This chapter shows how the new demands of a growing market shaped the development of 1790s political novels. In the wake of the French revolution, the proliferation of English fiction began to strike many observers as particularly dangerous – critics feared that novels might be the vehicle of threateningly radical and immoral ideas, while many authors expressed anxieties about where and by whom their works would be read. Examining novels by writers including Eliza Parsons, William Godwin, and Robert Bage, this chapter argues that political ideas across the spectrum were often conceived and expressed as functions of multiplicity: How many readers, how many epistolary voices, how many viewpoints, how many ideological challenges could one novel handle? Focusing first on the proliferation of voices that a long novel allows, and then on concerns about the alarmingly wide and indiscriminate spread of fiction to its readers, this chapter considers how these two ways of thinking about fiction’s function tie narrative style to the decade’s radical political debates.

Though numerous Gothic novels appeared in Romantic-era Britain, critics have tended to focus on the works of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, largely ignoring the Gothic output of trade publishing houses such as the Minerva Press. Using the work of Eliza Parsons, Francis Lathom and Isabella Kelly, this chapter argues that the division of Romantic-era Gothics into worthwhile ‘originals’ and uninteresting ‘imitations’ misses the complex intertextuality that characterised Gothic fiction at this formative moment. First,the chapter challenges scholarship’s traditional ‘trickle-down’ model of influence by considering Parsons’s The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) alongside Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790): their shared plotline not only defies expectation by demonstrating Parsons’s independence, but raises the possibility that Radcliffe was responding to the lesser-known fictions published in her day. Second, it questions the sufficiency of the term ‘imitation’ by looking at the creative and subversive uses to which Kelly’s Eva (1799) and Lathom’s The Midnight Bell (1798) put the figure of the Bleeding Nun, an element from Lewis’s The Monk (1796).