ABSTRACT
"Jacobin" became the dominant term of disapprobation for British reformers despite the fact that those denominated as "Jacobins" were affiliated more closely by personal ties and political beliefs with the Girondins, rather than the French Jacobin or Montagnard factions. With such an inclusive list of targets, the term "anti-Jacobin" seems only problematically useful in designating many of the writers and works usually categorized by their overt opposition to "modern philosophy". Even the extreme Anti-Jacobin Review and Literary Censor borrows strategies introduced by writers like William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft to instruct its readers in how to read, a strategy associated with the very Jacobins they decry. On the anti-Jacobin side, one of the key elements used to categorize such works is parodic figures taken to stand for particularly emblematic writers such as William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft, or Mary Hays. The works that particularly deserve more nuanced attention than the label "anti-Jacobin" encourages are those that are more ambiguous.
