ABSTRACT
Thomas Holcroft is most familiar as an autodidact author and radical reformer of the 1790s. Re-viewing Holcroft's translation work in the 1780s, then, rethinks a tendency to dismiss translation or adaptation as of only marginal historical rather than literary interest. Taking translation seriously as a form of self-education into middling rhetoric repositions translation as one site for constructing both national and trans-national identities. Particularly intriguing is Holcroft's decision to translate Isabelle de Montolieu's 1786 novel, Caroline de Lichtfield - among the very few works he translated by a female author and the only novel. In 1786, the same year in which he translated Montolieu's Caroline, he also translated more from Voltaire and Savary's Letters on Egypt. Both Montolieu's Caroline and Genlis's Tales of the Castle, which highlight educational plans for producing self-disciplined and feeling elite citizens, fall into Colby's "sentimental" category.
