Cinquante ans après : mémoire oweniste et chartiste du roman radical des années 1790

Abstract

This article looks at the memory of the British radical novel of the 1790s in the Owenist and Chartist literature of the 1830s and 1840s. Countering the idea that these novels were forgotten in the radical, essentially theoretical canon that crystallized in the early nineteenth century and fed the subsequent waves of radicalism before and after the Great Reform Act of 1832, it shows the persistence of certain novels, notably William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), as recommended reading in the Owenist and Chartist press, and/or as a source of thematic and formal inspiration for the now massively serialized political fiction developed by authors such as Ernest Jones (Woman's Wrongs) Thomas Wheeler (Sunshine and Shadow) and George W. M. Reynolds (The Mysteries of the Court of London).

Keywords

• Political fiction
• Owenism
• chartism
• press
• William Godwin