ABSTRACT
Imagined only as a set of ideas enacted in fiction, the Jacobin novel might be expected to tend toward the smug, certain, and monologic. Indeed, the Anti-Jacobin movement mercilessly derided radical writers as doctrinaire plotters, unaffected by the matters of everyday life and unwilling to acknowledge the tested wisdom of accepted patterns of behavior. Charlotte Smith is one of the first novelists to anticipate this Jacobin tendency toward autocritique, and her only epistolary novel, Desmond, offers an almost "real-time" glimpse of this development in the radical novel. Smith's novel, however, makes available an ironic and critical reading that questions the effects of this rhetorical balm. Clearly, Smith expects readers to forgive Desmond his French mistress and the excesses of his labyrinthine declarations of chaste love. Charlotte Smith's Desmond stops short of presenting its characters' actions as error, and, in so doing, it cannot quite claim a fully realized Jacobin stance.
