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Despite much recent interest in the culture of conservatism and loyalism in late eighteenth-century Britain, little attention has been paid to the highly conservative ®ction of the decade or so either side of 1800. After considering why this has been the case, this article reveals that there were many more of these`anti-Jacobin' novels than has previously been thought. It then surveys the major themes which run through the novels, binding them together into a coherent literary±political genre. When taken as a whole, rather than as the work of many individual authors, these novels reveal much about the society which bought and borrowed them. As a commodity in a competitive market, rather than as deliberate propaganda, they evolved according to the values and opinions of that readership which, in eect, commissioned them. The way in which they comprehend and portray Jacobinism elucidates how the threat posed to Britain by the French Revolution was actually perceived and understood by a large section of the British population, and the consistent themes of the novels emphasize the points around which the popular conservative campaign was organized in the aftermath of the revolution. Jacobinism emerges as many things, but never as a purely philosophical or political danger. A list of the major anti-Jacobin novels is appended.

The French Revolution sparked an ideological debate which also brought Britain to the brink of revolution in the 1790s. Just as radicals wrote 'Jacobin' fiction, so the fear of rebellion prompted conservatives to respond with novels of their own; indeed, these soon outnumbered the Jacobin novels. This was the first survey of the full range of conservative novels produced in Britain during the 1790s and early 1800s. M. O. Grenby examines the strategies used by conservatives in their fiction, thus shedding new light on how the anti-Jacobin campaign was understood and organised in Britain. Chapters cover the representation of revolution and rebellion, the attack on the 'new philosophy' of radicals such as Godwin and Wollstonecraft, and the way in which hierarchy is defended in these novels. Grenby's book offers an insight into the society which produced and consumed anti-Jacobin novels, and presents a case for reexamining these neglected texts.

Note on Contributor: M. O. Grenby is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the School of English at Newcastle University. He is the author of books on children's literature, eighteenth-century novels, and premodern child readers. Abstract:In Britain in the period 1760-1845 the debate on the relative merits of public (school) versus private (home) education remained unresolved and was vigorously debated in many media. It was in this same period that children's literature began to flourish: a much wider variety of books were published in much greater numbers. The new children's literature generally took domestic life for its subject; its authors often claimed that their books had emerged from domestic practice; and the books were often marketed as being for domestic use. It can seem, therefore, that the new children's literature was, in essence, a materialisation in print of domestic pedagogy, a product developed to supply a growing demand for didactic materials to use in the home. This essay will test the hypothesis, considering some real-life pedagogical practices and examining a wide range of later eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century children's texts (both print and manuscript). This evidence will show in fact that the boundaries between private and public education were blurred. Moreover, some children's books were themselves interventions into the debate on private versus public schooling. They presented a utopian, if still practical, vision of how the advantages of both models could be combined.