a century, is transformed by the astonishing range of sources brought to bear to illuminate them; by Barrell's close analysis of the legal arguments deployed and the constant insistence on extrapolating from innuendo, unsubstantiated allegation, and purported imitation of French political language and usages, to overt acts and genuinely treasonable intent; and by an encyclopedic analysis of what the real threat to order actually was. (Negligible, in a word, if Ireland is excluded.) My sole complaint about this already lengthy study is that an account of Paine's trial in absentia in 1792 might have been useful in describing the background to later events. But that, too, is a minor quibble about a study that is surely destined to become a classic work.

Emma Vincent Macleod's A War of Ideas examines a range of issues previously explored in part in John Cookson's fine study, The Friends of Peace (Cambridge, 1982), and in various studies of Whiggism in the early 1790s. This ground is therefore fairly well explored: what justifies a new study? The answer in brief is that this is essentially an introductory overview of the field rather than (at barely two hundred pages) a major new interpretation based upon sources not previously examined. This does not detract from its utility; the survey of the debates and summary of the existing literature is helpful and well researched, as is the assessment of the basic positions assumed by the government, parliamentary opposition, and outdoor opponents. Besides incorporating the twenty years of scholarship since Cookson's book, notably on the previously underexplored theme of religion, Macleod also explores several previously neglected areas, notably in a chapter on women's responses to the war issue, which focuses on Hannah More and Hester Piozzi.

The relationship between literature and radicalism is the subject of Andrew McCann's Cultural Politics in the 1790s. McCann examines five individuals—Burke, Godwin, Thelwall, Wollstonecraft, and Maria Edge-worth—with a further chapter that discusses Matthew Lewis's The Monk at length, largely in the context of the emergence and themes of “anti-Jacobin” discourse. The unifying theme behind McCann's study is the now-familiar assertion, usually linked to Habermas, that this period witnessed the emergence of a “public sphere” in which “intellectuals” first came to identify and write for a “public” and at the same time a “market.” McCann's particular concern with this theme is to understand the crafting of a “counterpublic” sphere dominated not by the middle class, but a mixture of radical intellectuals and plebeian activists. That something of the sort occurred is of course widely accepted; more contentious today is the description of a “proletarian public sphere” coexisting beside a “bourgeois” public sphere, when class and social determinants of ideas are widely under challenge in the wake of the retreat of marxist historiography. And “intellectuals”—here we would have to enlist both Paine and Thelwall, for instance—also caused this model trouble anyway. McCann treats these themes by linking the emergence of both types of public in light of a range of themes linked to consumer capitalism, such as privacy, individuality, sensibility, certain ideals of community, and consumption. Althusserian and Foucaultian jargon aside, his main argument seems to be that a contested definition of who the “public” was—Burke's 400,000? and who else? women like Wollstonecraft as well as men? nonwhites like Robert Wedderburn?—was central to the debates of the 1790s, and that an attempt to redefine this public, or to retain a tighter hold over the existing definition, was manifestly crucial to many of the key participants in the debate.

Among the choice of topics used to exemplify this theme, McCann's chapter on John Thelwall is the most innovative, since little has been written on him to date. Michael Scrivener's Seditious Allegories is the first major literary study (there is no modern biography) to rectify this omission. It commences by locating Thelwall within a specifically “Jacobin” discourse—the term remains highly contentious, being initially chiefly foisted upon the plebeian radicals by their opponents, though it was at one point embraced by Thelwall himself—and then analyzing the ways in which Thelwall, through poetry as well as prose, breached existing canons of both political and literary discourse to carve out a unique perspective on the French Revolution and its implications for Britons. Thelwall is such an interesting character both because he had considerable accomplishments on both the literary and political-theoretical side—his Rights of Nature against the Usurpations of Establishment is an extraordinary piece of thought—but also because he was a political actor, as the main intellectual in the London Corresponding Society, who for a brief period (1793–96) played a pivotal role in London radicalism. Like McCann, Scrivener sees Thelwall as central to the redefinition of the public in Britain in the 1790s, indeed as the key figure to break ranks from the more polite and literary reformers and directly to address a plebeian public (thereby provoking a breach with Godwin in particular). Scrivener's concern is more with the literary side, but he acknowledges Thelwall's theoretical importance and in the first third of his book examines the major pamphlets and lectures of the early and mid-1790s in light of existing scholarship about radical movements. Scrivener usefully draws out and categorizes various historiographic strands, both right and left, which have emerged respecting the period, but his main strength is the careful and illuminating treatment of virtually the entirety of Thelwall's oeuvre (the later writings of the Champion period do not fall under the “Jacobin” rubric and are not discussed here). Scrivener highlights what is distinctive and novel (particularly vis-à-vis Paine) about Thelwall's economic analysis, and he links the poetry and political theory as indicating a differentiated but continuous literary genre in a masterly fashion. There is a useful chapter on Spence and Wedderburn added, another analyzing Thelwall's defense at his 1794 trial, and interesting accounts of The Peripatetic, Thelwall's novel, The Daughters of Adoption, and his play, The Incas. The Tribune lectures, which reprinted in three volumes are overflowing with rich and varied material, get shorter shrift here, and remain largely unstudied, as does most of Thelwall's career after 1800. Scrivener's rigorous, careful study, however, goes far to rightly reestablishing Thelwall as a major figure in the debates of the 1790s.

Anne Mellor's Mothers of the Nation is also concerned with the ways in which women's writing sought to redefine the public sphere in the half century spanning the French Revolution, though less centrally with the role played by political debate in this process. Of her five chapters, one is devoted to Hannah More, the others address separate genres of writing (theater, poetry, the novel). (It is a pity historians were not included, given Catherine Macaulay's influence in the later eighteenth century and Harriet Martineau's through much of the nineteenth.) Mellor's initial argument is that claims (e.g., by Habermas) that the public sphere in this period was simply defined by men of property are erroneous: far too many women, including most of the most popular novelists, were involved in producing culture for this to be true. These women drew on traditions of female leadership (rulers, judges, preachers) in order to assert their authority in the public sphere, but they did not, for Mellor, merely intrusively smuggle in the values of the private and domestic sphere—“moral virtue and the ethos of care.” These values, instead, came to “dominate the discursive public sphere during the Romantic era” (p. 11). This is a tricky proposition to demonstrate, however, where there is no analysis of the most quintessentially “public” space in the public sphere, parliamentary and extraparliamentary politics. Can literary analysis and claims about reading habits and the influence of literature alone suffice to bolster such a view? Can “moral virtue” be associated solely with a private and domestic space? Clearly not. Nor without a major encounter with Wilberforce (not mentioned here) and the saints can the evangelical agenda respecting manners and paternal Christian care be appreciated, and the role of women within it be linked to women active in other corners of the public space. Hannah More is, however, a good entry point for such a study, and Mellor usefully surveys the wide range of her literary activities. Among the more politically minded women examined are Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, and Helen Maria Williams. The evidence submitted does not provide a sociological argument for women's inclusion in the redefinition of the public sphere, which would have required a much longer study, but a credible intellectual case for a reassessment of their contribution.

Last but not least, Rose Melikan's John Scott Lord Eldon supplements Horace Twiss's standard three-volume nineteenth-century biography by providing an exhaustive study of one of the major jurists of the era, a man linked to the regency debate, the Queen Caroline case, the passage of Catholic emancipation, and many of the other political events of the era. Eldon entered Parliament in 1783 and became solicitor general in 1788 and attorney general in early 1793. In the forefront of the legal campaign against the reformers, he does not seem to have been driven, like Burke or Windham, or judges like Eyre and Ashhurst, by ideological zeal. This may have limited his effectiveness; he failed in cases against Daniel Isaac Eaton, James Perry, and others, in 1793, and then even more grandly in the treason trials of 1794, discussed above. But Scott was undeterred and threw himself into reconstructing the treason laws with the “Two Acts” of 1795. Reluctantly, and sluggishly, he led the government's case against John Reeves, but he was not much more keen in the case against the radicals O'Coigly, O'Connor, Binns, and others in 1798. Unlike Pitt and Dundas, he appears to have believed that litigation was not the best means of proceeding against dissidents, preferring informal warnings and remonstration, and the banning of meetings to the prosecution of those who attended them. After he became lord chancellor in 1801, Eldon continued to be enmired in the regency debate, in the management of an enormous patronage system, and, in 1816–19, with the revival of the reform movement. Naturally enough he resisted Catholic emancipation. By 1829, indeed, he had come to symbolize an ancien régime shortly to be swept away by many of the same forces he and his associates had so successfully quashed during the 1790s. His motives and cast of mind in handling these issues, and the sources and shaping of his habitual resistance to constitutional and political reform, are well illuminated by Melikan, who has provided a fine study of a major legal figure.