SOURCE: Garside, Peter. Introduction to Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, vol. I, pp. v-xviii. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Garside presents an overview of the liberal and conservative rhetoric of the late eighteenth century and addresses the extent to which Memoirs of Modern Philosophers can be categorized as an anti-Jacobin novel.

After a slow start following publication in 1800, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers gradually began to attract public attention. The pseudonym of Geoffry Jarvis, the supposed ‘editor’ of a mutilated manuscript left by an impoverished author, was hardly calculated to fool experienced novel readers (the device is reminiscent of Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) where a part of the manuscript was supposedly used as gun wadding), and for a while speculation about the authorship was rife. According to a review in the British Critic, the use of a Bath printer had encouraged some to attribute the work...