SOURCE: "Effervescence," in London Review of Books, Vol. 11, No. 21, November 9, 1989, pp. 10-11.

In the following excerpt, Ryan examines the main arguments of The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, emphasizing the ways in which British writers explored the British political character through their preoccupation with the French national character at the turn of the eighteenth century.

The view expressed by Monied Interest in Dickens's story 'The Flight' might have made an epigraph for Seamus Deane's The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England. It was Monied Interest who declared that it was 'quite enough for him that the French are revolutionary—"and always at it".' The eight essays that make up what Froude would have described as 'a short study on a great subject' cover both more and less than the title of Professor Deane's book implies. The Revolution itself looms large and obtrudes less continuously than one...