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MIRIAM L. WALLACE

‘Doing’ history, or what I learned from
the 1794 London Treason Trials
LITERARY scholars who specialise in the English ‘Jacobin’ novelists 1
associated with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft work with
writing that generically engages both the ‘literary’ and the ‘historical’. For
example, a cryptic reference to the 1794 London Treason Trials as ‘too well
known to need repetition’, 2 led this literary critic into an explicitly interdisciplinary project between history, law, and literature. Initially documentation of the Trials seemed significant as background context for the
composition and reception of the English ‘Jacobin’ novels of Thomas
Holcroft, a proper literary project. But comparing twentieth-century
accounts of the trials with primary documents from 1794 and 1795 raised
interesting questions about the charge of ‘constructive treason’ itself and
the powerful rhetorical work accomplished by writings produced on both
sides either promoting or attacking the government’s case. Grappling
honestly with this kind of material requires that scholars resist falling into
either literary formalist or historical contextual approaches.
The British charge of high treason in 1794 derives from the statute of 25
Edward III c.2, defining as treason: ‘When a man doth compass or

imagine the death of our lord the king, or our lady the queen, or of their
eldest son and heir.’ 3 The concept of ‘constructive’ treason expands this
definition to include acts, which although they may not include the direct
murder of the king, queen or heir, can be said to lead ‘constructively’ or
by implication to such an event. A plan to imprison the king is held to be
treason constructively, even without the intent of murder, because captive
1. The term ‘English Jacobins’ was used in 1790s Britain to discredit radicals and
reformers by conflating them with the excesses of the French Revolution. Two progovernment periodicals, the Anti-Jacobin of 1797 and the Anti-Jacobin review and magazine
(1798-1821), were particularly significant in popularising the terminology of ‘Jacobinism’
as a catch-all for any person, group, or writing perceived to threaten the British establishment or William Pitt’s government. In fact the targets of the Anti-Jacobin were so varied
in their sympathies that it is difficult to recognise them as a coherent group at all. ‘English
Jacobins’ has become a normative term, however, for both historians and literary critics in
the twentieth century. Carl B. Cone’s important historical study is titled The English
Jacobins: reformers in the late 18th century (New York 1968) and Gary Kelly’s foundational
literary study is entitled The English Jacobin novel 1780-1805 (Oxford 1976).
2. Allene Gregory, The French Revolution and the English novel (Port Washington, NY
1965), p.57.
3. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the laws of England (1769; Oxford 1966), iv.78.

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kings tend to be short-lived. In the case of the 1794 trials the real fear was
that in pressuring the House of Commons for parliamentary reforms,
political societies were threatening the very constitution of English government embodied in the conjunction of the two Houses of Parliament
and the monarch. The government feared national that ‘conventions’
showing popular support for more frequent parliamentary elections,
broader access to representation, and lowering property requirements for
parliamentary office could pose a challenge to the British Constitution
itself, and so to the king in his role as state figurehead. In May 1794, the
government began rounding up prominent members of the London
Corresponding Society (LCS) and the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI). It then convened a grand jury to return a true bill against
thirteen men for high treason, and further refined the possibilities of
‘constructive treason’ in Chief Justice James Eyre’s ‘Charge to the Grand
Jury’ delivered in October of that year. 4
The charge of treason ‘constructively’ implied by other actions and
writings, rather than according to the strict definition of ‘treason’ as the
act of plotting the king’s death or imprisonment, seemed particularly

overdetermined in the case of a man best known as a literary figure,
Thomas Holcroft. An autodidact and respected novelist and playwright,
Holcroft was among the twelve men actually indicted on a charge of high
treason. 5 Never brought to trial – after the first three defendants were
acquitted the others were dismissed and the charges dropped – Holcroft’s
work and life seem to fall at the margins of most historical or literary
analysis. For literary critics, Holcroft is usually a minor literary figure,
sometimes credited with creating the first English ‘Jacobin’ novel (Anna
St. Ives, 1792), sometimes mentioned as the translator of important continental works (including works by Beaumarchais, Lavater, Mme de
Genlis, Frederick II of Prussia, and Goethe), sometimes as a minor dramatist. 6 For historians, Holcroft is usually most important for his
friendships with other more significant figures and his status as defendant
in the 1794 trials. 7
4. See Albert Goodwin, The Friends of liberty: the English democratic movement in the age of the
French Revolution (Cambridge, MA 1979) p.331-40.
5. The eleven other men indicted were John Horne Tooke, Thomas Hardy, John
Thelwall, John Augustus Bonney, Stewart Kyd, Jeremiah Joyce, John Richter, John
Baxter, Thomas Wardle, Matthew Moore, and Richard Hodgson.
6. See Joseph Rosenblum, Thomas Holcroft: literature and politics in England in the age of the
French Revolution (Lewiston, NY 1995); Rodney Baine, Thomas Holcroft and the revolutionary
novel (Athens, GA 1965); Gregory Maertz, ‘Transmission of German literature and dissenting voices in British culture: Thomas Holcroft and the Godwin circle’, in 1650-1850;

Ideas, aesthetics, and inquiries in the early modern era, ed. Kevin Cope and Laura Morrow (New
York 1997), p.271-300; Gregory, French Revolution and the English novel, and Kelly, English
Jacobin novel.
7. See Cone, English Jacobins; Goodwin, Friends of liberty; Emma McLeod, The War of
ideas: British attitudes to the wars and against revolutionary France, 1792-1802 (Brookfield, VT
1998), and The Debate on the French Revolution 1789-1800, ed. Alfred Cobban (London 1963).

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The fact that, for literary scholars, the Treason Trials and the public
and written debate that they produced are usually ‘context’ or ‘background’ to the analysis of ‘proper’ literature such as novels, plays, poems,
or translations of literary works, diminishes the potential for literarytrained critics to engage with this fascinating bit of writing as writing. But
if for historians the Trials are a matter of historical record, while the
novels produced by Godwin and Holcroft during and following the public
event of the trials are merely biographical and contextual documents, the
larger picture of how public debate and ideology were promulgated in
various written forms to a broad audience of literate British readers is

falsified. The work of radicals like Godwin and Holcroft spanned multiple
genres of writing, from original fiction and drama through memoirs and
histories to polemical essays, and it engaged many aspects of British
culture, from political reformist societies to London literati, from governmental reforms to domestic arrangements. Consequently, their
importance cannot be ascertained by studying a single genre of their
writing, nor their significance by examining an isolated avenue of influence. Also, the documents surrounding the Treason Trial are themselves
complicated representations. Some were quasi-official legal documents,
such as the record of the Trials themselves and the Charge to the Grand
Jury that returned the bill for the arrest of twelve men on the charge of
high treason. 8 Others were publicly distributed and polemical writings on
the significance of the trials and the charges, part of the larger 1790s
discursive field on the foundation of nation, the rights and meaning of
citizenship, and the interpretation of English history and tradition. None
of these documents is simply factual. Thus, some consideration of the
representational status of these documents is essential, rendering an
empirical historical approach of limited value; yet although a form
of persuasive rhetorical writing, these documents are not generically
‘literary’.

i. Historians and historiography

Some historians have been asking how approaches associated with literary
theory impact a sense of what history is and what historiography does or
ought to do. These concerns are usually presumed to have been initiated
by Hayden White’s Metahistory in 1973, and to have become more

8. For an insightful discussion of the kinds of legal documents represented by James Eyre
in ‘Charge to the grand jury’, in The Trial of Thomas Hardy for high treason, at the sessions house
in the Old Bailey (London 1794) and the record of The Trial of Thomas Hardy, see Alexander
Welsh, Strong representations: narrative and circumstantial evidence in England (Baltimore, MD
1992), p.24. John H. Langbein has also argued for caution in the historical use of the
published transcripts collected in A Complete collection of state trials (1816-1828) in ‘Criminal
trial before the lawyers’, University of Chicago law review 45 (1978), p.263-316 (p.264-67).

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pressing with the advent of ‘cultural history’ in the 1980s. 9 Historians of
historiography such as Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra have

turned to approaches considered more ‘literary’, in the case of White
emphasising the full range of tropes and narrative forms upon which
much writing of history depends, and in the case of LaCapra examining
the limitations of an empirical, scientific-objectivist mode of historiography in favour of more fluid, potentially carnivalesque, or psychologically-engaged modes. 10 Some historians have reacted with hostility,
confusion, or enthusiasm to such challenges. While cultural historians
such as Lynn Hunt have reacted with enthusiasm, still others suspected
that such approaches were, in Nancy Partner’s words, ‘smuggled out of
linguistics and philosophy departments by literary critics and free-ranging
or metacritics, and lobbed like grenades into unsuspecting history
departments’. 11 Complete neglect on the part of mainstream historians is
documented by Richard Vann, who argues that except for the 1973
Metahistory, the work of Hayden White has gone largely unread by historians and philosophers for a number of formal and disciplinary
reasons. 12
On the other side, some literary critics have welcomed the infiltration of
history by literary-influenced theories, seeing a challenge to the empirical
truth-claims of historiography as strengthening the prominence of their
own fields or legitimating their transgression of disciplinary boundaries.
Still others, particularly eighteenth-century scholars, prefer to maintain
history as a base on which to build claims, the empirical grounding of the
humanities disciplines. Both reactions are territorial, emphasising disciplinary authority and potentially delimiting valuable scholarly work.

This second response presents a particular danger for literary-trained
critics, who may exhibit an overabundance of respect for history and
historical truth, treating the work of historians as not a different epistemological method of dealing with mediated information, but as more

9. See the Norton anthology of theory and criticism entry ‘Hayden White’, ed. Vincent Leitch
(New York 2001), p.1709-12 (p.1710), and The New cultural history, ed. Aletta Biersack and
Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, CA 1989), especially Lynn Hunt’s ‘Introduction: history, culture,
and text’ (p.1-22). See also Peter De Bolla, ‘Disfiguring history’, Diacritics 16.4 (1986),
p.49-60; Chris Lorenz, ‘Can histories be true? Narrativism, positivism, and the ‘‘metaphorical turn’’ ’, History and theory 37.3 (1998), p.309-29; John E. Toews, ‘Frank Ankersmit
and Hans Kellner’s A New philosophy of history’, History and theory 36.2 (1997), p.235-48, and
Carol E. Quillen, ‘Crossing the line: limits and desire in historical interpretation’, History
and theory 37.1 (1998), p.40-68. Examples of historical work engaging such approaches can
be found in the special issue of History and theory on ‘Producing the past: making histories
inside and outside the academy’, ed. Ann Shapiro, 36.4 (December 1997).
10. See Lloyd Kramer, ‘Literature, criticism, and historical imagination: the literary
challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra’, in New cultural history, p.98-128.
11. See ‘Making up lost time: writing on the writing of history’, Speculum 61 (1986),
p.90-117 (p.95).
12. ‘The reception of Hayden White’, History and theory 37.2 (1998), p.143-61.

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absolutely true. As Suzanne Gearhart warns both literary and historical
scholars:
Literary theory and the philosophy of history – indeed, any theory that is concerned with ‘marking off’ the fundamental boundaries of a given field – frequently imply or state a theory concerning the ‘other’ discipline. But with almost
equal frequency, that ‘background’ theory idealises the ‘other’ discipline in a
variety of ways in order to permit the theorist to set the boundaries of his ‘own’
discipline, and these boundaries already contain in themselves the most basic
assumptions governing the discipline. Thus the most fervent believers in an ideal
history are often literary critics and philosophers. The most fervent believers in an
ideal of literature are frequently historians, philosophers, and scientists. This
idealisation of the ‘other’ discipline is just one side of a coin whose reverse is the
view that that ‘other’ discipline is unimportant, or lacking in rigor, or excessively
logical or dogmatic. 13

Some literary criticism has tended to an instrumentalist use of historical
work as the factual base on which to rest properly literary arguments,

without always adequate recognition of the interpretive and theoretical
elements of historical writing or the complexities of historical research.
Hayden White, in ‘The historical text as literary artifact’, argues that not
only historians, but scientists and literary scholars have a vested interest in
imagining historical accounts as determining a mid-point between the
truth claims of the physical sciences and of literary texts. White explains
that, ‘literary theorists, when they are speaking about the ‘‘context’’ of a
literary work [...] suppose that this context – the ‘‘historical milieu’’ –
has a concreteness and an accessibility that the work itself can never
have’. On the contrary, White claims that:
historical documents are not less opaque than the texts studied by the literary
critic. Nor is the world those documents figure more accessible [...] In fact, the
opaqueness of the world figured in historical documents is, if anything, increased
by the production of historical narratives. Each new historical work only adds to
the number of possible texts that have to be interpreted if a full and accurate
picture of a given historical milieu is to be faithfully drawn. The relationship
between the past to be analysed and historical works produced by analysis of the
documents is paradoxical; the more we know about the past, the more difficult it is
to generalise about it (Norton anthology of theory and criticism, p.1719).

White’s acknowledgement of the opacity of ‘historical’ documents and the
layered effect of historical work is a welcome reminder that historians do
more than simply ‘tell it like it is’. As critical historiographies have noted,
historical scholarship itself is writing that is largely based upon written
sources, and so would seem obliged to engage with serious questions about
the status of writing itself. Since post-structuralism it is difficult to accept
written documents of any kind as simply a matter of transparent record,
13. Suzanne Gearhart, The Open boundary of history and fiction: a critical approach to the French
Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ 1984), p.27-28.

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without recognising that the effect of transparent recounting is itself a
kind of writing practice. In the ‘documentary or self-sufficient research
model’, according to Dominick LaCapra:
there is a sense in which writing is not a problem. Writing is subordinated to
content in the form of facts, their narration, or their analysis. It is thus reduced to
writing up the results of research, and style is limited to a restricted notion of
mellifluous, immediately readable or accessible, well-crafted prose [...] in which
form ideally has no significant effect on content. 14

LaCapra and White explicitly contest such a version of historical writing
as adequate or even achievable. Further, as scholars have noted, the
documents of ‘historical record’ are not uniformly transparent themselves,
but rather plagued by differences in evidentiary quality, rhetorical style,
social status, and provenance. It is precisely these complexities that
demand the analytical and interpretive work of the historian.
The problem of generic complexity is particularly heightened for
scholarship on the English Jacobins, who were writing in the turmoil of
1790s London where the written records are so rich and diffuse, and who
were themselves so involved in the conflict about the powers of imagination and the grounds for rational knowledge. The peculiarity of the
documents produced around the 1794 Treason Trails is how self-consciously written they are, while their actual or quasi-legal status places
particular significance on their rhetorical strategies and particular kinds
of truth claims. One significant document, Lord Chief Justice James
Eyre’s ‘Charge to the Grand Jury’, was printed and distributed publicly
at the request of members of the jury who were impressed with his
exposition of the charge of constructive treason. 15 The ‘Charge’ was also
reprinted by publishers who were sympathetic to the reform societies, and
who rendered into capital letters those passages that they found most
objectionable. While both documents are (to the best of my knowledge)
accurate copies in content, the form of each encourages a particular
interpretive reading which impacts upon the reception of that content.
Another important document, William Godwin’s ‘Cursory Strictures on
the Charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice James Eyre to the Grand
Jury, October 2, 1794’, was first published in the Morning Chronicle and
later reprinted as a pamphlet. In it Godwin delineated objectionable legal
extrapolations in the published ‘Charge’, thereby offering a competing
reading of English law on treason. 16 Finally, in early 1795, Holcroft’s
pamphlet, A Narrative of the facts, relating to a prosecution for high treason;
including the address to the jury which the court refused to hear: with letters to the
14. Dominick LaCapra, ‘Writing history, writing trauma’, in Writing history, writing
trauma (Baltimore, MD 2001) ch.1, p.2-3.
15. Eyre, ‘Charge to the grand jury’ i.3-15.
16. W. Godwin, ‘Cursory strictures’, in Uncollected writings 1785-1822: articles in periodicals
and six pamphlets, ed. J. W. Marken and B. R. Pollin (1794; Gainesville, FL 1968), p.145-76
(p.154).

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attorney general, Lord Chief Justice Eyre, Mr Serjeant Adams, the Honourable
Thomas Erskine and Vicary Gibbs, Esq.: and the defence the author had prepared, if
he had been brought to trial, appeared, painting a powerful picture of the
impact of the trial, despite his dismissal, on Holcroft’s financial and social
standing. 17 A Narrative of the facts attacks a justice system that accuses a
man, then refuses to hear his defence, and leaves him tainted with the
shadow of a felony against which he is unable to defend himself. Holcroft
aligns himself with literary victims such as Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and
seeks to create through writing the public hearing he was denied at
the trial. He documents his own correspondence with supporters and
antagonists and even reiterates the Judge’s warning that he keep his
complaints about the trial’s effects to himself lest he suffer a less fortuitous
future trial. Each of these documents uses the particular persuasive power
and public reach of the written, casting itself as an ‘authentic’ and ‘true’
account in contention with other documents and with the event of the
trial itself. Thus, the problem of how writing and written representation
refer to material experience and abstract truth-claims, and even more
problematically, how such writing was received and read, are central
concerns of any analysis of the written debates surrounding the Treason
Trials of 1794. Obsessive retelling and rewriting of events and their
significance is particularly marked in the swirling representations of the
Trials.
This problem of representation makes the event of the Trials and their
public documents fertile ground for historically-minded literary critics,
and several important works have already engaged the Trials. John
Barrell’s magisterial Imagining the king’s death deals extensively with the
Trials, their published accounts, and the complexities of charging men
with imagining the death of the king in a historical moment when
imagination was particularly contested and expansive. 18 Judith Pascoe
has examined the spectacle of the Trials themselves in Romantic theatricality, noting that late-century courtroom trials became a popular entertainment drawing significant numbers of female spectators, and exploring
how the form of the legal trial played to those viewers. 19 Thus, my own
interest in the ways in which a concept of constructive, extrapolative
treason intersected with the larger Jacobin project to use popular written
forms to effect a larger change in public opinion, is set within a larger
context of literary critics working with historical materials in a mode that
is both historicist and informed by literary sensitivity toward the functions
of representation and figuration.
17. Holcroft, A Narrative of the facts (London 1794).
18. John Barrell, Imagining the king’s death: figurative treason, fantasies of regicide 1793-1796
(Oxford 2000).
19. Judith Pascoe, ‘The courtroom theater of the 1794 treason trials’, in Romantic theatricality: gender, poetry, and spectatorship (Ithaca, NY 1997), p.33-67.

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ii. Interdisciplinarity and English Jacobinism
Narrow disciplinary boundaries are particularly problematic for work on
English Jacobin writers like Godwin, Holcroft, and their colleagues. They
were themselves working across areas of knowledge production and use of
language which functioned differently in their day; in the case of the
Treason Trials, educated readings of English law and representations of
‘justice’ and ‘rights’ in popular print media were particularly in contention. The trial itself both put into question and solidified the developing
boundaries between the highly figurative, emotional language associated
with sentimental novels and some barristers’ pleas on one side, and the
rational discourse presumed by the ‘rule of law’ and Godwinian ‘truth’ on
the other. Godwin, Holcroft, and their compatriots asserted a claim to
authentic, masculine, and rational truth, the ‘language of impressive
sincerity’, 20 in the context of the trials, while at the same time their star
council, Thomas Erskine, was known for his dramatic and emotionally
compelling courtroom style. 21
English Jacobinism was concerned with the complex differences and
connections between historical and fiction writing, prefiguring contemporary interest in the relationship of fiction and history. Viewing
novels most often as a site for individual growth and education, the
English Jacobins combined writing popular fiction with the production of
biography, history, memoir, educational tracts, and political history.
Fiction reading led, some of them argued, to an interest in biography, and
biography of real people to an interest in history in a logical trajectory
from the more personal and affective, to the more general and informative. For example, Godwin’s preface to his novel of systemic injustice,
Things as they are or the adventures of Caleb Williams, represents the novel as
an effort to teach a broader public that ‘the spirit and character of
government intrudes itself into every rank of society’. 22 In addition,
Godwin famously dated his preface to correspond to the day of Thomas
Hardy’s arrest as the first victim of the 1794 Trials, seeking to tighten the
connections between fiction and historical event. Even more explicitly,
Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays both argue that reading fiction
serves usefully as a first step to developing an interest in history, arguing
that self-educated readers can be coaxed from the particular and affective
to the general and rational. 23 These writers, then, saw a linear connection
between genres of fiction and history, mirrored by individual readers’
20. See Maurice Hindle’s note to ‘Godwin’s letter to Joseph Gerrald’ in William
Godwin, Things as they are, or the adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. M. Hindle (1794; New York
1988), p.355-58 (p.355).
21. See Cone, English Jacobins, p.137-38, and Katherine Binhammer, ‘The sex panic of
the 1790s’, Journal of the history of sexuality 6.3 (1996), p.409-34 (p.428).
22. Godwin, Things as they are, p.3.
23. See Hays, excerpt in Women critics 1660-1820: an anthology, ed. by the Folger Collective on Early Women Writers; (1793; Bloomington IN 1995) p.298-99, and

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intellectual and political development. Such intellectual growth through
reading is imagined as particularly pressing and pertinent for female and
labouring readers, and as an alternative to the conventional classical
education common to university men. This significant aspect of English
Jacobinism cannot be appreciated by scholarship that restricts the proper
objects of its study to novels and plays on the one hand, or to political
treatises on the other. Such strictly delineated scholarship risks replicating
as disciplinary the civic distinctions which Godwin and Holcroft questioned.
But the project of Godwin’s and Holcroft’s fiction, to reach a larger
audience by means of an affective and popular genre, and to induce those
readers to expand their reading matter to include history, biography, and
political philosophy, was at odds with Godwin’s argument in ‘Cursory
strictures’ that ‘truth’ was endangered by the emotive and figurative
language of the Chief Justice’s version of the law. Most political historians
agree that the effective disjunction Godwin made between the language of
law and that of fiction contributed to saving Holcroft and his colleagues
from conviction. Carl Cone argues that: ‘When laid open by Godwin’s
indignant analysis this charge [of constructive treason] had implications
not foreseen by Justice Eyre or by the ministers. Readers of Godwin’s
pamphlet Cursory strictures saw that ministers did not have ‘‘clear and
undoubted grounds’’ for establishing treason’ (English Jacobins, p.203).
But Godwin’s and Holcroft’s strict separation in this case between an
authentic truth of intent and an illicitly imaginative charge undercut
their future projects, making their literary work politically suspect
because its rhetorical power and designs on its readers were evident to a
post-trial readership. Ironically, by overly delimiting the territory proper
to figuration and that of empirical truth, they undermined their own
powerful project of using popular, figurative, and affective writing to
impact and shape public reception of national, discursive, and political
ideas.
The complexity of writing produced by the English Jacobins, especially
Godwin and Holcroft, in terms of genre, argument, and ‘tendency’ (or
ideological implication) 24 makes either a purely ‘literary’ or a purely
‘historical’ approach equally inadequate. My project of examining the
trial and its public print representations in 1794 and 1795 depended upon
materials that are not ostensibly literary or aesthetic documents, but those
usually classified as historical documents. Attempting to claim Eyre’s
‘Charge’, ‘Cursory strictures’, or A Narrative of the facts as literary writing
in the modern sense was not the point; the issue is not whether these texts
are aesthetically complex or unfairly neglected rhetorical masterpieces.
Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the rights of man with a vindication of the rights of woman and hints,
ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (1792; Cambridge 1995), p.283-84.
24. See Godwin, ‘Of choice in reading’, in The Enquirer: reflections on education, manners, and
literature (1797; New York 1971), p.129-46 (p.135).

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Nor, on the other hand, was my work claiming to make significant
historical discoveries that shed light on previously obscure events and
motives. Rather, my essay was concerned with the implications of an
extended public debate on the kind of language that could be used in
legal charges and how it reflected on Godwin and Holcroft’s theories
about didactic fiction. The charge of constructive treason, asserting that
the accused had ‘imagined or compassed the death of the king’ by his
actions, including the act of writing, seemed peculiarly unstable when
applied to a writer of fictions and dramas that overtly theorised an
intentional political effect on their audiences. The charge itself appeared
to blur, rather than distinguish, fiction and law. It was precisely the
imaginative speculativeness of the charge as delivered by Eyre that
Godwin attacked in ‘Cursory strictures’, just as it was the figurative
dimension of the ‘Charge’ that seemed appropriate for examination by a
literary critic.

iii. Situating/situated disciplines
The historical shift in the US from a mid-twentieth-century conception of
literary study as properly concerned with a deracinated aesthetics to a
renewed interest in historical contexts and historicising conceptions of
authorship, literariness, subjectivity, institutionalisation, and print culture
has been extensively discussed. 25 On the other side, the discipline of
history has been challenged not only by the advent of post-structural
challenges to empiricism, objectivity, and discursive transparency, but
even more recently by the concept of ‘trauma’ as a site where the
historical and the personal, the factual and the affective conjoin. Because
‘trauma’ recognises the continuing impact of historical event and personal
experience, it has impacted both literary and historical disciplinary work,
and so represents one possible model for working productively across
disciplinary and generic boundaries. Dominick LaCapra’s recent work on
traumatic history, for example, draws upon concepts traditionally
understood as improper to history, such as the psychoanalytic concept of
transference to understand the particular relation of historiographer to
his or her subject, and trauma to recognise the importance of writing
history which acknowledges the affective dimension of historical accounts
and their significance and yet renders them in written analytical form
(p.1-42). This approach allows LaCapra to claim both the possibility
of objective historical research and a connection to the past which is
affective and engaged. He argues for ‘a conception of history as tensely
25. See Louis Montrose, ‘New historicisms’ in Redrawing the boundaries: the transformation of
English and American literary studies, ed. S. Greenblatt and Gunther Gunn (New York 1992),
p.392-418, and S. Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, ‘Introduction’ to Practicing new
historicism, ed. S. Greenblatt and C. Gallagher (Chicago, IL 2000) p.1-19.

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involving both an objective (not objectivist) reconstruction of the past
and a dialogic exchange with it and other inquirers into it wherein
knowledge involves not only the processing of information but also affect,
empathy, and questions of value’ (‘Writing history’, p.35). Similarly
stressing that affective knowledge and scholarly empathy should inform
good scholarship, Janet Walker has argued that:
empirically based realist historiography may not be the most appropriate mode
for certain historical representations because it may not take into sufficient
account the vicissitudes of historical representation and memory. We have an
ethical and political obligation to remember, acknowledge constantly, and deal
with traumatic events of the past. But, at the same time, we must acknowledge
that these events are subject to interpretation as they are remembered, spoken of,
written down, or visually communicated. In other words, precisely because the
past is open to partisan rereadings, there is a dire need to develop ways to
understand representations of the past in texts that adhere nevertheless to
historical reality. 26

The 1794 Treason Trials are, as evidenced by the partisan tone of
modern scholarship on the Trials, the real threat posed by the English
political societies, and the French Revolution itself, a kind of traumatic
site where accounts and analysis of documentary evidence are strongly
influenced by transferential identification. Scholarship that attends to the
complexities of reading the past, not simply as a mimetic mirror, but
rather as a ‘situated’ interpretation, imagines a specifically historical yet
not exclusively empirical mode of analysis. That is, rather than claiming
absolute ‘truth’ for a particular version of events, we might build on the
concept of ‘situated knowledges’, or knowledge which makes provisional
truth claims based on the analyst’s location, methodology and informational base, and which acknowledges the limitations posed by these specifics. 27 Famously theorised by Donna Haraway in the context of a
critique of radical constructivism and scientific truth, the concept of
situated knowledges enables scholars to make claims for objective provisional truth without claiming that those truths must therefore stand for all
places and all times, and to incorporate affective and experiential information. This comes close to a rapprochement with the methods of some
literary critics without eliding differences in the evidentiary status of
documentary accounts, trial records, polemical essays, and narrative
fiction. The richness of this way of thinking about historical work shows
the impact of thinking across disciplinary boundaries, and seems promising for scholarship on events like the Treason Trials.

26. ‘The traumatic paradox: documentary films, historical fictions, and cataclysmic past
events’, Signs 22:4 (1997), p.803-25 (p.806).
27. See Donna Haraway, ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism as a
site of discourse on the privilege of partial perspective,’ Feminist studies 14:3 (1988),
p.575-99.

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My essay on the 1794 London Treason Trials ended by arguing that
significant and traumatic events like the Trials need to be investigated
explicitly by those trained as literary critics for the special concern with the
material impact of figurative representations which they bring. This call
assumes that literary critics have a viable and necessary interest in
historical events and evidence (rather than attending to aesthetic textual
production in only tangential connection with the more factual world of
historical and legal detail). But, ironically, the address to ‘literary critics’
seemingly undercuts the interdisciplinary implications of the call itself:
literary scholars were called to expand their field of inquiry (moving into
interdisciplinary waters), but in issuing such a call, the essay also explicitly suggested that a particular disciplinary group, literary critics,
needed to move into these areas bearing their particular disciplinary
expertise.
This double bind, both calling upon scholars to expand beyond the
traditional boundaries of their terrain of expertise and at the same time
suggesting that particular scholars are the ones who ought to be moving
into these areas, typifies debates, both contentious and friendly, about
interdisciplinary work – scholarly and pedagogical – over the last several
years. As Vincent Leitch has argued, ‘Most interdisciplinary work supports or modifies but does not transform [...] existing disciplines’. 28 The
seeming threat of interdisciplinary work to the ‘disciplines’ (however
conceived), is much less than would be imagined because, as Leitch put
it, ‘the origin and end of interdisciplines is the discipline’ (p.126). In other
words, the researcher comes to interdisciplinary work with disciplinary
allegiances and affiliations intact, and tends to conceive interdisciplinary
work as adding something or working in between something in ways
which actually reinscribe the existing disciplinary distinctions. Challenging disciplinary boundaries with work that aims to transcend them
ironically also marks disciplinary boundaries and thus reifies them. The
trick is not so much to supersede or abolish the parameters of disciplinary
expertise as institutionally constituted, nor to merge fields so that history,
law, and literature become indistinguishable, but to facilitate a
relationship based on true dialogue between them. Under such a rubric,
the borders of any discipline may be contested, but the value of particular
approaches and those trained in them are exemplified as they stretch to
analyse material formerly considered off-limits, and converse with scholars whose training bore a different emphasis.
John Bender argues that recent critical approaches (such as feminism,
new historicism, and cultural materialism) which appear to reinvent the
interdisciplinarity preceding the ‘Enlightenment invention of the aesthetic

28. Vincent Leitch, ‘Postmodern interdisciplinarity’, Profession 2000 (New York 2000),
p.124-31 (p.125).

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‘Doing’ history, or what I learned from the 1794 London Treason Trials
as an autonomous discursive realm’, 29 actually suggest yet another way of
thinking beyond the constitution of modern disciplinarity specialisation.
Like Leitch, Bender argues that the term interdisciplinary ‘implies the
preservation of traditional disciplinary boundaries and provokes one to
think of the critic either as a fugitive living dangerously in limbo between
nations or operating as a kind of extraordinary ambassador [...] Interdisciplinarity in itself does nothing to denaturalise the category of the
aesthetic’ (p.87). On the other hand, what Bender names ‘transdisciplinary’ work is truly threatening; by claiming not merely to expand the
sorts of materials that might be considered by literary critics, but to
reconfigure the ways in which those materials are interpreted and thus
transform the assumptions on which interpretive disciplinary norms
are based, scholars really do begin reconfiguring particular disciplines
(p.87-88).
Bender further suggests that some of the most impressive critical work
in the field of eighteenth-century studies has come from scholars with
strong allegiances to other periods or regions (such as Jerome Christensen,
Nancy Armstrong, Cathy Davidson, Allon White and Peter Stallybrass).
Because the eighteenth century was the period of ‘Enlightenment’ and the
parameters of academic fields of knowledge derive in large measure from
the same period that scholars of the Enlightenment study, we, even more
than other period scholars, have a tendency to replicate in our scholarship
the epistemological assumptions of our objects of study (p.88). Greg
Clingham would appear to agree that there is a serious tendency for
eighteenth-century scholarship to repeat the terms of its subject of study.
In his introduction to Making history, Clingham notes the problem of
policing the boundaries between eighteenth-century historiography and
literature. Discussing the advent of ‘pseudohistorical’ documents such as
the works of Ossian and of Thomas Chatterton, works that expressly used
the concepts of historical authenticity and the vogue for the antique, as
themselves helping to create an Enlightenment sense of the historical,
Clingham points out that:
[The] gap [between the true and the false, between the historical event and the
psuedohistorical event ...] and attempts to police or to bridge it – is particularly
problematic [in the eighteenth century] for a variety of reasons. Because the
Enlightenment has been identified in postmodern culture as the origin of modernity itself [...], we have much invested in maintaining a rigid concept of
Enlightenment institutions and practices. But even as we have recognised and
explored the linguistic sophistication and self-consciousness of the eighteenthcentury texts, and positioned them more thoroughly within the contexts of
postmodern and new historical readings of eighteenth-century culture, our conception of the historiography of eighteenth-century culture has not kept pace. To
recognise, in eighteenth-century texts, the performativity of language in the
29. ‘Eighteenth-century studies’, Redrawing the boundaries (New York 1992), p.79-99
(p.87).

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production of historical knowledge – whatever the generic form that knowledge
might take – is to blur the boundaries between genres, to pose fundamental
questions about the nature of the personal and social identities, and to undermine
the notion of the eighteenth century as an origin for anything modern. 30

Eighteenth-century writing itself then, whether categorised in retrospect
as literary or historical, is both performative and constitutive, and so begs
the questions which strict disciplinarity takes as given. Clingham is
particularly interested here in the ways in which overtly literary or performative writing is not only part of historical record, but actually
functions to create the historical it assumes. Our very location as postmoderns, invested in locating the roots of modernism in our period of
study, potentially betrays our project and leads to overly rigid generic and
disciplinary boundaries.
Following Bender’s and Clingham’s warnings about the tendency for
work on the eighteenth century to replicate its own terms, we might
recognise a particular potential for situated criticism of the Enlightenment. Precisely because modern institutions are founded on the epistemological assumptions of the ‘Age of Reason’, this period, during which
the forms of history, law, and literature were created, presents a
particularly appropriate place for transdisciplinary scholarly investigation. Bender suggests that scholars trained in other periods, like Armstrong, Christensen, Stallybrass and White, may be better able to read
‘genealogically’ (Foucault) because of a ‘certain cognitive dissonance’
between their method and their subject (p.85-86):
the whole institution of criticism has been built on Enlightenment foundations; at
least critics of the Renaissance or the Romantic period could benefit from a
certain cognitive dissonance that provided openings for genuine analysis. In
eighteenth-century studies, however, the institution of criticism and the object of
study are far more congruent. The field’s often remarkable conservatism
reappears, in this light, as a historically determined systemic function.

Bender is suggesting that despite a certain lip service to interdisciplinary
work, the field of eighteenth-century studies tends to value highly work
that replicates the terms of its subject, work that reasserts Enlightenment
values of humanism, rationality, individuality, and rational discourse.
Thus, scholars situated with deep roots in periods with differing epistemological assumptions have been able to function something like the
other sex in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of one’s own, with the power of
revealing to the one its own blindspot rather than acting as mirrors: ‘It is
one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex – to describe that
spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head.’ 31 While Bender concentrates on the differences among literary critics because of their
30. ‘Introduction’, Making history: textuality and the forms of eighteenth-century culture
(Lewisburg, PA 1998), p.9-15 (p.10).
31. Virginia Woolf, A Room of one’s own (London 1935), p.136.

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‘Doing’ history, or what I learned from the 1794 London Treason Trials
different period expertise, his point about the advantages of another
perspective can be extended fruitfully to include other significant differences in stand-point, from sex/gender/sexuality, to disciplinary training,
to the type of institution with which scholars are affiliated or the kinds of
research which their institutional resources make possible. Even generational differences among scholars can contribute usefully to that ability to
show each other the ‘spot the size of a shilling’. It is surely no accident
that among the approaches Bender labels truly ‘transdisciplinary’ are
feminism, new historicism in the US, and cultural materialism in the UK,
all practices that invoke the writer’s own position and which were
strongly influenced by voices from outside conventional academic disciplines.
The epistemological moves familiar to those who work in the same
fields, defined by period or by discipline, tend to produce the same – over
and over. Likewise, those who work at similar institutions may run the risk
of taking their particular institutionalised and disciplinary divergences
and intersections as typical, rather than specific. The view from an
institution like mine – very small, public, American, solely undergraduate
and teaching-centred – is necessarily different from that of a large private
research university, with an extensive library of primary materials and a
highly specialised and research-oriented faculty. Taking note of these
differences as potential strengths implies that scholars ought at least to
talk across disciplines, institutions, and even positions within institutions,
if they really care to interrogate the foundations of our own claims to
knowledge. As Annette Kolodny put it many years ago, what one learns
to read in graduate school are ‘not texts, but paradigms’. 32 While she was
speaking specifically of literary study, Kolodny’s point bears repetition.
One learns to read disciplinary paradigms as well, within one’s larger
disciplines depending on theoretical and ideological allegiances, and
within the larger institutional construction of disciplines, which varies to
some degree from institution to institution.
Returning to Holcroft’s trial, in shoring up and even constructing
stronger barriers between the power of emotional rhetoric and the
appropriate and rational language of public accounts, the English Jacobins unwittingly undercut their own project of using the effect upon the
reader as an epistemological tool and recognising ‘romance’ and ‘fiction’
as allied with material conditions and political consciousness. Likewise,
protecting disciplinary domains may limit the forms of knowledge which
can be produced, or even recognised as knowledge. If the conversations
are heated, those trained under different epistemological paradigms or
disciplines can nevertheless offer each other a valuable service, and it pays
32. ‘Dancing through the minefield: some observations on the theory, practice, and
politics of a feminist literary criticism’, in Norton anthology of theory and criticism, p.2146-65
(p.2155).

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to keep disciplinary and institutional boundaries permeable enough to
allow this to happen. Ironically, in valuing the difference disciplinary
training makes with regard to our scholarship, we may promote truly
transdisciplinary work and create potentially richer scholarship of the
eighteenth century. Respect for the work of colleagues in other fields –
literature, history, and legal studies – is only increased by forays into their
terrain and greater understanding of the difficulties other scholars face in
their work.

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