The 1790s

In 1807, the English author James Henry Lawrence (1773-1840) published a romance, entitled L’Empire des Nairs, which he had translated from his own Des Reich der Nairen, published by the Berlin Journal der Romane in 1801. A few years later, he translated it into English and published it in London (1811). Although we seem to have forgotten this utopia, on which we hardly find any specific research, the book was either applauded, as in the Gottingen Review, which wrote that “the ideas which the author wishes to bring into circulation, are truly cosmopolitical”, or taken as “German non sense”, as in The Critical Review or in The Scourge. In France, the book was banned as soon as it appeared in 1807. But a second and a third edition appeared in 1814 and 1817. The Journal des Arts talks of an “inextricable labyrinthe d’absurdités”, making fun of romantics who have as a principle to “let all thing go through Lady nature’s hands”. Schiller, in a letter to a friend, talked about it as a “comical product” that wasn’t without interest. Last but not least, Shelley read it in 1812 and wrote to his author that he had made him “a perfect convert to its doctrines.”
The Empire of the Nairs is made of two parts. First, a long introduction against marriage as it is: an institution made exclusively for the comfort of males. Appealing for a society in which women and men would be equal, Lawrence calls for the abolition of marriage and paternity. Since the latter is never certain, and thus gives rise to jealousy and crime, we should put an end to it and let mothers give their name to their children. Daughters and sons would inherit from them, and from their uncles. There will be no patrilineality anymore. Then, taking the Malabar society of the Nairs as an example, the author draws a romance on the happiness that women and men get from complete sexual freedom, indubitable birth, and a strict gender division of work. Having no family ties, no interest except warfare, men make more valorous soldiers. Women, on the other hand, have no interest except raising and schooling children. There is a strong separation, in the Nair Society, between the private sphere, composed of women paid by the State for taking care of the children, and the public sphere, strictly composed of men. Freed from the family, either as chief, husband or father, men can wander from woman to woman, and keep their sexual energy for love and genius.
Beyond that obvious androcentrism, there might be something more interesting here: freeing both men and women from marriage goes hand-in-hand with a gendered separation of duties, if not rights. Which leads us to the question: why was there no more revolutionary way of thinking equality, at that time, that did not involve abolishing marriage? We’ll answer that question by comparing The Empire of the Nairs with two other radical critiques of marriage during the same period, one in English (Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792) and one in French (Charles Fourier, 1807); and by taking into account the political and the economic context, that is, the fact that marriage is the institutionalized way to bind children to men in societies that revolve around property and its patrilineal transmission.

This article contends that Wordsworth’s treatment of the Discharged Soldier is influenced by a scandal that followed the publication of William Cobbett’s pamphlet The Soldier’s Friend (1792). Cobbett publicized the mistreatment of soldiers in the secretive British army, calling particular attention to the embezzlement of troops’ salaries by senior officers. The Soldier’s Friend influenced both texts and protests that addressed military conditions in the 1790s. Wordsworth read contemporary pamphlets and knew the circle of Cobbett’s publisher, Ridgway. The behavior of Wordsworth’s Discharged Soldier evokes the demoralized soldiery Cobbett depicts: malnourished, poorly clothed, but unwilling to reveal details of his hardship for fear of recrimination under the Mutiny Act. Wordsworth explores these ideas further in The Borderers, in which Rivers has been corrupted by mistreatment in service and poses a threat to society on his return home, where he replicates the abuse he endured.

Publishing activities of Friedrich von Trenck in conditions of Hungarian censorship

This study analyses work of the radical enlightener and pamphleteer baron Friedrich von Trenck in the Kingdom of Hungary in years 1790 – 1791. In the light of his biography, works published to date and first of all the sources from Royal Hungarian Regency Council, the paper examines his writing and publishing activities. It brings up to now unreleased information about publishing, translations and censorship of his works in the Kingdom of Hungary. By means of these sources, the study also clarifies practices used in delivering the radical periodical Monathschrift to Hungary and reveals its recipients and distributors mainly from among Hungarian Jacobin−oriented aristocracy. It confirms the existence of various secret channels and illegal practices in importation and distribution of problematic texts.

BA Dissertation. Both modern critics and critics of the 1790s themselves have continually divided the feminist literature of this complex revolutionary decade into the radical or conservative camp. This Bachelor’s dissertation aims to elucidate how this categorisation is unjustified and possibly limiting. It analyses two novels by female writers, namely Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and Belinda by Maria Edgeworth, using both Feminist Literary Theory and New Historicist Theory, showing that, firstly, the novels aptly reflect the complex revolutionary feminist ideology of the 1790s and by their mere presence influence this same ideology. Therewith, they comply with the New Historicist claim that literary texts both reflect the ideology of their time and reinforce it. Most importantly, through analyses of these novels this dissertation shows that the terms used to describe the two sides of the feminist debate of the 1790s, radical and conservative, are too clear-cut. Instead, the novels contain important elements associated with both camps, contributing to the debate, but in the end leaving it with the reader to pass judgement. Accordingly, this paper shows that the division of literature into two camps is an act more of self-categorising, and an act of maintaining it by modern critics, than a fact. Finally, it argues that keeping up this categorisation is a limiting of the potential of literary interpretation.

This paper discussed translation and cultural exchange between French, English and Welsh during the 1790s. The research was  undertaken as part of the AHRC-funded project on Wales and the French Revolution at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies

This essay reads Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain (1794) as an engagement with the antiquarian strains of British radicalism in the early 1790s. Recent work on the poem by Damien Walford Davies and Paul Wright has brought out strongly how it links ancient acts of murder
with what Wordsworth later called modern Britain’s ‘wars … against liberty’, and shown how the poem dramatizes Wordsworth’s increasing awareness of ‘threatened Englishness’ and his abandonment of the ‘Celtic’ radicalism with which he aligned himself on his return from France in late 1792. I suggest that this is not simply a negative ‘reactionary’ turn; rather that Salisbury Plain sees Wordsworth facing the dangers that such ‘Celtic’ sympathies pose to a specifically English tradition of ‘Gothic’ radicalism. By bringing a range of historical material to bear upon the first text of the poem (also known as
‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’) I hope to recover Wordsworth’s immediate sense of the monumental historical and political antithesis staked out on the landscape of Salisbury Plain – registered physically in the correspondence between Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge, and figuratively in the opposition between the talisman of ancient English liberty, Magna Carta, and the Wicker Man, the emblem of ancient British slavery.

... 1790s. Frank Mabee Department of English University of Tennessee. ... flogging'. 21 The 'yoke' of tyranny and the aforementioned 'rod', dehumanize the sailor, keeping him from dignity and rationality – which prefigure abolitionist arguments. ...