The Infernal Quixote: A Tale of the Day was written by Charles Lucas. Lucas (1769-1854) was a writer and a Church of England clergyman. The Infernal Quixote is an early anarchist novel.

The Infernal Quixote is a satiric attack on the liberal ideas of Lucas’ day. The central figure in the novel is Lord James Marauder, who poses as a political revolutionary and radical philosopher in favor of increased rights for women and a change of government. But his statements and actions on behalf of his political views are actually ruses to conceal his true intentions. Marauder is an anarchist, freethinker, and someone who wants a change in government not for the benefit of the people but to empower himself. Worse, Marauder is a proponent of open marriages and wants more rights for women so that he can indulge his own lusts. Marauder is responsible for the Irish rebellion of 1798, which leads to a collapse of the British government and widespread social chaos. But Marauder meets his match in Fanny Bellaire, the standard pure and innocent Gothic heroine and sister of Marauder’s mistress Emily. Marauder is unsuccessful in seducing Fanny, in ruining her marriage to Mr. Wilson, a right-thinking conservative, or in raping her. Frustrated to insanity by his failure, Marauder throws himself off a cliff.

The Infernal Quixote is a polemic. Lucas uses the format of the Gothic novel to write an attack on and conservative answer to the liberal ideas of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other Jacobin novelists, who, like the authors of novels of Sensibility novels (see: The Gothic) and Sturm und Drang narratives (see: The Robbers, Romanticism), emphasized the rights of the individual over their duties to society. Lucas was later candid about this: “‘The work was written to counteract the revolutionary mania among the community at large,’ he remembered; it was ‘avowedly written against the modern principles of atheism and licentiousness, disguised as philosophy’.”¹ In this Lucas was adding to a prospering genre of anti-Jacobin novels, popular with readers, writers, and publishers alike through the 1790s and well into the 1800s. Jacobin novels, by contrast, were fewer in number (around twenty) and mainly appeared between 1791 and 1796.²

Although the world of The Infernal Quixote is no dystopia, it does show men in power following what Lucas sees as the ultimate conclusion of the rights of the individual: traditional ideas like marriage are attacked and men like Marauder come to power and ruin the lives of men and especially women. Marauder is no Gothic Hero-Villain. He has no redeeming qualities and is the spiritual son of Satan himself. (The introduction to The Infernal Quixote is Satan’s address to the “Peers of Hell,” in which he describes his various attempts to seduce England, through “that imp Voltaire” and the “Demagogues of France”³ and now through Marauder). Mr. Wilson is Lucas’ “Me” character, his fictional stand-in and mouthpiece, and most of what Wilson says is Lucas’ response to the ideas of Godwin et al.

Unfortunately, Lucas uses Marauder as a straw man, so that The Infernal Quixote is unconvincing as an argument for Lucas’ position. Lucas expresses his views in the novel with an abrasive energy and contempt for those who believe differently than he. And most damagingly, much of what the modern reader is likely to believe in, particularly the rights of women and the individual, are positions that Lucas opposes, so that the reader will often feel the urge to throttle Lucas for being such a reactionary blowhard.

As a novel, The Infernal Quixote is entertaining, especially in the thorough wickedness of Marauder and the relish with which he carries out his schemes. As a political argument, it fails completely.

Print: Mary Peace, ed. Anti-Jacobin Novels. Vol. 10. Charles Lucas, The Infernal Quixote: a tale of the day. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005.

¹ Charles Lucas, qtd. in M.O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and French Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2004), 3.

² Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel, 3-4.

³ Charles Lucas, The Infernal Quixote: A Tale of the Day, volume one (London: Minerva Press, 1801), iv.