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Mad Lord George and Madame La Motte: Riot and Sexuality in the Genesis of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Iain McCalman
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Extract

Throughout the first year of the French Revolution The Times newspaper could not decide who was the madder, Lord George Gordon or Edmund Burke. The former as a violent incendiary and convicted libeler had fortunately been safely locked in Newgate the previous year, but Burke was still loose. The newspaper had no doubt that he belonged in Bedlam; there could be no other explanation for his obsessive campaign to impeach Warren Hastings long after everyone else had lost interest in the case. A stream of reports suggested variously that he had checked himself into a lunatic asylum, been forcibly confined in a straitjacket, or become temporarily deranged through physical and mental exhaustion. On first reading The Reflections on the Revolution in France published in November the following year, many of his friends, as well as his foes, felt forced to agree.

Even those who found things to like in the book were puzzled that Burke should have produced such a work. In the first place, how did one explain what Thomas Jefferson called “the revolution of Mr. Burke,” an abrupt political tack from advocating parliamentary reform, religious toleration, and American liberty to denouncing France's fledgling efforts at liberty. Why had he turned so violently against the Dissenters and radicals with whom he had often cooperated in the past? Why did he believe that the apparently innocuous revolution in France was unlike anything that had gone before? And even when events in that country began to move more in line with his predictions, there remained something embarrassing about the tone of the book.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , July 1996 , pp. 343 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1996

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References

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70 Romilly, , Memoirs, Romilly to Roget, April 12, 1782, 1:217–18Google Scholar. For some of his other antiministerial activities in the immediate aftermath of the riots, see British Library Add. MS 5870, Newspaper cuttings, fol. 189; Add. MS 37835, George III's Correspondence with J. Robinson, November 1779-November 1784, fol. 196.

71 PRO, PC 1/3127, Letter from Lord George Gordon to Elias Lindo and the Portuguese and Nathan Solomon and the German Jews; Solomons, pp. 229–30Google Scholar.

72 The Times (January 4, 1788). For some early examples of anti-Semitic speculations associated with Gordon, see George (n. 26 above), vol. 5, no. 8249, from Rambler's Magazine (October 1, 1785); The Times (September 7, November 11, 1785).

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89 Public Advertiser (August 22, 1786).

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103 Solomons, pp. 262–63. See also The Times (January 9, 20, May 26, 1788).