In this article I want to analyse how Charlotte Smith’s novel Desmond (1792) mediates historicaldistance, i.e. how the novel engages with the past and how this engagement effectsa particular historical experience of the represented event. Smith's novel gives rise to anideological tension due to its confirmation of domestic tyranny, on the one hand, and itsstrong political support of the ideals of the French Revolution, on the other hand. I relatethis tension to the ways in which the novel constructs historical distance. Methodologically,I rely on the theoretical reflections on historical distance by the Canadian historianMark Salber Phillips. According to Phillips, historical distance is a rhetorical effect thatcan be studied from the text’s formal organization, its affective tone, and its ideologicalprogramme. This leads to a conceptual understanding of how a text represents a particularhistorical event.
