ABSTRACT
The popularity of Gothic novels supposedly grew with anxieties about revolution in their readership. William Hazlitt wrote that Gothic novels gained at least part of their interest from "the tottering state of all old structures at the time". Much has been written about the connection between the proliferation of Gothic novels in the 1790s and the French Revolution. However Gothic novels also revealed the dark side of chivalry, with their salacious and plundering barons; to equate these with French aristocrats would have signalled a liberal position. In fact, a number of characteristics of 1790s Gothic novels suggest that, like the early realist novel, the Gothic genre may have a place in the tradition of novels that engage with historiography. Anxiety in England about the French Revolution was itself closely connected to views of English history, specifically, the English Constitution. Representations of an ideal chivalric society could be seen as conservative opposition to the French republican style.
