As Britain addressed crucial questions of political reform at the end of the eighteenth century, it was compelled to consider the success of two very different experiments in social organization: the fledgling democracy of the newly independent America and the republic of revolutionary France (Dzelzainis and Livesey, 1â13). These two laboratories, in which competing ideas of governance were being tested, formed triangular points of reference for the architects of British reform: whilst Edmund Burke had supported American independence, he championed conservative critique of the violent upheavals in France; Thomas Paine, on the other hand, supported both nations in their pursuit of âlibertyâ in The Rights of Man (1792â93), the first volume of which he composed whilst living in Paris between 1787 and 1789. But if the Americans were thought to have swept away the advantages of a thousand years of settled government in a hasty rush towards democratic mediocrity, it was the French Revolution that cast the longest shadow over the course of the nineteenth century in Britain as the idealism that had powered its initial acts gave way to the sustained brutality of the Reign of Terror. Burkeâs fear that âlibertyâ in the abstract could not be prioritized above all else until its impact on the particulars of âpeace and orderâ was known proved to be tellingly prophetic: the implementation of the great democratic creed of libertĂ©, Ă©galitĂ©, fraternitĂ© was initially catastrophic and convulsive, leaving British supporters simultaneously bereft by its apparent failure and vulnerable to prosecution in Britain for the treacherous act of âimagining the kingâs deathâ implied in any attempt to conceptualize a republic (Barrell). In the aftermath of the Revolution, authors and readers were thus preoccupied with the description and analysis of events occurring abroad, as they witnessed and interpreted alternative approaches to reform and subsequently sought to identify the best way to democratize the unwritten constitution of Britain. The âlabourâ of reform in the nineteenth century was imaginative, conceptual, and discursive, but it was not understood solely in metaphorical terms as a work without physical cost: instead, its impact was registered in the language of bodily exertion, privation, and daily acts of self-sacrifice.
The mental labour of reading and writing undertaken in Britain in the long nineteenth century was clearly an advance on the brutal use of force to refashion civic society. But at the same time, its very efficacy made it potentially dangerous and authors could easily be accused of slipping from the role of commentator to that of seditious agitator. As William Godwin noted in his first âPrefaceâ to his novel Caleb Williams (1794):
Godwinâs fiction thus complements and extends the analysis he had undertaken previously in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793): like the philosophical Enquiry, the novel is âa study and delineation of things passing in the moral worldâ, but in addressing particulars and adopting an aesthetic form that privileges dramatic âinterest and passionâ, it also reaches a new, enlarged community of readers. However, the capacity of fiction to imagine the practical effects of proposed amendments to the constitution meant that when âterrorâ was âthe order of the dayâ, âeven the humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitorâ (Godwin, v).It is but of late that the inestimable importance of political principles has been adequately apprehended. It is now known to philosophers that the spirit and character of the Government intrudes itself into every rank of society. But this is a truth worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach. Accordingly, it was proposed, in the invention of the following work, to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man. If the author shall have taught a valuable lesson, without subtracting from the interest and passion by which a performance of this sort ought to be characterised, he will have reason to congratulate himself upon the vehicle he has chosen. (iv)
The Politics of Literary Labour
If Godwin was optimistic about the capacity of fiction to effect political change, he was also candid in his acknowledgement of the daily pains and scholarly discipline involved in literary creation. In a subsequent preface to a revised edition of Caleb Williams published in 1832, Godwin asserted the importance of inspirational immersion in his project: âI wrote only when the afflatus was upon me. I held it for a maxim that any portion that was written when I was not fully in the vein told for considerably worse than nothingâ (viii). But he also described the effort involved in the novelâs inception (10 years of thought) and composition (4 months of intense writing and re-writing for each of its three volumes). Formal questions here are also ethical ones, and Godwinâs prose styleâcompelling in its breathless tone of suspenseâwas the result of sustained experimental effort. He pondered the respective advantages of different narratorial modes, intuiting that political conviction could not be separated from questions of form and (self-)representation:
I began my narrative, as is the more usual way, in the third person. But I speedily became dissatisfied. I then assumed the first person, making the hero of my tale his own historian; and in this mode I have persisted in all my subsequent attempts at works of fiction. It was infinitely the best adapted, at least, to my vein of delineation, where the thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses which led the personages I had to describe primarily to adopt the particular way of proceeding in which they afterwards embarked.
Several metaphors of manual labour are deployed here to describe authorial endeavour: fiction performs work analogous to that of the surgeonâs dissecting knife, and authors (like natural philosophers) mine and quarry the seams and veins of human behaviour, engaging with, and learning from, other economies of knowledge such as the law. Godwin is clearly hoping to deploy imaginative effort in the service of what can be understood as a proto-psychological scienceâthe novel is positioned as a case-study, offering insights into âthe entrails of mind and motiveâ on a par with biography and early legal reporting. At the same time, Godwin was anxious about the status of his achievements; he called the âPrefaceâ a âtrue history of the concoction and mode of writing of this mighty trifleâ:When I had determined on the main purpose of my story, it was ever my method to get about me any productions of former authors that seemed to bear on my subject. [âŠ] I was extremely conversant with the âNewgate Calendarâ and the âLives of the Piratesâ. In the meantime, no works of fiction came amiss to me, provided they were written with energy. The authors were still employed upon the same mine as myself, however different was the vein they pursued: we were all of us engaged in exploring the entrails of mind and motive, and in tracing the various rencontres and clashes that may occur between man and man in the diversified scene of human life. (ix)
âWhat had cost [him] twelve monthsâ labour, ceaseless heartaches and industryâ could be read by even the most sympathetic reader in âa few hoursâ (ix). What, then, was the marker of the...[W]hen I had done all, what had I done? Written a book to amuse boys and girls in their vacant hours, a story to be hastily gobbled up by them, swallowed in a pusillanimous and unanimated mood, without chewing and digestion.