Walsingham's presence in the fashionable setting gives Robinson a pretext for putting fashion on trial and for assessing, in particular, how the smart set discuss novels. Robinson's virtuous characters have been obliged to vindicate modern books, contemporary novels particularly. Encountering Walsingham's vindication of the Enlightenment purveyed by contemporary writing, one might be persuaded that the novelist was the instrument through which modernity had been and would be made. Entrepreneurs such as James Harrison encouraged their clients to consider their library acquisitions as cultural capital, badges of their refinement and upward social mobility. It was left to the period's Gothic fictions to develop the repertory of stock situations that thereafter would betoken the horrors of reiteration. Otranto and its successors demonstrate how Gothic romance served Romantic-period culture as a site for exploring the more troubling implications of the eighteenth century's invention of the vernacular literary canon.