The political impact of the French Revolution in England was strangely oblique, even when one remembers that it was largely being experienced at one remove. My concern here is not only with some examples of that oblique reaction but with language generally, and with the manner in which the growing questioning of authority during the period reflected a more profound alteration, taking place over a much longer period – a movement from what might be termed the language of fidelity to the cultivation of dialects that could be regarded as more critically oriented. To put the matter another way, whereas in medieval times writers had been so close to the religion of their surrounding culture that they did not need to think about the possible religious implications of their language, by the middle of the twentieth century, they would have become so self-conscious and self-critical that they could not write anything containing such implications and not be aware of possible commenting voices ranging from the harshly critical to the warmly favourable. The 1790s, I shall maintain, provided a crucial juncture for this development.

In addition, however, attention may be drawn to recent emphases in the writing of history by which the possibility of concentrating on a small and particular detail and expanding one's attention from there can be explored, or, alternately, one may begin by proceeding to the widest possible extreme and moving inward.