Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T16:58:25.714Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Levellers, nabobs and the manners of the great: the novel's defence of hierarchy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

M. O. Grenby
Affiliation:
De Montfort University, Leicester
Get access

Summary

‘It is so,’ said Edward, ‘the happiness, nay the very existence of society, depends upon the due subordination of its members, and the contentment with that station assigned to us by Providence.’

Men who are born to fortune are appointed by Providence to the administration of a certain portion of the interests of the world: they are the helmsmen of happiness; and if they desert the wheel, is there any wonder that the even course should be lost?

Robert Dallas, Percival, or Nature Vindicated. A Novel (1801)

One of the principal reasons for the attack on the novel in the late eighteenth century was that it was said to encourage equality. It is a proposition with which numerous twentieth-century scholars have agreed, contending that the eighteenth-century novel was somehow an intrinsically ‘bourgeois’, or at least ‘democratic’, form, insisting that it stressed the equality of man because every character possessed an equal capacity to feel, to fall prey to adventures, to become a protagonist. Contemporary critics of the novel, though, were worried less about the sudden elevation of a protagonist out of his or her social station, and more about the effect these texts were having on their readers, men and women who were, they feared, increasingly being recruited from the lower reaches of society. Such new readers were having aspirations implanted in their giddy heads, wholly out of keeping with their real stations in life.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Anti-Jacobin Novel
British Conservatism and the French Revolution
, pp. 126 - 168
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×