From the early 1790s onwards conservative novels consistently outnumbered the radical fictions that had provoked them into being, and by the turn of the century succeeded in almost entirely vanquishing Things As They Are and Man As He Should Be from the booksellers' lists and the circulating libraries' shelves. To be able to assess this literary phenomenon it has been necessary to consider at the outset exactly what defined the anti-Jacobin novel. Having done this, the more complicated question is, why did the anti-Jacobin novel achieve and sustain such prevalence? Why, in other words, were they written?

Implicit in my analysis of the anti-Jacobin novel has been the assumption that its popularity and eventual dominance is certainly a symptom, and perhaps also in a limited way, a cause, of the almost hegemonic political conservatism that characterised Britain from the mid 1790s until after Waterloo, strangely calm seas disturbed by only the occasional squall.