THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

sensibility and his innate religiosity. Law, government, property, inequality, and marriage would be abolished as part
of a gradual process by which human perfectibility, conditioned by human reason, would transcend existing
limitations and impediments to fulfilled happiness.
Godwin’s revolutionary hatred of all forms of injustice, privilege, and political or religious despotism also informs
his novel, Things as They Are or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), a narrative centred on the problems of
class perception and the nature of oppression. Godwin is less concerned with the authority of the state and more with
the relatively petty, but no less damaging, exercise of power by a privileged class. ‘It is now known to philosophers’,
he remarks in his Preface to the novel, ‘that the spirit and the character of government intrudes itself into every rank
of society’, a factor exemplified in the story by the pervasive tyranny of a landowner, the once well-meaning Falkland.
Falkland’s tentacles are observed catching at the novel’s hero, Caleb Williams, at every turn. Imprisoned by one of his
persecutor’s many contrivances, Caleb exclaims against the false assumption that England has no Bastille: ‘Is that a
country of liberty where thousands languish in dungeons and fetters? Go, go, ignorant fool! and visit the scenes of our
prisons! witness their unwholesomeness, their filth, the tyranny of their governors, the misery of their inmates!’ Such
rhetoric forms part of a series of counterblasts to the complacent upholders of the idea of the free-born Englishman. If
Caleb fails finally to confront his persecutor in public, a failure which he regrets, he is no passive victim. His escapes
from confinement, his disguises, wanderings, and abortive attempts to flee from England, give the novel something of
the quality of an adventure story, but his understanding of his predicament, and his articulation
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of this understanding as a critique of the existing ills of society, give his narrative a truly radical bite. At the opening
of his story the narrator identifies Falkland’s attraction to the principles of chivalry. In concluding his memoirs, Caleb
returns to the issue. Chivalry has, he claims, served to corrupt a noble mind and perverted ‘the purest and most
laudable intentions’. The survival, or worse, the revival of aristocratic codes, it is suggested, works both as a disguise
to, and a justification of, class-oppression.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790) also forms a protest against Burke’s nostalgia for
the age of chivalry by ridiculing defunct, upper-class codes of behaviour. But her treatise goes beyond a mere attack
on a system of aristocratic values which keep the greater proportion of humankind in subservience. For Wollstonecraft
(1759-97), that greater part of humankind embraced the thraldom of women of all classes. Wollstonecraft was the
most articulate of a small group of writers, all of them associated with Godwin’s circle, who used fiction to propagate
certain key aspects of the new revolutionary ideology. This group included two other women writers, Mary Hays
(1760-1843), the author of Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), and Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821) whose novel A
Simple Story appeared in 1791. Hays’s Emma Courtney is ‘a human being, loving virtue’, but one ‘enslaved by
passion; liable to the mistaken weaknesses of our fragile nature’, and hers is a story of unhappy and unrequited love
and of a suffering accentuated by a character insufficiently disciplined by education. Hays’s later work includes the six
volumes of Female Biography, or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of all Ages and Countries (1803).
Inchbald’s A Simple Story scarcely reveals itself now as a work of political or sexual radicalism, concerned as it is
with a quiescent English Roman Catholic family, but it does manage to assert the pressing need for women’s
education in order to respond to a stifling lack of fulfilment. Inchbald’s later literary career included the novel Nature
and Art (1796), two unperformed dramas set in revolutionary France, and a string of comedies, one of which, a
version of Kotzebue's Lovers’ Vows of 1798, is the play disastrously rehearsed in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
The modest fiction of Hays and Inchbald shows a concern with the inconsistencies, limitations, and shortcomings
of a contemporary society, but neither writer possessed the fire and the outspoken feminist zeal apparent in
Wollstonecraft’s flawed, rancorous, polemical, and radically original novels. Both Mary (1788) and the unfinished
The Wrongs of Woman (1798) deal with the evidence of a universal oppression of women by men. Mary is told in an
unadorned, laconic, matter-of fact way, a style which, despite its periodic recourse to irony, might almost be described
as perfunctory. The narrative touches on a variety of issues which figure prominently in ‘Romantic’ literature, notably
on the significance of the imagination, the nature of religious feeling, and the soul-expanding effects of travel, and it
interestingly opposes the emotional security of female friendship to a loveless marriage and an unfulfilled love-affair,
but it is ultimately a tragedy without real substance. The
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Wrongs of Woman is a far more persuasive polemic concerning the need for a public recognition of women’s rights. It
is also a more impressive, if equally restless, work of fiction. Its heroine, Maria, is in many ways a development from
the suffering Mary. She is acutely sensitive to landscape and ambience, but her Rousseauistic musings are balanced by
her rejection of intellectual passivity and the kind of decorous feeling in which Rousseau himself (‘the Prometheus of
sentiment’) patronizingly limited women’s perceptions. Maria is also alert to ‘the present state of society and