In response to the French Revolution, a wave of enthusiasm for and optimism about social and political change swept Britain. The Dissenting minister Richard Price famously provoked Edmund Burke’s ire in 1789 by preaching that, having shared in the benefits of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and seen two other revolutions (American and French) he could see ‘the ardour for liberty catching and spreading, a general amendment beginning in human affairs, the dominion of kings, changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.’ Other members of the middling and professional orders, especially those concentrated around the arts, literature and professions of London, also saw these events as heralding wider changes in the European order: from war to peace; from competition to harmonious and productive exchange; from force and fraud to a rational grounding of authority. Tom Paine felt sufficient confidence that the age of European wars was over that he designed a whole welfare system on the assumption that the taxation collected to fight wars could safely be repurposed to promote a better society.

While the 1790s are often thought of as the most political of years, this chapter uses a range of sources to question that assumption and to point to the extent that much talk about politics was seen as an essentially private matter.That position was one that loyalism and the government increasingly challenged in the 1790s, breaking down long-standing ways of understanding private conversation and political discussion and opening the way for the emergence of a new language and politics for both loyalism and reform at the beginning of the nineteenth century.Using newspaper archives it identifies the emergence of a new lexicon of politics, linked especially to the period 1820-1840, alongside the development of a new set of political practices.In the 1790s those interested in reform faced new and disturbing challenges to their practices and expectations and had to develop ways of responding to a world in which their alternatives seemed to become dramatically starker.

The conclusion draws together these different levels of analysis – language and discourse; sociability and equality; and music and movement – to underscore that between them they reproduced a radical culture that was hugely intellectually ambitious, but rooted in sets of beliefs, relationships, practices and experiences that pulled in a very much more conformist direction and that worked to undermine the radical literary culture of wartime London, at the same time as loyalist and government forces further curtailed the scope for individual liberty and deliberative activity.

The deliberative style of radicals around Godwin and Holcroft was driven by a belief in truth and candour and it was one which was especially prized in its binary form, in contrast to the tendency of public meetings and political associations to fall back on rhetoric. It was a discourse that insisted on deliberative equality, but did so in a powerfully hierarchical society, divided on lines of class, status and gender.Godwin and others were often successful in drawing young men into their circles and engaging in this deliberative practice; but it was much more challenging to do so with women.This chapter examines how a number of women sought to resist and negotiate Godwin’s deliberative dominance using a range of strategies to discomfit him, to challenge his intellectualism and to claim a position of equality.

Godwin’s relatively new experience with women following the publication of Political Justice opened him up to a wider range of discursive and deliberative styles and helped lay the ground for his subsequent relationship with Wollstonecraft.In a society of stark gender inequality, it was a relationship in which something like equality was achieved, even if that was painfully won and remained fragile.Following Wollstonecraft’s death, a new set of imperatives faced Godwin which led him into a series of relationships in which he resorted to older and more traditional patterns of communication and with more traditional expectations.For all their egalitarianism, it is clear that class and gender inequality were far more deeply engrained than many of the radicals had assumed.

In the earlier chapters of the book we have seen that various forms of embeddedness in practices, conventions and behaviour that remained below the threshold of awareness for many, nonetheless served to complicate and shape people’s apparently more rational aspirations and conduct.This chapter examines a range of activities concerned with music and bodily movement, which most radicals treated mostly with a degree of disdain, rejecting them as corrupting of the young and fostering interests in fashion and in frivolous pursuits – such as dance, music and singing.Nonetheless, these activities were often central to the way in which people in the period experienced the world and it often served to ground them both in particular social milieu and in a set of narratives of the inevitability of the status quo.Loyalism did much to exploit the practical engagement of men and women in concerts, parades, balls, etc., as a basis for re-affirming their loyalties to the government and the nation. Radical intellectualism, in these circumstances, was often marginalised and weakened as a result.

While commentators tend to assume a single public culture, this chapter begins to develop an argument for a more fragmentary London world, in which there are many relatively small sets and circles, which provide many people, especially women, with the core of their social life.Close examination of the diaries of Marianne Ayrton and Eliza Soane allows us to see how very bounded women’s sociability and intimacies often were in practice. The chapter compares male and female experience and the relatively more open character of male expectations, in contrast to a female world where contacts were often very more rigorously policed.Using a range of diary sources it is possible to see that many women were rooted in ‘little platoons’ dominated by family and the business concerns of their husbands, while men were less socially constrained.Nonetheless, the chapter lays the ground for questioning how far the repression of the 1790s might have had differential effects, forcing men to question the reliability of their wider acquaintance.

The 1790s was a decade in which women made extensive contributions to the literary world and in which many of these women took up positions critical of the status quo.This chapter explores the case for seeing the emergence of an intensive set of relationships between those associated with the vanguard of literary exploration and feminism.In particular, the connections between Wollstonecraft, Inchbald, Hays, Alderson, Robinson, Fenwick, Smith and others are explored.Developing the argument of the previous chapter, this argues that the degree of contact and intimacy is not extensive and shows that it becomes so only towards the end of the decade and involving a very narrow group.This chapter also raises the question of how far there is a perception of a group of radical women in elite and loyalist literary culture, and points to the rather undiscriminating character of the references to such a group and to the very limited forms of attack used against those identified as key protagonists.

How did people understand those with whom they disagreed? How was that disagreement handled?And how was that process affected by the heightened political climate of the 1790s? More especially, how did literary radicals such as Godwin, who believed in the communicability of truth, understand his developing disagreements with a range of men who, by the end of the decade, were willing to denounce his ideas from the lectern and pulpit? This chapter charts the breakdown of several of Godwin’s friendships, including Samul Parr, James Mackintosh and Francis Burdett, and looks at the wider problems faced for his understanding of his deliberative aspirations as repression and financial hardship increasingly undermined the social world he had been able to take for granted earlier in the decade.It also looks at evidence of decreasing confidence among radicals, and others, in the light of this reaction and the intrusion of loyalism into people’s sense of their private concerns.

One exception, in these new relationships, was that with Sarah Elwes – the wife of John Elwes, from whom she was separated, following a criminal conversation case and an ecclesiastical divorce.This relationship enables us to see further into the complex and divided social worlds that existed in London in the period and sheds new light on Godwin’s life and his activities in the second half of the decade. It also allows us to explore some of the complexities of social and sexual relations in London, perhaps especially for a man who predicted the end of marriage and the development of attachment solely on the basis of intellectual worth.