Charlotte Dacre: The Passions: A Novel in Four Parts (1811)

Countess Appollonia Zulmer – beautiful, rich, and popular – can have any man she wants, at least until she meets Count Wiemar. Interested only in submissive, uneducated and unworldly women, Wiemar rejects Appollonia in favour of Julia, a simple woman whose primary joy in life is to obey her husband’s will. Despondent and then furious, Appollonia vows revenge, becoming Julia’s intimate confidante, opening her eyes to the limitations of patriarchy, and convincing her that her growing feelings for Count Darlowitz, Wiemar’s best friend, are no crime.

An epistolary novel about the destructive power of emotion, The Passions offers new insights into early feminism, romantic understandings of emotion and the sublime, and early nineteenth-century religious debates. It is an engrossing, powerful work of nineteenth-century literature, featuring one of the most memorable female villains of all time. Available to modern audiences for the first time, The Passions will engross literary scholars and casual readers alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: May 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781786839633

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Gothic Originals

Gothic Originals

Published so far

Charlotte Dacre, The Passions (1811), edited by Jennifer Airey

In preparation

Elizabeth Gunning, The Foresters. A Novel (1796), edited by Valerie Grace Derbyshire

The Female Vampire in Hispanic Fiction, edited by Megan DeVirgilis

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Factory Girl (1863), edited by Bridget Marshall

Dion Boucicault, The Vampire (1852) and The Phantom (1856), edited by Gary Rhoades and Matthew Knight

Washington Allston, Monaldi: A Tale (1841), edited by Kerry Dean Carso

Gothic Originals

CHARLOTTE DACRE

The Passions

(1811)

Gothic Originals

With full introductions and explanatory notes to the text, Gothic Originals consists of scholarly editions aimed at readers, teachers and students of the gothic. Each text is a definitive scholarly edition, edited by an expert in their field. The series consists of texts from the eighteenth century onwards, and includes hidden classics to forgotten anthologies of terror. The series is an essential collection for any serious scholar of the gothic.

General Editor

Anthony Mandal, Cardiff University

Series Editor

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Editorial Board

Carol Margaret Davison, University of Windsor

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

Marie Mulvey-Roberts, University of the West of England

Franz Potter, National University

Laurence Talairach, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès

Dale Townshend, Manchester Metropolitan University

Lisa Vargo, University of Saskatchewan

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

CHARLOTTE DACRE

The Passions.

In Four Volumes

edited by Jennifer L. Airey

© Jennifer L. Airey, 2023

Typeset in Minion 3 and SchwarzKopf New at the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, Cardiff University.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff cf10 4up.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-961-9 (hardback)

978-1-78683-962-6 (EPDF)

978-1-78683-963-3 (EPUB)

The right of Jennifer L. Airey to be identified as Editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Cover image: © Zoonar GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

Contents

Introduction

Biography

Dacre and Early Feminism

Epistolarity, ‘La nouvelle Héloïse’ and the Problem of the Female Reader

Religion, Atheism and ‘The Passions’

Romanticism and Ruins

Madness and the Gothic Sublime

Select Bibliography

Note on the Text

THE PASSIONS

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Conclusion

Emendation List

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Explanatory Notes

Introduction

SINCE ITS RECOVERY by feminist scholars in the 1990s, Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806) has become a staple of the gothic curriculum. With its graphic scenes of violence and wholehearted embrace of the supernatural, the novel defies the model of women’s gothic writing made famous by authors such as Ann Radcliffe. To date, however, Dacre’s other novels— Confessions of the Nun of St Omer (1805), The Libertine (1807) and The Passions (1811)—have received significantly less critical attention, and of these works, only Nun of St Omer has been released in a modern edition.

The time has therefore come for a new edition of The Passions, Dacre’s last novel, and in some ways, her most interesting work. In its depiction of Appollonia Zulmer, The Passions offers a portrait of female treachery to rival that of any gothic villain. The text also deepens our understanding of early nineteenth-century gender roles, including a critical meditation on early feminism and the restrictions of patriarchy. It offers important insight into early nineteenth-century religious controversies: the novel questions what it means to be an atheist and promotes the power of free will, even in despair. It also offers a new perspective on the growth of Romanticism; even as Dacre’s characters experience a full range of deep, overpowering, sublime emotions, the novel champions Enlightenment rationality over sensibility or Romanticism. The Passions therefore provides an important perspective on Romanticism as a movement, reflecting one of the many ways in which long-ignored women’s writings, as well as so-called low art texts, complicate our understanding of a given literary moment. More impressionistically, the novel is also an excellent read; it is an engrossing, powerful work of nineteenth-century literature, featuring one of the most memorable female villains of all time.

BIOGRAPHY

Charlotte Dacre, née Charlotte King, was born c. 1772, the younger daughter of infamous Jewish moneylender John King, and his wife Sara.¹ In 1784, King divorced his wife under Jewish law and moved in with Jane Isabella Butler, the widowed Countess of Lanesborough, whom he married in 1790. King was a notorious figure: born Jacob Rey c. 1753, he attended the Charity School of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews before serving as an apprentice to a Jewish merchant and later as a clerk to an attorney. Early in life, he changed his name to John King in what Todd M. Endelman has called a ‘self-conscious move to de-emphasize his Jewish background’,² and by the age of 21, he had established himself as a ‘money-broker, that is, a middleman who negotiated loans for others, taking a fee for himself’.³ King was known for his unscrupulous business dealings with high-profile clients, including the prophetess Joanna Southcott and the young actress Mary Robinson. He was also known for his affairs and illegitimate children, a reputation he encouraged. In 1781, he published his private correspondence with Robinson as Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite, and his Answers to Them, likely in a fit of anger when their flirtatious correspondence resulted neither in an affair nor in the return of the money that she and her husband had borrowed from him.

Throughout the 1780s, King also became known for his reformist politics. In 1783, he published Thoughts on the Difficulties and Distresses in Which the Peace of 1783, Has Involved the People of England, in which he criticized the government’s trade policies. Later, under pressure from the government, he turned away from political radicalism and began to re-embrace his Jewish heritage. Although he never formally converted to Christianity, he testified before the Court of King’s Bench in 1795 that ‘he had considered himself a member of the Church of England since he had been old enough to judge such matters for himself’.⁴ By 1798, however, he was defending Judaism in print, and by 1812, he had re-established ties with the Mahamad of Sephardi congregation in London. He also wrote an introduction to David Levi’s Dissertations on the Prophecies of the Old Testament (1817) in which he proclaimed the Jews as God’s chosen people. That same year, he moved to Florence with the Countess of Lanesborough, where he died in 1823.

Charlotte Dacre therefore grew up a cultural outsider and the daughter of a man who abandoned his patriarchal responsibility to his family. He offered no financial support to his ex-wife, Dacre’s mother, and made no provisions to ensure the health and safety of his children. Consequently, Dacre’s work is marked both by a yearning for and an anger at her father for his betrayal. She reached out to her father in her first publication, the 1798 Trifles of Helicon coauthored with her sister, Sophia, when she signed the dedication from ‘Your affectionate daughters’.⁵ Yet each of her four novels depicts in the strongest possible terms the destructive consequences of marital infidelity. The life of Cazire, heroine of Nun of St Omer, is fundamentally shattered, for instance, when her father leaves her mother for the evil Countess of Rosendorf, forcing Cazire into a nunnery and exposing her to the seductions of the married libertine Fribourg. The Libertine’s Angelo likewise devastates his children when he leaves the virtuous Gabrielle for the evil Milborough, while the adulterous wives of Zofloya and The Passions destroy their families, their children and themselves when they stray from the path of virtue. Underpinning each of Dacre’s works, then, is a fundamental sexual conservatism. She concludes The Libertine with a paean to matrimony—the ‘imperceptible chain which linked mankind together’—while The Passions warns against the dangers of sinful extramarital emotions.⁶

If Dacre’s novels contain a moralistic strain that condemns adultery, their sexually frank and violent content bespeaks a willingness to court notoriety in print. By adopting the penname Rosa Matilda after the gender-bending female villain of Matthew Lewis’s infamous gothic novel, The Monk (1796), she lay claim to a style and genre deemed inappropriate for female authors. She openly dedicated Nun of St Omer to Lewis, writing:

Allow me to dedicate to you the following pages, written at eighteen; not from any similarity they can boast to the style or subject of your writings, but simply as a slight tribute for the pleasure I have experienced in perusing them, and the admiration I entertain for your very various and brilliant talents.⁷

Unsurprisingly, her style was found offensive for a woman. The Literary Journal’s review of Zofloya accused Dacre of having ‘maggots in the brain’ and suggested she be committed to ‘an hospital for the reception of these unfortunate people while’ in a state of ‘derangement’.⁸

Dacre also rejected feminine decorum in her personal life. Despite her many literary warnings against adultery, she became the mistress to one of her publishers, Nicholas Byrne, the married editor of the conservative publication, the Morning Post. The couple had three children, born 1806, 1807 and 1809, and finally married in 1815, following the death of Byrne’s wife. Although there is no direct evidence that she renounced her parents’ Judaism, her three children were baptized in St Paul’s Cathedral on 8 June 1811. Following her marriage, Dacre did not write another novel, although she did continue to publish occasional verse. She died on 7 November 1825, according to her obituary, ‘after a long and painful illness, which her all [sic] purity of heart and sublime greatness of soul enabled her patiently and piously to endure’.⁹ Eight years after Dacre’s death, Byrne was murdered, stabbed ‘by a figure in a crape mask who was never identified’.¹⁰

DACRE AND EARLY FEMINISM

Appollonia Zulmer is The Passions’s most memorable character and its most outrageous villain. Driven by anger and pain at Count Wiemar’s rejection, Appollonia ‘poisons’ his wife with immoral books and letters, and precipitates, she claims, the breakdown of his marriage. Appollonia’s rhetoric is compelling, in part because such complex depictions of evil women were relatively rare in the period, and in part because she so openly denounces patriarchy. ‘In vain I would endeavour to awaken, or rather to excite in women some sparks of genius–some ray of independence, or sense of their equality with man in the scale of existence’ (p. 115), she writes, rejecting the idea that women must always be submissive to their husbands. Appollonia is highly educated, her letters littered with classical allusions, and she revels in her intellect, refusing to make herself lesser to appeal to men. Her rhetoric is in many ways stunningly progressive, and it has great appeal to the modern reader, despite the fact that it is spoken from the mouth of a villain.

Yet this feminist rhetoric is spoken by a villain. That Appollonia’s depravity is so clearly linked with her feminism has led several critics to claim that Dacre’s novel is inherently anti-feminist. Adriana Craciun, for instance, describes Appollonia’s character as ‘a literal demonization of Wollstonecraftian feminism’, while Diane Long Hoeveler writes that Dacre was ‘no feminist’.¹¹ Such arguments are supported by the fact that Appollonia’s words are directly reminiscent of Wollstonecraft’s and Mary Robinson’s rhetoric, who by 1811 were both deceased. Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) demanded increased educational opportunities for women that they might be better wives and mothers, was by 1811 widely viewed as immorality personified. The 1798 publication of William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had functionally destroyed Wollstonecraft’s posthumous reputation with its frank depiction of suicide attempts, illegitimate pregnancy and supposed atheism, leading the Anti-Jacobin Review to index ‘Godwin’s book under Prostitution: see Mary Wollstonecraft’.¹² Meanwhile by 1811, Mary Robinson was better known as the one-time mistress to the crown prince, than as the writer and feminist critic she became in her later years. Robinson, even more forcefully than Wollstonecraft, demanded rights for women and condemned oppressive societal double standards. ‘Man exclaims, If we allow the softer sex to participate in the intellectual rights and privileges we enjoy, who will arrange our domestic drudgery? Who will […] be our affianced vassals?’¹³ Robinson writes, sounding much like Appollonia, who exclaims:

The fact is, that the pride and vanity of man—in other words, his self-love causes him to dread superiority in woman […] Why else this endless despotism […] if it is not from servile dread, that their eyes should become opened!– that perceiving their equality in the scale of existence, they should (rebelling) throw off the iron yoke of slavery […] (p. 56)

It is certainly possible, then, that Dacre intended Appollonia to discredit early feminism. Appollonia, like Wollstonecraft, argues that men denigrate female intellect while allowing them few avenues for growth. Appollonia, like Robinson, uses the rhetoric of slavery to protest the condition of women; she will not ‘yield to the destiny which marks woman for the slave of man!’ (pp. 55–56). Belying the novel’s potential anti-feminist content, however, is the undeniable fact that Appollonia’s reading of the men in her life is correct. Wiemar, as Appollonia suspects, does not want an educated wife with thoughts and ideas of her own. He rejects Appollonia not because she is a villain, but because she is too educated, too self-assured. ‘The Countess Zulmer wants simplicity’, he tells Rozendorf. ‘Sensible of her power in conversation, whatever the topic, she takes a part, and enters freely; she obtains admiration, astonishment—but not love.’ (p. 11) Wiemar mocks feminist rhetoric, insisting that ‘Man is not so irrational as to deny to woman judgement or discrimination’, but in his next breath, he denigrates female intellect: man is not ‘so perfectly absurd, as to consider [woman] on an equality with himself’ (p. 12). What Wiemar wants—and what he initially finds in Julia—is a wife who has no will of her own and who glories in her submission. ‘Behold my picture of a perfect woman:—chaste simplicity, retiring charms […] seek[ing] after marriage no pleasure beyond the sphere of her duty, or the wish of her husband’. Appollonia may be a villain, but she understands Wiemar’s nature and the limitations patriarchy places on women.

If the text criticizes Appollonia, it reveals an unflattering core of solipsism in Wiemar. His ideal woman, we learn, is not merely submissive, but practically an extension of his own psyche, hardly a separate person at all. He describes his boyhood fantasies: ‘Always in my boyish dreams of love, the same fair image was the goddess of my idolatry […] I became enamoured with the being of my creative fancy; I looked around among women for her likeness’ (p. 36). Here, Wiemar’s words precede Percy Shelley’s Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude (1816), in which the central tragedy stems from the poet’s inability ever to actualize his love for the feminine externalization of his own soul: ‘He dreamed a veiled maid | Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. | Her voice was like the voice of his own soul’.¹⁴ Wiemar is initially happier than the Alastor poet. He tells Rozendorf, ‘at length I have discovered her […] The same sylphid form—the same bewitching softness and grace […] all, all reminded me of the visionary maiden of my boyish enthusiasm!’ (pp. 36–37). Julia seemingly springs forth fully formed from his dreams. Yet in a criticism of patriarchal extremes, even Darlowitz scoffs at Wiemar’s unrealistic view of women: ‘His conception of what woman should be, I know is refined to romantic excess’, he tells Rozendorf. ‘He would have them as the Houri’s of the Mahomedan paradise, the reward of the blessed.’ (p. 41) The problem, of course, is that Julia is neither a reward nor an extension of Wiemar’s own being, and disaster arises when she proves other than, separate from, himself. Wiemar is shocked not only by her infidelity, but by the recognition that she was never the woman of his imagination.

Dacre’s supposed discomfort with feminism is also undercut by her treatment of Amelia, Darlowitz’s long-suffering wife. Throughout the novel, Amelia is lauded as the perfect woman, a veritable angel in her household. Darlowitz writes:

How active she is in every duty of domestic life; yet, how elegant, how cheerful […] Conscious of the value she is of, in the midst of her family, yet not appearing to be so; knowing, as she must, that she is faultless, yet meek and unassuming as an angel. (p. 33)

Amelia is intelligent, but does not show off her intelligence—‘she is no pedant […] a character so detestable in a female’—and she lives for her family alone. Notably, Amelia is not, like Julia (at the outset), fully submissive, despite her alleged perfections. It is Amelia who has determined the shape of her life with Darlowitz, has convinced her husband to abandon society for their Edenic country home. ‘Since I made the determination of quitting the gay world, and devoting myself, jointly with him, to the education of our children, I have had no moment of vacancy, no cause for regret’, she tells her mother (p. 81). Additionally, Amelia, even more so than Appollonia, espouses ideas reminiscent of Wollstonecraft’s. In describing her educational programme for her children—‘she passes two hours in instructing them; she afterwards accompanies the dear creatures in a ramble if the weather any way permit’ (p. 34)—Darlowitz describes a plan similar to the one Wollstonecraft proffers in Vindication: ‘The woman who strengthens her body and exercises her mind will, by managing her family and practising various virtues, become the friend, and not the humble dependent of her husband’.¹⁵ Amelia functions, as Wollstonecraft advises, as the educated moral centre of her household, not only instructing her children, but improving the morality of her husband. She tells her mother:

I prevailed by degrees over the mind of my husband. I prevailed in his youth, for I feared that if many years were permitted to elapse, his pursuits would degenerate into habit, and it would then become difficult, if not impossible to wean him from the world. (p. 82)

The Wollstonecraftian woman elevates the morality of the household.

Amelia’s death is therefore proof that no woman can truly be good enough to avoid destruction under patriarchy. Neither Amelia’s love for her children nor her devotion to her husband can protect her from the consequences of Darlowitz’s infidelity, and she dies horribly, as do Julia, Appollonia and Madame de Hautville. Neither good female behaviour nor bad, Wollstonecraftian domesticity nor Robinsonian anger, can save women from the selfishness of the men that surround them. Appollonia’s villainy, then, lies less in her feminism than in her willingness to destroy other women to achieve her goals; she may speak like Wollstonecraft or Robinson, but she is no friend to women, a by-product of a patriarchal system that pits women against one another in a competition for male affection. Appollonia correctly diagnoses the problems of patriarchy while playing into the system she excoriates. What emerges from the text is less a conservative dismissal of early feminism than a criticism of male solipsism and dominance.

EPISTOLARITY, LA NOUVELLE HÉLOÏSE AND THE PROBLEM OF THE FEMALE READER

The Passions is an epistolary novel, a story told in letters, save for a brief concluding section related by an omniscient narrator. The epistolary form was popular throughout the eighteenth century, as novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) captured the public’s imagination. Pamela became such a cultural phenomenon that preachers reportedly read excerpts of the text from the pulpit, while Clarissa inspired an impassioned readership to correspond directly with the author. Central to the appeal of the epistolary novel is the sense of intimacy the form engenders, the tantalizing promise of direct access to the characters’ innermost thoughts and feelings. Readers experience Julia’s struggles, Wiemar’s dawning suspicions and Appollonia’s jealous villainy firsthand. At the same time, however, letters can also be manipulated or insincere, and thus they exist in a state of what Elizabeth Heckendorn Corn calls ‘epistemological ambiguity’.¹⁶

That the emotional immediacy of the epistolary form increases its impact on the reader also opened it to criticism from contemporary moralists. The novel genre as a whole was looked upon with consternation by many throughout the eighteenth century, and it was deemed especially dangerous for young and female readers. In 1750, Samuel Johnson famously cautioned against the moral dangers posed by realistic fiction:

Many writers, for the sake of following nature, so mingle good and bad qualities in their principal personages, that they are both equally conspicuous; and as we accompany them through their adventures with delight, and are led by degrees to interest ourselves in their favour, we lose the abhorrence of their faults […] or, perhaps, regard them with some kindness for being united with so much merit.¹⁷

The youthful reader may not correctly distinguish between good conduct and bad in realistic fiction, and thus might emulate the wrong sorts of actions. The danger was especially pressing—and inherently sexualized—when the reader was female, and thus moralists consistently warned against allowing young women unfettered access to books. Presbyterian minister James Fordyce, for instance, exclaimed in 1766:

To what dangerous resources are the generality of young women driven by the love of pleasure and amusement, ill directed! Having formed no taste for those that arise from reading […] their passions, naturally ardent, fly without previous examination to every object which flatters the ardor.¹⁸

Novels, moralists believed, could rouse passions in young women that they were ill-equipped to process, plunging them into sexual danger and imperilling their virtue.

Authors throughout the eighteenth century, too, linked illicit seduction with illicit reading. The evil Duke of Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis (1709), for example, seduces his unsuspecting ward, Charlot, by giving her access to inappropriate texts; he ‘recommended to her reading the most dangerous books of love […] those moving tragedies that so powerfully expose the force of love, and corrupt the mind’.¹⁹ Dacre herself invoked similar fears about female reading practices in her first novel, Confessions of the Nun of St Omer. Cazire, the protagonist, describes herself as having been poisoned by bad books: these books, ‘like the poisonous poppy, affected my brain with their dangerous influence, and dazzled my senses with the vivid strength of their coloring’.²⁰ She likens novels to a ‘seducer […] decked in all the charms of beauty’, and she becomes ‘enslaved with the brilliancy of the language and speciousness of the arguments’.²¹ Even Wollstonecraft concurred, cautioning that the impoverished state of female education left women vulnerable to the emotions provoked by sentimental fiction, unable to discern rational virtue in the face of the overwhelming power of sentiment: ‘novels, music, poetry, and gallantry, all tend to make women the creatures of sensation, and their character is thus formed in the mould of folly’, she writes.²²

Appollonia adopts a similar view of female reading when she attacks Julia’s virtue through the medium of books. She writes, ‘I know that there is not in the world a more subtle poison than that which is extracted from and administered by books’ (p. 67), and she sends Julia a copy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie; ou la nouvelle Héloïse. Wiemar, Julia reports, is alarmed to see her with the book—‘a shade of seriousness such as was wholly new to me, overspread his countenance as he cast his eyes upon the title-page’ (p. 65). She subsequently swears only to read works her husband has approved for her in advance. She tells Appollonia: ‘Whatever is not proper for him to see cannot be proper for me to read—and, what I thought he could not approve of, I should receive no pleasure in perusing.’ It was not by chance that Dacre names Rousseau’s novel, as it had long been a flashpoint in the debate over literature’s deleterious effects. Published in Amsterdam in 1761 and translated into English that same year, Rousseau’s story of premarital passion and extramarital desire became an instant sensation. According to Gillian Dow, ‘it is difficult to overestimate the [novel’s] impact’, and it was alternately praised for its lavish emotionality and condemned for its perceived moral failings.²³ Even as Anna Laetita Barbauld admired ‘the seductive, the passionate Rousseau,—the most eloquent writer in the most eloquent modern language’,²⁴ references to the novel also served as ‘a convenient shorthand for multiple anxieties surrounding female sexuality, national identity, and class mobility’.²⁵ In 1791, Edmund Burke condemned La Nouvelle Héloïse’s ‘philosophic gallantry’ and accused Rousseau of infecting French youth with ‘an unfashioned, indelicate, sour, gloomy, ferocious medley of pedantry and lewdness; of metaphysical speculations blended with the coarsest sensuality’.²⁶ While her politics were diametrically opposed to Rousseau’s, Wollstonecraft also depicts the novel critically in her unfinished Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1798). Reading La Nouvelle Héloïse primes Maria for the inconstant Darnford’s seduction; it ‘seemed to open a new world to her—the only one worth inhabiting,’ and she imagines Darnford as ‘the personification of Saint Preux, or of an ideal lover far superior’.²⁷ Maria thus personifies the Wollstonecraftian criticism of Rousseau’s emotional impact on undereducated women.²⁸

By the early nineteenth century, the moral panic over female reading had begun to recede. William Warmer explains, ‘[b]y the second decade of the nineteenth century, there is evidence that the debate about novels had reached closure. Some would still oppose all novel reading, but it was an extreme position, usually held by members of the religious right’.²⁹ Dacre thus repurposes La Nouvelle Héloïse in her 1811 novel to mock fears of female reading practices, invoking one of the most fearsome books of all to undermine moralist arguments. Appollonia’s plan to seduce Julia via Rousseau is an utter failure, and Julia’s morality is not altered by La Nouvelle Héloïse. She calls the novel ‘a most interesting story’ (p. 65), but approaches it otherwise as any modern reader would, with interest, but not all-consuming fervour. Indeed, Appollonia is never as villainous as she would like to believe. One contemporary reviewer rightly complained that Appollonia has very little effect on the novel’s conclusion:

The agency of all the misery is attributed to Apollonia’s revenge; yet the misfortunes of Julia arose wholly from the unbridled passions of Darlowitz, over whom Apollonia exerted no influence; and the sophistry of Apollonia had so far been unsuccessful with Julia, that she is not guilty of actual crime.³⁰

As the reviewer correctly points out, Appollonia repeatedly claims credit for Julia’s fall—‘You have been my tool!—my puppet!’ she exclaims (p. 279)—but it is Darlowitz, not Appollonia, who actually seduces Julia. In fact, Appollonia goes entirely silent in the novel’s third volume, during which Darlowitz works to sway Julia’s submission. I would argue, however, that this ineffectualness is by design, and is central to Dacre’s ideological point. In a rejection of anti-novelist hysteria, neither Rousseau’s novels nor Appollonia’s letters are enough to corrupt Julia’s mind. It is her sexual chemistry with Darlowitz that leads to her destruction, not any amount of illicit literature.

The influence of La Nouvelle Héloïse nonetheless resonates throughout The Passions. Wiemar and Julia’s names recall those of Rousseau’s Wolmar and Julie, and the novel begins with Wiemar in Switzerland, also the setting of Rousseau’s text. Both novels feature married women longing for another, and both women die tragically before betraying their husbands physically. Even the passionate letters exchanged between Julia and Darlowitz echo the rhetoric of Julie and Saint Preux. Dacre’s Julia, for instance, describes Darlowitz’s letters as ‘bathed with the tears of love and shame’ (p. 246), while Rousseau’s Julie tells Saint Preux that she ‘bathes my paper with my tears’.³¹ Dacre’s engagement with Rousseau reflects both her greater faith in female intellect and critical reading skills—certainly, Rousseau was no feminist, and Wollstonecraft criticizes him for ‘constantly endeavour[ing] to degrade the sex’³²—and her much more conservative class politics. By the 1790s, Rousseau’s critique of social class structure had become ideologically linked with Jacobinism, but Dacre strips La Nouvelle Héloïse of the class commentary that anti-Jacobins found so distasteful. Aristocratic Julie and lower-class Saint Preux could have been happy, had her father seen fit to let them wed. Dacre’s Julia, by contrast, is an impoverished aristocrat restored to her rightful class position by marrying Wiemar, and her adulterous desire for Darlowitz remains comfortably within her own class stratum. Interclass marriage, when it appears, is always destructive. The villainous Appollonia and Madame de Hautville are both lower-class social climbers who invade through marriage the world of their betters, implying that for Dacre, social mobility is not a fairy tale, but a threat. With the deaths of Appollonia and Madame de Hautville, upper-class boundaries are restored and the social upstarts effectively banished, a much more conservative conclusion than Rousseau’s. Even as Dacre criticizes the treatment of women, she offers a definitively conservative view of social class.

RELIGION, ATHEISM AND THE PASSIONS

If Dacre ends the novel with the reaffirmation of social class boundaries, she also offers a forcefully conservative vision of religious faith. Throughout the novel, Baron Rozendorf serves as the voice of conscience, judging the characters’ actions and offering them moral guidance. He also represents rational faith both in man’s inherent goodness and his ability to overcome through reason the temptation to sin. ‘It is a heathenish and atheistical dogma, to assert, that man is born evil’, he tells Darlowitz with a Rousseauvian faith.³³ ‘Such positions are not more false and blasphemous than they are absurd and dangerous, and were broached by those who only desired to sin without check or restraint’ (p. 130). To treat man with such contempt, to deny his fundamental potential for goodness, is to reveal one’s own inner corruption.

Positioning himself as an outsider to the book’s central events, Rozendorf proclaims the power of reason to overcome sin. He pleads with Darlowitz to moderate his feelings for Julia, to allow the ‘never-erring voice of conscience’ to bring him to his senses and guide him from destruction (p. 131). Implicitly invoking John Milton, who argues in Areopagitica (1644) that virtue must be tested—‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue’³⁴—he tells Darlowitz, ‘the real exaltation of virtue consists in overcoming those trials, in conquering our passions and ourselves’. Darlowitz, in contrast, insists upon man’s powerlessness before the forces of love and fate. ‘Our love is fate’, he insists, and man is merely ‘a miserable atom hurried along independently of his will’ (p. 242). In such a world, the concept of sin is meaningless. Speaking of adultery, he writes: ‘’Tis the laws of man alone which make it such, nature deems it none’ (p. 243). Julia should succumb, he insists, because man is subject to forces beyond his own will. There is no rational resistance, merely the ‘transcendent rapture’ of giving in (p. 244).

Darlowitz’s deterministic rhetoric is echoed by Appollonia in her attempts to destroy Julia. ‘Certain causes, originating independently of themselves, produce correspondent and inevitable results’ (p. 124), she tells Julia, insisting, like Darlowitz, that free will is merely an illusion. Religion, she further argues, is a human construct: ‘Opinion is arbitrary, and various as religion; […] the notions in which you were educated influence your view of things. The Mussulman in his devotions is as ardent as the Catholic’ (p. 125). If religion is meaningless and destiny is fixed—‘By destiny is the path of every human being already traced and marked out for him, from which to attempt to deviate is madness’ (p. 147)—then the pursuit of happiness is all. ‘Pluck, pluck ere they die, the blooming roses around’ (p. 146), Appollonia insists, alluding to the carpe diem rhetoric of Cavalier poet Robert Herrick (1591– 1674), who urges women to ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may’.³⁵ Choose, she advises, ‘the path of pleasure’ over ‘the path through misery’ (p. 145). Here, Appollonia’s rhetoric is also directly reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade’s, whose Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) begins with the entreaty to embrace hedonism: ‘If, nonetheless, it should come to pass that we meet with nothing but brambles and briars, while the wicked tread upon flowers […] will it not be decided that it is preferable to abandon oneself to the tide rather than to resist it?’ de Sade opines, an attitude that Appollonia, too, promotes.³⁶

Despite Appollonia’s self-congratulations, Julia never fully embraces Darlowitz’s or Appollonia’s philosophy. Appollonia claims that thought crimes are victimless, but Julia castigates herself for her adulterous desires, insisting that she has ‘irreparably sinned, even although I should never behold [Darlowitz] more’ (p. 141). She also concurs with Rozendorf that humans are, in Milton’s formulation: ‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’.³⁷ She writes to Appollonia: ‘We encounter evil in our path through life, but the power is given us to avoid it. We can distinguish between evil and good […] we should not be overcome by that which our reason tells us is wrong’ (p. 142). Like Rozendorf, Julia believes that reason is stronger than passion, a fact borne out in her choice to leave Darlowitz.

What emerges from The Passions, then, is a conflict between virtue and pleasure, those who believe in God and those who would reject religion in favour of a vaguely defined concept of fate. Darlowitz rejects materialism, the eighteenth-century belief that life was the product of biological processes only, exclaiming: ‘Materialists! ye who describe what torments the body can bear without expiring, know but half the power of nature!’ (p. 204) Yet he also finds comfort during his agonized death throes in imagining an atheist perspective, the possibility that after death, there is only nothingness. ‘Changing its state, shall the soul lose all memory of what has past in this life?—If not, oh! who would fly to death as a refuge!’ (p. 165) Appollonia, too, implicitly embraces atheist philosophy in a letter to Madame de Hautville when she expresses her indebtedness to ‘Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Diderot’ (p. 165). By 1811, Denis Diderot and Claude Adrien Helvétius were particularly infamous for rejecting Christianity. Diderot openly mocks the concept of religion in his Promenade du sceptique (The Skeptic’s Walk, 1747): God is

a Ruler whose name his subjects more or less agree on; but whose existence is very much in dispute. Nobody has seen him […] Nevertheless, he is assumed to be infinitely wise, enlightened, and full of tenderness for his subjects; but as he has resolved to make himself inaccessible, at least for the time being.³⁸

Meanwhile, Helvétius aroused widespread condemnation for his argument in De L’Esprit (On Mind, 1758) that humanity was motivated only by the desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. As Ian Cumming explains, for Helvétius, ‘[t]he sole motive of all human actions was self-interest’, and therefore society must restrain the desires of the individual to protect the safety of the community.³⁹ Such positions were shocking in the eighteenth century, and the French state ordered all copies of De L’Esprit to be burned. The state could not, however, prevent his ideas from spreading; Helvétius’s view of human nature directly influenced the hedonism that de Sade promoted, and that Appollonia implicitly endorses in her letters to Julia.⁴⁰

If the works of the French philosophes licensed previously unthinkable ideas about religion and God, those ideas were regarded with deep suspicion by the majority of eighteenth-century British society. Prior to the eighteenth century, to be an atheist was to believe that God existed, but that he did not intervene in human affairs. The idea that God did not exist at all would have been unthinkable in most quarters. ‘There is room to doubt, whether there ever have been thinking men, who have actually reasoned themselves into a disbelief of a Deity’, Thomas Broughton wrote in 1737.⁴¹ In 1782, physician Matthew Turner, writing under the pseudonym William Hammon, became the first British person to proclaim his atheism in print: ‘as to the question whether there is such an existent Being as an atheist, to put that out of all manner of doubt, I do declare upon my honour that I am one’.⁴² If atheists were now acknowledged to exist, however, they were still at best distrusted, at worst, despised. There was no way, many insisted, that an atheist could ever be a moral person. According to the author of ‘The Danger and Inutility of Atheism’ (1813), for instance, atheists ‘declare, without hesitation, that there is no God, consequently no essential difference between good and evil […] they would call you brother while cutting your throat’.⁴³

Dacre adopts a similar viewpoint in her depictions of Appollonia and Darlowitz. Appollonia’s atheism is another manifestation of her villainy, and while Darlowitz never fully proclaims atheism, he flirts with that philosophy when he seeks to escape the punishment he has earned with his embrace of hedonism. In this way, The Passions offers a conservative vision of religious faith.⁴⁴ The villains die agonizing deaths, characterized by terror of the afterlife and deep regret at their earthly behaviour. Early in the novel, Darlowitz imagines a peaceful end, surrounded by his loving family: ‘Night, which is the tomb, shall then shroud all, but its falling shadows shall cause no terror’ (p. 72). That vision is never realized, as Darlowitz ultimately dies in torment: ‘Death!—Horrid sound—yet only to the guilty […] My soul art thou prepared? No!—to die despairing!’, he writes (p. 257). Madame de Hautville likewise suffers terribly on her deathbed, terror of hellfire choking her with fear. ‘Had I led a life of virtue instead of sin, I should not now writhe on the bed of death, in terror and remorse. I should not now dread, as now I do, to die’, she tells Appollonia (p. 281).

In contrast to Madame de Hautville stands the Job-like Amelia, whose Christianity offers consolation for sorrow. Amelia suffers unjustly, but she remains philosophically disposed, articulating her misery, but never succumbing to despair. ‘I have enjoyed more happiness in this world, than falls in general to the lot of mortal’, she tells her mother. ‘Let me humbly and gratefully acknowledge the beneficence of my Creator, and bow beneath the trial he hath at length ordained I should endure.’ (p. 219) She accepts that humans are born to suffer, and finds consolation in the idea of her heavenly reward. ‘So far from fearing death, I shall then expect it, with resignation—nay, with ardour, conscious that I shall be translated through its means, from a state of ignoble penance, to one of ineffable glory.’ (p. 222) When she dreams, she dreams of transcendence. ‘I feel my whole being lifted up’, she tells her mother (p. 230). Amelia thus represents a deeply Christian response to misery, one that contrasts powerfully with Madame de Hautville’s terrors and Darlowitz’s agonies. True happiness, Dacre implies, lies in virtue, faith and a renunciation of this world for the joys to be found in heaven.

ROMANTICISM AND RUINS

The Passions ends in despair as the characters fail to overcome desperate, all-consuming emotion. In her madness, Julia becomes alternately a ‘ghost’ (p. 312), a ‘broken reed’ (pp. 311–12) and a ruined building, a ‘beauteous monument of human loveliness and human frailty’, now ‘sunk and abased’ (p. 318). Wiemar describes himself, too, as ‘a mouldering column in the midst of ruins’ (p. 263), his marriage in shambles and the sturdy foundation of his mind unsettled by his suffering. The image of ruins thus offers a vocabulary for describing the suffering individual broken by pain. Roman ruins in particular come to symbolize the ways that characters understand their own lives, and more broadly, the workings of time, history and mutability. Early on, Wiemar speaks of his enthusiasm for the ancient world, and of his great desire to visit the cultural sites of Rome. He imagines with relish ‘those superb fragments’ (p. 136), and longs to visit them with his wife. This fascination with ruins, which is also shared by Darlowitz, was quite commonplace in early nineteenth-century Britain. Such was the fad among aristocrats that in 1816, the future George IV imported ruins from Libya to create a faux ruin in Windsor Great Park. Ruins for George IV, as for Wiemar at the start of the novel, inspire an imperialist sense of triumph, the greatness of the present reflected in the remnants of the past. This view was also shared by the Vatican, which encouraged an interpretation of ruins as visual proof of the Catholic Church’s triumph over paganism. In 1472, Pope Pius II (1458–1464) forbade the destruction of Roman ruins, which, he claimed, proved the Church’s supremacy, and the desire to commemorate a pagan past overcome by Christian truth also drove the foundation and expansion of the Vatican Museum under Popes Benedict XIV (1740–58), Clement XIV (1769–1774) and Pius VI (1775–1799). The Church’s view was similarly promoted in contemporary verse. To commemorate the 1795 excavation of Augustus’s ‘sundial’ obelisk, for instance, Alexander De Sanctis wrote, ‘Rome for eternity will be in the Vatican the mistress of the unconquered Faith, and the venerable seat of the arts’.⁴⁵ When Wiemar initially thinks of Rome, then, he does so in this light, praising ruins as ‘monuments of ancient grandeur’ that embody cultural and religious triumph and prove the sublimity of humankind (p. 216).

While Roman ruins could represent the Church’s triumph, they could also serve as symbols of greatness lost and of cultural mutability. If the Roman religion, once the dominant belief system of Rome, could fade away to memory, what proof is there that Christianity will be any more permanent? Or that England itself will long endure? Percy Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) perhaps best encapsulates this view of ruins; the poem’s speaker comes upon the remnants of a forgotten tyrant’s lost empire: ‘Round the decay | Of that colossal Wreck’, a crumbling statue to the Emperor’s bygone might, ‘The lone and level sands stretch far away’.⁴⁶ Byron, too, looks to ruins as a symbol of loss. While he views the Coliseum as a sanctified spot on which ‘Heroes have trod’, he recognizes that ‘’tis on their dust ye tread’.⁴⁷ The Roman past is dead and gone, and only the memory of greatness remains. Thus for many authors, Rome served as an instance of memento mori and a harbinger that England, too, will one day fade. Clergyman Conyers Middleton, for instance, wrote in 1742:

One cannot help reflecting on the surprising fate and revolutions of kingdoms; how Rome, once the mistress of the world, the seat of arts, empire and glory now lies sunk in sloth, ignorance and poverty […] while this remote country, the jest and contempt of polite Romans, is become the happy seat of liberty, plenty and letters; flourishing in all the arts and refinements of civil life; yet running perhaps the same course which Rome itself had run before it, from virtuous history to wealth; from wealth to luxury; from luxury to an impatience of discipline and corruption of morals: till by a total degeneracy, it falls a prey at last to some hardy oppressor, and with the loss of liberty, losing every thing that is valuable, sinks gradually into its original barbarism.⁴⁸

There is no guarantee of permanence for England, for Christianity, for any institution, no matter how powerful, in a world of mutability. It is this belief that the Duchess de Sternach, Amelia’s mother, promotes, when she tells her daughter that ruins reflect ‘the nothingness of human grandeur’; proof of folly and of vanity, all structures yield ‘to the conquering hand of Time’, until only the rubble remains (p. 87). Darlowitz, too, grown discontent in his marriage following his sudden infatuation with Julia, describes ruins as proof of human fragility: ‘What is the power of man’, he asks Rozendorf, ‘when the most stupendous labours of his art are in an instant converted by the sudden motion of the earth on which he stands, into monumental piles of his weakness and extravagance?’ (p. 216)

When Wiemar finally visits the ruins of Rome, he, too, sees them through the lens of impermanence, decay, loss. His marriage is in disarray, and the sight of the Coliseum brings him only anguish: ‘a confusion of wild horrors rushed through my brain’. The Coliseum is not a site of triumph, but of persecution, the place where the ‘raging lion, fierce panther, or hungry tyger, were let loose on the heathen or Christian martyr’ (p. 234). At the same time, he describes Julia herself as a ruin, her madness described repeatedly in architectural terms. She is a ‘tower of strength’ now ‘tottering’ (p. 166), a ‘broken down […] wretch’ (p. 277), a ‘beauteous model of antiquity discovered in the midst of ruin’ (p. 263). Such descriptions are reflective of Wiemar’s continued narcissism. Julia is not a suffering individual with her own interiority, but an architectural design flaw. They are also reflective of Dacre’s—and by extension, early nineteenth-century culture’s—understanding of mental illness.

MADNESS AND THE GOTHIC SUBLIME

Much of the latter half of the novel is taken up with madness: Julia’s pathetic loss of sanity, Darlowitz’s breakdown and suicide, Wiemar’s periodic loss of self-control. As the novel’s title suggests, strong emotions are linked with the loss of reason, and thus are inherently dangerous, a moral emphasized in the novel’s concluding lines:

Here, like the painter of old, we must draw a veil over woe we have not power to delineate, and trust to have impressed on the minds of those who have contemplated the picture we have offered, the danger of listening to the delusive blandishments of sophistry; of yielding to the guilty violence of the Passions, or of swerving even in thought from the sacred line of virtue, and our duty. (p. 353)

This distrust of emotion is embedded in the novel’s treatment of Wiemar, who is defined by his deeply felt sentiments. A ‘creature of feeling’ (p. 14), he vacillates from the highest of highs, praising the ‘wondrous magnificence’ of the natural world (p. 3), to the lowest of lows when he realizes Darlowitz’s perfidy: ‘the violent conflict of sensation wound me to a pitch of madness’ (p. 264), he tells Rozendorf. He is also described repeatedly as an ‘enthusiast’ (p. 30), a loaded term in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To be an enthusiast by eighteenth-century standards was to experience religious feelings too strongly: what Jon Mee describes as ‘the very anti-self of enlightenment notions of civility’.⁴⁹ Most frequently associated with women and members of dissenting religious groups, enthusiasm was likened to a disease—‘as catching as the plague’—and a form of madness.⁵⁰ In letting his emotions run wild, Wiemar has opened himself up to danger and despair.

Dacre was not alone in proclaiming the power of strong emotions to disorder the mind and the senses. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, moralists and medical doctors alike warned that emotion too intensely felt was both self-indulgent and dangerous, potentially prompting a loss of sanity. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, writes in Leviathan (1651) that ‘Madnesse is nothing else, but too much appearing Passion’.⁵¹ This view was one of many, often contradictory understandings of mental illness in circulation in the early nineteenth century. Historically, the ancient Greeks attributed madness to spiritual affliction, an attack from the gods who ‘inflicted disability as a punishment upon those who incurred their anger’.⁵² A similar view persisted in Renaissance England, where many feared insanity as a product of witchcraft or Satanic possession. The sinner could open himself up to the demonic, resulting in a complete loss of self and sanity.

Others, in contrast, offered physiological explanations for mental disorders. Ancient Greek thinkers such as Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) had attributed insanity to physical causes; humoral medicine, which held that the body and mind were controlled by four substances (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood), attributed madness to an overabundance of black bile, an explanation also embraced by many in Renaissance England.⁵³ Moving into the seventeenth century, madness was increasingly medicalized. Thomas Willis’s work on the spinal column and nervous system in the 1660s developed a new vocabulary for discussing the mind/body connection, while the development of the psychiatric profession offered the hope that madness was a form of physical illness that could, with proper treatment, be cured.⁵⁴ That position was furthered when George III (r. 1760–1820), who fell ill in November of 1788 aged 50, was declared cured in March 1789. While he would again fall into insanity in 1811, this time for good, his apparent cure lent credence to the idea that the mind could be treated and improved. Doctors argued over the efficacy of ‘suppression’ or ‘endorsement’ as forms of treatment⁵⁵—was it better to allow the madman to work through his madness unopposed until he returns to his senses, as Wiemar does Julia, or to punish him for indulging his madness?—but George III’s recovery offered at least temporary evidence of the triumph of medical science. It also provided proof to the nation that madness did not have to be punishment for sin; known ‘to be a hard-working and honest man, courageous and composed, uxorious, deeply religious, prudent with spirits and food’,⁵⁶ George III was no libertine. Indeed, if the king could go mad, anyone could be so afflicted, and the number of patients admitted to private asylums rose by four hundred after the king’s illness became public.⁵⁷

Despite her culture’s changing attitude, Dacre rejects a scientific view of mental illness. The characters repeatedly insist that Julia has no hope of a cure, and the novel links her mental instability with her overabundant emotion and sin.⁵⁸ Julia herself is hyperfocused on the wrongs she has committed and accepts insanity as the punishment for her mental infidelity. Her madness also precipitates further sin, as Dacre links insanity with criminality. Julia, always gentle and kind when lucid, becomes a danger to herself and others when mad. She plots the death of her young caretaker, Jeanette, and it is only by accident that Jeanette escapes death at her hands. Insanity for Dacre is thus proof of, punishment for and spur to criminal behaviour, not a medical condition that could one day recede, a belief also apparent in her treatment of Appollonia. Appollonia’s monomaniacal focus on her thwarted love and pride becomes a form of madness that leads her to sin against Julia. Her inability to free herself from her cravings for vengeance, coupled with her compulsive gambling, consistently described as the ‘madness of high play’ (p. 19), transforms her into a greater criminal still, finally leading to her ignominious demise in a carriage accident.

Appollonia’s madness, like Julia’s, is ugly, painful and finally deadly, and it is prompted by her failure to temper her passions. Wiemar, too, has bouts of insanity when his emotions become too much to bear, and Dacre makes clear that these fits are painful, offering only moments of blissful unawareness. ‘Oh! would that blissful state of insensibility had continued, so that with the loss of reason, I might for ever have lost all memory of the past’, Wiemar writes (p. 265). Here, Dacre breaks with the Romantic tendency to idealize insanity or to link it with the force of poetic inspiration. For many of Dacre’s contemporaries, the true poet was connected to the voice of the divine, what Coleridge calls the ‘repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’.⁵⁹ Romantic poets frequently implied that insanity was the result of unbearable access to divine inspiration. As Wordsworth writes of poet Thomas Chatterton, dead of suicide at the age of seventeen: ‘We poets in our youth begin in gladness; | But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness’.⁶⁰ Chatterton, Wordsworth implies, fell victim to the sublime but unendurable nature of genius. Indeed, the experience of the sublime, as Edmund Burke wrote in 1757, ‘is founded on pain’,⁶¹ and it can be provoked by the experience of horror: ‘The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all motions are suspended, with some degree of horror’.⁶² Insanity in this construction is a dark form of sublimity, an experience that is painful but ecstatic, transcendent but horrifying.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, however, Dacre rejects the idea of sublimity in madness. Early on, Wiemar speaks longingly of the sublime, saying, ‘How truly Longinus has observed, that sublimity is in the terrible’ (p. 13). Yet his actual experiences are not awesome but horrible, and ultimately, it is Rozendorf’s rationality that Dacre endorses. Rozendorf, throughout the novel the voice of reason and morality, always pulls back from the brink when his emotions become too much. He removes himself from Linz when the experience threatens to overwhelm his mind, and he chooses not to indulge in sentiment. Morality, judgment, happiness are to be found in measured rationality, while the passions lead only to sin and death. We should, the novel suggests, follow Rozendorf ’s example, not Darlowitz’s, Julia’s or Appollonia’s, reject Romanticism’s dark sublime and the pleasures of unbridled emotion and take shelter in the safety of Enlightenment reason. The irony, of course, is that Dacre takes her reader on a journey through the darkest emotions before reaching her moralizing conclusion.

NOTES

1. Dacre’s birthdate has been the subject of some dispute. The register of her burial lists her age as 53 at the time of her death, placing her birth year in 1772. Dacre herself, however, claimed to be 23 in 1805, which would mean she was born in 1782.

2. Todd M. Endelman, ‘The Checkered Career of Jew King: A Study in Anglo-Jewish