ABSTRACT

Arnold Markley reads the novel as "profoundly inconsistent", because the conclusion "obliterates the gravity of the social critique he had developed throughout the work by contradicting the fundamental Godwinian tenet that human affairs are ruled by necessity rather than mere chance". W. M. Verhoeven, the novel's most recent editor, is even more damning in his conclusion that the ending "does not so much signal a shift towards compromise and reconciliation, as a complete recantation of radicalism". This chapter argues that the contradictions other critics have found in Hugh Trevor are encompassed and in some sense anticipated by more fundamental problems of mediation that lie at the heart of Holcroft's enterprise and perhaps at the heart of late eighteenth-century reformist fiction more broadly. It examines Hugh's initial foray into pamphlet journalism through the materiality of writing and its symbolic representation in connection with debates over the nature of print.