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Thomas Holcroft has been called the first revolutionary novelist in English, but at his best he is also one of the few really original and readable storytellers of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Anna St. Ives (1792) and The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794, 1797), his most mature and most radical novels, stand up well against the more celebrated Caleb Williams (1794) by William Godwin, and have justly attracted the attention of those interested in the popular fiction of their day and in the antecedents of the important protest novels of the Victorian period by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade, and the rest. Holcroft was a prominent figure in the 1780s and 1790s, and not only as a novelist. Once an actor of some promise, he became a popular playwright and a translator, editor, critic, pamphleteer, and journalist of some repute. He was a professional man of letters whose presence on the scene mattered a great deal.
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