ABSTRACT
Robert Bage (1728–1801) has been described as one of the four principal English Jacobin novelists of the period, along with William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and Elizabeth Inchbald (Kelly, English Jacobin Novel). Originally a paper-maker and owner of a Staffordshire mill, Bage, like the printer Samuel Richardson, began writing novels only in his fifties. For Bage, the immediate cause was the failure of a business venture, resulting in four epistolary novels published anonymously in the 1780s: Mount Henneth (1782); Barham Downs (1784); The Fair Syrian (1787); and James Wallace (1788). Bage achieved lasting recognition with the popularity of his two novels of the 1790’s, both of which eschew epistolary structure for an enhanced staging of social satire and political criticism. Bage’s career culminated with the Revolutionary allegory, Hermsprong, or Man as He Is Not (1796), influenced by Voltaire’s L’Ingénu, in which a confrontation occurs between the titular hero, raised among the American Indians, and the tyrannical Lord Grondale, who represents the worst of the entrenched British establishment. Hermsprong’s trial alludes to the treason trials of 1793–4 as does Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), a novel that also echoed Bage with its original title, Things As They Are. Bage’s Jacobin sympathies are even more economically revealed in the scathing wit of the last few sentences of Man As He Is, which ridicule Edmund Burke’s famous reaction to the French Revolution:
when an English senator had said in a book, supposed to contain the collected wisdom of the nation–‘That man has no rights’,–the whole French people fell into a violent fit of laughter, which continues to this day. Some rights, at least, they said, might be allowed to man; the rights of suffering, and of paying taxes; these no courts would dispute.–But if, said they, men have no rights, they have wills at least; and Kings, Lords, and Priests, shall know it. (vol. 4, p. 272)
