The first edited and fully annotated edition of Robert Bage's Hermsprong or Man As He Is Not (1796), this book will make accessible in accurate form an English novel that is lively in the reading and important in its historical interest. Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Thomas Love Peacock, among others, were attracted to it. As Professor Tave's introduction shows, Hermsprong has political and social interest because it is in part a witty response to the English attitude toward the French Revolution and to the rights of man and woman. The novel was reviewed enthusiastically by Mary Wollstonecraft, and it was considered dangerous politically and morally by some of its nineteenth-century critics. This edition has a critical and historical introduction, bibliography, chronology of the author's life, a note on the text, the text itself with full annotations and textual notes. Both the text and the commentary will be valuable to those who have an interest in the English novel or in the literature and the history of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Robert Bage’s Hermsprong satirizes English society of the 1790s targeting, in particular, corrupt clergymen, grasping lawyers and wicked aristocrats. The protagonist, a European raised among Native Americans, visits Europe and is dismayed by what he encounters. While such satire might seem conventional enough, Hermsprong is distinguished from other political novels of the period by its comedy, and it is a measure of Bage’s success that he won the admiration of writers as different in political outlook as Mary Wollstonecraft and Sir Walter Scott. Indeed, Hermsprong is built around debate, and celebrates the pleasures of the lively exchange of ideas. This Broadview edition contains extensive primary source appendices including material by William Godwin, Benjamin Franklin, Pierre de Charlevoix, and Voltaire.

Following the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, ideas of the 'Natural Rights of Man' (later distinguished into particular issues like rights of association, rights of women, slaves, children and animals) were publicly debated in England. Literary figures like Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Thelwall, Blake and Wordsworth reflected these struggles in their poetry and fiction. With the seminal influences of John Locke and Rousseau, these and many other writers laid for high Romantic Literature foundations that were not so much aesthetic as moral and political. This new study by R.S. White provides a reinterpretation of the Enlightenment as it is currently understood.