At first sight it is hard to imagine that the Gilbert Imlay who had so quietly and ignominiously departed from the United States in the course of 1787 was the same Gilbert Imlay who appeared in the full public glare of London's periodical press in the late spring of 1792. He had left his native America a penniless land-jobber and a bungling slave trader, but when we next hear from him he is ‘Captain’ Imlay, a ‘Commissioner for laying out Land in the Back Settlements’ and the ‘intelligent and lively author’ of A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America. Having overnight become an authority on America's western territory, by the time his novel The Emigrants appeared in March 1793, Imlay was hailed by William Enfield in the Monthly Review as an author who, on ‘the general subject of politics’, expressed himself ‘with the freedom of an enlightened philosopher’. Imlay's reincarnation as a Jacobin ‘modern philosopher’ and a champion of social and political reform could not have come at a more propitious moment. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’, Wordsworth famously wrote in The Prelude, describing the atmosphere of heady optimism generated by the popular movement for social and political reform in England in 1792:

Contrary to America and France, where the respective Revolutions had involved widespread bloodshed and massive social disruption, the ‘British Revolution’ – though certainly not free from violent upheaval – was largely fought in the pages of various print media.