Why Hermsprong Still Matters: Publication Day for Volume I

Today, P-Wave Classics publishes Volume I of Robert Bage’s Hermsprong; or, Man as He Is Not (1796), restoring one of the most remarkable and neglected novels of the late eighteenth century to its original three-volume form.

For modern readers, Bage’s name is still unfamiliar. Yet in his own time he was admired by figures including Sir Walter Scott, and Hermsprong stands among the boldest English novels of the 1790s: a work of satire, political argument and social observation written in the shadow of the American and French Revolutions.

At its centre is Hermsprong himself, an American-raised outsider whose refusal to accept the assumptions of British polite society unsettles almost everyone around him. Through him, Bage examines class, hierarchy, gender, education, hypocrisy and the strange rituals through which societies maintain power while pretending merely to preserve order.

But Hermsprong is not simply a “radical novel” in the abstract. What makes it enduringly alive is the way Bage embeds those questions within character, conversation and comedy. The novel argues constantly, but it does so through wit, irony and social interaction rather than sermonising.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the figure of Maria Fluart, one of the great overlooked heroines of eighteenth-century fiction: intelligent, funny, independent and entirely unwilling to perform the submissive femininity her society expects of her.

This new P-Wave Classics edition presents Hermsprong in three separate volumes, restoring the structure and pacing of the original 1796 publication. Volume I includes the Biographical Introduction, Editorial Note and full Introduction to the edition, together with extensive notes intended to make the novel accessible without flattening its historical texture.

Over the past weeks, we have also published a series of essays exploring some of the novel’s major themes and historical contexts:

• Why Hermsprong Walks: Class, Status and Social Rebellion in Robert Bage’s Novel: On walking, social hierarchy and why travelling on foot could itself appear quietly radical in the 1790s.
• Why Hermsprong Ignores London: Robert Bage and Provincial Intellectual Life: On the novel’s resistance to metropolitan cultural authority and the intellectual world beyond the capital.
• Maria Fluart in Hermsprong: Wit, Power and a Radical Heroine: On one of the most striking female characters of the eighteenth-century novel and the way Bage uses humour to dismantle authority.
• Women’s Education and Equality in Hermsprong and the 1790s: On female education, marriage, autonomy and the long afterlife of debates that continue into the present day.

Taken together, these essays form an attempt not simply to “reintroduce” Hermsprong, but to place it back into the conversations from which it has too often been absent.

Because the novel still speaks with surprising force.

Its scepticism toward inherited authority, its suspicion of performative virtue, its awareness of how power disguises itself as common sense, and its insistence that intelligence and moral worth are not confined to rank, gender or geography all remain strikingly contemporary.

More than two centuries after its publication, Hermsprong still feels argumentative in the best sense: restless, probing and unwilling to accept that social arrangements become just merely because they are familiar.

Volume I is published today in paperback and ebook editions by P-Wave Classics.

📚 Explore the book and order here↗︎