Hermsprong; or, Man As He Is Not

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Description

Robert Bage was a Staffordshire paper manufacturer who took up novel-writing in his forties, almost as a hobby, and ended up writing one of the sharpest satirical novels of the 1790s. Hermsprong; or, Man As He Is Not (1796) follows a young man raised among the Native peoples of North America who returns to rural England and finds its customs — arranged marriage, inherited rank, clerical authority, the unquestioned power of fathers over daughters — almost as strange as the English find him. Contemporaries read it as a "Jacobin novel," written in the same radical, post-Revolutionary current as William Godwin's Caleb Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria. It is funny, pointed, and unlike almost anything else being published in England the same decade Jane Austen was drafting her first novels.

Hermsprong was a real success on publication — William Hazlitt later praised it, and it is said to have been admired by Maria Edgeworth — but it fell out of print for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and remains almost completely unknown today. This appears to be its first freely available digital edition: transcribed in full from the original 1796 Minerva Press printing, all three volumes, seventy-seven chapters, unabridged.

Author & Genre

Robert Bage (1730–1801) was an English novelist and papermaker, part of the same radical literary circle as William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft. Genre: satirical Jacobin novel, 1796 original text.

"My friend, it is to little purpose who I am. I ask of you only to attend to the reasonableness of what I say. Truth is worth our regard, by whomsoever it is spoke." — Hermsprong, addressing an angry crowd