THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

passion. Burke may, in his most memorable paragraphs, have mourned the extinction of chivalry in France, but his
main recourse was not to the spirit of the Middle Ages but to the eighteenth-century concept of an equable political
balance, a balance which he finds evident in the existing order of things in Britain.
Paine, Godwin, and the ‘Jacobin’ Novelists
Burke’s attack on the ‘metaphysical abstractions’ on which the evolving Revolution in France was based, and his
related challenge to British apologists
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for the French experiment, were readily taken up. Burke had extended his criticism to include comment on the
Constitutional Society and the Revolution Society, both of them radical clubs supported largely by religious Nonconformists,
men who saw themselves as direct heirs to the spirit of the seventeenth-century English Revolution and
as victims of discriminatory laws. Prominent amongst members were the Unitarian minister, Richard Price (1723-91)
(who had actually provoked Burke’s riposte by preaching a sermon on the need to apply French lessons to Britain),
and a fellow Unitarian, the chemist, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) (who had his house wrecked by a Birmingham mob
as a result of attempting to celebrate the anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille in 1791). Amongst the most committed
of these radicals, in terms of both his writings and his actions, was the independent republican, Thomas Paine (1737-
1809). Paine’s support for both the American and the French Revolutions had made him friends in these
revolutionary nations and powerful enemies at home (his books were burned by the Public Hangman, but, having been
obliged to flee to Paris in 1792, he was granted the privilege of French citizenship). Paine’s acclaim in Jacobin France
was largely based on his reputation as the trouncer of the tyrant-loving Burke in his book The Rights of Man (1791,
1792). If his book lacks the elegance and the systematic argument of Burke’s, its attack upholds a new faith in
constitutionally defined rights and liberties and renders much of Burke’s creaking pragmatism ridiculous. The
‘poison’ of Burke’s ‘horrid principles’ is countered by a delineation of a despotism which extends beyond the person
of a king into ‘every office and department’ whose petty reflections and abuses of royal power are founded on ‘custom
and usage’.
The circulation of The Rights of Man through a chain of British and Irish radical clubs openly sympathetic to
France (and therefore increasingly hostile to the existing British Constitution) may well have reached hundreds of
thousands. Paine’s active political career in France was less propitious. It was while in prison (and under the shadow
of the guillotine from which he was released only by the fall of Robespierre) that he completed what was once his
most notorious work, The Age of Reason (1794-6). Here the ‘age of Revolutions’ bears a post-Voltairean and post
Jeffersonian fruit, one poisonous to Christianity and atheism alike. The ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’, propagated in
Jacobin France, is developed with a no-nonsense English thrust quite free of Robespierre’s posturing and ritualizing.
Paine dedicated his tract to his ‘fellow-citizens of the United States of America’, but his blunt arguments have
implications well beyond the Quaker libertarianism of Franklin or the non-sectarian aspirations of the American
Constitution. Paine proclaims his theism and a faith in a broad egalitarian morality of ‘doing justice, loving mercy,
and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy’. He rejects all forms of established, defined, or ‘revealed’
religion by treating the nature of ‘revelation’ as if it were little more than hearsay. Scriptural authority is disposed of
with much the same verve. The books of the Old Testament are dismissed as a
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collection of ‘obscene stories ... voluptuous debaucheries ... cruel and torturous executions and unrelenting
vindictiveness’. The Gospels strike him as merely anecdotal mystifications. ‘The Word of God’, he proclaims in
capital letters, ‘IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD’, and God himself stands for ‘moral truth’ not ‘mystery or obscurity’.
William Godwin (1756-1836), born into a strong Dissenting tradition, abandoned both his Calvinist theology and
his Congregationalist ministry in 1783 and assumed the alternative career of journalist and pamphleteer. His interest
in both the dissidence of Dissent and contemporary political developments led to his active participation in the debates
of the Constitutional Society. In 1789 he formed part of the congregation that heard Richard Price’s ‘Discourse on the
Love of our Country’ and he was sufficiently provoked by Burke’s response to it to begin work on what became his
own treatise, the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). The Enquiry is Godwin’s most systematic theoretical
work. He views human happiness and social well-being as the sole purpose of existence, but unlike Rousseau (whose
influence pervades the work) he looks forward to a gradual melting away of all government to be replaced by a new
system of radical anarchy. A rigid adherence to the leading principle of reason is substituted for Rousseau’s cult of