ABSTRACT
The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine; or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor was founded in July 1798, and survived for twenty-three years, making full use during that period of its standard repertoire of ‘invective, innuendo, distortion, misrepresentation, and vicious personal abuse’. The Review was dedicated to the exposure of a supposed conspiracy to raise arms and overthrow the British Constitution. The office set of the Anti-Jacobin in the British Library reveals that Robert Bisset was the most prolific of the review’s contributors. Bisset found in Godwin’s Memoirs an ideal subject for attack. They provided an opportunity for him to denounce Jacobinism in all its forms: political, religious and moral. Bisset holds up Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin in the review as exemplifying and illustrating ‘jacobin morality’. Sometimes he twists Godwin’s words to extract a sexual meaning, as for example when he quotes the statement in Memoirs that during Imlay’s absence she ‘derived particular gratification from Archibald Hamilton Rowan.
