Wishing a festive holiday to everyone who is celebrating today.In class today, we explored the cultural and political climate which surrounded the English Jacobins. In reaction to The Terror which followed in the wake of the French Revolution, many liberally minded Britons were branded as French-sympathizing traitors and their beliefs were cast as anti-British. Specifically, Canning's Anti-Jacobin poetry played heavily on this France-England divide by presenting Jacobinism as diametrically opposed to English nationalism.
In searching for source material, it was much easier to find expressly Anti-Jacobin texts. This is due in part to the fact that the Jacobins were less of a cohesive group than the Anti-Jacobins. That is, many people wrote on certain social issues but did not necessarily identify as Jacobins. On the other hand, Anti-Jacobins tended to oppose such progressive writers by grouping them together and attacking them as pro-French or anti-British. In many instances, such as in Canning's Ode to Jacobinism, Anti-Jacobins simply painted a gross caricature of the Jacobins. In class, it was suggested that, by doing so, the Anti-Jacobins were guilty of a kind of fear mongering by suggesting that progressive writers would lead England and its people to hell.
The Anti-Jacobins tended to write off Jacobins as undereducated. This attitude is evident in Canning's works when he attacks the "philosophic train" of the Jacobins, which included the works of writers such as Paine and Rousseau. In contrast, Paine's writing is rather respectful of Edmund Burke and maintains a fairly professional air throughout.
Question: To what extent were the English Jacobins a real threat to English nationalism? Conversely, to what extent did the Anti-Jacobins overreact? Consider the way in which Canning's poetry addresses Jacobin texts such as Paine's essay.
