ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about Thomas Holcroft's earliest works of fiction, Manthorn or the Enthusiast and two-volume novel Alwyn, or The Gentleman Comedian. In both works, as in Paine's response to Burke, the manner of oratorical performance shares a mutually constitutive relationship with the quality of the speaker's character, a relationship which underwrites Holcroft's project of moral improvement through a careful scrutiny of delivery. These fictional works explore the possibilities for moral development through various forms of theatrical performance and here Paine's example may be as instructive for the way it contrasts Holcroft's early fiction as for the way it harmonizes with it. Many of ideas had significant currency as the cornerstones of the elocutionary movement in eighteenth-century rhetorical thought. While Holcroft's literary output between 1778 and 1780 consists of a dazzling range of productions a perusal of these texts leaves little question about the primacy of the theater in matters of moral development.
