Natural rights and the birth of Romanticism in the 1790s / R.S. White.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

White, R. S., 1948-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Romanticism--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Romanticism.

Natural law.

History.

Human rights.

Great Britain.

Human rights--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Natural law--History--18th century.

Human rights in literature.

Natural law in literature.

Physical Description:

x, 277 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Basingstoke [England] ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Summary:

Following the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, ideas of the 'natural rights of man' (later distinguished as particular issues like rights of association, rights of women, slaves, children and animals) were publicly debated in England in the 1790s. Literary figures like Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Thelwall, Blake and Wordsworth reflected these struggles in their poetry and fiction. With the seminal influences of John Locke and Rousseau, these and many other writers laid foundations for high Romantic literature that were not so much aesthetic but moral and political. The focus of this book allows a recovery of figures who have not been foregrounded before, like Bage, Inchbald, Spence, Charlotte Smith and many others who are usually placed as 'Jacobin' writers rather than part of the first-wave Romantics. Although focusing on the 1790s, the book sets the development of natural rights thinking in a much longer perspective and traces its evolution from natural law, resurrected in the eighteenth century under the new guise of natural rights. Literature of sensibility or benevolence was a literary transition to Jacobin writing of the late eighteenth century, and the literature of natural rights in general. As well as tracing the history of the 'rights of man' paradigm, this pioneering study also places these concepts in the light of subsequent debate and the eventual acceptance of human rights and civil rights in the twentieth century.

Contents:

1 From Natural Law to Natural Rights 1

Rights and Romanticism 7

Natural law 10

Hobbes and the demise of natural law 16

Natural rights 22

Richard Cumberland and sympathy 24

Locke's influence 27

Causes aplenty: political and social contexts in the 1790s 30

Joseph Johnson: A congenial publisher 39

2 The Social Passions: Benevolence and Sentimentality 41

Sentimentality and benevolence 41

Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith 43

Oliver Goldsmith 49

Henry Mackenzie 57

Women writers 61

Robert Merry 63

Sentimentality and romanticism 67

3 Rights and Wrongs 77

Jean-Jacques Rousseau 77

Thomas Paine versus Edmund Burke 84

Mary Wollstonecraft 90

Thomas Spence 92

William Laurence Brown 95

4 Manifestoes into Fictions 100

William Godwin 101

Mary Wollstonecraft 109

John Thelwall 116

An exception proves the rule: Thomas Holcroft 130

Helen Maria Williams 134

5 Novels of Natural Rights in the 1790s 140

Elizabeth Inchbald: Nature and Art 141

Robert Bage, Hermsprong or Man As He Is Not 145

Charlotte Smith: The Old Manor House and Desmond 149

Eliza Fenwick: Secresy; or, the Ruin on the Rock 162

Mary Hays: The Victim of Prejudice 163

6 Slavery as Fact and Metaphor: William Blake and Jean Paul Marat 168

Slavery in fact and fiction 169

William Blake: slavery as metaphor 181

Jean Paul Marat: The Chains of Slavery 192

7 Rights of Children and Animals 196

Locke 197

Rousseau and Wollstonecraft 200

Wordsworth 205

Thomas Spence: The Rights of Infants (1797) 210

Child labour 212

Animal rights 224.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-262) and index.

ISBN:

1403994781

OCLC:

59002808

Publisher Number:

9781403994783 (cloth)