Introduction

Appreciation of polemical strategy involves much more than simply contextualising texts. The emphasis is not on illuminating obscurities through the explanation of historical or biographical allusion. Rather, it is the exploration of the complex ways in which the text engages other texts, addresses the reader, and participates in the political struggles which it is intended to shape and influence. For biographers and historians texts offer a kind of evidence which demands considerable tact in interpretation: as it has been argued elsewhere, “It is vital to establish the nature of the relationship between polemic and reality if literary sources are to be used as historical documents.” The French Revolution together with what E. P. Thompson has felicitously termed the making of the English working class alter the political agenda, as the pressure for electoral reform and the later progressive extension of the franchise redefine the boundaries of the political nation.