England in 1815, the year of Emma, the year of the Battle of Waterloo, was in many ways a very different place from England in 1688, the year of Oroonoko and the Glorious Revolution. Many of these changes would have happened if the novel never existed, or indeed if literature itself did not exist. England in 1688 was a single kingdom with a complex of arrangements with Scotland (ruled by the same monarch) and Ireland (where the Glorious Revolution was far from bloodless). But by 1815 England was the most powerful element of a United Kingdom governing Scotland and Ireland from Parliament in London; and movements toward independence by Scotland and Ireland would be dormant for at least the next hundred years. In 1688, England had a few prospering colonies on the western Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean. By 1815 a group of American colonies had declared their independence, provoking a brief but disastrous war of national liberation; but the United Kingdom had kept Canada and acquired further territory in the Caribbean, which together with an empire in the East, coastal India from Bombay to Calcutta, and Australia as well, a continent on its own, made the United Kingdom one of the most powerful players in world politics.
With respect to its internal politics, the period begins just before William of Orange gave up any claim of divine right to rule as the price of becoming King William III. When it ends, the anointed king, George III, has sunk into senile oblivion and has been replaced by his eldest son as regent, but for all practical purposes Parliament rules England, and the identity of the king on the throne is no longer very significant. In 1688, trade has begun to rival agriculture as the source of British wealth, but by 1815, not only have the profits of trade dwarfed those of farming, but an industrial revolution is under way that will make the United Kingdom the premier European economic power in the manufacture of textiles and other goods. The spinning jenny of Hargreaves, the power loom of Cartwright, the potteries of Wedgwood were the harbingers of what would soon become a factory system, based primarily in the English Midlands, an industrial power that would dominate Europe. And science, which Charles II fostered in the Royal Society, led by Isaac Newton, had begun to change the way people thought about the world. But though we think of literature as a reflection of the culture that produced it, it is equally true that literature changes culture, and some of the cultural differences between 1688 and 1815 can be traced to the influence of the rise of the novel.
We saw in Chapter 1 that there was not yet a large reading public for fiction in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. But there is evidence for a considerable increase in what might be called “bare literacy” during the eighteenth century. About 50 percent of men and 15 percent of women were able to sign their names to court registers around 1700; around 1820 those figures rose to 65 percent for men and 40 percent for women. This literate fraction was higher in London and the North, and considerably higher in Scotland and the American colonies. Estimating the change in what might be called the mass reading public is far more difficult in an era that did not collect data on what and how much ordinary people read. But the reading public for which Radcliffe, Godwin, Austen, and Scott were writing was much larger than the public of Behn and Defoe.1
One index to the change is the sheer number of novels published. The researches of Peter Garside and others have demonstrated that in the last half of the eighteenth century the number of novels published annually doubled from around 50 per year around 1760 to a high of 111 novels published in 1808. Furthermore, the organization of the book trade itself was changing. Peter Feather’s researches present an “inward looking and complacent oligopoly” of booksellers dominating the book trade around the middle of the eighteenth century, but that trade both expanded and altered after 1770 with new and more entrepreneurial men entering the field, like John Murray and William Lane, who created the specialized publishing house, attempting to sign up the best authors in their chosen fields. Murray became the prestigious publisher of Jane Austen and Lord Byron; Lane’s Minerva Press published what we would think of as down‐market Gothic novels. There was also a bottom rung consisting of publishers like John Bailey and S. Fisher, who put out chapbooks, which were cut‐down versions of popular novels, adventure stories, and criminal biographies, each running from a dozen to a hundred pages, and priced at around sixpence each.
The latter half of the period also saw the development of the circulating library. Books were relatively expensive at this stage of publishing technology, and the English reading public wanted to read more novels and other forms of literature than they could afford to purchase outright from booksellers. Entrepreneurial publishers like William Lane established a circulating library – begun in 1770 – that allowed the subscribers to borrow books from a catalogue of over 20,000 titles, and to exchange them for others when they had finished reading them. The enterprising Lane also established franchises for the Minerva Library all over England, in towns like Newcastle, Bath, and Birmingham, providing their proprietors with the books they were to carry. In an 1808 advertisement for the Minerva Library in Leadenhall Street, London, we learn that subscribers paid an annual subscription of 16 shillings to borrow two ordinary novels at a time with exchange privileges. For premium subscribers who wanted access to the “newest and most expensive” books, the annual subscription price was 31 shillings sixpence, which was approximately what one would have to pay to buy outright a single three‐volume novel like Scott’s Waverley. We do not have statistics on how often readers changed their books, but one probably exceptional reader, Mary Russell Mitford, left a record in her letters of having read 55 volumes of fiction in the course of a single month. And English periodicals complained, as noted in Chapter 8, about women who were becoming addicted to reading fiction and in consequence neglecting their household duties.
The vast increase in the sheer quantity of published fiction, and the innovations in the ways of supplying it suggest an equally great increase of demand for entertaining reading for all classes except the poorest and least literate. In the course of the nineteenth century new institutions like railway bookstalls would cater to that demand. But beyond this, there is also evidence that the rise of the novel changed aspects of the way people think.
Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things presents the notion that three modes of thought successively held sway in the Renaissance (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), the Classical Age (roughly from Descartes through Kant), and the Modern Age (the nineteenth century and after). In the Renaissance, thought operated through representations taking the form of the homologies of macrocosm and microcosm, where the relation of God to humanity might be figured in terms of the relation of a king to his subjects, or a father to his family. In the Classical Age, thought operated through representations like a map, where there need be no direct resemblances between the map and the terrain that is to be understood through the map. (My New York subway map shows me which stations are on each subway line, and in what order they are reached, but the station does not look anything like the circle or hexagon iconically representing the station – nor is the map a “good likeness” of the city terrain: it makes Manhattan much larger than Brooklyn or Staten Island because of the density of stations and lines to be represented there, and it would not be a better map if its representation of the size and shape of the boroughs were more realistic.) The map operates through a series of simple categories (lines, stations, interchanges) that allow the reader to understand how to get from one place to another.
Foucault posited that in the nineteenth century the key way of representing thought was the narrative rather than the map or the analogy: we would understand a phenomenon by understanding its history, through the story of how it had gotten to be what it is. Thus Marx understood the nature of the industrial society he lived in by understanding how it had developed historically from earlier forms of socio‐economic organization, from hunter‐gatherer tribes in pre‐history, through pastoral societies, to feudal societies based on agriculture, to early modern societies in which trade strongly supplements the wealth produced by agriculture. Similarly, Darwin understood the nature of mankind as a product of an evolution from earlier organisms, with the mechanisms of random variation and natural selection generating history, a struggle for existence with the more probable survival of those who are fittest in each environment, who are likely to pass their genetic material down to subsequent generations. Both Marx and Darwin argued that the mechanisms that had generated the human beings and their societies of the present day would continue to operate into the future. Michel Foucault’s own discussions of sanity and insanity, health and illness, crime and punishment, licit and deviant sexuality, also took the form of narratives, histories that presented the genealogy of current institutions and ways of thinking as they had developed from previous versions.
While Foucault never suggests that it was the rise of the novel that caused the coupure or rupture between the Classical and Modern epistemés – indeed, he presents these changes in the representation of thought as though they happened of themselves, without any warning, like earthquakes – it is striking that this move toward grand narratives and toward narrative explanations of historical phenomena occurred precisely when the novel was replacing the lyric and the drama as the most universally read form of imaginative literature, generating throughout Europe entire nations of readers of narrative.
There were also direct influences between the novel and philosophy. David Hume’s discussion of the basis of morality in the common sentiments of mankind undergoes a significant change between its presentation in the Treatise of Human Nature (1738–40) and in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). As Carrie Shanafelt has argued,2 in the Treatise, Hume argues for a morality based on sentiment, but views the basis of lived experience which provokes those sentiments as contained within the individual, the monadic self – which poses a problem:
Shanafelt argues that it is no accident that in the decade between the Treatise and the Enquiry the major novels of Richardson and Fielding are published, novels that depended for their effect on our collective response to the situations in which the characters found themselves. The novel, in other words, presented objects of observation that Hume’s society had in common. Shanafelt argues elsewhere that there are actually direct and specific influences as well, that Fielding’s chapter “On Love” in Tom Jones seems to have even more intimately reshaped Hume’s argument in the chapter on Self‐Love in the Enquiry.3
It has long been noted that the eighteenth century stands as a watershed in the evolution of masculinity,4 an evolution that was not merely reflected but advanced and disseminated in literature. As late as the mid‐seventeenth century, the most admired form of masculinity was the warrior, as we see from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing as clearly as from Othello. The warrior ideal continues to appear in Restoration texts like Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. During the Restoration, two competitive figures emerge, the libertine rake and the fop. Dorimant, in Etherege’s The Man of Mode, notoriously based on the courtier and poet John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, was the quintessential rake, a predatory male seeking sexual satisfaction and not very particular about how he treats the women charmed enough to provide it. The rake’s opposite number was the titular “man of mode” or fashion, Sir Fopling Flutter, in the same play. Unlike the rake, who was often characterized as slovenly, the fop competed with women and with other courtly gentlemen for perfection of dress and pursuit of the latest fashions. The Restoration fop is decidedly heterosexual: As Randolph Trumbach has shown, it is not until the early eighteenth century that foppish effeminacy becomes linked to same‐sex desire.5 These Restoration archetypes appear all through the earlier fiction of our period: Richardson’s Lovelace in Clarissa is the quintessential libertine, and a somewhat toned down version is Pamela’s employer and husband Mr. B. And versions of the heterosexual fop also appear the novels of that period, such as Lord Fellamar in Tom Jones or Lady Davers’s obnoxious nephew Jackey in Pamela.
Around mid‐century, though, the Restoration model for masculinity undergoes considerable interrogation by both Richardson and Fielding. Superficially, the eponymous hero of Tom Jones seems to be a libertine; he has that reputation, certainly, even though Fielding takes pains to make clear that Tom is not sexually aggressive, that he is usually the seduced rather than the seducer, and unlike the rake he takes a sentimental interest in the ladies he beds even after he is done with them. Fielding meant Tom for a model, but his moralistic society did not entirely go along. Richardson, partially in response to Fielding, intentionally created a positive model for masculinity, an idealized Christian gentleman, in his 1753 Sir Charles Grandison, and his titular hero had considerable staying power over the following six decades. Like the warrior, Grandison bears arms and is by no means afraid to draw his sword when absolutely necessary, but as a Christian hero, his sense of honor is tempered by a deep respect for the sixth commandment. To the aggressions of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen and Count Belvedere, Sir Charles responds not with a challenge to a duel, but with deft maneuvering to get his way while avoiding any encounter that would imperil two immortal souls. As Gerard Barker puts it, “Respectful, gentle, and modest among women, yet bold and forceful among men, Grandison became a feminine wish‐dream of the ideal male suitor.”6 Barker traces the evolution of the Grandisonian hero through the later history of the novel, where we can find him in Frances Sheridan’s Sidney Biddulph, in Frances Burney’s Evelina, in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story, down to his apotheosis as Fitzwilliam Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
The ideal of the Grandisonian hero, circulated throughout British society through the novel, becomes so generally accepted by polite society in the late eighteenth century that it has to be critiqued by the Jacobin novelists of the 1790s. Thomas Holcroft in Anna St. Ives (1792) presents in his villain, Coke Clifton, a predatory male masquerading as a Grandisonian hero; meanwhile the hero, Frank Henley, is a genuine Grandison combining bravery and honor with modesty and restraint. Unlike the usual aristocratic hero, though, Henley stems from the lower middle classes like his creator Holcroft, while Clifton is a scion of the landed gentry. And the history we are given of Ferdinando Falkland in the first volume of Caleb Williams allows William Godwin to examine the fearful contradictions inherent in the values of the ideal aristocrat. But the fact that the class basis of this form of masculinity is questioned, would only have speeded up the adoption of the ideal of the polite gentleman down the class system, reaching even to the lower orders, as Philip Carter has argued.7 And the persistence of the Grandisonian ideal, even among the working classes of mid‐twentieth century America, is evidenced by my own mother’s insistence that I simultaneously “act like a gentleman” by giving up my seat on a streetcar to any elderly person and “stand up for myself” with my coevals. The Grandisonian ideal for masculinity had its triumph in the Regency period, but also found competition from the world‐weary, rebellious, anti‐social Byronic male, versions of whom we can see in the Victorian period in Edward Rochester and in Heathcliff, and of course with still other versions of the masculine ideal in later periods.
One factor that brought the novel from its despised status as a genre around the beginning of the eighteenth century to its far higher position a century later, when it surpassed drama and rivaled poetry, was an audience for whom the novel did genuinely important cultural work, the development and control of the empathic responses of individuals within society. Catherine Gallagher has summed up the case for this in the earliest version of her book, Nobody’s Story.8
Starting off with Roland Barthes’s essay “L’Effet de réel.” Gallagher argues that realism was not a way of trying to hide or disguise fictionality but was, rather, the formal sign of fiction. Her point is that, before the middle of the eighteenth century, there were just two categories: truths and lies. Narratives were known to be untrue because they were grossly improbable. Such narratives are not similar to the fictions of mid‐century by Richardson and Fielding but radically different from them. When fiction as a third category took shape its mark was realism and verisimilitude, and not improbability (which was a mark of non‐truth).
First of all, pure fiction is distinguishable from a lie. Liars want to be believed, whereas fiction has “no intention to be credited.” Second, pure fiction is, as Gallagher puts it about Nobody, meaning that the characters have no real‐life referents. Pamela and Tom Jones were not surrogates for real people, as Defoe’s Moll Flanders was for real people like Moll King or Mary Carleton, or as his Robinson Crusoe was for Alexander Selkirk. And the story is told for its own sake: we want to read it despite the fact that it is about Nobody.
But Gallagher’s ultimate point is that pure fiction could stimulate “compassion,” “identification,” and “sympathy” precisely because the stories were about Nobody. Gallagher suggests that these important emotions – feelings that were in fashion and in turn caused the fashion of the sentimental novel in the 1770s – were normally hard to achieve unless the object was someone whom one knew, a family member or a business associate or a neighbor. The fact that other people had other bodies, other relatives, other property – these were impediments to sympathetic identification. Therefore stories about Nobody – fictional characters with none of those impediments – were more effective than stories about real people, who could be adversaries or competitors. As Fielding says in Joseph Andrews, his satirized characters are not an individual but a species. And when we aren’t seeing some particular other person, we become capable of seeing ourselves, capable therefore of gaining self‐knowledge of an important sort. Gallagher thus views the moral correction we receive in Fielding as a private lesson, as opposed to the public execution of specific people like Lord Hervey or Eliza Haywood that we find in the satires of Pope. This change is similar to the contemporary social changes, which were moving away from public executions and towards modern modes of discipline and punishment.
Most important, Gallagher argues that eighteenth‐century readers identified with novel characters because they were fictional, rather than in spite of that fact. These readers had to learn how to read fiction, since it didn’t come naturally. It is for this reason that we get novels as early as the middle of the eighteenth century like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) satirizing characters who think fictions are true, and equally why Henry Fielding scolds his reader for thinking that his ridiculed characters are representations of specific individuals rather than embodiments of general faults like selfishness and hypocrisy.
But just as problematic as the naive reader who takes fiction for truth, there is the sentimental reader who takes fiction too seriously. In a sense taking fiction seriously at all might be thought to be taking it too seriously, since our concern in the novel is always about Nobody. At any rate, from about 1760 on, there are attacks on fiction in the press from moralists who think that the “disproportionate activity of the representative faculties” leads to unsteadiness of character and emotional disorder.
And some novelists (not all) begin to “manipulate the processes of identification and disidentification, to teach readers to break off the sympathetic response especially in moments of romantic indulgence.” So the novel is a school for the moral sentiments, but the moral education will fail if it works too sentimentally: the reader has to learn as well how to stop sympathizing and will inappropriate feelings away. As Gallagher put it:
This book has tried to present its own narrative of how the English novel came into existence and poised itself to dominate the field of literature, as it would in the nineteenth century, through an intensive discussion of individual novels by ten authors who made a difference. And in these last few pages I have backed up from the microscope to view the entire historical period through the lenses of modernity, gender, and empathy. My literary‐historical narrative has been generated by the current canon of British literature, which has changed quite a bit since I started teaching fiction fifty years ago, and it might be a salutary exercise to discuss how that canon has changed and to point at three entire genres and two prolific authors that I left out of this story.
To begin with the genres, the three significant forms of narrative fiction that entirely fall out of my history are the Menippean satire, the moral fable, and the religious allegory. John Bunyan, who like Aphra Behn died in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, wrote religious allegory. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) was a moral tract portraying the good Christian’s journey, through hardships and temptations, to his heavenly reward, but its allegorical form, portraying temptations as dangers, allowed it to be read as an exciting adventure story. It was Benjamin Franklin’s favorite book and its form influenced how he saw his own journey through life, as he revealed it in his Autobiography.
Another significant genre is the moral fable (where the characters are representative individuals, but are not walking concepts, as they are in Bunyan). One apologue often taught in classrooms today is Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), which is set in exotic Abyssinia and Egypt, but is essentially an argument, couched as a narrative, that there is no life‐choice that will guarantee perfect, secure earthly happiness. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is probably the most successful and scarifying Menippean satire ever written – and it may well have been read by more readers than any of the ten novels in my historical narrative, especially if one counts the abridged editions, the illustrated children’s books and the animated or live‐action films.9 My primary reason for leaving out Bunyan, Swift, and Johnson, and the genres they wrote in, is that they are survivors rather than progenitors. They look backward rather than forward: allegory and fable and Menippean satire are classical genres, and their influence on the later history of the novel is tangential and oblique. That said, postmodern contemporary fiction has had a tendency to find its formal models in early texts, and novels like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) are Menippean satires that owe their existence to Jonathan Swift.
One other important genre which my narrative slights, in terms of space, is the sentimental novel, which gets a few pages in Chapter 7 on Tristram Shandy because of Sterne’s ambivalent jocularity about sentimentality and the expression of sympathy for distress. It is an important genre, beginning, according to John Mullan, with Sarah Fielding’s novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744–53), which came out before the term “sentimental” in its modern meaning actually existed.10 Other important texts in this genre would include Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1764–70), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Sarah Scott’s The History of George Ellison (1770), culminating in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771). A typical passage from Mackenzie may give some sense of what these novels were all about; here the hero, Mr. Harley, is paying a touristic visit to the London lunatic asylum, Bethlehem Hospital, where he meets a young lady who has gone mad after the death of her lover:
Sentimental novels of this sort continued to be published into the 1780s, including Thomas Day’s best‐selling children’s book Sandford and Merton (1783–89) and I argue elsewhere that the Gothic, which takes over in the 1790s, is at least in part an outgrowth of the sentimental novel.12 While there are no canonical sentimental novels, the genre was genuinely important because it was the literary manifestation of a widespread cultural movement that changed the way people felt towards victims of misfortune. Novels of sensibility were an ethical gymnasium that toned up the higher emotions, teaching the middle‐class readers for whom they should feel and how to express those feelings.
There are also two individual authors, Smollett and Edgeworth, whose work, it could be argued, deserves a chapter in Reading the Eighteenth‐Century Novel. Tobias Smollett was a Scottish physician who wrote picaresque romances around mid‐century, including Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753), Launcelot Greaves (1760), and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). Smollett was decidedly a canonical novelist when I was in college and graduate school in the 1960s, and I read him alongside his mid‐century contemporaries, Richardson, Fielding,and Sterne. Roderick and Peregrine, the heroes of his first two novels, begin with nothing, are disowned by what remains of their family, and have a sequence of more or less random adventures, in which they are treated brutally and treat others in the same way, before finally ending up wealthy and married to a chaste and beautiful woman.
The protagonists’ brutality can be both physical and mental. In the first chapter of Roderick Random, the hero before starting his travels throws a rock at the tutor of his wealthy cousin, who has done nothing in particular to harm him, breaking four of his front teeth. In Peregrine Pickle, a friend of the hero, a painter named Pallet, has mistakenly been locked up in the Bastille in women’s clothing (he had been to a masquerade), and he is soon to be released. Pickle first tells Pallet that his offense would usually be punished by a particularly painful form of execution (breaking on the wheel), but that it had been mitigated to imprisonment for life, and then adds that Pallet is to be castrated for the offense of cross‐dressing. When the jailer comes to unlock his cell, Pallet cowers in the farthest corner, holding his chamberpot as a possible weapon, refusing to budge. George Orwell once argued that “these petty rogueries” were still worth reading about “because they are funny.”13 I can attest that by the late 1970s my students were no longer able to find them funny, or to understand why anyone else did. And I took Smollett out of my syllabus. In a way this is unfortunate, because Smollett is historically important: the loose and episodic structure of some of the earlier novels of Dickens, like Nicholas Nickleby, comes from his reading of Smollett.
If I were to add another chapter, it would be on Castle Rackrent (1800) by Maria Edgeworth, an Anglo‐Irish novelist who was the most original woman writer in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Interesting in herself, Edgeworth also directly influenced both Austen and Scott. Austen mentions Edgeworth’s society novel Belinda (1801) in Northanger Abbey as one of those works “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best‐chosen language.” It also explicitly takes up English colonialism, more directly in some ways than Austen’s Mansfield Park. And Edgeworth’s first novel, Castle Rackrent, a fast‐moving and funny national tale about the decline and fall through four generations of Irish gentry, written in the authentic‐sounding voice of an old family servant, is credited by Walter Scott with giving him an impetus to write his own regional novels about Scotland.
Edgeworth’s later novels like Ennui (1809) and The Absentee (1812) take up the economic problems generated by absentee landlords, who receive their rents in Ireland and spend or squander them in England. Harrington (1817) is told by an anti‐Semite who learns from experience that the myths he learned in childhood were based on lies. Edgeworth combines something of the wit of Jane Austen with an explicit interest in the difficult problems posed by class and nationality. Despite her realism about human nature, she hopes that mutual understanding of cultural differences by people of good will can lead to improvements in social conditions. Her novels were written not merely to entertain but to inform that conversation, and in this sense Edgeworth might also be thought a bridge to the next generation of social novelists like Thackeray and Dickens, Trollope and Eliot, who considered from their later perspective the condition of England. But that would be in another book; this one is concluded.