The revolution in action : servants in British fictions of the 1790s

Abstract

Taking its title from Napoleon's famous description of Figaro as "the Revolution in action", the following thesis explores the depiction of servants in British fictions of the 1790s, and argues that both radical and conservative authors self-consciously foregrounded provocative servant characters as symbols of revolutionary energy. In a decade in which prose fiction was intensely politicised, servants in British prose fictions assume obvious ideological significance in a way which distinguishes them from earlier eighteenth-century servants, as well as from the servants that follow in the nineteenth century. Such a reading differs substantially from the only other study of servants in British prose fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bruce Robbins' The Servant's Hand, which argues that literary servants are both always marginalised, and always independent of their particular socio-political contexts.