Dismembering Anglo-America: the Body Politic and the First English Novel about the American Revolution

Essay Excerpt

"The Critical Review’s praise for Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Emma Corbett; or the Miseries of Civil War (1781) placed this now largely forgotten novel firmly in the sentimental tradition. Pratt’s heroine, wrote the reviewer, ‘formed upon the models of Clarissa and Eloisa,’ was ‘in point of literary composition…hardly inferior to either of those characters.’ The novel enjoyed a significant readership on both sides of the Atlantic for about twenty years, with five editions appearing in England and four in the United States before the end of the century. But despite its contemporary popularity, Emma Corbett, like so many sentimental novels of the late eighteenth century, has vanished from critical consciousness. This neglect needs reassessment. Emma Corbett was the first English novel about the American Revolution."