For he was essentially a novelist of manners and character at a transition time, when manners and character had come out of one stage and had not settled into another.

Even Miss Edgeworth in _Belinda_ shows the disadvantage of this: and she was a lady of genius, while Bage had only talent and was not quite a gentleman.
Thomas Holcroft was not a gentleman at all, never pretended to the title, and would probably have been rather affronted if any one had applied it to him: for he was a violent Atheist and Jacobin, glorying in his extraction from a shoemaker and an oysterseller, and in his education as a stable boy.

He was, however, a man of considerable intellectual power and of some literary gift, which chiefly showed itself in his dramas (the best known, _The Road to Ruin_), but is not quite absent from his novels _Alwyn_ (1780), _Anna St.Ives_ (1792), and _Hugh Trevor_ (1794-1797).

The series runs in curious parallel to that of Bage's work: for _Alwyn_, the liveliest and the earliest by far of the three, is little more than a study partly after Fielding, but more after Smollett, with his own experiences brought in.

The other two are purpose-novels of anarchist perfectibilism, and Holcroft enjoys the traditional credit of having directly inspired Godwin.