Against London: Robert Bage, Cultural Snobbery and Hermsprong

A Literary Party at Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1848, by William Walker. Via Wikimedia Commons. A London literary gathering in the late eighteenth century. Cultural authority was concentrated in the capital, even as readers and writers flourished across the provinces.

In the first post in this series, we saw how Hermsprong’s habit of walking disrupts the social signals of rank and status.

That same refusal operates on a larger scale throughout the novel. For Hermsprong is not only indifferent to the rituals of polite society; it is also curiously indifferent to the place where those rituals were most fully codified and enforced: London. To read Robert Bage’s Hermsprong in its proper context is to recognise something that eighteenth-century readers would have felt immediately but which modern readers can easily miss: this is a novel written outside London, and in some sense against it.

By the 1790s, London had become more than the political centre of Britain. It was the arbiter of taste. Books were reviewed there, reputations were made there, and literary authority flowed outward from it. To be recognised in London was, in effect, to exist. To be ignored there was to risk irrelevance. This produced a cultural hierarchy that extended well beyond literature. Intellectual life in “the provinces”, whether in Cornwall, the Midlands or the North, was often treated with a mixture of condescension and indifference. Provincial writers might be read, but they were rarely granted authority. Their work was assumed to lack polish, connection, or importance simply because it originated outside the capital.

That attitude was not merely implicit. It shaped the reviewing culture of the time, in which London journals often set the terms of judgement, and it influenced how writers themselves were positioned within the literary world. Geography became a proxy for credibility.

Robert Bage stood outside this system. He was not a London man. He lived and worked in the Midlands, moving within a network of provincial thinkers whose interests ranged from science and industry to philosophy and politics. This was the wider intellectual world that produced figures such as Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton and James Watt, a world that was anything but marginal, yet one that London could still regard as secondary. Hermsprong reflects this alternative geography of thought.

The novel does not simply happen to be set away from London; it proceeds as if London were not the natural centre of intellectual life at all. Much of the action unfolds in Cornwall and other provincial settings, where the novel’s most important conversations take place. Questions of class, education, religion and sincerity are debated in drawing rooms far removed from the capital and, crucially, without reference to it. What is striking is not simply that London is absent, but that nothing in the novel requires its presence.

When Hermsprong travels to London, the narrative does not expand into the expected panorama of metropolitan life. There are no salons, no fashionable assemblies, no sense that the capital represents a higher court of judgement. London is passed through rather than entered. The novel quickly reorients itself elsewhere. The real intellectual and moral life of Hermsprong takes place outside it.

This would not have gone unnoticed by contemporary readers, many of whom were themselves living far from London. By the late eighteenth century, the reading public had expanded dramatically. Circulating libraries and reading societies flourished in towns and cities across Britain: in Bath, Bristol, Birmingham, Norwich, York and beyond. Merchants, professionals, dissenters and educated women formed a growing audience for novels, one that was geographically dispersed and increasingly confident. Yet even as this readership expanded, literary authority remained stubbornly metropolitan. London still set the tone. Reviews, reputations and fashions were shaped there, and readers elsewhere were accustomed to measuring what they read against those standards.

This created a tension. Readers outside London were consuming literature locally, often in precisely the kinds of settings Bage depicts, yet they did so within a framework of judgement that privileged the capital. Cultural authority was centralised, even as readership was not. It is in this context that Hermsprong becomes provocative. Bage writes for that wider readership, but he does not defer to the authority it was expected to recognise. He does not send his characters to London to validate them, nor does he treat the capital as a necessary point of reference. Instead, he allows judgement to emerge where his readers already are, in provincial settings, among individuals capable of thinking for themselves.

Characters such as Lord Grondale embody inherited rank and assumption, but they do not command intellectual authority simply by virtue of position. That must be earned, and it can be earned anywhere. For a London critic, this might register as absence, a failure to engage with the centre. For a provincial reader, it could feel like something else entirely: recognition. The novel acknowledges a world in which intelligence, independence and moral clarity are not confined to a single city. It suggests, without ever stating it directly, that the authority London claims for itself may be less secure than it appears. That suggestion still carries weight.

Even now, cultural authority in Britain tends to cluster in London. Institutions elsewhere may flourish—galleries in Liverpool or St Ives, universities across the country, regional theatres and presses—yet the sense that the capital remains the place where things are decided has not entirely disappeared, particularly when it comes to the Midlands. That hierarchy persists, if in altered form.

Hermsprong belongs to an earlier moment in which that hierarchy was already being tested. By writing a novel that neither depends on London nor defers to it, Bage aligns himself with a broader shift in British cultural life, one in which intellectual and social authority could no longer be contained within a single centre. What might look like a simple matter of setting is in fact something more deliberate.

In Hermsprong, the provinces are not peripheral. They are the point.

Yet the book does not challenge authority only through where it is set. It does so, even more sharply, through who is allowed to speak, and how.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the figure of Maria Fluart, whose wit and independence disrupt not just social hierarchy, but the assumptions governing women’s place within it.

Read the next article: “Maria Fluart in Hermsprong: Wit, Power and a Radical Heroine.”

Volume I of Hermsprong is published on 12 May.

📚 Explore the book and pre-order here↗︎