Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Almost all the fictions of the last age will vanish, if you deprive them of a hermit and a wood, a battle and a shipwreck. Samuel Johnson, Rambler 4 (1750). That there is a Castle, any Man who has seen it may safely affirm. But you cannot with equal Reason, maintain that there is no Castle, because you have not seen it. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (1752), IX, xi . In a famous passage in Reflections on the Revolution in France Edmund Burke declared that the age of chivalry had come to a shameful end on (Tuesday) October 6, 1789. On this day of infamy republicans and sans-culottes had laid their grubby hands on the person of Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France. Burke's image of an “innocent” aristocratic oligarchy demeaned by physical contact with its great unwashed subjects is one of the great rhetorical moments in his writing. Its power reverberates in the writing of others because it grounds the mysteries of nationhood, majesty, monarchy, and the eternal-feminine in the frailty of a single human body. Only a male reader untouched by what Burke called “that generous loyalty to rank and sex” would find this event other than repellent. On November 6, 1794, Major Watkin Tench, the first historian of the Botany Bay Settlement, was taken prisoner in revolutionary France. His account of that experience enlists the Burkean moment: he writes of the “brutal and unmanly spirit ... log in or subscribe to read full text