The Haunts of the Banditti

What is it about?

In the 1790s, banditti occupied rocky shelves in picturesque landscapes and accompanied exiled aristocrats in gothic fiction; in news columns, they framed attempts at political participation by non-citizens from Ireland, France, and the West Indies; in political philosophy, they gestured toward the gaps created by artificial legal boundaries. By recovering the network of the powerful Romantic bookseller George Robinson, this article outlines a Romantic-era history of the banditti that moves across media, genres, and national borders. This approach puts the gothic serials and new reports of Robinson’s popular Lady’s Magazine in dialogue with canonical literary and philosophical texts also published and distributed by his firm, including the first English translation of Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, William Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Following the banditti throughout Robinson’s network links Celtic, Caribbean, and European figures and connects Romantic-era aesthetic and media practices to the mobile and intercultural qualities of modernity that the Robinson imprints of the 1790s sought to articulate.

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