Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the central text in British counterrevolutionary thought, is long, complex, and written from the point of view of the propertied elite. Though readily excerptible, the book as a whole is ill adapted to reach a wide audience. Burke himself never sought to address such an audience and disdained to reply to Paine. When he included a catena of quotations from Rights of Man in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (London, 1791), he presented them as anonymous fragments and professed that they deserved no other than “the refutation of criminal justice” (95). Nor was Burke at all inclined to compromise with ideas of reform. To the end of his life, he advocated the complete restoration of the ancien régime.

Yet many writers who shared Burke's aversion to the principles of the Revolution sensed that disdain and prosecution might not be the best strategy to combat Jacobinism and were prepared to engage with the enemy and even to advocate moderate reforms to forestall revolution in Britain. Kevin Gilmartin's Writing against Revolution shows what a difficult task they faced. To associate in order to combat the Jacobin associations and to argue with a mass audience in order to provide an antidote for Jacobin propaganda: such activities were fraught with anxieties, ambiguities, and even contradictions. These tensions are most clearly demonstrated in the chapter on Southey and Coleridge, whose personal doubts and worries are amply preserved in their letters. Thus in private letters to Lord Liverpool, they boldly advocate repression, while in their journalism they naturally argue more circumspectly. In the other chapters, where such evidence is lacking, the argument is supported primarily from analysis of the texts themselves. These are, for the most part, not widely read today, and Gilmartin's study is therefore an exercise in recuperation (no easy task with such texts as William Paley's Reasons for Contentment). As such, it furthers one of the most notable shifts in the last generation of scholarship, the expansion of the canon of works studied. The result has undoubtedly been the construction of a far more nuanced and representative account of British writing of the Romantic period. Writing against Revolution is a valuable contribution to this continuing process. Several of the authors treated, perhaps especially Hannah More, deserve to be more widely read and discussed in the classroom.

Each of the five chapters describes a different kind of writing, and the progression is roughly chronological, from the texts distributed by John Reeves’ Association for Preserving Liberty and Property in the early 1790s to the counterrevolutionary writings of Southey and Coleridge between about 1810 and 1830. Throughout, Gilmartin seeks to show that these texts are not only more complex than they have usually been thought but that they are not all straightforwardly repressive. A good illustration of the first aim is his analysis of the tensions contained in so seemingly simplistic a tract as Paley's Reasons for Contentment (1792). A clear case of the second is More, whose evangelical convictions led her to advocate moral reform in tandem with her anti-Jacobinism. On More, Gilmartin provides a useful and convincing corrective to the argument of some recent feminist scholars that More's writing is somehow “liberating” and to critics who have seen her as a social realist. Less persuasive is his bold claim that the Cheap Repository Tracts embody “a project for social change as thoroughgoing and closely reasoned as anything in Jeremy Bentham or Robert Owen” (71). Her aim was moral regeneration, not social change. Her vision of society is thoroughly nostalgic, appealing to the myth of the local moral economy, an ideal that can be traced back to Chaucer's Parson and that had recently been given memorable expression in Goldsmith's Deserted Village (1774). Her employment of this topos, of course, reinforces Gilmartin's argument that she was no social realist. This nostalgia, shared by Paley (the passage from Reasons for Contentment [quoted on 33] evokes Goldsmith) and by Southey (Quarterly Review [1817, quoted on 238]), shows how far the moderate “reforms” advocated by these writers differed from the visions of Bentham and Owen.

Succeeding chapters deal with anti-Jacobin periodicals and with the anti-Jacobin novel. The periodical editors, and especially their reviewers, were troubled by the same paradox as John Reeves and his Association: how to maintain a stance of superiority, while engaging in the same practices as their opponents. Thus the Anti-Jacobin Review argued that “the Press itself” was the most effective means of social control, while often recommending the criminal prosecution of Jacobin publications (110). Many authors worried about descending to the plebeian public sphere (associated with Jacobinism), even as they realized that doing so was essential. Novelists, in particular, feared that they were “working with contaminated instruments in a contaminated environment” (158). In part, of course, this reflects the generally low prestige of the novel. More appears to have been an exception, confident that her role as moral instructor involved no derogation.

Writing against Revolution is a fine book, based on extensive and intelligent reading of primary sources, informed by current scholarly debates, and engagingly written. One strange mistake, apparently deriving from an inattentive reading of Burke's Reflections, should be corrected: the claim that Hugh Peter (or Peters) was “notorious for having preached at the execution of Charles I” (7). There was no sermon at the execution. The sermon to which Burke refers was preached two days earlier on 28 January 1649.