The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel 9780199566747, 0199566747

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

THE E IG H T E E N T H -​ C E N T U RY  N OV E L

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The Oxford Handbook of

THE EIGHTEENTH-​ CENTURY NOVEL Edited by

J. A. DOWNIE

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3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2016 The moral rights of the author‌have been asserted Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939745 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​956674–​7 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents

List of Illustrations  List of Contributors  Prologue 

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PA RT I   1660 – ​1 7 7 0 :  F ROM ‘N OV E L S’ TO W HAT I S N OT Y E T ‘ T H E N OV E L’ The Economics of Culture, 1660–​1770 1. The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century  Peter Hinds

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2. Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695–​1774  Michael F. Suarez, S.J.

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3. Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1660–​1770  Pat Rogers

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4. Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-​Habermasian Perspectives  Brian Cowan

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Influences on the Early English Novel  5. The Continental Influence on the Eighteenth-​Century Novel:  ‘The English Improve What Others Invent’  Walter L. Reed

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6. Criss-​Crossing the Channel: The French Novel and English Translation  Gillian Dow

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7. Religious Writings and the Early Novel  W. R. Owens

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8. Travel Literature and the Early Novel  Cynthia Wall

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9. Secret History, Politics, and the Early Novel  Rebecca Bullard

137

Early ‘Novels’ and Novelists  10. Restoration Fiction  Thomas Keymer

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11. Testing the Market: Robinson Crusoe and After  David Oakleaf

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12. Gulliver Effects  Clement Hawes

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13. ‘Labours of the Press’: The Response to Pamela  Peter Sabor

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14. Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel  John Dussinger

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15. Henry Fielding and the Progress of Romance  Scott Black

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16. Novels of the 1750s  Simon Dickie

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17. Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-​Century Novel: The ‘Vast Empire of Biographical Freebooters’ and the ‘Crying Volume’  Tim Parnell Epilogue: The English Novel at the End of the 1760s  J. A. Downie

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PA RT I I   17 7 0 – ​1 832 :  T H E M A K I N G OF T H E E N G L I SH N OV E L Literary Production, 1770–​1832 18. The Book Trade, 1770–​1832 John Feather

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19. The Rise of the Illustrated English Novel to 1832 Robert Folkenflik

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Authors, Readers, Reviewers, and Critics, 1770–​1832 20. Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1770–​1832  W. A. Speck 21. ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ Novels? Gendered Fictions and the Reading Public, 1770–​1832  Barbara M. Benedict

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22. Reviewing the Novel  Antonia Forster

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23. ‘Ordering’ Novels: Describing Prose Fiction, 1770–​1832  Peter Garside

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Novels and Novelists, 1770–​1832  24. The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–​1832  Ros Ballaster

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25. Developments in Sentimental Fiction  Geoffrey Sill

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26. Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s  Deidre Shauna Lynch

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27. The Anti-​Jacobin Novel  M. O. Grenby

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28. The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance  David H. Richter

472

29. Novel and Empire  Markman Ellis

489

30. The Popular Novel, 1790–1820 Gary Kelly

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31. The Evangelical Novel  Lisa Wood

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32. ‘Pictures of Domestic Life in Country Villages’: Jane Austen and the ‘Realist’ Novel  Jan Fergus

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33. Authorizing the Novel: Walter Scott’s Historical Fiction  Ina Ferris

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34. Parody and Satire in the Novel, 1770–​1832  Gary Dyer

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Epilogue: The English Novel at the End of the 1820s  J. A. Downie

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Index 

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List of Illustrations

When two artists are listed, the first is the designer; the second, the engraver. 19.1 Anonymous, after S. F. Ravenet, frontispiece, Joe Thompson, 1 (1750). (Courtesy of The Huntington Library.)

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19.2 S. F. Ravenet, frontispiece, The Works of James Thomson, 1 (1750). (Courtesy of The Huntington Library.)

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19.3  John Clark and John Pine, frontispiece, Robinson Crusoe (1719). Private Collection. (Courtesy of Geoffrey Sill.)

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19.4 Francis Hayman, Pamela (1742), drawing. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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19.5 Francis Hayman and Gravelot, Pamela, 1 (1742). (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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19.6 P. Lavergne and Michael Van der Gucht, frontispiece, The Adventures of Rivella (1714). (Courtesy of The Huntington Library.)

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19.7 William Hogarth and Simon Ravenet, frontispiece, Tristram Shandy, 2nd edn., vol. 1 (1760). (Courtesy of The Huntington Library.)

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19.8 Anthony Walker, frontispiece, Sir Launcelot Greaves, British Magazine 1/​ 2 (February 1760). (Courtesy of James G. Basker.)

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19.9 Louis Philippe Boitard, ‘A Gawrey Extended for Flight’, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, 1 (1751), facing p. 162. (Courtesy of The Huntington Library.)

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19.10 Thomas Stothard and William Walker, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Novelist’s Magazine 12 (1783), facing p. 150. (Courtesy of The Huntington Library.)

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19.11 William Blake, frontispiece, Original Stories from Real Life (1791). (Courtesy of The Huntington Library.)

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19.12 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Lady Booby attempts to seduce the immaculate Joseph’ (1792). (Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, College of William and Mary.)

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19.13  George Cruikshank, Robinson Crusoe (1731). (Courtesy of Geoffrey Sill.)

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x   List of Illustrations 19.14 Thomas Stodhart and Thomas Medland, ‘Robinson Crusoe discovers the Print of a Man’s Foot’, Robinson Crusoe, 1 (1790), facing p. 194. (Courtesy of The Huntington Library.)

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19.15 Bertie Greatheed, Castle of Otranto (c.1781–​4), watercolour. (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.)

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19.16 William Hamilton and John Royce, The Old English Baron, 4th edn. (1789), facing p. 129. (Collection of Robert and Vivian Folkenflik.)

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23.1 Keywords in titles, 1770–1832                   390 23.2 Publication of new novels, 1770–1832                392

List of Contributors

Ros Ballaster is Professor of Eighteenth-​Century Studies in the Faculty of English, Mansfield College, Oxford University. Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1684–​ 1740 was published by Oxford University Press in 1992. Her most recent critical work, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–​1785 (Oxford University Press) appeared in 2005. Barbara M. Benedict is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Trinity College, Connecticut. She is the author of Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–​1800 (1994); Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early-​ Modern Literary Anthologies (1996); and Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (2001). She has also edited Eighteenth-​Century British Erotica, vol. 4. Wilkes and the Late Eighteenth-​Century (2002), and, with Deidre LeFaye, Northanger Abbey, for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. Her essays address eighteenth-​ century literature, popular culture, collecting, and book history. She is working on the representation of gender in early advertising. Scott Black is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah. He is author of ‘Anachronism and the Uses of Form in Joseph Andrews’, Novel (2005); Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (2006); and ‘The Adventures of Love in Tom Jones’, in J. A. Downie (ed.), Henry Fielding in Our Time (2008); as well as essays on Hume, The Spectator, Eliza Haywood, José Ortega y Gasset, and Heliodorus. Rebecca Bullard teaches English Literature at the University of Reading. She is author of The Politics of Narrative Form: Secret History 1674–​1725 (2009); co-​editor with John McTague of vol. 1 of The Plays and Poetry of Nicholas Rowe (forthcoming); and co-​editor with Rachel Carnell of The Secret History in Literature, 1660–​1820 (forthcoming). Brian Cowan holds the Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he is also Associate Professor in the Department of History & Classical Studies. He is the author of The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (2005) and editor of The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (2012). He edited the Journal of British Studies in conjunction with Elizabeth Elbourne for the North American Conference on British Studies from 2010 to 2015, and has been a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University.

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xii   List of contributors Simon Dickie is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Cruelty and Laughter:  Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (2011), and is now writing a book about biblical and liturgical allusion in eighteent-​century culture, to be called Sporting with Sacred Things. Gillian Dow is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Southampton, and is currently seconded as Executive Director at Chawton House Library. Her main interest is in cross-​Channel exchanges in women’s writing of the long eighteenth century. Her most recent edited collection in this area, co-​edited with Jennie Batchelor, is Feminisms and Futures: Women’s Writing 1660–​1830 (Palgrave, 2016). J. A. Downie is Professor of English at Goldsmiths, University of London. His most recent book is A Political Biography of Henry Fielding (2009). Between 1978 and 2000 he was The Scriblerian’s Editor for Defoe and the Early Novelists. He is now working on a study of Austen’s novels and their contexts, and a political biography of Joseph Addison (in conjunction with Charles A. Knight). John Dussinger is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-​ Champaign. His books and articles have concerned eighteenth-​ century culture, especially the novelists of the period. His volumes for the Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson were recently published (with Thomas Edwards, 2013; and with Sarah Wescomb, Frances Grainger, and Laetitia Pilkington, 2015). He has also published an e-​book on Mary Astell for the University of Illinois Press (2015). Gary Dyer, Professor of English at Cleveland State University, is the author of British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–​1832 (1997; paperback edn., 2006), and ‘Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets: Being Flash to Byron’s Don Juan’, PMLA (2001). He is writing a book entitled Lord Byron on Trial: Literature and the Law in the Romantic Period. Markman Ellis is Professor of Eighteenth-​Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Politics of Sensibility (1996); The History of Gothic Fiction (2000); The Coffee House: A Cultural History (2004); and co-​author of Empire of Tea (2015). He has edited Discourses of Slavery and Abolition (2004); Eighteenth-​Century Coffee House Culture, 4 vols. (2006); and Tea and the Tea Table in Eighteenth-​Century England, 4 vols. (2010). He is currently working on a project on the social organization of intellectual culture in 1750s London. John Feather is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Arts English and Drama at Loughborough University, having been there since 1988, and previously working in publishing and librarianship. His many publications include A History of British publishing (2nd edn., 2006); Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain (1994); and The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-​Century England (1985). His current research interests include the changes in the British book trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and business models in the eighteenth-​century London book trade.

List of contributors    xiii Jan Fergus is Professor Emerita of English at LeHigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is the author of a book, many essays, and a biography on Jane Austen, Jane Austen: A Literary Life (1991), which emphasizes Austen’s literary career. Her most recent book is Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England (2006). Ina Ferris is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, has published widely on nineteenth-​century novels and literary culture, and has a special interest in Scott. Her books include The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (1991); The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (2002); Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–​1900 (2009), co-​ edited with Paul Keen; and Book-​Men, Book Clubs, and the Romantic Literary Sphere (2015). Robert Folkenflik, Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, has published numerous books, editions, and essays, mainly on eighteenth century topics. His publications on literature and art include ‘Charlotte Charke:  Images and Afterimages’, in Philip E.  Baruth (ed.), Introducing Charlotte Charke:  Actress, Author, Enigma (1998); ‘Tobias Smollett, Anthony Walker, and the First Illustrated Serial Novel in English’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction (2002); ‘The Rupert Barber Portraits of Jonathan Swift’, in Brian A. Connery (ed.), Representations of Jonathan Swift (2003); and ‘Representations’, in Jack Lynch (ed.), Johnson in Context (2011). For his ongoing work on Johnson portraiture he received a grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Antonia Forster is Professor of English at the University of Akron. Her publications include an edition of The Taming of the Shrew for Sourcebooks (2008); Index to Book Reviews in England 1749–​1774 (1990); and Index to Book Reviews in England 177–​1800 (1997). Vol. 1 (1770–​1799) of The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (with James Raven) was published by Oxford University Press in 2000. Peter Garside is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He has helped provide a number of bibliographical resources relating to British fiction, including The English Novel 1770–​1829 (2000) and the online database British Fiction, 1800–​ 1829 (2004). He has also edited a number of novels belonging to this period, including Walter Scott’s Waverley (2007), and is the co-​editor of English and British Fiction 1750-​ 1820 (2015). M. O. Grenby is Professor of Eighteenth-​Century Studies in the School of English at Newcastle University. He is the author of The Anti-​Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (2001), Children’s Literature (2008), and The Child Reader 1700–​1840 (2011), as well as co-​editor of Popular Children’s Literature in Britain (2008), The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature (2009), and Children’s Literature Studies: A Handbook to Research (2011). He is editing vol. 3 of The Letters of William Godwin for Oxford University Press.

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xiv   List of contributors Clement Hawes holds a joint position in History and English at the University of Michigan. He specializes in British literature and history 1660–​1800, writing broadly about historiographical issues and more closely about such authors as Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart. He is the author of Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (1996) and The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (2005), and editor of Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment (1999), Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings (2003), and (with Kumkum Chatterjee) Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters (2008). He is also the co-​editor, with Robert Caserio, of The Cambridge History of the English Novel. Peter Hinds is Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in English at the University of Plymouth. His research currently focuses on the history of the book and of reading in late seventeenth-​century England. He is the author of ‘The Horrid Popish Plot’: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-​Century London (2010) and co-​editor (with James Daybell) of Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580–​1730 (2010). He has also published several articles on Sir Roger L’Estrange and the London book trade. Gary Kelly is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Alberta, teaching English and Comparative Literature. He has published books on fiction of the Romantic period and on women’s writing of Revolution and Romanticism, as well as editions of Bluestocking writers, English and American women poets, Mary Wollstonecraft’s novels, women’s Gothic fiction, and Newgate literature. He is the General Editor of the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture. Thomas Keymer holds a Chancellor Jackman Professorship at the University of Toronto. His books include Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (2002); Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-​Century Reader (paperback edn., 2004); and, as editor, vol. 1 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English (forthcoming), which covers the period from the origins of print to 1750. He is General Editor of the Review of English Studies and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Deidre Shauna Lynch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature in the Department of English at Harvard University. Her books include The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998); Loving Literature: A Cultural History (2015); and, as editor, Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (2000). She is also an editor of the Romantic-​period volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. David Oakleaf, Professor, Department of English, University of Calgary, has published essays on eighteenth-​century writers from Swift and Haywood to Sterne and Burney; he has edited Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (2nd edn., 2000) and written A Political Biography of Jonathan Swift (2008). W. R. Owens was Professor of English Literature at the University of Bedfordshire. He has published widely on John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe, and was joint General Editor (with P. N. Furbank) of The Works of Daniel Defoe (44 vols., Pickering & Chatto,

List of contributors    xv 2000–​9). Recent publications have included an edition of The Gospels: Authorized King James Version for Oxford World’s Classics (2011). Tim Parnell is Senior Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths, University of London. His publications include Constructing Christopher Marlowe (co-​edited with J. A. Downie) and critical editions of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. He has written widely on Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, aspects of eighteenth-​century culture, and the broader traditions of the novel. He is a contributing editor of The Scriblerian and is currently completing Laurence Sterne: A Literary Life. He is Literary Director of the Goldsmiths Prize, which he conceived and set up in 2013. Walter L. Reed received his doctorate in English and American literature from Yale University in 1969 and taught there as Assistant Professor. In 1976 he moved to the University of Texas at Austin as Associate Professor, where he also served as Director of the Comparative Literature Program. He came to Emory University in 1987 to be Chair of the English Department; he is currently William Rand Kenan, Jr. University Professor at Emory. His publications include Meditations on the Hero (1974); An Exemplary History of the Novel (1981); Dialogues of the Word (1993); and, most recently, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin (2014). David H. Richter is Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New  York. He is the author of The Progress of Romance:  Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel (1996), and the editor of Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-​Century Literature (1999) and the Blackwell Companion to Literary Theory (forthcoming). His current book project is Reading the Eighteenth Century Novel. Pat Rogers was Distinguished University Professor and DeBartolo Chair in the Liberal Arts, University of South Florida from 1986 to 2015. He formerly held teaching posts at Cambridge, London, Wales, and Bristol. He has written or edited over forty books, including Edmund Curll Bookseller, with Paul Baines (2007); A Political Biography of Alexander Pope (2010); The Life and Times of Thomas, Lord Coningsby:  The Whig Hangman and His Victims (2011); and Documenting Eighteenth-​Century Satire (2012). At present he is completing a bibliographical survey of Curll’s publications. Peter Sabor, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, holds the Canada Research Chair in Eighteenth-​Century Studies at McGill University and is Director of the Burney Centre. His publications include, as co-​author, Pamela in the Marketplace:  Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-​Century Britain and Ireland (2005) and, as editor, Juvenilia in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (2006), The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, vol. 1.  1786 (2011), and The Cambridge Companion to ‘Emma’ (2015). Geoffrey Sill is the author of Defoe and the Idea of Fiction (1983); The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (2001); and articles in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, English Studies, Eighteenth-​ Century Studies, Literature and Medicine, Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture, and Eighteenth-​Century Fiction. He

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xvi   List of contributors is the co-​editor (with Gabriel Cervantes) of Defoe’s Colonel Jack (Broadview, 2016) and editor of vol. 5 (for 1789) of The Court Journals of Frances Burney (forthcoming). W. A. Speck is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Leeds. His research and publications lie mainly in the field of English history and culture in the ‘long’ eighteenth century. His most recent book is A Political Biography of Thomas Paine (2013). Michael F. Suarez, S.J., is University Professor, Professor of English, Honorary Curator of Special Collections, and Director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. His recent publications include The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), a million-​word reference work on the history of books and manuscripts from the invention of writing to the present day, which he co-​edited with H. R. Woudhuysen. He is also co-​editor of the recently published Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5. 1695–​ 1830 (2009). A Jesuit priest, Suarez is co-​General Editor (with Lesley Higgins) of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins in 8 volumes from Oxford University Press (2006–​14), and is Editor-​in-​Chief of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. Cynthia Wall is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (1998) and The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (2006) (Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize); and editor of Pope, Defoe, and Bunyan. Lisa Wood is Associate Professor of English and Contemporary Studies and Coordinator of the Youth and Children’s Studies Program at the Brantford campus of Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. She has researched and published in the fields of children’s literature, media, and culture, as well as British fiction of the late eighteenth century. Her publications include Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism and the Novel after the French Revolution (2003), which explores the intersection of Anglican Evangelicalism and conservative politics between 1790 and 1820, and articles on didactic Evangelical fiction of the late eighteenth century.

Prologue

It is generally accepted that the emergence and development of the English novel is an eighteenth-​century phenomenon. Although writings calling themselves ‘novels’ had been appearing in English since the middle of the sixteenth century, when the dedication to Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566) mentioned ‘these histories (which by another terme I call Nouelles’, it is apparent that this referred to the sort of short tales to be found in works like Boccaccio’s Decameron rather than the multi-​volume publications with which the eighteenth-​century reader would become accustomed. Thus when Addison included ‘A Book of Novels’ in an early number of The Spectator devoted to the contents of a lady’s library, he clearly meant a volume such as Delarivier Manley’s subsequent The Power of Love: In Seven Novels (1720), rather than ‘the four volumes of the New Atalantis’ cited in the title page of the same author’s The Adventures of Rivella (1714). In turn, Manley’s ‘novels’ closely corresponded to the notoriously disparaging definition of ‘the novel’ offered in Johnson’s Dictionary—​a ‘short tale, generally of love’. Over thirty years ago Percy G. Adams made the eminently sensible suggestion that it is only the ‘generic critic’ who needs to define the term, ‘novel’.1 For those who are not generic critics, it is perhaps sufficient to observe that considerably more prose fiction was published in English at the end of the eighteenth century than at the beginning. McBurney’s Check List of English Prose Fiction 1700–​1739 lists a single title for the year 1701,2 William Fuller’s A Trip to Hamshire [sic] and Flanders—​hardly the most representative ‘novel’ of the period. While there were fluctuations in the annual rates of publication, with surges in the early 1720s following the publication in 1719 of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, and again in the 1740s after the appearance of Pamela, a significant, sustained upturn in the publication of new novels took place only from the 1770s, and more particularly from the late 1780s onwards, so that the magical figure of one hundred was nudged for the first time in 1799.3 It is equally illuminating to look at the different ways in which prose fiction was described at the beginning and at the end of the eighteenth century. Of the twelve new 1 

Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1983), 3. 2  William Harlin McBurney, A Check List of English Prose Fiction 1700–​1739 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1960), 3. 3  Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel, 1770–​ 1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 1: 807. The hundred barrier was finally breached in 1808. In both cases, we are of course talking about the titles of new novels that have either survived, or that were reviewed at the time of publication.

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xviii   Prologue publications, excluding translations, listed by McBurney for the years between 1700 and 1705, we find the following:  something calling itself ‘an historical novel’; a flagrant rip-​off of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress; an ‘amatorious novel’ by Mary Davys; The Consolidator—​a political allegory involving a trip to the moon by Defoe; a scandal chronicle entitled The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zaranians which used to be attributed to Delarivier Manley, but which seems to have been the work of a ‘medico-​ politico quack’ called Dr Joseph Browne;4 and Swift’s brilliant but controversial A Tale of a Tub. Of the hundred titles listed in The English Novel, 1770–​1829 for the year 1799, on the other hand, it is interesting to note that 70 per cent of the various fictions on offer included an indication of what the reader could expect to find between their covers in their titles, with ‘novel’ the word most commonly used (thirty-​nine instances), followed by ‘tale’ (twenty), and ‘romance’ (eleven).5 What conclusions can safely be drawn from such raw data? Perhaps the most straightforward is that by the end of the eighteenth century a degree of generic stability had been reached as far as authors, publishers, readers, and critics were concerned—​by 1800, that is, an established and growing market for prose fiction had resulted in the emergence of a category of the British reading public which could be described, with confidence, as ‘novel, or romance readers’. And were we to leap forward to the 1820s, it appears that authors and publishers no longer felt it necessary to flag up the fictitious nature of narratives to potential readers other than by alerting them that what was on offer was a ‘tale’, even if this bare description was occasionally subject to embellishment, such as the suggestion that it was ‘a tale founded on facts’.6 Perhaps this was because by then ‘the novel’—​whether it offered ‘pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages’ such as those inhabited by Austen’s characters, or the ‘scenes’ of ‘higher life’ delineated by Edgeworth, or took the form of a ‘Historical Romance’ in the vein made familiar by Scott—​was linked more or less straightforwardly in readers’ minds with an entertainment in prose with a strong narrative thread and incidents which did not unduly strain their credulity. One of the most important points to be made about accounts of the eighteenth-​ century English novel is that, even today, only a tiny fraction of the prose fiction that has survived is ever mentioned by critics and literary historians, let alone considered at any length. Although sufficiently obvious, the implications for our understanding of ‘the rise of the novel’—​or whatever one prefers to call the process—​are not addressed so readily. How can we be sure that accounts of the eighteenth-​century novel do not concentrate on unrepresentative examples? While a degree of comfort can be derived from the knowledge that those ‘canonical’ novels still studied on degree courses were 4 

The Amours of Edward IV. An Historical Novel (1700); The Progress of the Christian Pilgrim, From the Present World, to the World to Come (1700); The Fugitive (1705); [Daniel Defoe], The Consolidator: or, Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (1705); The Secret History of Queen Zarah, and the Zaranians (1705)—​this used to be attributed to Delarivier Manley, but see my essay, ‘What if Delarivier Manley Did Not Write The Secret History of Queen Zarah?’, The Library, 7th ser., 5/​3 (2004), 247–​64. 5  Interestingly, by the 1820s the position had changed. See Peter Garside’s essay in the present volume. 6  For instance, Beatrice, A Tale Founded on Facts (London, 1829), and The Midshipman, A Tale Founded on Facts (London, 1829).

Prologue   xix clearly contemporary best-​sellers also, it has to be acknowledged that in restricting discussions of eighteenth-​century fiction, as they used to do, to ‘the great “Quadrilateral”—​ Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne—​who’, according to Saintsbury, ‘marked out and fortified for ever the position of the English Novel’,7 critics elected to exclude other hugely popular examples of the genre. It is of course perfectly possible to defend such a method of proceeding on the grounds that what we should be concerning ourselves with is not an archaeological project to discover what was actually read by the eighteenth-​century reading public, but the establishment of a ‘great tradition’ of novel-​writing in which the best-​sellers of the past do not necessarily have a place. On this view, even though they seem to have sold in their thousands, Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, let alone the vast majority of the numerous productions of the Minerva Press at the turn of the nineteenth century, should be silently omitted from accounts of the making of the English novel. Such an approach has a long and distinguished history. When critics first started ordering novels towards the end of the eighteenth century, they skipped over most of the early examples to focus on the ‘canonical’ novelists. Thus James Beattie began his account of what he called ‘New Romance’ with Robinson Crusoe, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, before turning to the works of Fielding and Smollett.8 A similar approach was adopted by Anna Laetitia Barbauld in her prefatory essay to the multi-​volume collection, The British Novelists, first published in 1810. Although she mentioned Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe by name, Barbauld explained how: Of the lighter species of this kind of writing, the Novel, till within half a century we had scarcely any … At length, in the reign of George the Second, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett appeared in strict succession, and their success raised such a demand for this kind of entertainment, that it has ever since been furnished from the press, rather as a regular and necessary supply, than as occasional gratification. Novels have indeed been numerous ‘as leaves in Vallombrosa.’9

Barbauld’s early attempt to delineate what we should nowadays be tempted to call a ‘canon’ of English novels and novelists has proved to be of considerable historical consequence over and above her decision to begin The British Novelists with Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. While she reprinted fifteen novels written by men, she also reprinted ten written by women. Demonstrably, Barbauld’s decision to collect together the best novels written in English was not unduly influenced by the sex of the novelist. 7  George Saintsbury, ‘Introduction’, in Sir Walter Scott, Lives of the Novelists (London and New York: J. M. Dent & Sons and E. P. Dutton & Co., n.d.), p. ix. 8  James Beattie, ‘On Fable and Romance’, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783), 565–​73. It should be noted, however, that Beattie offers The Pilgrim’s Progress and Gulliver’s Travels as examples of moral historical allegory. 9  Anna Barbauld, The British Novelists; with An Essay; and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical (London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington, et al., 1810), 1: 36–8.

xx

xx   Prologue Yet the practice of gradually excluding early women writers from the ‘great tradition’ began soon after the appearance of a reissue of The British Novelists in 1820. A crucial element in this process appears to have been serendipitous. Although Walter Scott had had the idea of publishing a collection of novels as early as 1808, it was, most probably, the apparent success of the reissue of The British Novelists which encouraged the launch of Ballantyne’s Novelists Library the following year. A comparison of the contents of the two collections is revealing. While The British Novelists was built around individual titles, presumably as a consequence of Barbauld’s aim of reprinting what she considered to be the best English novels, Ballantyne’s Novelists Library concentrated on authors. Thus the ten volumes included: ‘The Novels of Fielding’; ‘The Novels of Tobias Smollett, M.D.’ (including Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote); ‘The Novels of Le Sage, and Charles Johnstone’; ‘The Novels of Samuel Richardson, Esq. viz. Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison. In Three Volumes’; ‘The Novels of Swift, Bage, and Cumberland’; and ‘The Novels of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe Complete in One Volume’. The only departure from this formula was the miscellaneous fifth volume which reprinted works by Sterne, Goldsmith, Johnson, Mackenzie, Walpole, and Reeve. One of the unforeseen consequences of this editorial policy appears to have been the exclusion, with the sole exception of The Old English Baron, of novels by women writers other than Radcliffe. However, the composition of the volume devoted to ‘The Novels of Swift, Bage, and Cumberland’ strongly suggests that the principle governing selection was the avoidance of duplication rather than any other consideration. Consisting of five ‘novels’, it included Gulliver’s Travels, Henry by Cumberland, and Barham Downs, Mount Henneth, and James Wallace by Bage. Pondering ‘some oddities’ about Ballantyne’s Novelists Library in his Introduction to the Everyman edition of Scott’s Lives of the Novelists, Saintsbury observed that ‘Scott, risking and incurring the displeasure of some who generally agreed with him by giving some of the works of the eccentric and unpopular Bage, does not give them all, and omits the one which he himself calls the best’.10 But Hermsprong was the sole example of the work of Swift, Bage, and Cumberland to appear in Barbauld’s British Novelists, and doubtless this was the deciding factor in an otherwise eccentric and inexplicable decision. If serendipity was a factor in deciding which eighteenth-​century novels and novelists would be included in the ‘great tradition’, it would be equally distorting and potentially misleading to restrict accounts of the ‘eighteenth-​century English novel’ to those published between 1701 and 1800. Until the publication of The Strange, Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner in 1719, early eighteenth-​century ‘novels’ largely worked within the conventions which had operated during the later seventeenth century. While not all the prose fiction published in these years adhered to Johnson’s dismissive description of the novel as ‘a short tale, generally of love’, most others tended to conform to one of several pre-​existing literary traditions, such as the memoir or the private 10 

Saintsbury, ‘Introduction’, pp. viii–​ix.

Prologue   xxi history. It was almost certainly in response to the challenge to readers’ expectations posed by Defoe’s spurious autobiographies that Mary Davys explained in 1725 that ‘’Tis now for some time, that those Sort of Writings call’d Novels have been a great deal out of Use and Fashion, and that the Ladies (for whose Service they were chiefly design’d) have been taken up with Amusements of more Use and Improvement; I mean History and Travels.’11 Considerations such as these are not, of course, readily apparent in the hugely influential account of the emergence and development of the novel offered by Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel. Watt began his study by painting himself into a corner not merely by taking it for granted that the novel was ‘a new literary form … begun by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding’, but also by going on to assume that as the appearance of our first three novelists within a single generation was probably not sheer accident, and that their geniuses could not have created the new form unless the conditions of the time had also been favourable, [The Rise of the Novel] attempts to discover what these favourable conditions in the literary and social situation were, and in what ways Defoe, Richardson and Fielding were its beneficiaries.12

It should come as little surprise that, after begging the question so flagrantly, Watt proceeded to discover to his own satisfaction that social and cultural conditions were indeed propitious for the emergence of the novel in England in the early eighteenth century. Watt’s ‘triple-​rise’ thesis (as J. Paul Hunter aptly refers to it13)—​according to which the rise of the middle class led to the rise of the reading public, which led, in turn, to the rise of the novel—​has proved to be enduring because of its manifold attractiveness to critics. There are, however, major difficulties with each plank of the ‘triple-​rise’ thesis. ‘Though literary critics, politicians, and students have continued to see early modern England in terms of the rise of the middle class,’ Jonathan Barry pointed out in 1994 in his Introduction to a volume of essays with the significant title The Middling Sort, ‘few professional historians have dared to do so.’14 True, the blurb to Paul Langford’s volume in the New Oxford History of England, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–​1783, asserts that ‘[t]‌his was, above all, a period of rapid commercial growth and burgeoning pretensions’,15 while John Brewer’s thesis about the ‘consumption of culture’ in the middle of the eighteenth century is founded on the assumption that ‘culture was well within the purchasing power of the “middling sort” who had enough money and leisure time to acquire a small but solid library and prints or paintings to decorate their houses, and to enjoy periodic visits to the 11 

The Works of Mrs. Davys: Consisting of, Plays, Novels, Poems, and Familiar Letters (London, 1725), p. iii. 12  Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1960), 9. 13  J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​Century English Fiction (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1990), 66–​7. 14  Jonathan Barry, ‘Introduction’, in Barry and Christopher Brookes (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–​1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 1. 15  Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–​1783 (Oxford: OUP, 1987), back flap.

xxii

xxii   Prologue theatre, art exhibits and concerts’.16 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have also simply assumed that there was a growing middle class of English men and women in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,17 although Dror Wahrman has subsequently argued—​with particular relevance to the period covered by this volume—​that the significant changes took place from the 1820s onwards, when ‘two key—​linked—​developments suddenly became conspicuous: the coupling of “middle class” with social change and the coupling of “middle class” with demands for parliamentary representation’. On this view, ‘it was not so much the “rising middle class” that was the crucial factor in bringing about the Reform Bill of 1832; rather, it was more the Reform Bill of 1832 that was the crucial factor in cementing the invention of the ever-​rising “middle class”’.18 The implications for Watt’s thesis are to do with timing: if ‘the rise of the novel’ was conditioned by the development of an identifiable and sizeable middle class, then it would seem reasonable to expect the social developments upon which it depended at least to have coincided with, if not actually to have preceded, the literary. Instead, they seem to have taken place some years later. If there is indeed a link between the ‘rise’ of the middle class and the ‘rise’ of the novel, then it would make sense to locate the latter not in the earlier, but in the later, eighteenth century. This, in turn, would fit in better with the actual upturn in the production of prose fiction in English. Similar problems attend the notion that the novel was linked to the growth of the reading public in Britain in the early eighteenth century. As H. S. Bennett sagely remarked in his English Books and Readers half a century ago: ‘To speak of the reading public is to speak of a body about which we are very imperfectly informed.’19 Not that this has prevented Jürgen Habermas and his disciples from writing about ‘the bourgeois reading public of the eighteenth century’,20 even though, as David Cressy observes: Every study demonstrates that literacy in pre-​industrial England was closely and consistently associated with social and economic positions … The gentle, clerical and professional classes, of course, had full possession of literacy, except for a few who were decrepit or dyslexic. Members of this dominant class, who comprised no more than 5 per cent of the population, were the primary audience for most of the output of the press. Literacy was an attribute of their status and an active element in their lives. Here, and here only, was the seventeenth-​century cultivated elite. And 16

  John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 93. See also Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-​Century England (London: Europa Publications, 1982). 17   Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–​1850 (London: Routledge, 2002). 18   Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780–​ 1840 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 227–​8, 18. 19  H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1558–​1603 (Cambridge: CUP, 1965), 2. 20  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 85. For an insightful assessment of the validity and influence of Habermas’s assertions on the emergence of a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ in the eighteenth century, see Brian Cowan’s essay in the present volume.

Prologue   xxiii among their wives and daughters were the principal female participants in literate culture, a minority within a minority.21

While it is almost certainly the case that there was a growth in literacy between 1701 and 1800, in the absence of firm evidence it would be imprudent to overstate the case. E. P. Thompson doubted whether ‘a purposive, cohesive, growing middle class of professional men and of the manufacturing middle class’ existed, ‘(except, perhaps, in London) until the last three decades of the century’.22 Every bit as disconcerting for those who believe in the emergence of a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ at the turn of the eighteenth century is Cressy’s observation that ‘The period between 1720 and 1760 is one in which virtually nothing is known about the incidence of literacy’.23 If, as I have suggested, there are serious doubts about the ‘rise’ of the middle class in Britain, or the ‘rise’ of a bourgeois reading public in the early eighteenth century, then the search for the kind of favourable conditions necessary for ‘the appearance of our first three novelists’—​Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding—​‘within a single generation’ may be misguided, more especially as the thesis that ‘the rise of the novel’ took place in these years is not borne out by the statistical evidence. Comparatively few new works of prose fiction were published during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. Considerably more were in fact published in the 1670s and 1680s, a significant number of which were actually called novels on their title pages, and described as such in the Term Catalogues. True, there were brief booms between the publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719 and the publication of Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, and once again in the 1740s after the publication of Pamela. But the real upturn in the production of new novels took place only in the later 1780s—​an increase which was sustained throughout the 1790s and into the nineteenth century.24 And, as I have already remarked, this transformation in the fortunes of ‘the novel’ was accompanied by a growing stability in the terms used to describe prose fiction. The final desideratum for the acceptance of ‘the novel’ as a form of literature meriting critical respect was provided by Scott as ‘The Author of the Waverley Novels’. To adopt Homer Obed Brown’s term, Scott’s contribution helped to ‘institutionalize’ the novel by allowing it to realize its ‘generic identity’.25 For this reason, the approach taken in the present volume is radically different from that of The Rise of the Novel and other subsequent attempts to offer a ‘grand narrative’ which seeks to account for the origins of the English novel. Rather than concentrating on the novel’s ‘birth’, or ‘origins’, or ‘rise’, 21  David Cressy, ‘Literacy in Context: Meaning and Measurement in Early Modern England,’ in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 315. 22  E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991), 31–​2. 23  Cressy, ‘Literacy in Context’, 317. 24  These figures are derived from McBurney, A Check List of English Prose Fiction 1700–​1739; Jerry C. Beasley, A Check List of Prose Fiction Published in England 1740–​1749 (Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1972); James Raven, British Fiction, 1750–​1770: A Chronological Check-List of Prose Fiction Printed in Britain and Ireland (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1989); and Garside et al. (eds.), The English Novel, 1770–​1829. 25  Homer Obed Brown, Institutions of the English Novel from Defoe to Scott (Philadelphia:  U of

Pennsylvania P, 1997), p. xi.

xxiv

xxiv   Prologue The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-​Century Novel aims simply to supply critical and contextual commentary on the long prose fiction which was published in English from the later seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Instead of merely offering chapters on ‘canonical’ authors, therefore, the emphasis is placed on viewing Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Burney, Radcliffe, Edgeworth, Austen, and Scott in perspective. Their novels, in other words, are situated against the background provided by the rest of the fiction which was published while they were writing, as well as against the cultural background of the period, including the conditions governing their production and publication. Similarly, while a number of contributors comment on ways in which contemporaries sought to deal with questions of definition—​some of them even seeking to contribute to early twenty-​first-​century debates on what constitutes a novel—​there has been no attempt to suggest that there is a consensus on such a vexed question, much less to offer yet another ‘grand narrative’ purporting to account for the emergence and development of that eclectic entity, ‘the English novel’. J. A. Downie

Pa rt  I

1660 –​17 7 0 :  F ROM ‘N OV E L S’ TO  W HAT I S N OT Y E T ‘ T H E  N OV E L’

2

The Economics of Culture, 1660–​1770

4

Chapter 1

The B o ok Tra de at t h e Turn of the E i g h t e e nt h Centu ry Peter Hinds

Introduction Sir Roger L’Estrange was the chief press censor for Charles II and James II. In his pamphlet, Considerations in Order to a Regulation of the Press, he identified a surprisingly broad array of people involved in the production and distribution of books upon whom he thought a close eye should be kept. He pointed to:  the Advisors, Authors, Compilers, Writers, Printers, Correctors, Stitchers, and Binders of unlawful Books and Pamphlets: together with all Publishers, Dispersers and Concealers of them in General:  and all the Stationers, Posts, Hackney-​ Coachmen, Carryers, Boatmen, Mariners, Hawkers, Mercury-​Women, Pedlers, and Ballad-​Singers so offending in Particular.1

L’Estrange was writing the year after the passing of the Licensing Act of 1662 which commanded that ‘No Persons [were] to print Seditious and Heretical Pamphlets, or import or publish such Pamphlets’. The Act argued that ‘the well-​government and regulating of Printers and Printing Presses is matter of Publique care … especially considering that by the general licentiousnes of the late times many evil disposed persons have been encouraged to print and sell heretical, schismatical, blasphemous, seditious and treasonable Bookes, Pamphlets and Papers’.2 In attempting to contain such revolutionary ideas, 1  Roger L’Estrange, Considerations in Order to a Regulation of the Press (London: Henry Brome, 1663), 31. 2  The Statutes of the Realm (London, 1909), 5: 428–​35: the punctuation has been altered but the spelling is original.

6

6   PETER HINDS L’Estrange cast his net very wide, suggesting that print publication involved an extensive production and distribution network involving more than the agents with whom we might be more routinely familiar—​the author, printer, publisher, and bookseller—​and that it is important to set printed texts in a broader publishing context. To establish this broader context, those at the end of L’Estrange’s list should be taken into consideration, especially the hawkers, pedlars, and ballad-​singers. Such sellers would all ‘cry’ their wares in one way or another: they would carry small and inexpensive printed books, pamphlets, and poems and the sale of their goods involved an oral performance of some kind, either crying the titles, vocally advertising the content, or singing a sample of the latest ballad (indeed ballads usually began life as oral texts, were subsequently written down, found their way into print, and could then be performed orally again).3 These sellers were difficult to monitor and regulate, and they illustrate the relationship and the interpenetration the book trade had with other media of publication in the late seventeenth century, in this case with the spoken word (using ‘publication’ here in its broadest sense of ‘making public’). According to Adam Fox, late-​seventeenth-​century society was ‘partially literate … in which many could not read and even those who could received much of their information and knowledge, edification and entertainment, by listening to the spoken word’, and where ‘oral traditions … remained vital and highly developed’.4 Understanding the book trade therefore requires consideration of specific historical moments in the development of print publication in an attempt to capture the complex ways in which texts could circulate and thus the ways in which they were experienced and ultimately understood. This circulation, and the interpenetration of spoken and printed discourse, can be brought to life vividly in the coffee-​house environment, a phenomenon that developed in the mid to late seventeenth century in England and burgeoned in the eighteenth. The coffee house provided a new social space in which printed texts—​such as topical pamphlets, newspapers, other serial publications, and poetry—​could circulate, and offered a forum for the discussion and exchange of opinion fuelled by these texts. Here, again, spoken and printed discourse were closely related to one another and demonstrate how, at this time, ‘the oral and the textual fed in and out of one another in reciprocal and mutually enriching ways’.5 Within this coffee-​house context of informal reading and debate, there developed from about 1735 onwards a system of subscription lending; some coffee houses built up a library of titles which could be read on the premises for a fee. Even if the coffee-​house environment was not suitable for reading texts longer than twelve pages (or thereabouts), this culture of lending and borrowing books may have helped inspire the ‘circulating’ libraries which developed from the 1740s and which played a role in the distribution and consumption of longer and more expensive texts, the novel amongst them.6 3  Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1998), 153–​6. 4  Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–​1700 (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 49–​50. 5 Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 363. 6  Markman Ellis, ‘Coffee-​House Libraries in Mid-​Eighteenth-​Century London’, The Library, 7th ser., 10/​1 (2009), 27–​8, 36.

The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century    7 Fox’s sense of the ‘textual’ refers not only to print but to manuscript publication. Naturally this form of publication pre-​dates print and involved scribes writing multiple copies of texts for circulation, albeit in smaller quantities than the technology of print allowed and with a smaller and often less extensive circulation. As Harold Love points out, ‘many of the texts known to an educated English reader of the seventeenth century would have been encountered in manuscript rather than in print’. He notes that ‘the advent of the press … did not extinguish older methods of publication through manuscript’, and what he terms ‘scribal publication … had a role in the culture and commerce of texts just as assured as that of print publication’.7 Print, then, was one medium alongside older forms; its development was a gradual process. These other forms of publication—​oral and manuscript—​remained an important part of how texts of all kinds (news, political opinion, poetry, drama, prose fiction, theology, or history) were distributed and experienced. Printed books need to be situated in a broad field of communication to get a clear, contextualized picture of the book trade in the period. Nevertheless, the importance of print technology to the phenomenon of the novel in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was fundamental, as the length of these texts would make scribal reproduction vastly expensive and their readership a rarefied elite. The novel’s readership was large in comparison to manuscript publication, though the price of lengthy printed books was still out of reach of many in society. The novel emerged out of and alongside other methods of publication, but it capitalized and depended upon the development of printing in England. This contextualizing of printed texts might nudge us into considering what books really meant to late-​seventeenth-​century readers; that is, into considering the ways in which they circulated and were experienced, not only in terms of their content, but as physical objects. Recently, much valuable work has been done in the history of the book and reading (upon which this essay will draw) in order to try and uncover these experiences and we are now beginning to get a richer sense of how people read in the late seventeenth century, as responses to books are traced and attention is paid to real, historical readers in contrast to the ‘ideal’, abstract reader. So, in order to give a character of the book trade in the late seventeenth century this essay will look, in the next section, at the organizations and institutions of the book trade as well as print regulation; it is a highly compressed narrative which sets aside some complexities and details of the book trade’s history in order to provide a longer view, beginning with the origins of printing in England and moving through to the early eighteenth century. Many of the important developments in the book trade in the eighteenth century—​such as debates over copyright and the growth of the book trade outside London—​make better sense within this historical context. The following section then considers printed books as physical objects and the individual experiences of readers; in order to do so it will provide several brief case studies of readers and authors. These sections thus use very different methods in an attempt, firstly, to consider broad historical 7 

Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​Century England (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 3–​4.

8

8   PETER HINDS contexts and developments, and secondly, to look closely at the surviving testimony of readers and their encounters with books, including novels.

Organizations, Institutions, and Book Trade Regulation When printing began in England in the late fifteenth century, it was a trade dominated by foreigners.8 Although the Englishman William Caxton was an important pioneer, the majority of the personnel and all of the technology involved (the printing press, cases of individual letters of metal type, as well as the paper) came from continental Europe. Only in the 1520s and 1530s, largely as a consequence of royal intervention which sought to protect domestic trade, did Englishmen begin to get a foothold. Royal grants of patents to individual printers to print particular books, including bibles, were gradually extended to the grant of monopoly rights to print entire classes of books. Royal intervention also encompassed the control of books printed in England containing political or religious views unpalatable to the Crown and Church by means of pre-​and post-​publication censorship. Henry VIII issued a proclamation in 1538 that all books should be licensed by the Privy Council before going to print, and that books could be seized after they had been printed, and those responsible prosecuted. These regulations were reinforced and refined by subsequent monarchs: Elizabeth I added the two Archbishops, the Bishop of London, and the Vice Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge Universities to the list of licensers, while a Star Chamber decree of 1637 added further measures, including restricting the number of printers in London to twenty. Such state censorship can be seen as a response to the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation and the break-​up of the Christian Church throughout Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Moreover, controls on imported books, whilst protecting domestic trade, also served the state in terms of censorship, impeding the flow of innovative ideas from the Continent. These early mechanisms of control—​especially the exclusive patent and monopoly rights and pre-​publication licensing—​were hugely important in conditioning the development of the book trade in subsequent years, particularly with regard to the most vexed issue of all—​copyright. The ownership of a title, and the protection of rights to print it, were fundamental to members of the trade, guaranteeing business and a stable income after making substantial investments in labour, equipment, and raw materials. Royal patents and monopolies helped provide such guarantees for some in the trade, 8 

In this section I have drawn on several sources, the following extensively: John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1996); Michael Treadwell, ‘The Stationers and the Printing Acts at the End of the Seventeenth Century’, James Raven, ‘The Economic Context’, and John Barnard ‘Introduction’, all in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4: 1557–​1695 (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 753–​76, 568–​82, and 1–​26 respectively.

The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century    9 but not all printing was limited to books under patent and monopoly. Consequently, as demand for books increased and the trade expanded throughout the sixteenth century, a new method of regulation was needed, both for the government and those involved in printing. This new method took the form of the Stationers’ Company, which was granted its Royal Charter in 1557.9 The Company emerged out of the medieval guild system which structured trades of all kinds. To set up business in London one needed to attain the status of freeman, and this was possible only after serving a term of apprenticeship within the guild system. Initially, before printing arrived in England, the Stationers’ Guild was made up of scriveners, booksellers, and bookbinders—​essentially the activities involved with manuscript production and circulation—​and printers gradually became members themselves as their trade grew. The Stationers’ Company went on to develop several important functions: it created the Stationers’ Register into which all new titles were to be entered providing proof of ownership of and rights to print a title; it had the right of self-​regulation and to control of apprenticeships and progression in the trade; it established that non-​ members of the Company were prohibited from printing and the Company had the right to seize illegally printed books. What also emerged from these Crown and Company structures was London’s dominance of the book trade in the seventeenth century, which would continue into the eighteenth, but would eventually be challenged to some degree by other cities and towns. The royal patents and monopolies were awarded to printers operating in London, which suited the Crown in terms of control. Furthermore in order to own a printing press one had to be a member of the Stationers’ Company, and to be a member of the Company one had to serve an apprenticeship in London. This again reinforced the importance of the metropolis. There was no explicit prohibition against printing in the provinces until the 1662 Licensing Act, but this situation suited the financial interests of those established in London. Moreover, another structural determinant reinforcing London’s trading importance, and thus the market for goods of all kinds, including books, was demography; whilst London’s population was around half a million in the late seventeenth century there were only four towns outside the capital with populations of over 10,000. There were thus considerable barriers to establishing a press outside London and so printing remained restricted to a limited number of Stationers. The novel’s development was linked to the growth and the broadening of a national readership; crucial in this was the challenge to the historic trade-​restrictive practices, especially those of the Stationers’ Company, which would ultimately lead to the gradual spread of printing outside London. Alongside these legal and economic features of the book trade it is useful to consider the kinds of book being produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as, although certain species of fiction did feature in the early years of the book trade, and although the market for it gradually expanded over time, fiction did not necessarily 9 

For the Stationers’ Company see Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: A History, 1403–​1959 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960).

10

10   PETER HINDS inspire the invention or propel the first growth of printing in continental Europe or in England. In fact the most popular and financially remunerative publications in England until the eighteenth century were those dealing with religious matters (bibles, psalm books, and catechisms), books pertaining to law, school books (primers and ABCs), and also almanacs (popular for their astrological predictions but also for practical, general information on weather, farming, and medical matters). These sorts of book were granted patents and monopolies and could guarantee a stable income. Towards the end of the seventeenth century and beyond, publishers such as Henry Herringman and Jacob Tonson did begin to develop specialisms in, and make good profits from, certain kinds of literary fiction (drama and poetry) but, overall, non-​fiction predominated. The Civil Wars and Interregnum, leading to the abolition of the prerogative courts, the execution of Charles I, and the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, generated an enormous surge in printed books, driven by highly politicized pamphlets and newspapers. There are records of 848 published titles from 1640; by 1642 this had more than quadrupled to 3,666.10 With the nation’s political structures under threat and no longer functioning effectively, restricting printing was practically impossible. Indeed, if a graph of quantity of titles published over time is plotted for the seventeenth century, the peaks correspond closely to political and religious crises, with the Civil Wars producing the most extreme peak of all. As the figures in the table demonstrate, against the background of a general rise in titles between 1621 and 1680—​a rise which continued into the early eighteenth century and beyond—​there was an extraordinary increase of 270 per cent over the preceding twenty years between 1641 and 1660, followed by a 30 per cent decline between 1661 and 1680.

Number of titles11

1621–​40

1641–​60

1661–​80

12,029

32,238

22,289

Although Parliament attempted to control the presses at various times between 1641 and 1660, the licensing regulations were difficult to enforce and, in addition to the increased expression of political opinion in print, piracy (the flouting of others’ copyright) became more common. Naturally, the potential of print technology for producing hundreds of copies relatively quickly helped spread radical religious and political opinion in quantities impossible in an entirely manuscript and scribal culture. Manuscript publication was still important, but print certainly played a significant role in generating and sustaining political revolution. Immediately following Charles II’s restoration in 1660 there was much legislative activity of a religious and social nature which attempted to contain the energies 10  Survival rates are complicated. It cannot be assumed that all books survived, especially the cheap and ephemeral. 11  My figures are taken from the ‘Statistical Tables’ compiled by Barnard and Bell for Barnard and McKenzie (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book, 4: 779–​85.

The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century    11 released by the Civil Wars, including the Printing or Licensing Act of 1662 which sought to prevent another outpouring of radical religious and political sentiment. Sir Roger L’Estrange was appointed chief censor (his official title was the Surveyor of the Press). His ideological conservatism, strict Church of England beliefs, and loyalty to the restored Stuart monarchy fuelled his attempts to suppress what he considered seditious opinion. For L’Estrange, politics was beyond the intellectual reach of common people, and printing, and the consequent spread of opinion, encouraged the ignorant to wrestle with ideas of which they could only have an imperfect grasp. The proof of this, for L’Estrange, had been the execution of Charles I and the collapse of political order. The Licensing Act had some effect in suppressing printed political opinion, although many of its measures proved difficult to enforce. For instance, even though the Act reiterated the 1637 Decree that there should only be twenty printers operating in London, at the time it was passed there were fifty-​nine, the numbers declining to thirty-​three by the late 1660s as a consequence of fire and plague rather than strict enforcement of the legislation. When the Licensing Act lapsed in 1695—​never to be renewed—​there was a gradual expansion of printing in London as well as the possibility for development in the provinces: between 1695 and 1705 the number of printing houses in London increased from forty-​five to around seventy; presses were established in Bristol in 1695, in Shrewsbury in 1696, and in Exeter in 1698. The growth continued.12 The Licensing Act thus had some limited restraining effect when in force and, whilst these figures do not represent an explosion of printing in the early eighteenth century in response to its lapse, they do represent growth made possible only by its demise, both within and without London. Even though the Licensing Act was not renewed, there was pressure to reintroduce regulation in some form. Without it, the Stationers’ Company was liable to lose control of the trade, particularly with regard to the registration of copy-​ownership in the Stationers’ Register. Without some guarantee of copyright, piracy was becoming a menace to, and taking away profits from, copy-​owners in the trade. The Stationers thus lobbied for the Act’s reinstitution periodically for many years until the introduction of the ‘Act for the Encouragement of Learning’ in 1710—​the actual title of what is now known as the Copyright Act—​which granted publishers fourteen years of copyright for new titles, and twenty-​one years for existing titles. Whilst this was a significant development, the fiercely protective Stationers ensured that copyright wrangles continued for many decades, and it was not until the early 1770s that the concept of perpetual copyright was laid to rest.13 The growth of newspaper publication was another aspect of the trade that benefited from the lapse of the Licensing Act. From 1665, a few years after the Licensing Act came into force, the only printed newspaper was the London Gazette (published bi-​ weekly). Soon after 1695, however, there were several newspapers in London and many in the provinces. If London’s dominance had made setting up as printer in the provinces at first financially difficult and then legislatively impossible between 1662 and 1695, bookselling was 12  13 

Treadwell, ‘The Stationers and the Printing Acts’, 767, 776, 772. See the essay ‘The Book Trade 1770–​1832’ by John Feather.

12

12   PETER HINDS a different matter, and this aspect of the book trade underwent expansion. There were booksellers outside of London by the late sixteenth century and more established themselves in the early seventeenth; Norwich has the earliest recorded bookseller, but other bookselling towns include Oxford and Cambridge (the two university towns), York, Shrewsbury, Exeter, Bristol, and Newcastle. In many respects this served to entrench London’s productive dominance as books printed there were distributed further afield, yet this distribution to, and bookselling in, the provinces was an important feature in the book trade; London relied upon this market of provincial readers and the agency of local booksellers helped shape reading patterns and tastes.14 Another engine for the distribution of books, especially novels, in London and the provinces, were the libraries, usually run by booksellers, a phenomenon which developed from the 1740s onwards. This growing system of book lending ensured that more readers—​in terms of geography, gender, and class—​could gain greater access to books, although purchasing lengthier books remained something of a luxury. A baseline for calculating a market for books is literacy, although establishing literacy levels is problematic. However, despite evidence for literacy being hard to come by and difficult to interpret, David Cressy has been able to take several useful, general snapshots of literacy rates for men and women and how they changed over two centuries:15

Literate men Literate women

1580s

1640s

1710s

1740s

20% 5%

30% 10%

45% 25%

58% 32%

These global levels are subject to local variation. For instance, social class affected one’s ability to read and write. The professions (clergymen, lawyers, doctors) were universally literate, the gentry almost universally, and as we move down the social scale we find decreasing levels of literacy, from yeomen, through tradesmen, craftsmen, and husbandmen, to labourers where there was a very high proportion of illiteracy. Geographical location made a difference too, and literacy was at its highest in London both for men and women, lower in other cities and towns, and lower still in rural areas.16 Nonetheless, difficulties aside, these estimates of the growth of literacy amongst men and women are plausible and in line with what one might expect. So the market for print grew in specific ways from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century. Whilst London’s dominance continued, printing gradually began 14 

John Barnard and Maureen Bell, ‘The English Provinces’, in Barnard and McKenzie (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book, 4: 671–​3, 686. 15  David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: CUP, 1980), 175–​7. See also W. B. Stephens, ‘Literacy in England, Scotland, and Wales, 1500–1900’, History of Education Quarterly 30/​4 (1990), 552–​5. 16  David Cressy, ‘Levels of Illiteracy in England, 1530–​1730’, Historical Journal 20/​1 (1977), 1–​23; ‘Literacy in Seventeenth-​Century England: More Evidence’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8/​1 (1977), 141–​50.

The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century    13 spreading to towns in the provinces (though bookselling outside London had always been possible). The restrictive practices generated by the Stationers’ Company—​ controlling apprenticeships, limiting trade to London, perpetual rights to print titles—​ began to give way to freer trade (in particular the new copyright legislation began to open up the market). Literacy levels, and thus the market for books, continued to rise. Booksellers specializing in certain kinds of ‘fiction’ began to establish themselves. And from the 1740s libraries ensured that it was financially possible for books to find their way to more readers. Thus, aided by the expiry of the Licensing Act, by the early eighteenth century many of the early structural limitations and regulations had fallen away, or had begun to fall away and, whilst this was not a period of unfettered growth, the removal of much protectionism, regulation, and private vested interests allowed for an expansion of printing not possible before.

Books and Their Readers The Quaker George Fox related the following violent incident in his Journal, which occurred in 1652 in Tickhill, near Doncaster. Fox had entered a church in order to preach his own unorthodox religious doctrine against the Church of England; ‘when I began to speak,’ he wrote, ‘they [the residents of Tickhill] fell upon me and the clerk up with his Bible as I was speaking and hit me in the face that my face gushed out with blood that I bled exceedingly in the steeplehouse’.17 Fox recorded many acts of violence against him in his Journal, as he represented himself as suffering for his radical religious beliefs, but this particular recollection is interesting for the way he represents the physical book, wielded by a ‘church’ official, doing bodily harm as a material and symbolic representation of the spiritual damage that authorized, enforced interpretation of Scripture mediated by a Church of England minister could do. As a Quaker, Fox privileged revelation and individual interpretation of the Bible. This is an extreme example but it illustrates that books have value (in Fox’s case controversial and symbolic) often related to, but over and above, their textual content. In this respect the broader ‘significance’ or experience of a book can encompass more than the text. The physical book frequently mattered to readers and Samuel Pepys gives us ample evidence of this in a number of ways: ‘To [St] Paul’s churchyard’, he wrote in his diary on 8 July 1664, ‘about my books—​and to the binders and directed the doing of my Chaucer, though they were not full neat enough for me, but pretty well it is—​and thence to the clasp-​makers to have it clasped and [em]bossed’.18 This was Pepys’s copy of The workes of our ancient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer (1602), an enormous and expensive book which he considered important and valuable enough to justify the 17 

George Fox, The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 78–​9. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Mathews, 11 vols. (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1970–​83), 5: 199. 18 

14

14   PETER HINDS expense of rebinding, clasping, and embossing, and the effort of visiting both bookbinder and claspmaker. Pepys was proud of his books and sensitive about their appearance; on 18 January 1665 he went to his bookseller to ‘give thorough direction for the new binding of a great many of my books, to make my whole study of the same binding’ (6: 14). In July 1666 he embarked upon a major project to redesign his study, commissioning a carpenter to build several bespoke bookcases and employing a bookbinder to new-​ gild the spines of his books ‘to make them handsome, to stand up in my new presses [i.e., bookcases]’ (7: 243). So Pepys had a very personalized relationship with his books and played a part in their manufacture and remanufacture: readers could therefore be very close to the process of book making. The study of such historically specific experiences as well as the material aspects of texts has been a burgeoning and valuable field of investigation over the last twenty years.19 If the significance of physical books was important to readers so were booksellers and the general culture of book buying. These contexts had a hand in steering readers in their approach to what they read, and in this respect readers’ relationships with booksellers can be revealing. On 10 August 1667, Pepys visited Henry Herringman’s bookshop in the New Exchange:  I hear of several new books coming out—​Mr. Pratts history of the Royal Society and Mrs. Phillips’s poems. Sir Jo. Denhams poems are going to be all printed together; and among others, some new things, and among them he showed me a copy of verses of his upon Sir Jo. Minnes’s going heretofore to Bulloigne to eat a pig. Cowley, he tells me, is dead; who it seems was a mighty civil, serious man, which I did not know before. Several good plays are also likely to be abroad soon—​as, Mustapha and Henry the 5th. Here having stayed and divertized myself a good while, I home again. (8: 380)

Pepys discovers which publications are forthcoming, is shown a new piece of verse by its author, Sir John Denham, and picks up some gossip about the poet Abraham Cowley (both the fact of his death and a new opinion about his personality). Pepys’s administrative position on the Navy Board brought him into contact with Denham who was the surveyor of the royal works (before Sir Christopher Wren) and a poet of renown. Denham shows Pepys a copy of his short satirical poem ‘To Sir John Mennis being invited from Calice to Bologne to eat a Pig’, most probably in manuscript as Henry Herringman printed Denham’s collected poems (in which this satire appears) in the following year. So here, manuscript, print, author, and reader come together in the space of the bookseller’s shop; and, even if such access to forthcoming works and their authors was not absolutely every customer’s experience—​and Pepys is one reader, not all readers—​this does illustrate the potential intimacy of the bookshop together with the possibilities for information exchange about publications, even in a large shop such as

19  D. F. McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1986; Cambridge: CUP, 1999) has been influential. For a useful gathering-​together of essays on the topic see David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (eds.), The Book History Reader (London: Routledge, 2002).

The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century    15 Herringman’s. Only two days later Pepys was back at Herringman’s shop hearing other customers (whom he knows) lamenting Cowley’s death—​‘the best poet of our nation’, he is told, and ‘a good man’ (8: 383). Pepys did not know Cowley personally, but their social circles certainly overlapped, and so a picture emerges here of a close relationship with the book trade amongst literate, book-​buying Londoners; we get a glimpse of a social world with a large degree of acquaintance or at least familiarity, even amongst the frequenters of this particularly well-​known bookseller. So the experience of, and encounters within, bookshops manoeuvre customers in their approach to authors and books, and their social interactions are a part of this process. It must be said, however, that getting access to the traffic of customers, trade, and information within bookshops in the late seventeenth century is difficult and we are often left with anecdotal moments such as those Pepys provides, but excellent work has been done with the evidence that survives.20 The booksellers’ role in publishing could be important in other ways. Their reputation amongst readers often had a strong bearing on how an author’s work was received and valued and, in a letter from September 1696, the antiquary Basil Kennet passed on his opinion of one particular bookseller’s personal standing and how this affected his relationship with the printed book (in this case Dryden’s translation of Virgil): ‘’twill be impossible to think of Virgil without Mr Dryden as of either without Mr Tonson’.21 Dryden’s monumental effort was thus mediated to the reading public by Jacob Tonson, who was becoming a major figure in the book trade in the 1690s whilst also gaining broader cultural and even political significance. Tonson’s growing influence was picked up satirically in the following lines from William Shippen’s Faction Display’d, which mockingly ventriloquizes Tonson’s self-​importance:  I am the Touchstone of all Modern Wit, Without my stamp in vain your Poets write. Those only purchase everliving Fame, That in my Miscellany Plant their Name.22

Since the 1680s, Tonson had been publishing miscellany collections of poetry and to appear in one of these, according to Shippen’s satire, is to guarantee fame for the poet: Tonson’s name ratifies the poet’s value. In order to look further at how readers approached their books it is useful to widen the focus and consider the information they could glean about the latest publications from booksellers’ catalogues. The first edition of the Term Catalogues was published in Michaelmas Term 1668; it was printed by the booksellers John Starkey and 20  See Giles Mandlebrote, ‘From the Warehouse to the Counting House: Booksellers and Bookshops in Late 17th-​Century London’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), A Genius for Letters: Booksellers and Bookselling from the 16th to the 20th Century (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1995), 49–​84. See also Johns, Nature of the Book, 58–​186. 21  Quoted in Kathleen M. Lynch, Jacob Tonson: Kit-​Cat Publisher (Knoxville: Tennessee UP, 1971), 119. 22  Faction Display’d. A Poem. Answer’d Paragraph by Paragraph (London, 1704), 17.

16

16   PETER HINDS Robert Clavell and lists most of the printed books licensed for publication in a particular term.23 The books are grouped under the following general headings: ‘Divinity’, ‘Physick’, ‘Mathematicks’, ‘Plays and Poems’, ‘History’, ‘Law’, ‘Charts and Maps’, ‘Musick’, ‘Libri Latini’, ‘Reprinted Books’, and ‘Miscellanies’. As these catalogues reach their final editions (the last was in 1711), new categories begin to emerge such as ‘History and Politicks’, ‘Mathematical Sciences’, ‘Physick and Natural Philosophy’, and ‘Philology’, but notably missing is any category for the novel, or any category relating to prose fiction that we might recognize today. Michael McKeon has argued in relation to the Term Catalogues that: ‘By modern standards the most pressing problem raised by such usage is the absence of any will to distinguish consistently between “history” and “literature,” “fact” and “fiction”.’24 The predominant organizing principle of the Term Catalogues is genre or subject matter which, with ‘Libri Latini’, ‘Reprinted Books’, and ‘Miscellanies’, gives way to the notion of books in general (i.e., language, reprints, and miscellaneous), and details about author, publisher, format, and price concede precedence to this conceptual way of listing books. Other essays in the Handbook consider the evolution of the idea and forms of the novel but the organizing principle of the Term Catalogues represents a starting point for discussion: the novel must emerge from this kind of taxonomy, this way of dividing up, conceiving of, or thinking about, printed discourse, for authors and for readers. However, accounting for the emergence of new literary forms is a complex activity, and as J. Paul Hunter writes:  in the late seventeenth century in England—​at a moment in the history of reading when audiences were broadening and readers were learning to read for new purposes, when generic categories were loosening and new species were becoming visible—​texts constituted themselves self-​consciously from other texts for readers newly discovering how their needs and desires interacted. Readers read, as writers write, in the context of the continuity of their own experiences and desires.25

Hunter goes on to trace the novel’s development from a range of prior forms of publication and in doing so he charts an increased appetite for the public, printed revelation of private affairs (to take one strand of his argument). A major consideration in this dynamic is autobiographical writing, examples of which we have seen as evidence earlier. George Fox’s and Samuel Pepys’s texts represent different kinds of autobiographical expression: Fox’s Journal was written as a memoir, retrospectively in the 1670s, and was printed posthumously in 1694; it is an example of the ‘spiritual autobiography’, the 23 

Mercurius Librarius, printed for John Starkey, runs from Michaelmas Term 1668 to Midsummer Term 1670. It becomes A Catalogue of Books, printed for Robert Clavell from Midsummer Term 1670 to the last edition in Easter Term 1711. 24  Michael McKeon, ‘Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel’, Cultural Critique 1/​1 (1985), 163. 25  J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​Century English Fiction (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. x.

The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century    17 intimate, confessional publications of Protestant nonconformists in the mid to late seventeenth century which shared experiences with, and offered guidance for, co-​religionists throughout tests of faith and religious persecution; Pepys’s diary was more straightforwardly (mostly) a daily record of his life. Fox’s work was published for the spiritual support of fellow Quakers; Pepys’s writing remained private, and in code, during his lifetime. The seventeenth century saw a rise in the practice of diary keeping (the capturing, examining, and taking account of one’s life), impelled at root by a religious imperative to record and scrutinize the self, and later saw a subsequent rise in autobiographical writing. Although the novel did not simply and directly descend from the diary or the autobiography these methods of close self-​examination ‘made it possible for the novel to emerge by creating a cultural climate receptive to issues of privacy’.26 Samuel Richardson’s later work of epistolary fiction Pamela (1740), with its self-​examining, letter-​writing heroine, owes a debt to the scrutinizing habits of the diary and autobiography and both belongs and responds to the phenomenon of their growth. It is also related to, in part, the growing practice of private letters being printed for wider public consumption (for various reasons of political comment or protest, instruction, and entertainment). In this respect, the seventeenth century was thoroughly familiar with private manuscript letters finding their way into print, amongst which could be found the correspondence of political figures (letters revealing the arcana imperii, or state secrets), domestic letters (familial and amorous), and letters on spiritual matters. The printing press contained a revelatory potential for making the private and the secret very public, and the frisson generated by opening to public view the doors of government chambers or domestic closets provided by print was significant. In the middle of the century The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645) controversially printed a selection of King Charles I’s letters to and from the Queen, Henrietta Maria, which had been captured during the Royalist defeat at the battle of Naseby. These letters were edited and annotated by Charles I’s political opponents in order to score propaganda points in the print disputes of the Civil Wars. From these revelations Charles emerged weak and overly influenced by his French, Catholic wife in matters of state and the publication generated several pamphlet responses. Around thirty years later, during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1678–​ 82), the letters of a secretary close to the Duke of York, Edward Coleman, sent to Louis XIV’s court in France were discovered. They seemed to confirm a Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and reintroduce the Catholic faith to England. These letters were examined behind closed doors in the Privy Council and Parliament and later printed. These revelations, with their sense of illicit access, which sensationally brought state machinations to public eyes, also delineated character and relationships; in The Kings Cabinet Opened they showed a devoted couple and an influential wife, and in the case of Coleman, an ambitious, zealous, and deluded young Catholic man. Furthermore, they presented a more unbuttoned, unguarded, and familiar language constructed for

26 Hunter, Before Novels, 303.

18

18   PETER HINDS specific eyes and purposes, not with a wider public in mind. So print made possible this kind of public, collective peering into private affairs—​in these cases presented as scandalous, for readers’ outrage and censure—​and constituted part of contemporary readers’ expectations when presented with new and evolving but related ways of writing, Richardson’s included.27 Revelations of private affairs were also played out in fictional forms and, interestingly, in ways that played with the boundary between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’. For instance, Aphra Behn’s Love-​Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–​7) posed as ‘found text’. Behn kept her authorial identity a secret and the anonymous dedication to the work tells the reader of its supposed provenance: ‘Having when I was at Paris last Spring, met with a little Book of Letters, call’d L’Intregue de Philander & Silvia, I had a particular fancy … to translate ’em into English.’28 In fact the book Behn claimed she had translated did not exist; Behn used the idea of merely translating L’Intregue de Philander & Silvia as a form of protection as she was producing a politicized text which engaged with and criticized contemporary politicians and public figures.29 She was writing Tory, royalist propaganda primarily in order to discredit Ford Lord Grey (Philander) who became involved in a sexual scandal in the 1680s. Importantly, Love-​Letters also is at the beginning of a trend in publishing English printed translations of amorous foreign correspondence in the late seventeenth century—​Roger L’Estrange’s translation of Lettres portugaises as Five Love-​Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier (1678) represents another example—​which Ros Ballaster argues imports a new language of desire into English prose fiction.30 As William B. Warner notes, Richardson’s Pamela is pushing against texts such as Behn’s Love-​Letters in interesting, sometimes conflicting ways; Richardson must forge his own text in response to prior forms such as this, which involves a complex operation of rejection and criticism on the one hand and incorporation and appropriation on the other.31 Richardson’s response in Pamela begins on the title page where, with prolix and intense didacticism, he announces its purpose is to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the YOUTH of BOTH SEXES. A Narrative which has its Foundation in TRUTH and NATURE; and at the same that it agreeably entertains, by a Variety of curious and affecting Incidents, is intirely divested of all those Images, which, in too many Pieces calculated for Amusement only, tend to inflame the Minds, they should instruct.

27 

Although Clare Bryant expresses some valid reservations about a simple manuscript–​print/​ private–​public binary assumption, letters are perceived to be private and secretive even if in reality they could have a more social dimension (Eighteenth-​Century Letters and British Culture [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006], 6–​10). 28  Aphra Behn, Love-​Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (London: Randal Taylor, 1684), A2r. 29  Aphra Behn, Love-​Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, ed. Janet Todd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 3. 30  Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: OUP, 1992), 63. 31  William B. Warner, ‘The Elevation of the Novel in England: Hegemony and Literary History’, in Richard Kroll (ed.), The English Novel: 1700 to Fielding (London and New York: Longman, 1998), 49–​69.

The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century    19 For Richardson, Behn’s fiction—​and that of other women writers such as Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood—​belongs to those ‘Pieces calculated for Amusement only’ which ‘inflame’ readers’ imaginations. Yet at the same time that Richardson communicates his distance, he tells his own tale with the epistolary form and incorporates a seduction plot (as did Behn and others). As Toni Bowers points out, Richardson produced one of the ‘most … influential seduction stories of the eighteenth century’ and ‘was in many respects the heir of Behn, Manley, and Haywood’ even though he engaged polemically with these predecessors.32 Moreover, in terms of physical books, Pamela’s duodecimo format means that it is physically aligned with the precursors against which Richardson inveighs. Placing our modern selves within this dynamic of change in order to understand it can be fraught with difficulty but, whilst we can never read Pamela with the eyes of its first eighteenth-​century readers, we can find ways of approaching the book that avoid anachronism. As we have seen, locating Pamela within contemporary publishing contexts and readers’ experiences (for instance, the printing of private letters, factual or otherwise), and also their generic expectations (in relation to the Term Catalogues’ taxonomy of discourse) helps align us with historical readings (and Hunter’s ‘experiences and desires’ of historical readers). Susan E. Whyman’s investigations into letter-​ writing between 1660 and 1800, and her efforts to recover the reading practices of an individual reader—​Jane Johnson—​around the time of Pamela’s publication, help us get closer to the horizons of expectations of contemporary readers. Johnson regularly read printed letter collections, factual or fictionalized, and was primed with a well-​developed ‘epistolary literacy’ (Whyman’s term) when she came to Pamela, which Richardson relied upon and utilized for his own epistolary fiction.33 As with the qualification in relation to Pepys earlier, Johnson was one reader, not all readers, and we should be careful about generalizing too readily, but these findings provide suggestive insights which allow us to position texts more carefully in respect of real readers’ experiences. The history of reading as a field of study has recently been fruitfully engaged in recovering the habits of readers, though evidence of private responses (rather than contemporary published, critical responses) can sometimes be difficult to find and difficult to interpret. As recent criticism has duly noted, it is important to guard against approaching Pamela too readily as a novel, and critics have found it useful to separate the idea of the novel (and the expectations this generates) from what these texts categorized as novels actually set out to do for their readers, or to separate this problematic generic classification from the author’s motivation and impulse to write and how a reader might have been primed to approach them. Richardson is a good example, as he never tired of telling his readers how they should be reading, how they should be affected by what 32  Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–​1760 (Oxford: OUP, 2011), 248, 252. 33  Susan E. Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–​1800 (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 173, 166, 9–​10, 19–​45.

20

20   PETER HINDS they read, and what moral they should draw from his publications. As Brean Hammond and Shaun Regan put it, in many ways Richardson was interested in ‘producing a livelier kind of conduct manual than had previously been attempted’. He did not even ‘see himself primarily as a novelist furthering the project of fiction writing. Rather, he was responding to a widely held perception that society was corrupted by degrees of immorality that established institutions were no longer capable of redressing.’34 For John Skinner, whilst Pamela takes literary influences from the romance tradition, the fable, and even the theatre, it also ‘seems a classic example of the fiction derived from “non-​ literary”, rather than “literary” models’.35 Literary criticism has blended with the histories of the book and reading to produce a more nuanced, and perhaps more cautious, history of literary change. Attempting to imagine the circumstances and experiences of historical readers in relation to their books and, alongside this, reconstructing the cultures of book production, bookselling, and book buying can provide important information and even qualify grand claims (however powerful and valuable) that are less grounded in the material world and actual historical behaviour.

Conclusion This essay has approached the topic of the book trade at the turn of the eighteenth century from different perspectives. It represents a very selective history of the book trade with one eye on the development of the novel. The first section took several chronological steps back in order to present a historical overview; the second moved in close to examine anecdotal, recorded responses to books and the culture of book buying and ownership, as well as considering the idea of genre at a more conceptual level. The histories of the book and reading are very plural disciplines and methodological approaches can encompass broad archival, statistical research through to tracking down, interpreting, and accounting for particular individualized, lived experiences. The intention here has been to set out some conditions of the book trade necessary for the development of the novel, and also to sketch the cultures of publishing and reading from out of which this form would emerge. As Roger E.  Stoddard writes:  ‘Whatever they may do, authors do not write books. Books are not written at all. They are manufactured by scribes and other artisans, by mechanics and other engineers and by printing presses and other machines.’36 Books are

34 

Brean Hammond and Shaun Regan, Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–​1789 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 85–​6. 35  John Skinner, An Introduction to Eighteenth-​Century Fiction: Raising the Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 77. 36  Roger E. Stoddard, quoted in Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 9.

The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century    21 thus part of a manufacturing process that operates within economic and legal constraints which should not be ignored. And as Roger Chartier notes: ‘Reading is not uniquely an abstract operation of the intellect: it brings the body into play, [and] it is inscribed in a space and a relationship with oneself or others.’37 Samuel Pepys’s experience is testimony to this point. These two quotations are intimately related as books are historical artefacts and readers are historical people. At the same time as we place texts in their cultural, philosophical, or political contexts, it is also valuable to place those texts in their immediate context of the physical book, those books in the hands of readers, and those readers in their studies, in coffee houses, in libraries, and in bookshops.

Select Bibliography Barnard, John, and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4: 1557–​1695 (Cambridge: CUP, 2002). Cressy, David, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: CUP, 1980). Feather, John, A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1996). Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-​Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–​ 1800, trans. David Gerard (London: Verso, 1976). Finklestein, David, and Alistair McCleery, The Book History Reader (London: Routledge, 2002). Hunter, J. Paul, Before Novels:  The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​Century English Fiction (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book:  Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1998). Love, Harold, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​Century England (Cambridge, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1998). McKenzie, D. F., Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1986; Cambridge: CUP, 1999). Whyman, Susan E., The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–​1800 (Oxford: OUP, 2009).

37 Chartier, The Order of Books, 8.

22

Chapter 2

Business of Fi c t i on Novel Publishing, 1695–​1774 Michael F. Suarez, S.J.

Unprecedented Growth in Readers and Publications The eighteenth century witnessed a remarkable proliferation of print. From the first decade to the last, the number of titles published annually in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland increased by more than 350 per cent.1 The annual output of publications rose especially sharply in the last four decades of the century (1761–​1800). Between 1763 and 1774, for example, there is a c.20 per cent increase in publication of books and pamphlets (counting titles and excluding variants wherever possible); between 1774 and 1783, c.15 per cent growth; and, most remarkably of all, between 1783 and 1793, a more than 40 per cent rise. We should bear in mind, however, that counting imprints is a flawed way to measure output (to say nothing of productive capacity). These statistics represent only numbers of imprints; they show a clear trajectory in the supply of print, but they do not genuinely measure productive output because they consider neither sheet counts nor edition quantities. The strong upward trend in the production of titles from the 1760s onwards may be accounted for, in part, by rapid demographic growth combined with improvements in literacy rates. In 1695, the population of England was approximately 5.1 million; in 1755, it had risen to about 6.1 million. By 1780, England had some 7.2 million inhabitants, and twenty years later at century’s end, there were more than 8.6 million residents. The 1 

For more detailed data, explanations of how the data were generated, their limitations, and extensive references to the scholarly literature on bibliometrics, demography, and literacy, see Michael F. Suarez, S.J., ‘Introduction: “The Worldliness of Print” ’ and ‘Toward a Bibliometric Analysis of the Surviving Record, 1701–​1800’, in Suarez and Michael F. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695–​1830 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 1–​36, 39–​65.

Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695–1774    23 growth in the market for print was not merely a function of a larger citizenry, however; among the most important factors contributing to the tremendous rise in the production and consumption of print, including novels, was the remarkable economic development that ran in tandem with the population increase. Along with that growth came an unprecedented rise in urbanization: between 1700 and 1800, the number of city dwellers in England increased from 870,000 to more than 2,427,000, or roughly 2.8 times the total for 1700. At the beginning of the century, some 55 per cent of the workforce was engaged in agriculture, but by 1800 only about 40 per cent of a much larger population were agricultural labourers.2 Throughout the 1700s, literacy rates rose, with women’s rates improving faster than men’s. At the time of Queen Anne’s death in 1714, approximately 45 per cent of men and 25 per cent of women were able to read. By mid-​century, adult male literacy stood at about 60 per cent; for adult females the figure had risen to some 40 per cent. For the rest of the century, adult male literacy remained stable at around 60 per cent, but women’s literacy continued to make gains, increasing to roughly 45 per cent by 1800.3 Correlating the growth in literacy with robust increases in population—​as well as urbanization and higher standards of living—​largely accounts for the remarkable growth of the English reading public. Taking into consideration the changing population and shifting age structure of that population over time, as well as varying literacy rates by gender, we may arrive at the following rough estimates. In 1700, the English reading public aged 15 and over consisted of approximately 1,267,000 individuals (815,000 males and 452,000 females). In 1750, the total number of adults able to read was around 1,894,000 (approximately 1,136,000 males and 758,000 females), an increase of nearly 50 per cent. During the following five decades, the rise in the numbers of readers was even more remarkable:  the 2,928,000 literate citizens (1,681,000 males and 1,247,000 females) in 1800 constitute a surge approaching 55 per cent. Thus, the adult English reading public at century’s end was about 2.3 times larger than at the accession of Queen Anne. Hazarding a similar analysis for Scotland is fraught with greater difficulty and, hence, uncertainty. Extrapolating from what is known, making informed assumptions and relying on estimates, we may say that in 1700 Scotland had about 200,000 readers over the age of 15; in 1750, perhaps some 315,000 adults could read—​an increase of 57.5 per cent. By 1800, significant growth in population and in female literacy produced a reading public numbering approximately 485,000, a 54 per cent rise. Overall, then, the reading public in Scotland was approximately 2.4 times larger in 1800 than in 1700. As in England, these readers were chiefly concentrated in metropolitan areas and, as the century progressed, had increasingly greater access to, and hence participation in, the world of print. 2  On the demography of England, see E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–​1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: CUP, 1989). 3  For an extended discussion and fuller references, see Suarez and Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 5: 8–​12.

24

24   MICHAEL F. SUAREZ, S.J.

The Fiction Market: Authors, Publishers, and Best-​Sellers The years from the definitive lapse of the Printing Acts to the Lords’ decision in Donaldson versus Becket that copyright was not perpetual (1695–​1774) witnessed the thoroughgoing commercialization of novel publishing and many attendant developments that materially affected the production, distribution, and reception of fiction in Britain. Among the more central changes were the emergence of an expanded reading public; the efflorescence of the newspaper and periodical press; the substantial enlargement of the provincial book trade; the advent and burgeoning of commercial circulating and subscription libraries; the genesis and expansion of literary reviews; the rise of specialist publishers of children’s books; the enlargement of the reprint trade; and the advent of new ways of thinking about authorship, patronage, and the market. No less an author than Samuel Johnson, the son of a bookseller, referred to ‘the trade of writing’ in The Rambler, no. 145 (1751) and he characterized authors at the lower end of the profession as ‘manufacturers of literature’. The reading public had a great appetite for prose fiction. Robinson Crusoe (1719) was published in six editions (not including piracies and serializations) of 1,000 copies each in four months.4 The turning point in novel publishing, however, was Richardson’s Pamela (1740; part  2, 1741). In the fourteen months following its first publication, Pamela was printed in six authorized editions (including one in French) totalling an estimated 20,000 copies. There were also London piracies, a Dublin reprint from the press of George Faulkner, and ongoing serial publication. According to Keymer and Sabor, Richardson and his allies had variously marketed the novel as piety, pornography, and pedagogy, and would soon package it as a showy octavo for the libraries of the prosperous—​and those who wished to appear so.5 Pamela occasioned a flood of responses—​including Richardson’s own sequel.6 Illustrated editions with engravings by Hayman and Gravelot (1742) and Joseph Highmore (1744) further augmented sales.7 Benjamin Franklin, a successful and highly entrepreneurial printer in Philadelphia, reprinted Pamela (2 vols., 1742–​3), attempting to undercut British imports, but his foray into the English fiction proved a financial failure, and it was more than thirty years before any publisher in the American colonies printed an unabridged novel.8

4 

Keith I. Maslen, ‘Edition Quantities for Robinson Crusoe, 1719’, The Library, 5th ser., 25/​1 (1969), 145–​50. See Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-​Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 17, 2, 39, 37–​8. 6  See Tom Keymer and Peter Sabor (eds.), The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, 1740–​1750, 6 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001). 7  See figs. 4 and 5. 8  See James N. Green, ‘English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin’, in Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (eds.), A History of the Book in America, 1. The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 267–​8. 5 

Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695–1774    25 The most popular and enduring response to Pamela, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), was remunerative far beyond its author’s expectations: the prestigious London bookseller Andrew Millar bought the copy for £183. 11s., even though Fielding had imagined receiving as little as £25 for the work. Joseph Andrews proved profitable for Millar, too: the first edition of 1,500 copies sold out in about four months, prompting a second edition of 2,000 copies. The publication of the third edition nine months later, in March 1743, indicates that sales remained brisk. Although Millar’s print run of 3,000 for this third edition was not fully expended for another five years, the sale of 6,500 sets (13,000 volumes) in less than seven years made Joseph Andrews a very sound investment.9 Readers increasingly consumed novels as luxury products and emblems of their status and leisure.10 In all genres, the book trade kept the price of new literature artificially high, a well-​documented practice that has far-​reaching implications for the nature and scale of readership. Like other books, fiction was expensive: novels in ordinary trade bindings typically cost 3s. per volume; unbound fiction sold for 2s. or, more typically, 2s. 6d. per volume. Samuel Richardson—​one of London’s leading printers, and, hence, able to control the physical form of his novels more than most authors—​ tried to make Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (vols. 1–​2, 1747; vols. 3–​4, April 1748; and vols. 5–​7, December 1748) more affordable for his devoted readers. For the third and final instalment he stipulated that a smaller type should be used in order to fit material that would have taken eight duodecimo volumes into seven. Although it sold well, Richardson’s greatest novel did not enjoy the enormous popular success of Pamela.11 In Dublin, Faulkner’s authorized Clarissa (1748) reached only a single edition, as did an unauthorized two-​volume abridgement (1756) selling for the bargain price of 6s. 6d. Another publication of 1748, Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, was such a success that William Strahan printed 6,500 copies in less than two years (January 1748–​ November 1749).12 Roderick Random’s eventual market rival, Tom Jones (1749), was an even greater sensation: a good thing because Millar paid Fielding £600 in advance for the copy. Joseph Spence, a contemporary observer, recorded that the whole press run was sold ‘before it was publisht’ as ‘the way here generally is to send in their number of Books to each of the Booksellers they deal with, for four or five days before the Publication; that they may oblige people, who are eager for a new thing’—​‘all the books were disposed of ’ before its publication date.13 The first two editions totalling 3,500

9  Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. xxix–​xxxiv. 10  See James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–​1800 (Oxford: OUP, 1992). 11  T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson (Oxford: OUP, 1971), 219–​20, 306, 317. 12  L. M. Knapp, ‘Smollett’s Works as Printed by William Strahan, with an Unpublished Letter of Smollett to Strahan’, The Library, 4th ser., 13/​2 (1932), 284. 13  Austin Wright, Joseph Spence: A Critical Biography (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1950), 232 n. 29.

26

26   MICHAEL F. SUAREZ, S.J. six-​volume duodecimo sets (18s. bound, 16s. ‘sew’d in Blue Paper and Boards’)—​21,000 volumes in all—​were followed by a more economical four-​volume duodecimo reset in small pica (12s. bound; 10s. 6d. sewed) in 3,000 copies. Even a robust market could be glutted, however. The fourth edition of 3,500—​bringing the total number of copies printed to 10,000 in only nine months—​was not exhausted for a dozen years, and the fifth edition did not appear on the market until 1763.14 In Ireland, John Smith’s unauthorized 1749 Dublin reprint, in three relatively economical volumes costing just 8s. 8d., saw two editions in as many years. Given the triumph of Tom Jones, it is no surprise that Millar appears to have paid £800 for the copy in Amelia (1752 [1751], 4 vols. 12mo; 12s. or 10s. 6d. sewed). Contrary to legend, however, Fielding’s novel did not meet the expectations of Millar, who rashly ordered an initial print run of 5,000. First sales were sufficiently promising for the publisher to commission a new edition of 3,000 copies within a month of publication, but this was quickly stopped, and a new London edition did not appear until Millar printed Fielding’s Works some ten years later (1762).15 Two unauthorized Dublin reprints—​both available for as little as 4s. 4d.—​were published some nineteen days after Amelia went on sale in London, though the extent to which these were sold in England remains unknown. Fielding’s last novel did not enjoy anything like the tremendous popularity of Tom Jones. The first four volumes of Sir Charles Grandison (3,000 copies 12mo and 1,000 8vo) were published in November 1753; in that same month, however—​despite Richardson’s elaborate security measures in London and foresighted business arrangements with Faulkner in Dublin (Pamela II had been ‘pirated’ in Dublin, much to Richardson’s ire)—​an unauthorized edition of the first six volumes appeared in Ireland’s capital, forcing Richardson to publish volumes 5 and 6 in December. The Dublin publication appears not to have materially hurt sales in England: by the time volume 7 was ready in March 1754, the original 4,000 copies of volumes 1–​6 had been disposed of for some months. A third edition of 2,500 (7 vols., 12mo) entered the market in March as well.16 Two periodical serializations and four unauthorized editions are known to have been published during the eighteenth century; in all likelihood, there were others as well.17 Evidence from the Strahan Ledgers shows that, once Tristram Shandy captured the popular imagination, its two-​volume instalments had initial press-​runs of 4,000.18 Knowing that the popularity of his novel would attract unauthorized imitations and, 14 

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1: pp. xlvii–l. 15  Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. xlv–​xlvi, xlvi–​l. 16  See Alan Dugald McKillop, Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P, 1936), 214–​15, 215 n. 32. 17  See Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris, 3 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 1972), 1: p. xiii. 18  Kenneth Monkman, ‘The Bibliography of the Early Editions of Tristram Shandy’, The Library, 5th ser., 25/​1 (1970), 11–​39.

Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695–1774    27 quite possibly, piracies, Sterne took the unusual (but not unprecedented) precaution of signing his name in every copy of volume 5 of Tristram Shandy before it and its companion volume 6 appeared in December 1761 (dated 1762).19 Advertisements in the London Chronicle alerted would-​be purchasers to look for the signature, a feature that Sterne’s audience would come to regard as an emblem of the author’s celebrity and éclat.20 Sterne was by no means being overly cautious: when Smollett’s Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) was pirated almost immediately after its initial publication, the pirates had virtually no time to determine if the novel would be a popular success (it was not); instead, they were gambling on the commercial strength of Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751). Given the reputation of Tristram Shandy to date, Sterne’s expenditure of time, trouble, and money seems highly prudent. Contrary to popular perception among modern students of literature, more than sixty years would pass before the Statute of Anne (8 Anne, c. 19, [1709]), which took effect in 1710, materially altered either the trade practices or the principal remedies that members of the book trade sought for the piratical printing and sale of works they owned. Scrutiny of court records and other archival evidence indicates that publishing booksellers sought better redress outside the Act—​both in ex parte injunctions restraining continued publication and sale, and in equity damages, as well as in commercial measures sustained by the trade itself.21 If we measure the popularity of novelists in 1750–​69 by numbers of editions published—​irrespective of the size of print runs—​then there are few surprises at the top of the list: Sterne (35), Henry Fielding (33), Eliza Haywood (31), Smollett (28), Defoe (28), and Richardson (23) occupy the first six places with more than twenty editions each. There are some unexpected names, however, among those having between fifteen and nineteen editions in this period: Madame Riccoboni (17), Edward Kimber (17), Sarah Fielding (16), Charles Johnston (16), John Langhorne (15), Jean François Marmontel (15), and Voltaire (15)—​an indication both of the popularity of translations and the fugitive nature of literary reputation. Other highly-​popular fiction authors included Cervantes (13) and Rousseau (11), Charlotte Lennox (14) and Frances Brooke (11), John Cleland (14) and Goldsmith (14), whose Vicar of Wakefield was published in 1766.22 If we consider the century as a whole, then the two most popular novelists (by numbers of editions printed) are Defoe and, remarkably, Goldsmith.23

19  For the printing of a spurious continuation, see K. I. D. Maslen and John Lancaster (eds.), The Bowyer Ledgers (London and New York: The Bibliographical Society and the Bibliographical Society of America, 1991), no. 4273. 20  Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London: Routledge, 1986), 113. 21  See Michael F. Suarez, S.J., ‘To What Degree Did the Statute of Anne (8 Anne, c. 19, [1709]) Affect Commercial Practices of the Book Trade in Eighteenth-​Century England? Some Provisional Answers about Copyright, Chiefly from Bibliography and Book History’, in Lionel Bently, Uma Suthersanen, and Paul Torremans (eds.), Global Copyright: Three Hundred Years Since the Statute of Anne, from 1709 to Cyberspace (Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2010), 54–​69. 22  Data from James Raven, British Fiction 1750–​1770: A Chronological Check-​List of Prose Fiction Printed in Britain and Ireland (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 14. 23 Raven, British Fiction 1750–​1770, 16.

28

28   MICHAEL F. SUAREZ, S.J. The presence of Haywood, Riccoboni, Sarah Fielding, Lennox, and Brooke—​Burney, Radcliffe, Robinson, and Yearsley would come later—​suggests that the novel was a highly congenial genre for female authors, and there are several celebrated instances in which a woman wrote and successfully published a work of fiction to escape from the shackles of poverty. Elizabeth Boyd, for example, tells us in the preface to her first novel, The Happy-​Unfortunate, or the Female Page (1732), that she was delivered ‘from almost the lowest Condition of Fortune’ by the subscription income it generated. Yet, women novelists accounted for only about 14 per cent of new fiction titles in the two decades spanning 1751 to 1770; the 1770s saw the proportion of novels by women rise to almost one-​third, however.24 Attribution studies play an important role in scrutinizing fiction authorship: most eighteenth-​century novels were published anonymously and it was not uncommon for male authors to publish under a female pseudonym in the hope of attracting purchasers from a female readership. There are thirty-​three new novels that can be positively identified as having been written by women in the 1750s, forty-​three in the 1760s, forty-​ five in the 1770s, 118 in the 1780s, and 260 in the 1790s.25 Yet, in her pioneering study of provincial readers in eighteenth-​century England, Jan Fergus has shown that women did not comprise the largest reading audience for fiction, as is commonly thought. Accordingly, she urges us to ‘see [the] reading of fiction in the last half of the eighteenth century as more complicated, more fluid, [and] less gender-​bound’ than is usually assumed.26 Among the most important fiction publishers in the 1750s were Millar, the Dodsleys, the Nobles, Lane and Hogg, and Robert Baldwin. Sterne’s defection from James Dodsley to Becket and De Hondt was partially a cause and partially a symptom of that firm’s rise to prominence as fiction publishers in the 1760s. In the 1770s John Bew, Thomas Cadell (Millar’s former apprentice), John Bell, and Thomas Lowndes were all conducting a healthy business in fiction. William Lane, who would come to be the king of novel publishing and purveying, did not enter the market until 1775. Meanwhile, in the 1750s–​70s, several Dublin publishers—​the Hoeys (James and Peter), George Faulkner, Robert Main, Richard Moncrieff, Dillon Chamberlaine, Caleb Jenkin, Samuel Price, and the Sleaters (William I and II)—​were conducting a brisk trade in reprints of London novels.27

24 

Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 1: 39–​40, 45. 25 Raven, British Fiction 1750–​1770, 19; Garside, Raven, and Schöwerling (eds.), English Novel 1770–​ 1829, 1: 46–​7, table 6. 26  Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 41–​74, 8–​9. 27 Raven, British Fiction 1750–​1770, 34–​7; Garside, Raven, and Schöwerling (eds.), English Novel 1770–​ 1829, 1: 73, table 12; see also Mary Pollard, A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade, 1550–​1800, Based on Records of the Guild of St Luke the Evangelist (London: The Bibliographical Society, 2000).

Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695–1774    29

Irish Reprints Reprinting successful novels was a low-​risk, high-​profit enterprise. Yet, the market performance of most first-​edition fiction was not sufficiently vigorous to warrant producing more copies for sale. Only about 40 per cent of all novels published in the 1770s and 1780s, when the reading public was rapidly expanding and fiction was firmly established as a fashionable consumer commodity, were ever reprinted.28 For the years 1695 to 1774, the percentage was far less than 50. From the 1740s onwards, Dublin was the centre of the reprint trade, but London and even provincial reprints were not uncommon. Most Dublin reprinting occurred within two years following a novel’s initial publication and was chiefly intended to provide a cheap supply of fiction for the Irish market. Dublin maintained a great reprint trade in novels, but Dublin booksellers were not commonly publishers of first-​edition fiction. Although the degree to which Irish reprints of London first-​edition fiction were sold in England and Scotland is by no means clear, we do know that these Dublin productions were significantly cheaper than their London counterparts. The cost of composition (e.g., typesetting) and presswork was slightly reduced, and lower-​grade paper was used. Pages were typically more crowded:  type sizes were sometimes smaller, margins more narrow, and type was often ‘set solid’ (i.e., without leading). Presswork in Dublin reprints also often shows evidence of hasty production, as publishers raced both to occupy the local market and to forestall competition from London first editions. In addition, booksellers were not averse to abridging novels without notice, in order to compress three volumes into two. A further economy was achieved because the publisher almost never paid the author. Though in no way illegal if sold only in the country where they were produced—​ copyright legislation did not extend to Ireland until 1801—​vending Dublin reprints in England, Scotland, and Wales was certainly illegal. English booksellers repeatedly inveighed against this practice, but the difficult task of determining its actual extent remains an area for further research. The paucity of documentation recording legal proceedings against parties caught smuggling or selling Dublin reprints suggests that such clandestine trading did not materially damage the English market. Yet, given how much less expensive these Dublin editions were, the commercial impetus to sell them in Scotland and northern England seems virtually irresistible. It is hard to see how the Dodsleys’ 1761 octavo edition of volumes 3 and 4 of Tristram Shandy, retailing at a very reasonable 5s., could have competed in an open market with the 1761 Dublin reprint of all four volumes then published in a single duodecimo that sold for 2s. 8½d. By a variety of methods, Dublin reprints frequently condensed London editions quite considerably. Three novels originally published in 1751 make a good case in point. 28 

Garside, Raven, and Schöwerling (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, 1: 35–​6, table 3.

30

30   MICHAEL F. SUAREZ, S.J. Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little (1751), some 272 octavo pages in the London first edition, amounted to a mere 176 duodecimo pages in its first Dublin edition and 182 pages, also duodecimo, in its 1753 Dublin edition. Peregrine Pickle (4 vols., 1751), which sold for the standard London price of 12s., was reprinted in the same year in Dublin in 3 volumes, selling for 7s. 6d., a discount of 4s. 6d. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (4 vols., 1751) by Eliza Haywood saw a Dublin edition in two volumes in the year immediately following its publication. Even a blockbuster such as Fielding’s Tom Jones (4 vols., 1749) was consistently sold in Dublin as a three-​volume work (e.g., in 1750, 1759, and 1766). Thus, the full retail price of this enormously popular work was reduced from 12s. to 8s. 8d. Even when condensing a work into fewer volumes was not a primary source of savings for the publisher, prices were substantially lower. Robert and James Dodsley’s 1760 London edition of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy in sextodecimo sold for just 4s., but the contemporaneous Dublin edition in two volumes duodecimo was even less expensive, retailing for 2s. 8½d. The History of Frederick the Forsaken (2 vols., [1760] 1761) was sold by the Noble brothers for the standard London price of 6s., but the Dublin edition of 1761, also in two volumes, retailed for a mere 2s. 8½d. Henry Fielding’s Amelia (4 vols., [1751] 1752), despite its initial printings amounting to an excessively optimistic 8,000 copies (that is, 32,000 volumes), appeared in some fifteen British editions by the end of the century, to say nothing of an unauthorized abridgement (1760) and several Dublin editions. Both of the 1752 Dublin editions, one listed as ‘four volumes in two’ and the other simply as ‘4 vols’, sold for a mere 4s. 4d. sewed, and 5s. 5d. bound, a major and highly attractive reduction from the London price of 12s. Even when significant savings might be had, a less expensive edition could be far harder and less pleasurable to read. The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole’s innovative tale that began the fashion for Gothic novels, first published as a 200-​page octavo ([1764] 1765), was frequently reproduced in London as a 200-​page duodecimo, but the Dublin duodecimo of 1765 runs to a mere 146 pages. As one might imagine, the octavo edition is highly attractive; the London duodecimos provide a more typical reading experience, and the compact Dublin version is far from easy on the eyes.

Novel Continuations and Spin-​Offs The celebrity of a small pantheon of writers led to a succession of highly emulative, if not thoroughly imitative, productions. Often protagonists’ names and, consequently, the titles of novels suggested an association with an established best-​seller, however spurious (e.g., James Walcot’s The New Pilgrim’s Progress of 1748). In 1762, for instance, the bookseller John Hinxman rewrote the title page of John Dunton’s 1691 publication Christopher Wagstaff, styling him ‘Grandfather to Tristram Shandy’.

Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695–1774    31 Unauthorized sequels and spin-​offs abounded, as lesser authors sought to cash in on the reputation of especially popular works. A good case in point is The History of Tom Jones the Foundling, in His Married State (Dublin, 1749; London, 1750, 2 edns.). Similarly, Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749) not only saw seven editions before 1800, but also occasioned two different adaptations (1770, 1786) long after its initial appearance. John Carr anonymously authored a spurious volume 3 of Tristram Shandy in the autumn of 1760, thus anticipating the publication of Sterne’s volumes 3 and 4 in 1761. Tellingly, the London imprint of this octavo running to nearly 225 pages is as spare as possible: ‘London: Printed in the Year 1760.’ In much the same way, an ersatz volume 9 of Tristram Shandy was published in London early in 1766 to capitalize upon the market eager for Sterne’s next production; the true volume 9 did not appear, however, for another year, giving the fake continuation enough room in the market to reach a second edition. A 1740 edition of Defoe’s Roxana includes an unauthorized continuation partially cobbled together from several other published works, including Eliza Haywood’s The British Recluse (1722). A 1745 edition also appears with a sequel, entirely different from that published five years earlier. The lack of narrative closure in Defoe’s later fictions invited such continuations, but so too did the commercial motives of the booksellers. Often—​as with Moll, Roxana, and a spurious continuation of Le Sage’s Gil Blas (1741)—​ the sequels of roguish originals exhibit newly discovered virtue. Defoe’s Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726; rev. edn., 1735), and Richardson’s Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison (1753–​4) are among the principal fictions that spawned bastard offspring of various kinds. The Fortunate Transport (1748), for example, is a retelling of Moll Flanders. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is almost certainly the biggest progenitor of derivative fictions among novels published in the second half of the century, but the vogue for Shandyism both in England and on the Continent (particularly in Germany) is only the most conspicuous example of a common phenomenon driven less by aesthetic values than by commercial motives. In 1760 alone, readers might have purchased the London publications Tristram Shandy at Ranelaugh, Tristram Shandy in a Reverie, Tristram Shandy’s Bon Mots, and Yorick’s Meditations upon Various Interesting and Important Subjects. Of course, popular authors themselves also sought to profit from their publishing successes—​and their booksellers undoubtedly in some instances encouraged them to do so. Sarah Fielding penned both David Simple (2 vols., 1747) and, five years later, a sequel, Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple (1752), which Andrew Millar marketed as volumes 3 and 4 of the original two-​volume work. In the following year, a Volume The Last, In which His History is concluded was also published by Millar. In much the same way, five years after the initial success of Chrysal; or, the Adventures of a Guinea (2 vols., 1760), Charles Johnston continued his popular tale with an additional two volumes, styled volumes 3 and 4 by T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, who were then among the most important fiction publishers of the time.

32

32   MICHAEL F. SUAREZ, S.J.

Fiction for Non-​Affluent Readers: Abridgements and Serializations Abridgements of novels—​both in newspapers and magazines, and in separately published works—​were an important part of the fiction market. First-​run novels were too expensive to reach the lower regions of a highly stratified market. Used books, along with newspaper and periodical serializations and publication in parts or ‘numbers’, occupied an important place for consumers of lesser means. Abridgements were particularly attractive for ‘pyrate’ publishers, both because they took advantage of the already established reputation of steady-​selling works, and because they required less investment per copy to produce. No author had to be paid, and paper and composition costs were lower for these shorter works. Ironically, from 1741 onwards, abridgements were adjudged to enjoy protection under the 1709 Copyright Act: Lord Chancellor Hardwicke in Gyles versus Wilcox concluded that the Act for the Encouragement of Learning ‘must not be carried so far as to restrain persons from making a real and fair abridgement’ of another publisher’s book, because ‘abridgements may with great propriety be called a new book’. Abridgements were a common feature of the eighteenth-​century publishing landscape. Defoe’s Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)—​not taking into account The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720)—​must be reckoned among the most popular novels of the century. Not surprisingly, chapbook versions soon proliferated, and a piratical abridgement, The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1722), quickly appeared. (Notice how the title of the cheaper piracy could easily fool unsuspecting customers into thinking they were buying the complete novel.) An abridged version of all three parts, The Wonderful Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (2 vols., 1752), fed a hungry public three decades later. Similarly, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, which saw seven editions in the two years following its publication, not only appeared in numerous chapbook editions, many with variant endings, but also was published in a more substantial abridgement in 1759. Roxana, too, first issued as an octavo exceeding 400 pages, was reduced to a mere 144 duodecimo pages in 1765. Richardson’s novels also attracted many abridgements. A much-​shortened version of all three of his great novels was published in 1756 as a single duodecimo volume, The Paths of Virtue Delineated; or, the History in Miniature of the Celebrated Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison. This work was in sufficient demand to be reprinted eight years later in 1764. Virtue Rewarded: Or, the History, In Miniature, Of the Celebrated Pamela (1768) proclaims itself as the third edition, which it may be, in which case no copies of the sixty-​eight-​page duodecimo in the first two editions have survived. A more upscale abridgement ‘Adorned with Copper Plates’, published by Francis Newbery, first appeared on the market in 1769. Perhaps not surprisingly Richardson’s Clarissa, a novel

Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695–1774    33 of about 1 million words, was abridged on several occasions (e.g., 1756, 1769). Sir Charles Grandison (7 vols., 1753–​4) understandably also attracted multiple abridgements (1770, 1780, 1789, 1792). Richardson himself issued two volumes of improving extracts from his fictions: A Collection of such of the Moral and Instructive sentiments, cautions, aphorisms, reflections, and observations contained in the History [of Clarissa] (1751), and the more comprehensive Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison (1755). The History of Sir Charles Grandison Spiritualized (1760), by one ‘Theophila’, was very much in this vein. Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (2 vols., 1752) was quickly issued in a mere ninety-​three duodecimo pages, ‘Containing A  Remarkable Account of Her Reading Romances’. Another best-​selling work of fiction of a very different kind, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), saw abridgements by the author himself, and by others, published under various titles over many years. Whether a popular work was meant to excite feelings of piety, sexual arousal, laughter, or pity, the pattern was often the same:  abridgements in newspapers and periodicals, chapbooks and pamphlets, and/​ or small-​format books were far more common that most literary historians realize. In sum, there was a great deal of open textual appropriation and recycling of recently published works: the number of extracts, abridgements (or ‘epitomies’), and serializations of booksellers’ properties by outside parties runs into many thousands. As R. M. Wiles and Robert D. Mayo have variously shown, the thriving periodical trade in London and the provinces, ‘functionally outside the copyright law’, was utterly dependent upon this traffic in the grey market.29 Robinson Crusoe, first published in April 1719, was not only conventionally pirated soon thereafter, but also reprinted serially in the Original London Post between October 1719 and October 1720, and routinely abridged.30 Captain Singleton, published in June 1720, was serialized in a provincial newspaper, The Post-​Master, in Exeter, between November 1720 and November 1721.31 Moll Flanders (1722) was also serialized both in the London Post and in the Kentish Post, published in Canterbury.32 For popular works, such piecemeal piracies were common. Pamela was quickly pirated and then serialized without sanction in a periodical with the remarkable title Robinson Crusoe’s London Daily Evening Post.33 The Hermit (1727, 1746) was adjudged commercially viable enough 29 

Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–​1815 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1962), 160 (see also 159–​272); R. M. Wiles, Serial Publication in England before 1750 (Cambridge: CUP, 1957). 30 Wiles, Serial Publication in England, 27. The Original London Post serialized both Robinson Crusoe and the sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. See Jordan Howell, ‘Eighteenth-​Century Abridgments of Robinson Crusoe’, The Library, 7th ser., 15/​3 (2014), 292–​342. 31  P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), 196. 32  D. J. Shaw, ‘Serialization of Moll Flanders in The London Post and The Kentish Post, 1722’, The Library, 7th ser., 8/​2 (2007), 182–​92. 33  Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, 39.

34

34   MICHAEL F. SUAREZ, S.J. to appear in fifty-​two parts around 1750 and in an abridged version five years later; it saw another sixteen editions before the century’s end. Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid was first issued in thirty-​seven periodical parts or ‘numbers’ between 1755 and 1756; it was not printed in a single volume until Andrew Millar’s 1764 publication. Yet, it was not until Tobias Smollett’s Sir Lancelot Greaves, published serially (in twenty-​five parts) in the British Magazine between January 1760 and December 1761, that a major writer produced a work of fiction intended for initial publication in serial form; many others would follow. Magazines were important sources of fiction, especially as the century progressed. The British Magazine, or Monthly repository for gentlemen and ladies (1760–​7), which Smollett himself edited, featured book reviews, essays, poetry, and, perhaps not surprisingly, an unprecedented amount of fiction. One of its chief competitors, the Court Magazine (1761–​5), undertaken by Hugh Kelly, also published a great deal of fiction, as did Kelly’s subsequent project, the Court Miscellany; or, Lady’s New Magazine (1765–​7 1).

Fiction Translations in Britain and on the Continent From the booksellers’ perspective, a translation of a good Continental novel was both less expensive and a better publishing bet than a mediocre, original work in English. Nearly 18 per cent of all novels first published in Britain between 1750 and 1769 were translations, with French being far and away the predominant language for these source texts. This figure closely matches the proportion of French titles listed in the catalogue for John Noble’s circulating library (1767?). Later, in the last decades of the century, the proportion of fiction translations published declined to about 10 per cent, in part because the total number of first-​edition novel publications increased, and in part because the fashion for French fiction waned.34 Although Spanish and Italian are represented among fiction translated into English—​ with Cervantes and, later, Riccoboni leading the way—​novels from other languages are rare, despite the frequent pronouncement that Eastern tales were translated from original manuscripts. (The Arabian Nights [1706] was published at least twenty times over the course of the century, but the translations were from the French, not from the Arabic.) If novel-​writing was seldom remunerative, then translation was commonly even less so, as is borne out in the few surviving agreements between booksellers and translators. It should be noted, however, that publishers occasionally commissioned translations from well-​known authors, rather than Grub Street drudges, as a gambit to attract the purchasing public. Gil Blas in Smollett’s translation, for example, first appeared in 1749 and was published in at least a further twenty editions by the end of the century, despite its being a lengthy four-​volume work and the presence of competing translations on the market. 34 

Garside, Raven, and Schöwerling (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, 1: 56–​9.

Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695–1774    35 From the middle of the century onwards, works by prominent English novelists were rapidly translated into French and German; translations into Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and other languages were not uncommon. Typically, these were duodecimos, often in paper covers, and they sold well. Richardson had an ardent Continental following, as did Goldsmith and Sterne. Johann Joachim Bode’s highly successful rendering of Tristram Shandy into German (1774) happily includes a substantial subscription list, providing modern scholars with valuable information about a putative readership that is otherwise difficult to document. Although Dutch booksellers became less central to the distribution of English books (and to the publication of translations) after mid-​century, Johann Wendler of Leipzig was particularly instrumental in creating a fashion on the Continent for contemporary English literary works, including novels. We should remember, however, that the Bibliothèque angloise, ou histoire littéraire de la Grande Bretagne (first published in Amsterdam in 1717), and the Bibliothèque britannique, ou histoire des ouvrages des savans de la Grande-​Bretagne (The Hague, 1733), were important antecedents to Wendler’s own Brittische Bibliothek (1756). Between c.1740 and c.1780, the Leiden bookseller Johannes Luchtmans and John Nourse in London carried on a lively reciprocal trade that included English novels among more scholarly works, and is well documented in Luchtmans’s business papers. Luchtmans himself went on a buying tour to London.35 By the middle of the 1770s, the Continental market for English books—​with novels clearly the most fashionable of such commodities—​was sufficiently vigorous to induce the powerful Parisian publisher Charles-​Joseph Panckoucke to travel to London prospecting for translations.

Circulating Libraries Because books were expensive to buy, avid readers who could afford to do so increasingly availed themselves of circulating libraries, paying an annual fee for the privilege of borrowing books. Using both primary and secondary sources, I have been able to document some fifty London circulating libraries known to have been in operation at some time between 1695 and 1775, and about forty-​five functioning outside London. Doubtless, there were many more whose existence remains undocumented. It is routinely assumed that circulating libraries made novels widely available to readers of modest means; in fact the subscription charges levied by such institutions were prohibitive to all but the fairly affluent. Francis Noble’s circulating library catalogue of c.1765 stipulates an annual subscription fee of half a guinea (10s. 6d.), or 3s. per quarter. In 1766, a consortium of London bookseller-​proprietors advertised an annual fee of 12s. per annum; by the end of the century, London circulating libraries were typically charging as much 35 

P. G. Hoftijzer, ‘Business and Pleasure: A Leiden Bookseller in England in 1772’, in Susan Roach (ed.), Across the Narrow Seas (London: The British Library, 1991), 179–​88.

36

36   MICHAEL F. SUAREZ, S.J. as 1 guinea (or 21s.) for an annual subscription. When thinking about the ways in which readers who were not wealthy could gain affordable access to novels, it is helpful to remember that it was a standard practice for many booksellers to allow customers to borrow books for a fee. Such rentals are well attested in booksellers’ day books (or running business ledgers), in handbills, and in newspaper advertisements. Many of the most successful fiction publishers operated circulating libraries, as they attracted high numbers of potential retail customers and brought in ready cash. Because publishing booksellers were commonly undercapitalized, the cash fees paid to them for memberships in their circulating libraries gave them a much-​needed source of liquidity. Most retail customers purchasing books and other commodities relied on credit for purchases (documented either with promissory notes or, more commonly, entries in vendors’ daybooks and ledgers). Accounts receivable were non-​liquid, and most often slow to become liquid assets; ledger credit from six to eighteen months was routinely offered to customers. Hence, a bookseller’s accounts payable might well require external borrowing if sufficient cash reserves were not on hand. (In the typical retail billing cycle, accounts were resolved once a year, around Christmas time, when rents were also payable.) From the 1750s onwards, supplying circulating libraries in London and the provinces with new fiction was a crucial aspect of business for many publishers of novels. Critics of the day sometimes levelled the charge that publishing booksellers routinely issued inferior novels merely to swell the stock of circulating libraries, which provided a ready market even for novels that otherwise never would have found their way into print. Nevertheless, a 1770 estimate that 400 of every 1,000 copies first printed were sold to such commercial outlets should be treated with caution. Although most circulating libraries were run by booksellers, not all of these proprietors would have been publishing booksellers, especially in the provinces. The Annual Register for 1761 estimated that a representative provincial circulating library would have only ‘about 100 volumes’, though it is not clear if the author meant titles or actual volumes—​an important distinction, because a significant number of titles would have been multi-​volume works. London libraries, especially those operated in tandem with significant publishing and retail bookselling businesses, were managed on an altogether different scale. The catalogue (c.1766) of the London circulating library owned by the bookseller Thomas Lowndes lists 6,290 titles, of which about 10 per cent are novels and some 18 per cent plays. Although students of literature most often associate circulating libraries with the circulation of fiction, the surviving catalogues of Samuel Fancourt (1748), William Bathoe (1757), and John and Francis Noble (1767) indicate that the Lowndes catalogue is unexceptional, both in the overall number of publications available and in the fact that fiction titles represent only about one-​tenth of the total.36 Similarly, John Bell’s 1778 library catalogue listed some 8,000 titles, of which almost 900, or 11 per cent, were novels.

36 

Edward Jacobs, ‘Eighteenth-​Century British Circulating Libraries and Cultural Book History’, Book History 6 (2003), 2.

Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695–1774    37

Conclusion The era from 1695 to 1774 saw Britain become a culture in which print was increasingly indispensable for the conduct of everyday affairs. Writing in the persona of a fictional Chinese traveller named Lien Chi Altangi, Oliver Goldsmith said that ‘Were we to estimate the learning of the English by the number of books that are every day published among them, perhaps no country, not even China itself, could equal them in this particular.’37 Inseparably linked to the business of producing, marketing, and selling books, prose fiction developed into a form of popular entertainment as never before. Astute students of this period will constantly bear in mind that the book trade was not merely a servant, but also a critical and creative agent in the production, distribution, and consumption of English literature. Literary critics sometimes write about texts as if there were such a thing as the work ‘in itself ’, abstracted from its material instantiations and the circumstances of its production. Yet, such idealized, ahistorical texts do not exist. There are only real books (and broadsides, manuscripts, and pamphlets) that bear the traces of their making. The predominantly economic motives of participants in the book trade influenced what writers produced, which works were published, how they reached different kinds of readers, and how they were understood. The material forms that comprise a novel both affect and effect its meanings and, hence, influence its reading and reception. Knowledge of book history—​of the transmission, production, marketing, distribution, and consumption of texts—​is not merely a useful adjunct to literary study. Such hard-​won understandings are essential to many of the central concerns of literary criticism and literary history. In the absence of this kind of knowledge, students of the novel may themselves be producing fiction when they talk and write about how a text means.

Select Bibliography Fergus, Jan, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England (Oxford: OUP, 2006). Jacobs, Edward, ‘Eighteenth-​Century British Circulating Libraries and Cultural Book History’, Book History 6 (2003), 1–​22 and accompanying web resources. Keymer, Tom, and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-​Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: CUP, 2005). Mayo, Robert D., The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–​1815 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1962). Raven, James, British Fiction 1750–​1770: A Chronological Check-​List of Prose Fiction Printed in Britain and Ireland (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1987). Raven, James, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–​1800 (Oxford: OUP, 1992).

37 

The Citizen of the World, 2 vols. (London, 1762), 1: 115.

38

38   MICHAEL F. SUAREZ, S.J. Raven, James, ‘Historical Introduction: The Novel Comes of Age’, in Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel, 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 1: 15–​121. Suarez, S.J., Michael F., ‘The Business of Literature: The Book Trade in England from Milton to Blake’, in David Womersley (ed.), A Companion to English Literature from Milton to Blake (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 131–​47. Suarez, S.J. Michael F., and Michael L. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695–​1830 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009). Wiles, R. M., Serial Publication in England before 1750 (Cambridge: CUP, 1957).

Chapter 3

So cia l Struct u re , C l as s , and Gender, 16 6 0–​1 7 7 0 Pat Rogers

The novel grew up with the coming of modernity, but its origins lie firmly in what is generally called the ‘early modern’ period. A single example will serve to illustrate this fact. We think of prose fiction as the place in which literature deals most directly with urban experience, where the older forms of poetry and drama had tended to inhabit the court or the country. Yet the world which ushered in the English novel was still predominantly rural. We can easily see that Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) is set in a new and rapidly changing society, and the text makes it clear that the heroine belongs to this sometimes threatening environment—​as soon as she quits the city for small towns such as Colchester or embarks on the robber-​infested highway to Chester, the whole atmosphere of the book changes. It is the same with Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), with a stark demarcation between the first two-​thirds of the book, located in an almost bucolic setting, and the final third, which takes place in the crowded and confusing spaces of London. The fault-​line lies not just between rural and urban, but between old and new. We could say that this difference symbolizes the conditions that were necessary, and largely sufficient, for the birth of the novel. The clashing tectonic plates of tradition and modernity produced a literary earthquake that did an immense amount to create the landscape in which readers and writers have operated for the past two hundred years. The sections of this essay that follow will explore some of the ways in which social life in England developed as the new medium of fiction gradually moved from the status of a parvenu in the literary genres to a place of dominance. That position had not been fully achieved by 1770, but the novel was well on the way to its later key role. But of course the story takes a long and winding road, and few generalizations that apply to 1660 fit equally well with the facts in 1770—​or, for that matter, with those in 1720. In order to make broad summary possible, it is necessary to elide some of the detail; and since the novel was relentlessly looking forward, we shall spend less time on the residual features of the world that was slowly lost (as widely visible in 1660) and more on the dynamic processes which spawned the emergence of a new society (already well advanced in

40

40   PAT ROGERS 1770). At the same time we need to recognize that much of the change was evolutionary in character. Britain experienced some dramatic turns over the course of a century. Politically, this period saw the end of a destructive civil war, the restoration of the monarchy, major dynastic crises in 1688 and 1714, and two serious attempts by the Stuarts to regain the throne. The first British empire took shape, with the first major challenge to imperial power brewing in the American colonies as this phase of history came to an end. Economically, a substantial agricultural revolution was under way, just as the Industrial Revolution started on its unstoppable course. Yet the nation experienced no full-​scale revolution (in the modern sense of the term) of its own, for reasons that have elicited much inconclusive discussion—​this is despite the fact that countless popular riots took place in many parts of the country, based on many separate grievances. Behind all the factors making for stasis or change lie basic demographic circumstances.1

Demographics and Structure For most of this period the nation was demographically stable; economically still agricultural for the most part; and politically a constitutional monarchy based on the rights of property. A slight decrease in the population of England and Wales from a peak in 1657 was not fully made up until 1717. This accompanied a fall in prices which induced a decline in the rural economy but may have helped boost the sale of consumer goods in the towns. Over the first half of the eighteenth century the number of people hovered between five and five-​and-​three-​quarter millions, increasing on average at the rate of about 1 per cent roughly every four years: it would have taken 350 years to double itself, and it was not until the later 1750s that the total reached six millions. Thereafter the curve became much steeper, and in the second half of the century population increased by about 1 per cent a year. By the time of the first official census in 1801 it had reached nine millions and was climbing ever more rapidly. The reasons for this acceleration have been hotly debated. Some authorities put it down to increased fertility, generally associated with earlier marriage; at the start of the century women did not marry on average until the age of 27. Other writers think the birth rate stabilized around 1740 at about 35 per 1,000, and attribute the change to a fall in the death rate. Numerous medical, social, and economic factors have entered into the argument; but the haziness of early Hanoverian vital statistics makes certainty impossible. (There were plans for a regular census in 1753, but an MP opposed this as subverting English liberty, and Parliament agreed.) It is conceivable that another reason for the rise lay in the gradual unfreezing of the Little Ice

1  In some parts of the sections that follow, I have adapted and updated material originally used in an essay on the writer and society which appeared in Pat Rogers (ed.), The Context of English Literature: The Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1978), 1–​80.

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1660–1770    41 Age, with a slightly warmer climate in Europe beginning to prevail after 1650. In an agricultural economy, too, harvest failures still played a part in checking fertility. Meanwhile Scotland and Ireland followed a parallel curve, slightly out of sync, though they did not experience the Industrial Revolution in quite the same dramatic form. The Irish population remained at a slow rate of increase until the 1780s, when a rapid upsurge was observed. These two countries provided by far the most important body of immigrants (mostly to London); otherwise immigration into England from abroad was not on a major scale. Internal immigration consisted mainly of the movement of young people from the countryside into larger towns, especially the capital, a trend visible in several works of fiction. London and its immediate environs had something like three-​ quarters of a million inhabitants; no other British city reached six figures. The capital stood at the centre of distribution for agricultural, as well as manufactured, goods; it dominated economic life far more completely than it has ever done since. If the demographic and economic patterns show evidence of change (slow as it was, to begin with), this is less true of the political nation. England still remained a land of elites and oligarchies, where traditional patterns of authority and deference survived almost intact. Half the land under cultivation was owned by 5,000 people; and almost half of that amount belonged to the lucky 400 families who thus took an unquestioned place in national or local affairs. In 1700 about 175 of these were headed by a peer of the realm: by 1770 this had gone up to almost 200.2 Few institutions were in any obvious sense representative of the people at large; if Parliament embodied one kind of social elite, equally the local magistracy, who carried wide administrative and supervisory powers, in every corner of life, performed a separate ruling-​class function in the shires. Older Whig historians tended to draw a picture of social harmony, with each man and woman content in his or her lot, and the asperities of class conflict softened by deep ties of kinship and communal assent. A new generation of commentators, of whom E. P. Thompson was the most eloquent, have raised many questions concerning the reality of this harmony. Certainly, no one who spends time ferreting through county archives relating to quarter sessions, turnpike trusts, or forest courts, could doubt that collisions between authority and populace were common occurrences. The game laws were perhaps the most frequent grounds for conflict; they were backed by penalties so severe that they often proved counterproductive. Unfortunately for our purposes, we rarely get near the submerged half of the population, the almost three million men and women without capital, since their articulacy seldom measured up to their sense of grievance. Professional writers, catering mostly for a highly literate audience in long-​sanctified forms, were largely cut off from these underground cries. The rise of the novel did little to change this at first, in spite of pioneering efforts by Defoe and others to enter the consciousness of ordinary people. The deserving poor figure in much sentimental fiction, but there was little serious attempt to find a literary language which would give such people an effective voice. 2  John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-​Century England (Cambridge: CUP, 1984), 15. This book provides the fullest account of the recruitment, background, and influence of the peers.

42

42   PAT ROGERS Everywhere that life was most nasty and brutish, it was generally at its shortest. The death rate in London around 1750 had reached about 50 per 1,000, whereas the country as a whole averaged no more than 35 per 1,000. Up to half of the infants baptized in London in this period died before the age of 5, many of them stupefied by gin and laudanum, used as painkillers. The figures would certainly have been no better in the late 1600s or early eighteenth century. In the terrible winter of 1740, when temperatures fell to 6° centigrade below normal and the Thames froze right across, twice as many people died in London as were born. Despite the long-​term rise in population, such years of crisis occurred periodically, when the death rate comfortably exceeded that of births: this happened in 1681, 1727, 1729, 1730, and 1742; while 1763 was not much better. Plague had been largely eliminated and did not recur even during a famine in the 1690s.3 One scourge alone, smallpox, was comparatively well contained in the capital, because of immunity developed after perpetual outbreaks. Higher up the social scale prospects were of course more favourable: there was a spectacular increase in the expectation of life among a sample of ducal families which have been studied—​the male expectation went up from 33 to 45, the female from 34 to 48, as between groups who were born at the start and the middle of the eighteenth century. The seven leading eighteenth-​century novelists in one bibliography average 66  years, although the one woman (Frances Burney) tilts the scale with her score of 87, and she lived on as late as 1840. For comparison, we may take a sample of forty leading politicians, and this achieves the identical mean lifespan of 66. By contrast the expectancy at birth in the population at large rose only slowly, from around 33 or 34 in 1660 to 35 or 36 a century later.4 The figures are skewed by the high rate of mortality among infants and childbearing women; people of either sex who survived unscathed into their thirties had a reasonable chance of living into their fifties or sixties (and among the prosperous classes even into their seventies). The London death rate was at its peak in the 1730s, when an official report discovered 7,000 retailers of strong spirits, of whom 2,000 were unlicensed—​this was certainly an underestimate. Gin shops used the slogan: ‘Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for two-​ pence, and straw for nothing.’ Parliament tried in 1736 to limit consumption by imposing heavy duties on retailers; but attempts at total or partial prohibition in this area rarely worked. There were extensive riots against the measure in the East End, and the Act never became effective, as the prime minister, Robert Walpole, had to concede. (It is worth noting that the familiar distinction between a prosperous West End of the city and an impoverished East End had existed for many years: we know for example that the rents charged in the more and less fashionable quadrants of London display this pattern in the 1690s.) Fines and whipping did not discourage illegal hawking: over eight million gallons of spirits were produced annually by 1743. It was not until 1751 that another campaign made more headway, this time led by the polemical skills of Henry Fielding, with An Enquiry in the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and the starker black-​and-​white 3 

Christopher Hill, Reformation to Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 254. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–​1971: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 528–​9. Other figures used here have been taken from this source. 4 

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1660–1770    43 symbolism of his friend William Hogarth’s diptych entitled Beer Street and Gin Lane. Among all writers it was Fielding who had the closest knowledge of seamy urban life, thanks to his day-​to-​day work as an inner-​city magistrate, and some of this familiarity can be traced in his novel Amelia, which appeared in this very same year. Meanwhile the older professions organized themselves better and made general headway. The clergy retained their traditional ascendancy, even though many curates and some vicars of impoverished parishes led the humble life of Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews. The legal profession was headed by judges and the handful of serjeants-​at-​law, with the Recorder of London holding an important and politically sensitive place. There were only about 200 barristers, virtually all based in London. A small but select group of ‘civilians’ had to themselves ecclesiastical law and all cases relating to matrimony or to probate. Meanwhile the old distinction between attorneys and solicitors disappeared; an Act of 1729 set up, not before time, something resembling a professional code to guide this much-​criticized body of men. In Tom Jones we hear of a debt which ‘an Attorney brought up by Law-​charges from 15s. to near 30l.’. This kind of abuse did not disappear overnight, but a number of measures, such as the formation of the Society of Gentleman Practisers in 1739, helped slowly to improve the standing of the legal profession. (Not that the satirists, or the novelists, saw much change for the better.) During this same period the armed services offered increasing opportunities to those sufficiently well connected or well heeled to obtain a commission. The naval establishment grew rapidly around the middle of the century, when sea power generally proved the decisive factor in war. There must have been approaching 5,000 regular army officers to fight in the European theatre, to assist in colonial struggles (not generally against natives but as part of the remoter conflict of major powers), or to man the garrisons. There were thirty-​five garrison towns in Britain alone; an intriguing number of early novels are set in their vicinity, and Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice was not the first young lady in English fiction to be entranced by a redcoat. In the long run there was a larger movement in social history which took place outside these well-​recognized modes of getting on in life. New professions, like surveyor, land agent, and architect, came to prominence. The activities surrounding commerce and finance became less socially dubious, an important condition of Britain’s economic take-​off later in the eighteenth century—​only Amsterdam had anything like the sophisticated London credit market. Merchants and manufacturers were slower to find acceptance, and seldom play a heroic role in early novels, yet they took an increasing role in high politics as MPs. They often represented the more urban constituencies, where landowners held on to the county seats; but it should be remembered that until reform arrived in the nineteenth century great manufacturing centres like Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds sent no members to Westminster. Even the important trading city of Glasgow, as a Scottish ‘burgh’, had to share its member with pipsqueaks like Renfrew and Rutherglen. Nabobs with interests in India and West Indian merchants with sugar estates in the Caribbean enjoyed greater prosperity as the turns of war and diplomacy gave Britain its first great empire, with a new administrative bureaucracy replacing the old commercial venturers. Spain and the Low Countries were in decline,

44

44   PAT ROGERS and the eastern European powers had not yet emerged on the world scene. France was the major trading rival, and the Utrecht settlement of 1713 had given Britain a temporary start in the richest markets: the merchant shipping fleet trebled between 1702 and 1776. The slave trade, of course, played a significant part in all this. Meanwhile, at the very top of the scale, the great Whig dynasties grew bigger, yet more cohesive. The dukedoms thrived, while the squirearchy pinched and scraped. A man like Sir Roger de Coverly (died in The Spectator, by the hand of Joseph Addison, October 1712) would never have seen such golden days again.

Class The contemporary social register was delicately shaded with fine nuances which elude our observation today. Merchants had their own elaborate caste system, while the exact distinction is not always easy to draw between the various grades of landowner, from the great magnates like the Duke of Devonshire through the various categories of gentry down to the lesser freeholders, though the top and bottom of this scale are miles apart. Very approximately, one might say that the structure was a pyramid, with the magnates enjoying an income of £5,000 upwards, up to £40,000 even; the wealthiest gentry including baronets (under 1,000 of them) had £3,000 or £4,000 per annum; the class termed by the early demographer Gregory King ‘esquires’ would number some 3,000, and receive around £1,000 per annum; and the remaining gentry (12,000 or more in all) £250 as a minimum. The 100,000 freeholders or owner-​occupiers might earn £300 and downwards, with the poorest among them not making more than £50 a year. Social prestige and influence went closely in line with this economic gradation. National figures in politics needed a strong territorial base, and they often exercised influence as Lord Lieutenant of a county.5 Lord Coningsby, a brutal seigneur who ruled Herefordshire for more than twenty years, was able to grab most of the local pickings and thus control most affairs even though he often had to play second fiddle to his neighbours the Harleys at Westminster. Power and status might thus be distributed in uneven ways around the country. Below the magnates, but active in Parliament and local affairs (e.g., turnpike trusts or canal building) came the knights of the shire. The squires were men of the stamp of Allworthy in Tom Jones, magistrates and church patrons, highly important people within a narrow geographic area. Below that, real power was circumscribed but gentility still strenuously maintained. Gregory King’s estimate, relating to the year 1688, bases the count on families rather than individuals. His figures suggest that fully 850,000 families, out of a total of about a million and a third, constituted the common people and had less than £10 annually 5  For the importance of Lords Lieutenant, see Cannon, Aristocratic Century, 122. Lord Coningsby held posts as both Lord Lieutenant and custos rotulorum for Herefordshire and Radnorshire, high steward of Hereford, steward of crown manors in Radnor, and MP for Leominster.

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1660–1770    45 to live on. This means that some 2,800,000 people, that is more than 60 per cent of the population, were ‘decreasing the wealth of the kingdom’. By contrast the 160 families headed by a temporal lord garnered an income not far short of £3,000—​outdoing bishops, whose financial and social standing varied greatly between the richest and poorest dioceses, but who averaged £1,300 per year. Lower down the scale we note that substantial ‘merchants by sea’ could reach up to £400, while the surprising total of 10,000 ‘persons in the law’ averaged £140 per family, possibly on the low side. Beneath these we encounter groups such as farmers and freeholders, each tending to cluster around £50 or a little higher. The navy does a little better than its military counterpart, with its officers making £80 as against £60 for those in the army. Some of King’s categories, like the officers, make obvious sense to a modern eye. Others do not correspond to our modern social typology. Perhaps the most obvious difference is the presence of terms which cannot be translated directly in a later scheme of upper/​upper middle/​lower middle/​working classes. The hierarchy is more gradual and yet in a way more clear-​cut. Plainly the lords, baronets, and knights form an upper class, although the gaps in wealth and prestige were immense even here—​knights, who numbered only just over 100 in 1770, tended to be associated with wealthy City merchants, as opposed to the hereditary baronets who had grown up in a family of high status. Today we admire the former group more highly, because they had worked for their success, unlike the baronets. But this was not the attitude of snobbish people at the time, and indeed as late as Jane Austen’s comic figure Sir Walter Elliot. The first sentence of Persuasion (1817) portrays a character-​type which would have been entirely familiar to readers a hundred years earlier: ‘Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-​hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage.’6 Occasionally novelists poke fun at baronets, as with Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, the heroine’s rejected suitor in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a brutish roué with an unusually high income of £8,000 (ten times what King set as the average for his kind). Another rich baronet is the hero of Smollett’s Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762), who exhausts much of the estate of £5,000 he has inherited on an absurd quixotic adventure. More commonly, the knight comes in for more scathing treatment in fiction, as he displays his plebeian origins or his mercenary outlook. Even Grandison has an eccentric and frankly silly knight called Sir Rowland Meredith. In resources and power it is a steep jump downwards to the gentry, even though some gentlemen enjoyed high incomes comparable to those of the lower aristocracy. Yet contemporaries referred endlessly to the ‘nobility and gentry’. Swift addressed the third of his Drapier’s Letters (1724) to ‘the nobility and gentry of the kingdom of Ireland’, and in England too there were any number of appeals, addresses, letters, and dedications directed to this well-​recognized pairing. What united gentlemen, and mutatis mutandis ladies, with their superiors lay in two factors. First, both groups had normally shared a similar education and belonged to the same moral and intellectual universe, with

6 

Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Janet Todd and Antje Blank (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 3.

46

46   PAT ROGERS common habits of leisure and social practices. Second, both generally derived most of their money from landed property, ranging from the huge estates of the richest peers to the more modest holdings of squires like Fielding’s Squire Western. This in itself is enough to differentiate them from those lower down on Gregory King’s list, including ‘persons in sciences and liberal arts’ (where the author John Dryden or the painter Sir Godfrey Kneller might have found themselves in 1688). Self-​evidently there is no single grouping that King labelled ‘middle class’. We can apply this term to the social spectrum he observed only in an anachronistic way. It is true that people did speak of the ‘middle station’ in society, but it was never ‘a socially self-​conscious or particularly coherent grouping’.7 Famously, at the start of Robinson Crusoe (1719), the hero’s father tells him that his was ‘the middle State, or what might be called the upper Station of Low Life’. This, Crusoe senior regards as a particularly fortunate position in the world, ‘not exposed to the Miseries and Hardships, the Labour and Sufferings of the mechanic Part of Mankind, and not embarrass’d with the Pride, Luxury, Ambition and Envy of the upper Part of Mankind’.8 We could not find a neater summation of some prevailing attitudes in the eighteenth century. But the groups who occupy the intermediary places in King’s scheme, including merchants, tradesmen, clergymen, farmers, shopkeepers, artisans, and craft workers, made up an extremely disparate spread. No common class-​consciousness united them, and they had limited contacts—​ few artisans would have had easy social relations with clergymen, for instance, and they would not have been seen as fellow members of a ‘class’. Moreover, it is unlikely that many esquires, or some of the gentry, would have felt happy to be yoked into this grouping. While as we have seen the social standing of the mercantile and manufacturing people did slowly improve, the nation had not overnight transformed itself into a bourgeois culture—​a process hardly complete even by the end of the Victorian age. The truth is more elusive. Some writers from the late seventeenth century, right up to the mid-​eighteenth century, might correspond to what we regard as middle class: Richardson and Sterne provide good examples, while some female authors such as Mary Davys might fit. But where to place Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, and many others, who achieved some standing as a result of literary success, but often failed to reach a position of financial solvency and social respectability? For that matter, how should we categorize Henry Fielding, a man from the upper gentry with close family connections to the aristocracy, as well as to the upper branches of the army, the law, and the church? He spent much of his life as a hack author, promoter of illegitimate theatre, and impoverished trainee lawyer:  until he had almost reached his forties, he would not have been welcome at many polite dinner tables. Then again, the growing audience for literature (to be considered in more detail shortly) did include a solid core of people of the middle station; but it also embraced a wide selection of aristocratic men and women, and increasingly a base of readers from the underclass, 7  Paul Langford and Christopher Harvie, The Eighteenth Century and The Age of Industry (Oxford: OUP, 1992), 42. Langford’s is the finest brief survey of the period. 8  Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. Donald Crowley (Oxford: OUP, 1972), 4.

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1660–1770    47 some of whom might not even have needed popular chapbook recensions to enjoy Moll Flanders, Pamela, or Fanny Hill. Finally, while many novels of the period do feature bourgeois characters, the heroes and heroines seldom represent this class: they are quite often outsiders like Tom Jones or socially ambiguous figures like Burney’s Evelina, who turn out to have high birth that has been hidden from the world. Many of the central characters are adventurers, like most of Defoe’s protagonists (Crusoe reneges on his solid background) and several of Smollett’s. Few grounds exist, then, to describe the early novel as ‘bourgeois’ in any meaningful way. The most straightforward among the groups listed by King fall at the bottom of his pile. They include ‘labouring people and out servants’, ‘cottagers and paupers’ (a dismaying two-​and-​a-​half million individuals belonged to families in these two categories), ‘common seamen’, ‘common soldiers’, and ‘vagrants’. One or two individuals such as the thresher Stephen Duck, the kitchen-​maid Mary Leapor, and the footman Robert Dodsley escaped from this wretched state to enter the world of literature via poetry or drama, but it is hard to think of any novelist who had such a bad start in life. Nor do members of the underclass commonly figure in literature, except as comic foils, criminals, or cheating servants. All these appear in Tom Jones, a perfect gallery of eighteenth-​ century types ranging from grand ladies through lawyers, clergymen, schoolmasters, and more, right down to the barber-​servant Partridge, the inept highwayman, the loose Molly Seagrim, and her father the poacher Black George. The only major writer to put a proletarian or classless figure at the centre of his novels was Defoe. Even here, we find in Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), and Colonel Jacque (1722) that the protagonists find implausible ways to free themselves from the bonds of their early unprivileged lives—​ways of escape that were wholly out of reach to most outcasts in eighteenth-​century England. By a seemingly unstoppable process, society was growing more urban in character long before the Industrial Revolution. In 1650 only about 9 per cent of the English population lived in towns with a population above 10,000, and the percentage was less than half of this in Scotland. By 1750 the proportion had very nearly doubled to 17 per cent. The increase was spread widely across the nation, but some larger towns such as first Bristol and now Liverpool, had experienced rapid growth associated with overseas trade. A much more modest rise took place in some of the old county towns such as York and Gloucester. But almost everywhere prosperity and amenities were burgeoning in the provinces, so as to create what Peter Borsay has called ‘the English urban renaissance’. Spas constituted another growth area, and Bath is the town outside London which figures most frequently in the early novel. It was a trendy location, much as Brighton would become in later centuries, built around leisure, fashion, and competitive consumption, and its residents included many writers, musicians, actors, and architects. As Tobias Smollett noted right at the end of our period in Humphry Clinker (1771), adventurers, male and female, were drawn to the town. This offered up endless opportunities to writers for a comedy of intrigue. Yet the permanent population was still relatively low: not much more than 1,000 in 1660, before its rise to fashionability, and barely exceeding 7,000 in the 1760s.

48

48   PAT ROGERS It was to such men of opulence and conspicuous expenditure that writers had looked in the past. Gradually the patronage system began to decline, and this process coincided pretty neatly with the rise of the novel. It is improbable that the two facts are unconnected. Of course, writers of fiction certainly took such patronage as was on offer: Tom Jones again provides a good example, as it is dedicated to Lord Lyttelton, a poet but also a grandee and at this time one of the lords of the Treasury. More ambiguously, Laurence Sterne, whom many contemporaries regarded as a tuft-​hunter bent on conquering London society, added a belated dedication to William Pitt in the second edition of Tristram Shandy in 1760. This might seem a gesture inspired by the popular appeal of the ‘great commoner’, then at its height; but Pitt would accept an earldom within a few years, and he was in any case a man with numerous connections to the upper echelons of society—​he was in fact an Eton school-​friend of Lyttelton, and later a relative by marriage. However, most of the early novelists stood at one remove from the old world of patrons, and made their way in a variety of occupations—​Eliza Haywood and Charlotte Lennox worked as actresses early in their careers, while Samuel Richardson amassed more of his wealth from his work as a government printer than from his own books, successful as they were.

Gender Women tended to live longer than men, as is the case today. But it has been shown that ‘the periods of their lives when women were most likely to die were different from those of men’. This is because women were ‘four times more likely to die in the first ten years of marriage than were men … and were twice as likely to die in the second ten years. Thereafter they were more likely to survive than men.’9 This imbalance is of course explained by the high rate of maternal mortality, often as a result of puerperal fever—​a risk that is thought to have declined somewhat over the eighteenth century. These facts dramatize a larger feature of life in the period, namely the extent to which the experience of most women was conditioned by issues around reproduction and child-​rearing. In some ways gender was a less important determinant of social well-​being than rank. Ladies of the aristocracy and gentry with abundant servants certainly enjoyed a more comfortable life than common people of either sex. Nevertheless, at every level women found that their opportunities in a patriarchal society were severely limited compared to those of their fathers, brothers, and especially husbands. Novels of the period, most of them naturally written by women, express some of the frustrations and anger to which this imbalance gave rise.

9  Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500–​1760: A Social History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), 28, 166. This book provides a thorough overall survey of women’s lives in the context of society at large.

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1660–1770    49 In terms of agency, the most favourable condition was perhaps that of a widow. Some of the legal restraints imposed on a wife disappeared, while inheritance rights were generally preserved, even under cases where ‘strict settlements’ ensured that the family estate passed to the male heir. Many widows took over the business of their deceased husband: this was common in a number of trades, including bookselling. Quite often, as with Hester Thrale—​the wife of a lazy and self-​indulgent London brewer—​it would have made better business sense if the wife had been able to run the concern even before her husband died. The next most desirable condition on the whole was that of an unmarried woman—​ young girls of every station above the very poorest were generally granted a certain degree of freedom and had the right of refusing (if not choosing) a potential mate. Unmarried women who had gone past the early age at which they tended to be regarded as ‘marriageable’ could still look forward to a life which might often be useful, productive, and in most respects fulfilling—​among these were novelists such as Sarah Fielding (1710–​68), the talented sister of Henry. A measure of social stigma attached to the category of ‘old maid’, but it was one which many women preferred to incur rather than lose their independence in a loveless union. As Bridget Hill has shown, single women found abundant ‘ways of escape’ from poverty and dependency.10 Least agency belonged to wives, whose legal identity was merged into that of their husbands. Only the few women who had access to money of their own achieved any large amount of self-​determination. Some historians believe that a movement began in this period towards more companionate marriages, with a greater element of emotional, if not legal or financial, equality between the spouses. Some evidence can be found for this view in real life, though rather little in fiction. One more category, even more despised and rejected, was that of the abandoned woman—​either as a result of seduction and betrayal, separation, or, in a very few instances, divorce. Women found themselves excluded from the professions, the military, government offices, and Parliament, besides lacking the vote. Equally they were debarred from higher education, even from Dissenting academies. It may not seem to matter that they could not enter Oxford or Cambridge, since not much more than 0.1 per cent of the English population followed that route, and the figure was little higher in Scotland with its four ancient universities. But of course the males who did enjoy such a privilege possessed a disproportionately powerful stake in society. Instead many women found means to educate themselves, and they made important contributions to the economic, mercantile, cultural, and even political life of the nation. At the bottom of the social scale their work, paid or unpaid, was vital to the survival of most households. Higher up the ladder, women took an active part in science, most notably botany, and even in medicine—​they had to serve as unlicensed healers, but that was not much of a drawback in an age when the official training that male doctors received lacked a great deal in rigour and efficacy. Nevertheless, it is in literature that women made the most dramatic strides forward. A growing number of poets and dramatists came to the fore, with Susanna Centlivre

10 

Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660–​1850 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2001), 126–​42, part of a trailblazing study.

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50   PAT ROGERS (1669–​1723) outdoing even Behn as one of the most performed playwrights of the era. Scholars and essayists such as Elizabeth Carter abounded:  women founded reading groups and literary circles, one of which was vital to the success of Samuel Richardson. And for the first time female authors were able to infiltrate a new literary form, the novel, almost at its inception, and operate on terms of equality with men. What of men? For the most part they were brought up to regard themselves as genderless, the male sex being normative and the female sex gendered and deviant because other. Yet males too had to conform to strict if largely unstated expectations, and could run into gender constraints nearly as restrictive as their sisters. In 1804 a woman author noted some of the prejudice at work: ‘Feminine manners in a man excites contempt in the feelings, but a masculine woman creates disgust.’11 But as everyone knows, such stereotypes lasted very much later than this.

Readers and Writers Attempts to estimate the size and composition of the reading public are subject to considerable margins of error, and this applies particularly to the subset which was made up of consumers of fiction. We might project one crude estimate of reading figures from the size of editions. The standard print run for books of an average size on a subject of general interest was 1,000 for the first edition: if the book went into later editions (most novels didn’t) this would normally be a further 1,000 or 1,500 copies. By comparison expensive learned works rarely had a run of more than 500 copies initially, while at the other end of the scale sermons of a popular preacher might reach 2,000 or more. Even classical texts in the original Latin, partly on the back of the educational market, could attain a figure of 3,000. The biggest sellers of all were school grammars (possibly 10,000 per edition); almanacs (up to 50,000 annually); and bibles or prayer books. It is reasonably safe to say that the fictional work in English with the largest sale was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), whose two parts were reprinted in 1701 with a run of 8,000 and 5,000 respectively.12 What of the new classics, that is the novels which survive today? The original version of Robinson Crusoe probably had the standard run of 1,000 when it appeared at a price of 5s. on its first appearance in 1719—​both figures reflect the publishing norm. Within two weeks there was a second edition of the same size, as we know from paper ledgers of the printer. Third and fourth editions came out in the following weeks on a similar scale. In 1720 the fifth followed, and then in 1722 two more, one in the handier duodecimo size. 11 

Mary Pilkington, Memoirs of Celebrated Characters (London, 1804), 98. The comment was provoked by Charlotte Charke, a figure from the second quarter of the eighteenth century. 12  These figures come from a number of places, but chiefly William St Clair, The Reading Nation and the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 453–​79. St Clair provides the most valuable background to many of the issues considered here.

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1660–1770    51 Only one more edition (1726) appeared in Defoe’s lifetime, although by then there had been several unauthorized versions issued by pirates, as well as a serial publication in newspaper instalments, and one printed in Dublin (the absence of a copyright agreement meant that Irish publishers were free to do their own thing). The ‘tenth’ legitimate edition appeared in 1753. Very few novels had such a prolonged afterlife, and the price paid by booksellers for a share in copyrights demonstrates that fact: in 1770 a publisher was able to acquire an eighth share in the rights of four books including Moll Flanders and Roxana for one guinea. Among the most popular novelists was Eliza Haywood, and though her collected Secret Histories reached a fourth edition in 1742, again with a run of 1,000 copies, many of her individual works went quite rapidly out of print. The pattern continued: even Oliver Goldsmith’s popular Vicar of Wakefield (1766) did not exceed this scale in any of its four early editions. It is clear that fiction was not the highest selling branch of literature for a long time to come: the figures just cited pale beside the totals achieved by poets like Pope and James Thomson, moralists like James Hervey—​author of the once celebrated Meditations among the Tombs (1746)—​or historians such as Lord Clarendon and David Hume. It is impossible to know how many of these copies were actually read, and if so by how many people. The legend of collective family reading probably has some substance in it, and one famous anecdote tells how a village blacksmith used to read Richardson’s Pamela (1740) to a large audience of entranced locals: ‘At length, when the happy turn of fortune arrived, which brings the hero and heroine together, and sets them living long and happily … the congregation were so delighted as to raise a great shout, and procuring the church keys, actually set the parish bells ringing.’ On average perhaps a thousand or so books and pamphlets were issued in London each year during the first half of the eighteenth century, starting from a smaller base in 1700. The proportion of fictional works gradually increased over time, but including the numerous translations from languages such as French and Spanish the annual tally made up only a small percentage of these publications—​certainly no more than 10 per cent. As a very rough estimate, useful only as indicating a general scale of magnitude, we might conclude that the number of novels sold in a given year would be unlikely to exceed 100,000, at least until the last quarter of the century. How many individual readers would such a calculation suggest? The evidence is too slender for any dependable judgement to be made. With fewer books available, and fewer distractions from other media, it is likely that books of all kinds were read more slowly—​compulsive addicts of fiction like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who gobbled up everything that was sent to her in Italy, certainly made up a minority. A reasonable guess might be that the average reader got through something like two to four novels a year—​no more. But that was enough for a fairly stable market to emerge, and for an increasing awareness of fiction to develop among the literary public—​much more so than at the time when Aphra Behn produced her fiction in the late 1680s. With hindsight, opportunities for the professional author look to have burgeoned within the period. Not all contemporaries saw it that way. A long and unhappy tradition exists of fulminations against the book trade: much of this emanates from writers

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52   PAT ROGERS of moderate success, like James Ralph (1705–​62) who contributed a sour review of The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade in 1758, but similar criticisms are found in Oliver Goldsmith and others. Ralph frets a great deal about the status of authorship, and complains that whereas a man ‘may plead for Money, prescribe or quack for Money, preach for Money, marry for Money, fight for Money’, writers were expected to be uniquely disinterested, so that ‘he who aims at Praise ought to be starved’. Often Ralph harks back to the favoured era at the start of the century, when Matthew Prior and Joseph Addison had benefited from ‘the Link of Patronage which held the Great and the Learned together’.13 A more refined version of this critique appears in Goldsmith’s account of the Augustan age (1759). The reign of Queen Anne is there singled out because: ‘At that period there seemed to be a just balance between patronage and the press … the writers … were sufficiently esteemed by the great, and not rewarded enough by booksellers, to set them above independence.’14 Laments over the decline of patronage are usually accompanied by bitter words directed against booksellers. Samuel Johnson is one of the few moderating voices on this issue, acknowledging that the trade was led by ‘generous liberal-​minded’ men.15 For a short period patronage had flourished thanks to munificent grandees such as Lord Somers and Lord Halifax, but their successors were men of less repute like the Duke of Chandos and George Bubb Dodington. By the middle of the century the system had begun to wither away. In any case novelists had never relied on patrons to the same extent as writers in other genres. Nor did they often use the widely employed method of publishing which involved subscriptions made by purchasers before the book came out. Frances Burney achieved success with this method late in the century, but few well-​known writers of fiction preceded her—​with occasional exceptions such as that of a work by Eliza Haywood, Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier, translated from the French in 1720. This attracted a respectable tally of more than 300 buyers for the then undiscovered author. Clearly the market for novels increased over time, and Jan Fergus has shown from the records of booksellers in the English Midlands how both men and women created a demand for particular modes of fiction by their reading preferences.16 Brief chapbook versions of popular works, often sold by itinerant pedlars, continued to be published to reach those with the lowest standard of literacy. In general, the levels of literacy matched social and economic standing, as described earlier. Overall the proportion of people with basic functional skills, such as the ability to read and write their own names, remained low in 1660: it stood at around 30 per cent, with a lower percentage among women than men, and a higher percentage in London, with up to 66 per cent of the population meeting this test. Very few of the labouring class were fully literate, and virtually

13  James Ralph, The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated. With Regard to Booksellers, the Stage, and the Public. No Matter by Whom (London: R. Griffiths, 1758), 2, 72. 14  [Oliver Goldsmith], ‘An Account of the Augustan Age in England’, in The Bee. Being Essays on the most Interesting Subjects (London: J. Wilkie, 1759), [2]‌36. 15  James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 2 vols. (London: Charles Dilly, 1791), 1: 168. 16  See Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England (Oxford: OUP, 2006).

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1660–1770    53 none of those higher up on the scale, including merchants, were illiterate. By 1700, the figure for all males had risen to something approaching 45–​50 per cent, and by 1760 it was getting on for 60 per cent. It is estimated that about 25 per cent of women were literate in the 1720s. This gradual increase obviously contributed to a rise in the reading public, and it disproportionately affected those towards the bottom of the social scale.17 One more development which holds immediate relevance is the growth of the circulating library from the middle of the eighteenth century. Hardly any lending libraries had existed until this time. The inception of this process is usually credited to Allan Ramsay (1686–​1758), the poet and bookseller, who began to loan out items from his stocks for a fee from his Edinburgh shop around 1725. His example was soon followed in Bath and Bristol, and more slowly in London, although the book trade tried in 1742 to prevent coffee houses from loaning out volumes to their customers. Access was gained by payment of an entrance fee and an annual subscription. By the third quarter of the century the libraries had spread to most provincial towns, and expansion continued well into the nineteenth century. Moralists condemned these institutions as the products of a modern Babylon, where young ladies in particular were liable to feed to the peril of their good name on this ‘ever-​green tree, of diabolical knowledge!’ (as a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) famously describes them).18 In fact, research long ago established that most circulating libraries carried a wide range of literature in all categories, the improving as well as entertaining.19 But the fear was that impressionable girls would end up like Catherine Morland, in Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), with their heads turned by novels featuring high-​flown romance, fantastic adventures, and imaginative scenery. Such books undid the work of educating women to be tractable, pious, and domestically focused. That was a prejudice against which novelists had to battle right up to the Victorian age.

Select Bibliography Borsay, Peter, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–​ 1770 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Cannon, John, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-​Century England (Cambridge: CUP, 1984). Cressy, David, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: CUP, 1980). Fergus, Jan, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England (Oxford: OUP, 2006). Griffin, Dustin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–​1800 (Cambridge: CUP, 1996). 17 

These approximate estimates are drawn from a variety of sources. The best survey of the spread of literacy and its social consequences remains David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: CUP, 1980), even though its data extend only as far as 1715. 18  [Richard Brinsley Sheridan], The Rivals, A Comedy (London, 1775), 12. 19  See especially Paul Kaufman, Libraries and Their Users: Collected Papers in Library History (London: Library Association, 1969).

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54   PAT ROGERS Hill, Bridget, Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660–​1850 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2001). Hunter, J. Paul, Before Novels:  The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990). Langford, Paul, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–​1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation and the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). Shoemaker, Robert B., The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-​Century England (London: Hambledon, 2004). Stone, Lawrence, and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–​1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Vickery, Amanda, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1998). Wrigley, E. A., and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–​1971: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: CUP, 1989).

Chapter 4

Making Pu bl i c s a nd M aking N ov e l s Post-​Habermasian Perspectives Brian Cowan

The two most influential works for the study of eighteenth-​century literary culture in the last half-​century must surely be Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) and Jürgen Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), a book more commonly known in English as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989).1 Both books were composed in the post-​war era, and both authors owed a fair amount to the tutelage and influence of the German Frankfurt School of neo-​Marxist critical social theory in particular, and to the general enterprise of a historical sociology of knowledge. The critical theorist Theodor Adorno (1903–​69) served as Habermas’s academic patron in 1950s Germany, and was also Watt’s occasional interlocutor and intellectual companion in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. Habermas, Watt’s junior by a little more than a decade, was aware of, cited, and elaborated upon Watt’s arguments about the rise of the eighteenth-​ century novel in his own work. Both Watt and Habermas posited an important relationship between literature and society in the eighteenth century in which an understanding of each term would also help illuminate the other.2 For Watt, general eighteenth-​century social changes such as the rise of a middle-​class cultural aesthetic and especially a general ‘reading public’ enabled the literary innovations in formal realist prose fiction-​writing that gave birth to the novel. Literary change 1  I would like to thank Alan Downie, Marcie Frank, Kevin Pask, and Ben Pauley for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. The arguments presented here have developed from conversations inspired by the Major Collaborative Research Project sponsored by Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, ‘Making Publics, 1500–​1700: Media, Markets and Association in Early Modern Europe’, from 2005 to 2010. 2  For direct references to Watt in Habermas, see The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 37–​8, 258 n. 23.

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56   BRIAN COWAN such as the birth of the modern novel, in other words, was a product of socio-​economic transformations. Habermas’s argument about the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere, although phrased in more explicitly Marxisant terminology, posits a rather different relationship between literature and society. For Habermas, the significant changes in eighteenth-​century literary culture—​including particularly the invention of the ‘domestic novel’ such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740)—​and literary sociability, such as the introduction of the coffee house and the literary salons, enabled the rise of a new public sphere in which ‘the relations between author, work and public changed’ so that ‘the privatized individuals coming together to form a public also reflected critically and in public on what they had read, thus contributing to the process of enlightenment which they together promoted’ (50–​1). This ‘public sphere of rational-​critical debate in the world of letters’ prefigured and set the stage for the emergence of rational-​critical debate in the political realm as well. Such a formulation of the relationship between literature and society has been immensely appealing to both cultural historians and literary scholars with an interest in demonstrating the importance of the eighteenth century to the modern world, and this must surely account for the increasing popularity of the Habermasian public sphere paradigm. The reception history of both Watt and Habermas in eighteenth-​century studies has also varied considerably over the last half-​century. Watt’s book was rather quickly recognized as an important contribution to eighteenth-​century literary history, and it put the study of the eighteenth-​century novel squarely at the forefront of literary scholarship. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Watt made the eighteenth century important in ways in which it had not been in early twentieth-​century literary scholarship, and in this way his well-​received work elevated the status of the whole field. The Rise of the Novel made questions about the nature, the development, and the social functions of fictional prose-​writing in the eighteenth century central to the professional study of English literature, and the work has been emulated and challenged so many times by so many eminent scholars that it is tempting to read the post-​Watt literary history of the eighteenth century as a case study in the anxiety of scholarly influence.3 It now seems to be almost an unspoken requirement that in order to be recognized as a major scholar of eighteenth-​century literature, one must come up with a new account for the rise of the novel. Surely, Watt’s thesis has been revisited and revised more often than any other study of eighteenth-​century English literature. Habermas’s work, on the other hand, was originally recognized only within Germany as an important, if sometimes controversial, contribution to the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory, and it was received as such. Although his later philosophical

3  The collected eighteen essays, ‘Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 12/​ 2–​3 (2000) all review Watt’s influence extensively. For another positive appraisal, see John Richetti, ‘The Legacy of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel’, in Leo Damrosch (ed.), The Profession of Eighteenth-​Century Literature: Reflections on an Institution (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992), 95–​112. Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (1983; repr. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996), p. xiv, explicitly acknowledges the anxiety of Watt’s influence on the original composition of his book.

Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives    57 work would soon find English translators and interpreters such as Thomas A. McCarthy, Raymond Geuss, Martin Jay, and David Held, Habermas’s original critical-​historical book on the emergence and transformation of the bourgeois public sphere would find Italian (1971) and French (1978) translators long before it would be translated into English in 1989.4 Literary theorists such as Terry Eagleton, Peter Stallybrass, and Allon White developed Habermasian insights from his original German work; but for most anglophone historians, the French reception of Habermas’s public sphere theory has crucially shaped their understanding; indeed even the wording of the common translation of Habermas’s original German phrase bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit is now commonly rendered as a more direct translation of the French phrasing l’espace publique—​the ‘public sphere’.5 If Habermas’s reception in eighteenth-​ century studies was slower than Watt’s, he has made up for lost time in the last two decades as the public sphere concept has been adopted and adapted by scholars from a variety of different disciplines. Explicitly Habermasian concerns with the emergence of a public sphere between the late seventeenth-​century British revolutions and the late eighteenth-​century French Revolution have begun to shape both major surveys of the period as well as standard textbook accounts. Under the guise of the newly refashioned public sphere paradigm, Watt’s story of the rise of the novel has now been subsumed by the even larger narrative of the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere, in which the rise of novel-​writing and -​reading has become a standard feature, alongside the rise of the coffee house, the literary salon, and an increasingly active and autonomous role for public political opinion and action.6 Given the growing prominence of the public sphere concept, it is hardly 4 

Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978); Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: CUP, 1981); Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1986); David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1989). A short English précis of Habermas’s argument was published as ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)’, New German Critique 3 (1974), 49–​55, and much cited thereafter. 5  Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986), 80–​100. On the reception history of Habermas’s public sphere concept amongst historians, see Brian Cowan, ‘Public Spaces, Knowledge, and Sociability’, in Frank Trentmann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Consumption (Oxford: OUP, 2011), 251–​66; and in early modern English historiography, Brian Cowan, ‘Geoffrey Holmes and the Public Sphere: Augustan Historiography from Post-​Namierite to the Post-​Habermasian’, Parliamentary History 28/​1 (2009), 166–​78; Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) offers a representative interdisciplinary sample of anglophone responses to Habermas at the moment of the English translation of his Strukturwandel. A very useful bibliography of public sphere studies, both Habermasian and otherwise, can be found online: [http://​ publicsphere.ssrc.org/​guide/​]. 6  See John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), esp. 125–​200; T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–​1789 (Oxford: OUP, 2002), esp. 145–​54; Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–​1815 (London: Penguin, 2007), esp. 475–​86; James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), esp. 92–​104, 111–​19; and, with some

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58   BRIAN COWAN surprising to find literary histories asserting that ‘the public sphere is clearly visible in the eighteenth-​century novel’.7 The problems raised by the two seminal post-​war works remain at the forefront of eighteenth-​century studies today, although the current answers to those problems differ greatly from those proposed by Watt and Habermas in the mid-​twentieth century. Both Watt and Habermas have been strongly (and repeatedly) criticized for two cardinal sins of historical analysis: teleology and anachronism. Watt’s rise of the novel is teleological in triplicate, since he argued that it was based on the concomitant rise of a reading public and a middle-​class cultural sensibility. Habermas’s public sphere adopts an explicitly Marxist teleology that understands its structural transformation in terms of a renegotiation of the relationship between class and state power between the seventeenth-​century English bourgeois revolution and the eighteenth-​century French one. While this form of historical teleology was commonplace at the time when both Watt and Habermas wrote their books, it has since been largely eschewed in the face of revisionist scrutiny and postmodern scepticism regarding the determined ‘rise’ or permanency of just about any socially significant phenomenon. Related to this teleological scepticism has been the charge of anachronism. Both Watt and Habermas have been criticized for getting their history of the long eighteenth-​century context wrong. Watt’s new ‘novel’ genre is mainly based on a study of the well-​known mid-​eighteenth-​century fictional works of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, whereas subsequent students of English prose fiction noticed rather quickly that this was a highly selective choice of authors and writings. Later histories of the novel have made room for a broader selection of writers, especially female authors such as Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Penelope Aubin, and Eliza Haywood.8 Some have acknowledged the influence of Continental (especially French) influences on English writers, and the importance of vernacular translations as a formative process in the development of a distinctive sense of the novel has recently received increased attention.9 reservations, Nicholas Henshall, The Zenith of European Monarchy and Its Elites: The Politics of Culture, 1650–​1750 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 193–​205. 7   John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700–​1780 (London: Routledge, 1999), 15; see also Anthony Pollock, Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–​1755 (London: Routledge, 2009). 8   A non-​exhaustive list includes: John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–​1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670–​1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1994); William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–​1750 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1998); Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–​1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Brean Hammond and Shaun Regan, Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–​1789 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 9  Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010); Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009); Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006).

Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives    59 Watt’s dating of the emergence of the English novel to the decades between the 1720s and the 1740s has also been questioned. Proponents of Behn, Manley, and company prefer to date the emergence of the genre in English to the later seventeenth century, while others see even the early eighteenth century as much too early. For the latter group, it was only with the construction of a canon of English prose fiction in the late eighteenth century by booksellers and editors such as Francis Noble, who first presented Defoe’s novels as straightforward works of fiction, James Harrison’s Novelist’s Magazine (1779–​ 89), and eventually the publication of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s fifty-​volume collection of The British Novelists (1810) that a sense of the novel as a recognizable genre of English fiction-​writing really emerged.10 Michael McKeon’s rethinking of the origins of the novel has called into question the entire generic category of the ‘novel’ itself, along with the associated categories of social class and gender, and in so doing he has written over the course of the last two decades two sweeping dialectical histories of the formation of the new categories of early modern knowledge that shaped English fiction-​writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The novelty of the novel, as it came to be understood as such during this period, lay in the elaboration of a ‘modern view of fiction’ by Restoration and eighteenth-​century critics from Dryden to Johnson who constructed an explicitly ‘realist and aesthetic formulation of fiction’ that had previously remained untheorized and hence only implicitly understood by contemporaries. McKeon’s Secret History of Domesticity (2005) extends this argument to an understanding of the emergence of a modern concept of privacy as the product of increasing pressure to discuss and theorize modern privacy as an experience separate from the public realm, and it uses the emergence of the ‘domestic novel’ from Defoe to Austen as a poignant case study of a more general social and epistemological process.11 Watt’s triple-​rise thesis is not mentioned here at all, although the histories of class formation, the reading public, and the novel all receive sustained treatment as part of the more general process of ‘explicitation’ that is the subject of this wide-​ranging work. Habermas’s arguments about the bourgeois public sphere have been even more controversial than Watt’s thesis about the rise of the novel. The timing of the emergence of his ‘public sphere’ has been criticized by some for not recognizing important early modern developments that preceded his own claims for the importance of the late seventeenth century, and by others for ignoring the persistence of traditional religious and aristocratic social norms and politics throughout much of the eighteenth century, if not 10  P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, ‘Defoe and Francis Noble’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 4/​4 (1992), 301–​13; Homer Obed Brown, Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997); Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge: CUP, 1998); J. A. Downie, ‘The Making of the English Novel’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 9/​3 (1997), 249–​66; and J. A. Downie, ‘Mary Davys’ “Probable Feign’d Stories” and Critical Shibboleths about “The Rise of the Novel” ’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 12/​2–​3 (2000), 309–​26. 11 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–​1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987); McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), 746 n. 159.

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60   BRIAN COWAN beyond.12 While debates along these lines often reveal more about the preferences and prejudices of the critics than they do about Habermas’s original arguments, they have prompted some scholars to wonder openly ‘when is a public sphere?’.13 Although the phrasing is awkward, the question is apposite. For to conceive of ‘civic publicness’ (another way of rendering Habermas’s original bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit) as a potentially transient moment, rather than as part of a stage in Marxist world-​historical development roughly parallel with the rise of the bourgeoisie, gives the concept greater flexibility than it originally had for Habermas. The public sphere concept has too often been reified, and too closely associated with a particular time and particular places, especially the salons and coffee houses of eighteenth-​century Europe; even Habermas, whose original formulation recognized that the ‘idea of the public’ sphere was not ‘actually realized in earnest in the coffee houses, the salons, and the societies’, still claimed that ‘as an idea it had become institutionalized, and thereby stated as an objective claim’.14 The public sphere concept has always worked better as a metaphor than as a descriptive term of historical analysis.15

Publics in the Making In recent years, a variety of what we might call ‘post-​Habermasian’ perspectives on the history of early modern public-​making have emerged, and these may bear some relevance to future research on the emergence of the novel. In a post-​Habermasian guise, the public sphere paradigm has been used to suggest the basis for a new post-​Whig, and post-​revisionist narrative for early modern political history. In The Politics of the 12  Peter Lake and Steve Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007); J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660–​1832 (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 185; and compare Clark, ‘The Re-​Enchantment of the World? Religion and Monarchy in Eighteenth-​ Century Europe’, in Michael Shiach (ed.), Monarchy and Religion: The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-​Century Europe (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 67. See also J. A. Downie, ‘How Useful to Eighteenth-​ Century English Studies is the Paradigm of the “Bourgeois Public Sphere” ’, Literature Compass 1 (2003), 1–​18; Downie, ‘Public and Private: The Myth of the Bourgeois Public Sphere’, in Cynthia Wall (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 58–​79; and Downie, ‘Periodicals, the Book Trade, and the “Bourgeois Public Sphere” ’, Media History 14/​3 (2008), 261–​74. 13  See the special issue of Criticism 46/​2 (2004), ed. Joseph Loewenstein and Paul Stevens. 14 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 36. See also Michael McKeon, ‘Parsing Habermas’s “Bourgeois Public Sphere” ’, Criticism 46/​2 (2004), 275–​6; McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, 48; and Conal Condren, ‘Public, Private and the Idea of the “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England’, Intellectual History Review 19/​1 (2009), 15–​28. 15  For examples of both, see Brian Cowan, ‘What Was Masculine About the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in Post-​Restoration England’, History Workshop Journal 51 (2001), 127–​57; Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005); and Ann C. Dean, The Talk of the Town: Figurative Publics in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2007).

Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives    61 Public Sphere in Early Modern England, Lake and Pincus argue that the early modern period, instead of being marked by either growing conflict, as the Whigs posited, or persisting consensus, as revisionist historians often retorted, can more usefully be seen as marked by multiple and various moments in which different ‘publics’ were made (and often unmade). Publics came and went; they were labile and transient, without ties to any particular social class or any given social space, such as the coffee house or the salon. Post-​ Habermasian histories of public-​making take care to recognize that they are studying a pluralistic process of interest formation, of active recruitment to encourage new members to join a given public, and of claims to the legitimacy of these new interest groups. Any given public could potentially provoke the emergence of an equally interested ‘counter-​public’ with different views on the same topics.16 Publics tend to form around things of interest, broadly conceived—​some things are material, other things might be practices, ideas, or beliefs. For this reason, several post-​Habermasian studies of public formation have found inspiration in Bruno Latour’s actor-​network theory and ‘thing theory’ more generally.17 The thing theory of public formation elaborates upon Martin Heidegger’s observation that: the Old High German word thing means a gathering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter. In consequence, the Old German words thing and dinc become the names for an affair or matter of pertinence. They denote anything that in any way bears upon men, concerns them, and that accordingly is a matter for discourse. The Romans called a matter for discourse res … Res publica means, not the state, but that which, known to everyone, concerns everybody and is therefore deliberated in public.18

In recent years, Heidegger’s theory of the thing has been adopted by Latour and others under the guise of Dingpolitik, a means of thinking about power relations in terms of people and their things. While the thing theory of public formation has by no means replaced Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, particularly amongst historians who, by nature, 16 

Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002) is a key text; Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (eds.), Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2009) offers early modern examples. See also the collected materials available online: [http://​www.makingpublics.org/​]. Richard Helgerson’s list of twelve characteristics of a public are particularly useful: [http://​makingpublics.mcgill.ca/​docs/​study/​desk/​1/​HelgersonList.pdf], accessed 2 January 2011, and see ‘Printing Publics’, Patricia Fumerton, ed., Early Modern Culture 8 (2010): [http://​emc.eserver.org/​1-​8/​issue8.html], accessed 29 April 2013. 17  Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-​Network-​Theory (Oxford: OUP, 2005); and see the essays edited by Bill Brown in Critical Inquiry 28/​1 (2001). Cynthia Wall explores the role of ‘things’ across the gamut of eighteenth-​century writing forms in The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006). 18  Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’ (1951), in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1975), 174. For a guide to Heidegger’s thing, see James C. Edwards, ‘The Thinging of the Thing: The Ethic of Conditionality in Heidegger’s Later Work’, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (eds.), A Companion to Heidegger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 456–​67.

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62   BRIAN COWAN are antipathetic to theory, it does offer a potentially fruitful new way of thinking about how publics were made that is also compatible with recent historiographical trends in early modern and eighteenth-​century studies as well. Dingpolitik accepts the ‘inherent limits imposed by speech impairment, cognitive weaknesses and all sorts of handicaps’, and works to understand politics in this world of imperfectly mediated communication; recent approaches amenable to this perspective have begun to shed new light on eighteenth-​century studies.19 Needless to say, this hardly lends itself to a history of the triumph of rational-​critical debate that Habermas posited as a hallmark feature of his bourgeois public sphere, although some historians have usefully discussed the ways in which critical appeals to reason and some conception of a general public interest were used and invoked by contemporaries as a legitimization strategy for their arguments. While this variegated and always ever incomplete approach to the history of publics lacks the world-​ historical gravitas of Habermas’s original work, it has the benefit of being more context-​ sensitive and more widely applicable to a wide variety of different time periods. Another key difference between Habermas and these post-​Habermasian histories of public-​making relates to the ways in which they conceive of the relationship between the state and its various publics. For Habermas, the public sphere was, somewhat paradoxically, a product of the new efflorescence of private life in the eighteenth century. The public sphere in the political realm (politische Öffentlichkeit) was part of the ‘private realm’ (Privatbereich) that was separate from the state’s ‘sphere of public power’ (Sphäre der öffentlichen Gewalt) (30). The emergence of the bourgeois public sphere is part of a story of the separation between state and civil society that is a hallmark of modernity for Habermas. For post-​Habermasians, the relationship between state and civil society is less distinct. In the last two decades, early modern historians have developed a new social history of the state (and of state formation) in which state and society have been understood to be mutually constitutive, rather than separate and distinct. It is now understood that early modern state formation went hand in hand with ‘elite formation’, and the successful exercise of political power was dependent upon playing the part of the magistrate convincingly. Proper magisterial performance was increasingly associated with humanist and courtly concepts of civility and decorum. In this respect, post-​Habermasian histories of the politics of the public sphere owe as much to the enduring influence of Norbert Elias as they do to Habermas.20 Sociability emerges in this historiography as a key element of the state making process.21 19  Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or How to Make Things Public’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 41; Clifford Siskin and William Warner (eds.), This is Enlightenment (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010). 20  Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–​1700 (Cambridge: CUP, 2000); Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 2005); Withington, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England’, American Historical Review 112/​4 (2007), 1016–​38; and Cowan, ‘Public Spaces, Knowledge, and Sociability’. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, rev. edn. by Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennell (1939; repr. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), remains a foundational text. 21  Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives    63 Equally important is the role of state power in enabling sociable practices. Key public sphere institutions such as the coffee house, the bookselling business, and the commercial theatre, for example, all relied upon the legal legitimacy and regulatory authority conveyed by licensing, libel, and copyright legislation. Official state business, such as local council meetings, often took place in public houses or in private salons. Given the widespread participation of office-​holding elites in these forms of public sociability, it is not easy to draw a clear line between the state and the public sphere.22 There has been a tendency in some readings of Habermas, and particularly in studies of continental Europe, to associate the public sphere with oppositional politics, and indeed perhaps even with the basis for revolutionary changes in the state.23 Yet the more we know about the practices of early modern sociability, the more we find that the state itself was deeply involved with enabling them. A final characteristic of post-​Habermasian histories of public-​making is that they tend to place less emphasis on print culture alone as a key means of communication and public formation. Habermas thought that the press developed ‘a unique explosive power’ (20) that enabled the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere. Thus it was ‘the needs of a bourgeois reading public that later on [in the eighteenth century] would find genuine satisfaction in the literary forms of the domestic drama and the psychological novel’ (43). Here the influence of Watt’s Rise of the Novel on Habermas is clear. The high-​water mark of this enthusiasm for the revolutionary impact of print culture was probably Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), but more recent histories of the book have been less sanguine about positing a direct relationship between printing and social change.24 More often than not, it was the norms and practices of sociability that shaped the book trade, rather than the other way around. This is not to say that printing and the book trade did not matter or that print culture had no role in making early modern publics, but rather that print must be placed within the broader context of a diverse and extensive media culture that included not just ‘the full gamut of print’, but also ‘circulating manuscripts, public performance of a variety of types (sermons, show trials, disputations, executions and even, at times, plays), and rumour’, as Peter Lake has insisted in his reformulation of the concept of the public

22 Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee; James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and English Book

Trade 1450–​1850 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007); Mark Dawson, Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London (Cambridge: CUP, 2005); Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: CUP, 2007); and Antoine Lilti, Le Monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005). 23  Roger Chartier, Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1996); Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture. 24  Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: CUP, 1979); compare Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), and William St Clair, The Reading Nation and the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004).

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64   BRIAN COWAN sphere.25 One might also add to this list material objects such as works of visual art or items of clothing, fashionable accessories such as fans or tobacco stops, playing cards, or even seal dies or chamber pots. These things, understood both in the colloquial and the Heideggerian sense, need to be incorporated into future studies of early modern public-​ making. A post-​Habermasian history of early modern public formation must take on board the multiple forms of communication, and the complexities of mediation in an age when print was indeed becoming a crucial, but by no means the only, mode of idea diffusion.

Novel Formations A post-​Habermasian perspective on public-​making can also shed new light on the enduring questions raised by Watt about the rise of the eighteenth-​century English novel. Was ‘formal realism’ truly the distinctive and novel characteristic of the eighteenth-​century novel? If so, where did these conventions of realistic fictional prose-​ writing come from? How did the ‘reading public’ actually read, and to what extent could readers’ demands be known and accurately responded to by authors and booksellers? Can any of these creative or communicative practices be usefully understood as a product of ‘middle-​class’ attitudes or prejudices? If the unitary concept of a singular and formative public is broken down into a series of multiple, transient, sometimes competing and often contestatory publics, we can rephrase these questions in ways that might help illuminate the slow emergence of the new forms of early modern fiction-​writing that came to be known as novels in the later seventeenth century and were ultimately understood as a discrete genre by the later eighteenth century. In the remainder of this essay, I will discuss two areas for investigation that have begun to shed light on these questions from a post-​Habermasian perspective: the relationship between early modern news culture and the novel, and the related link between political partisanship and novel-​writing.26

25 

Peter Lake, ‘The Politics of “Popularity” and the Public Sphere: The “Monarchical Republic” of Elizabeth I Defends Itself ’, in Lake and Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, 59–​60. 26  Given the multiplicity of publics and genres that influenced the making of the novel, it should be emphasized that these two relationships are only a few amongst many others that would need to be considered in any complete history of the novel’s emergence. Other influences would include genres such as theatrical writing and performance, historiography, pornography, and erotica. See Paulina Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–​1710 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Karen O’Brien, ‘History and the Novel in Eighteenth-​Century Britain’, Huntington Library Quarterly 68/​1–​2 (2005), 397–​413; Bradford K. Mudge, The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–​1830 (Oxford: OUP, 2000); Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, takes all of these genres into account.

Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives    65 The lexical correspondence between news and the novel is far from coincidental. Watt argued that the ‘rise of journalism’ provided an important precursor to the rise of the novel in that it created ‘a new form of writing … which was wholly dependent on printed performance’, and he recognized that Defoe’s early experience as a journalist writing for the Review (1704–​13) and other periodicals helped form his novelistic prose style in his later fictional works, but Watt did not devote much space in his study to the practices, forms, and conventions of news-​writing and its influence on the novel.27 Perhaps Watt thought that journalism and the practices of non-​fiction prose-​writing that developed along with the periodical in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were too transparently obvious to require sustained critical attention. News-​writing, after all, with its claim to report ‘just the facts’ in an impartial and objective manner, is about as close to formal realist prose as one could imagine. More recent studies of news culture and news-​writing have explored the development of journalistic prose as a new genre in its own right, and indeed critics such as Lennard Davis and J. Paul Hunter have both put a strong emphasis on the importance of news-​writing and journalism in their own works on the origins of the English novel.28 The invention of the newspaper, in accounts such as these, laid the groundwork for the development of novel-​writing by habituating readers to a sense of ‘now’, or of contemporaneity, that made the present seem interesting and worthy of serious attention. Once this taste for the present had been achieved through journalism, writing about current events and living personalities could become the focus of aesthetic experiments in fiction-​writing. Journalism liberated fiction from the tyranny of the past and, to a certain degree, from the hegemony of neoclassicism. For this reason perhaps, Hunter asserted that ‘journalists and hacks [provided] the class from which novelists chiefly came’.29 Newspapers and the periodical essays referred to by Habermas and others as ‘moral weeklies’ that accompanied them in the coffee houses and the print market also generated new forms of readerly subjectivity through their regular, serial publication. Although the term ‘weekly’ is something of a misnomer as many periodicals were published more than once a week, or even daily such as the Daily Courant (1702–​35), it was the regularity of their publication that mattered most. Readers came to expect the development of a continuing narrative over the course of several issues as a particular news story unfolded and developed. While early modern news reports were exceedingly short—​most were only two or three sentences long—​they would often unfold and develop over the course of several issues, thus creating a sense of expectation about future developments that readers of the early English novel would also find in their much more complicated fictional plots. The relationship between the anecdotal form in 27 Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U

of California P, 1960), 196, 103–​4. 28 Davis, Factual Fictions, 42–​84; J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​ Century Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), 23. 29 Hunter, Before Novels, 295.

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66   BRIAN COWAN which early modern news reporting was conveyed and the narrative conventions of the early novel would surely repay more careful investigation.30 Early modern journalism was also notable for its vernacular style; one which more closely resembled informal oral communication than it did formal conventions of written composition.31 The newspapers and periodicals of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often conveyed their stories through the guise of letters (especially transcriptions of manuscript newsletters from abroad or at home) or of a dialogue between two recurring interlocutors. In this respect, the style of early modern periodical prose-​writings resembled two of the dominant conventions found in the emergent English novel: epistolarity and verbatim accounts of conversational dialogues between various characters. The publication in print of epistolary correspondence was particularly central to both the periodical and the early novel. Newspapers originally emerged in the guise of printed versions of manuscript newsletters and they continued to report their news in the form of ‘letters from abroad’ into the eighteenth century. The papers also encouraged responses from their readers and they would often print readers’ own letters within their pages, and in so doing, they created a virtual dialogue, mediated by print, between the news-​writer and the news reader. This became a particularly powerful combination in the 1690s and afterwards as some English periodicals such as John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1691–​7) took a casuist turn and offered to respond to their readers’ queries. This practice would be imitated by Defoe in his Review, as well as by Addison and Steele in the Tatler (1709–​11), the Spectator (1711–​14), along with other periodicals. The emergence of this form of periodical casuistry would arguably influence Defoe’s novels, especially Moll Flanders (1722), and Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–​8). The reproduction of dialogue was also central to many early English periodicals, and this practice helped shape the concepts of fictional characterization that would be found in the early English novel. Many journalists adopted a phantom image of their authorial selves in their periodical prose-​writings. This eidolon conceit was first popularized by Sir Roger L’Estrange in his Tory journal the Observator (1681–​7), in which partisan banter between two stock characters structured the prose printed on each side of this double-​ sided folio periodical. Beginning with a simple question-​and-​answer format, L’Estrange soon moved on to more sophisticated debates between ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’, thus popularizing both terms in both contemporary and later political discourse.32 L’Estrange’s 30  Compare Robert Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napolean (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010), 269–​99. 31  Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–​1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 154–​8; T. A. Birrell, ‘Sir Roger L’Estrange: The Journalism of Orality’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), assisted by Maureen Bell, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4: 1557–​ 1695 (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 657–​61; but see also David Randall, ‘Epistolary Rhetoric, the Newspaper, and the Public Sphere’, Past & Present 198/​1 (2008), 3–​32. 32  See Anne Duncan Page and Beth Lynch (eds.), Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008); Peter Hinds, ‘The Horrid Popish Plot’: Roger

Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives    67 characters, to be sure, were not very sophisticated, and his Whig was always a foil for the superior arguments of his Tory Observator, but this discursive innovation proved to have great staying power and it was later adopted by many other journalists, such as Defoe’s Mr. Review; John Tutchin’s Whig Observator; and the short-​lived 1709 periodical, the General Postscript which offered a dialogue between two characters, significantly named ‘Novel’ and ‘Scandal’. The most famous periodical eidola were surely Richard Steele’s Isaac Bickerstaff for the Tatler, and his collaborative invention with Joseph Addison, Mr. Spectator. In the Tatler and Spectator papers particularly, readers were treated to a whole host of additional new, interesting, and fictional albeit verisimilar characters such as Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Honeycomb, Nicholas Gimcrack, and the political upholsterer. While the periodical essays of Addison and Steele abandoned L’Estrange’s direct emulation of dialogue between their characters, they compensated for this distance by creating a host of believable, albeit often risibly satiric new characters. It would be a short step from the imaginative world of Mr. Spectator and his club to that of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders.33 Early modern news culture was understood by Watt to be an important ingredient for the rise of the novel, and Habermas saw it as an key element in the making of his bourgeois public sphere, and both were surely right to posit a relationship between the development of these new genres of both non-​fiction and fiction prose-​writing, news and the novel, but more recent studies of the invention of journalism are less sanguine about the relationship between news culture and the rise of a reading public or still less, the middle class. News was published because it found a ready and eager readership to be sure, but the character and quality of the news published owed as much to the constraints of elite patronage, political manipulation of the press, and partisan concerns to provide effective propaganda as it did to a simple desire to cater to a growing class of paying customers. Spin, rather than sales, shaped the nature of early modern news production.34 This leads us to consider the relationship between political partisanship and the formation of the novel in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This period has been characterized as one marked by ‘the rage of party’, and for good reason. If some historians of the novel have looked to Aphra Behn’s prose fiction of the 1680s as a possible point of origin, political historians have become more decisive in their agreement that the period saw the emergence of solid and enduring partisan divisions as the still raw wounds of the Civil Wars and Interregnum were opened once again over debates regarding the royal succession of the Catholic prince James Stuart, the Duke of York. L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late-​Seventeenth-​Century London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Robert Willman, ‘The Origins of “Whig” and “Tory” in English Political Language’, Historical Journal 17/​3 (1974), 247–​64. 33  See Scott Black, ‘The Spectator in the History of the Novel’, Media History 14/​3 (2008), 337–​51. 34  See Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper; Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2005); J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: CUP, 1979); J. A.

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68   BRIAN COWAN James’s accession to the throne in 1685 settled little, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688–​9 created the conditions for an ongoing party rivalry between Whigs and Tories.35 Neither Watt nor Habermas paid much attention to partisan politics in their works, but new histories of the novel and the public sphere cannot afford not to do so. This is particularly true because most of the writers identified as early English novelists also wrote partisan political propaganda. Amongst Watt’s founding fathers of the novel, both Defoe and Fielding were well known for their political writings.36 Only Richardson stands out as conspicuously uninvolved with partisan politics, and even his work invited politically charged responses.37 When the canon of early novelists is expanded, as it should be, to include writers such as Behn, Congreve, Manley, Swift, and Haywood, the personal connections between political writing and novel-​ writing become obvious. In such a politically charged culture as later Stuart and early Hanoverian Britain, partisan writing was ubiquitous and partisan readings of texts, even prose fictions, was even more commonplace. Given the deep importance of partisanship to the culture of Restoration and post-​revolutionary Britain, political readings of early English novels have been a standard feature of the critical literature. Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) can be read as a commentary on the crisis of James II’s kingship; Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a statement on kingship in general; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) as a critique of the Hanoverian Whig ascendancy; Fielding’s Tom Jones (1746) as a response to a mid-​eighteenth-​century Whig crisis; and so on.38 Such readings can offer important insights into the novels and their possible reception by contemporary readers, but perhaps even more interesting are the broader epistemological and hermeneutic issues for the reading public that were raised by this fervid political climate. When every potential truth claim was potentially suspect as a partisan ‘sham’, it could be immensely difficult for readers to accurately distinguish between fact and fiction. When questions of high political import such as the royal succession were at issue, this could be immensely disturbing, not to mention politically destabilizing; but with regard to other issues, such as whether the printed relation of

Downie and Thomas N. Corns (eds.), Telling People What to Think: Early Eighteenth-​Century Periodicals from the Review to the Rambler (London: Frank Cass, 1993); and Downie, ‘Periodicals, the Book Trade, and the “Bourgeois Public Sphere” ’, 261–​74. 35  Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–​1685 (London: Penguin, 2005); Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–​1720 (London: Penguin, 2006); Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2009); Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (2nd edn., London: Hambledon, 1987). 36  See P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006); J. A. Downie, A Political Biography of Henry Fielding (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009). 37  Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-​Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), esp. 9, 78–​9; Kate Loveman, Reading Fictions, 1660–​1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 175–​96. 38  Richard Kroll, ‘ “Tales of Love and Gallantry”: The Politics of Oroonoko’, Huntington Library Quarterly 67/​4 (2004), 573–​605; Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship and Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: CUP, 1991); Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection

Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives    69 Robinson Crusoe’s travels was real or not, they could offer some amusement and pleasure for readers critically inclined to find faults in its plausibility.39 The instability of truth claims in a polarized political culture posed significant interpretive challenges for contemporary readers (and indeed later historians and critics of the period), but it also afforded immense creative opportunities for writers who wished to engage with, and capture the attentions of, their reading publics. Both J. A. Downie and Mark Knights have suggested that this climate of authorial deceit, readerly suspicion, and partisan motivations ‘may well have provided a perfect breeding ground’ for the emergence of the novel during the same period.40 In order to appreciate the fertility of this breeding ground for the novel, post-​Habermasian historians and critics will need to appreciate the full variety of expressive appeals that could attract a public in the age of raging parties. This will require an expanded reading repertoire beyond Watt’s authoritative canon of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding to be sure. The period produced thousands upon thousands of newspapers and periodicals, cheap pamphlets, printed ephemera, manuscript libels and newsletters, oral sermons, speeches and performances, amongst many other genres and media for idea dissemination. All of these ‘things’ called out for, and found, their own public. Works and sources such as these can help us gain a better understanding of the development of the novel as a distinctive genre of prose fiction as it emerged amongst a cacophony of competing voices and calls for public attention. While many contemporary writers still struggled to appeal to an idealized, unitary ‘public’ for approbation in this competitive public sphere, their works were consistently received by an increasingly fragmented series of multiple and different ‘publics’. The important questions raised by Watt and Habermas in their influential studies can best be addressed by taking these plural and competitive publics into account in future work on the emergence of the eighteenth-​century English novel.

Select Bibliography Davis, Lennard J., Factual Fictions:  The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia:  U of Pennsylvania P, 1983). Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:  An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Hammond, Brean, and Shaun Regan, Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–​ 1789 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

(Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 144–​96; Paul Monod, ‘Tom Jones and the Crisis of Whiggism in Mid-​Hanoverian England’, in David Womersley (ed.), ‘Cultures of Whiggism’: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2005), 268–​96. 39 Loveman, Reading Fictions, 1660–​1740; Rebecca Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–​1725 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009). 40 Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 14–​15; Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, 332; Knights, ‘History and Literature in the Age of Defoe and Swift’, History Compass 3 (2005), 1–​20.

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70   BRIAN COWAN Knights, Mark, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2005). Lake, Peter, and Steve Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007). Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public:  Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). Loveman, Kate, Reading Fictions, 1660–​1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008). McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–​1740 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins UP, 1987). McKeon, Michael, The Secret History of Domesticity:  Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005). Siskin, Clifford, and William Warner (eds.), This is Enlightenment (Chicago:  U of Chicago P, 2010). Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1957).

Websites [http://​publicsphere.ssrc.org/​guide/​] [http://​makingpublics.mcgill.ca/​]

Influences on the Early English Novel

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Chapter 5

The C ontine nta l Influence on the Eight e e nt h -​ Centu ry  Nov e l ‘The English Improve What Others Invent’ Walter L. Reed

Most modern accounts of the eighteenth-​century English novel (or the novel in Britain during the ‘long eighteenth century’) have ignored, minimized, or simply denied the Continental influence on this allegedly ‘new species of writing’, as it was called by Richardson in remarks on Pamela. The novel was identified this way as well by a commentator on Joseph Andrews, Fielding’s counter-​fictional answer to Pamela, even though Fielding had claimed the classical sanction of Aristotle’s Poetics and the vernacular precedent of Cervantes’s Don Quixote for his contribution to this new species. Ian Watt’s forceful thesis in The Rise of the Novel, that the novel only came into being as a modern literary form in eighteenth-​century England in the writings of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, has held sway for decades, but among comparative-​minded scholars of English, not to mention scholars of Spanish and French literature, this nationalist presumption has been increasingly challenged from different historical and theoretical perspectives. The time has come to state it clearly and without apology. The novel did not arise, de novo, in eighteenth-​century England. Rather it was refashioned there: given new circumstantial realism, invested with new literary prestige, and provided with new sorts and conditions of readers. These features had, to a greater or lesser degree, informed a considerable number of earlier works of prose fiction in Spain and France, books that were readily available to English readers and writers, in English translations as well as in their original languages. A saying common in the eighteenth century (mentioned as such, though vigorously denied, by

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74   WALTER L. REED William Blake) may be invoked, without cosmopolitan or other-​nationalist rancour: the English improved what others had invented.1 ‘Influence’ is thus a less apt term for the way the protean super-​genre of the novel (also known as ‘prose fiction’, ‘romances’, ‘true histories’, ‘lives’, ‘adventures’, and ‘tales’ in this period) established itself in the English language and on British soil than a commercial term like ‘traffic’ or ‘trade’. Not only was the early seventeenth-​century Spanish novel Don Quixote continually translated, imitated, and widely read between 1660 and 1832, making it a perennial best-​seller in Britain during this period, but the national identity of much of the fiction published in the kingdom is not easily fixed, as original foreign language texts, English translations, loose paraphrases, chapbooks, pseudo-​translations, parodies, adaptations, and ‘imitations’ of Spanish and French novels were printed in London and Edinburgh, as well as imported from the Low Countries. Novels written in English and published in Britain were exported as well, leading to significant changes in the form of the novel as it continued to be developed in other nation states—​though these novels were most influential abroad, according to Pascale Casanova, after they were translated into French, sometimes expurgated of what seemed to French readers their excessive attention to realistic detail. The European traffic in fiction in the long eighteenth century, in which German novels also became significantly involved later in the period, was a distinctly multinational affair, even as the character of the ‘improvements’ and the balance of trade were continually shifting.2 There is no general agreement on the reasons for the emergence of the modern European novel in Renaissance Spain, but emerge there it did, not only with Don Quixote (1605, 1613) but also with the genre of the picaresque novel, exemplified by Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604), La Pícara Justina (1612), and Vida del Buscón (1626), not to mention other assorted genres of prose fiction like the pastoral romance, at which Cervantes also tried his hand. And various reasons are given why, in spite of the fact that many of these Spanish novels were translated into English early on in the seventeenth century, no significant novelistic imitations or improvements of these fully-​fledged novels were produced by English writers before the third decade of the eighteenth century, when Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders, two picaresque novels by Daniel Defoe, were both published in 1722. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, announced on its title page as ‘Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote’ in 1742, was only the first of many reworkings of this Spanish classic by English novelists, which include Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752, with an introduction by Samuel Johnson), Tobias Smollett’s Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760–​2), Laurence Sterne’s 1  In notes towards a public advertisement for his engraving Chaucer[’]s Canterbury Pilgrims, Blake exhorts his countrymen to give the lie to ‘that well known Saying Englishmen Improve what others Invent’ (The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982), 576). 2  The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004), 146. A historical account of the shift from cosmopolitan to nationalist histories of the novel in England after 1800 is given by William B. Warner in Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–​1750 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998), 18–​24.

The Continental Influence on the Eighteenth-Century Novel    75 Tristram Shandy (1760–​7), and Richard Graves’s The Spiritual Quixote (1772). Smollett’s Quixotic refashioning was preceded by his own translation of Don Quixote (1751), as well as by his translation of Gil Blas, the influential French adaptation of the Spanish picaresque (alleged by some to have been an appropriation of a Spanish original),3 and three overtly picaresque novels of his own, Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), and Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753). Traditionally considered as one of the most accomplished novelists of the eighteenth century, Smollett developed his art of the novel thoroughly immersed in Spanish examples. No one can claim that the ‘Cervantick’ tribute novels of eighteenth-​century Britain (Smollett, after all, was a Scot) are superior to the original, but studies have demonstrated that each of them shows significant critical insight into the many-​faceted artistry of Don Quixote as well as being an accomplished English novel in its own right. For example, Fielding’s Quixote imitation transforms the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, dramatized in all its comic inconsistency in Don Quixote, into an ethical critique of the social pretensions that often accompanied neoclassical dogma. Smollett’s recasting of Cervantes’s hero as an emotionally distressed lover languishing in prison, an episode based more on Cervantes’s biography than on his novel, shifts the image of the hero from the earlier reception of this exemplary novel as satire towards the idealizing pathos of later Romantic interpretations. Sterne’s is at once the least overt and the most systematic reconstruction of Don Quixote, in its setting, its narrative point of view, and its characters. Sterne repositions Cervantes’s adventures of the open road in the perils of the domestic household, exchanging the nag Rocinante for the metaphorical ‘hobby horse’. He refashions the unstable reflexivity of Cervantes’s author/​editor into Tristram’s first-​ person narrative self-​consciousness, full of antic digressions and narrative surprises; he translates Quixote’s omnivorous chivalric learning into Walter Shandy’s ‘Tristrapaedeia’, the encyclopedic curriculum for his son; and he restages the comedy of ill-​constructed arms and armour endured by Quixote and Sancho as the attempts of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim to reconstruct, in a kind of play therapy, the battle in which Toby suffered his embarrassing wound.4 In the case of the English appropriation of the Spanish picaresque novel, it is not an imitation (or travesty) of a particular book but the evocation of a particular genre, the expectations of form and theme that come from an understanding shared by authors and readers (and publishers and booksellers as well) that a certain type of story, character, setting, incident, and style will be featured in the proffered literary transaction. When readers are familiar with English translations of the so-​called true histories of Spanish rogues and servants of many masters (and perhaps the earlier and cruder English picaresque by Richard Head and Francis Kirkman The English Rogue described in the Life of Meriton Latroon [1665–​80]) and then pick up a novel with the extended title ‘The Fortunes and 3  See Francisco de Isla and Juan Antonio Llorente, ‘Two Arguments for the Spanish Authorship of Gil Blas’, introd. and trans. Nancy Vogeley, PMLA 125/​2 (2010), 454–​66. 4  See ­chapters 6 and 7 of Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) for further elaboration of these intertextual transformations.

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76   WALTER L. REED Misfortunes Of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, And during a Life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Years a Whore, five Times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother) Twelve Years a Thief, Eight Years a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums’, they realize that what is on offer is not a journalistic criminal biography, nor a chronicle of aristocratic scandal, nor a Puritan spiritual autobiography, but a fictional first-​person narrative mixing entertainment, moral edification, and social critique, framed by the disingenuous protest that this story, unlike all those others, is not fiction but fact, a claim that is a crucial part of the fictional contract to which the reader is invited to sign on. This expectation gains support if these readers also happen upon another, more overtly picaresque novel with a similar title, summarizing ‘The History And Remarkable Life’ of one ‘Col. Jacque, commonly call’d Col. Jack’, published in the same year. Defoe’s novels are difficult to assign to any literary genre, in part because of his genius for thoroughgoing impersonation of his various narrators. The evidence of his conscious awareness of the Continental genre of the picaresque novel (with influential French and German examples as well as Spanish ones by this time) does remain elusive. He seems to have known Spanish, and a copy of Ubeda’s La Pícara Justina is listed in the sale catalogue of his library. But the circumstantial evidence that Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and even his later Roxana could and should be read as picaresque novels—​as ingenious adaptations of the genre if not as deliberate improvements on the earlier Spanish examples—​is strong. Given the many different genres in which Defoe wrote (including neoclassical poetry), the idea of a ‘nearly pure and certainly naïve mimesis’ in Defoe’s fictional narratives, as John Richetti has called it, needs reconsideration.5 In fact, the assignment of a literary text to a particular genre is always debatable, and a simple or single designation of genre rarely satisfies experienced readers. A case in point from later in the century is Smollett’s last novel Humphry Clinker, which one modern critic sees as ‘extending the possibilities of the picaresque rather than discarding it’, while another critic finds ‘little evidence visible of the picaresque’ in what is obviously, to him, an epistolary novel and perhaps a sentimental novel as well.6 The best account of the workings of genre, especially the multiple, proliferating genres of the novel, is provided by the Hispanist and comparatist Claudio Guillén. In his essays, ‘Toward a Definition of the Picaresque’ and ‘Genre and Counter-​Genre: The Discovery of the Picaresque’, Guillén shows in great detail how a genre is initially perceived as such and how it engages readers and authors in its later reception history.7 The generic intentions of an author finally are at the mercy of the generic expectations of readers, whether these are common readers or professional critics or, in the case of the Spanish picaresque, a

5  John J. Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 18. For more on the question of Defoe’s elusive literary allusion, see Reed, Exemplary History of the Novel, 93–​105. 6  Robert D. Spector, Tobias George Smollett (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 105; Robert Giddings, The Tradition of Smollett (London: Methuen, 1967), 148. 7  Claudio Guillén, Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971).

The Continental Influence on the Eighteenth-Century Novel    77 character in a novel—​Ginés de Pasamonte in Don Quixote, who announces that he is at work on the story of his life in this genre, a story which will eclipse other picaresque novels like Lazarillo de Tormes. The potential for a work of fiction being taken as a work of history, of course, is the enabling condition of Cervantes’s exemplary novel. Consideration of the genre of Don Quixote itself provides a way of turning from the Spanish influence on eighteenth-​century English novels (Spanish blueprints for the English house of fiction) to the French influence (French fashions for well-​dressed British narrative). For there were a number of seventeenth-​century French imitations of ‘the manner of Cervantes’ in Don Quixote. Charles Sorel’s L’Histoire comique de Francion (1623) and Le Berger extravagant (1627–​8), Paul Scarron’s Roman comique (1651–​7), and Antoine Furetière’s Roman bourgeois (1666), all translated into English after their publication in French, became part of a larger genre of ‘serio-​comical’ novels, as Mikhail Bakhtin, one of the most important twentieth-​century theorists of the novel, has called them, a genre most fully realized in ‘the great Renaissance novel’ of Cervantes but not limited to this single masterpiece. In Bakhtin’s long view, Gargantua and Pantagruel, the ‘picaresque adventure novel’, and Don Quixote initiate a form of prose fiction that he identifies as the novel’s ‘Second Stylistic Line’. The major eighteenth-​century representatives of this novelistic great tradition are for him the novels of Fielding, Sterne, and Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. (Howard Mancing notes that Scarron was ‘an important link’ between Cervantes and Fielding, ‘one that supplements Fielding’s direct inspiration by Miguel de Cervantes’, and Richter was known as ‘the German Sterne’.) The eighteenth-​century novels of Richardson and Rousseau, on the other hand, represent for Bakhtin the ‘First Stylistic Line’ of the novel, a much longer tradition of prose romances stretching back through the heroic romances of seventeenth-​century France and the chivalric romances of sixteenth-​century Spain to the Greek and Latin novels (also called romances) of antiquity. From the broad historical perspective of this widely-​ read Russian observer, the international character of the novel could not be more clear.8 It was the romance novel of seventeenth-​century France that provided the main inspiration for the novels of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood, now widely recognized as important early English novelists, publishing popular and accomplished prose fiction before Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding made their contributions to the further elevation of the novel in England.9 In this sense, one could argue that the French influence on the English novel pre-​dates as well as post-​dates the Spanish 8   See the section ‘The Two Stylistic Lines of Development in the European Novel’ in Bakhtin’s extended essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), 366–​422. A particularly cogent parsing of Bakhtin’s broadly inclusive history of the novel is Howard Mancing, ‘Don Quixote and Bakhtin’s Two Stylistic Lines of the Novel’, in Thomas A. Lathrop (ed.), Studies in Spanish Literature in Honor of Daniel Eisenberg (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009), 177–​96. The observation about the influence of Scarron on Fielding comes from the article on Scarron in Howard Mancing, Cervantes Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 658–​69. 9  See, for example, Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684–​1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) and Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti (eds.), Popular Fiction by Women 1660–​1730: An Anthology (Oxford: OUP, 1996).

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78   WALTER L. REED influence, where the traditional association of these romances with women writers, readers, and patrons in France (sometimes known, disparagingly, as ‘salon romances’) offered a career open to talent for these pioneering English women of letters. There were the heroic, neoclassical romances of Mme de Scudéry and La Calprenède, whose multi-​volume adventures were translated into English in their entirety but were translated and published in separate, shorter sections as well. After 1660, the long form of romance became less popular in France than the shorter and more historically oriented nouvelles. The shorter nouvelle provided a framework for the psychologically realistic representation of emotions in Mme de La Fayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, first translated into English in 1679 and republished as late as 1777. There were also the chroniques scandaleuses, politically-​coded romans à clefs about the vices of the aristocracy or satirical exposés of the licentiousness of the religious orders by French authors like Mme de Villedieu, Mme d’Aulnoy, and the Comte de Guilleragues. Guilleragues’s Letters of a Portuguese Nun was translated into English in 1678 by Roger L’Estrange and had run through ten editions by 1721. This popular French novel was a particular model for Behn’s first work of fiction, her Love-​Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684–​7), which claimed (falsely) to be translated from a French original and which is known (correctly) as the first entirely epistolary novel in English. The real and pretended French origins of this imported form of fiction, a form that used the device of an exchange of private letters among intimates and acquaintances to dramatize characters’ states of mind and to advance a narrative of the conflicts among them, reflected the political allegiances and linguistic competence of Royalist exiles returning from Bourbon Paris after the Restoration. The novels of political scandal and erotic licence of Delarivier Manley followed in this vein; Manley’s New Atalantis (1709) pretended to be ‘Written originally in the Italian, and translated from the third Edition of the French’. The failed prosecution of its author for libel by the Whig government only increased its popularity among readers of different genders and social classes. Eliza Haywood moved the genre, identified at this point as the ‘novel of amorous intrigue’ by William Beatty Warner,10 away from the specific political satire favoured by Behn and Manley and gave it a more general entertainment value. Haywood’s three-​volume Love in Excess (1719–​20) was one of the best-​selling novels of the next two decades, and she became one of the most prolific English novelists of this period. The appeal to such ‘Frenchness’ in fiction carries over to Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress (1724)—​now usually referred to as Roxana—​whose heroine, unlike Moll Flanders, consorts with the aristocracy on the Continent instead of the middling and criminal classes in England, and John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill (1749). As Bradford Mudge has argued, the moral improvement of the English novel proclaimed by Richardson and Fielding was accompanied by the simultaneous degradation of the novel into an amorphous kind of ‘immodest’ writing later known as pornography. Sexually explicit fiction, aimed primarily at erotic arousal, became the speciality of the notorious

10 Warner, Licensing Entertainment, passim.

The Continental Influence on the Eighteenth-Century Novel    79 bookseller and promoter Edmund Curll. Venus in the Cloister: or, The Nun in her Smock (1725), a translation from the French of Jean Barrin’s salacious anti-​ecclesiastical ‘whore dialogue’ novel of 1683 by ‘a Person of Honour’, is generally regarded as the nadir of Curll’s prurient line of product, fiction, and non-​fiction commissioned and published over several decades.11 The role of translation in promoting this influence needs emphasis. Translations from French literature appeared in greater numbers than translations from Greek and Latin during the eighteenth century in Britain, and the varieties of French fiction rendered into English were numerous. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English mentions over a dozen different subgenres that were published and republished in the course of the long eighteenth century, including ‘the French-​pioneered novelette on the imaginary amours of aristocrats or the psychological conflicts of pseudo-​historical figures’, of which Mme d’Aulnoy’s fifteen ‘historical’ works in translation were much in demand. Both Behn and Haywood turned their hands to translation, although with a rather cavalier attitude towards the French originals. Behn claims to have ‘rais’d’ Bonnecorse’s fiction La Montre from its original state of ‘Rubbish’ even as she greatly extended its length. Haywood’s translations of Boursault (Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier), Préchac (The Disguis’d Prince), and two novels by Mme de Gomez elaborated on the original French texts as well, acknowledging themselves as paraphrases rather than translations proper. The popularity of these foreign fictions seems to have boosted sales of Haywood’s own novels.12 It was the morally and politically subversive nature of this particular kind of French influence on the English novel that turned those concerned with the novel’s middle-​ class respectability and its integrity as a literary form against such models in subsequent decades. While the libertine novel flourished in France, becoming more tightly plotted, psychologically sophisticated, and socially analytical in the novels of Crébillon, Marivaux, and Laclos,13 the advent of Richardson’s Pamela, followed by Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, was understood as a specific rejection—​indeed, as a concerted moral improvement, in the eyes of many English readers—​of the French novel, often epistolary, of illicit amours. Back in 1715, a translator of Pierre Daniel Huet’s Lettre-​ traité de l’origine des romans (originally published as a preface to Mme de La Fayette’s Zayde in 1670) humbly hoped that although the English had, up to that point, had to rely on translations from the French for their prose fiction, soon ‘some English genius will dare to naturalize romance into our soil … since we are acknowledg’d to be very ingenious, in improving foreign inventions’. But by 1751, a reviewer of Smollett’s Peregrine

11 

See Bradford K. Mudge, The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–​1830 (Oxford: OUP, 2000), passim. 12  Jennifer Birkert, ‘Prose Fiction: Courtly and Popular Romance’, in Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 3: 1660–​1790 (Oxford: OUP, 2005), 339–​48. 13  See Peter Brooks, The Novel of Worldliness: Crébillon, Marivaux, Laclos, Stendhal (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969).

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80   WALTER L. REED Pickle felt confident enough of the English novel’s stature to disparage, wholesale, ‘that flood of novels, tales, romances, and other monsters of the imagination, which have been either wretched translated, or even more unhappily imitated, from the French’, and to hope that ‘this forced and unnatural transplantation could not thrive long in a country, of which the faculty of thinking, and thinking deeply … has not ceased to be the national characteristic’.14 For many men of letters concerned for the purity of the increasing number of middle-​class women readers of fiction as well as the dignity of the literary form itself, the French influence on the English novel could only be regarded as a bad one. And yet French readers, writers, and publishers embraced Richardson’s English improvement of the novel with great enthusiasm. Abbé Prévost, himself the author of The Life of Mr. Cleveland, Natural Son of Oliver Cromwell that had been popular in England since its translation in 1731, especially for its last volume, Manon Lescaut, was credited with the translation of all three of Richardson’s novels. Although it has been proposed that Pamela directly or indirectly took some of its cues from Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne, four of the eleven parts of which had been translated into English by the time Richardson composed his new species of writing,15 the balance of trade between French and English fiction shifted dramatically in the other direction after Pamela. Noting that these commercial terms were used by French critics at the time, Lynn Festa expands on Horace Walpole’s observation that ‘Richardson’s works have stupefied the whole French nation’. ‘Pamela’s triumphant progress’ through Paris as well as London ‘led to a proliferation of critical letters, apologies, polemics, parodies, imitations, sequels and theatrical adaptations’. But what is most important about this enthusiastic reception for the history of the novel, according to Festa, is not the way an individual novel in one language spawned a wide variety of imitations in another. Rather it is the way the remarkable international success of Pamela (not unlike, mutatis mutandis, the reception a century-​and-​a-​half earlier of Don Quixote) gave rise to a new genre that became known as the sentimental novel. Its immediate and broad European appropriation, with translations into Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, and Danish as well as French within three years of the publication of the first part, created the taste and expectations by which English novels like Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Man of Feeling, Evelina, and even Sense and Sensibility were read by a newly constituted cosmopolitan readership of this widespread though loosely defined genre of fiction.16 The sentimental novels of Rousseau—​Julie and the novelistic 14 

Both quotations are given in Mary Helen McMurran, ‘National or Transnational? The Eighteenth-​ Century Novel’, in Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (eds.), The Literary Channel: The Inter-​National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002), 62. 15  Lynn Festa reports the current consensus that the French translator of Pamela ‘unnamed on the title page’, was ‘at times incorrectly identified as Prévost’ (‘Sentimental Bonds and Revolutionary Characters: Richardson’s Pamela in England and France’, in Cohen and Dever (eds.), The Literary Channel, 77). The question of Marivaux’s influence on Richardson is explained as a matter of novelistic genre by James S. Munro, ‘Richardson, Marivaux, and the French Romance Tradition’, Modern Language Review 70/​4 (1975), 752–​9. 16  See Festa, ‘Sentimental Bonds and Revolutionary Characters’, 73–​7.

The Continental Influence on the Eighteenth-Century Novel    81 parts of Émile, which shifted the emphasis of the sentimental novel from courtship and marriage to education and moral development—​played an important role in the rapid proliferation of the genre. Richardson’s Clarissa had a greater and more direct impact on Rousseau’s extravagant tragic sentimentalism than Pamela did, but Julie; ou, La Nouvelle Héloïse had a considerable impact in England as well, heightening and intensifying the sense of intimacy between author and reader through characters who in the epistolary medium were passionate authors and readers themselves. Translated immediately as Eloisa by William Kenrick in 1761, it was still prompting translations of sequel novels like Laura: or letters from some persons in Switzerland in 1790, of which one reviewer wrote: ‘We do not remember to have seen the progress of love in the female breast so delicately and artfully represented since the productions of Richardson and J. J. Rousseau.’17 The relative merits of Clarissa and Julie were often weighed against one another in both countries. Rousseau’s colleague and rival Diderot published an extravagant appreciation of the English novelist soon after Richardson’s death. His Éloge de Richardson of 1762 was an important formulation of reader-​response to the sentimental novel, for authors and readers alike. ‘Oh Richardson! One plays a role in your works, in spite of oneself. We join the conversation, approving, blaming, admiring; we are irritated or indignant … My soul is held in perpetual agitation. How good I was, how just, how content with myself! After reading you, I am like a man at the end of a day he has spent doing good.’18 (Rousseau himself took this encomium as a slight aimed at his own novel by his former friend.) As is frequently the case in transnational cultural exchanges—​for example, in the renewed American enthusiasm for earlier African-​American blues music after the so-​ called ‘British invasion’ of the 1960s—​French Anglomania over Richardson significantly increased the English appreciation of their great improver of fiction. And yet not all attention paid to Rousseau was favourable. While Émile attracted a flattering imitation by Ann Radcliffe in The Romance of the Forest (1791), it also drew the hostile critique of Mary Wollstonecraft, both in her attack on Émile’s condescending treatment of female education in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and in her unfinished anti-​Émile novel, The Wrongs of Woman: Or, Maria (1798), in which the lovers correspond with one another in the margins of a copy of La Nouvelle Héloïse when they are both imprisoned in a madhouse. As we have already noted, French influence provoked British resistance as often as it did emulation, during what was an extended period of military and political conflict between the two countries. Indeed, Linda Colley has argued that throughout the period the very concept of British national identity was significantly defined by its salubrious difference from the French.19

17 

Peter Garside, James Rainer, and Reiner Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, vol. 1: 1770–​1799 (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 437. 18  Denis Diderot, Contes et romans, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 898; my translation. 19  Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–​1837 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992).

82

82   WALTER L. REED In this context, it is worth noting again that the nationality of a particular novel was not a simple, straightforward affair. Rousseau, after all, was a citizen of Geneva, a writer in the French language and resident in France for much of his adult life; like other radical French thinkers, he was even an exile for some time in England. Rousseau’s first novel, like many of the controversial novels composed in French by French authors, was published not in France but in Holland, due to the censorship of the ancien régime. Furthermore, even though Amsterdam was the major source for interdicted French writing (as it had been for interdicted Spanish writing in earlier centuries), a number of influential French books of the period were published in French in London and distributed abroad from Britain, from the popular novels of Anne de la Roche-​Guilhen, a member of the Huguenot diaspora, published while she was living in England in the late seventeenth century after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, to the transformative treatise of Mme de Staël on German Romantic literature, De l’Allemagne, published in French as well as English in 1813, since under Napoleon de Staël’s writing could not be published in France.20 Publishing histories of Britain have traditionally been ‘remorselessly anglocentric’, James Raven has complained, ‘isolating the English—​and British—​trade in books from that of Europe and severely underestimating the market for imported books’. These books included the ‘imported clandestine literature, long available in St. Paul’s Churchyard,’ much of it the disreputable pornographic fiction mentioned earlier.21 And they included La Nouvelle Héloïse, which was actually imported to England from Holland before it became available in France and which was later recorded in greater numbers in the original French in influential English private libraries than in the numerous English translations published in Edinburgh as well as in London over the next decade. If the traffic in French fiction had overtaken the traffic in Spanish novels by the 1750s, the traffic in German literature was on the rise in England at the expense of the French in the 1770s, particularly after the appearance of Goethe’s tragic, sentimental, epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774 (although it was initially translated into English from a French translation rather than the original German, it should be noted). Mme de Staël played an important role as cultural ambassador in turning the attention of English readers to German literature, which had already become an important source of inspiration for Romantic writers like Scott,

20  Joan DeJean describes La Roche-​Guilhen as ‘the one French Huguenot woman writer whose story is reasonably well known’ (‘Transnationalism and the Origins of the (French?) Novel’, in Cohen and Dever (eds.), The Literary Channel, 41). The publication of de Staël in England is detailed in V. Stockley, German Literature as Known in England 1750–​1830 (London: Routledge, 1929). Colley relates the surprise of an American ambassador in 1818 at finding people at a government dinner party in London conversing in French (Britons, 165). This was a habit of the European aristocracy less widespread in Britain than in Germany or Russia, but a sign that translation would not have been necessary for all British readers. 21 Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–​1850 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007), 143.

The Continental Influence on the Eighteenth-Century Novel    83 Wordsworth, Coleridge, and, later, for De Quincey and Carlyle. There was a noticeable shift of English interest away from the still dominant neoclassicism of French literature and towards the vernacular, folk, populist, anti-​classical, and anti-​French disposition of German Sturm und Drang and Romantic writers. The growing attention to German philosophy, biblical scholarship, and history as well as literature has been called ‘the Herder effect’ in European letters, after the emphasis in Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–​91) on the importance of a distinctive historical past and native language for various European peoples still aspiring to national unification and statehood. It also encouraged the Scots, Welsh, and Irish peoples from the so-​called Celtic fringe concerned to assert their cultural and regional distinction within Great Britain. Although the attention of modern scholars of British Romantic literature has been primarily focused on the impact of German poetry, drama, aesthetic theory, and biblical history, German fiction and literary criticism did play a major role in shaping novels and ideas about the novel as a genre in this culturally revolutionary period in Britain. English adaptations of the German novel were not as extensive as the English appropriation of Spanish and French fiction, but they are significant enough to merit attention in a consideration of Continental influence at the end of the long eighteenth century. For one thing, English literature in general and the English novel in particular were held in high regard among German authors and readers. The influential German ‘bardolatry’ of Shakespeare is a well-​known case in point. Goethe, easily the most eminent and sophisticated German man of letters of the century if not of all time, considered that ‘the novel … was preeminently an English genre, and the tradition in which Goethe was working was that of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne and Goldsmith, the developing novel of manners’, according to Jane K. Brown, at least when he came to write the third of his novels, Die Wahlverwandtschaften.22 This contribution of Goethe to the novel of manners made little or no impression on English readers in this period—​it was only translated as Elective Affinities in 1854—​but his earlier Wilhelm Meister, the exemplar of the influential genre of the Bildungsroman, drew more attention. Carlyle translated the Lehrjahre as Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in 1824 as part of his sustained effort to raise English appreciation of German novels or ‘romances’. Further interest was generated by De Quincey’s attack on this translation shortly after its publication and by Carlyle’s own Shandean treatment of the genre in Sartor Resartus, which began appearing in 1833. Yet it was only later, in the Victorian period, that the complex genius of this exemplary German novel had its full impact on English novels of education and socialization. The still earlier impact of The Sorrows of Young Werther at the beginning of the Romantic period was immediate, however, in England and abroad. Goethe’s first novel created its own international ‘Werther effect’, not unlike the earlier European ‘media event’ of Pamela, as Warner has called it, and the wildly enthusiastic reception by

22  Jane K. Brown, ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften and the English Novel of Manners’, Comparative Literature 28/​2 (1976), 97.

84

84   WALTER L. REED readers of La Nouvelle Héloïse.23 The first English translation of Werther appeared in 1779, and it was greeted with a remarkable number of poetic tributes to the hero and heroine of the novel, mostly by women, along with critical attacks in literary reviews, mostly by men, on the moral example provided by the adulterous love and suicidal ending of the tragic plot. Charlotte Smith published five sonnets ‘Supposed to be Written by Werther’ between 1784 and 1786; these were followed by Smith’s first novel, Emmeline, in 1788. As Sydney McMillen Conger has shown, Emmeline was a fully developed adaptation and transformation of Goethe’s controversial original, and it was only one of many such sympathetic yet critical Werther or Charlotte or ‘Laura’ novels by women in the succeeding decades. Such sequels were still current enough in 1818 to be satirized by Peacock in Nightmare Abbey, where the young hero Scythrop, thinking he has lost both women with whom he fancies himself in love, asks the butler to bring him a bottle of port and a pistol, in order to ‘make my exit like Werther’.24 But the impact of Goethe’s exemplary Romantic novel continued to be felt in a more positive, pathos-​filled manner in what is now acknowledged to be one of the most influential English novels of all time, though not its greatest masterpiece, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. As Victor Frankenstein’s ‘creature’, soon to be known more prejudicially as ‘the monster’, reports to his creator in their interview on the mountainside of the Alps, ‘the Sorrows of Werter’, one of three masterpieces of Western literature that made up his curriculum in what might be called ‘Human Studies’ when he was spying and secretly sharing with the exiled French De Lacey family, became for him ‘a never-​ending source of speculation and astonishment’.25 Werther takes a place of honour here beside Milton’s Paradise Lost and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. At least in Shelley’s international imagination, the lowly novel of the eighteenth century had risen indeed. The English estimation of German novels in general was a good deal lower at the Romantic end of the long eighteenth century, however. In her ‘Introduction’ to the third edition of Frankenstein in 1831, Mary Shelley herself recalled in a nostalgic but condescending fashion the ‘ghost stories, translated from the German into the French’ that had originally inspired her.26 Wordsworth in his ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ was more vociferous, charging that ‘frantic novels’ and ‘sickly and stupid German Tragedies’ had all but taken away interest in ‘the invaluable works of our elder writers … Shakespear and Milton’.27 Coleridge expressed serious reservations about Matthew Lewis’s erotic

23 Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 176–​230. For an account of Rousseau’s reception, see Robert Darnton, ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity’, in Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Sydney McMillen Conger, ‘The Sorrows of Young Charlotte: Werther’s English Sisters 1785–​1805’, Goethe Yearbook 3 (1986), 20–​56. 24  Thomas Peacock, Nightmare Abbey/​Crochet Castle, ed. Raymond Wright (London: Penguin, 1986), 119. 25  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. M. K. Joseph (Oxford: OUP, 1980), 128. 26 Shelley, Frankenstein, 7. It is worth noting that Shelley had also been influenced by a Gothic novel from another continent, the American Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. 27  Stephen Gill (ed.), William Wordsworth (Oxford: OUP, 1984), 599.

The Continental Influence on the Eighteenth-Century Novel    85 and fantastic novel The Monk, inspired by Schiller’s novel The Ghost Seer, because along with its ‘libidinous minuteness’ and ‘impiety’, it dignified and popularized the German genre of the ‘shudder novel’ or Schauerroman. This type of novel, which Coleridge found promising enough in German fiction but deplorable in its cheap imitations in English, is estimated to have made up 38 per cent of the fiction market in England the year before Lewis’s novel and Coleridge’s review.28 Again, we see here the two main kinds of ‘improvement’ that English novelists made on novels imported from Spain and France: on the one hand, imitations that paid direct homage to a particular noteworthy example, where the distinction of the original is openly acknowledged, as with Don Quixote, Julie, or Werther; on the other hand, appropriations that paid more oblique tribute to a number of texts, none of them necessarily of great artistic merit, by working within or revising a particular novelistic genre, like the picaresque, the sentimental novel, or the tale of terror. William Godwin avidly consumed ‘one of the earliest, if not the first, of the Schauer-​Romantiks or “shudder novels”: Naubert’s Hermann d’Unna’ as he was writing Caleb Williams, his first outing as a writer of fiction.29 Matthew Lewis continued to produce ‘Germanico-​terrifico-​ Romance’, as a reviewer called his translation of a popular German novel, Zschokke’s Aballino, as The Bravo of Venice (1805).30 Where the Gothic novel proper was concerned, the English could claim precedence, beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Clara Reeve’s The English Baron, and continuing with the more civilized Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, examples of the genre which attracted the creative attention of Jane Austen and Walter Scott. These two writers, both to be recognized as major figures in the later development of prose fiction, parodied, adapted, and absorbed the Gothic novel, incorporating its elements within the emerging nineteenth-​century genres of the domestic novel and the historical novel, respectively. And as Homer O. Brown has argued, it was with the fiction of Austen and Scott, along with the growing literary nationalism of the early nineteenth century focused on British novelists of the eighteenth century, that novel-​writing finally became accepted in Britain as a respectable profession in its own right and the novel was finally acknowledged as a culturally important form of literary production.31 With Scott in particular, the English novel became a major export item throughout the nineteenth century, extending its influence as a socially transformative and politically authoritative genre well beyond Western Europe. The historical novel was deemed worthy of 28 

‘Review of [M. G. Lewis] The Monk’, in Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1995), 1: 58–​65. The calculation of the percentage of Gothic novels is made by Robert Miles, ‘The 1790s: The Effulgence of the Gothic’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 42. 29  Maurice Hindle, ‘Introduction’, in William Godwin, Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1988), p. xxvii. 30  Quoted in Stockley, German Literature, 219. 31  Homer Obed Brown, Institutions of the English Novel from Defoe to Scott (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997).

86

86   WALTER L. REED imitation in a variety of modern nation states in the making or remaking. And with Austen, the perfection of the free indirect style of narration (used but less well developed by Frances Burney before her), a narrative point of view moving magically back and forth between the quasi-​omniscient perspective of the author and the distinctly limited point of view of a character, the example of the English novel became still more widely influential as this upstart genre gradually became the dominant literary form of the nineteenth century. However, even with these British masters, who cast a long shadow over the history of the novel over the next two centuries and around the world, it can be shown that the English were still in the business of improving what others had invented. Scott has long been considered the great originator of the historical novel and its exporter extraordinaire—​a figure like Byron, his rival in narrative poetry before he turned to fiction, where native British genius ended up having greater influence abroad than at home. And yet a recent essay by Richard Maxwell in The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period begins with a straightforward assertion that will be surprising to many: ‘The historical novel begins as a French genre.’32 Observing the precedence of Mme de La Fayette’s The Princess of Cleves (1678) and three historical novels published in the 1730s by Abbé Prévost (set in England, Scotland, and Ireland), Maxwell sets the historical record straight. Similarly, Goethe’s third novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften or Elective Affinities (1809), made significant use of the free indirect style of narration two years before Sense and Sensibility, Austen’s first novel, was published. There is no evidence that Austen was aware of Goethe’s controversial domestic novel and its innovative narrative technique, but there is ample evidence that Scott was quite aware of the earlier French—​as well as earlier English imitations of the French—​historical fiction before him. This is not to say that earlier French examples are more important than subsequent British influence as far as Scott and the historical novel are concerned. (With comic overstatement but with insight into the characteristic conflict of region versus nation at the heart of the genre, Mark Twain went as far as to blame the influence of Scott’s novels for the American Civil War.) Nor should the invention of the free indirect style be credited, as it often has been, to Flaubert instead of Austen (even though Flaubert’s influence on the modern European and American novel is beyond question).33 National pride in novelists who belong to the nation and write in the nation’s dominant language is certainly a valid basis for histories of the novel in any country, however they are figured. The remarkable growth of this modernizing literary form, in its growing number 32 

Richard Maxwell, ‘The Historical Novel’, in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), 65. 33  See Charles Lock, ‘Double Voicing, Sharing Words: Bakhtin’s Dialogism and the History of the Theory of Free Indirect Discourse’, in Jørgen Bruhn and Jan Lundquist (eds.), The Novelness of Bakhtin: Perspectives and Possibilities (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum P, 2001) for an account of varying genealogies of the technique; and Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 108, for recognition of Austen as ‘the first extensive practitioner of the form’.

The Continental Influence on the Eighteenth-Century Novel    87 of genres, editions, and volumes; in its expanding audience of all sorts and conditions of readers; and in its increasing reputation as literature of the highest artistic order, among the most valuable assets in the cultural capital of the West, can be profitably traced within any number of national and linguistic traditions in and beyond Western Europe. But in considering the development of the novel in Britain, from the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy to the ascension of Queen Victoria, it is important to understand that the manufacture and improvement of the product by the English was always a transnational, greater European affair.

Select Bibliography Ardila, J. A. G. (ed.), The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain (London: Legenda, 2009). Bakhtin, Mikhail, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin:  U of Texas P, 1981), 366–​422. Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004). Cohen, Margaret, and Carolyn Dever (eds.), The Literary Channel: The Inter-​National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002). France, Peter, and Kenneth Haynes (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 4: 1790–​1900 (Oxford: OUP, 2006). Gillespie, Stuart, and David Hopkins (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 3: 1660–​1790 (Oxford: OUP, 2005). Guillén, Claudio, Literature as System:  Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971). Mancing, Howard, The Cervantes Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004). Parker, Alexander, Literature and the Delinquent: The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe, 1599–​1753 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1967). Paulson, Ronald, Don Quixote in England:  The Aesthetics of Laughter (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins UP, 1998). Stockley, V., German Literature as Known in England 1750–​1830 (London: Routledge, 1929). Texte, Joseph, Jean-​Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature: A Study of the Literary Relations Between France and England During the Eighteenth Century, trans. J. W. Matthews (London: Duckworth, 1899). Warner, William Beatty, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–​1750 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998). Williams, Ioan, The Idea of the Novel in Europe, 1600–​1800 (New York: New York UP, 1979).

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Chapter 6

Criss-​C ros si ng t h e Chan ne l The French Novel and English Translation Gillian Dow

Introduction On 7 December 1660, Samuel Pepys, chronicler of the age, read until midnight. While Pepys read history, his wife Elizabeth’s choice was ‘Great Cyrus’, a work of prose fiction that became a particular favourite. In May 1666, her husband gives an account of a dis­ agreement: ‘I find my wife troubled still at my checking her last night in the coach in her long stories out of Grand Cyrus, which she would tell, though nothing to the purpose nor in any good manner.’ Two years after her enthusiasm for ‘Grand Cyrus’ becomes an irritation, Pepys buys L’Illustre Bassa for his wife, and in June 1668, the couple see a new play, which neither enjoys, ‘being very smutty … and my wife tells me is wholly … taken out of the Illustr. Bassa’.1 I use these accounts of reading in Pepys’s Diary in the 1660s to point to the popularity and influence of one writer and her romans héroïques in England and, more generally, to highlight the ease with which fiction crossed national borders and was assimilated into other literatures at the beginning of the long eighteenth century: Elizabeth Pepys had clearly observed both cross-​channel and cross-​genre transfer when she saw versions of tales from Illustre Bassa on stage in London. Madeleine de Scudéry (1608–​1701),

1 

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Mathews, 11 vols. (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1970–​83), 1: 312; 7: 122; 9: 247.

Criss-Crossing the Channel    89 author of Ibrahim, ou l’Illustre Bassa (1641–​4), Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–​53), and Clélie, histoire romaine (1654–​60) met with an enthusiastic reading public across the Channel, eager to both translate and adapt her tales for a variety of uses. Scudéry provides an excellent example of a once-​popular French writer whose works were both enjoyed in England and important in the history of the novel, but who has been all but forgotten by twenty-​first-​century scholars. Pepys’s reading—​ or rather, his account of his half-​ French wife’s reading—​ highlights, too, an issue that is of key concern when one examines French fiction in England. The French novel was clearly present: throughout our period, immigrant booksellers operated in London and major London booksellers stocked French novels. From the mid-​eighteenth century, traders in the vicinity of the Strand advertised their holdings of foreign literature with pride. A  glance round any extant eighteenth-​century library, or in the manuscript catalogues of collections that no longer exist, indicates that a wealth of French fiction was to be found on British shelves. References, however, are elusive. We may not even be aware that a work of French origin is being referred to at all—​‘Great’ or ‘Grand’ Cyrus in Pepys’s account has been sufficiently anglicized to disguise the Frenchness of this fictionalization of the Persian King. It is, however, essential to differentiate between the presence of a French novel, and that same novel in translation. From Pepys’s wife’s reading of Scudéry in the 1660s to William Godwin’s reading of ‘Manon L’Escaut’ in 1816, in many cases we simply have no way of knowing whether a French novel, or an English translation of a French novel, is being read. The situation is further complicated when we consider that for many French novels, there were several translations, that some English novels advertising themselves as translations were actually original works, and that not all translations were acknowledged to be so. In an attempt to retell the fascinating but complicated story of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, cross-​channel transfers have been the focus of some attention in the last decade. This essay follows the example of these recent publications, although it moves beyond case studies of individual novels and novelists to emerge with slightly different conclusions about the prevalence of translated fiction throughout the period. In what follows, I shall use a series of case studies of both novels and novelists in an attempt to provide not comprehensive coverage of the ‘influence’ of the French novel on the British novel in the long eighteenth century, but rather to explore a process of cultural exchange in which the notion of ‘influence’ as a one-​way process is rejected. By giving priority to literary reviews and journal and diary entries, and by including discussion of both canonical and lesser-​known fiction, this account demonstrates that translation was central to the understanding of the novel in the period. I read France and England as the two locations from which the novel developed in tandem in the eighteenth century. My underlying premise is that the French novel in Britain cannot be considered in isolation from an exploration of the English novel in France.

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90   GILLIAN DOW

‘Neatly Drest in English’: The French Novel in Translation The expression most frequently used by English translators in the period in relation to their translations is that they are giving the work an ‘English dress’. The translator of Scudéry’s Clelia expresses, in his preface to ‘the Ladies’, that the aim in undertaking this translation was ‘to render the admirable Clelia as neatly drest in English’ as she has been ‘set forth in French’. As the century progressed, an ‘English dress’ came to mean a literal disguise: it was seen to be the duty of the translator to adapt a French work for the British reading public. The scholar of the French novel in England in the long eighteenth century has therefore to pick a path through translations and adaptations, always aware of the potential extent of changes between the source language and the target language. Stuart Gillespie summarizes our twenty-​first-​century perspective neatly when he writes of our tendency to ‘suppose the purpose of the translation is to provide a guide to the original’.2 The eighteenth century viewed things differently. A French novel with an eighteenth-​century ‘English dress’ is quite different from the original source language. Where translators’ prefaces appear in translated novels in the period—​and admittedly these are less frequent than prefaces to more ‘prestigious’ enterprises—​they are quick to point out that translation necessitates truncations and expansions, and that it may also require changes in plot. Domestication is the prominent model. The best-​known expression of this practice is Dryden’s famous assertion in his Dedication of the Aeneis (1697) that he has ‘endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age’.3 Moreover, translators in both France and England find themselves throughout our period as editors of their source texts. Pierre Antoine de La Place’s translation of Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744; trans. 1745) changes references to Shakespeare to references to Voltaire, and includes a note saying he has done so for the benefit of his French readers. The English translator of Genlis’s The Rival Mothers (1800) includes several notes directing readers towards English sources to supplement their reading, pointing out that although the French author refers her readers towards Voltaire, similar ideas can be found in Chesterfield’s letters. The thrust, in the eighteenth century, is towards taming foreign fiction, rather than attempting to preserve the ‘foreignness’ for which modern translation theorists like Lawrence Venuti have argued.4

2  Stuart Gillespie, ‘Translation and Canon-​Formation’, in Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 3: 1660–​1790 (Oxford: OUP, 2005), 7. 3  Quoted in Julie Candler Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity & Culture in France and England, 1600–​1800 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 150. 4  For Venuti’s argument see Daniel Weissbort and Astradur Eysteinsson (eds.), Translation—​Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 546–​57.

Criss-Crossing the Channel    91 The fate of one of Eliza Haywood’s original novels, the 1744 The Fortunate Foundlings, gives an excellent example of some of the ways in which new prose fiction in the period criss-​crossed the Channel. The novel was translated as Les Heureux Orphelins by the novelist Crébillon fils in 1754, with an acknowledgement that it was ‘imitated from the English’ but no mention of Haywood’s name; in 1759, it was back-​translated by Edward Kimber and appeared once again in an English dress as The Happy Orphans: an Authentic History of Persons in High Life, announcing that it was ‘translated and improved from the French’, but with the disappearance of the common ancestor, Haywood’s novel, and no sign at all that the English translator was even aware of the existence of The Fortunate Foundlings. Modern critics tend to read such translation activity as ‘indebtedness’, and to feel indignant when debts are not acknowledged. Some scholars have even argued that Haywood concealed her debt to French fiction through free translation, implying both that the concealment was intentional, and that Haywood may have felt she had something to lose by revealing her sources. But such readings can be anachronistic in imposing twentieth-​century views of the literary process a translator is undertaking on eighteenth-​century practitioners. Translations of French novels in the period can be more accurately read as creative originals, and the use of French novels must be compared to an author’s use of a variety of sources.

Case Studies of the Popular French Novel in Britain In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt identifies French fiction from La Princesse de Clèves (1678) to Les Liaisons dangeureuses (1782) as a tradition that stands ‘outside the main tradition of the novel’.5 Although recent work on the rise of the novel challenges Watt’s Anglocentric perspective, his choice of two French novels to bookmark the beginning and the end of the ‘French’ eighteenth-​century novel is in many ways apt when viewed from a twentieth-​century perspective. La Fayette’s historical tale of thwarted passion and Laclos’s epistolary novel of aristocratic excess are the only novels from this period which can claim a presence in the Anglo-​American tradition since the moment of their publication: both have remained in print in English translation, and, as hyper-​translated texts, they have long served to represent French fiction of the eighteenth century. And yet there are many other French novels that influenced the development of the English novel. The following case studies have been chosen to point up salient features of the relationship between French and British fiction in the period, and are discussed chronologically below: La Princesse de Clèves (1678), a work whose popularity varied throughout the eighteenth century, before it became established as the ‘first’ French novel; La 5 Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U

of California P, 1960), 30.

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92   GILLIAN DOW Vie de Marianne (1731–​42), Marivaux’s sentimental novel, whose themes interlocked with the prominent themes of English fiction in the period; Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Rousseau’s best-​selling work, used as a cultural signifier for the worst of French Revolutionary excess in the 1790s; and Adèle et Théodore (1782), a hugely popular epistolary novel in England on publication which has been entirely neglected since the mid-​ nineteenth century. Long considered a landmark text, La Princesse de Clèves is now a canonical French novel whose presence in Britain waxed and waned throughout the period. The first English translation—​published a year after the French source text—​rejoiced in a title which highlighted the Frenchness of this new ‘Romance’: The Princess of Cleves. The most famed Romance. Written in French by the greatest Wits of France, Rendered into English by a Person of Quality, at the Request of Some Friends. La Fayette engaged directly with early anxieties about the genre, like the Abbé Pierre Daniel Huet, whose Traité de l’origine des romans—​sometimes seen as the first European treatise on the origins of prose fiction—​was appended to her Zayde (1670). La Fayette explicitly denied that La Princesse de Clèves was a novel or roman. In accounts of early French fiction, much depends on how the term roman is translated: ‘romance’ would serve to back up claims that the ‘novel’ proper was not invented until the 1740s; while ‘novel’ would emphasize continuity from the prose fiction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. La Fayette chooses another term. In a letter of April 1678, she stresses both the realism of La Princesse de Clèves and that the work as a whole should be ‘properly regarded as a memoir’.6 In France, as in England, even the choice (and terminology) of genre is at issue. There are major differences between La Fayette’s tale—​set in the court of Henri II in 1558–​9, and including accounts of real-​life characters—​and French prose fiction by earlier writers such as Scudéry and La Calprenède, more familiar to the reading public of the late seventeenth century. Where Scudéry’s voluminous ‘romances’ appeared in elegant folio volumes in England, La Fayette’s ‘novel’ is a tighter—​and shorter—​publication. It was translated twice in the eighteenth century, in 1727 and 1777. Elizabeth Griffith’s latter translation contains a preface in which she does not hesitate to claim (contrary to earlier translators) that the work is a novel, and a historical novel at that. Griffith adopts the defence typical of translators in this period: she points out that this is a moral work in which a woman ‘who gives her hand without her heart’ feels ‘the deepest sorrow and distress’. Griffith also makes cuts to the original text, and in particular to the episodic nature of some of the adventures of minor characters, whose tales disappear in her translation. By shortening La Fayette’s novel and focusing on the main tale of the love triangle between the Princess and her husband, and the Duc de Nemours, Griffith makes the work fit the expectations of English readers in the 1770s, quite a different community from the readers who read the first translation in 1679, or indeed, who read the French original in either period. Close readings of a novel that sees several

6 

See Madame de Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves, ed. Terence Cave (Oxford: OUP, 1999), p. viii.

Criss-Crossing the Channel    93 translations can tell us much about the target language’s changing attitude to fiction. That La Princesse de Clèves engaged the interest of British readers at both the beginning and the end of our period explains the canonical status afforded to it in all accounts of the rise of the European novel, however configured. Pierre Carlet Chamblain de Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne—​an episodic tale of a young orphan girl, brought up by a curé after her mother’s murder—​was respons­ible in large part for the taste for sentimental accounts of young, unprotected heroines that marked many European novels of the 1740s and 1750s. The editors of a 1965 edition of an early English translation even went as far as to argue that there is ‘a bit of Marivaux in nearly every eighteenth-​century English novel’.7 Certainly, the publication, between 1740 and 1742, of La Vie de Marianne, Pamela, and Joseph Andrews sparked a debate about Richardson and Fielding’s debt to Marivaux. Early French readers saw Marianne in Pamela, although their subsequent admiration for Marivaux was lessened by the comparison: as the critic Grimm put it, ‘if it is true that [his] novels were the models for Richardson and Fielding, one could say, for the first time, that a bad original has produced admirable imitations’.8 What is certain is that some later translations of Marivaux’s novel, including Mary Collyer’s enormously popular 1742 The Virtuous Orphan; or, The Life of Marianne, were written by those who had read Pamela’s story. Collyer’s free translation adds scenes, cuts others, and gives Marivaux’s text a decidedly moral tone which owes much to Richardson, and which is absent from the original. Most significantly, Marivaux’s tragic ending is reversed when virtue is rewarded in Collyer’s telling of the tale. The allusions to Pamela are clear, the cross-​channel flow of fiction at mid-​century evident. Later in the century, Frances Burney was to acknowledge Marivaux’s influence in the preface to Evelina (1778). She outlines a cross-​channel tradition, setting Marivaux alongside Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett, and describes herself as ‘charmed with the eloquence of Rousseau’.9 It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Rousseau’s first novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) in Britain: it was one of the most influential works of fiction to be published in the eighteenth century. From the moment of the appearance of Julie, comparisons were drawn between the novel and Richardson’s work, which Rousseau had certainly read in translation: Rousseau admired the English author’s style, and used some of his themes. Julie is not, however, a mere reworking of Clarissa. The pastoral setting—​the small community of Vevey in the Swiss Alps—​spawned a host of imitators Europe-​wide, and Lake Geneva became a site for literary pilgrims to pay homage to Rousseau’s work. Indeed, the relationship between St. Preux (a tutor) and Julie d’Étange (a wealthy nobleman’s daughter) was considered to be the purest expression of an inappropriate passion,

7  See William H. McBurney and Michael F. Shugrue (eds.), The Virtuous Orphan or, The Life of Marianne, Countess of ***** An Eighteenth-​Century English Translation by Mrs. Mary Mitchell Collyer of Marivaux’s La vie de Marianne (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1965), p. xi. 8  Quoted in French in McBurney and Shugrue’s introduction to The Virtuous Orphan, p. xi. My translation. 9  Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: OUP, 1968), 9, font reversed.

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94   GILLIAN DOW and the subsequent ‘regulation’ of this passion when St. Preux joins Julie and her husband, the rational atheist Baron de Wolmar in their estate at Clarens moved the first English readers to tears, and imitation. William Kenrick’s translation Eloisa: or, A Series of Original Letters appeared in 1761; the change of the heroine’s name was, Kenrick claimed in his preface, ‘a matter of no importance to the reader’, despite the classical tones inevitably introduced by this alteration. Nor did Kenrick hesitate to make changes to the French sentence structure and overall form: he believed that Rousseau ‘sometimes wants propriety of thought, and accuracy of expression’.10 In 1761 alone, there were two London editions, and one in Dublin: Kenrick’s translation went through fifteen editions before 1815. Nicola Watson has argued that it was not until the late 1780s and 1790s that Rousseau’s novel became generally notorious in England, and that a mere allusion to the heroine operated ‘as a convenient shorthand for multiple anxieties surrounding female sexuality, national identity, and class mobility’. In this period—​when Burke’s counter-​ revolutionary A Letter from Mr. Burke, to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) used a reference to Rousseau’s novel to launch his attack on French Revolutionary principles—​both Jacobin and anti-​Jacobin novels rework Rousseau’s narrative to their own ends, recasting both St. Preux and Julie in a process which, as Watson points out, is very like cultural ‘translation’.11 The original Julie continued to be admired, despite reworkings and direct criticisms. The Shelley circle read it on the banks of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816: Percy found ‘an overflowing … of sublime genius, and more than human sensibility’.12 Despite anti-​Jacobin anxieties about the radical nature of Rousseau’s ideal society, his Julie inspired the new generation of Romantics in their own explorations of truth and nature. In 1782, the same year that Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangeureuses appeared, Stéphanie-​ Félicité de Genlis published her first novel, which was rapidly translated into English as Adelaide and Theodore, or letters on education (1783). Prior to 1830, Genlis’s novel significantly outsold Laclos’s in both France and England, thus providing an excellent example of a French novel that was both celebrated and influential in its own time, but which has been all but forgotten today. The novel gained much of its popularity in England in the late eighteenth century by demonstrating a clear moral purpose, asserting its usefulness as a system of education, and by claiming to counteract the damaging effect of Rousseau’s writings. Another attraction for the British reader may have been the championing of the English novel within the pages of the French text: Richardson’s novels are said to be the only ‘moral’ texts that can safely be read by young women. The editions of the translation (four between 1783 and 1796), attest to its popularity in the

10  Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise, translated and annotated by Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1997), p. xxvii. 11  Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–​1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 4. 12  Quoted in Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 3.

Criss-Crossing the Channel    95 period. If there was a little bit of Marianne in novels in English post-​1742, and a version of Julie in many novels of the 1790s, there was also a little bit of the Baroness d’Almane and Adelaide in many English novels post-​1783: Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) contains a direct reference to Genlis’s characters. The rational perfections of the young Adelaide herself were not the only inspiration for British readers and novelists. One of the Gothic inset tales—​focusing on the Italian Duchess of C***, a tale of spousal abuse—​was an important source for Radcliffe in her A Sicilian Romance and for Austen in Northanger Abbey.13 Building on the success of Adelaide and Theodore, Genlis’s novels continued to be translated and widely reviewed in Britain until her death in 1830: post-​Revolution, she concentrated mainly on historical fictions celebrating le grand siècle of Louis XIV, and comparisons between her work and La Fayette’s Princesse de Clèves were readily made by British observers at the time, and are apparent today. In the preface to her novel Bélisaire (1808), Genlis claimed the historical novel was a justifiable source of national pride for the French, having been invented by French novelists: six years before Scott’s Waverley changed perceptions of the origins of the historical novel in Europe for ever, few would have disagreed with her. Looking at French novels now in print in accessible translations demonstrates that although novels such as La Princesse de Clèves have always been available to the English reader in translation, once-​popular novels such as Marivaux’s Marianne and Rousseau’s Julie have fared less well, and Adèle et Théodore has been entirely forgotten. The recognition of the importance of some French novels for English readers in the long eighteenth century has, on the other hand, led to new translations in recent years. After almost two centuries of neglect, Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Peruvienne (1747) is now available to English readers.14 Between the first publication and the end of the century, this novel—​one of the major European best-​sellers of the eighteenth century—​saw at least fifty editions or reprints of the French source text: there were four different translations and/​or adaptations into English in 1748, 1753, 1755, and 1795.15 Graffigny herself became a literary celebrity, with Prévost dedicating his translation of Richardson’s Clarissa to her. The novel clearly appealed in part because of its own debt to oriental tales, popular Europe-​wide:  Galland’s French translation of the Thousand and One Nights (1704–​16) and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) are the acknowledged ancestors of Graffigny’s text. Less attention has been paid to works such as Robert Challes’s Les Illustres françaises (1713), published in English translation by Penelope Aubin as The 13  See J. C. Schaneman, ‘Rewriting Adèle et Théodore: Intertextual Connections Between Madame de Genlis and Ann Radcliffe’, Comparative Literature Studies 38/​1 (2001), 31–​45; and Gillian Dow, ‘Northanger Abbey, French Fiction, and the Affecting History of the Duchess of C***’, Persuasions 32 (2010), 28–​45. 14  Françoise de Graffigny, Letters of a Peruvian Woman, trans. and introd. Jonathan Mallinson (Oxford: OUP, 2009). 15  For more information about the English translations, see Letters of a Peruvian Woman, trans. and introd. Mallinson, pp. vii–​xxix, and Translations and Continuations: Riccoboni and Brooke, Graffigny and Roberts, ed. Marijn S. Kaplan (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011).

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96   GILLIAN DOW Illustrious French Lovers (1726), a work whose traces can be seen in both Richardson’s Pamela and Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. And although Manon Lescaut is recognized as an important novel in Britain today, Prévost’s Le Philosophe anglais ou Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland (1731–​9) seems to have been just as influential in its own time. Prévost’s preface situates his work neatly within the story of the cross-​channel development of the novel when he claims that he has translated the manuscript autobiography of the dead Cleveland, an illegitimate son of Oliver Cromwell, brought up by his mother in an isolated cave. This novel has been read as an important French source for the Gothic novel in England—​Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783) is just one of several late eighteenth-​century English novels that has been read as directly inspired by Cleveland.16 As scholars of the British novel in the period rediscover French sources, the way in which the canon is represented through available English translations will continue to change shape; as new translations of French novels become available, cross-​channel intertextualities will become easier to trace.

The Novelist-​Translator The translators of novels in the period were not a homogeneous group. Although they sometimes undertook commissions in response to perceived demand from readers, many seem to have worked in their leisure hours, and for their own amusement. The work of translating French novels was not highly regarded, in part because of the status of prose fiction more generally in the period. The term ‘hack work’ is frequently used in our own accounts of translators of prose fiction in the period, although these scruples are not applied to translations of other genres: the translator of classical languages was undertaking work of high cultural capital, closely followed in prestige by the translator of verse. Novelists who translated novels from across the Channel were acutely aware of questionable integrity of the practice, and satirical portraits proliferated. Richard Savage, working for the bookseller Edmund Curll in the 1720s, described his literary career in the following terms:  ‘I abridg’d Histories and Travels, translated from the French what they never wrote, and was expert at finding out new Titles of old books.’ In a similar vein, Marie-​Jeanne Riccoboni, one of the most popular novelists in Britain in the 1750s and 1760s, wrote an amusing pastiche of the translator’s craft. In the preface to her translation of Fielding’s Amelia she highlights that she has left out ‘whatever was difficult … I assumed it was badly written and moved on’. What remains is an unfaithful translation of Fielding’s original, but Riccoboni advises it should be printed regardless: ‘If it’s a flop, too bad for the author; we’ll claim that it’s a literal translation. If it sells,

16  See Richard Maxwell, ‘Phantom States: Cleveland, The Recess, and the Origins of Historical Fiction’, in Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (eds.), The Literary Channel: The Inter-​National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002), 151–​82.

Criss-Crossing the Channel    97 we’ll boast of the infinite care with which we added, cut, corrected, and embellished the original.’17 Riccoboni takes a dim view of her own craft, although her preface is certainly intended as pastiche. At their best, however, English translations of French novels were viewed as creative works that eighteenth-​century commentators believed surpassed the French original. There is nothing, in the story of the eighteenth-​century novel, like the case of the nineteenth-​century symbolist poets and translators Mallarmé and Baudelaire who as the French translators of Edgar Allan Poe gave the American poet an elevated status and prestige that he still enjoys in France today. And yet there are many prominent novelists who also translated fiction from across the Channel, in both France and England. In his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791), Alexander Fraser Tytler (Lord Woodhouselee) (1747–​1813) sets down his rules for successful translation in an extended thesis, one of the first in the English language. In a clear defence of the domesticating model, Tytler’s argument is that translation should flow with the same ease as original composition, and he notes that ‘the best translators … have composed original works of the same species with those which they have translated’.18 It is perhaps unsurprising that the French novel in the eighteenth century had some of its best advocates in those British practitioners who translated and wrote novels themselves. In Britain, the literary career of Tobias Smollett serves as an excellent case study of the novelist-​translator. Cervantes’s masterful work Don Quijote had already seen four English translations by the time Smollett’s translation was printed, but it was Smollett’s Don Quixote (1755) that rapidly became the definitive eighteenth-​century version of the Spanish text, running to nineteen editions by 1799. Smollett’s first translation was, however, of Lesage’s Gil-​Blas de Santillane, published in 1748. This memoir-​novel, first published in French between 1715 and 1735, was itself influenced by Cervantes: a fictional autobiography, it has a Spanish setting, and the nature of the narrative sets it firmly within the tradition of the picaresque. In Adventures of Roderick Random, published in the same year as his Gil-​Blas, Smollett acknowledges his debt to Lesage: later, in his The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1752), the influence of Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux, which he also translated, can be observed. Smollett’s later translations from the French were of Voltaire’s Micromégas (in a new English Works of Voltaire in 1761–5) and of Fénelon’s Télémaque (published posthumously in 1776; the original, first published c.1695, was by far the best-​ selling French novel of the first half of the eighteenth century). Smollett’s translating activity may have been undertaken ‘for reasons of expediency’, but it certainly helped him direct his skills as a failed dramatist in a new direction—​towards success as a novelist.19 He was not the only British translator/​novelist to take this route in the period: success as a writer of prose fiction and as a translator often went hand in hand. 17 

Quoted in Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity & Culture in France, 152–​3. Alexander Fraser Tytler, Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791), quoted in Weissbort and Eysteinsson (eds.), Translation, 188–​94. 19  Leslie A. Chilton, ‘Tobias Smollett: A Case Study’, in Gillespie and Hopkins (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 3: 106. 18 

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98   GILLIAN DOW There were certainly British novelists who were openly reluctant to admit that they were indebted to the French novel, and who took care to highlight this in both their correspondence and in prefaces to their own novels. Richardson wrote that he was not ‘acquainted in the least’ with the French language or fiction, and that ‘it was Chance and not Skill or Learning, that made me fall into this way of Scribbling’, although he seems to have read La Princesse de Clèves in English as well as some of La Calprenède’s works.20 That Richardson—​a novelist who was also a publisher, and who seems to have been acutely aware of the works of his rivals—​should have remained in entire ignorance of the work of such contemporaries as Marivaux seems unlikely. Henry Fielding was more forthcoming: he had read La Vie de Marianne, and admired it. His enthusiasm for French fiction more generally is not, however, unqualified. In his preface to Joseph Andrews, a novel which announces itself as an ‘imitation’ of Cervantes, Fielding acknowledges his debt to other Continental practitioners. While he admires Fénelon’s Telemachus as ‘of the Epic Kind’, he dismisses ‘Clelia, Cleopatra, Astræa, Cassandra, the Grand Cyrus’ as Romances which contain ‘very little Instruction or Entertainment’.21 Clearly, Fielding is differentiating the earlier romance from the now-​popular sentimental novel. It was a distinction that was to become more entrenched as the century progressed. Towards the end of the period, Thomas Holcroft (1745–​1809) translated throughout his career. Although Holcroft claimed to view this work as ‘irksome to a mind desirous of fame’, his translations of Genlis’s Tales of the Castle (1785) and Isabelle de Montolieu’s Caroline of Lichtfield (1786) are fluid and readable works, both of which saw several editions. His correspondence with Genlis herself suggests that he took great pains to produce novels that would engage his British readers: when the French author objected to the cuts Holcroft made in his translation, he replied that ‘to an English reader, I have done the book a service, and no injury’.22 Montolieu’s story of an arranged marriage, and Genlis’s framework novel for children may seem unlikely places for the author of the revolutionary novels Anna St. Ives (1792) and The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794) to have been inspired. It is likely, nevertheless, that sustained engagement with lengthy French texts helped Holcroft develop narrative techniques that would serve him well.

Women Novelists and Translators Translation has long been viewed as a rite of passage for the woman novelist in the period. Josephine Grieder is just one critic to have pointed out that almost every woman novelist of the latter half of the eighteenth century translated from French 20 

Cited in Rita Goldberg, Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot (Cambridge: CUP, 1984), 128. 21  Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: OUP, 1967), 4. 22  William Hazlitt, Memoirs of the late Thomas Holcroft, written by himself; and continued to the time of his death, from his diary, notes, and other papers (London, 1852).

Criss-Crossing the Channel    99 ‘often as she was pursuing her own work independently’.23 This can be partly explained by the increasing emphasis on female education in French as an accomplishment for gentlewomen. The constant comparisons between English women writers and what were seen as direct earlier French models such as Scudéry and La Fayette may provide another reason: Ros Ballaster, Jane Spencer, and April Alliston have all observed that such comparisons are numerous, even when the work of the English women writers under discussion is of quite a different tone and style. Translation from French fiction may have offered the woman novelist a ‘safe’ way to enter the literary marketplace—​giving her a role as a cipher or mediator, and removing the stigma of ‘original’ publication. Whatever the reasons for authorship, there are countless female translators of French prose fiction in the period, many of whom published their own novels. Aphra Behn’s and Eliza Haywood’s publishing careers included extensive translations from the French; Frances Brooke translated Riccoboni and Nicolas Étienne Framery, and saw success with her own novels in France, where Voltaire was of the opinion that her The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763) was the best novel of its kind since Richardson’s Clarissa; Mary Charlton’s career as one of the most popular novelists for Minerva Press in the 1790s is interspersed by translations of both French and German texts, and she too was widely read in France in the early 1800s. Helen Maria Williams’s translation of Bernardin de St. Pierre’s best-​selling Paul et Virginie (1787) was published in 1795, after her first novel Julia (1790), which was itself strongly influenced by Rousseau’s Julie. Paul and Virginia includes eight original sonnets, and a preface explaining that it was composed ‘amidst the turbulence of the most cruel sensations’ of Robespierre’s Paris, giving a pre-​Revolutionary text an added piquancy in a post-​ Terror Europe.24 Charlotte Smith’s translation of Manon Lescaut provides a useful case study of the novelist-​translator in England. Smith’s 1786 translation was the third version of Prévost’s novel to appear in the eighteenth century. Smith’s preface couches her endeavours in terms of ‘amusement’ in the ‘long winter of 1784’, which she spent in Normandy, the passages she translated and read aloud to her friends prompting her to ‘write it anew in English’. The resulting Manon L’Escaut: or, The Fatal Attachment is a proto-​feminist reading of the original text, the translator’s changes making for a more sympathetic reading of the heroine herself. Crucially, in terms of Smith’s writing career, the publication of Manon L’Escaut: or, The Fatal Attachment, can be seen as a trial piece in her apprenticeship as a novelist: Smith’s first novel Emmeline: or, The Orphan of the Castle was published just two years later in 1788. Like other novelists in the period, she seems to have taught herself the craft of fiction through translation.

23  Josephine Grieder, Translation and Prose Fiction: The History of a Literary Vogue (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1975), 40. 24  See Deborah Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2002), 123.

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Reception A map of the eighteenth-​century English novel looks quite different when viewed from the other side of the Channel. One of the most popular mid-​eighteenth-​century novels in France was Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, published for the first time in French in a 1745 translation by Pierre Antoine de La Place, who did a great deal to popularize the English novel at mid-​century, although the changes he made to Behn’s text rendered it almost beyond recognition.25 Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy have been extremely popular in France almost from the moment of publication, and Diderot acknowledged Sterne’s influence on his Jacques le Fataliste (1796). On the other hand, the novels of Jane Austen have never been fully accepted as part of the French canon of British fiction, despite being translated early by the popular Franco-​Swiss sentimental novelist Isabelle de Montolieu, among others. Sydney Owenson sums up the strangeness of French opinions of English fiction in France (1817), when she records the enthusiasm of some friends for ‘Betsi Tatless’, which they rank as a ‘jewel’ of a novel, alongside Richardson’s Clarissa. This enthusiasm clearly puzzles Owenson: ‘I tried, in vain, on my return to England, to procure “Betsey Thoughtless,” the first genuine novel, I believe, written in the English language.’26 Sixty years after her death, Eliza Haywood’s posthumous reputation was in better shape in some parts of France than it was in Haywood’s native country. In Britain, a sense of the canon of eighteenth-​century French novels is no less clear. English-​language histories of French fiction in the period have tended to privilege the works of Enlightenment thinkers, seeing Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1727), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and Rousseau’s Émile (1762) as clear examples of the canonical eighteenth century: they have paid more attention to the roman-​à-​thèse than to the roman de sensibilité. More recent attempts to map the impact and presence of French fiction in Britain have adopted a bibliographical perspective, which gives as much weight to the novels of Riccoboni as the contes of Voltaire, in terms of their impact on the literary marketplace of their own time. The thorny question of ‘influence’ cannot easily be evaluated by either approach. A focus on the actual reader can be more rewarding where such evidence is available. William Godwin’s diary entries, which record his reading between 1788 and 1836, document a large amount of reading in French historical and philosophical writings, as we might expect from a Jacobin novelist and publisher. His reading of French fiction includes works that span the entire period we are concerned with here. He reads Scarron’s romances and Fénelon’s Télémaque, as well as works by Marie-​Catherine d’Aulnoy and Lesage, La Galland’s Arabian Nights, and La Fontaine’s Fables. Authors from the first half of the eighteenth century include Crébillon, Marivaux, Montesquieu, 25  For a recent discussion, see Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton UP), 90–​8. 26  Sydney Owenson, France, 2 vols. (London, 1817), 1: 152.

Criss-Crossing the Channel    101 and both Prévost’s Manon Lescaut and his Histoire de Marguerite d’Anjou. Marmontel’s contes, Rousseau’s Julie, and Bernardin de St. Pierre’s Paul et Virginie appear in Godwin’s diary, as do novels by Isabelle de Montolieu, Isabelle de Charrière, and Adélaïde de Flahaut. He reads Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801), Germaine de Staël’s Corrine (1807), and Victor Hugo’s Notre-​Dame de Paris (1831) almost as soon as they are published. Voltaire seems to have been a particular favourite with Godwin: on 22 September 1794, he records reading Candide, which seems to have prompted ‘talk of optimism’ over supper; there are eleven other mentions of reading Voltaire’s most popular tale through the subsequent decades, with the last recorded on 24 March 1830.27 Godwin is not a ‘typical’ reader, if such a thing exists. But the account of his reading gives an example of the kinds of French fiction still popular and available at the end of our period. In her ‘Essay on the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing’, Anna Laetitia Barbauld surveyed Continental fiction, offering her own version of the key works in French literature, from Fénelon’s Télémaque to Genlis’s Adèle et Théodore, via Scarron, La Fayette, Lesage, Marmontel, Graffigny, Rousseau, Bernardin de St. Pierre, and Isabelle de Montolieu—​a more restricted selection than that which Godwin was reading in the same period, but a revealing one nonetheless, privileging novels that could be considered educational. Barbauld is involved in the process of canonization, always directly linked to the promotion of national culture. And her selection for the fifty-​volume series, despite the Continental traditions explored in her introductory essay, is necessarily an Anglocentric one: she does not include a single work of French fiction in translation, as Scott was to do in his Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (1821–​4) which included all of Smollett’s translations, and three novels by Lesage. Barbauld’s choices were certainly driven by the demands of her publisher, but some sense of what might be behind such an agenda can be gained from her own words on the French tradition. Although she admits that ‘a great deal of trash’ pours out of the British presses, she also claims that ‘our novels are not vicious … a girl, perhaps, may be led by them to elope with a coxcomb … but she will not have her mind contaminated with such scenes and ideas as Crebillon, Louvet, and others of the class, have published in France’.28 In the Romantic period, the story of the eighteenth-​century English novel was revised to present a picture of isolation from French fiction of the same period. Related to the question of canon-​formation is the business of reviewing fiction. From the launch of Ralph Griffiths’s Monthly Review in 1749, British reviewers did attempt to give an account of all foreign publications. It was a worthwhile endeavour that was always to elude them as the waves of French fiction threatened to overwhelm reviewers from the start. As the century drew to a close, the task became insurmountable. A prolific reviewer for the Monthly Review, William Enfield wrote to the editor Ralph Griffiths in July 1792 to return some of the ‘foreign books’ he had been sent, since he was ‘not at all 27 See The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010): [http://​godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk]. 28 Barbauld, The British Novelists; with An Essay; and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical (London, 1810), 1: 55–​6.

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102   GILLIAN DOW in the habit of writing translations from the French’.29 In October 1795, Enfield expresses his weariness of novels more generally, with his characteristic dry wit: ‘I have no objection to lounging now and then an hour in Lane’s shop: but to be shut up for several days together in his warehouse, is to an old man an irksome confinement.’30 It might be concluded, from Enfield’s comments, that writing reviews of French novels was the most irksome confinement of all. An irritated tone is rarely absent from published reviews of the French novel in the latter half of the period: as Jennifer Birkett has pointed out, English reviewers could be ‘outright xenophobes’.31 This xenophobia manifests itself in several ways, from simple dismissal of the French novel under review, to condescending remarks on the cultural differences between France and England. Even praise is rarely unqualified. The English Review’s favourable account of Genlis’s Adelaide and Theodore cannot resist an attack on the French novel more generally: ‘Fast as the French may be following us in a literary progress, they are still at an unspeakable distance.’32 The literary reviews and periodicals in this period have a clear agenda: to promote national novels over the French model. Francophone novelists themselves observed the increasing English emphasis on morality with dismay. Isabelle de Charrière, writing in January 1797 on the reception of her novel Trois Femmes in England criticizes English ‘délicatesse’, pointing out that in the current climate, both Fielding and Richardson would be obliged to rewrite Tom Jones and Clarissa, and announcing her intention to write to a British newspaper on the subject.33 In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, led by the more combative style of Francis Jeffrey and the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviewers, even fewer French novels are reviewed at length, and reviews of individual works increasingly become the site for lengthy dismissals of their former influence. Although individual reviewers recognize that a work such as Staël’s Delphine (1802; translation 1803) is ‘one of the most fascinating novels we have lately met with’, they are nonetheless sorry that it has been translated, since they ‘abominate both its religion and its morals’. Clearly, this reviewer has not been swayed by Staël’s lengthy preface, in which she traces the genealogy of the novel from La Princesse de Clèves through what she sees as masterpieces of the form, that is, English novels of the mid-​eighteenth century, which Staël believes were the first to give novel-​ writing a truly moral purpose.34 A review of a translation of Guillaume Charles Antoine Pigault-​Lebrun’s My Uncle Thomas (1801) in the Critical Review for October 1804 provides a stinging account of the ‘sources’ for ‘vices and follies’: ‘our novelists’, the reviewer 29 

Bodleian Library, MS Add C89-​90, Document 65. Bodleian Library, MS Add C89-​90, Document 93. 31  Jennifer Birkett, ‘Prose Fiction: Courtly and Popular Romance,’ in Gillespie and Hopkins (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 3: 346. 32  English Review (August 1783), 106–​9. 33  In a letter to Chambrier d’Oleyres, dated 23 January 1797, Charrière writes: ‘je m’égaie un peu sur la délicatesse excessive du beau monde anglais … Fielding, s’il vivait, serait obligé de réformer son Tom Jones, et Richardson d’ôter Lovelace de l’histoire de Clarisse’ (quoted in Cecil Courtney, Isabelle de Charrière [Belle de Zuylen], a biography [Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993], 651). 34  Critical Review (May 1803). 30 

Criss-Crossing the Channel    103 writes, ‘long ago exhausted Spain [and] France has been long since in requisition’, a fact that is all to the good since ‘the mawkish and insipid, the sentimental and gallant, works of this kingdom, have afforded a plentiful supply’.35 The Quarterly Review’s 1809 account of the London publication of Sophie Cottin’s novel Amelie Mansfield ‘cannot recommend’ it: the reviewer ends with a lament that fiction reaches British shores ‘from the schools of France and Germany’, since such works ‘tend at once to corrupt the taste and deprave the national character’.36 British critics increasingly object to cross-​channel and transnational accounts of the novel: for them, the English novel must strive for independence from all foreign models. Throughout the early nineteenth century, the French novel is represented in Anglo-​ American culture as part of a dangerous tradition, and one that British and American readers would do best to avoid as the national novel forges a new path. Clearly, opposition to Napoleon’s empire building informs accounts of French fiction. References to French artifice proliferate in this period, while the wholesome novels of Walter Scott are championed. An 1835 article in the American Quarterly Review on the Works of Fenimore Cooper praises him for authoring ‘a bold and original national literature’. It ends by dismissing early French models for the historical novel in the following terms: ‘What has driven Scudéry to the bottom shelf of our libraries but that her pages represent nothing which ever existed on the earth, nor in the heavens, nor in the water under the earth?’ In this climate, French novels no longer had relevance for the English-​speaking reader. While the eighteenth-​century English novel had developed in tandem with the French novel, nineteenth-​century England was wary both of translating and of the cultural transfers that had marked the development of the early novel more generally. A marked slowdown in the appearance of English translations distinguishes the British reception of many major nineteenth-​century French novelists:  Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert had to wait many years for their works to appear in English; most of George Sand’s and Zola’s novels created a scandal in Victorian Britain. English novelists were less quick to acknowledge the influence of their French counterparts (there is no major nineteenth-​ century English novelist who also translated French novels) and English critics lambasted French immorality. In the nineteenth century, English readers could not read French novels as Elizabeth Pepys had done in the late seventeenth century—​for unrestrained pleasure and amusement, and without anxiety. An ‘English dress’ was no longer enough to disguise faulty French undergarments.

Select Bibliography Aravamudan, Srinivas, ‘Fiction/​Translation/​Transnation: The Secret History of the Eighteenth-​ Century Novel’, in Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (eds.), A Companion to the Eighteenth-​Century English Novel and Culture (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009). 35  Critical Review (October 1804). 36  Quarterly Review (May 1809).

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104   GILLIAN DOW Cohen, Margaret, and Carolyn Dever (eds.), The Literary Channel: The Inter-​National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002). France, Peter (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). France, Peter, and Kenneth Hayes (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 4: 1790–​1900 (Oxford: OUP, 2006). Gillespie, Stuart, and David Hopkins (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 3: 1660–​1790 (Oxford: OUP, 2005). Grieder, Josephine, Translation and Prose Fiction: The History of a Literary Vogue (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1975). Hayes, Julie Candler, Translation, Subjectivity & Culture in France and England, 1600–​1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009). McMurran, Mary Helen, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010). Mander, Jenny (ed.), Remapping the Rise of the European Novel (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, SVEC 2007: 08). Thomson, Ann, Simon Burrows, and Edmond Dziembowski (eds.), Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, SVEC 2010: 04). Weissbort, Daniel, and Astradur Eysteinsson (eds.), Translation—​Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader (Oxford: OUP, 2006).

Chapter 7

Rel igious Wri t i ng s a nd the Early Nov e l W. R. Owens

To begin an exploration of the relationships between religious writings and the early novel, we might consider an episode in Henry Fielding’s first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742). As has often been remarked, the dominant character in this novel is not the young footman, Joseph, intent on preserving his chastity against all temptation, but his ebulliently good-​hearted spiritual mentor and companion, Parson Abraham Adams. When he meets up with Joseph, early in the novel, Adams is on his way to London carrying nine volumes of the manuscripts of his sermons, hoping to have them published and thereby make ‘a considerable Sum of Money’ to support his struggling family.1 He ima­ gines, indeed, that he might be paid at least £10 for each volume—​a great deal of money at that time—​but is discouraged by a cynical fellow-​clergyman, Parson Barnabas, who tells Adams that the bottom has fallen out of the market for sermons, the present age being so wicked that nobody reads them any more (66). The discussion between the two clergymen is presented by Fielding in richly comic fashion, and it becomes clear to the reader that the unworldly Adams is not being very realistic in his expectations of financial gain. When they meet a bookseller (who at that time would undertake the publication as well as the sale of books), Adams immediately tries to interest him in his manuscripts, but is again disappointed. The bookseller would not publish any new volumes of sermons ‘unless they come out with the name of Whitfield or Westley, or some other such great Man’, or had been preached on a special occasion such as 30 January (the anniversary of the execution of Charles I), or, at the very least, could be advertised as having been ‘published at the earnest Request of the Congregation’ (69). The bookseller is referring here to George Whitefield (1714–​70) and John Wesley (1703–​91), founders of what would become known as the Methodist movement in

1 

Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Douglas Brooks-​Davies, rev. Thomas Keymer (Oxford: OUP, 1999), 58.

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106   W. R. OWENS the Church of England. Methodism was growing strongly at this time, but was also attracting much opposition, and sermons by such famous and controversial preachers would indeed have been highly saleable commodities. The mere mention of their names prompts a heated discussion between the two clergymen. Barnabas denounces Whitefield as an enemy to the clergy of the Church of England: ‘He would reduce us to the Example of the Primitive Ages forsooth! … and would make Mankind believe, that the Poverty and low Estate, which was recommended to the Church in its Infancy … was to be preserved in her flourishing and established State’ (70). Adams, by contrast, wishes Whitefield well in his attacks on ‘the Luxury and Splendour of the Clergy’, having as little time as Whitefield for the outward trappings of religion (an attitude exemplified in his carelessness about his dress and appearance). His own disagreement focuses on Whitefield’s espousal of what Adams describes as ‘the detestable Doctrine of Faith against good Works’. That merely holding correct beliefs (‘faith’) would be more important in God’s eyes than virtuous behaviour (‘good works’) is regarded by Adams as a doctrine ‘coined in Hell’. ‘Can any Doctrine have a more pernicious Influence on Society,’ he asks, ‘than a Persuasion, that it will be a good Plea for the Villain at the last day, Lord, it is true I never obeyed one of thy Commandments, yet punish me not, for I believe them all?’ Adams’s own sermons, he tells the bookseller, are founded on the quite contrary belief that ‘a virtuous and good Turk, or Heathen, are more acceptable in the sight of their Creator, than a vicious and wicked Christian, tho’ his Faith was as perfectly Orthodox as St. Paul’s himself ’ (71). This episode in Joseph Andrews exemplifies some of the ways in which early novels and novelists engaged with religious writings and it indicates the importance of such writings in the wider intellectual and cultural debates of the period. A renewed emphasis on the Reformation doctrine of ‘justification by faith alone’—​that salvation was the gift of divine grace rather than achieved by any effort of the human will—​was to become central to the eighteenth-​century Evangelical Revival. Fielding, however, was influenced by the ideas of a group of Church of England clergymen known as ‘latitudinarians’ (because they allowed ‘latitude’ in matters of dogma, liturgical practice, and ecclesiastical organization more generally), who preached a combination of faith and works. These included figures such as Isaac Barrow (1630–​77), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; John Tillotson (1630–​94), Archbishop of Canterbury; and Benjamin Hoadly (1676–​1761), Bishop (successively) of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury, and Winchester. Their published writings were frequently quoted or alluded to by Fielding, and they can be seen to have influenced Joseph Andrews in important ways. At one point Adams refers to Hoadly’s A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (1735), a rationalistic exposition of the Eucharist designed to encourage Christians to dedicate themselves to the ‘Uniform Practice of Morality’,2 describing this highly controversial work as an ‘excellent Book’, written ‘with the Pen of an Angel’ (71). Furthermore, as 2  Benjamin Hoadly, A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament, 157; cited in Martin Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1959), 97.

Religious Writings and the Early Novel    107 Martin Battestin has pointed out, Adams’s trenchant statement of the doctrine preached in his own sermons paraphrases closely some remarks in a famous sermon of Hoadly’s, in which he had declared that ‘an honest Heathen is much more acceptable to [God], than a dishonest and deceitful Christian; and that a charitable and good-​natured Pagan has a better Title to his Favour, than a cruel and barbarous Christian; let him be never so orthodox in his Faith’.3 The writings of Isaac Barrow were a particular favourite of Fielding’s, and indeed he explicitly aligned himself with Barrow’s theology of human perfectibility through moral effort: ‘I say, with Dr. Barrow, Let us improve and advance over Nature to the utmost Perfection of which it is capable, I mean by doing all the Good we can; and surely that Nature which seems to partake of the divine Goodness in this World, is that most likely to partake of the divine Happiness in the next.’4 Battestin argues, convincingly, that in its structure and thematic concerns, Joseph Andrews is indebted to Barrow’s sermon ‘Of Being Imitators of Christ’, in which the Old Testament figures of Abraham and Joseph are presented as exemplars of true faith and of chaste behaviour respectively (Genesis 12–​21, 39). Abraham, says Barrow, has to leave his ‘home and fixed habitation, his estate and patrimony, his kindred and acquaintance, to wander he knew not where in unknown lands … leading an uncertain and ambulatory life in tents, sojourning and shifting among strange people, devoid of piety and civility’. As Battestin suggests, it is difficult not to be reminded here of Parson Adams’s various encounters in his travels with people ‘devoid of piety and civility’, to the point where ‘he almost began to suspect that he was sojourning in a Country inhabited only by Jews and Turks’ (156). Battestin also draws attention to Barrow’s account of how the biblical Joseph held out against the advances of his master Potiphar’s wife: rejecting the solicitations of an imperious mistress, advantaged by opportunities of privacy and solitude; when the refusal was attended with extreme danger, and all the mischiefs which the disdain of a furious lust disappointed … could produce; and all this by one of meanest condition, in a strange place, where no intercession, favour, or patronage of friends could be had … doing this, merely upon principles of conscience, and out of the fear of God … He that considers this example, how can he be ignorant of his duty in the like case?5

As with the resemblance of Barrow’s description of the biblical Abraham to the travels of Parson Adams, so it is difficult reading this account of the biblical Joseph not to be reminded of the situation of Fielding’s young footman as he repels the advances of Lady Booby. 3 

Hoadly, ‘The Good Samaritan’, in Twenty Sermons (London, 1755), 332; cited in Battestin, Moral Basis, 22. 4 Fielding, The Covent-​Garden Journal, 11 April 1752; cited in Battestin, Moral Basis, 61–​2. Captain Booth, the irreligious hero of Fielding’s last novel, Amelia (1751), is converted by reading Barrow’s works while in prison. 5 Barrow, Theological Works, ed. Alexander Napier (Cambridge, 1859), 2: 501–​3; cited in Battestin, Moral Basis, 35.

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108   W. R. OWENS

Publication Figures for Religious Writings It always needs to be remembered that religious writings formed the largest category of printed works in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. James Ravens’s count of titles in the Term Catalogues issued by booksellers between 1668 and 1709 reveals that books classified as ‘divinity’ accounted for 30 per cent of all titles, and 42 per cent of all new titles published. To put this into perspective, the next largest category (excluding ‘miscellanies’) was history, at 8 per cent of the total. Furthermore, it seems that religious publishing was increasing in volume over this period, forming a third of the total number of publications between 1668 and 1674, about 37 per cent between 1675 and 1689, and over 45 per cent between 1690 and 1709.6 The same general pattern emerges from John Feather’s detailed subject analysis of the output of the press during the whole of the eighteenth century, where his conclusion is that ‘religion in all its manifestations provides the largest single group of books’. To give an indication of what is included in the catch-​all term ‘religious writings’, Feather presents a table breaking it down into ten groups, giving the total number of titles in each group between 1701 and 1800, as follows: Christianity: general  3,637 Natural religion  2,294 The Bible (including commentaries)  4,062 Doctrinal theology  4,965 Moral and devotional theology (including hymns)  4,182 Preaching, sermons, church organization  16,111 Liturgy, church government  4,187 Ecclesiastical history and geography  1,238 Denominations and sects  11,534 Non-​Christian religions  610 Total: 52,820

In a further breakdown of the largest group here, ‘Preaching, sermons, church organization’, Feather shows that by far the greatest number of these were sermons—​almost 15,000 in all. As he says, if we average this out, it means that three sermons were being published every week. In fact, however, the rate of publication was not even, and nearly half of all sermons appeared during the first twenty and the last twenty years of the century (about 3,500 in each period).7 6 

See James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–​1850 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007), 92; John Barnard, D. F. McKenzie, and Maureen Bell (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 4: 1557–​1695 (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 788 (table 4). 7  John Feather, ‘British Publishing in the Eighteenth Century: A Preliminary Subject Analysis’, The Library, 6th ser., 8/​1 (1986), 32–​46.

Religious Writings and the Early Novel    109 A simple count of titles of course cannot tell us anything about the actual quantities of published works circulating, in terms of the size and number of editions of each title. Some titles may have appeared only once, in a very small print run; others may have sold in vast numbers, and been published in many editions. However, even if such information were to be taken into consideration, it would ‘almost certainly enhance the magnitude of religious literature’ as a proportion of the whole.8 Guide books to religious conduct, for example, were among the most popular publications of the period, appearing in numerous editions. Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Path-​way to Heaven (1601) had reached twenty-​five editions by 1704; Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety (probably first published in 1611) was in its ‘sixty-​second’ edition by 1757; Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man (1658) had appeared in something like 140 editions by 1800.9 These and other religious writings are frequently referred to in early novels in ways which confirm their ubiquity in the wider culture. In Samuel Richardson’s first novel, Pamela (1740), for example, the heroine presents copies of The Whole Duty of Man along with other religious books to her neighbours.10 Among the religious and devotional books owned and read by the heroine of Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa (1747–​8), are Thomas à Kempis’s famous Imitation of Christ, ‘Drexelius on Eternity, the good old Practice of Piety, and … Francis Spira’. Clarissa is pleased to find in her apartment at Mrs. Sinclair’s a number of ‘devout books’, including sermons by John Sharp, Archbishop of York, John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Robert South, rector of Islip in Oxfordshire, and a popular devotional handbook by John Inett, rector of Tansor in Northamptonshire, A Guide to the Devout Christian, first published in 1688, and in its fourteenth edition by 1741.11 One of the greatest religious classics of the seventeenth century mentioned in Clarissa is Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living (1650), usually published bound together with its companion volume Holy Dying (1651). At one point in the novel, Lovelace claims to be reading Holy Living and Holy Dying, but evidently without taking it seriously: This old divine affects, I see, a mighty flowery style upon a very solemn subject. But it puts me in mind of an ordinary country funeral, where the young women, in honour of a defunct companion, especially if she were a virgin, or passed for such, make a flower-​bed of her coffin. (1001–​2)

Lovelace jests, but—​unknown to him—​his words will come true at Clarissa’s funeral, where maidens will strew her coffin with flowers. In her elaborate preparations for her

8 Raven, The Business of Books, 92.

9  See J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​Century English Fiction (New York and London: Norton, 1990), 235. 10  Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Peter Sabor, introd. Margaret A. Doody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 494. 11  Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 295, 561, 525.

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110   W. R. OWENS own death, Clarissa, as Margaret Anne Doody points out, ‘follows literally’ Taylor’s injunction: ‘first dresse thy soul, and then dresse thy hearse’.12 It is noteworthy that in writing his novels Richardson claimed to have been motivated by religious impulses, and indeed to have regarded his novels as, in some sense, religious writings. He defended Pamela on the grounds that it would ‘inculcate religion and morality in so easy and agreeable a manner, as shall render them equally delightful and profitable’ (31). Similarly, in a ‘Postscript’ to his masterpiece, Clarissa, he declared that it was designed to ‘inculcate upon the human mind, under the guise of an amusement, the great lessons of Christianity’ (1495). It seems that some early readers of Richardson’s novels did value them for their religious sentiments. A writer in the Weekly Miscellany thought that Pamela would ‘reclaim the Vicious, and mend the Age in general’; Dr Benjamin Slocock recommended it to his parishioners from the pulpit in St. Saviour’s, Southwark; and years later a clerical acquaintance of Richardson’s wrote to him to say that Pamela had ‘a beautiful simplicity which I never knew excelled except in the Bible’. Samuel Johnson thought that Clarissa was ‘calculated to promote the dearest interests of religion and virtue’.13 All the evidence suggests that there was an enormous, almost insatiable appetite for religious reading matter during this period, and that there was much less of a division between religious writings and what we now call novels than there would be today. As Pat Rogers has remarked, religious writings ‘were abroad in the general imagination as surely as the images of popular television programmes inhabit our consciousness today … no living Englishman (or woman) could have escaped the power of the religious word; it was the stuff of his culture’.14

The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Early Novel The religious writer who made the most significant impact on the development of the early novel, it may be argued, was John Bunyan (1628–​88). In Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), he produced the outstanding example of the genre of spiritual autobiography, which would be one of the major influences on the shape and thematic concerns of early novels. His famous allegory of the Christian life, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; 2nd part, 1684), sold in vast numbers, and did much to make acceptable the idea of using fiction for religious and moral purposes. The two works are closely related, because to a very large extent The Pilgrim’s Progress is a reworking in allegorical form 12 

Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 174. 13  See T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 121, 338. 14  Pat Rogers, Robinson Crusoe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979), 58.

Religious Writings and the Early Novel    111 of Bunyan’s own spiritual and psychological experiences as earlier recounted in Grace Abounding. Spiritual autobiography was a relatively new genre of religious writing in the seventeenth century, and only really began to appear in significant numbers from the 1650s onwards.15 It had its origins in the emphasis Protestants—​and especially Puritans—​ placed on the responsibility of individual Christians to mark the stages of their own religious conversion and to record and reflect upon the spiritual significance of each event in their lives. Although the specific details of each person’s conversion experience would differ, the sequence of events tended to follow a similar basic pattern. This usually fell into three major stages: a sinful pre-​conversion state, sometimes including providential escapes from danger; a process of conversion which may have been gradual or may have happened quite quickly; an account of trials, doubts, and resolution following conversion, and evidences of the caring hand of Providence. These three major stages can be discerned in Grace Abounding, although Bunyan devotes more space than is usual to his protracted process of conversion, and to the repeated waves of doubt and despair that he suffered. His account of his spiritual crisis is remarkable for its vivid descriptions of the physical as well as mental torment he went through. In his darkest period, the Devil ‘fiercely assaulted’ him with the suggestion that he should ‘sell and part with Christ’. This thought came into Bunyan’s head so unremittingly, as though it was his own, that, in sheer exhaustion, he gave way: ‘I felt this thought pass through my heart, Let him go if he will! and I thought also that I felt my heart freely consent thereto.’16 His description of the physical and mental torment he subsequently suffered is harrowing. Then was I struck into a very great trembling, insomuch that at some times I could for whole days together feel my very body as well as my mind to shake and totter under the sense of the dreadful judgement of God … I felt also such a clogging and heat at my stomach by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially at some times, as if my breast-​bone would have split in sunder … Thus did I wind, and twine, and shrink under the burden that was upon me; which burden also did so oppress me, that I could neither stand nor go, nor lie either at rest or quiet … methought I saw as if the Sun that shineth in the heavens did grudge to give me light, and as if the very stones in the street, and tiles upon the houses, did bend themselves against me. (42)

The nightmarish experiences described here lasted for over two years before, finally, Bunyan came to believe that he had not after all ‘sold and parted with Christ’, but that his salvation was secure: ‘Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed, I was loosed from my affliction and irons, my temptations also fled away’ (48–​9). 15 

For overviews, see Paul Delaney, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Columbia UP, 1969); D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: OUP, 2005). 16  John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. W. R. Owens (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 36–​7.

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112   W. R. OWENS The agonizing process of Bunyan’s conversion is marked, above all, by his extraordinarily intense and constantly developing relationship with the Bible. He reads the Bible incessantly, but for every text that seems to promise hope, he finds one that seems to threaten him, plunging him into despair. He is haunted for months by some words from Hebrews 12:17 describing how Esau, who sold his birthright, afterwards ‘found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears’ (37). Bunyan’s crisis does not end until this terrifying text is overcome by a very different one, from 2 Corinthians 12:9: ‘My grace is sufficient for thee’ (53–​5). It is not until he learns a method of interpretation that enables him to reconcile such apparently conflicting texts that Bunyan can begin to have confidence that he is on his way to heaven.17 Grace Abounding is of course a retrospective account of religious despair, written from a position of psychic wholeness and strength. Bunyan is describing experiences of some ten years earlier, and his purpose in writing and publishing his autobiography is to provide comfort to fellow believers: ‘If you have sinned against light, if you are tempted to blaspheme, if you are down in despair, if you think God fights against you, or if heaven is hid from your eyes; remember ’twas thus with [me], but out of them all the Lord delivered me’ (3). There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that reading Grace Abounding did in fact provide consolation for readers. The author of A Mirrour of Mercy (1709) found that it matched ‘my own Case exactly’: it became ‘in great measure … the Means of my Conversion’. William Seward ‘was much humbled thereby, and comforted withal, to find that other Saints of GOD have been most grievously tempted, and yet came off Conquerors’. The Methodist preacher John Haime described it as ‘the best book I ever saw’: ‘I read it with the utmost attention, and found his case nearly resembled my own.’18 What these comments indicate is the important part spiritual autobiographies like Grace Abounding could play in the process of individual ‘self-​fashioning’, to use Stephen Greenblatt’s term for the ways in which people form and shape identities and conceptions of themselves.19 Spiritual autobiographies may be said to be examples par excellence of ‘self-​fashioning’ in action, describing as they do the protracted struggle by which the converted person becomes a wholly new self, one who thinks differently and lives differently, and forms new social relationships. As we shall see, a number of early novels took the form of (fictional) spiritual autobiographies, and it may be argued that reading about the ‘self-​fashioning’ of others was an important aspect of working towards becoming a different person oneself.20 17 

See further, W. R. Owens, ‘John Bunyan and the Bible’, in Anne Dunan-​Page (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), 39–​50. 18 See A Mirrour of Mercy (1709), 12, 34; William Seward, Journal of a Voyage from Savannah to Philadelphia (1740), 39; John Haime, A Short Account of God’s Dealings with Mr. John Haime (1799), 6. See further, Isabel Rivers, ‘ “Strangers and Pilgrims”: Sources and Patterns of Methodist Narrative’, in J. C. Hilson, M. M. B. Jones, and J. R. Watson (eds.), Augustan Worlds (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1978), 195. 19  See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-​Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1980). 20  See further, Michael MacDonald, ‘The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies 31/​1 (1992), 32–​61.

Religious Writings and the Early Novel    113 Certainly the Bunyan who would subsequently produce the confidently expansive allegorical fiction of The Pilgrim’s Progress was a very different person from the inward-​ turning, isolated, and agonized character described in Grace Abounding. In the twelve years that separated the two works he had become an experienced and versatile writer, with publications including sermons, theological treatises, works of doctrinal controversy, and religious poetry. With The Pilgrim’s Progress, however, he produced something strikingly new and original in English prose fiction. When he showed it to friends, some of them were worried that it was ‘feigned’, that it relied too much on ‘metaphors’, or that it was not a work of sufficient ‘solidness’ for the purpose of conveying religious truths. Bunyan, however, was unrepentant, defending his use of allegory and dialogue, and arguing that the Bible itself offered a precedent for the use of metaphor and parable for religious purposes.21 In the poem that he included as a preface to his book, Bunyan not only answered his critics, but described in some detail how he came to write the allegory. When at the first I took my Pen in hand, Thus for to write, I did not understand That I at all should make a little Book In such a mode; Nay, I had undertook To make another, which when almost done, Before I was aware, I this begun. And thus it was: I writing of the Way And Race of Saints in this our Gospel-​Day, Fell suddenly into an Allegory About their Journey and the way to Glory, In more than twenty things, which I set down; This done, I twenty more had in my Crown, And they again began to multiply Like sparks that from the coals of Fire do flie … … I did not think To show to all the World my Pen and Ink In such a mode; I only thought to make I knew not what: nor did I undertake Thereby to please my Neighbour; no not I, I did it mine own self to gratifie … Thus I set Pen to Paper with delight, And quickly had my thoughts in black and white. For having now my method by the end, Still as I pull’d, it came; and so I penn’d It down, until it came at last to be For length and breadth the bigness which you see. (3)

21 

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. W. R. Owens (Oxford: OUP, 2003), 4–​8.

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114   W. R. OWENS The writing of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan tells us, came about in a quite unexpected and unpremeditated fashion, as a surge of ideas that he was powerless to resist took hold of his imagination. He hadn’t intended to write this book—​indeed he had to set aside another work on which he was engaged—​but it flowed as easily as if he were spinning flax, and could draw his story effortlessly along. He wrote it, he says, ‘with delight’, with no other end in view than to gratify himself.22 But if the idea for The Pilgrim’s Progress came into Bunyan’s head suddenly and unexpectedly, it did not come from nowhere. As he says, it was initially prompted by another work he was writing, a sermon treatise based on a text from the first letter to the Corinthians, where the Apostle Paul compares the gaining of salvation to running a race for a prize. In his sermon, Bunyan develops the idea of a short sprint into something more like a long, arduous cross-​country run across a rough and dangerous countryside, one that needs determination and perseverance to finish. ‘Because the way is long,’ he writes, ‘and there is many a dirty step, many a high Hill, much Work to do … thou must Run a long and tedious Journey, thorow the waste howling Wilderness, before thou come to the Land of Promise.’23 We can see here the germs of ideas that prompted the creation of the Slough of Despond and the Hill of Difficulty, as well as the larger allegorical framework of the Christian life as a pilgrimage to the Celestial City. This idea of pilgrimage was familiar to Bunyan and his readers from the book of Exodus in the Bible, which recounted the story of the liberation of the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt and their subsequent travels through the wilderness to reach the Promised Land of Canaan. In the New Testament book of Hebrews, their travels are understood as prefiguring the experience of every Christian: they were ‘strangers and pilgrims on the earth’, who desired ‘a better country, that is, an heavenly’.24 As Bunyan began to develop and elaborate his idea of the Christian pilgrimage, he remembered books he had delighted in reading as a boy—​popular ballads and chapbook versions of medieval chivalric romances.25 In episodes such as Christian’s fight with the monstrous Apollyon, and the imprisonment of the pilgrims by Giant Despair in Doubting Castle, there are echoes of folk-​tale heroes and stories of knights like St. George who slew dragons. He also drew upon a tradition of popular Puritan religious writing which used allegory and dialogue between invented characters. A good example is Richard Bernard’s little book, The Isle of Man: or, The Proceedings in Manshire against Sin, first published in 1627, in which vices are given allegorical names and put on trial as if in an English criminal court. Another important influence was a work already mentioned, Arthur

22 

On this passage as ‘the locus classicus for inspiration in English literature’, see N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1987), 182. 23  John Bunyan, The Heavenly Footman, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. Roger Sharrock, 13 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–​94), 5: 150. 24  Hebrews 11:13–​16. 25  He refers to this childhood reading in A Few Sighs from Hell (1658); see Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. Sharrock, 1: 333.

Religious Writings and the Early Novel    115 Dent’s immensely popular The Plain Mans Path-​way to Heaven, first published in 1601, in which theological doctrines are presented in the form of dialogues spoken by a group of characters, each of whom is given a different point of view. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, however, Bunyan takes these earlier approaches and techniques a great deal further in the direction of what we now think of as the novel. Much more effectively than Dent, he uses dialogue to enliven his book, and indeed the acuteness with which he catches the rhythms of colloquial speech is one of the great attractions of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Equally importantly, although working within an allegorical framework he creates and puts into motion a range of characters who behave and interact with each other like recognizable people, and he constructs a ‘plot’ in which events follow one another in an understandable sequence. For Coleridge, this was at the very heart of Bunyan’s achievement in The Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘with the same illusion as we read any tale known to be fictitious, as a novel, we go on with the characters as real persons’.26 A great deal of the ‘story’ of The Pilgrim’s Progress is taken up with the temptations, dangers, and enemies—​both external and internal—​that the pilgrims have to face. Sometimes these have to be faced alone. Christian has to fight Apollyon and pass through the terrifying Valley of the Shadow of Death by himself. More often, however, he has the company of other pilgrims, and what he and they learn on their pilgrimage is that they can help and support one another and enjoy fellowship together. We see this human solidarity in the famous Doubting Castle episode, where Christian and Hopeful are imprisoned by Giant Despair—​a marvellous folk-​tale character, complete with a comical domineering wife. Urged on by his wife, Giant Despair beats the pilgrims unmercifully with his ‘grievous Crab-​tree Cudgel’, telling them all the while that they will never escape, and that they may as well kill themselves. Christian is ready to think that death would be better than this dungeon, but Hopeful, in keeping with his name, counsels patience and courage: My Brother … remembrest thou not how valiant thou has been heretofore; Apollyon could not crush thee, nor could all that thou didst hear, or see, or feel in the Valley of the shadow of Death; what hardship, terror, and amazement hast thou already gone through, and art thou now nothing but fear? … wherefore let us … bear up with patience as well as we can. (113)

By a process of rational deliberation, and reflection on experiences in the past, the pilgrims are able to comfort each other, and prevent themselves from giving way to abject terror and despair. Bunyan here has transmuted the metaphorical chains of his own despair into richly imagined fictional narrative. In the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1684, there is an even greater emphasis on human companionship and mutual support. Here Christian’s wife, Christiana, sets out on pilgrimage with her children and her friend Mercy, retracing the 26 

Cited in Roger Sharrock (ed.), The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1976), 53.

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116   W. R. OWENS route taken by Christian and visiting the scenes of some of his trials and victories. Along the way they are joined by a great number of fellow pilgrims. Some are heroic figures, like Great-​heart, Mr. Valiant-​for-​Truth, and Mr. Stand-​fast. Others exhibit a range of human frailties, like Mr. Feeble-​mind, Mr. Ready-​to-​halt, Mr. Despondency, and his daughter Much-​afraid. In its depiction of social interaction between a community of believers, and by encouraging the reader to become imaginatively involved in the lives and experiences of the pilgrims, The Pilgrim’s Progress may be seen to foreshadow the mode of narration that would characterize the early novel. Samuel Johnson famously declared it to be one of only three books ‘written by a mere man that was wished longer by its readers’—​the other two being Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe.27

Robinson Crusoe as Spiritual Autobiography In his Preface to Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe insisted that the story of his hero’s life and adventures was ‘told with … a religious Application of Events’ and designed for ‘the Instruction of others by this Example, and to justify and honour the Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of our Circumstances’.28 An early satirical attack on Robinson Crusoe associated it with ‘the Pilgrim’s Progress, the Practice of Piety, and God’s Revenge against Murther’, as a book that pious old women would leave as a legacy.29 Karl Marx, famously, dismissed Crusoe’s prayers and religious reflections as mere ‘recreation’, nothing more than ‘a source of pleasure to him’, and regarded them as of ‘no account’ in understanding the novel.30 More recent critics have taken seriously the religious themes in Robinson Crusoe, and have explored the extent to which Defoe’s novel may be seen to conform to the conventions of genres of religious writing such as the ‘guide tradition’, the ‘Providence tradition’, and the ‘pilgrim tradition’.31 For G. A. Starr, the basic structure is that of the spiritual autobiography: ‘the hero’s vicissitudes, highly individual and complex as they appear to be, actually follow a conventional and regular pattern of spiritual evolution’.32 It is worth tracing this pattern in some detail. The early part of the novel, covering Crusoe’s ‘original sin’ of disobeying his father and going to sea, and his subsequent wanderings and adventures, culminating in his shipwreck on the island, may be regarded 27 

Cited in Pat Rogers (ed.), Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 59. 28  Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Thomas Keymer and James Kelly (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 3. 29  Cited in Rogers (ed.), Defoe: The Critical Heritage, 42. 30  Cited in Rogers (ed.), Defoe: The Critical Heritage, 166–​7. 31  See J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1966). 32  G. A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965), 72.

Religious Writings and the Early Novel    117 as forming the first stage of his spiritual autobiography. As we have seen, this was usually devoted to an account of the autobiographer’s pre-​conversion state of sinfulness and estrangement from God. During this stage, Crusoe does not recognize the guiding hand of Providence in his affairs. His having been saved from the shipwreck should have been a lesson to him, but, as he later recalls, he did not then stop to enquire ‘why Providence had been thus merciful to me’ (77). When he notices some stalks of barley beginning to spring up near his cave, he at first regards it as a miracle, a ‘Prodigy of Nature’. However, when he later recalls shaking out an old bag that had contained chicken feed at that very spot, and guesses that there were some seeds among the chaff, his ‘religious Thankfulness to God’s Providence began to abate’ (68). He ought also to have seen the hand of Providence in the preservation of his cave dwelling when a great earthquake strikes the island, followed by a hurricane and a violent rainstorm, but again, as he recalled, ‘no sooner was the first Fright over, but the Impression it had made went off also’ (77). The second stage of a spiritual autobiography, the account of the subject’s conversion, may be seen to begin in Robinson Crusoe when Crusoe falls seriously ill with a fever. So weak that he cannot get out of bed, he has a terrible nightmare in which he sees ‘a Man descend from a great black Cloud, in a bright Flame of Fire’ coming towards him to kill him with a great spear, crying out ‘Seeing all these Things have not brought thee to Repentance, now thou shalt die’ (75). As Starr puts it, Crusoe’s illness and dream here ‘serve as final indications of the spiritual condition which he has reached, and of the greatness of the change he is about to undergo’.33 For the first time, Crusoe begins seriously to reflect on his spiritual condition, and comes to recognize his need of salvation. As he recovers from his illness, he finds in one of the sea-​chests he brought ashore from the wreck a copy of the Bible. As in the case of Bunyan, for whom Bible reading was of central importance, so here, it is his reading of a passage from Psalm 50 that marks the turning point in the process of Crusoe’s religious conversion: I was earnestly begging of God to give me Repentance, when it happen’d providentially … that reading the Scripture, I came to these Words, He is exalted a Prince and a Saviour, to give Repentance, and to give Remission: I threw down the Book, and with my Heart as well as my Hands lifted up to Heaven, in a Kind of Extasy of Joy, I cry’d out aloud, Jesus … thou exalted Prince and Saviour, give me Repentance! (82–​3)

This was Crusoe’s first true prayer, for, as he says, ‘now I  pray’d with a Sense of my Condition, and with a true Scripture View of Hope founded on the Encouragement of the Word of God’ (83). For Crusoe, as for Bunyan, the experience of conversion is no instantaneous event, but is, instead, a lengthy process of learning to trust in God. He will continue to experience attacks of anxiety and dejection, but whereas before his conversion he would find himself overwhelmed with anguish, to the point where he would ‘wring my Hands, and 33 Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, 103.

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118   W. R. OWENS weep like a Child’, now, he says, ‘I began to exercise my self with new Thoughts’. Reading in the Bible the words ‘I will never, never leave thee, nor forsake thee’, he now without hesitation takes them as words spoken from God to himself: ‘Why else should they be directed in such a Manner, just at the moment when I was mourning over my Condition, as one forsaken of God and Man?’ (96–​7). From this point in the novel, Crusoe increasingly recognizes that he is in the care of Providence. As he puts it, echoing the words of Psalm 78:19: ‘What a Table was here spread for me in a Wilderness.’34 This, we might say, equates to the third stage of the spiritual autobiography, the account of post-​conversion trials and resolution. Spiritual progress is not without its difficulties: there is much trial and error and many times of distress. But after his conversion Crusoe makes significant changes in his day-​to-​day activities. He prays regularly, continues to read the Bible, and begins to keep the Sabbath day. His discovery of the coincidence of remarkable dates of events in his life strengthens his sense that his life is under the controlling hand of Providence. Even his terror at the footprint is gradually overcome, and when cannibals arrive on the island, he becomes the instrument of Providence in converting Friday. By the end of the novel, he is able to assume a leadership role, and his authority over the organization and governance of everything on the island is recognized by the Spanish and English sailors whom he rescues.

Conclusion As we have seen throughout this essay, the connections between religious writings and early novels were often extremely close. What we should also note, in conclusion, is that some early novelists were themselves authors of major religious writings. Defoe is a good example of this. The most popular of all his works during the eighteenth century, with the exception of Robinson Crusoe, were his religious conduct books, The Family Instructor (vol. 1, 1715; vol. 2, 1718), which ran through at least eighteen editions and was still being reprinted into the nineteenth century, and Religious Courtship (1722), which also appeared in many editions. In these works Defoe adopts what may be described as a ‘novelistic’ style, using naturalistic dialogue between groups of characters who interact in dramatically effective and engaging ways. As Benjamin Franklin was the first to note, Defoe, like Bunyan before him, in his way of mixing ‘Narration and Dialogue’ had found ‘a Method of Writing very engaging to the Reader, who in the most interesting Parts finds himself as it were brought into the Company, and present at the Discourse’.35 The Family Instructor is a most coherent and original statement of the importance of family, as opposed to institutional, religion. According to Defoe, religion is above all 34  Crusoe quotes or alludes to this text on at least three occasions; see Robinson Crusoe, ed. Keymer and Kelly, 81, 110, 125. 35  Cited in Defoe, Religious Courtship, ed. G. A. Starr, in Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, gen. eds. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, 10 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006–​7), 4: 18.

Religious Writings and the Early Novel    119 a matter of behaviour, not theological correctness or niceties of belief. Disputes about such matters, in his eyes, are a snare, and many doctrinal problems may safely be left unanswered. He likes to give pictures of ‘religious, sober, pious’ families, in which the children ‘do all things so prettily, and their Behaviour is so agreeable; they love one another so entirely, and enjoy one another so perfectly, that I believe they are the Pattern of all the Town’.36 But what he also goes on to show, with great imaginative force, is how the most fearful quarrels and animosities are liable to erupt in families over religion, and how enormous upheaval may be caused within a family if the parents decide to introduce strict religious observance. In the second volume, he depicts the horrific, even pathological, states of mind fathers may be led into by the exercise of their parental duties, in particular the duty to ‘correct’ or punish their children. Many of these scenes are sketched with novelistic brilliance, as, for example, the portrayal of a tender-​hearted father who—​as he naively explains to a neighbour who rebukes him for administering punishment while in a rage—​can only bring himself to beat his erring children by getting into a ‘Passion’.37 The fact that Defoe was the author of The Family Instructor as well as Robinson Crusoe complicates, usefully, the formulation of the title of this essay: ‘Religious Writings and the Early Novel’. The division of categories works as a way of thinking about the novels of Fielding, with his interest in the ideas of the latitudinarians and his hostility to Methodism. It works, also, for Richardson, who, though he paid conventional tribute to Christian values, and no doubt thought of himself as promoting the cause of religion, would be more accurately described as a keen and shrewd moralist rather than as a religious writer. By contrast, as with Bunyan, Defoe shows his genius in his religious writings just as much as in his novelistic ones, and indeed for these writers the two kinds of writing reinforced each other.

Select Bibliography Damrosch, Leopold, God’s Plots and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985). Hunter, J. Paul, Before Novels:  The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​ Century Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990). Hunter, J. Paul, The Reluctant Pilgrim:  Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1966). Knight, Mark, and Thomas Woodman (eds.), Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700–​2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–​1740 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins UP, 1987).

36  Daniel Defoe, The Family Instructor, ed. P. N. Furbank, in Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 1: 120. 37 Defoe, The Family Instructor, ed. P. N. Furbank, in Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 2: 131.

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120   W. R. OWENS Rivers, Isabel, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–​1780, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 1991, 2000). Rivers, Isabel, ‘Religion and Literature’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–​1780 (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 445–​70. Sim, Stuart, Negotiations with Paradox: Narrative Practice and Narrative Form in Bunyan and Defoe (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). Starr, G. A., Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971). Starr, G. A., Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965). Stewart, Carol, The Eighteenth-​ Century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957).

Chapter 8

Tr av el Literat u re a nd the Early Nov e l Cynthia Wall

[Dr Johnson] talked with an uncommon animation of travelling into distant countries; that the mind was enlarged by it, and that an acquisition of dignity of character was derived from it. He expressed a particular enthusiasm with respect to visiting the wall of China. James Boswell, Life of Johnson1

Visiting the Great Wall of China was not exactly an everyday occurrence in eighteenth-​ century Britain, but the fact that Samuel Johnson fantasized about it reflects the increasing intimacy of the world through travel. Expanded trade routes, the explorations of science, the thrust of empire, improvements in roads and coaches, meant that more and more Britons of all classes could travel with relative ease and economy at home and abroad, visiting other houses, other cities, other cultures. Since the seventeenth century, missionaries and envoys had been bringing back fascinated accounts of China, along with porcelain, lacquer furniture, and opium. Britain became the dominant sea power in the eighteenth century, in trade, exploration, and colonization, creating and tightening webs of cultural connection and exchange. The convention of the Grand Tour sent thousands of well-​to-​do young gentlemen (and the occasional lady) to Europe. Technological improvements in the comfort, affordability, and safety of road travel allowed more people to travel for pleasure, and the increased accuracy of maps meant that the idea of the nation was better visualized. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the British were practically zooming around their island and the world—​and writing about it. ‘Travel literature’ covers a lot of territory, so to speak. Just about any genre could be (and was) appropriated for describing the experiences of travel, and Peter Hulme and 1 

James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, introd. Pat Rogers (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1980), 929.

122

122   CYNTHIA WALL Tim Youngs note: ‘Prose fiction in its modern forms built its house on this disputed territory.’2 ‘Travel narratives’—​itself a loosely fitting term—​applies generally to those documentary accounts by travellers of their travels; presumed true, but not always reliable. In fact, the deliberate smudges between truth and fiction in the eighteenth-​century novel appear equally reliably in many non-​fictional genres. Travel literature, or what we might call the rhetorics of exploration, emerges in letters, diaries, journals, biographies, travel narratives, country house guides, ship’s logs, poems, plays; and the cannibalistic novel feeds on them all. From London as a source of topographical mystery to be penetrated even by its inhabitants, to the newly opened houses of the great in the country; from the recently domesticated wilds of Scotland and Ireland, to the new touristical patterns of Europe; and from the exotic lands across the seas to life on the sea itself, the rhetorics of travel supplied hosts of models for narrative and imagery in the early novel.

To and Around London Samuel Johnson famously announced, ‘Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’3 For much of the eighteenth century, most of the literary world seemed to think the same. Certainly Johnson’s biographer James Boswell never lost that feeling. In 1762, when he was 22, he finally managed to get his father, the laird of Auchinleck in Scotland, to approve his spending a year in London. He writes in his journal: ‘Elated with the thoughts of my journey to London, I got up … The scene of being a son setting out from home for the wide world and the idea of being my own master, pleased me much … I rattled down the High Street in high elevation of spirits.’4 And London rarely disappoints during that year, from his first glimpse (‘When we came upon Highgate hill and had a view of London, I was all life and joy … I gave three huzzas, and we went briskly in’ [44]) to his last day (‘I have been attaining a knowledge of the world … I am now upon a less pleasurable but a more rational and lasting plan’ [333]). (Though just the day before, he was frolicking with ‘a fine fresh lass’ who accosted him on the Strand [332].) As Boswell noted after a walk across London, from Hyde Park Corner to Gracechurch Street to London Bridge (over a frozen river Thames) to Whitechapel: ‘As the Spectator observes, one end of London is like a different country from the other in look and in manners’ (153). And Boswell dutifully, even joyfully, recounts all the different ‘countries’ he encounters. He visits all the tourist sites, attending Drury Lane Theatre (to see the famous David Garrick), eavesdropping in the coffee houses and dining in the steakhouses, strolling the pleasure gardens at Ranelagh, 2 

Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 6. 3 Boswell, Life of Johnson, 859. 4  James Boswell, London Journal 1762–​1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (2nd edn., New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 40–​1.

Travel Literature and the Early Novel    123 dancing in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy, climbing the Monument of the Great Fire (‘This is a most amazing building. It is a pillar two hundred feet high. In the inside, a turnpike stair runs up all the way. When I was about half way up, I grew frightened. I would have come down again, but thought I would despise myself for my timidity’ [232]), and sauntering across London Bridge, viewing ‘the Thames’s silver expanse and the springy bosom of the surrounding hills’ (232)—​or picking up prostitutes. Boswell never says he used any sort of guidebook to navigate London (he had been there before, after all, and what young person can tolerate the idea of being mistaken for a tourist?), but guidebooks proliferated, and topographies quite often constitute literary art. London was a large and confusing place: ‘So large is the Extent of London, Westminster, and Southwark, with their Suburbs and Liberties, that no Coachman nor Porter knows every place in them; therefore this Book may also be a Guide for them, and prevent, as hath been too often done, their losing any more Portmanteaus, Trunks, Boxes, or Parcels,’ says William Stow in his Remarks on London (1722). The text syntactically replicates topographical confusion:  [S]‌ome People are so ignorant, especially in the Country, as to think London, Westminster, and Southwark, is all London, because contiguous to one another; which is a grand Mistake; for if you should send a letter to a Friend in King-​Street, which is in Westminster, but write at the bottom of the Superscription, London; how should the Postman know, whether you mean King-​street by Guildhall, King-​street on Great tower-​hill, King-​street in Spittle Fields, King-​street in Prince’s street near St. Anne’s Church, King-​street near Golden Square, King-​street in Dean-​street by Soho-​ square, King-​street in Covent-​garden, King-​street by Hay’s court near Newport Market, King-​street in Upper Moor-​fields, King-​street by Old-​street Square, King-​street by Bloomsbury Square, King-​street by St. James’s Square, King-​street near the Six Dials [sic], or King-​street in the Mint?5

John Stow was the first private citizen to write a detailed, accurate, and purportedly objective description of London in 1598 (A Survey of London); this was expanded in 1603, 1618, and 1633, and it served as a model (or a deep well for plagiarism) for many others through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as James Howell’s Londinopolis (1657), Thomas De Laune’s The Present State of London (1681), Edward Hatton’s A New View of London (1708), and John Strype’s magnificent two-​volume folio update, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster (1720). A small sampling of available descriptions of and guides to London in the eighteenth century include The Antiquities of London and Westminster (1722), A New and Compleat Survey of London (1742), William Maitland’s The History of and Survey of London, from its Foundation to the Present Time (1760), The Curiosities of London and Westminster Described (1786), not to mention the sections on London in guidebooks to or travel narratives of Britain, such as John Macky’s A Journey through England (1722), or Daniel Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the 5 

W[illiam] Stow, Remarks on London (London, 1722), Preface, n.p., font reversed.

124

124   CYNTHIA WALL Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–​6). Some of the guides are arranged alphabetically, as in Hatton’s New View; others sort themselves topographically: Red Lion Square, a large Place, and much longer than broad. It hath graceful Buildings on all sides, which are inhabited by Gentry, and Persons of Repute; the Houses having Palisado Pails, and a Freestone Pavement before them. The middle of the Square is inclosed from the Streets, or passage to the Houses, by a handsome high Palisado Pail; with rows of Trees, Gravel Walks, and Grass Plats within; all neatly kept, for the Inhabitants to walk in. Out of this Square are several Streets which lead to other Places: Viz. Lee street, Fisher’s street, Orange street, Drake street, North street, Lamb’s Conduit passage, Princes street, and Gray’s Inn passage.6

Defoe’s novels all tend to read like historical documents of one sort or another; similarly, his non-​fiction often casts itself novelistically, with characters and conversations. In his Tour thro’ the whole Island of Great Britain, London moves and shifts like a living entity, and the line of boundary the narrator describes around its circumference darts through the streets with all the energy of Moll Flanders or Roxana or Colonel Jack:  From Tottenham Court, the line comes in a little south, to meet the Bloomsbury buildings, then turning east, runs behind Montague and Southampton Houses, to the N.E. corner of Southampton House, then crossing the path, meets the buildings called Queen’s Square, then turning north, ’till it comes to the N.W. corner of the square, thence it goes away east behind the buildings on the north side of Ormond Street, ’till it comes to Lamb’s Conduit … 7

Eighteenth-​century novels set in London are almost as cartographically and demographically precise as the topographies and guidebooks. In 1722, Defoe’s eponymous heroine Moll Flanders comes into a sort of emotional and spatial clarity when she maps herself onto the streets, as when she is tempted to murder a small child for her gold necklace:  Here, I say, the Devil put me upon killing the Child in the dark Alley, that it might not Cry; but the very thought frighted me so that I was ready to drop down, but I turn’d the Child about and bad it go back again, for that was not its way home; the Child said so she would, and I went thro’ into Bartholomew Close, and then turn’d round to another Passage that goes into Long-​lane, so away into Charterhouse-​Yard and out into St. John’s-​street, then crossing into Smithfield, went down Chick-​lane and into Field-​lane to Holbourn-​bridge, when mixing with the Crowd of people usually passing there, it was not possible to have been found out …8 6 

A Survey Of the Cities of London and Westminster (London, 1720), 1: [Book 3]: 254. Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 289. 8  Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1971), 194. 7 

Travel Literature and the Early Novel    125 In Moll Flanders, the streets of London are some of the most precisely detailed spaces of the whole work; knowing how to travel through them—​when to be visible, when to disappear; where to find the crowds, and where to leave them behind; distinguishing the houses that are also shops from those that are simply houses; in short, having a guidebook in your head to keep the King Streets straight—​can be the most crucial travel knowledge of all (and include the most suspenseful travel adventures). One striking generic similarity between travel literature and early novels is how frequently both appear in epistolary form. Defoe’s Tour (1724–​6), Macky’s Journey (1722), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), for example, are all formed from actual letters or modelled as correspondence; the voluminous and posthumously published correspondence of Mary Delany, Horace Walpole, and Frances Burney all contain copious travel narratives; and novels such as Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) assume the form of epistolary travel narratives. The letter, of course, is a traveller, and subject to its own adventures, as Charles Gildon’s novel, The Post-​Boy Robb’d of His Mail (1706), whimsically recounts. Burney’s novel Evelina (1778) is an epistolary novel in which its young heroine travels to London; both London and her letters are matters of travel narrative. Like Boswell and Defoe, Evelina experiences and records the different climes of London. As she writes to her guardian (in a letter superscribed ‘Queen-​Ann-​Street’): ‘This moment arrived. Just going to Drury-​Lane theatre … the houses and streets are not quite so superb as I expected. However, I have seen nothing yet, so I ought not to judge.’9 But her experiences at balls and ridottos and concerts and parks (particularly meeting Lord Orville) complete her happiness—​at least until she moves from the aristocratic Queen Anne Street over to ‘Mr. Dawkins’s, a hosier in High Holborn’ (171) with her vulgar, squabbling relatives the Branghtons: ‘London now seems no longer the same place where I lately enjoyed so much happiness; every thing is new and strange to me; even the town itself has not the same aspect’ (172). And her letters themselves—​the time and space they take to travel—​ become part of the plot: when in the third volume she writes to her guardian of her happiness that Lord Orville seems to love her (‘I have been, all day, the happiest of human beings!’ [307]), he writes back instantly: ‘You must quit him!’ (309). Except that Villars’s letter is dated 28 September; it is followed textually by several more of Evelina’s happy letters, while we wait for the crushing command to reach her. And indeed, it does: ‘I have just received your letter,—​and it has almost broken my heart!’ (321). The reader occupies those days between Reverend Villars’s sending the letter and Evelina receiving it in a state of anxious dread; the letter is a travel adventure of its own. In writing so fully and so regularly to her guardian about her travels and her daily life—​of ‘all that passes in the day, and that in the same manner as, if I could see, I should tell you’ (26)—​Evelina coincidentally follows the advice Samuel Johnson gives in the real world (in the same year as the novel) to a friend’s daughter on her travels: 

9 

Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: OUP, 1968), 25–​6.

126

126   CYNTHIA WALL Miss Nancy has doubtless kept a constant and copious journal … Let her review her journal often, and set down what she finds herself to have omitted, that she may trust to memory as little as possible, for memory is soon confused by a quick succession of things; and she will grow every day less confident of the truth of her own narratives, unless she can recur to some written memorials … If she observes this direction, she will not have travelled in vain; for she will bring home a book with which she may entertain herself to the end of life.10

Narrating travel pins it down for the traveller as well as the reader, keeping it fresh and vivid and three-​dimensional. Travel-​writing is, like novel-​writing, the representation of a world.

Travelling Great Britain In 1775, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote in an essay on German novels that actually they weren’t very good because German roads weren’t very good. As Deidre Lynch notes: ‘For Lichtenberg, England alone represented a home-​base suitable for aspiring novelists, because England alone boasted a well-​developed system of post roads and speedy mail and coaches. Novels set in England practically organized themselves … (He complains that, given the state of the German roads, a German father could overtake a runaway daughter and forestall a would-​be novelist’s narrative altogether.)’11 Since the seventeenth century England had improved its roads, canals, and coaches, and travel became easier, safer, and more affordable. More accurate maps and itineraries, such as John Ogilby’s Britannia (1675), gave Britons a sense of their own geography. John Bunyan’s Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress may have been one of the first literary travellers of the ‘long’ eighteenth century in 1678; although his pilgrimage was neither easy nor safe, what with floundering in the Slough of Despond, battling Apollyon, and being captured and tortured by country estate owner Giant Despair, still, he travelled over a recognizably green and pleasant land, a familiar topography. As Thomas Babington Macaulay put it affectionately in the nineteenth century: ‘There is no ascent, no declivity, no resting place, no turnstile, with which we are not perfectly acquainted. The wicket-​gate and the desolate swamp which separates it from the City of Destruction, the long line of road, as straight as a rule can make it … the steep hill and the pleasant arbour, the stately front of the House Beautiful by the wayside, the low green valley of Humiliation, rich with grass and covered with flocks, all are as

10 Boswell, Life of Johnson, 890. Burney did not meet Johnson until after the publication and

subsequent fame of Evelina, but they then became close friends. One can see why, if Evelina is following his directions even before he’s there to give them to her author. 11  Deidre Shauna Lynch, ‘Novels in the World of Moving Goods’, in Cynthia Wall (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 121.

Travel Literature and the Early Novel    127 well known to us as the sights of our own street.’12 Bunyan’s spiritual allegory is also a travel narrative of England. The rise of tourism and the rise of tour guides are, not surprisingly, closely intertwined. For the first half of the century, Defoe’s Tour was the primary published text. The narrator is interested in absolutely everything: roads, villages, markets, customs, clothing, landscapes, architecture. The ‘large fat sheep’ in Lincolnshire and Leicestershire vie in interest with the chalk hills of Tilbury, the ducks of Oosy Island, the oysters of Colchester, the suspicious death-​rate of wives brought to the marshes, and the ‘hurry and business, and not much of gaiety and pleasure’ of Harwich (62). And the houses; he always notes the notables. Chatsworth, for example, home of the Duke of Devonshire, is ‘indeed a most glorious and magnificent house, and, as it has had two or three founders, may well be said to be completely designed and finished … [F]‌or a stranger coming from the north … and wandering or labouring to pass this difficult desert country … on a sudden the guide brings him to this precipice, where he looks down from a frightful height, and a comfortless, barren, and, as he thought, endless moor, into the most delightful valley, with the most pleasant garden, and the most beautiful palace in the world’ (474, 476–​7). Defoe’s interest in travelling, and in writing down the customs and geographies of his homeland, has its travel literary forebears, most notably Celia Fiennes (1662–​1741), who travelled ‘through England on a side-​saddle’ (as one of her descendants described it).13 Fiennes kept a travel journal that was not published until the nineteenth century, but seems to have been intended for publication, for in her preface, ‘To the Reader’, she writes a traveller’s manifesto:  if all persons, both Ladies, much more Gentlemen, would spend some of their tyme in Journeys to visit their native Land, and be curious to inform themselves and make observations of the pleasant prospects, good buildings, different produces and manufactures of each place, with the variety of sports and recreations they are adapt to, would … form such an Idea of England, add much to its Glory and Esteem in our minds and cure the evil itch of over-​valueing foreign parts[.]‌14

She, too, observed and recorded the details of towns and cities, roads and houses, work and play; she, too, visited Chatsworth and devotes several pages to describing it inside and out:  the Duke’s house lyes just at the foote of this steepe hill which is like a precipice just at the last, notwithstanding the Dukes house stands on a little riseing ground from 12  Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress, with a Life of John Bunyan, by Robert Southey’, Edinburgh Review 543 (December 1831), 452. 13  Celia Fiennes, Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary (London: Field & Tuer, 1888). 14  Celia Fiennes, The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes, 1685–​c.1712, ed. Christopher Morris (London: Macdonald, 1982), 32.

128

128   CYNTHIA WALL the River Derwent which runs all along the front of the house and by a little fall made in the water which makes a pretty murmurring noise; before the gate there is a large Parke and several fine Gardens one without another with gravell walkes and squairs of grass with stone statues in them[.]‌ (105)

Fiennes is particularly fascinated with modern plumbing, and describes the pipes of the fountains and the marble ‘batheing room’ (with a bathtub big enough for two, ‘deep as ones middle’) with equal relish. Her own travel narratives end up giving us a thickly upholstered, richly textured visualization of England in all its centres and corners. The urge to travel infected an increasing number of the English over the eighteenth century, and the age of tourism dawned.15 Particular attractions were the great estates, such as Chatsworth, which were being opened to the public, and by the mid-​ eighteenth century guides to the houses and gardens of England’s aristocracy were printed aplenty, beginning with Benton Seeley’s description of the gardens of Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, in 1744. In 1759 Seeley printed a guide to the inside of the house, and by the second half of the eighteenth century, the middle and upper classes of England were touring their countryside in droves, guidebooks in hand, the housekeepers of the estates leading the tours. Not all came to admire; John Byng, fifth Viscount Torrington (1743–​1813), also toured all the corners of England and made his rather irascible opinions known in four volumes. He pointedly and repeatedly and noisily skips Chatsworth: ‘[For] I do abominate seeing modern houses, and modern furniture … I come abroad to view old castles, old manors and old religious houses, before they be quite gone; and that I may compare the ancient structures, and my ideas of their taste, and manners, with the fashions of the present day[.]‌’ Chatsworth, he thinks, is in ‘horrid taste’—​‘all windows’ and parterres and ‘drizzling cascade[s]’.16 But when Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet approaches Pemberley, home of Mr. Darcy (and played by Chatsworth in the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice):  she saw and admired every remarkable spot and point of view. They gradually ascended for half a mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills;—​and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance.17

15 

See Carole Fabricant, ‘The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public Consumption of Private Property’, in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century (New York: Methuen, 1987), 254–​75. 16  C. Bruyn Andrews (ed.), The Torrington Diaries, 4 vols. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1935), 2: 39, 180. 17  Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 271. See also ‘Appendix 3: Pemberley and its models’.

Travel Literature and the Early Novel    129 Modernity in taste. Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle are taken around the house by the housekeeper, Mrs. Reynolds—​she doesn’t sell them a guidebook, but she does show them the public rooms, the portraits, the great staircase, a pretty sitting room, and the picture gallery. ‘ “And of this place,” thought [Elizabeth], “I might have been mistress!” ’ (272). And through this transformative country-​house tour, Elizabeth does indeed become mistress of the great house—​the fictional tourist entering and fulfilling the fantasy of staying. The experiences of travel literally and literarily create new possibilities with new vision. Elizabeth learns about the real Darcy by partaking in the popularity of the domestic tour. Since 1707, England and Scotland had comprised Great Britain, so Scotland was part of the domestic tour as well. And yet, for the English, it was also exotic and Other, particularly in the later eighteenth century, after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745—​‘the beginning of the end of ancient Scotland’.18 The concerted English attempts to eradicate many of the Scottish traditions had suddenly heightened their appeal. In 1773, James Boswell finally coaxed Johnson into a tour of his native country, and each published an account of the trip—​Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland appeared in 1775, and Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides in 1786. The narratives are as different as the travellers: in this case, we might call Johnson’s the travel narrative, with its detailed and impersonal accounts of geography, climate, religion, education, politics, manners, buildings, and bagpipes, and Boswell’s the proto-​novel, with its deeply personal interest in the conversations with and domestic details of those families they visit. Even their formal structures differ:  Johnson follows a topographical route, organizing his observations by place (a ‘journey’); Boswell moves temporally, recording their travels day by day (a ‘journal’). Johnson, 64 at the time of the tour, begins his narrative by immediately striking out from Edinburgh in the second paragraph as ‘a city too well known to admit description’. Boswell, on the other hand, has a full account of how he orchestrated the whole trip, and ‘exulted in the thought, that I now had him actually in Caledonia’—​with eighteen pages about their time in Edinburgh following (166–​84). Johnson worries over making ‘diminutive observations’ (about, say, the ‘incommodiousness of the Scotch windows’), because they can ‘seem to take away something from the dignity of writing’ (47–​8), while Boswell confesses himself bored by ‘mechanicks, agriculture and such subjects’ when he’d rather have ‘science and wit’ (261). Johnson wants to gather a thick sense of Scotland:  We were now treading that illustrious island [Ikolmkill], which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge, and the blessing of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish, if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. (140–​1) 18 

Peter Levi, ‘Introduction’, in Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. Levi (London: Penguin, 1984), 11.

130

130   CYNTHIA WALL Boswell wants to make a Scotsman out of Johnson, tempting him with a tasty bit of dried fish: ‘I insisted on scottifying his palate; but he was very reluctant. With difficulty I prevailed with him to let a bit of one of them lie in his mouth. He did not like it’ (185). On the other hand, ‘Dr. Johnson ate several plate-​fulls of Scotch broth, with barley and peas in it, and seemed very fond of the dish’ (203), and Johnson quite approved of the old clans—​‘I am quite feudal, sir,’ he asserts to Boswell (who instantly wishes he were head of a clan) (233). The two narratives are profitably read side by side as examples of how two people travelling together can in another sense be on completely different journeys.

Europe and the Grand Tour ‘What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,’ Johnson is reported as saying. ‘Time may be employed to more advantage from nineteen to twenty-​four almost in any way than in travelling.’19 Not everyone felt as Johnson did. (Not even Johnson; revisit the opening epigraph to this essay.) The eighteenth century was the height of the Grand Tour, where young men of family and means travelled to Europe for three years or so, accompanied by a tutor, to learn the languages, customs, and polishes of other Western cultures. In fact, the English term ‘Grand Tour’ came from a French phrase, le grand tour.20 Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield (1694–​1773) famously wrote his son long, frequent, and very particular letters about how to behave and what to learn while abroad, for ‘avoir du monde is, in my opinion, a very just and happy expression for having address, manners, and for knowing how to behave properly in all companies; and it implies very truly, that a man who hath not those accomplishments, is not of the world’.21 Chesterfield does not write a travel narrative, but he does describe in detail how to travel. ‘Our young English travellers’, he notes, ‘generally distinguish themselves by a voluntary privation of all that useful knowledge for which they are sent abroad; and yet, at that age, the most useful knowledge is the most easy to be acquired; conversation being the book, and the best book in which it is contained’ (2: 190). ‘Go into every house’ (2: 211), he advises, and listen to the rhythms of the country; ‘[acquaint] yourself with all those political and constitutional particulars of the kingdom and government’ (2: 190); ‘be minutely attentive to every word and action’ (2: 209); when in Germany, ‘speak nothing but German … call it your favourite language’ (2: 254–​5); and if an Englishman travels, observes, and learns as he should, ‘he is no longer an Englishman … but he is an European; he adopts, respectively, the best manners of every country; and is a Frenchman at Paris, an Italian at Rome, and 19 Boswell, Life of Johnson, 995.

20  See James Buzard, ‘The Grand Tour and After (1660–​1840)’, in Hulme and Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, 39. 21  Charles Strachey (ed.), The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son, 2 vols. (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons and Methuen & Co., 1901), 2: 226.

Travel Literature and the Early Novel    131 Englishman at London’ (2: 263). But most important of all, to truly become a man of power in the world, ‘labour to acquire the great art of pleasing, without which nothing is to be done. Company is, in truth, a constant state of negotiation’ (2: 269). That, according to Chesterfield, is the greatest accomplishment of travel, and in fact his elaboration on this travel advice would serve the novelist as well: ‘Keep your own secret, and get out other people’s. Keep your own temper, and artfully warm other people’s’ (2: 269). Daniel Defoe was himself a dedicated traveller and observer, and in fact often acted as a spy for the English government to promote such delicate matters as the Union with Scotland in 1707. His novelistic characters—​particularly vulnerable women fending for themselves—​quickly and carefully learn the art of pleasing others (as well as keeping their own secrets, and getting out others’) because they well know the extent to which profitable company is a matter of constant negotiation. Roxana takes her own version of the Grand Tour first as the wife of a jeweller and later as the mistress of a European prince. She herself had been born in France but raised in England. Over the course of her story, she acquires, not just money and men, but shall we say a certain je ne sais quoi about handling that money and those men through her European observations and travels. A good portion of the novel essentially becomes travel narrative. When she is ‘widowed’ in France (technically, she still has a first husband, missing and only presumed dead), a German prince ends up taking extremely good care of la Belle veuve de Poictou, as she becomes known. The pair travel to Italy, and Roxana comments that ‘the History of our Journey, and Stay abroad … would almost fill up a Volume of itself ’. She recounts the planning details as well as the touristic trajectory of the journey, from the evening spent in ‘chearful Consultations about the Manner of our Travelling; the Equipage and Figure he shou’d go in; and in what Manner I shou’d go’,22 to negotiating the Alps on a horse litter carried by mules, to their arrival in Venice; ‘We were near two year upon this Grand Tour, as it may be call’d, during most of which, I resided at Rome or at Venice, having only been twice at Florence, and once at Naples: I made some very diverting and useful Observations in all these Places’ (102). Roxana learns Italian, immersing herself in her new country. ‘I began to be so in Love with Italy, especially with Naples and Venice,’ she notes, ‘that I cou’d have been very well satisfied to have sent for [her maid] Amy, and have taken up my Residence there for Life’ (102–​3). Roxana insists she has ‘no-​Mind to write the History of [her] Travels’—​at least, ‘not now’ (103), but two pages later she is still narrating their return from Venice to Turin via Milan, back over the Alps, meeting the coaches between Chambéry and Lyons, and concludes: ‘and so, by easie Journeys, we arriv’d safely at Paris, having been absent about two Years, wanting about eleven Days, as above’ (105). Roxana’s European travel narrative occupies a good quarter of the novel; she would have read Chesterfield’s Letters with delight, and perhaps edited them from her own female perspective. As she was born in France, raised in England, courtesaned in Paris, renowned for her Turkish dance in London, married to a Dutchman, made a countess in

22 

Daniel Defoe, Roxana, ed. John Mullan (Oxford: OUP, 1996), 99.

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132   CYNTHIA WALL Holland—​all the result of her refined art of pleasing—​Roxana is an eighteenth-​century fictional character who demonstrates that a woman, too, can be du monde. And yet the fictional Roxana already had a female Grand Traveller model in the real world. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–​1762) travelled through Europe to Turkey with her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, in 1716, where he was to take up his appointment as ambassador. Lady Mary was largely self-​taught in literature and languages, including Latin; when she arrived in Turkey, she studied Arabic and translated Arabic poetry. Her letters to her friends and family were polished and edited and handed over for publication to a friend just before her death in 1762; they appeared as the Turkish Embassy Letters in 1763, to the horror of her family and the delight of Voltaire, Johnson, Smollett, and Gibbon. The letters’ headings mark a trail from Rotterdam, The Hague, Nijmegen, Cologne, Nuremburg, Ratisbon, Vienna, Prague, Leipzig, Hanover, Peterwardein, Belgrade, Adrianople, and Constantinople. She looks at everything, everywhere, an amateur ethnographer with ‘a very diligent curiosity’,23 and she systematically compares new cultures to her own, quite often in their favour. She comments on the Dutch maids scrubbing their pavements ‘with more application than ours do our bedchambers’ (3). She comments on the visible differences in the ‘free towns’ in Germany and ‘those under the government of absolute princes’—​‘in the first, there appears an air of commerce and plenty … In the other, a sort of shabby finery, a number of dirty people of quality tawdered out, narrow nasty streets out of repair, wretchedly thin of inhabitants, and above half of the common sort asking alms’ (8). She writes to Alexander Pope about the Vienna opera and Arabic poetry; to her sister Lady Mar about extreme fashions; about the necessity of carrying her own bed with her in Bohemia, because ‘the villages [are] so poor and the post houses so miserable, that clean straw and fair water are blessings not always to be found’ (30). One letter to her sister has all the makings of a novel in the story of the Countess of Cosel, ‘kept prisoner in a melancholy castle some leagues from hence’, who had been mistress to the King of Poland until she alienated and angered him with her vanity and avarice (32–​3). She notes that the Turkish ladies (Muslims) ‘have more liberty than we have’ precisely because no woman, of what rank so ever being permitted to go in the streets without two muslins, one that covers her face all but her eyes and another that hides the whole dress of her head, and hangs half way down her back and their shapes are also wholly concealed … You may guess then how effectually this disguises them, that there is no distinguishing the great lady from her slave and ’tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her, and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the streets. This perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of discovery. (71)

23 

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters, ed. Malcolm Jack (London: Virago Press, 1993), 29.

Travel Literature and the Early Novel    133 She then gives the details of how the ‘intrigues’ are accomplished (the ‘gallants’ almost never know who their lady lovers are), and concludes: ‘Thus you see, dear sister, the manners of mankind do not differ so widely as our voyage writers would make us believe’ (72). In the end she finds that Turkish people are not so unpolished as we represent them. ’Tis true their magnificence is of a different taste from ours, and perhaps of a better. I am almost of opinion they have a right notion of life; while they consume it in music, gardens, wine and delicate eating, while we are tormenting our brains with some scheme of politics or studying some science to which we can never attain, or if we do, cannot persuade people to set that value upon it we do ourselves. (142)

Lady Mary learns—​and teaches—​cultural appreciation through careful observation. While a number of Grand Tourists may well have wrapped themselves in English insularity, both real and fictional travellers of the eighteenth century made it a point to observe, record, and learn from difference.

High Seas and Distant Lands When the wealthy aristocrat and botanist Joseph Banks was asked if he would take the Grand Tour, he replied: ‘Every blockhead does that; my Grand Tour shall be one around the whole globe!’24 And he accompanied then Lieutenant James Cook (1728–​79) on his first voyage (1678–​81) on the Endeavour. Cook was to make three voyages of discovery:  the first, to mark the transit of Venus from the recently ‘discovered’ Tahiti (to help determine longitude and to acquire a more accurate sense of the size of the universe) and to hunt for the Great Southern Continent that must be balancing the land masses in the northern hemisphere (Australia and New Zealand); the second (1772–​5), as commander of the Resolution, exploring the Antarctic, returning several times to Tahiti and New Zealand; and the last (1776–​ 80), as captain of the Discovery, to find the Northwest Passage—​a putative sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across the upper reaches of North America. Cook kept careful journals of his travels, constantly revising and rewriting his accounts. Boswell described Cook as ‘a plain, sensible man with an uncommon attention to veracity. My metaphor was that he had a balance in his mind for truth as nice as scales for weighing a guinea.’25 By the end of the eighteenth century, Cook’s accounts became some of the most widely read travel narratives in Europe; readers in general felt as Boswell had after meeting Cook: ‘while I was with 24  Quoted in Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–​1800 (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), 298. 25  John Wain (ed.), The Journals of James Boswell 1762–​1795 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), 296.

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134   CYNTHIA WALL the Captain, I catched the enthusiasm of curiosity and adventure, and felt a strong inclination to go with him on his next voyage.’26 For the most part, Cook was a reliable narrator and a respectful ethnographer, deploring the ravages in the wake of European exploration, protecting the natives as much as he could from his own sailors, and endeavouring in good faith to understand and objectively record the customs and languages of other lands. His journals are remarkable because they supply a narrative of naming and drawing a new and greatly expanded version of the world for his contemporaries—​‘discovery’ and ‘endeavour’ in the act of happening—​bringing the whole world into visibility for the West. His observations are voraciously inclusive, from the food (he tasted a soup of fish, yams, and coconuts ‘and found it so good that I had afterwards fish dress’d the same way and found it very good though my Cook did not come up to theres [sic]’ [465]), to sexual practices (of a young man publicly making love with a young woman: ‘What makes me mention this, is because, it appear’d to be done more from Custom than Lewdness’ [52]), to the difficulty of learning others’ customs (‘as we were never able to form any connections with them, they had not so much as touch’d the things we had left in their hutts on purpose for them to take away’ [130]), to instances of political decorum (‘I was quite charmed … I had no where seen the like, no not even amongst more civilized nations’ [472]), to a remarkable layering of mutual perspectives (‘he balled out “Maeno maeno” [Vile vile] and would not here another word; so that we left him with as great a contempt of our customs as we could possibly have of theirs’ [507]). In a travel narrative, the arc of the narrative is often determined from the outside, by weather or events or the generally unexpected; on a ship, the shoals, the calms, the storms, the culture of the inhabitants, all shape the course and temper of the journey. (Or as William Sherman puts it, the organization of travel-​writing ‘always seemed prone to reproduce the haphazard nature of the travels they described’.27) And in notable passages of Cook’s third journey, the binding image is ice. In August 1778, as Cook took his ships towards the Alaskan shore, north past Cape Lisburne, they encountered a dramatically different landscape:  The Weather was now tolerable clear in every direction, except to the Eastward, where lay a fog bank, which was the reason of our not seeing the land … Some time before Noon we percieved [sic] a brigh[t]‌ness in the Northern horizon like that reflected from ice, commonly called the blink; it was little noticed from a supposition that it was improbable we should meet with ice so soon, and yet the sharpness of the air and Gloomyness of the Weather for two or three days past seemed to indicate some sudden change. At 1 pm the sight of a large field of ice left us in no longer doubt about the cause of the brightness of the Horizon we had observed. At ½ past 2 we tacked close to the edge of it in 22 fathoms Water being then in the latitude of 70° 41´, not being able to stand any fa[r]ther, for the ice was quite impenetrable 26 Boswell, Life of Johnson, 722. 27 

William H. Sherman, ‘Stirrings and Searchings (1500–​1720)’, in Hulme and Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, 30.

Travel Literature and the Early Novel    135 and extend[ed] from wbs to ebn as far as the eye could read … [It] was as compact as a Wall and seemed to be ten or twelve feet high at least, but farther North it appeared much higher, its surface was extremely rugged and here and there were pools of Water. (572–​3)

The description of that landscape was recaptured in art and fiction, as in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Sea of Ice (1823–​4), or in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818): ‘About two o’clock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end.’28 Robert Walton’s narrative, which encloses the story of Frankenstein and his Creature, is itself enclosed in scenes of ice; at the end, Walton writes to his sister: ‘I am surrounded by mountains of ice, which admit of no escape, and threaten every moment to crush my vessel’ (148). Cook had decided: ‘[with] the Wind freshening, a thick fog coming on with much snow, and being fearfull of the ice coming down upon us, I gave up the design I had formed of plying to the Westward … I did not think it consistant [sic] with prudence to make any farther attempts to find a passage this year in any direction so little was the prospect of succeeding’ (577). So Walton, with less grace: ‘It is past; I am returning to England. I have lost my hopes of utility and glory … the ice began to move, and roarings like thunder were heard at a distance, as the islands split and cracked in every direction. We were in the most imminent peril … The ice cracked behind us, and was driven with force towards the north; a breeze sprung from the west, and on the 11th the passage towards the south became perfectly free’ (150). The plots and plans of men, in the real voyages of James Cook and the fictional ones of Robert Walton, are shaped and driven by the nature of their vessels and their routes through the seas. Many novels ‘catched the enthusiasm of curiosity and adventure’ in a voyage, and set significant scenes in the fascinating ‘little Wooden World’ of ships.29 Eliza Haywood’s Idalia finds herself in a jewel-​and tapestry-​laden floating palace when captured by Barbary Corsairs; Defoe’s Moll Flanders makes a tidy little nest for herself and her husband Jemy on their transport voyage to Virginia; Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver spends his most notable sea voyage in a wooden doll house; Gustavus Vassa, or Olaudah Equiano, describes in compelling detail (in his semi-​fictionalized memoir) life aboard a ship, a world so circumscribed and interdependent that a black slave can, through his courage, diplomacy, and ingenuity, become the acknowledged virtual ‘captain’ of that ‘little world’.30 Worlds within worlds; the absolutely bounded world of the ship (from which ‘there was no Possibility of escaping but my immediate Death’)31 ploughed its way over

28 

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 11. Eliza Haywood, Idalia, or, The Unfortunate Mistress (3rd edn., London, 1725), 73. 30  Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, ed. Vincent Carretta (London: Penguin, 1995), 144, 154, 72. 31 Haywood, Idalia, 73. Or, as Johnson said, ‘being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned’ and ‘a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company’ (Boswell, Life of Johnson, 247). 29 

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136   CYNTHIA WALL the seas to discover other worlds as yet unbounded (by Europeans, at any rate); encircled ships circling oceans, sea journeys creating narrative ones.

Conclusion Travel-​writing is an exercise in ethnographic observation, in the ability to recreate a world; the early novel equally shares an interest in closely observed and analysed detail, in the similarities and differences of other cultures, in the remarkableness of the ordinary and the sometimes surprising familiarity of the unknown. Travel-​writing and the early novel overlap—​often deliberately—​in form as well as in content, with journey at the centre literally and literarily.

Select Bibliography Colley, Linda, Captives:  Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–​ 1850 (London:  Jonathan Cape, 2002). Fussell, Paul (ed.), The Norton Book of Travel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987). Ogborn, Miles, and Charles W. J. Withers, ‘Travel, Trade, and Empire: Knowing Other Places, 1660–​1800’, in Cynthia Wall (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). Pennell, C. R. (ed.), Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader (New York: New York UP, 2001). Redford, Bruce, Venice and the Grand Tour (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1996). Salmond, Anne, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (London: Allen Lane, 2003). Thomas, Nicholas, Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (London: Allen Lane, 2003).

Chapter 9

Se cret History, P ol i t i c s , an d the Early Nov e l Rebecca Bullard

Introduction Secret history is a polemical form of historiography that flourished during the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth. One of the earliest critical essays on secret history distinguishes it from other forms of history-​writing on the grounds of its method and subject matter. The orthodox historian, the author asserts, ‘considers almost ever Men in Publick’, whereas the secret historian ‘only examines ’em in private’: Th’ one thinks he has perform’d his duty, when he draws them such as they were in the Army, or in the tumult of Cities, and th’ other endeavours by all means to get open their Closet-​door; th’ one sees them in Ceremony, and th’ other in Conversation; th’ one fixes principally upon their Actions, and th’ other wou’d be a Witness of their inward Life, and assist at the most private hours of their leisure: In a word, the one has barely Command and Authority for Object, and the other makes his Main of what occurs in Secret and Solitude.1

What occurs in secret and solitude is, according to almost all secret histories, sexual and political intrigue of the most opprobrious sort. Secret historians reveal the seamy side of public life, exposing their rulers’ sexual appetites and lust for personal power. They put women centre stage in the political history of nations, suggesting that mistresses and courtesans control both weak male rulers and the countries that they pretend to govern. They suggest that real 1 

Antoine Varillas, Anekdota Eterouiaka. Or, The Secret History of the House of Medicis, trans. Ferrand Spence (London, 1686), Dedication, sig. a4v–​a5r.

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138   REBECCA BULLARD power resides not in the public world of masculine authority to which orthodox history addresses itself, but in the private spaces of the backstairs, inner closet, and bedchamber. Scandalous stories about those in positions of power were designed to entertain readers and sell copies in the eighteenth century as much as they are today, but secret histories also had a more serious political purpose. They attacked what many of them referred to as ‘arbitrary government’—​that is, absolute rule or, in England, the rule of a monarch without reference to Parliament. The first English text to bear the title tag ‘secret history’, The Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian (1674), exposes the sexual and political misdemeanours of the sixth-​ century Byzantine Emperor Justinian, but it was widely interpreted as an attack on the current English monarch, Charles II. In works such as The Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II and K. James II (1690), The Secret History of the Duchess of Portsmouth (1690), and The Royal Mistresses of France, or, The Secret History of the Amours of all the French Kings (1695), polemicists claim that clandestine leagues between England and France, French secret agents (including Charles II’s French mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth), and the political and sexual corruption of the Stuart and Bourbon courts are part of a royal conspiracy against the Protestant religion and English political liberty. Secret history not only exposes these political dangers but also presents itself as a bulwark against them. Arcana imperii or secrets of state to which only the monarch has access underpinned absolute rule. Secret history reveals the monarch’s secrets in an effort to shatter the powerful aura of mystery surrounding the throne. If secret history’s primary aims were political, however, the methods that practitioners of this genre adopted had significant literary implications. Secret history flourished during the period that also witnessed the emergence of the form that we have come to know as the novel. Secret history shares several characteristics with this emerging literary form, including an interest in private scenes of intrigue and sensitivity towards the relationship between fact and fiction. It is important here to note, however, that several of secret history’s key characteristics are rarely found in contemporary novels, and that other, shared, characteristics tend to be much more sophisticated in secret history than in the emergent novel. Secret history’s overt political instrumentalism is an example of the former, while its self-​conscious approach towards plotting the past (the subject of the next section of this essay) falls into the latter category. Analysing the relationship between secret history and the novel illustrates the benefits of reading early novels in the light of contemporary non-​literary or sub-​literary genres like secret history, but it also reveals the dangers of such an approach for understanding the broader literary history of the early eighteenth century. Accounts that focus on the novel’s development sometimes squeeze out or pass over distinctive literary characteristics of other contemporary genres that do not appear in the dominant examples of this period’s prose fiction.

Secret History, Politics, and the Early Novel    139

Revealing Secrets and Replotting the Past Secret history is a revisionist form of historiography. It seeks to provide readers with new information that supplements existing historical narratives in order to replot the past. This revisionist purpose is evident in the very earliest examples of the genre. In the sixth century, Procopius wrote his Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian (a translation of which became the first English text to bear the title ‘Secret History’) to undermine his own History of the Wars, a celebratory account of Roman victories over the Persians, Goths, and Vandals. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several secret historians were explicit about their revisionist agenda. David Jones describes his Secret History of White-​hall as a ‘Supplemental Part, as well for the detecting of past Falsities, as for the perfecting of past Discoveries’ in several recent works of political history.2 In his True Secret History of the Lives and Reigns of All the Kings and Queens of England (1702), the Whig statesman John, Baron Somers, begins his account of each reign with a ‘General History’ so as to call attention to the differences between this and the secret history that he writes. As he puts it in the preface to this work, secret history reveals ‘the Secret Springs and real Causes from whence so many strange and various Effects have proceeded; which oftentimes has [sic] been very different from what has been pretended’.3 Secret history is an iconoclastic form of history-​writing, bent on destroying the delusive stories which, it claims, are fabricated by those in positions of power. Sometimes we can see in secret history what has become known as a ‘Whig’ interpretation of the past—​a depiction of progress out of a superstitious past towards a rational, liberal present.4 Many early secret historians were fervent Whigs in the partisan sense of that word: they defended the Glorious Revolution that brought William III and Mary II to the throne in 1688 as the triumph of Protestantism and constitutional monarchy over the popery and slavery of the Jacobites. The author of The Secret History of the Four Last Monarchs of Great Britain, for instance, promises to bring our Late Monarchs Reigns upon the Stage; and then let all the World judge of the Furberies and Tyranny of those Times, and the Integrity, Sincerity, and Sweetness of Their Present Majesties Reign; since by comparing Them, the most wilfully Blind

2  D[avid] Jones, The Secret History of White-​hall (1697; 2nd edn., London, 1717), p. vi. Because of irregularities in pagination in the first edition, most subsequent references are to the second edition. Where the first edition is used, this is specified. 3  [John Somers], The True Secret History of the Lives and Reigns of all the Kings and Queens of England (London: no publisher, 1702), 1. 4  See Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1931).

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140   REBECCA BULLARD may be convinced, how infinitely Happy we are, under their present Majesties Government, beyond what we were in the late Reign.5

Published in 1691 (and a compilation of two earlier secret histories—​one of the reigns of Charles II and James II, the other of James I and Charles I), this secret history presents itself as a direct product of the Revolution in 1688. Only in these newly enlightened times, the author suggests, does it become possible to reveal the secrets of the murky past. Several secret historians, including John Dunton in Satyr Upon King William; Being the Secret History of His Life and Reign (1703), claim—​rather dubiously—​that a secret history of William and Mary’s reign is impossible, since these upright monarchs had no secrets to hide. In 1714, after the Protestant, Hanoverian monarch George I  had ascended to the British throne, Whig polemicists once more turned to secret history. Their aim was to attack the recently-​fallen Tory ministry of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. Oxford, it was claimed by the new Whig ministry, had attempted to prevent the Hanoverian succession and had negotiated for the return of James II’s son, commonly known as the Pretender, as king. Secret histories on this theme include The Secret History of the Chevalier de St George (1714) (the ‘Chevalier’ is the Pretender), John Oldmixon’s Secret History of Europe (1712–​15), Arcana Gallica; or, the Secret History of France for the Last Century (1714), and William Stoughton’s Secret History of the Late Ministry (1715). These works deliberately evoke the Whig secret histories that had been published in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. According to Whig polemicists, both 1688 and 1714 were revolutions in which a threat of French-​inspired arbitrary government was overturned by the timely arrival of a foreign but Protestant monarch.6 They present secret history as a token of new-​found political freedom: a narrative about the secrets of the past that can, at last, be published with impunity. But if some secret historians write Whiggish accounts of recent political history, others adopt a much more self-​reflexive and sceptical approach towards the relationship between secrecy and narrative. In the preface to his Secret History of White-​hall, David Jones promotes his book by claiming that there is no one Party, or sect of Men in England, much less the Court exempted, but may draw very seasonable Informations, and no less timous Instructions herefrom, seeing they have all of them, in their respective turns, though many quite against

5  The Secret History of the Four Last Monarchs of Great Britain (London: no publisher, 1691), sig. A3r. The unusual word ‘furberies’—​an anglicization of the French fourberie, or ‘deception’—​gestures towards the French source of the Stuart tyranny that was ousted by William III in 1688. See OED, † ‘fourbery’ obs. 6  A Secret History of One Year (London, 1714), 3, asserts that ‘the Circumstances of the Revolution of 1688, and the Turn of Affairs which has now happen’d in Great Britain, since the Death of the late Queen, are founded on such a visible Analogy of Causes and Effects, that they may well bear the same name, viz. THE REVOLUTION’. This secret history, once assigned to Daniel Defoe, is de-​attributed in P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, Defoe De-​Attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist (London and Rio Grande, OH: Hambledon Press, 1990), 66.

Secret History, Politics, and the Early Novel    141 their knowledge, been imposed upon by French Emissaries and made Tools of to serve the Interest of France, to the prejudice of themselves, and of their own Country. (sig. A7v–​A8r, font reversed)

Throughout this secret history, Jones claims that French agents have controlled every event in English politics for over a century—​including even supposed Whig triumphs such as the Revolution in 1688. He reveals that on the eve of the Revolution French agents were ‘extraordinary busy to countermine whatever Advices have been given the King [James II] for taking a timely Precaution to defend himself ’. Readers are informed that ‘there is … in this Case a Wheel within a Wheel, and whatever open Professions of Kindness are shew’d [James II] from [France] by a timous Premonition of his Danger, there is as great Care seriously to thwart all by contrary Counsels’ (318). Jones’s revelations lead to two, connected conclusions: first, that his readers have no more political liberty under William III than they did under James II because of the ongoing, insidious influence of France upon English politics and, second, that it is impossible to write a definitive secret history. To write a narrative based on secrets is also to open up the possibility of future revelations—​smaller wheels within wheels, to extend Jones’s metaphor—​ that undermine existing versions of the past. Sceptical secret history suggests that historical narratives are always contingent, vulnerable to revision and reinterpretation.

Fact and Fiction Over recent decades, much scholarly effort has been invested in situating the novel within contemporary discourses of fact and fiction—​discourses that operated across a number of fields, including natural philosophy or experimental science, religion, politics, and law as well as literature. Secret history is involved in these debates. Secrets are hard to verify because they are, by definition, known to only a tiny number of people. The revelations made in secret history thus fall far short of an empirically desirable state of affairs, in which multiple witnesses are able to affirm the veracity of any claim.7 Indeed, as revelation begets revelation, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell fact from fiction. The fecundity or generative potential of secret history is evident in the stories that dominated the political milieu in which secret history was published. Throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, revelations about Catholic plots against the Protestant religion and the power of Parliament were routinely followed by counter-​ accusations that these so-​called plots were nothing more than Nonconformist and republican fictions designed to overthrow the Established Church and the monarchy. Sometimes, accusations and counter-​accusations came from the same source. One example is Matthew Fuller, who published a series of pamphlets during the 1690s and 1700s 7 

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-​Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), 25.

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142   REBECCA BULLARD about the ‘warming-​pan scandal’—​the accusation that in 1688 Mary of Modena, James II’s Queen, had fabricated the birth of a male heir by secretly conveying a baby into the birthing chamber in a warming pan. Fuller first of all claimed to provide new evidence to prove the alleged Catholic plot, subsequently asserted that he had been in the pay of Presbyterians when he made those accusations, and then recanted this counter-​accusation to reaffirm his original position. Secret history is part of a political culture in which the ‘discovery’ of previously concealed facts bred accusations about the invention of fiction. Many of secret history’s detractors accused it of being fiction—​a set of propagandist lies designed to defame the great and the good. Secret historians make two different sorts of response to such accusations. Sometimes they affirm the veracity of their narratives, drawing on a range of proofs to reassure their readers that their accounts are genuine. Somers, for instance, asserts his elevated social status, his access to many private manuscripts, and his involvement in state affairs as vouchers for the reliability of his narrative. He presents himself as a statesman-​historian like the Roman historian Tacitus, closing the gap between secret history and the prestigious neoclassical genre of ‘perfect’ history (sig. A3v). Other secret historians, lacking Somers’s credentials, ask their readers to compare their accounts with other printed materials or even with their own experience of recent political events.8 Secret history is thus a useful tool for understanding the range of devices that contemporaries used to justify the idea that their narratives are a ‘true history of fact’: a phrase often used by contemporary novelists. Instead of attempting to affirm the truth of their accounts, however, some secret historians actually embrace the precarious position that their narratives occupy on the boundaries of true history and fiction. Compounding the intrinsically unreliable nature of narratives based on secrets, many secret historians draw attention to the dubious ethical status of those who deal in secret intelligence. The revelation of secrets always involves a betrayal of trust and, therefore, a degree of deception. Some secret historians publicize the suspect sources of their intelligence: cast-​off mistresses and courtiers or spies, for instance.9 In the preface to A Secret History of White-​hall, which is made up of the letters of a spy at the French court, David Jones asserts that ‘it’s no hard matter to imagine what Qualifications were necessary to recommend our Author to the Imployment afore noted, and how far his Out-​side must differ from his In-​side during his aboad there’ (p. iv). Far from hiding the untrustworthy character of his informant, Jones makes sure that his readers consider his track record of dissimulation and deceit. The promise to enlighten readers by revealing secrets tends instead to encourage profound scepticism towards any narrative of past events that claims to be based on previously undiscovered intelligence. 8 

e.g., Jones, Secret History of White-​hall, pp. v–​vi; Secret History of … K. Charles II and K. James II, sig. A2v. 9  For instance, The Amours of Messalina, Late Queen of Albion (1689) claims to derive from the information of ‘a Woman of Quality, sometime a Confidant of Messalina late Queen of Albion [Mary of Modena], and one that has been very familiar with her in her most secret Intrigues; but upon some Disgust received since their Retirement to the Gothish Court [Saint-​Germain-​en-​Laye] … has thereupon left the Court’ ([Gregorio Leti], The Amours of Messalina [London, 1689], part 1, 3–4).

Secret History, Politics, and the Early Novel    143

Daniel Defoe, Secret Historian The most sophisticated secret historian of the early eighteenth century exploits precisely this scepticism towards the possibility of writing a history of secret events. In 1714 and 1715 Daniel Defoe published The Secret History of the White-​Staff. In the three separate pamphlets that make up this secret history, Defoe defends his former patron, Oxford, against the accusation that he had, while in power, negotiated for the return of the Pretender. This accusation led to Oxford’s impeachment on charges of treason and, as we have already seen, Whig polemicists seized the opportunity to publish secret histories of this notoriously secretive minister. Defoe ingeniously uses Oxford’s reputation for secrecy—​the very trait that his political opponents seized on as evidence of his guilt—​to exculpate him. The Secret History of the White-​Staff reveals that Oxford only appeared to negotiate with Jacobites: that these negotiations were, in fact, a sham. According to Defoe, the false promises that Oxford made to the Jacobites allowed him to bring this potentially dangerous group under his control.10 Defoe thus exploits the idea that secrets operate like wheels within wheels (a metaphor that he uses on occasion) to beat Whig secret historians at their own game.11 But Defoe’s interest in the sceptical potential of secret history extends beyond his particular defence of Oxford. He concludes the third and final part of his secret history with the assertion that there remain still more secrets to reveal about the last four years—​a statement that sounds suspiciously like a marketing ploy for future, printed revelations. Between the publication of parts two and three of his secret history, however, Defoe did bring out a revelatory text that, in its purpose, is entirely at odds with his secret history of Oxford’s ministry. A Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff, Purse and Mitre (1715), which claims to have been written by ‘A Person of Honour’, asserts that both The Secret History of the White-​Staff and the antagonistic responses to it had been written to the order of booksellers. As Defoe puts it, the booksellers and their hacks caused ‘the deceiv’d People to Dance in the Circles of their drawing, while these have enjoy’d the Sport of their own Witch-​craft’: the political furore in print had no higher purpose than increasing book sales.12 In this strange intervention in the political flyting instigated by Oxford’s impeachment, Defoe pursues the method of secret history to a sceptical extreme, undermining both his own and his opponents’ arguments (respectively, for and against Oxford) by highlighting the instability of any narrative grounded on secrets. 10 

[Daniel Defoe], The Secret History of the White-​Staff (London, 1714), 22. Predictably, Whig polemicists responded in typical contemporary fashion, with vituperative printed refutations of Defoe’s arguments. See, for instance, John Oldmixon, A Detection of the Sophistry and Falsities of the Pamphlet, Entitul’d the Secret History of the White-​Staff (London: J. Roberts, 1714). Defoe was also attacked by Tory polemicists: Considerations on the Secret History of the White-​Staff (London, 1714); A History of the Mitre and Purse (London, 1714); and [William Pittis], Queen Anne Vindicated from the Base Aspersions of Some Late Pamphlets (London: John Baker, 1715). 12  [Daniel Defoe], The Secret History of the Secret History of the White-​Staff, Purse and Mitre (London: S. Keimar, 1715), 8. 11 

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144   REBECCA BULLARD In the end, it seems, Defoe’s interest in the narratological implications of claiming to reveal secrets overtakes even his desire to defend his former patron.13

Daniel Defoe, Novelist In his late novel, Roxana (1724), Defoe returns to his earlier preoccupation with the relationship between secrecy and narrative. Towards the end of Roxana, the first-​person, eponymous narrator twice uses the phrase ‘secret history’. Both instances occur shortly after Roxana becomes estranged from Amy, the servant who has accompanied her through her various guises, managing both amatory and financial affairs for her mistress. Having at last achieved substantial wealth and social prestige, Roxana remarks with concern that Amy ‘knew all the Secret History of my Life; had been in all the Intriegues of it, and been a Party in both Evil and Good’, and that ‘it must be only her steddy Kindness to me, and an excess of Generous Friendship for me, that shou’d keep her from ill-​using me in return for it; which ill-​using me was enough in her Power, and might be my utter Undoing’.14 In Amy’s absence, Roxana puts her friend the Quaker in charge of her financial affairs, but she is keen to inform her reader that ‘you must not understand me as if I let my Friend the Quaker into any Part of the Secret History of my former Life’, since ‘it was always a Maxim with me, That Secrets shou’d never be open’d, without evident Utility’ (326). When Roxana refers to the ‘secret history’ of her life she seems at first to be alluding in a general way to titillating tales of sexual intrigue in high places—​her affairs with noblemen and princes, for instance. By understanding Defoe’s plot-​based conception of the relationship between secrecy and power, however, we are able to appreciate the sophistication with which he puts secret history’s chief convention to work in his final novel. In Roxana, Defoe articulates the same relationship between secrets, plots, and power that is to be found in The Secret History of the White-​Staff, in which Oxford is an exemplar of the correct management of secrets: although he employs many secret agents (among them, Defoe himself), Oxford never lets any of these spies know the full nature of the task on which they are employed, and he never gives any assignment to one single agent, preferring to spread business among a number of informers.15 The principles underlying these strategies have their foundation in Defoe’s narratological conception of secrecy. Defoe suggests that secrets are narratives, created 13  For an alternative interpretation of this peculiar secret history, see Geoffrey Sill, Defoe and the Idea of Fiction, 1713–​1719 (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1983), 87–​93. 14  Daniel Defoe, Roxana, ed. John Mullan (Oxford: OUP, 1996), 317. 15  For a description of Oxford’s methods in which both of these strategies are articulated, see [Daniel Defoe?], Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr Mesnager (London, 1718), 49: ‘his Discourse is always reserved, communicating nothing, and allowing none to know the whole Event of what they are Employed to do; his Excess of caution makes Business hang on his Hands, and his Dispatches were thereby always both slow and imperfect; and it is said, he scarce ever sent any Person abroad, though on Matters of the greatest Importance, but that he left some of their Business to be sent after them’.

Secret History, Politics, and the Early Novel    145 when the events of the past are rearranged and/​or supplemented with fictional interpolations in order to conceal the truth. And if narrative is central to the creation of secrets then it is also a hermeneutic device that enables their exposure, since secrets can only be kept hidden by preventing those who would discover them from replotting a true account of the past. By spreading intelligence between agents and keeping each of them under-​informed, Oxford prevents any of them from creating a full narrative of his affairs. Roxana, on the other hand, repeatedly stresses Amy’s presence at every stage in her story. Amy’s fidelity creates two different problems for Roxana. First, Amy becomes the clue that Roxana’s estranged daughter, Susan, traces to work out the identity of her mother. Susan accidentally discovers that Amy is providing for her financially. Aware that her mother disappeared into France having abandoned her as a child, and also that Amy and Roxana had been in France together, Susan deduces that Roxana is the woman who abandoned her as a child. Susan pursues Roxana until Amy takes a unilateral decision to murder her. Susan, therefore, is not Roxana’s only problem by the end of this novel. The fact that Amy remains constantly at Roxana’s side also gives her more insight into Roxana’s business than Oxford would ever have allowed one of his agents. Amy has the capacity to create narrative ligatures between the events of Roxana’s life, which means both that she can exercise control over Roxana’s life in the present and potentially publicize Roxana’s secrets in the future. The dark ending of Roxana is a direct result of Roxana’s mismanagement of her secrets. The famous final sentence of this novel informs the reader that ‘the Blast of Heaven seem’d to follow the Injury done the poor Girl, by us both; and I was brought so low again, that my Repentance seem’d to be only the Consequence of my Misery, as my Misery was of my Crime’ (330). This disturbing conclusion led many eighteenth-​century editors to revise the novel’s ending, turning Roxana into a prosperous, Christian penitent on the model of Defoe’s earlier novel, Moll Flanders (1722), and the tradition of spiritual autobiography to which both novels clearly owe debts.16 The differences between the conclusions of Defoe’s two female-​centred novels have been attributed to religious differences between their protagonists: Roxana’s hollow repentance (‘only the Consequence of my Misery’) contrasts with Moll’s (at least superficially) sincere conversion. In fact, the differences between these two endings can also be explained by reference to the central characters’ understanding of the relationship between secrecy, narrative, and power. Moll Flanders is an adept controller of secrets in the mould of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. Instead of having a single confidante who follows her through the novel, Moll rarely shares her secrets with others. Where she does confess secrets—​for instance to her friend known as the Governess and the chaplain at Newgate prison—​she always withholds a certain amount of information about her past, as Oxford does when managing his agents in The Secret History of the White-​Staff. It is hard to escape the conclusion that, while soteriology might play a part in determining the different conclusions of Moll

16 

See Defoe, Roxana, ed. Mullan, 331–​40, for the textual history.

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146   REBECCA BULLARD Flanders and Roxana, the degree to which the central characters grasp the relationship between secrecy and narrative is also significant. The plots of these novels are shaped by human actions as well as (perhaps more than) providence. Few contemporary commentators would have drawn direct connections between secret history and spiritual autobiography. Moll Flanders and Roxana reveal that both genres have space to resonate in the capacious form of the novel.

Jonathan Swift Like Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift also responds to secret history’s scepticism, which becomes part of his arsenal of unsettling, satirical devices. In his journey to the island of Glubbdubdrib in Part Three of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Gulliver comments directly upon the genre of secret history. In the section called ‘Antient and Modern History corrected’ (a title that immediately evokes the revisionism of secret history) Gulliver meets ghosts who offer revelations about the events of history without the intervention of historians. He informs his readers that:  Here I  discovered the Roguery and Ignorance of those who pretend to write Anecdotes, or secret History; who send so many Kings to their Graves with a cup of Poison; will repeat the Discourse between a Prince and a chief Minister, where no Witness was by; unlock the Thoughts and Cabinets of Embassadors and Secretaries of State; and have the perpetual Misfortune to be mistaken.17

Gulliver’s reference to the secret historian’s ‘mistakes’ is, of course, ironic: the convenient absence of witnesses is, itself, a fictional cover for the secret historian’s invented accusations. In spite of his vehement denunciation of secret historians, however, Gulliver proceeds in his very next sentence to validate—​at least in some degree—​their methods:  ‘Here I discovered the true Causes of many great Events that have surprized the World: How a Whore can govern the Back-​stairs, the Back-​stairs a Council, and the Council a Senate’ (186). Although he doesn’t name names and thus turn secret historian himself, Gulliver nonetheless affirms the idea that the physical appetites of leaders, rather than their political strategy, are what drive major historical change. Even the rhetorical devices that Swift deploys evoke secret history. The climactic structure of Swift’s clauses (‘Back-​stairs … Back-​stairs … Council … Council’) figures the interlocking wheels within wheels of secret history. And the fact that Gulliver begins both the sentence denouncing secret history and the one that resembles it with the revelatory expression ‘Here I discovered’, highlights the tenuous foundations of his denigration of secret historians. The phrasing of this 17 

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins (rev. edn., Oxford: OUP, 2005), 186.

Secret History, Politics, and the Early Novel    147 sentence differs subtly, but significantly, between the first edition (published in 1726) and the substantially revised version of 1735, which serves as copy text for all modern, critical editions. In 1726, Swift has Gulliver discover the ‘secret Causes’ rather than the ‘true Causes of many great Events’.18 Although the 1735 alteration makes Gulliver sound less obviously like a secret historian, it hardly eliminates the inconsistencies in Gulliver’s attitude towards the revelation of secrets. The claim to speak with ghosts is, after all, not likely to win him more credit with sceptical readers than he gives to the accusations of secret historians. Gulliver attacks the conclusions of secret historians but not their methods—​ and in doing so he undermines the foundations of his own assertions. It is possible to interpret Gulliver’s attitude towards secret history in a number of different ways. In readings that focus on Lemuel Gulliver as first-​person narrator (perhaps seeking to situate Gulliver’s Travels within the context of other early novels that present their readers with particularly ‘rounded’ or realistic protagonists), Gulliver’s inconsistencies might provide evidence of his failing sense of self-​awareness—​a failure that, according to this interpretation, culminates in his devotion to the Houyhnhnms in Part Four. There has been critical resistance in recent years towards such a character-​ based analysis of Gulliver’s Travels on the grounds that it seeks to turn Swift’s generically awkward fiction into a novel in procrustean fashion.19 I suspect that these critical accounts themselves oversimplify the nature of the early novel. As the current volume demonstrates, early novels are defined not just by the consistency or roundedness of their central characters—​in fact, this is a rather rare element of just a few early eighteenth-​century prose fictions—​but by a range of characteristics including a sensitive (often playful) approach towards questions of fact and fiction, a self-​conscious exploration of human psychology and/​or moral and social relations, and the construction of a sophisticated, often vexing or perplexing, relationship between an implied reader and a narrator. Gulliver’s statements on secret history exhibit all three of these characteristics and might, therefore, be considered novelistic in a more complex sense than the one often evoked in discussions of Gulliver’s Travels and the early novel. A biographical reading of Swift’s career might provide another method of interpreting Gulliver’s conflicting statements about secret history. Between 1710 and 1714 Swift enjoyed a privileged position as friend and, to some degree, confidant of senior government figures including Oxford himself—​a position that even allowed him to publish the secrets of the Whig opposition in works such as The Conduct of the Allies (1711).20 Swift returned to Ireland following Oxford’s fall from power and was never again a political insider. In the years immediately before and after this event, he made several attempts to 18 

Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (London, 1726), 111. The introductions to both of the most recent, scholarly, student editions share this concern to distance Gulliver’s Travels from the tradition of the novel. See Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Rawson and Higgins, pp. xxii–​xxiii; and Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Robert DeMaria (London: Penguin, 2001), p. ix. 20  Swift asserts that ‘the true Spring or Motive’ of the War of Spanish Succession which had raged since 1702 ‘was the aggrandizing a particular Family’—​that is, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough and the Earl of Godolphin gained in political and financial terms from the ongoing war (The Conduct of the Allies [London, 1711], 60). 19 

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148   REBECCA BULLARD write a history of Oxford’s ministry but none was ever published. At the heart of several of these narratives are character sketches of Oxford which—​like the secret histories written by the Whigs and by Defoe—​emphasize this minister’s secretive character. Swift may have felt uncomfortable writing a historical narrative that, because of Oxford’s notorious secrecy, necessarily resembled secret history: a disreputable genre that Oxford’s political enemies had used against him. It is also possible that Oxford’s secrecy led to the withdrawal of materials without which Swift knew that his account would remain incomplete.21 Swift’s deep interest in secrecy seems to have made him feel very profoundly the difficulty of determining whether one is really ‘in’ a secret (to use a common eighteenth-​ century idiom) or whether one is a dupe of those who are keeping the real secrets to themselves.22 Gulliver’s inconsistent attitude towards secret history seems to reflect Swift’s own hamstrung position as a would-​be historian of a highly secretive politician. A third way of approaching Gulliver’s views on secret history—​perhaps the most useful for readers of Gulliver’s Travels—​is as part of Swift’s deliberately unsettling satirical strategy.23 Like secret history, satire provides an alternative way of viewing affairs that grates against received or orthodox opinion. But in relation to secret history (as is often the case in Swift) the precise object of satire is difficult to determine. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift satirizes both secret history and his own critique of this genre, yet his account of Lilliput in Part One reads something like a secret history. In Lilliput we find allusions to key figures and events in recent British political history (including Charles I and George I), stories about corrupt ministers ripe for impeachment, and conspiracies and plots against virtuous patriots. But it is impossible to make these allusions into a roman à clef (or allegorical ‘key’ novel) of the kind written by Swift’s contemporary, Delarivier Manley. Even as it glances towards recent British history, the story of Gulliver refuses to become anything other than the story of Gulliver. At one and the same time, then, Swift condemns secret history and suggests that it is the only true sort of political history; he refuses to publish secret history and publishes a satirical travel narrative that looks very like (but is not) secret history. Ultimately, he leaves his readers—​like Gulliver—​rudderless in a storm, steered off course by sceptical, satirical forces that are similar to those that we find in secret history itself.

Delarivier Manley Scepticism is not, however, the only possible response to the more implausible of secret history’s claims to reveal secrets. Some secret historians claim to tell secrets not in order 21 

See Harold Williams, ‘Jonathan Swift and the Four Last Years of the Queen’, The Library, 4th ser., 16/​ 1 (1935–​6), 61–​90. 22  Swift was, in fact, excluded from explicit knowledge of Oxford and Bolingbroke’s negotiations with the Pretender, a point discussed in Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1962–​83), 3: 25. 23  On Swift, satire, and secret history see Melinda Alliker Rabb, ‘The Secret Memoirs of Lemuel Gulliver: Satire, Secrecy, and Swift’, ELH 73/​2 (2006), 325–​54.

Secret History, Politics, and the Early Novel    149 to convince their readers of the truth of their narratives, but to elicit a response that we might call partisan complicity. This response proves particularly helpful in reading the work of Delarivier Manley who is, perhaps, the early eighteenth century’s most celebrated secret historian. Unlike Gulliver’s Travels, The New Atalantis is an allegorical narrative that clearly refers to particular individuals and events of the present and recent past. Here, Astrea (the Goddess of Justice) and Virtue are led on a tour of the vices and indiscretions that take place on the island of Atalantis—​a thinly disguised version of Britain—​by a figure named Lady Intelligence. Intelligence’s name alludes not to her brainpower but rather to the secretive world of spies and intelligencers that, as we have already seen, populate much secret history of the early eighteenth century. But the allegorical nature of Manley’s text creates an ambiguity about its status as secret history: even as it purports to reveal secrets it also creates them by covering up with fictional, romance-​style names the real identities of the individuals whom Manley satirizes. Immediately, then, there is a difference between this secret history and those of Manley’s Whig predecessors. The authors of the earlier Whig texts aim not only to expose the secrets of those in power but also to alert their readers to their previous ignorance about these secrets. Readers are to be shocked by the author’s superior intelligence. In Manley’s texts, however, the use of allegorical names requires the reader to work to construct the text’s meaning with the author.24 The reader becomes complicit in the act of discovery by uncovering two secrets: the author’s references and the secrets that those references reveal. The published Key to Atalantis (1709)—​a two-​page key that deciphers the identities of many of the characters in Manley’s text—​reinforces the requirement that the reader play an active part in decoding the text. Some of the characters to whom the key refers (for instance, the Duchess of Marlborough or the Earl of Portland) were celebrated public figures. However, others—​such as Cornelius Overkirk, Mrs. Perishall, or ‘Lee Warner, Esq.; of Norfolk’—​are likely to have been obscure in their own day. In order to understand Manley’s stories about these characters, readers would have needed already to be well versed in contemporary political gossip, either through conversation or correspondence with politically informed circles or through wide reading in the contemporary political press. Manley works not so much to reveal as to reinforce existing Tory ideas about their Whig opponents. The New Atalantis exists within a network of partisan narratives—​oral, written, and printed—​which position their readers as already ‘in the secrets’ of their political opponents. A second device that Manley uses to cultivate a sense of complicity with her readers is the use of familiar stories in secret history. In her autobiography, The Adventures of Rivella (1714), Manley asserts that in her scandal fictions, The New Atalantis and 24 

Some secret histories do use allegorical names, but these are rarely so obscure that they require the use of a key to decipher them. The Secret History of the Duchess of Portsmouth, for instance, represents Charles II as the Prince of the Isles and Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, as Francelia, while The Secret History of Arlus and Odolphus (London, 1710) depicts Robert Harley (future Earl of Oxford) as Arlus and the Earl of Godolphin as Odolphus.

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150   REBECCA BULLARD Memoirs of Europe, ‘she did but take up old Stories that all the World had long since reported’.25 It is impossible to gauge with any degree of accuracy whether Manley’s assertions are true or to know how many of her revelations would already have been known to her readers. Nonetheless, many of the allegations that Manley makes against public figures were commonplace political gossip during the first decade of the eighteenth century.26 Moreover, a great deal of the action of individual stories is set during the reigns of Charles II, William III, and the beginning of Queen Anne’s reign in 1702: hardly up-​to-​ date for a political tract published in 1709. One might attribute Manley’s publications of old stories as a response to legal threats—​an attempt to avoid committing seditious libel. But Manley clearly did attack both the reigning monarch and her ministers at a number of points in her secret history, so we should, I think, look elsewhere for an explanation of the deliberate air of belatedness that she cultivates throughout The New Atalantis. We find that explanation in her clear desire to make her readers complicit in the discovery of secrets. Manley tells her readers, as it were, what they already know. Again, then, she makes a display of intimacy with her Tory readers that is a deliberate reconfiguration of Whig secret historians’ aggressive determination to enlighten those who read their texts. Manley was not the only secret historian to elicit partisan complicity from her readers. This device is also a feature of some contemporary Whig secret histories. John Dunton, a fervent Whig polemicist, uses it in his secret histories, which attack the Stuart kings and the Oxford ministry. The ‘revelations’ that he makes in these texts can hardly have been mistaken for genuine secrets. He affirms, for instance, that James II and Charles II ‘abjur’d the Reformed Religion, (which tho a great Secret hitherto, I positively affirm to be Matter of Fact) and became Reconciled to the Church of Rome’; that they resolved to destroy the Church of England, ‘(which tho’ a surprizing Secret, yet I assert is a Real Truth)’; that the fire of London in 1666 was a Catholic plot, ‘(which Secret I receiv’d from a Person of undoubted Credit, and dare affirm it for Truth)’; and that Charles II refused to exclude his brother from the line of succession, ‘not out of Love to his Person, but Affection to Popery (a Secret which has hitherto lain conceal’d) which he knew that Gentleman would introduce and establish’.27 Dunton’s use of parentheses mimics the ostentation with which he reveals his secrets in something of the manner of a stage whisper, but all of these accusations had been mainstays of Whig propaganda, including secret history, for decades. Indeed, his hyperbolic rhetoric of disclosure serves only to flaunt the mismatch between his promises and the kind of information his texts actually contain. But for Dunton, it is the claim to reveal secrets, rather than the actual contents of his text, that makes him an heir to the secret historians of the 1690s. In Dunton’s

25 

Delarivier Manley, The Adventures of Rivella (London, 1714), 110. On the belatedness of many of the stories that Manley retells, see Rebecca Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–​1725: Secret History Narratives (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 90–​3 and Rachel Carnell, A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 179. 27  John Dunton, The Hanover-​Spy: Or, The Secret History of St James’s (London: Printed for the author, n.d. [1718]), 25–​7. 26 

Secret History, Politics, and the Early Novel    151 estimation, the more ostentatious and absurd this claim, the more overt is his opposition to popery and arbitrary government. Indeed, one ‘secret’ of texts like Manley’s and Dunton’s is the frequently fictional status of their claims to reveal secrets.

Conclusion Secret history flourished in the peculiar cultural and political conditions of the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first of the eighteenth. In this era of partisan conflict, accusations of plots, counter-​plots, and conspiracies formed the unstable foundations of each party’s version of the past. Secret history is part of the robust and vituperative print culture that fuelled and was shaped by this party rage, but its literary characteristics clearly appealed to some of the early eighteenth century’s most brilliant prose writers, among them Defoe, Swift, and Manley. It is, I think, not a coincidence that all three of these writers had close associations with Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. It was in seeking to revise Whig accounts of the past—​whether in the run-​up to Oxford’s ministry (in Manley’s case) or after his fall from power (in the case of Defoe and Swift)—​that these writers came to engage closely with secret history’s conventions. Instead of simply writing pro-​Oxford or Tory rebuttals of secret history’s accusations, Manley, Defoe, and Swift look to secret history’s methodological underpinnings: its claims to enlighten its readers with shocking new revelations, its revisionism, and its play with categories of fact and fiction. As we have seen, each writer puts secret history’s conventions to very different uses, but their complex engagement with this polemical form of historiography brings secret history a little closer to the form that we now call the early novel. The Whig ascendancy that began after the fall of Oxford and continued for most of the eighteenth century put paid to the politically combative environment in which secret history flourished. While this form did not disappear altogether, its characteristics altered in response to changing political circumstances and literary tastes. The bedchamber intrigues of private citizens replaced those of monarchs and ministers.28 So, for instance, most of the ‘secret histories’ by the prolific writer Eliza Haywood during the 1720s are not overt political interventions in the manner of earlier secret histories.29 Secret history’s female-​centred plots, its interest in what goes on behind closed doors, and its self-​conscious approach towards the concept of fiction may have helped foster these characteristics in the mid-​eighteenth-​century novel, but the legacy is not a

28 

This is the process described and analysed by Michael McKeon in Part Three of The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005). 29 Even Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1725) and The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1727)—​the romans à clef for which Alexander Pope attacked Haywood in The Dunciad (1728)—​are relatively ineffective as opposition polemics. The former brings private citizens much more sharply into focus than ministers, while the latter actually creates a rather complimentary love-​story around the unglamorous new monarch, George II.

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152   REBECCA BULLARD direct one. The complexities of the novel are, generally speaking, not the same as those of secret history. Secret history’s self-​conscious approach towards the political, narratological, and veridical implications of claiming to reveal secret intelligence reveal a sophistication with which ephemeral forms of literature are rarely credited. If we read minor genres like secret history only in relation to literary survivors like the novel, we risk passing over or flattening out some of the most peculiar and interesting features of eighteenth-​century literary history.

Select Bibliography Bannet, Eve Tabor ‘ “Secret History”: Or, Talebaring Inside and Outside the Secretorie’, Huntington Library Quarterly 68/​1–​2 (2005), 375–​96. Bullard, Rebecca, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–​ 1725:  Secret History Narratives (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009). Knights, Mark, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2005). Knights, Mark, ‘The Tory Interpretation of History in the Rage of Parties’, Huntington Library Quarterly 68/​1–​2 (2005), 353–​73. Loveman, Kate, Reading Fictions, 1660–​1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). McKeon, Michael, The Secret History of Domesticity:  Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005). Mayer, Robert, History and the Early English Novel:  Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). Parsons, Nicola, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-​Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Patterson, Annabel, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). Rabb, Melinda Alliker, Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650–​ 1750 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Early ‘Novels’ and Novelists

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Chapter 10

Restoration Fi c t i on Thomas Keymer

In Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, written in 1722 but set during the great London epidemic of 1665, Defoe’s eyewitness narrator recalls one among many competing attempts to explain the disease:  I have heard, it was the opinion of others, that it might be distinguish’d by the Party’s breathing upon a piece of Glass, where the Breath condensing, there might living Creatures be seen by a Microscope of strange monstrous and frightful Shapes, such as Dragons, Snakes, Serpents, and Devils, horrible to behold: But this I very much question the Truth of, and we had no Microscopes at that Time, as I remember, to make the Experiment with.1

It is a characteristic moment of indeterminacy in Defoe, giving with one hand, taking back with the other. Fleetingly, the fearful, baffling predicament of the city seems to become comprehensible through the agency of empirical science, albeit with an accompanying residue of ancient superstition (dragons) or religious dread (devils). Yet no sooner is rational, modern explanation offered than it evaporates as just another false item of traumatized collective memory: a speculative, anachronistic projection of eighteenth-​century diagnostic apparatus on to the terrifyingly limited resources of the seventeenth century. Ways of seeing and understanding now taken for granted by Defoe and his readers were unavailable, or so it would seem, to his characters in another age.2

1 

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa, introd. David Roberts (Oxford: OUP, 1990), 203. 2  A further paradox, as Defoe may or may not have known, is that there were early microscopes in plague-​year London, though micro-​organisms of the kind evoked in this passage were not reported until the 1670s. Robert Hooke popularized his pioneering microscopy experiments in Micrographia (1665), and devices were already available to curious consumers such as Samuel Pepys, who purchased one in 1664, though without much success in making it work (Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution [London: Little, Brown, 1999], 42–​50).

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156   THOMAS KEYMER Does Defoe’s sense of the gulf separating the 1720s, when his novels were written, from the Restoration period,3 in which several are set, extend from the technology of microscope optics to the technology of narrative representation? Things might be seen and shown now, his implication is, that in the absence of more recent enabling mechanisms were simply invisible then; might the same be true of the literary description of things? If people ‘had no Microscopes at that Time … to make the Experiment with’, was it also the case that they had no novels to render experience with—​that the novel genre, as is often supposed, had not yet come into being? Fifty years ago, the standard answer to that question would have been straightforward: the novel is a modern, post-​1700 phenomenon, and earlier forms of fiction were something else (typically, romance), lacking the mimetic power we associate with novels. The answer has grown in nuance over recent decades, and it has been forcefully argued that the techniques of realism characteristic of eighteenth-​century narrative owed much to seventeenth-​century innovations, including the premium newly placed on rigorous observation and literal description in Restoration empirical science. As Michael McKeon has shown, the natural philosophers of the Royal Society in the 1660s disparaged less systematic precursors by analogy with the fanciful writers of heroic romance, and their prescriptions for transparent prose style and functional voyage narrative herald the rhetorical and representational emphases used by later novelists to display their commitment to the real. For Cynthia Wall, the close, exhaustive attentiveness to the physicality of things promoted by scientists such as Robert Hooke, the first great popularizer of analytic microscopy, created a new appreciation for observed and recorded detail that influenced novels and also (in its effects of microscopic and telescopic zoom) satires such as Gulliver’s Travels. Other scholars have looked to popular thought and everyday print towards the end of the seventeenth century—​J. Paul Hunter identifies the exuberant, proliferating journalism of the 1690s, with its restless curiosity and self-​conscious itch for newness and singularity—​‘as contributors to the social and intellectual world in which the novel emerged’.4 Yet to trace key features of the eighteenth-​century novel to cultural and discursive developments of the Restoration is not to say that these features were also already present in Restoration fiction. Individual works by the Puritan allegorist John Bunyan or the hyperactive journalist John Dunton might be identified as proto-​novelistic in important ways, but few deny that something categorically different takes shape after 1700. 3 

Normally understood as the period between 1660, when the Stuart dynasty was restored to the throne in the person of Charles II, and 1688, when his brother James II was displaced in the ‘Glorious Revolution’, but often used in practice as shorthand for 1660–​1700. Scepticism has recently been expressed about the usefulness of political dates for literary history (see n. 20), and for the purposes of this essay coverage extends to 1695, when the licensing system that had regulated the press since 1662 (with a notable intermission of 1679–​85) was allowed to lapse. 4  Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–​1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), 68–​73, 100–​28; Cynthia Sundberg Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006), 70–​95; J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​Century Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), 5, see also 167–​94.

Restoration Fiction   157 Textbook accounts of the rise of the novel—​in Ian Watt’s celebrated, if also contested, phrase—​continue to emphasize a generic watershed in the eighteenth century, though locating its decisive point at different moments of technical innovation or commercial and reputational breakthrough. Among the most popular candidates are 1719, with the more or less simultaneous appearance of compelling alternative templates for fiction in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Haywood’s Love in Excess; 1740–​1, when the controversy surrounding Richardson’s Pamela set off a creative decas mirabilis that would culminate with Clarissa (1747–​8) and Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749); less specifically, the 1780s, in which various statistical and status indicators (an enduring quantitative uplift in the production of novels, canonizing initiatives such as Harrison’s Novelist’s Magazine, the prestige arising from serious attention by literary historians) combine to mark the institutionalization of the genre. The author of one recent survey acknowledges that to begin a history of the novel in 1700 is an arbitrary convenience because ‘much that was written earlier both prepares for and anticipates what would emerge from presses between 1700 and 1800. Yet that arbitrary stretch of time saw an explosion of new energies, a sequence of fictional experiments, that justifies special attention.’5 The co-​authors of another make 1660 their official point of departure, and intelligently question evolutionary accounts in which ‘the novel … progressed inexorably, onwards and upwards, from uncertain beginnings in the early eighteenth century to the works of the great Victorian novelists’. Yet in practice they remain silent about fiction published in the first quarter-​ century following the Restoration, and look back no further than Aphra Behn’s Love-​ Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–​7) on the somewhat tentative grounds that, alongside the received eighteenth-​century canon, Behn displays ‘some of the same characteristics, though not all and not incontestably’. She is ‘legitimately to be discussed in the same frame of reference as Defoe, Richardson and Fielding’.6 Even as they resist Watt’s assumptions and contest his claims, formulations of this kind display the enduring power of The Rise of the Novel, with its ultra-​canonical emphasis on Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Pamela and Clarissa, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones as the exemplary agents of generic revolution, and its derivation from these works (or the first four) of defining criteria for the novel, seen as a genre activated by specifically eighteenth-​century conditions. ‘Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding’ is Watt’s qualifying subtitle; more explicit still about the time frame involved is the Cambridge dissertation of 1938 from which The Rise of the Novel rose, entitled ‘The Novel and Its Reader: 1719–​1754’, which is to say the period from Defoe’s earliest novel to Richardson’s last. Watt radically rethought and extended this thesis during his wartime ordeal on the Burma railway and his bracing encounters with Theodor Adorno and critical theory in post-​war California, and in the process amplified his original sense of relatively sudden generic emergence into a sophisticated and ambitious account of cultural 5  Patricia Meyer Spacks, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-​Century English Fiction (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2006), 2. 6  Brean Hammond and Shaun Regan, Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–​1789 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. ii, 26, 44.

158

158   THOMAS KEYMER cause and effect. As he later put it, ‘philosophical, social, economic, and educational changes affecting both authors and audience … led to an emphasis on the individual, on the particular in time and space, on the material universe, and on quotidian life; all these and other historical factors had created a substantially new version of literature’s ancient concern with verisimilitude’. In the hands of Defoe and Richardson especially, and through the operation of what we would now call print culture (in particular, the dual effect of objectivity and privacy arising from the printed page and the reading practices fostered by it), the result was more than a transient phenomenon and ‘contributed permanent qualitative changes in the expressive idiom of fiction’.7 This idiom was above all realist, designed to particularize characters, environments, and circumstances with a richly textured impression of lived experience. Here the creative importance of Watt’s triumvirate—​or really duumvirate, Fielding being the Janus-​faced misfit who looks back to ancient epic and forward to postmodern metafiction—​lay in ‘the suddenness and completeness with which they brought into being what may be regarded as the lowest common denominator of the novel genre as a whole, its formal realism’.8 Earlier writers may have fumbled towards the same thing, but they did so in sporadic, unsystematic ways, without the serious and sustained reality effect—​though Watt was later scathing about Roland Barthes’s ‘l’effet de réel’ as a diminished concept, ‘identified with the mere copying of things’9—​that was achieved by Defoe and Richardson. The preliminary truth-​claims of Behn’s fiction were unsupported by authenticating solidity of setting or plausibly individualized character, and although in Bunyan there were ‘many passages of vivid and particularised physical description’, these passages were ‘incidental and fragmentary’, lacking consistent visualization of milieu.10 To his critics, Watt’s analysis depended for its formidable clarity on sweeping exclusions, notably of women writers in English, and of European (especially French, Italian, and Spanish) traditions of fiction. Underlying all these exclusions was his attitude to romance, which he represented as a category opposed, not contributory, to that of the novel. Margaret Anne Doody pursues this objection in its bluntest form in order to relocate the origins of the novel in classical and oriental antiquity, though she is able to do so only by pitching her generic common denominator even lower than Watt’s, declaring—​with more than an echo of E. M. Forster—​that ‘a work is a novel if it is fictional, if it is in prose, and if it is of a certain length’.11 More nuanced and persuasive is 7 

Ian Watt, ‘Flat-​Footed and Fly-​Blown: The Realities of Realism’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 12/​2–​3 (2000), 156–​7. 8 Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1960), 34. 9  Watt, ‘Flat-​Footed and Fly-​Blown’, 160. 10 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 26, 33, 19. 11  Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996), 16. Compare Forster’s ‘a fiction in prose of a certain extent’, a definition he adopts—​with more flippancy than is sometimes recognized—​from Abel Chevalley, a French critic who had translated Elizabethan fiction by Thomas Deloney (Aspects of the Novel [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927], 17).

Restoration Fiction   159 William B. Warner’s argument that the status of Watt’s triumvirate as generic originators was always something of a conjuring trick, an illusion brought about by the success of Richardson and Fielding in discrediting and eclipsing earlier fiction—​specifically, ‘the novel of amorous intrigue, developed in the late Restoration by Behn under the strong influence of the continental novella’—​even as they appropriated and reworked the most appealing features of this tradition.12 It is certainly the case that by presenting themselves as innovators ex nihilo—​Pamela introduces ‘a new species of writing’; Tom Jones founds ‘a new Province of Writing’—​and disparaging Behn and her followers as both illicit and irrelevant,13 Richardson and Fielding did much to render the fiction of previous generations invisible. Influential criticism by their promoters—​in Richardson’s case Samuel Johnson’s celebrated Rambler paper of 31 March 1750, in Fielding’s An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding (1751), perhaps by Francis Coventry—​ reinforced the marginalizing effect, and when scholarly histories and taxonomies of fiction were first attempted in the Scottish Enlightenment, though due attention was given to the longue durée from Apuleius to the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, the only English precursors worth mentioning by name were Defoe and Bunyan. In these accounts, Behn could be glimpsed at best very distantly beneath Hugh Blair’s blanket dismissal of Restoration fiction as ‘in general of a trifling nature, without the appearance of moral tendency, or useful instruction’.14 For Blair, and more systematically James Beattie, Robinson Crusoe marked a decisive point of rupture (alongside the French example of Marivaux) between pre-​Cervantic ‘Old Romance’ and the high-​flown roman de longue haleine of the seventeenth century, and on the other hand the ‘New’ or ‘Modern Serious Romance’ as recently brought to perfection by Richardson and Fielding.15 The most ambitious history of fiction written during this period was Clara Reeve’s dialogue, The Progress of Romance (1785), and here the distinction between outmoded romance and a new genre characterized by moral seriousness and rigorous verisimilitude hardened further. ‘No writings are more different than the ancient Romance and modern Novel’, affirms Reeve’s spokeswoman, the clear-​eyed Euphrasia; the former was ‘an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things’, the latter ‘a picture of real life and manners’.16 This sense of a defining generic modernity was confirmed and implemented in the multi-​volume anthologies of novels that became influential agents of canon formation following the breakdown of perpetual 12  William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–​1750 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998), 42. 13  Samuel Richardson, Selected Letters, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 41, 173 n; Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 77. For their comments on Behn and Haywood, see Richardson, Selected Letters, 173 n; Fielding, Tom Jones, 530, on Behn, and his mockery of Haywood as ‘Mrs. Novel’ in Act III of The Author’s Farce (1730). 14  Ioan Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance, 1700–​1800: A Documentary Record (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 250. 15  Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance, 320–​2. 16  Cheryl Nixon (ed.), Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688–​1815 (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2009), 351, 353.

160

160   THOMAS KEYMER copyright in 1774. Though eclectic and capacious, Harrison’s Novelist’s Magazine of 1780–​ 9, which at its peak was selling 12,000 copies of each weekly number, reprinted no fiction written before 1700 with the single exception of Don Quixote,17 and in the next generation Robinson Crusoe was the only pre-​1740 item included by Anna Laetitia Barbauld in her fifty-​volume British Novelists (1810). In a long introductory essay ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-​Writing’, Barbauld reaches into antiquity to locate ‘the origin of fictitious tales and adventures’, but she is reluctant to apply the term ‘novel’ without qualification to anything before Pamela. Her wording is characteristically guarded when she observes that Zayde (1670) and La Princesse de Clèves (1678) by Mme de La Fayette ‘are esteemed to be the first which approach the modern novel of the serious kind’, and it is clear that she uses the term in its older, emphatically non-​serious, sense in her single dismissive sentence about Aphra Behn: ‘Mrs. Behn’s Novels were licentious; they are also fallen.’18 This diminished and now superseded meaning—​equivalent to Warner’s ‘novels of amorous intrigue’, from the Italian novella or French nouvelle—​was still current in the mid-​eighteenth century, when Johnson defined ‘Novel’ in his Dictionary of 1755 as ‘a small tale, generally of love’, and the Earl of Chesterfield explained that ‘a Novel is a kind of abbreviation of a Romance’19—​one reason why Richardson and Fielding favoured the more elevated term ‘History’ to decontaminate their own work. Yet this is not the whole story about eighteenth-​century perceptions of generic emergence, and one can see elsewhere a view of the novel as already on the rise before the era identified by Watt. Even before 1660 (a more meaningful watershed, Steven N. Zwicker has argued, in political than in literary terms),20 attacks on amatory fiction of the kind that Behn would later practise indicate its growing prominence. Milton was hostile when using the term ‘amatorious novel’ in 1644, as was Henry Vaughan in his excoriation of ‘lascivious fictions’ in 1655, but these are early examples of an anti-​novel discourse that could not have taken shape until there was a meaningful target to aim at.21 They indicate not only the low status of ‘novels’ but also their rising profile. Fifty years later, it was common to find this profile discussed in more celebratory terms, and with an emphasis on characteristics, such as circumstantial particularization, that anticipate the novel genre in its modern form. The author of The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705) drew heavily on a French source of 1683 when affirming that an upstart genre of ‘Little Histories’ or ‘Historical Novels’ had now ‘banish’d’ chivalric and heroic romance, reshaping audience tastes in ways that ‘made Romances so much cry’d down, as we find ’em at present’. These 17 

Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–​1815 (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1962), 363–​7. 18  Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), 378, 388, 400. 19  Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), s.v. ‘Novel’; Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance, 100. 20  Steven N. Zwicker, ‘Is There Such a Thing as Restoration Literature?’, Huntington Library Quarterly 69/​3 (2006), 425–​49. 21  See Milton’s expanded version of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644) and, for Vaughan, his 1655 preface to Silex Scintillans.

Restoration Fiction   161 works appealed to English tastes not only for their pacy narration and economical prose, the passage continues, but also for an attentiveness to individual detail that transcends the ideals and abstractions of earlier works, which ‘describe Men in general, they represent them Covetous, Courageous and Ambitious, without entering into the Particulars, and without specifying the Character of their Covetousness, Valour or Ambition; they don’t perceive Nice Distinctions, which those who know it Remark in the Passions’.22 Another French source, Pierre-​Daniel Huet’s ‘Traité de l’origine des romans’ (first published in 1670 as a preface to Zayde, and translated into English the following year) reappeared in an English version of 1715, accompanied by a translator’s preface which hailed the treatise for demonstrating, from the example of novels, ‘from what Obscure and Mean Beginnings, the most Polite and Entertaining Arts have risen to be the Admiration and Delight of Mankind’, or again ‘by what Steps they arise to Perfection’.23 Documents like these—​testaments to what Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever call ‘the inter-​national invention of the novel’, a phenomenon constituted in ‘processes of literary and cultural exchange that occurred across the English Channel’24—​continued to inform criticism in the mid-​eighteenth century, with an emphasis on generic evolution that existed in tension with the new story of generic revolution. When the influential commentator William Warburton contributed a preface to Clarissa, it may have been because he situated Clarissa in an evolving tradition from classical antiquity to modern France that Richardson dropped the preface as soon as he could. Warburton took revenge by recycling his material elsewhere, deftly twisting the knife in a new conclusion: among contemporary exponents of the genre, he now declares, ‘Mr. De Marivaux in France, and Mr Fielding in England, stand the foremost’.25 Yet whether they emphasize continuities or discontinuities between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all these narratives simplify a complicated generic situation, one best imagined not as autonomous primary creation or traceable linear evolution but as something more akin—​in its fluidity and multiplicity of potential—​to a swarming primordial soup. For one thing, as James Grantham Turner shows in a richly documented recent essay, the novel/​romance binary that solidified in the eighteenth century was largely alien before 1700, when ‘ “Romance” … coexisted with “Novel” in a promising state of flux: both keywords denoted fiction-​in-​general, neither adhered to a unified referent … neither synonymous nor opposite’.26 Without even this most basic 22  Nixon (ed.), Novel Definitions, 99, 102 (from the unsigned preface to The Secret History of Queen Zarah, 1705, which paraphrases du Plaisir’s Sentiments sur les lettres et sur l’histoire, 1683, via an intermediate source of 1702). Though long attributed to Delarivier Manley, Queen Zarah is probably the work of Joseph Browne (J. A. Downie, ‘What if Delarivier Manley Did Not Write The Secret History of Queen Zarah?’, The Library, 7th ser., 5/​3 [2004], 247–​64). 23  Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance, 43 (from Stephen Lewis’s preface to his translation of Huet, The History of Romances, 1715). 24  Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (eds.), The Literary Channel: The Inter-​National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), 2. 25  The Works of Alexander Pope Esq., ed. William Warburton, 9 vols. (London, 1751), 4: 169. 26  James Grantham Turner, ‘Romance and the Novel in Restoration England’, Review of English Studies 63/​258 (2012), 58–​85.

162

162   THOMAS KEYMER bifurcation of categories, the fiction of the Restoration was eclectic, experimental, and heterogeneous, and it displays modes and procedures in the process of formation, not any settled consensus about narrative practice. Despite the groundbreaking taxonomic efforts of Paul Salzman and others, it resists classification into clear subgeneric groups—​ sentimental, oriental, Gothic, and so forth—​of the kind identifiable a century later.27 Some works pioneer features that Watt and scholars writing in his wake define as constitutive of the novel, but others move in other directions, and can only be appreciated for what they are if we resist the urge to analyse them in terms of conventions and criteria that were still unformed.28 The difficulty of mapping Restoration fiction does not mean, contrary to whatever expectations one might form from its low profile in modern debates, that there was any shortage of it on the ground. Statistically, indeed, fiction seems in the closing decades of the seventeenth century to have been a larger component of total print output than in the opening decades of the eighteenth, though variations in definition, accidents of survival, and other bibliographical uncertainties make it hard to compare like with like. J. A. Downie notes that more than ten works of fiction were published every year in England between 1677 and 1692, with a peak of twenty-​three works in 1683, whereas between 1700 and 1719 the figure of ten was reached only once, in 1708—​in which year seven of the ten were translations. On the face of it, ‘the popularity of prose fiction tout court declined between the 1690s and the publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719’,29 and though the number of new titles then spiked in the early 1720s, when Defoe and Haywood were in their prime, the annual total was not securely or permanently in double figures until the 1740s. The standard checklists of pre-​1750 fiction were compiled before the availability of ESTC, and must be handled with care, but it seems to be the case that, over the six years preceding the appearance of Pamela in 1740, original works of fiction were outnumbered by translations, mostly from French.30 Translation was also a major factor in the seventeenth century, but it often involved transformation and creative surplus, and it also often generated creative extension. During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian Republic, voluminous heroic romances in French such as La Calprenède’s Cassandre (1642–​5) and Mme de Scudéry’s Le Grand 27  See Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–​1700: A Critical History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 351–​78. 28  It is customary to decry the thought-​crime of teleology at this point, as though no story of development could ever assist our understanding of genre. One recent handbook claims that its twenty-​ three contributors ‘all resist the teleological, progressive story of the rise of the novel, as well as the claimed superiority of realist fiction’ (Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (eds.), A Companion to the Eighteenth-​Century English Novel and Culture [Oxford: Blackwell, 2005], 8), though the chapters that follow are far less hidebound or doctrinaire than this prescription suggests. 29  J. A. Downie, ‘Mary Davys’s “Probable Feign’d Stories” and Critical Shibboleths about “The Rise of the Novel” ’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 12/​2–​3 (2000), 313; see also Downie, ‘The Making of the English Novel’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 9/​3 (1997), 253–​5. 30  James Raven, British Fiction 1750–​1770: A Chronological Check-List of Prose Fiction Printed in Britain and Ireland (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1987), 9; William Harlin McBurney, A Check List of English Prose Fiction, 1700–​1739 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1960), 96–​109.

Restoration Fiction   163 Cyrus (1649–​53) were fashionable reading, especially in Royalist circles, with their ideal­ized reflection of an aristocratic ethos that was now under threat. A more directly political tradition in Britain derived from John Barclay’s Argenis (1621), originally published in Latin and encoding a wide range of references to public events, both historical and topical; two English translations soon appeared, as did keys designed to unlock the political applications. The confluence of these traditions is seen in English translations of French sources such as Sir Charles Cotterell’s Cassandra (1652), which added an audacious layer of Royalist innuendo to La Calprenède’s text, and in original works such as Percy Herbert’s The Princess Cloria (1653–​4) and Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa (1651–​6), both of which were resumed and extended (in 1661 and 1669 respectively) in the more auspicious circumstances of the Restoration. For both these authors, the focus of romance on plots of conflicted amatory allegiance and personal betrayal invited extension into the turbulent public realm, a path later followed by Behn in Love-​Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, a three-​stage roman à clef mischievously keyed, as events unfolded, to the conspiratorial politics and treasonable plotting surrounding the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685. At the same time, the sheer length and structural plasticity of romance, with its multiple protagonists and intertwined stories, made possible a mode of political representation capacious enough to accommodate the complexity of events and the challenges they presented to writers whose broadly Royalist ideology did not preclude mixed feelings, varying prescriptions, and contrasting assignments of blame. For Herbert as he justified his generic choice, ‘by no other way almost could the multiplicity of strange actions of the times be expressed, that exceeded all belief and went beyond every example in the doing’.31 Heroic romances retained some currency for the remainder of the century, and still seemed a target worth attacking in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), in which a series of humiliating predicaments is brought on the heroine by her obsessive reading of works such as Cassandra and Parthenissa, and by her failure to distinguish between romance and the everyday world. Well before 1700, however, these works also encountered formidable competition in terms of both political identity and structural economy. The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is among much else an appropriation of romance tropes for radical purposes of religious dissent, though Bunyan constantly worries (in unrelenting marginal glosses and a prefatory ‘Apology for His Book’) about the tendency of allegorical fiction to assume its own imaginative life, unleashed from the doctrines it should serve. The resulting constraints on expression make The Pilgrim’s Progress in some ways less indicative of the future than Bunyan’s enthralling spiritual autobiography of 1666, Grace Abounding, with its trenchant first-​person directness and its urgent revelations of inner crisis. Alongside the desperate immediacy of Bunyan’s similes in this earlier work—​‘I should in these dayes, often in my greatest agonies, even flounce towards the Promise, (as the horses do towards sound ground, that yet stick in 31  Paul Salzman (ed.), An Anthology of Seventeenth-​Century Fiction (Oxford: OUP, 1991), 212, and see Salzman’s commentary on this passage in his ‘Royalist Epic and Romance’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 225.

164

164   THOMAS KEYMER the mire)’—​equivalent allegorical episodes in The Pilgrim’s Progress seem almost wilfully flat, held back by Bunyan’s anxiety that imaginative pleasure might trump religious instruction: in this case, that the Slough of Despond in which his protagonist sinks will become just a meaningless site of fictional adventure. Where Grace Abounding confidently proclaims the capacity of its direct style to ‘be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was’, The Pilgrim’s Progress never shakes off its opening worry that, rather than illuminate spiritual truth, the ‘feigning words’ of fiction might instead just ‘make us blind’.32 No such inhibitions accompany Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668), the libertine fantasy of an elite republican in which two narrators give rival accounts of an island community founded by the first of them, George Pines, and visited during the rule of Pines’s grandson by the second, a Dutch mariner named Cornelius Van Sloetten. (At first, Neville published Pines’s memoir as a free-​standing pamphlet, adding the more barbed Van Sloetten narrative a month later, in what may have been a ruse to deflect the attentions of Roger L’Estrange, Charles II’s energetic licenser and surveyor of the press.) In place of Pines’s dubious paradise of sexual transgression, sensual indulgence, and patriarchal absolutism—​Neville’s glance at the Stuart court is hard to ignore—​the austere republican Van Sloetten reports something else: a community of naked, superstitious, inarticulate semi-​savages, riven by internecine tumults and insurrections, and subject to arbitrary punishment and brutal repression. In this state of nature, or condition of degeneracy, as the present ruler smoothly assures Van Sloetten, ‘it is impossible, but that in multitudes disorders will grow, the stronger seeking to oppress the weaker; no tye of Religion being strong enough to chain up the depraved nature of mankinde’. Fortunately, the younger Pines has been able to turn the crisis to political advantage, for ‘bad manners produceth good and wholesome Laws for the Preservation of Humane Society’—​ laws under which, it now turns out, blasphemers are summarily executed, adulterers have their eyes bored through, and anyone defaming the ruler is whipped into exile.33 In two generations, the first narrator’s fool’s paradise of lust and licence has decayed, as reported by the second, into a dystopian blend of sanctimonious Cromwellian dictatorship and divine-​right Stuart hubris. Ominously for English readers following the disastrous war of 1665–​7 with the United Provinces, which now looked set to dominate world trade, the work closes with Van Sloetten’s reflection on how truly flourishing the island might one day become, with all its natural riches, in the industrious hands of the improving Dutch. With their very different literary resources and strategies—​ Bunyan’s defiant Nonconformist demotic; Neville’s island as republican satire and thought-​experiment—​ these works herald important aspects of Robinson Crusoe, in which plain-​style description and providentialist explanation coexist with quasi-​allegorical reference to the plight of Dissenters under the restored Stuart monarchy of 1660–​88 (which is almost 32  John Bunyan, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (London: OUP, 1966), 79, 5–​6, 141. 33  Derek Hughes (ed.), Versions of Blackness: Key Texts on Slavery from the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 17, 18.

Restoration Fiction   165 exactly the span of Crusoe’s castaway ordeal). Yet it was not only on ideological grounds that French and French-​influenced romances were starting to look cumbersome and dated, and they also had to compete with leaner, fitter rivals in the sphere of translation, not least the racy ancient novels that had already begun to reappear in erotically charged vernacular versions. Some of these works had first been adapted into English in the Elizabethan period, and new translations of Achilles Tatius (1638), Apuleius (1639), and Heliodorus (1631, 1638, 1640) were all published in the run-​up to the Civil Wars. Part of their appeal is indicated by the adroit marketing strategy of the Restoration bookseller Edward Poole, who in 1687 repackaged his austerely named edition of The Æthiopian History of Heliodorus (1686) as The Triumphs of Love and Constancy … The Second Edition—​though as he did so Poole still retained a solemn dedication by Nahum Tate, co-​translator of the work, which dismisses La Calprenède and Barclay as pale imitators of Heliodorus, the locus classicus, in their handling of love and statecraft. There was more love to be had, though less constancy, in Petronius, whose fragmentary, transgressive Satyricon was first reconstructed in something like its modern form in an Amsterdam edition of 1669, and fully translated into English in 1694. Well-​known episodes from the Satyricon circulated much earlier, and among the cleverest of the period’s experiments in fiction is Walter Charleton’s The Ephesian Matron (1659), a sensuous, intellectually elaborate rereading of one of the bawdy Milesian tales interpolated in Petronius’ text. In its original form, the tale is a masterpiece of black comedy in which a famously chaste widow starts off grieving at her husband’s tomb, and ends up not only copulating with a passing soldier but also crucifying the husband’s corpse (a ruse she devises to save the skin of her new lover, from whom relatives have stolen and buried the corpse of an executed criminal in his charge). Though Charleton resists the misogynist moral of the Latin text, which he turns instead into an affirmative fable of human endurance, he playfully intensifies the widow’s transgression, and even has her make love on top of the coffin. His primary interest is in catching the alluring physicality of her reawakening, ‘her lips, swelling with a delicious vermillion tincture, and gently trembling … a temperate and Balmy-​ sweat, exstilling from the pores of her snow-​white skin’. In this endeavour, Charleton’s prose goes beyond the original in its lingering evocation of sexual ecstasy, even though, he concedes with a rueful sense of the transient and ineffable, this ‘cannot be described, so as to be understood by any, but such as feel it, nor those, but when they feel it’.34 A physician and philosopher who attempted to reconcile Hobbesian materialism with Christian doctrine and became active in Royal Society circles after the Restoration, Charleton seems almost to embody the alignment between empirical science and the emergent novel to which scholars have often alluded. For Helen Thompson, it is ‘possible to read Charleton’s treatment of Epicureanism in The Ephesian Matron as the imagined application of materialist doctrine to romance’.35 Not so much a translation of as a 34  [Walter Charleton], The Ephesian Matron (London, 1659), 47, 51. The work was reprinted in 1668 with misogynist interpolations, probably by another hand. 35  Helen Thompson, ‘Plotting Materialism: W. Charleton’s The Ephesian Matron, E. Haywood’s Fantomina, and Feminine Consistency’, Eighteenth-​Century Studies 35/​1 (2002), 197.

166

166   THOMAS KEYMER commentary on, even riposte to, the cynical fable told in the Satyricon, the work shares with its source an Epicurean impatience with any distinction between elevated soul and base body, but contests interpretation of the widow’s transformation in terms of ‘the inhærent Mutability and Levity of womans Nature’ (56). Instead Charleton’s narrative bears witness to the admirable regenerative capacity of the embodied soul, evoked with close attention to touch and inward sensation. In this endeavour, Charleton’s physico-​ material idiom never quite liberates itself from off-​the-​peg Petrarchan diction (‘exstill’ first appears in a medical treatise of 1657; ‘snow-​white’ is the oldest of sonneteer’s clichés). Yet in impulse, if not quite achievement, The Ephesian Matron looks forward to novelistic concerns with the intricacies of inward life and the subtleties of its outward manifestation, most obviously when, anticipating what would become a favourite Richardsonian formulation about psychological depth, Charleton considers ‘how to dive into the most secret recesses, and hidden conceptions of the mind, onely by observing the figures and characters that her inward motions draw upon the forehead, eyes, and other parts of the face’ (50). Other translations provided the technical resources to do the same job from within. In the short term, the most significant imports from France were the concentrated, psychologically charged nouvelles of La Fayette (the first appeared in English as The Princess of Monpensier in 1666) and her imitators such as the prolific Marie-​Catherine Desjardins. In their formally rigorous distillations of romance and their representations of intense passion in recognizable modern settings, the elegant, streamlined nouvelle historiques and nouvelles galantes of the period (emphasizing respectively erotic obsession and sexual intrigue) were an enabling resource for Behn in her shorter amatory fiction of the 1680s. Of more enduring influence—​and no less immediately important for Behn, whose Love-​Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister exploits the same narrative technique—​was Lettres portugaises (1669), an epistolary fiction so convincing in its evocation of abandonment and despair that it is still sometimes taken for the authentic utterance of an impassioned Portuguese nun (specifically the future abbess of Beja, Mariana Alcoforado). Yet this dense, stylish work is almost certainly an exercise in ventriloquism by Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, comte de Guilleragues, whose fine-​tuned neoclassical French has something of the resonant quality of Racinian tragedy, with its powerfully condensed lexicon of passion. That said, it is in the English translation of 1678, as Five Love-​Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier, that this work comes most fully to life. Here the précieux refinement of the original text meets the robust coffee-​house slang of its English translator, Roger L’Estrange, who as licenser of the press was keenly aware of trends in the book trade of the day, and obviously sensed the appetite for fiction of different kinds (he also produced much-​reprinted translations of Quevedo and Aesop). The nun’s eloquence gains volatile energy from this distinctive stylistic mix, and in the English version her presence shifts from the remotely spiritual to the urgently sexual in ways highlighted by L’Estrange’s preface, with its teasing declaration ‘that a Woman may be Flesh and Blood, in a Cloyster, as well as in a Palace’.36 36 

Charles C. Mish (ed.), Restoration Prose Fiction, 1666–​1700: An Anthology of Representative Pieces (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1970), 38.

Restoration Fiction   167 Lettres portugaises is modelled in obvious ways on the Ovidian literature of female complaint, and consists simply of five letters addressed by the cloistered writer—​cloistered first within the walls of her convent, but also by the loneliness of romantic fixation and the prison-​house of artificial language—​to the unresponsive lover who has left her. Beyond this, almost nothing happens, except that the cavalier each time fails to reply, and the stranded nun addresses him again, creating an almost Beckettian effect of immobility that was only partly destroyed when an enterprising hack came out with Five Love-​ Letters Written by a Cavalier, In Answer (1683, and the first of several spurious extensions). Nothing happens outwardly, to be more exact. Yet for just this reason the text unfolds as a single-​minded narrative of inwardness: a study of consciousness as it fluctuates in the isolation of ongoing private crisis. For though formally addressing the lover who has abandoned her, and who reaffirms this abandonment by his unbroken silence, the nun is really writing to herself alone, as she comes to acknowledge. Her cloistered condition is one in which she has ‘only my single self to encounter’ (44), and by the close of the fourth letter she realizes that ‘’Tis not so much for your sake that I write, as my own’ (51). Struggling with her own subjectivity and the effort to fix it in language, her letters function not to narrate an action, there being no action to narrate; rather, they constitute, in her state of tragic solipsism, the narrative action in themselves. They simultaneously advance and communicate the process of self-​expression and debate she comes to call ‘this Trial to get the Mastery of my Passion’ (52)—​a process that, rather than take simple linear form, circles endlessly back and forth, without determinate outcome. In the second letter, language fails to catch the extremity of the nun’s condition, with implications of self-​alienation that seem heightened by her insistent reflexive verbs: ‘There is so great a difference betwixt the Love I write, and That which I feel, that if you measure the One by the Other, I have undone my self ’ (41). By the end of the fifth letter the most she can say, with a plangent effect of straining for measure, is that she is ‘not yet out of hope of a more peaceable Condition, which I will either Compass, or take some other Course with my self ’ (57). Other nuns took other courses in other imported works, and L’Estrange (who as well as being a superb prose stylist was an opportunist of unsurpassed cynicism) may have been gesturing towards the thriving market for French pornography when advertising his convent-​bound heroine as sexual ‘Flesh and Blood’. Only a year beforehand, in 1677, he had raided and briefly closed a bookshop selling notorious imports such as L’Ecole des filles, a work of erotica now best known from the shamefaced diary entries of Samuel Pepys,37 and over the next few years this and several similar works appeared in English translation. One such publication was Venus in the Cloister, or, The Nun in Her Smock (1683), adapted from Jean Barrin’s exuberant Vénus dans le cloître, a classic instance of the illicit subgenre that James Grantham Turner has called ‘cloistral pornography’, and still notorious at the time of Shamela (1741), when Fielding incriminatingly places a copy in the library of his anti-​heroine.38 With its rudimentary fictional 37  David Foxon, Libertine Literature in England, 1660–​1745 (New York: University Books, 1965), 9; see also, for Pepys in 1668, 5–​6. 38  James Grantham Turner, Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England, 1534–​1685 (Oxford: OUP, 2003), 344, 345.

168

168   THOMAS KEYMER development as a series of bawdy dialogues between novice and initiate, Venus in the Cloister was within spitting distance generically of more decorous amatory fictions, and it blurs categories further by having its randy nuns relax between bouts of tribadism and flagellation with books such as ‘Pregnant Chastity, a Curious Novel’.39 The spate of pornography to which it contributed also generated risqué fictional narratives such as The London Jilt (1683), a raunchy picaresque novel which in its subtitle, The Politick Whore, clearly evoked the Italian ‘whore dialogue’ tradition of Pietro Aretino, whose Ragionamenti had inspired a series of underground pamphlets entitled The Crafty Whore and The Wandring Whore between 1658 and 1663, and Ferrante Pallavicino, whose La retorica della puttana was translated into English with additions from Aretino as The Whores Rhetorick (1683). In the following century, the dubious output of this short period was remembered when John Cleland fashioned the erotic periphrasis of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–​9) in self-​conscious contradistinction to ‘the coarseness of L’Ecole des filles, which had quite plain words’.40 It was also remembered by the notorious bookseller Edmund Curll, who, prosecuted in the 1720s for republishing Venus in the Cloister, indicated that his strategy had been to smuggle the work into print ‘among the common Herd of Novels’, camouflaged among works with a species resemblance, though less flagrant in tone.41 Part of Curll’s defence was that the 1683 edition had been published without retribution, and the fact that so much material of this kind appeared during the Licensing Act lapse of 1679–​85 suggests that booksellers may have treated the suspension as a green light to publish pornographic fiction. There were in fact a few prosecutions for obscene libel in the 1680s, but the legislative situation remained very uncertain, and in general the ramshackle apparatus of Restoration censorship was directed against the more pressing dangers of blasphemy and sedition.42 In this ever-​present context of political censorship, a probable reason for Behn’s turn to prose fiction in her last years is that it offered a more discreet and less closely monitored arena for political encoding than the theatre, in which her belligerent Toryism had made her a controversial figure (and, on one occasion, the subject of an arrest warrant) during the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–​82. The clever circumspection with which Behn used the genre is apparent not only in Love-​Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, with its elaborate trail of decoy messages about sixteenth-​century history, but also in Oroonoko (1688), published at a moment of exceptional political volatility and danger, and to some extent (like Dryden’s poem The Hind and the Panther the previous year) a prediction of the crisis that would play out a few months later, when the Whig-​ sponsored, Dutch-​led ‘Glorious Revolution’ brought the final overthrow of the Stuart

39 

Jean Barrin, Venus in the Cloister (London, 1683), 96. Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–​1782, ed. Joseph W. Reed and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1977), 77 (13 April 1779). 41  See Curll’s preface to The Case of Seduction (London, 1725), p. iv. 42  For a fuller account, see Thomas Keymer, ‘Obscenity and the Erotics of Fiction’, in Clement Hawes and Robert Caserio (eds.), The Cambridge History of the English Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), 131–​46. 40 

Restoration Fiction   169 regime. Literally, Oroonoko tells the story of an African prince enslaved, brutalized, and eventually murdered in the English colony of Surinam, and though written long before abolitionism emerged as a mainstream movement, its latent potential as an anti-​ slavery text was eventually fulfilled in eighteenth-​century stage adaptations.43 Beneath this progressive surface, however, lurks a subtext that even by the standards of the 1680s was ultra-​conservative. From Behn’s preliminary dedication to a diehard royalist for whose ‘noble Principles of Loyalty … this Nation Sighs for’ to the ‘frightful Spectacles of a mangl’d King’ evoked at the close of the narrative,44 Oroonoko is laden with the ideology of innate nobility and divine-​right kingship that underpinned Stuart rule (though it also represents, in the hero’s arbitrary grandfather, abuse of divine right). We soon learn that Oroonoko ‘had heard of the late Civil Wars in England, and the deplorable Death of our great Monarch’ (129), and passages like this are amplified by barbed references to the impending Dutch conquest of Surinam (in 1667, after the action closes). The cumulative effect is to associate Oroonoko’s murder—​which Behn represents as a treacherous violation of natural hierarchy, blamed on ‘the English mobile’ (183) and an administration ‘consist[ing] of such notorious Villains as Newgate never transported’ (182)—​not only with the execution of Charles I in 1649 but also with the dangers faced by the present king. For Richard Kroll, the work constitutes ‘Behn’s desperate attempt … to warn James II that if he continues on the path he has described since his accession, he risks suffering the same fate as his father’, though we need not share Kroll’s conclusion, given the politicization of almost all literary discourse at the time—​that ‘Oroonoko is therefore not a novel’.45 Increasingly, this term was now being applied to a variety of narratives that sought to transcend the amatory stereotype in innovative ways. When the bookseller Richard Bentley brought out a twelve-​volume series of Modern Novels in 1692–​3, many of the works included were reprints (often translated) in the old vein, but the collection also included remarkable original works such as the anonymous Vertue Rewarded; or, The Irish Princess, A New Novel (1693). Set with considerable specificity in Clonmel, County Tipperary, during the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution (which, though largely bloodless in England, was far from being so in Ireland and Scotland), Vertue Rewarded is an ambitious exploration of colonial relations and competing national identities, amplified by a skilfully integrated subplot from Inca history. In its use of courtship plots involving native and settler Irish women and Anglo-​German soldiers in the Williamite army, the novel anticipates a key trope of the national tale in the Romantic period, and there are sound reasons for thinking that Richardson may have recalled the work in the subtitle, Virtue Rewarded, of his first novel.46 43 

See Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 244–​64. Hughes (ed.), Versions of Blackness, 120, 189. All quotations from Oroonoko are to this edition, and are given in the body of the text within parentheses. 45  Richard Kroll, ‘ “Tales of Love and Gallantry”: The Politics of Oroonoko’, Huntington Library Quarterly 67/​4 (2004), 578. 46  For a fuller account, see the editors’ introduction in Vertue Rewarded, ed. Ian Campbell Ross and Anne Markey (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010), 9–​29. 44 

170

170   THOMAS KEYMER A year earlier, when the young William Congreve playfully theorized the genre in his preface to Incognita (1692), it was not amatory content that he stressed, but the ‘familiar nature’ of novels in their relation to ordinary experience—​their capacity to ‘come near us … delight us with accidents and odd events, but not such as are wholly un­usual or unprecedented—​such which, not being so distant from our belief, bring also the pleasure nearer us’. More interesting and original was Congreve’s emphasis on the shaping agency of the novelist, and the irrelevance of neoclassical rules (the unities of time, place, and action that structured contemporary tragedy) to a genre wittily regulated instead by an authorial ‘unity of contrivance’.47 With his teasing interruptions of story and self-​conscious jokes about reader response, Congreve goes on in the body of the work to make the virtuosity of his own narration more important than the plot he narrates, expressing frequent scepticism about the mimetic capability that would later become the central claim of the genre. Analogies with Fielding’s self-​conscious narrator can be overplayed—​just as it was stretching a point when another experimental narrative of the 1690s, Dunton’s Voyage round the World (1691), was reprinted in 1762 as ‘Grandfather to Tristram Shandy’48—​but Incognita’s metafictional moves are striking nonetheless. ‘Now see the impertinence and conceitedness of an author who will have a fling at a description, which he has prefaced with an impossibility,’ he writes at one typical impasse (491). For Congreve, the novel was not yet some miraculous technology for representing the minute particulars of experience, but in no less significant a sign of generic advance, it could already reflect on itself in sophisticated ways.

Select Bibliography Bullard, Rebecca, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–​1725: Secret History Narratives (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009). Doody, Margaret Anne, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1997). Hunter, J. Paul, Before Novels:  The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​ Century Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990). Letellier, Robert Ignatius, The English Novel, 1660–​1700: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997). Loveman, Kate, Reading Fictions, 1660–​1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–​1740 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins UP, 1987). McKeon, Michael, The Secret History of Domesticity:  Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005).

47 

Salzman (ed.), Anthology of Seventeenth-​Century Fiction, 474, 475.

48 On The Life, Travels, and Adventures of Christopher Wagstaff, Grandfather to Tristram Shandy

(1762), adapted from Dunton, see René Bosch, Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy as Perceived and Influenced by Sterne’s Early Imitators (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 58–​60.

Restoration Fiction   171 Newcomb, Lori Humphrey, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia UP, 2002). Paige, Nicholas D., Before Fiction:  The Ancien Régime of the Novel (Philadelphia:  U of Pennsylvania P, 2011). Salzman, Paul, English Prose Fiction, 1558–​1700: A Critical History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Salzman, Paul, ‘Royalist Epic and Romance’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 215–​30. Staves, Susan, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–​1789 (Cambridge: CUP, 2005). Turner, James Grantham, ‘ “Romance” and the Novel in Restoration England’, Review of English Studies 63/​258 (2012), 58–​85. Turner, James Grantham, Schooling Sex:  Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England, 1534–​1685 (Oxford: OUP, 2003). Wall, Cynthia Sundberg, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006). Warner, William, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–​1750 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998).

172

Chapter 11

Testing th e  Ma rket Robinson Crusoe and After David Oakleaf

The publication of Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719 heralded a decade of lively, inventive fiction. Customers were buying leisure reading; booksellers and writers were cashing in. Booksellers turned first to their backlists. A Tale of a Tub (1704) had satirized the literary war of all against all, but with four editions in the decade it deterred nobody. Aphra Behn’s popular Histories and Novels (6th edn., 1718), lavishly reissued in two illustrated volumes in 1722, inspired other collections of women writers: Jane Barker’s Entertaining Novels (2 vols., 1719), two different four-​volume collections of Haywood (1723 and 1724), and Mary Davys’s Works (2 vols., 1725). Behn’s Love-​Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister was also republished (6th edn., 1721). Arthur Blackamore elaborated Behn’s ‘Wandering Beauty’ as Luck at Last (1723), and Jane Barker adapted both it and Behn’s ‘History of the Nun’ in The Lining of the Patch-​Work Screen (1726). A Behn protégé and biographer who had helped edit (and perhaps swell) the 1696 Behn collection, Charles Gildon exposed Defoe as the author of Robinson Crusoe, published as a memoir; he then reprised his past success in a traditional form, the collection of tales, in The Post-​Man Robb’d of his Mail (1719) and All for the Better (1720). Some republished writers, notably Barker and Swift, wrote new works. An old hand encouraged by the success of The Reform’d Coquet (1724), Davys revised her earlier novels for her Works. Yet an actress new to writing (Haywood) and a pamphleteer new to fiction (Defoe) sparked the novel boom and contributed most to it. When others tested the market, they imitated Haywood’s sexual intrigues, Crusoe’s voyages to the far-​ flung destinations that were sending coffee, tea, chocolate, and sugar to English coffee houses and salons, china, silks, spices, and tobacco to its shops.1 1  Sarah Prescott, Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 1690–​1740 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 71–​2; Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 33, 88–​9, 120–​7; Kathryn R. King, Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675–​1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 166–​8.

Testing the Market: Robinson Crusoe and After   173 The results of this scramble resist categorization, and novel stabilized in meaning only later. Yet 1719 was a landmark year. A sharp increase in the publication of fiction began shortly before 1720 but petered out later in the decade. What might sell found publishers, what did sell was copied. There were novels and new novels, histories and secret histories, memoirs and secret memoirs, voyages and travels and lives and adventures. John J. Richetti’s groundbreaking Popular Fiction Before Richardson identified tales of rogues and whores; tales of travellers, pirates, and pilgrims; scandal chronicles; novellas erotic and pathetic; and pious polemics. Yet such subdivisions can obscure affiliations among authors pitching their wares to a relatively small readership, much of it part of a conservative rural elite.2 A writer who called his or (often) her work a novel worked in a recognized tradition that William Congreve had distinguished from longer French antecedents in his preface to Incognita; or, Love and Duty Reconcil’d: A Novel (1692). Her ‘Two former Volumes of Novels having met with a favourable Reception’, Barker re-​entered the market with A Patch-​Work Screen for the Ladies; or, Love and Virtue Recommended in a Collection of Instructive Novels (1723). Yet she took an oddly dim view of her prospects because ‘Histories at Large are so Fashionable in this Age; viz. Robinson Crusoe, and Moll Flanders; Colonel Jack, and Sally Salisbury’.3 In the Preface to her Works in 1725, Davys too complained:  ‘’Tis now for sometime, that those sort of Writings call’d Novels have been a great deal out of Use and Fashion, and that the Ladies (for whose Service they were chiefly design’d) have been taken up with Amusements of more Use and Improvement; I mean History and Travels: with which the Relation of Probable Feign’d Stories can by no means stand in competition.’4 Longer tales of individual protagonists were selling, and Downie argues that Defoe’s strategy of presenting fiction as autobiography had galvanized the category by destabilizing the relation of fact and fiction.5 Their collections of self-​proclaimed novels show that Barker and Davys are not throwing in the towel. Facing competition, they are promising superior narrative pleasures to their implicitly superior readers. Barker reworked the collection of short novels as a patchwork medley. Her Patch-​Work Screen prompted a sequel, The Lining of the Patch Work Screen, although Arthur Bettesworth’s advertisements for Entertaining Novels in 2  Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992), 35 (fig. 2), 38; John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–​1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Sarah Prescott, ‘The Debt to Pleasure: Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess and Women’s Fiction of the 1720s’, Women’s Writing 7/​3 (2000), 427–​45; Kathryn R. King, ‘The Novel Before Novels (with a Glance at Mary Hearne’s Fables of Desertion)’, in Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (eds.), Eighteenth-​Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms (London: Associated UP, 2001), 36–​57. 3  Jane Barker, The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson (New York: OUP, 1997), 51. 4  Mary Davys, The Reform’d Coquet; or Memoirs of Amoranda, Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady and The Accomplish’d Rake, or Modern Fine Gentleman, ed. Martha F. Bowden (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999), 87. 5  J. A. Downie, ‘Mary Davys’s “Probable Feign’d Stories” and Critical Shibboleths About “The Rise of the Novel” ’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 12/​2–​3 (2000), 309–​26.

174

174   DAVID OAKLEAF four volumes (Daily Post, October 1729 and after) may suggest slow sales. Publishing by subscription, Davys too is positioning herself respectably in the market, revising several earlier tales; The Memoirs of Alcippus and Lucippe (1704) demurely joins its siblings, including the previous year’s The Reform’d Coquet, as The Lady’s Tale. Title pages and costly frontispiece engravings of celebrated subjects, putative authors (Crusoe, Moll, Roxana, Gulliver), and authors also reveal writers jostling for readers and prestige. They were central to marketing Defoe, Swift (who elaborately framed Gulliver), and Haywood, although the frontispiece portrait to her collections may have backfired. Writers knew their traditions and their rivals.6 Class consciousness has coloured attempts to appraise these offspring of the marketplace. Gentlemen seldom wrote for pay. Swift dedicated A Tale of a Tub to John, Lord Somers to court preferment. A gulf separated this manoeuvre from a vulgar commercial transaction: ‘for as some unnatural Parents sell their Offspring to Beggars, in order to see them no more, I took three Guineas for the Brat of my Brain, and then went a hundred and fifty Miles Northward, to which Place it was not very likely its Fame should follow’.7 Davys positions herself among Defoe’s destitute protagonists, for whom guinea promises a rare gleam of gold in the daily struggle for copper and silver. Yet Swift’s transaction is as self-​interested as Davys’s, and Swift was thoroughly enmeshed in the world of commercial publication, as were his fellow propagandist Defoe and his fellow Scriblerian Pope. Scriblerian satire of Grub Street, including ‘the efforts of the Scriblerians to make of Defoe a non-​person’,8 were consequently defensive. The flip side of professionalization is the commodification of letters. Disdain for it takes gendered forms. ‘THE Condition of an Author is much like that of a Strumpet, both exposing our Reputations to supply our Necessities,’ wrote Ned Ward, who was disreputable enough to embrace the scandal: ‘The only difference between us is, in this perticular, where in the Jilt has the Advantage, we do our Business First, and stand to the Courtesie of our Benefactors to Reward us after; whilst the other, for her Security, makes her Rider pay for his Journey, before he mounts the Saddle.’9 This equation of the paid writer with the hackney horse and the prostitute, which prompts the gentlemanly airs adopted by professionals like Pope, weighed especially heavily on women. One writer’s craft could tar his sister with ‘distinctive popularity and scandal’.10 Yet the market for leisure reading spawned all 1720s fiction. 6 King, Jane Barker, 196–​200; Prescott, Women, Authorship, 22–​3, 72–​6; Janine Barchas, Graphic

Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-​Century Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 21–​48, 60–​77. 7 Davys, The Reform’d Coquet, ed. Bowden, 88. 8  Terry Belanger, ‘Publishers and Writers in Eighteenth-​Century England’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1982), 21; Homer Obed Brown, Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997), 178. 9  Edward Ward, A Trip to Jamaica (3rd edn., London: [no publisher], 1698), [3]‌. 10  William B. Warner, ‘Novels on the Market’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1600–​1780 (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 94.

Testing the Market: Robinson Crusoe and After   175 Not by chance, a pair of pamphleteers, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, wrote the most popular fictions of the decade, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. When they served Robert Harley as propagandists, catching the taste of the town had been their bread and butter. Outside Ireland, where the Wood’s pence controversy renewed Swift’s polemical value, they were in opposition, and the 1716 Septennial Act had lessened demand for partisan pamphlets. Like the reduced partisan edge that distinguishes Haywood’s amatory fiction from Behn’s and Manley’s, Ros Ballaster argues, their turn to fiction reflects this political shift. Even Manley re-​entered the market with The Power of Love: In Seven Novels (1719), a collection directed, her title suggests, at readers of Love in Excess, while the sixth edition of her decade-​old New Atalantis in 1720 provides further evidence that the market for amatory fiction had been revitalized by Haywood’s novel.11 A few facts are indisputable. First, writers everywhere display alertness to their rivals. Second, women enjoyed striking success. Haywood, Penelope Aubin, and Davys established influential narrative conventions and professional strategies. Third, Robinson Crusoe, the most popular novel of the decade, established a vogue for a new form—​the apparent autobiography—​and a content—​far-​flung adventures. This market frames Defoe’s original accomplishment and his rapid adjustment to others’ successes. Finally, Swift reacted by crafting Gulliver’s Travels to sell like Robinson Crusoe while driving it out of fashion. In the event, he seems to have left Defoe’s imitators defensive but without a viable alternative model. Darker assessments of contemporary society, perhaps, and more or less jocular imitations of Travels temporarily galvanized the market, but writers were nearing the end of the rich vein they had begun mining at the start of the decade. Despite launching a writing career that lasted over three decades, Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Enquiry: A Novel has proved to be especially hard to free from demeaning associations. W. H. McBurney ranked it with Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels in sales but not worth.12 William Beatty Warner credits Behn, Manley, and Haywood with ‘developing the first formula fiction on the market’,13 and Richetti calls Haywood ‘the Barbara Cartland or Danielle Steele of her day’.14 Yet when James Sterling dubbed Behn, Manley, and Haywood ‘the fair Triumvirate of Wit’ in a 1732 poem, he invited comparison with a trio of admired dramatists—​William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Fletcher.15 It is misleading to associate amatory fiction with the mass market. No early eighteenth-​ century novelist demonstrated mass appeal to the available reading public:  poetry, drama, and pamphlet controversies commonly had larger print runs than novels.16

11  Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 155–​6. 12  William H. McBurney, ‘Mrs. Penelope Aubin and the Early Eighteenth-​Century English Novel’, Huntington Library Quarterly 20/​3 (1956–​7), 250. 13  Warner, ‘Novels on the Market’, 94. 14  John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700–​1780 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 38. 15 Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife, 89–​90. 16  K. I. D. Maslen, ‘Edition Quantities for Robinson Crusoe, 1719’, The Library, 5th ser., 24/​1 (1969), 149.

176

176   DAVID OAKLEAF Nor is Haywood’s plot of sexual pursuit inherently low. Jane Austen relies on it a century later, emphasizing courtship but recording many threatened or actual seductions and elopements. Toni Bowers has shown that the seduction plot was a staple of political writing, used to explore life under contradictory allegiances, a pressing concern after the Protestant Hanoverians replaced the exiled Roman Catholic Stuarts.17 Its ironies served the pious Jacobite Barker well in Love Intrigues, where a baffled courtship figures the frustrations of a devoted but apparently hopeless attachment to personal monarchy, an attachment shared even by many who accepted the new order. They served equally well the Whiggish optimism of Love in Excess and the extreme scepticism of later Haywood narratives like Lasselia; or, The Self-​Abandon’d (1723).18 When Samuel Richardson began publishing fiction two decades later, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor show, he reju­venated rather than rejected the amatory plot, learning invaluable literary and commercial lessons from Haywood.19 Love in Excess enjoyed significant if not extravagant success, selling some 6,000 copies in her lifetime. Appearing in three parts over a year (January and June 1719, February 1720), it made Haywood a bankable commodity. In December 1720, her publishers advertised a collection that never appeared, The Dangers of Giving Way to Passion, in Five Exemplary Novels. Its constituent novels, published separately, were included with Love in Excess in Works of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (1724) and Secret Histories, Novels and Poems (1725; edns. 1732, 1742). Counting separately issued parts, Haywood published forty-​eight titles by January 1730, mostly fiction but also plays, miscellaneous works, and translations.20 Behn and Defoe turned to fiction as established writers. Haywood is the first English writer to win literary fame as a novelist. It is a further sign of her dominance that writers who were not or were not exclusively imitating Defoe were usually imitating Haywood. Despite the lingering misconception that Haywood addressed unsophisticated readers, the opposite is true. No hack scribbling in a garret, Haywood early won a place in the circle of accomplished writers surrounding the literary entrepreneur Aaron Hill. Her enthusiastic language of love aligns her with the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s culture of politeness; that is, with modernity. It derives from Paradise Lost, which adopted an elevated style to celebrate naked lovers in a garden, lovers who fell from their initial bliss, quarrelled, and reconciled. Her early books were expensively produced as ‘highbrow belles-​lettres for conspicuous consumption’, the Works being part of this strategy. The 17 

Toni Bowers, ‘Representing Resistance: British Seduction Stories, 1660–​1800’, in Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (eds.), A Companion to the Eighteenth-​Century English Novel and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 140–​63. 18  David Oakleaf, ‘The Eloquence of Blood in Eliza Haywood’s Lasselia’, Studies in English Literature 39/​3 (1999), 487. 19  Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-​Century England and Ireland (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 21–​2, 27. 20  Patrick Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), 53–​5, 65–​7, 88–​9, 819–​20; throughout, I take Haywood’s publication information from this work, citing page numbers only for references not readily found under the title of a particular work.

Testing the Market: Robinson Crusoe and After   177 West End bookshop of William Chetwood, Haywood’s first bookseller and her companion in the theatre, played a role in this strategy. After her angry break with the Hill circle, Haywood relied on writing in quantity, but this need not mean destitution or disgrace.21 The protagonist of our usual stories about the novel, by contrast, occupied the cultural margins. A citizen not a gentleman, and a Protestant Dissenter, Defoe could not differ more from Haywood. ‘I had no room for Desire’, his stranded solitary reflects.22 Inspired in part by Woodes Rogers’s and Edward Cooke’s accounts of a marooned Scotsman, Andrew Selkirk, Defoe’s tale panders to English enchantment with ‘the travelling Memoirs of any casual Adventurer’,23 but Defoe vividly reimagines his commonplace material. The publication of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe on 25 April 1719 was an event. It sold like one of Defoe’s topical pamphlets—​some 6,000 copies by the time Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe appeared in August. In the following twelve months, Defoe published two more fictional autobiographies—​ Memoirs of a Cavalier in May, The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton in June—​before returning unsuccessfully to the well with Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Readers were curious about characters’ interior worlds. Although it is easy to polarize Defoe and Haywood, both contribute to the paradoxical cultural development that confers public authority on the notion that individuals—​in principle, all individuals—​ have unique and valuable inner lives. Both represent individuals from groups with little cultural authority. Sometimes powerful, Haywood’s gentry women are often vulnerable and, in other hands, inconsiderable. Exposed to social danger by a foolish father and respected by neither her sexual rival Alovisa nor the charismatic older man who is idly trying to seduce her, Amena in Love in Excess is exposed as credulous and unimportant before she retires to a convent. Such a figure conventionally merits only condemnation or laughter, yet in Haywood she commands narrative sympathy. This is momentous. That Amena also models the authority of desire for male as well as female readers should not obscure the particular claim that Haywood boldly makes for the human significance of a naive young woman. Moll Flanders and The Fortunate Mistress show that Defoe was quick to grasp the narrative potential of this claim, but he turned first to men who eventually acquire an unlikely gentility. Their voyages in part figure their extraordinary social mutability. Distinctively urban and modern, Defoe imagines protagonists free from the defining 21 

Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector 1685–​1750 (Oxford: OUP, 2003), 61–​101; Robert A. Erickson, ‘Milton and the Poetics of Ecstasy in Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century Fiction’, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), A Companion to the Eighteenth-​Century English Novel and Culture, 124; Al Coppola, ‘The Secret History of Eliza Haywood’s Works: The Early Novel and the Book Trade’, 1650–​1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 19 (2012), 133–​61 (my thanks to Professor Coppola for sending me a copy of his essay prior to publication). 22  Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. W. R. Owens (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), 152. 23  Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author (London: John Morphew, 1710), 180.

178

178   DAVID OAKLEAF certainties of a landowning gentry. In Moll and Roxana, he even imagines them, to a degree, free from gender constraints. Recognition by kin affirms identity in romance but painfully constrains self-​fashioning in Defoe. Changing clothes or neighbourhoods to craft new identities as needed, his protagonists embody the fluid, speculative personality that contemporaries feared as a source of political corruption.24 This too is momentous. Defoe’s psychological realism often comes down to this conscious performance of a social identity. ‘Instead of reporting experiences or feelings, rather than imitating life or art,’ Paula Backscheider comments, ‘he invents an imitation of reporting and imitating.’25 Readers were also curious about the wider world. Crusoe’s voyages and surprising adventures inspired imitators, Defoe the first and most prolific of them. The fourth edition of Robinson Crusoe added maps. Farther Adventures took Crusoe to India, to South East Asia, into China, and across Russia. Singleton crosses Africa. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (January 1722) and The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col. Jacque (December 1722)  take their protagonists to North America. Jack, Defoe’s Cavalier, and Roxana in The Fortunate Mistress (February 1724) travel on the Continent. Defoe’s final novel, A New Voyage round the World, by a Course Never Sailed Before (November 1724), is again global in scope. Moll travels within Britain, too, the subject of Defoe’s monumental three-​volume Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–​6). Although H.F. in A Journal of the Plague Year (March 1722) notoriously refuses to leave London during the great plague outbreak of 1665, England’s traumatic recent past, like the criminal underworlds that spawn Moll and Jack, was an exotic foreign land to those prosperous enough to read fiction. In other hands, the upstarts’ material had failed to take. Little noticed, Mary Hearne’s Lover’s Week (1718) and The Female Deserters (advertised in the Evening Post, 25 November 1718; dated 1719) re-​entered the marketplace together as Honour the Victory and Love the Prize (1720). A single protagonist who, enmeshed in a historical conflict that haunts the present, travels widely and records private encounters as well as public events over a period approximating Crusoe’s island exile had appeared in The Memoirs of Majr. Alexander Ramkins (December 1718). If the amours its title promised recall Manley and anticipate Haywood, Maximillian E. Novak observes, its military adventures shout ‘Defoe’. Accepting a contested attribution, Novak calls it ‘Defoe’s first, if somewhat halting, effort at producing … realist fiction’. But could its slow sales have encouraged Defoe? In December 1719, the bookseller reissued his unsold sheets of Memoirs as The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures so that Major Ramkins could swim in Crusoe’s wake.26 24 

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975), 458–​9. 25  Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1986), 226. 26  Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: OUP, 2001), 4–​5, 530–​1; P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, Defoe De-​Attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist (London and Rio Grande, OH: Hambledon Press, 1994), 117–​18.

Testing the Market: Robinson Crusoe and After   179 An anonymous anti-​novel—​the Epistle Dedicatory is signed W.P.—​registered new trends with startling promptness. Advertised as ‘just publish’d’ in the 16 February 1720 issue of Theatre, The Jamaica Lady: or, The Life of Bavia is contemporary with the third part of Love in Excess. Its title promises sexual intrigue, a Crusoe-​like voyage, and a naval scandal. Alleging reluctance to offend ‘the Fair Sex’, W.P. deliberately parodies women’s fiction. His heroines are Bavia—​the English daughter of a Scottish father, fleeing back to England with the reputation of a witch—​and the prostitute Holmesia, the Jamaica-​born daughter of a transported English prostitute and a mulatto sailor.27 W.P. performs linguistic and literary codes with a playful masculine assurance that anticipates Fielding. In the Preface, he knowledgeably distinguishes his realistic tale from ‘Novels’ that typically translate ‘some foreign piece’ or ‘abridge the Story of some larger History’. The feminine of Bavius, Virgil’s proverbially bad poet in Eclogues 3. 90–​1, the name Bavia promises artfulness. A romantic initial tale of Bavia—​the devoted daughter of a noble family, married to the venal Cupidus, she preserves her virtue from a villainous ship’s captain, trades a mere gem for that greater jewel her chastity, and so on—​is rebutted point by point in a parallel narrative that carnalizes her as a deformed lecher. Along with ‘the Negro Language’ and Irish—​the book ends with a glossary—​the Jamaica Lady’s dialects include the naval jargon of Captain Fustian, whose name means ‘bombast’ or ‘jargon’. Masculine forthrightness challenges narrative elaboration: ‘Nay, Friend, don’t lengthen the Engagement, but let me have them Board and Board’ (13); ‘don’t part thy Story; there is more trouble to splice it than the Tale is worth. I will have thee steer thy direct Course’ (16). Struggling against the current, W.P. resists the erosion of gender and class privilege in the marketplace for fiction. A crowded school of Crusoe’s followers swam with the current. The Adventures, and Surprizing Deliverances, of James Dubourdieu, and His Wife: Who Were Taken by Pyrates … Also the Adventures of Alexander Vendchurch … Written by Himself appeared in early October 1719. ‘Proper to be Bound in with Robinson Crusoe’ declared hopeful advertisements in the Daily Post (9 October) and Original Weekly Journal (10 October). The separately paginated Vendchurch story, like Crusoe’s, presents itself as a memoir. Written as a letter to a friend about a French man and his English wife encountered in Paris, the Dubourdieu story feminizes the Crusoe story, giving the wife’s name pride of place on the first page. In a trope shared with amatory fiction, she blames her youthful reading for her Crusoe-​like restlessness. Nearly as quick was Chetwood, soon to be one of Defoe’s booksellers. Defoe must have appealed to his bookshop’s fashionable clientele, for Chetwood followed his model closely in The Voyages, Dangerous Adventures and Imminent Escapes of Captain Richard Falconer … Written by Himself, now alive (December 1719, dated 1720) and The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle, in several parts of the world. Intermix’d with the story of Mrs. Villars, an English lady with whom he made his surprizing escape from Barbary (1726). Desperate to compete with Crusoe, Peter Longueville’s The Hermit (1727) strands its protagonist for fifty years! Its title-​page marriage to a whore

27 

The Jamaica Lady: or, the Life of Bavia (London, 1720), [A3v–​A4r].

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180   DAVID OAKLEAF and then three wives echoes the title of Colonel Jack, in which Jack ‘married four Wives, and five of them prov’d Whores’—​soon emended to ‘was Five times married to Four Whores’. Defoe came every bit as close as Haywood to establishing a formula. Fiction writers pandered shamelessly to an appetite for scandal. In 1723, Barker associated Crusoe not only with Moll Flanders and Col. Jack (neither known as Defoe’s) but also with Sally Salisbury, a courtesan much in the news between stabbing her aristocratic lover on 22 December 1722 and her trial for intended murder on 24 April 1723. An octavo volume for the libertine market—​it was priced at 2s. 6d.—​Authentick Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury by ‘Captain Charles Walker’ (February 1723) added a key identifying clients like Lord Bolingbroke to the second edition prompted by a competing shilling pamphlet, The genuine history of Mrs. Sarah Prydden, usually called, Sally Salisbury (May 1723). It has been recognized that Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress (February 1724)  answered Haywood’s Idalia; or The Unfortunate Mistress, published in three parts a year earlier (April–​June 1723). Less has been made of the likelihood that Haywood and Defoe were both exploiting this scandal. Advertised from early April, the first part of Idalia was issued on or near 24 April 1723, coinciding with Salisbury’s well-​publicized trial. The Fortunate Mistress (28 February 1724) appeared hard on the heels of her illness and death in Newgate Prison, to which she had been sentenced for assault.28 Defoe may have one eye on Idalia when he boasts in his Preface that ‘this Story differs from most of the Modern Performances of this Kind … in this Great and Essential Article, Namely, That the Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History’.29 But he fixes his other eye on a low scandal in high life. The unnamed but familiar subject of Walker’s epigraph—​attributed to the Earl of Rochester and quoted in some advertisements—​was Nell Gwyn who, like Defoe’s upwardly mobile Restoration courtesan, became a royal mistress. Readers’ curiosity extended to fashionable bagnios and bedrooms. The early marketing of her works to West End readers leads directly to Haywood’s later association with pornography and Covent Garden, site of her bookshop. If Haywood appeals more innocently to curiosity about contemporary life in A Spy upon the Conjuror (March 1724) and The Dumb Projector (May 1725), her works about the dumb philosopher Duncan Campbell, she targets public life more directly in the works that solidified her reputation for scandal, Memoirs of a Certain Island (September 1724, October 1725) and The Secret History of the Court of Caramania (September 1726). When Defoe’s and Haywood’s rivals make high moral claims, they are distancing themselves from scandal.30

28 

Barbara White, ‘Salisbury, Sarah (1690×92–​1724)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004), online edn., article 67088; Brean Hammond and Shaun Regan, Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–​1789 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 52–​3. 29  The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 10 vols., gen. ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008–​2009), vol. 9, 21; hereafter cited parenthetically by volume and page. 30  ‘A Panegyrick on Nelly’, Miscellaneous Works of … Rochester and Roscommon (London, 1707), 30; Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, 372–​7, 534–​5.

Testing the Market: Robinson Crusoe and After   181 The highest claims came from Penelope Aubin, Haywood’s and Defoe’s most prolific, thoughtful, and influential imitator. When Captain Boyle and Mrs. Villars escape from Muslim captivity in Barbary, for example, Chetwood is imitating Aubin as well as Defoe. Now often dismissed as a pious hack, Aubin was thoroughly professional. No sign of artless mediocrity, her providential plot also sustained Milton, Defoe, and Samuel Richardson. Her seven novels, collected in 1739 with a preface likely by Richardson, make her an important mediator between 1720s and later fiction.31 In The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil and His Family. Being an Account of what happened to them … at Constantinople (July 1721), Aubin took aim at Defoe’s readers: ‘As for the truth of what this narrative contains, since Robinson Crusoe has been so well received, which is more improbable, I know no reason why this should be thought a fiction.’ Geographic displacement and a title combining ‘adventures’ with ‘strange’ make the connection obvious. ‘If this trifle sells,’ she added, ‘I conclude it takes, and you may be sure to hear from me again.’32 Take it did, and Aubin returned. Like Defoe, she covers a lot of ground. The Noble Slaves (1722) shipwrecks two lords and two ladies. The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, an English Lady; taken from her own memoirs (1723)—​the encyclopaedic full title verges on parody—​combined far-​flung adventures with the Defoe claim of presenting another’s story: ‘The Story … I had from the Mouth of a Gentleman of Integrity, who related it as from his own Knowledge’.33 The Life and Adventures of the Lady Lucy (1726) opens in the north of Ireland during the Troubles before carrying the heroine to Germany. Its sequel, The life and adventures of the young Count Albertus (1728), takes Lucy’s son to Barbary and eventually to martyrdom for his faith in China. An Anglican with Catholic and French Huguenot connections, Aubin treats persecuted religious minorities with a rare sympathy that recalls Defoe’s treatment of the rescued French priest in Farther Adventures. Aubin borrows with flair. The Life of Madam de Beaumount, A French Lady; Who lived in a Cave in Wales above fourteen Years undiscovered, being forced to fly France for her Religion; and of the cruel Usage she had there (October 1721) domesticates Crusoe’s implausibly well-​stocked island as a cave complete with aristocratic French furniture and a skylight! Close to starving in the Welsh wilderness, her pious protagonist and her companions seize and stab the kid of a providential she-​goat: ‘They lick’d up the warm Blood, and eat the raw Flesh, more joyfully than they wou’d Dainties at another time, so sharp is Hunger!’ Awaking covered in snow, ‘they sat eating their strange Breakfast of raw Flesh’. Mary Rowlandson’s story of her North American captivity lurks with the Bible and Robinson Crusoe behind this scene, but Aubin can teach even Defoe something about the narrative uses of goats and caves.34 31 Prescott, Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 47–​51.

32  Penelope Aubin, The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil and his Family, in Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti (eds.), Popular Fiction by Women 1660–​1730: An Anthology (Oxford: OUP, 1996), 115. 33  The Life of Charlotta Du Pont … by Mrs. Aubin (London, 1723), p. v. 34  Penelope Aubin, The Life of Madam de Beaumount (London: E. Bell, J. Darby, A. Bettesworth, F. Fayram, J. Pemberton, J. Hooke, C. Rivington, F. Clay, J. Batley, E. Symon, 1721), 120–​1. For

182

182   DAVID OAKLEAF Aubin read Haywood attentively, too. ‘Very ambitious to gain the Esteem of those who honour Virtue’, Aubin nevertheless exploits lurid sexual situations. Although she often projects it on to oriental tyrants, she retains the masculine sexual aggression that is distressingly routine in Haywood. The Turkish lord who threatens to rape the Count de Vinevil’s daughter in front of her father, Chris Mounsey notes, sensationally creates a sexually charged image of cruelty that lingers in the imagination.35 The Life and Amorous Adventures of Lucinda, an English lady … Written by her self (dated 1722, advertised in the Post Boy and the Daily Post on 31 October 1721) promises amatory material embedded in a Defoe-​style pseudo-​autobiography; uniquely, it appeared without Aubin’s name on the title page. Pious but hardly obsessed with mere virginity, Aubin has the violated Eleanora marry her lover in The Noble Slaves. Once freed, Violetta in Count de Vinevil, who bore her Turkish kidnapper a child, marries the marquis who loves her—​but only after her captor dies. An embodiment of the landownership at the heart of gentry ideology, sexual possession remains inviolate in Aubin. She slights ‘other female Authors my Contemporaries, whose Lives and Writings have, I fear, too great a resemblance’ not for the sex but for an unchristian ‘Style careless and loose, as the Custom of the present Age is to live’.36 She resists, that is, Haywood’s enthusiastic modern style. On religious grounds, Aubin also contests Defoe’s modernity, as does Swift. At first taking ‘perfect green Barley’ and ‘Stalks of Ryce’ for ‘pure Productions of Providence for my Support’, Crusoe recalls ‘that I had shook a Bag of Chickens Meat out in that Place, and then the Wonder began to cease’. Later he accepts that ‘it was really the Work of Providence’ operating through a natural process, ‘as if it had been dropt from Heaven’ (vol. 1, 115). Aubin’s laboured providentialism deliberately rejects just this ‘human internalization of divinity’.37 Equally hostile, Swift detested the subordination of Church discipline to personality. Regarding Protestant Dissenters as infidels, he heard only cant in Crusoe’s nods to Providential deliverance. His shipwrecked narrator in Gulliver’s Travels therefore omits them. ‘There is no God in [Gulliver’s] prose’, John Mullan sees, diagnosing this as ‘a mockery of individualism’ and ‘the modern world of novels’. Defoe’s modernity makes unlikely bedfellows of Aubin and Swift.38 What writers appropriate and resist is ideologically fraught. The wilderness exile of Madam de Beaumount turns on a mother’s relationship with her daughter, a relationship that is hierarchical and mutually affectionate but not erotic. Haywood’s amatory fiction, by contrast, foregrounds the clash between mutual sexual desire and inequalities Rowlandson’s story, see her A True History of the Captivity & Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (London, 1682), 11. 35 

Chris Mounsey, ‘ “ … bring her naked from her Bed, that I may ravish her before the Dotard’s face, and then send his Soul to Hell”: Penelope Aubin, Impious Pietist, Humourist or Purveyor of Juvenile Fantasy?’, British Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies 26/​1 (2003), 55–​75. 36  The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, p. vi. 37  Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–​1740 (1987; repr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002), 332–​3. 38  John Mullan, ‘Swift, Defoe, and Narrative Forms’, in Steven N. Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650–​1740 (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), 251–​2, 269.

Testing the Market: Robinson Crusoe and After   183 imposed by gender and rank. Crusoe and Friday embody a relationship central to Whig contract theory, the relationship between master and slave or servant that Defoe feminizes in the Roxana–​Amy relationship. Locke had provocatively located servitude in the state of nature: ‘the Grass my Horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore I have digg’d’ all become personal property.39 Crusoe’s domestication of his island with the aid of a servant who owes him his life is as exemplary as the ideologically charged twenty-​eight-​year span that places Crusoe on his island between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution.40 Although an element of religious devotion informs Galesia’s desire for learning, however, Aubin’s sister novelists were not conspicuously pious. The god of amatory fiction is Cupid, imagined as a powerful, sometimes vindictive force. Haywood’s subject is not spiritual life or psychology. It is emotional turmoil, which need not spring from sexual passion or jealousy. The deftly framed stories in The Fruitless Enquiry (February 1727) reveal unsuspected agony at the heart of apparently happy domesticity. Anziana in its first story, like Miriam in The Fair Hebrew (1729), is threatened by her punitive family as she lies helpless in labour. Davys, a poor but respectable widow patronized by fellows and students of Cambridge University, reworked the amatory plot comically and tragically. The mentor lover’s reform of the heroine in The Reform’d Coquet became a narrative staple. In The Accomplish’d Rake (1727), she turned to brutal reality: her heroine agrees to marry her rapist only to safeguard the interests of their son. John Stephens published The Fruitless Enquiry and The Accomplish’d Rake a month apart and advertised them together in the Daily Post in late April, hopeful, perhaps, that Gulliver’s Travels revealed a market for social critique.41 For Swift’s anti-​novel triumphed in the marketplace. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, ‘By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships’, places itself subversively among Crusoe’s heirs while parodying 1720s fiction. Absurd court gossip about Gulliver’s affair with a Lilliputian lady perhaps apes scandal romance. The scene in which a female Yahoo sexually assaults Gulliver after watching him strip to bathe in a stream reverses genders to parody amatory fiction’s voyeurism. Swift’s parody of Crusoe is similarly deliberate. Convinced that only society and Church discipline can order personality, he particularly targets the mendacious truth claim at the heart of Defoe’s pseudo-​autobiographies. It slights his audacity to claim that ‘while [Defoe and Haywood] were involved in a market-​driven competition to locate a successful fictional product, Jonathan Swift found one serendipitously’.42 There was nothing serendipitous about it. 39 

[John Locke], Two Treatises of Government (London, 1690), 247. Richard Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660–​1730 (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 250. 41 Spedding, Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, 278–​80, 826; Stephens included a list of his recent publications in Davys’s novel. 42  Hammond and Regan, Making the Novel, 65, 80–​5. See also J. Paul Hunter, ‘Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel’, in Frederik N. Smith (ed.), The Genres of Gulliver’s Travels (London and Toronto: Associated UP, 1990), 66–​9. 40 

184

184   DAVID OAKLEAF Swift published Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World to display his continuing mastery of the literary marketplace. He had once claimed a place beside Joseph Addison and Richard Steele by parodying a low-​born, Dissenting almanac maker in the voice of the patrician Isaac Bickerstaff. He was now parodying Defoe, his low-​born, Dissenting fellow pamphleteer. Everything we know about the publication of Travels reveals Swift’s confidence: his return from Ireland after a dozen years to publish his masterpiece in London; his friends’ anticipation as word of his project spread; his playful collaboration with them; the high price he demanded for his book; and his eagerness back in Ireland to hear how his Travels took. His correspondence expresses not doubt of his success but nervousness about the political reaction. Nervous enough to bowdlerize some passages, as Swift indignantly discovered, Benjamin Motte was sure enough of success to pay the unprecedented sum of £200 to share the risk. Henry Fielding got slightly less for Joseph Andrews two decades later, the same price per volume for Tom Jones. Publishing his Travels anonymously, the Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin, could not avoid a trial of strength with the authors of Love in Excess and Robinson Crusoe. Prompted by Pope, Swift (as ‘Richard Sympson’) uncharacteristically demanded payment—​a fact as significant as the benchmark sum. In Defoe’s and Haywood’s marketplace, Swift triumphed. Published on 28 October 1726, complete with maps and a frontispiece portrait, Travels outdid even Crusoe in sales, reaching its third edition by Christmas, its fourth the following May, and a fifth, smaller format edition early in 1728. It was serialized and pirated in Dublin. A week after it appeared, John Arbuthnot wrote to Swift: ‘I will make over all my profits to yow, for the property of Gullivers Travells, which I believe will have as great a Run as John Bunian.’43 Like Swift, Arbuthnot shows no genteel reluctance to contemplate the sales that measure popularity. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is the only other pre-​Pamela fiction that compares in popularity with Crusoe. Pope’s poems on Gulliver’s homely domestic life show that Swift offered familiar pleasures, but Travels can be seen as the rock on which the ships sailing in Crusoe’s wake foundered. It made the devices of Defoe’s pseudo-​biographies recognizable and laughable, a satiric point Swift emphasized by adding the ‘Letter from Capt. Gulliver to His Cousin Sympson’ and the Horatian motto (Splendide Medax, ‘splendidly a liar’) to the 1735 Faulkner edition. Gildon had already exposed Defoe as a liar in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D—​-​De F–​, of London, Hosier, but Swift made him a byword for falsehood. In a narrative now accepted as genuine, Madagascar; or, Robert Drury’s Journal, During Fifteen Years Captivity on That Island … Written by Himself, Drury complains that his ‘plain, honest Narrative of Matter of fact’ will be ‘taken for such another Romance as Robinson Crusoe’. William Mackett testifies that Drury is ‘an honest, industrious Man, of good Reputation’, and asserts his faith that ‘the Account he gives of his Strange and Surprising Adventures, is Genuine and Authentick’.44 Gulliver had 43  The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., 4 vols., ed. David Woolley (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999–​2009), 3: 44. 44  Robert Drury, Madagascar; or, Robert Drury’s Journal (London: W. Meadows, J. Marshall, T. Worrall, and the author, 1729), pp. iii, ii.

Testing the Market: Robinson Crusoe and After   185 made such authenticating devices laughable, however, so Drury must disavow any connection with Crusoe while directing his strange and surprising adventures at its readers. Only after Crusoe was esteemed as fiction would a bookseller, Francis Noble, associate Defoe’s other novels with the author of Robinson Crusoe.45 Apart from such discredited conventions, Swift’s impact is hard to assess. He inspired imitation and attack. Pope attributed Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput. Written by Captain Gulliver (January 1727) to Haywood.46 A Voyage to Cacklogallinia: With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of that Country. By Captain Brunt (July 1727) and A Trip to the Moon. By Mr. Murtagh McDermot. Containing some Observations and Reflections … upon the Manners of the Inhabitants (Dublin; repr. London, 1728) respond to Swift’s novelty. Some Memoirs of the Amours and Intrigues of a certain Irish Dean, who Liv’d and Flourish’d in the Kingdom of Ireland (2 parts, 1728) exploits amatory conventions to attack Swift, perhaps the reason it too has been implausibly ascribed to Haywood.47 Although Haywood’s popular proto-​Gothic novel, The Distressed Orphan (May 1726) preceded Gulliver, The Fruitless Enquiry and Davys’s Accomplish’d Rake may reveal a Swiftian darkening. Travels may also have emboldened Haywood to satirize Hanoverian sexual intrigues in The Perplex’d Duchess (October 1727), published anonymously under a trade publisher’s imprint. Swift may have kicked a crumbling structure. Defoe apparently wrote no novels after New Voyage. Aubin and Davys each wrote only one novel after Travels. Although 1727 was a prolific year for Haywood, she too shows signs of testing a shifting market. The Fruitless Enquiry, Cleomelia, and The Agreeable Caledonian did well enough to be republished posthumously, but Love in Its Variety translates an older collection. An English eunuch’s tale provides a sensational Haywood touch, but enslavement in the eastern Mediterranean marks Philidore and Placentia; or, L’Amour Trop Delicat (1727) as an uncharacteristic exercise in Aubin’s mode. Escaping rape, Placentia reflects: ‘but Heaven provided better for me, and when I thought myself most abandon’d of its care, was nearest to me’.48 It was one of Haywood’s least successful works—​another sign that a fresh approach was wanted. Haywood’s play, Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-​Lunenburgh (1729), showed that the stage was becoming more lucrative than fiction.49 Aubin tried oratory and, with The Merry Masqueraders, or, The Humorous Cuckold (1730), the stage. Popular in a pious new mode, Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Friendship in Death (1728, 1731) turned from surprising adventures and emotional turbulence. Although the market for fiction faltered, the fiction written between Defoe’s innovation and Swift’s devastating parody established lasting patterns. The spirited contest between rival forms, evident in Defoe’s skirmish with older versions of the novel 45 

P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, ‘Defoe and Francis Noble’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 4/​4 (1992), 301–​13. 46 Spedding, Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, 647. 47 Spedding, Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, 658–​9. 48  Eliza Haywood, Philidore and Placentia; or, L’Amour trop Delicat. Part II (London: Tho. Green, 1727), 33. 49 Spedding, Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, 309.

186

186   DAVID OAKLEAF practised especially by women, would recur; witness Henry Fielding’s competition with Samuel Richardson, Sir Walter Scott’s with Jane Austen. Women maintained their importance as writers and readers of fiction. Richardson revitalized the amatory plot by eroticizing the master–​servant relationship and integrating it with his innovative reimagining of Defoe’s pseudo-​memoir as writing to the moment. Republished, Aubin’s novels and later Defoe’s linked 1720s fiction with later. So did Haywood’s return to fiction after Richardson and Fielding re-​energized it as she and Defoe had done in 1719. The inventive writers of the 1720s established enduring literary and commercial strategies.

Select Bibliography Backscheider, Paula R., Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1986). Barchas, Janine, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-​ Century Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 2003). Downie, J. A., ‘Mary Davys’s “Probable Feign’d Stories” and Critical Shibboleths about “The Rise of the Novel” ’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 12/​2–​3 (2000), 309–​26. Hammond, Brean S., Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–​1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Hunter, J. Paul., Before Novels:  The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990). Ingrassia, Catherine, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-​ Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: CUP, 1998). King, Kathryn R., ‘New Contexts for Early Novels by Women: The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians, 1719–​1725’, in Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (eds.), A Companion to the Eighteenth-​Century English Novel and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 261–​75. King, Kathryn R., ‘The Novel Before Novels (with a Glance at Mary Hearne’s Fables of Desertion)’, in Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (eds.), Eighteenth-​ Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms (London: Associated UP, 2001), 36–​57. McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–​1740 (rev. edn., Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins UP, 2002). Mullan, John, ‘Swift, Defoe, and Narrative Forms’, in Steven N. Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650–​1740 (Cambridge: CUP, 1998). Prescott, Sarah, Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 1690–​1740 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Turner, Cheryl, Living by the Pen:  Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992). Warner, William B., ‘Novels on the Market’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1600–​1780 (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 87–​105.

Chapter 12

Gulliver Effe c ts Clement Hawes

Gulliver’s Travels is a kissing cousin of the eighteenth-​century novel. In The Progress of Romance (1785), Clara Reeve classifies Swift’s text both as a novel and as among, in her words, ‘Stories Original and uncommon’.1 And while Swift’s debts to classical satirists such as Lucian and Apuleius are not in doubt, questions about the novelistic features of Gulliver’s Travels cannot be resolved merely by invoking classical precursors. Swift wrote, as they did not, in the wake of modern sailor-​narrators such as William Dampier, author of A New Voyage Round the World (1697), as well as their fictional counterparts. As Alan Downie points out, moreover, Gulliver’s Travels was still seen as a novel in 1824, when it appeared in volume 9 of Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library.2 The conventions of the novel, as Downie argues, were indeed not firmly consolidated until some fifty years after Swift wrote. With the exception of Michael McKeon, twentieth-​century critics have nevertheless been almost unanimous in viewing Gulliver as outside the genre and marginal to its formation. And since the appearance of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), as Deborah Baker Wyrick observes, ‘it has been difficult to place Gulliver’s Travels within a university course in the English novel’.3 Our anachronistic category has lacked the flexibility to deal with a text that simultaneously imitates and violently estranges so-​called reality. Indeed, the ahistorical privileging of a certain spectrum of realistic modes has unduly narrowed our literary historiography, excluding alternate possibilities that emerged along with them. Let us grant that the novel as a stable genre gets consolidated far later in the century than Watt had suggested. Defoe himself, meanwhile, may not be the ideal poster-​boy for the ‘formal realism’ that Watt associates with the novel. Consider causation in Robinson 1 

Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance through Times, Countries, and Manners, 2 vols. (Colchester and London, 1785), 2: 53. 2  Alan Downie, ‘Jonathan Swift and the Making of the English Novel’, in Hermann Real and Helgard Stöver-​Leidig (eds.), Reading Swift: Papers from the Third Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1988), 181. 3  Deborah Baker Wyrick, ‘Gulliver’s Travels and the Early English Novel’, in Peter J. Schakel (ed.), Critical Approaches to Teaching Swift (New York: AMS Press, 1992), 133.

188

188   CLEMENT HAWES Crusoe (1719). Crusoe receives, at a key juncture, a dream that foretells and sanctions his violence against Caribbean cannibals. The dream is a sort of ‘supernatural naturalism’ that mingles the divinely portentous with the morally queasy. And indeed, both the wish-​fulfilling appearance of the grateful Friday and the wealth that Crusoe accumulates through his Brazilian plantation push the genre, on Peter Hulme’s account, toward ‘colonial romance’.4 Defoe achieved a powerful verisimilitude—​that truism remains sound—​but not a fully secular realism. His characters are driven, fiercely, by economic motives: a persuasive approach to the hard facts of social reality. And yet Defoe’s cosmos, framed by radical Protestant assumptions, remains full of possible signs and supernatural portents. And so, in the world of early eighteenth-​century fiction, a certain verisimilitude is often no more than one of several strands—​along with fantasy, or romance, or providential causation—​braided into a given narrative. If we can see how the fantastic and the plausible may be figured together, the kaleidoscope shifts and rearranges the elements of literary history before our eyes. The precise constituents of ‘realism’, as a category of literary historiography, cannot be taken for granted. The discourse of natural philosophy, meanwhile, was not always a model of sober, scrupulous, and reliable observation. Bacon’s recommendation that experimental philosophers focus on ‘monsters’ as well as on natural regularities had led the early Royal Society to ‘accounts of strange lights in the sky, two-​headed cats, a luminescent shank of veal, [and] prodigious sleepers who slumbered for weeks on end’.5 This is not even to mention the fact that the Royal Society’s brightest luminaries, Sir Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, had separately dedicated themselves to a hugely time-​consuming quest for the Philosopher’s Stone. As readers in the twenty-​first century, we cannot read the scientific discourse of a later time back into its less-​than-​rigorous beginnings. Early science was a threshold phenomenon: a natural philosophy inflected by alchemical fantasies and monster-​mongering. In the focus of early science on dubious anomalies Swift spotted satirical daylight: a major opening in the self-​legitimating claim to represent the real and the rational. The impulse towards a neat opposition between Swift and Defoe, moreover, has obscured their joint context: their overlapping place, in the 1720s, on a continuum of narrative modes that includes everything from spiritual autobiography (after Bunyan) to farcical grotesquery (after Rabelais). Swift’s satire of voyage literature is directed above all at contemporary narratives, including Robinson Crusoe, which purported to be empirically true. Since Gulliver’s detailed reportage includes talking horses and flying islands, however, Swift preserves the referential ‘style’ of formal realism, as Downie puts it, ‘without the content’.6 At the same time, Gulliver is indeed a character in the novelistic sense: a carefully situated ego, with particular traits such as wanderlust, a strong memory, and a great facility with 4  Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–​1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 208. 5  Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 67. 6  Downie, ‘Swift and the Making of the English Novel’, 184–​5.

Gulliver Effects   189 languages. Gulliver, moreover, is visibly transformed by the impact of his experiences. To wit: he reflects in Brobdingnag on how coarse his own skin must have appeared to the acute vision of the Lilliputians. One cannot square such marked interiority with the notion that Gulliver is a satiric device only:  a mask that obeys, say, the conventions of Menippean satire.7 Indeed, precisely this novel-​like interiority makes for the vertigo of Gulliver’s devolution, after the voyage to Houyhnhnmland, into a would-​be Houyhnhnm. For would-​be novelists of the eighteenth century, Gulliver’s Travels was a work to be reckoned with, pushed against, adapted, extended, purified, and translated into new registers. Because ‘influence’ is by no means so transparent a phenomenon, however, we must cast a broader net.8 This essay tries, in this broader vein, to tease out some of the ways in which the legacy of Gulliver’s Travels reverberated in the eighteenth-​century novel. Time and again important eighteenth-​century novels, in the manner of Gulliver’s Travels, present reality itself as a manifold. Intensify workaday reality sufficiently, indeed, and it mutates into something else: the surreal close-​up, say, of a grainy human breast 16 feet in circumference. The deeper ‘truth’ to which the early novel aspires thus sometimes threatens to overwhelm ordinary reportage. Above all, the gestation period of the novel includes Swift no less than Defoe: an insight that may serve to move us past a just-​the-​facts literalism that still sometimes hamstrings efforts at writing the history of the early novel. And though the early novel is often viewed through the rear-​view mirror of a realism fully realized only in the nineteenth century, eighteenth-​century approaches to the real often remained Gulliverian: interwoven with supernatural, surreal, and absurdist tropes.

Nobody Here Before the appearance of Gulliver, fictional narratives—​Defoe’s works are again the most distinguished example—​typically claimed to be true. Given this background, one possible ‘Gulliver effect’, no less important for being necessarily speculative, deserves notice. The number of new novels appearing annually gradually declined between the publication of Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740—​indeed, according to McBurney’s Checklist, no new novels were published in 1738, only translations.9 The emerging form seems to have gone into hibernation. What could have determined this dormancy? Certain contingencies, to be sure: Delarivier Manley died in 1724; 7 

Northrop Frye terms Gulliver’s Travels a ‘Menippean satire’. See Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957), 303. 8  The entire critical oeuvre of Harold Bloom, dealing with novels as well as poems, exists to demonstrate this premise. 9  See William Harlin McBurney, A Checklist of English Prose Fiction 1700–​1739 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1960), 105–​6. I am grateful to Alan Downie for this point (personal communication). See also Michael Cox (ed.), The Concise Chronology of English Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 194–​210.

190

190   CLEMENT HAWES Defoe, having capped his novelistic career in 1724 with Roxana, died in 1731. And before the theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 finally nudged Fielding into writing novels, he had been a playwright and journalist. But such contingencies do not explain all. After publishing numerous volumes of fiction of various kinds during the 1720s, particularly ‘secret histories’, in the ensuing decade Eliza Haywood restricted herself to Love-​Letters on All Occasions, Lately passed between Persons of Distinction (1730), and the romance-​satire hybrid, The Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo: A Pre-​Adamitical History (1736). Did Swift’s satirical intervention somehow produce a temporary silence—​a publishing slump lasting about fourteen years—​among those labouring in the vineyard of fictional prose? As regards the post-​Gulliver muteness of the novel, the question of the ‘Gulliver effect’ can only be speculative. And yet, when the novel re-​emerged from that silence it ceased claiming to be anyone’s literally true history. Fiction was content to be fictive: something made up, fabricated. Gulliver’s Travels had forced the novel to grow up.

Nobody Here But Us Necroromancers Henry Fielding’s A Journey from This World to the Next (1743) isolates, extends, and recasts a mock-​epic episode in Gulliver’s Travels; it abandons a common-​sense realism in order to pursue a Gulliver-​like absurdism. Although the Swiftian text with which it is usually discussed is A Tale of a Tub (1704), Fielding’s satire has a Gulliverian subtext. The Journey is an ironic travelogue that uses metaphysical ‘travel’—​the transmigration of souls—​as its essential plot device. Drawing from Plato’s Myth of Er in Book 10 of The Republic (perhaps as relayed through William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses in 1738), Fielding produces a picaresque account of recycled souls. As in Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) Fielding experiments here with ways of reframing the illusionistic effects of realist representation. A Journey, which appeared in the same three-​volume set of miscellanies as The Life of Jonathan Wild, can be seen as a novella. It playfully challenges, through reincarnation, the metaphysical notion of what constitutes an individual character or narrator. Though mock-​heroic satire is one strain Fielding brings to the collective invention of the novel, what Fielding masters in his early metafiction is how to write novels that complicate, like Gulliver’s Travels, both the protocols of formal realism and its claims to veracity. Fielding’s response to a particular version in Gulliver’s Travels of a familiar classical topos—​a magical encounter with the underworld—​especially helps to place Swift’s satire within the history of the novel. ‘In Glubdubdribb,’ Frank Palmeri writes, ‘Gulliver discovers that those celebrated as the greatest heroes in ancient and modern history were in fact the greatest criminals.’ This dark insight Gulliver applies, in Palmeri’s words, ‘to all historiography, secular as well as sacred, ancient as well as modern’.10 That Fielding 10 

Frank Palmeri, Satire, History, Novel: Narrative Forms, 1665–​1815 (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2003), 121.

Gulliver Effects   191 picks up such a supernatural episode, from a book that generally proceeds by way of an ostentatious parading of the factual, speaks to a metaphysical strain frequently played down in histories of the early British novel. The narrator of A Journey initially travels in a coach made from a substance so ether­ eal that, like needle and thread in Lilliput, it is invisible. Unlike Gulliver’s Travels, however, the Journey is not primarily set in the sublunary world. The novella’s first sentence thus plays on the double meaning of depart. Returning to the other world every time he ‘departs’, the narrator of A Journey travels, as it were, through successive reincarnations, with the most recent journey beginning in 1741. Fielding ignores Christianity by way of pagan literary tradition. This tradition he elaborates such that historical personages of the Christian faith experience a pagan afterlife. As in metempsychosis, the narrator of Journey is reborn, time after time; but (not having drunk from the River Lethe) he is able to remember, and so to narrate, his past lives. Most of the reincarnations are no more than a chapter long, and many are no more than a paragraph. One of the effects of covering so many lifetimes is of course to generate a perspective whose scale is mind-​ boggling for individuals. The ultimate goal is release from the wheel of earthly existence into Elysium. The judge of the underworld, King Minos, who sentences souls to new incarnations (‘lots in life’), functions himself, through such fitting decisions, as a sort of satirist. We are informed that a certain banker, for example, must be ‘purified’ in the body of a hog for seven years before he can be reborn in human form.11 Fielding’s text can be seen at such moments as an important way station between Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, which cultivates the ‘judicial metaphor’ typical of satire,12 and the achievement of Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). The Journey extends the range of the novel to things unseen. Another strain of Gulliver’s journey beyond realism that Fielding extends to great effect, both in A Journey from This World to the Next and in his better-​known works, is metafictive irony. The Journey thus complicates personhood and reframes the empirical world of physical ‘laws’. Indeed, the metaphysical apparatus of the Journey permits a stronger point than the mere observation that here Fielding, as so often, subverts formal realism with metafiction. So he does: the layered ontologies in the Journey, as in many religious traditions, render the claims of mundane empiricism relative. The sheer complexity of ontological levels in the Journey can indeed be gauged by Ronald Paulson’s comment about the significance in Fielding’s novella of the historical personage, Julian, whose own narrative includes some twenty incarnations: ‘There is in fact a veritable Chinese box of commentaries here—​Fielding the author on the outside, the I of the narrative, Julian in heaven, Julian in each of his metamorphoses, and finally the other people involved in each metamorphosis.’13 Among well-​known frame tales, The Arabian Nights may be the only one that exceeds this multiplicity of stacked levels. The 11 

Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq., ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar and Hugh Amory, ii (Oxford and Hanover, NH: OUP and UP of New England/​Wesleyan UP, 1993), 15. 12  Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-​Century England (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1967), 95–​9. 13 Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-​Century England, 93.

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192   CLEMENT HAWES ‘heart of the matter’, as Italo Calvino writes of such multiply framed tales, is ‘the successive layers of subjectivity and feigning that we can discern under the author’s name, and the various “I”s that go to make up the “I” who is writing’.14 The narrator of the Journey, in his encounter with Julian the Apostate—​so called because he rejected Christianity in favour of his original pagan theology—​is confronted with the multiplicity of layered identities to which this ‘character’ belongs.15 Since the very cosmos of Fielding’s fiction is alien to Christian ontology, we cannot reasonably object to Julian’s abandonment of the faith. This same soul, in any case, was later incarnated as Archbishop Latimer, martyred at Oxford in 1555. He was also reborn as a long line of individuals defined by their occupation. The result is a Swiftian catalogue of reincarnations. Julian has been all of the following: ‘a Slave, a Jew, a General, an Heir, a Carpenter, a Beau, a Monk, a Fidler, a wise Man, a King, a Taylor, an Alderman, a Poet, a Knight, a Dancing-​Master, and three times a Bishop’ (39). The catalogue is wholly miscellaneous. Satirical levelling overlaps with metaphysics, with things unseen. The use of narrative to emphasize ruptures in ‘identity’ inflects the genre towards Gulliverian metamorphoses and (to anticipate Fielding’s own controversial practice of character-​development) morally ‘mixed’ characters. To delve deeper into the creative exchange between Fielding and Swift we must consider the latter’s absurdist sensibility. Swift counters the literary claim to deliver reality with something like the humeur noire practised in twentieth-​century surrealism: for starters, a grotesque account of micro-​and macro-​people embedded within po-​faced reportage. He provides a vision infinitely beyond any trompe l’œil notion of realistic mimesis. On McKeon’s account, the dialectic of the novel’s development moves from realism (which challenges romance) to extreme scepticism (which challenges realism and exposes it as naive in its own right). However, McKeon’s blanket characterization of sceptical authors as ideologically conservative is too one-​dimensional.16 Moreover, the dreamscape of Gulliver does not seem adequately described in terms of philosophical scepticism. The tone of Gulliver—​Swift’s consummate black humour—​exceeds the more philosophically inflected varieties of scepticism in the air: it is more akin to the theatre of the absurd. According to Joshua Foa Dienstag, a ‘pessimistic’ sensibility objects, ‘via the language of the “absurd” ’, to ‘the widely shared model of a universe predisposed to being subdued’.17 Swift’s absurdism is, in precisely this sense, a pessimistic intervention. In Fielding’s presentation of identification as a process—​not necessarily continuous or organic—​he extends, for the history of the novel, a major ‘Gulliver effect’. For even as Swift engaged with Robinson Crusoe, he sandbagged a concept generally seen as central to the early novel: the representation of the singular, insular, and integral individual, the subject of an individually owned experience. So scrupulous is Gulliver 14 

Italo Calvino, ‘Levels of Reality in Literature’, in The Literature Machine, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Vintage Books, 1997), 111. 15  See the treatment of layered consciousness in Martin Price, Forms of Fiction: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983). 16  Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–​1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), 21. 17  Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethics, Spirit (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 35.

Gulliver Effects   193 about telling us everything in his experience, for instance, that he notoriously informs us as to the awkward details of his bowel movements in Lilliput. Another key example of such sabotage—​Gulliver’s strange ‘conversion’ among the Houyhnhnms—​foreshadows, in Fielding’s Journey, the apostasies of Julian. Radically refashioned by a sudden conversion, Gulliver becomes divided against his own kind. His burgeoning misanthropy puts him on the fringe of human society. So much for the presumptive coherence of subjectivity! Extending this sense of the plastic, pliable, and often-​refolded nature of identity, Fielding develops in the Journey a radically different way of seeing ‘character’. Fielding’s narrator, though ‘first-​person’, is metaphysically revealed as plural. His pluralized ‘I’ encompasses, within one continuous memory, various bodies and serial lives, rather like the annular rings that mark the layered growth of a tree. The narrators of both tales push strongly against the easy continuity of identities that personal names and pronouns may impose. Fielding’s encompassing project as a novelist is indeed to undermine the sense that a single genre or style could provide a transcript of unmediated reality. Such a literary project owes something crucial to his engagement with Gulliver’s Travels, and not least to the paratextual ‘Letter to Cousin Sympson’, which calls the main text into doubt. Should Brobdingnag really be spelled Brobdingrag?18 The integrity of texts as artefacts, like the sanity of narrators, cannot be taken for granted. Fielding’s self-​reflexivity can be seen as responding to the framing paratexts of Gulliver’s Travels. As a material artefact, the text of Journey purports to be a lost and fragmentary manuscript, imperfectly rescued from its ignominious use by a stationer as wrapping paper for pens. That Fielding validates it with a reference to a real stationer in London recalls Gulliver’s reference, towards the end of his travelogue, to the real William Dampier as ‘Cousin Dampier’: a hint that they are brother fabulists under the skin. Fielding’s tip of the hat to Robert Powney functions both as friendly publicity and as a deliberate superimposition of ontological levels. Another Gulliver-​like inflection in Fielding’s Journey is its evocation of vulnerabilities about sexual being—​the embodied level of human existence—​especially as it impacts genealogical legitimacy and historical reputations. The symbolism of union, the negotiation of consent, and the threat of impurity all make this substrate of existence both political in itself and a rich mine of political symbols. Recall that Gulliver feels compelled to deny what we assume to be impossible: that he had an affair with a certain Lilliputian lady. His indignation on behalf of her honour seems absurd. Even so, the absurdity of this rumoured affair is perhaps meant to be relative. After all, in Brobdingnag a parallel difference of size does not prevent casual sexual toying with Gulliver by the ladies-​ in-​waiting. Among other activities left unspecified, he is set astride one frisky young woman’s gigantic nipple, which he rides like a surreal hobby horse. One suspects that the difference of size makes the sexual activities, whatever they may be, that much more piquant, at least for the randy and rambunctious ladies. Among the edgiest features of Gulliver’s Travels is Gulliver’s specifically sexual disgust. This Fielding elaborates in A

18 

[Jonathan Swift], The Works of J.S, D.D, D.SD.P. In Four Volumes (Dublin, 1735), 3: p. v.

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194   CLEMENT HAWES Journey from This World to the Next. One of Fielding’s more intriguing inventions in Journey is to end the fragmented tale with the narrator’s transmigration into the body of Anne Boleyn. Her role in the Protestant Reformation is of course not demonized, as in Catholic historiography, but she finds her royal status, as queen to Henry VIII, no great prize. Far from it: when my Coronation was over, and I  was raised to the Height of my Ambition, instead of finding myself happy, I was in reality more miserable than ever; for besides that the Aversion I had naturally to the King was much more difficult to dissemble after Marriage than before, and grew into a perfect Detestation, my Imagination, which had warmly pursued a Crown, grew cool when I was in the possession of it, and gave me time to reflect what I had gained by all this Bustle; and I often used to think of myself in the case of the Fox-​hunter, who when he was toiled and sweated all day in the Chace, as if some unheard-​of Blessing was to crown his Success, finds, at last, all he has got by his Labour is a stinking nauseous Animal. (115)

The summary comment on this passage seems especially reminiscent of Gulliverian disgust: ‘But my Condition was yet worse than his; for he leaves the loathsome Wretch to be torn by his Hounds, whilst I was obliged to fondle mine, and meanly pretend him to be the Object of my Love’ (115). One can only wince at this approach to the sexually unspeakable: it is impossible not to read it, along with ‘stinking nauseous Animal’, as a ‘Gulliver effect’. In the passage from A Journey just quoted, Fielding figures unwanted sex through analogy to an archaic rural sport. The system that put Anne Boleyn in bed with Henry VIII, despite his ongoing marriage to Catherine of Aragon, was in no way concerned with her consent. But there is a further point. Henry VIII had ensured, through his behaviour, that there could be no heroic myth of origins for the Church of England. Consider, by way of contrast, the precedent described in the New Testament. Punning in Matthew on St. Peter’s name in New Testament Greek, Jesus says: ‘Thou art Peter [Petros], and upon this rock [petra] I will build my church’ (Matthew 16:18). Peter is a sufficiently worthy foundation stone. Hence the rub: Henry VIII is comparably foundational for the Church of England. However, he seems firmly ‘stony’ only in his ruthless dispatching of unfruitful wives, including Anne Boleyn. For both Swift and Fielding satire seems inherent in the founding of the Church of England in 1534 by a serial queen-​ killer. As the founding stone begins to look more like a stumbling block, the problem of legitimacy emerges. The particular resonance of the plot of Tom Jones turns on a sophisticated reworking of the logic of legitimation. And perhaps we can see Tom’s ultimate legitimation as Squire Allworthy’s heir—​bastard or not—​as a Gulliver effect. Anglicans are not mere acolytes of the beastly Henry, whose body and actions stink. And even at the price of breaking the Stuart’s dynastic succession, the House of Hanover can be legitimated on the throne. And we must remember as well that the nasty Yahoos degenerated from a divine origin. That origin is not essence is a crucial aperçu of Tom Jones. If one can

Gulliver Effects   195 degenerate from high origins, one can also rise above low ones. Meanwhile, the institution of arranged marriage at its worst, as in Squire Western’s odious plans for Sophia, can have overtones of sanctioned rape. We regard Blifil, as seen through Sophia’s eyes, as disgusting; we regard the Jacobites as his political equivalent in terms of class politics; and so an archaic lack of consent threatens on multiple levels simultaneously.

Nobody Here But Us Geldings In Tristram Shandy (1759–​67) we find a central avatar, and a second telling example, of the eighteenth-​century Gulliverian intertext: a novel in which reality remains conspicuously and resolutely absurd. One can pinpoint a specifically Gulliver-​like strain of humour that is simultaneously bawdy and noirish. It is a matter, once again, of layering: as the onion of memory is peeled, Tristram’s familial wounds, his sexual disability, and his denial of the latter all swim into view. And though Sterne’s debt to Swift is thoroughly acknowledged, that debt is usually understood to reside in the affiliation of Tristram Shandy with A Tale of a Tub (1704). One needs instead to speculate about possible Gulliver effects in terms of masculinity, warfare, and humeur noire. Sterne develops in particular a satirical theme already present in Gulliver’s Travels in which war and the masculine quest for glory are exposed in all their patriotic gore. That Sterne’s dedication to William Pitt may be ironically intended emerges from context: as prime minister, Pitt, a self-​conscious imperialist, had overseen Britain’s costly victory over France in the Seven Years War. Sterne continues, from a different angle, the disenchanting account of war in Gulliver’s Travels. In listing all the motives that lead a prince to choose war, Gulliver produces a catalogue that is endless in principle: the balance of power is equal; the balance of power is unequal; my neighbour is too strong; my neighbour is weak; and so on. Swift depicts a mandarin ruling class making such calculations without the slightest emotions. As for commoners, he shows us a humanity that glorifies mass destruction and unabashedly delights in it as a spectacle. To the horror of the Master Houyhnhnm, Gulliver blandly describes the delight of spectators to a battle as human body-​parts rain down from the clouds around them. This is the import of Gulliver’s Travels: we take violence in our stride as entertaining. To war we devote the lion’s share of human intelligence, planning, manpower, resources, and technical ingenuity. In casually offering the secret of making gunpowder to the King of Brobdingnag, Gulliver fully inhabits, just as Swift entirely estranges, such a licensed and normative viciousness. As regards organized violence, Sterne’s novel especially highlights the relevance of male impotence. The narrator Tristram himself seems to experience an accidental penectomy. While he is a boy of 5, a window sash slams down on his penis while he is attempting, with the aid of his nurse, to urinate out the window. Although readers are never certain precisely how bad the damage is, we cannot but be chilled by the implications of the following statement. Tristram’s father Walter decides, in his

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196   CLEMENT HAWES words, to ‘put him, however, into breeches … let the world say what it will’.19 Given the death in war of Bobby, Tristram’s older brother, this accident may also represent the end of the family line. Tristram participates in a family pattern of sexual doom. His Uncle Toby, a shell-​shocked veteran, suffers from a mysterious war-​wound to his groin. A cannonball landed too near Toby, breaking a parapet that then wounded him. The Widow Wadman, a prospective wife, is preoccupied with ascertaining the nature and scope of this wound. Even the Shandy family bull is infertile. Sexual disability becomes a governing metaphor in Tristram Shandy, resonating strongly, for example, with the narrator’s inability to master his own story. Sterne makes satirical hay by exploiting the tragic-​comic gap between actual male biological equipment and the cultural role—​in patronymic naming practices, for example—​of the phallus as a symbol of patriarchal authority. If authority settles conflicts through organized violence—​seldom without a display of phallic bullying—​the outcome is often dismal for the biological equipment of individual males. And if the story is, as Yorick says in the novel’s final sentence, about ‘A COCK and a BULL’ (2: 809), the cock, so to speak, gets gored. Sterne’s novel begins, famously, with an act of coitus interruptus:  the begetting of Tristram, supposedly botched from the start by the unlucky scattering of the ‘animal spirits’ that occurs during the crucial moment. Even this odd tale assumes what the story intimates may not in fact be true: that Walter Shandy is indeed the biological father of Tristram. No matter: either way, Shandy males are less than adequate. The novel indeed explores in depth the costs, individual and social, of masculinity and its contradictions. Now consider the incident in which Gulliver—​a giant in Lilliput—​stands like a Colossus while Lilliputians march between his legs, as if he were a living victory arch. Glimpses of his penis, visible through a rip in his breeches, inspire awe in the Lilliputian onlookers. Gulliver’s flashing cock is of course improper, but it is also enormous, fantastic, mighty. Part of the overlay of jokes here is our sense that the incident may appeal to Gulliver’s masculine vanity. The vainglory of this episode is of course deflated by the abjection of his erotic abuse in Brobdingnag. A worse abjection comes in Part IV when Gulliver is molested, or even raped, by the female Yahoo. Gulliver’s Travels and Tristram Shandy share an impulse to demystify the phallus, to underline its unsuitability as a symbol of unflagging omnipotence. The term ‘hobby horse’ becomes a synonym in Tristram Shandy for individual eccentricities, most of which seem tied to wounded masculinity: to what goes, like a hobby horse, between one’s legs. That psychosexual wound, in a vicious cycle, perhaps in turn helps to generate the desire to dominate, to make war, and all the rest. There is reason enough, even without exploring Sterne’s signature ‘hobby horse’ theme, to read this tangle of threads in Tristram Shandy by way of a Gulliverian intertext. As a satire, Tristram Shandy operates like the proverbial bucket of cold water on

19  Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, 3 vols. (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1978–​84), 2: 522.

Gulliver Effects   197 tumescent pride. Tristram Shandy observes that ‘nothing was well hung in our family’ (1: 449). Although he is ostensibly referring to the fatal window sash, the double entendre is clear. And indeed, the accident of the window sash is in a sense ‘caused’ by the familial curse. Uncle Toby, whose wound has left him with a compulsion to re-​enact battle-​scenes on his lawn, has appropriated for his military models the window’s lead counterweight: the device that would ordinarily keep it from suddenly slamming down. A physical trauma to Uncle Toby’s groin creates in him a neurotic compulsion. That compulsion then leads, as if by contagion, to a comparable physical wounding of his nephew: Tristram is seemingly, in current parlance, Bobbitized. Sterne’s exploration of the costs of war is more ‘novelistic’ than Swift’s: more alert to costs that persist even in the next generation. Tristram is thus shell-​shocked at one remove. His narrative eventually breaks into three different temporalities, so that he is, as it were, in three different places ‘at the same time’. Rather than the ‘body-​in-​ pieces’ of a human infant before it achieves the premature gestalt of an imagined ego, Sterne gives us, so to speak, a temporally fragmented narrator: a narrator-​in-​pieces. The memories of Tristram’s childhood are never properly joined to the writing ‘now’ of his adulthood; and, in fact, much of his autobiographical account concerns not his ‘own’ life but that of his Uncle Toby. Sterne’s novel pulls apart the joints—​the articulation of separate generations and chronologically arranged memories—​that permit the novel to abstract any single strand alone from the intertwined tangle of human lives. Set against Swift’s emphases in Gulliver’s Travels, Sterne’s mode of zigzagging irony comes into sharp focus. Sterne reflects critically on the double bind of masculinity: the very emphasis on masculinity that was used to recruit men into military service could not infrequently lead, through the misfortunes of combat, to its grotesque opposite: a maiming of one’s physical manhood. Uncle Toby, as the Widow Wadman’s pointed inquiries imply, may well have been unmanned. The Widow thus wants to know precisely where Uncle Toby was wounded—​a question he disingenuously answers by pointing to a map. Toby is of course too traumatized to speak of this matter. To venture one sort of answer to the Widow’s question, masculinity itself seems to impose a peculiar sort of psychic wound: an impossible demand to master vulnerability. ‘Defence mechanisms’ are, for sufficiently obvious reasons, conspicuous in Tristram Shandy. The wound of Tristram’s ‘accidental circumcision’ is foreshadowed in the mishaps befalling his nose at birth and, from his father’s eccentric viewpoint, his accidentally truncated given name. Tristram, especially from the perspective of his disappointed father, is jinxed. That plot-​developments verging on castration can be funny seems a Sterneian discovery. A ‘figurative’ castration proves to be universal. Somewhat in this same vein of black humour, everyone at the court of Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels is devoted to ‘leaping and creeping’, to assuming contorted and acrobatic postures within the pecking order at court. Universal castration: before Freud and Lacan, there were Swift and Sterne; and we can take Sterne’s novelistic elaboration of this key trope as a detumescent ‘Gulliver effect’.

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Nobody Here But Us Curmudgeons The satire created by Tobias Smollett in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) provides a third pertinent example of a novel that appropriates and recombines Gulliverian elements. For Smollett, as for Swift, the seeming promise of treating embodied human life in a physical world—​that a shared reality could be acknowledged and inhabited—​ remains troubled by implications of inequality. In exposing the impact on social relations of luxurious commodities, Smollett amplifies the curmudgeonly voice of the alienated Gulliver, self-​banished to dwell in a stable with horses. Travelling throws into relief the differences between those tied to the local and those enjoying a cosmopolitan existence. The travelogue and its fictional analogues confront, as a matter of course, tensions between vernacular culture and the financial realities of Continental and transatlantic exchange. Far-​fetched goods permitted the English elite to luxuriate precisely in their distance from all things local. Smollett’s ringing denunciation of luxury in Humphry Clinker amplifies and moralizes this note in Swift. Gulliver, as we recall, assures the Master Houyhnhnm ‘that this whole Globe of Earth must be at least three times gone round, before one of our better female Yahoos could get her Breakfast, or a Cup to put it in’ (229). Trade and commerce are but old luxury writ large. So much for globalization! The prerogatives of elite luxury of course included both travel and the engrossing of items, such as porcelain and tea, fetched from afar. Accessible only to a few, the Grand Tour, usually involving travel in both France and Italy, was essential to cap the education of the English elite. That Smollett ventriloquizes his ranting critique in the voice of a prickly old curmudgeon, the Welshman Matthew Bramble, is doubtless likewise a Gulliver effect—​a refined version of the ranting Gulliver who lives in a stable. Bramble’s age and Welsh sensibility provide him with a certain distance on the commercial priorities and achievements of southern England. But how should one present so irascible a voice? Smollett had earlier published a grouchy version of the Grand Tour, Travels through France and Italy (1763–​5), in his own voice, in which he found abroad little to write home about. Sterne had then wickedly parodied the peevish Smollett as ‘The Learned Smelfungus’ in A Sentimental Journey (1768). Smollett’s recovery in Humphry Clinker (1771) depends on the Gulliverian trope of the satirist satirized, which enabled Smollett—​by way of the curmudgeonly Bramble—​to present an amusing and yet effective critique of contemporary values in commercial Britain. For satirists such as Smollett and Swift, literary travel sets up perspectives that are promising for the satiric goal of distancing: making the familiar strange. Japan, it is worth recalling, is the one ‘real’ country to which Gulliver travels in Gulliver Travels: perhaps a tongue-​in-​cheek comment on British ignorance of the former. Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) is likewise set in ancient Japan, which functions, of course, as a thin veil for contemporary Britain. The text belongs to the eighteenth-​century subgenre of ‘It-​Narratives’: stories told from the perspective of a subhuman object such as

Gulliver Effects   199 a coin or a lapdog.20 Atom is also a roman à clef satirizing the architects, such as Pitt, of the Seven Years War. Japan notwithstanding, Atom is primarily set inside various organs of the human body, and so it happens that Smollett, in terms of scatology, out-​Swifts Swift. Whatever is most intolerable about Gulliver’s voyage to Brobdingnag—​his tripping headlong into a gargantuan cowpat, for example—​is of course intensified by the relative tininess of Smollett’s atom. If Swift notoriously provides us in Gulliver’s Travels with an ‘excremental’ vision of humanity, Smollett similarly provides us with a claustrophobically ‘intestinal’ vision. Smollett means to show us the irritable bowels, as it were, of that grumbling and gaseous organism, the body politic.

Nobody Here But Us Monkeys Lord Rochester’s famous portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, in which he crowns a monkey with laurels while gazing languidly out at the viewer, launched a richly developed ‘monkey-​man’ theme for seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century British arts and letters. Swift’s simian Yahoos are meant to do for the species what Rochester did for himself and the peerage. Such an attack on the species-​being of humanity is of course precisely why Swift has so often been accused of misanthropy. And indeed, the typical Gulliverian recognition scene, as opposed to the gratifying recognition trope in romance, discloses not concealed noble birth but disavowed kinship with a species regarded as distant. The King Kong-​like scene in Part II of Gulliver’s Travels, wherein a huge Brobdingnagian monkey perches atop a high roof and force-​feeds Gulliver, is highly apropos. Her maternal instinct, like the later sexual desire of the amorous female Yahoo, serves to confirm the disavowed nature of Gulliver. He belongs, as do we, with the humanoid primates. Before Darwin there was Swift; and perhaps Freud should have considered the latter when cataloguing the great wound-​givers to human narcissism. Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud have little on Swift.21 ‘Before Copernicus and Galileo’, as Edward Dolnick points out, human beings saw themselves as central, if badly so: ‘the center was a shameful, degraded place’.22 In Swift’s poem from the 1730s, ‘The Day of Judgment’, however, God simply cannot be bothered to judge humankind. Humanity is not so much thrillingly evil as insignificant. At any rate, eighteenth-​century novelists learned from Rochester and Swift—​not to mention Lord Monboddo23—​that a monkey makes for a discomfiting sort of mirror. 20  See Mark Blackwell, The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-​Narratives in Eighteenth-​ Century England (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2007). 21  Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-​Analysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 353. 22  Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, The Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World (New York: Harper, 2011), 112. 23  In the course of his six-​volume opus, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773–​92), Monboddo provocatively connects humanity to the orang-​utan.

200

200   CLEMENT HAWES This is why Francis Burney’s Captain Mirvan, towards the end of Evelina (1778), dresses a monkey up like an aristocrat and unleashes it, as a prank, on the unsuspecting guests at an elegant party. Here, then, is a fourth Gulliver effect: Burney’s monkey-​business widens its representation of manners to explore class antagonisms. Burney’s appropriation of this simian motif in the riotous conclusion to Evelina sharpens a cultural perception that British aristocrats merely ‘ape’ the mighty French aristocracy. As the French careen towards their revolution of 1789, British national feeling, as Burney suggests, likewise has a strong component of ressentiment: not merely a matey camaraderie, as per the usual fraternal language of eighteenth-​century nationalism, but a resentful repudiation of domination from above by elements that seem ‘foreign’. Captain Mirvan personifies such ressentiment. The captain’s direct-​action ‘satire’ expresses hatred for precisely those Englishmen who aspire, above all, to be French. No less than in Rochester’s joke on himself and his class, the simian parody of fops is funny. The practical joke is harsh—​the monkey bites, literally drawing blood—​and yet we laugh to see the fops thus humiliated. To be sure, the captain’s snarling hatred of all things French is itself ridiculous, the inverted mirror-​image of Madame Duval’s annoying Francophilia. This abrasive conflict—​snobbish Francophilia versus resentful Francophobia—​speaks volumes about the ongoing refusal of the English elite to identify with local cultures, languages, and peoples. The French ruling class, meanwhile, tended to represent for the English aristocracy not only a dangerous rival but a seductive ideal, both cultural and political: a style of excessive consumption and political self-​aggrandizement of which one could only dream. For English commoners, this Francophilic syndrome represented an unpalatable truth: that one’s local overlords aspired to be even more dominant, as was the egregious ruling class across the channel. The captain’s gussied-​up monkey thus enacts, or acts out, the bitter critique of such aspirations. If Evelina does not quite endorse the captain’s cruel monkey tricks, it does render them intelligible. The comparable cruelty of the male aristocrats who arrange, as an ad hoc sporting event, a foot race between two 80-​year-​old women, seems infinitely worse. The former prank is withering but funny; the latter, an example of callousness. Given that Evelina is often seen as inflected towards a genteel world, one must emphasize that its awareness of class dynamics is no less keen than that of, say, Moll Flanders (1722). Indeed, the monkey-​scene explodes the complacency of the drawing-​room ethos in which such vapid specimens of the aristocracy as Lord Lovell and Sir Clement Willoughby flourish. Burney’s swerve from Gulliver’s Travels is registered in the fact that the simian image of abjection, rather than standing for the species as a whole, becomes in her novel an image of class struggle: a grotesque image superimposed on the face of the class enemy. Captain Mirvan, dramatizing his opinion that the fancy people are Yahoos, attacks the deracinated English aristocracy precisely in the name of the nation from which they are aloof. Moreover, Mirvan’s reductionist trope—​a fop is a monkey—​tends to prevail as an authoritative commentary on the scene, on the cultural self-​subjugation practised by the English elite. Mirvan attempts to get the Frenchified monkey-​men to recognize themselves in his parody. A Gulliver effect obtains above all in the element of forced

Gulliver Effects   201 recognition. Burney’s most privileged readers likewise confronted an image of themselves not only as mannered, pampered, and laughably artificial, but, and above all, as dependent on mimicry. Burney’s Mrs. Selwyn adds to the texture of Evelina a more sophisticated satirical voice than that of the captain, a rabid English chauvinist. The various complacent male blockheads fully deserve her sharp commentary; and she seems to develop further that strain of Gulliver’s Travels in which Swift satirizes men as men rather than as generic human beings. Male disavowals of embodiment, for example, are in Gulliver’s Travels a familiar form of delusional pride. Despite Gulliver’s own smug remarks about the abstracted scientists in the Academy of Lagado, for instance—​the disembodied male brainiacs whose frustrated wives cheat on them—​he is himself among the most egregiously neglectful of husbands. Indeed, when it comes to domestic neglect, Gulliver cannot see the enormous mote in his own eye. (That the globe-​circling Dampier was in fact married, despite being absent from home for as long as a dozen years at a stretch, brings to mind another dimension of Swift’s satire on the travelogue: the genre gave a new meaning to the concept of roving husbands.) Mrs. Selwyn draws upon, and in a sense completes, Swift’s satire of abject domestic failure. The scathing nature of her proto-​feminist views is sufficiently exceptional: that she dares to utter them is truly audacious. Her witty remarks explore the margins of what can be said. Like the ranting character of Gulliver himself, living with horses in a stable at the end of Gulliver’s Travels, Mrs. Selwyn is a self-​isolating character. Unlike Evelina, she is an alienated one. If her views are not quite endorsed in Evelina, neither are they merely marginalized: she cannot be reduced to a female version of the misanthropic Man of the Hill in Tom Jones. In her undomesticated commitment to truth, Mrs. Selwyn disrupts polite conversation with biting remarks. And indeed, the critical consensus around Evelina’s eventual husband, Lord Orville, serves to highlight just this critical point. Lord Orville so personifies a domesticated masculine propriety that he comes off, in an otherwise dazzling novel, as a flat character. Absent Mrs. Selwyn and her commentaries on the male of the species, we might die of boredom near the denouement of Evelina. The enjoyment that we feel in Burney’s irrepressible invention, more­ over, owes something to Mrs. Selwyn’s ability to translate certain ‘unspeakable’ aspects of Gulliver’s Travels into the more genteel epistolary novel. That she is considered rude and satirical within the refined world of the novel points to a Gulliverian genealogy: for Burney, as for Swift, the truth—​as a bracing disruption of polite chitchat—​tends to hurt.

Nobody Home: A Reprise In Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1798) we find a further twist on the Alexandrian ‘heroic drinking’ topos. Castle Rackrent is a multi-​generational Irish novella recounting the decline of the Rackrent family. Sir Patrick Rackrent—​the family patriarch, and a paragon of traditional hospitality—​dies, like Alexander (according to Gulliver) from

202

202   CLEMENT HAWES excessive drinking. The heroic drunkenness of Sir Patrick’s death, however, contrasts favourably with the failure of Sir Condy, the last Rackrent, to drain the gigantic horn from which Sir Patrick drank whiskey. No one can string the bow of Ulysses; no one can drink whiskey like Sir Patrick. Edgeworth starts from a mock-​heroic perspective and traces a saga in which things go steeply downhill from there. The accelerated pace of this decline-​and-​fall narrative renders absurd materials that could have been treated as tragic. Edgeworth represents herself, as Declan Kiberd remarks, ‘as a sort of Gibbon on speed’.24 This ‘degeneration’ may be seen as a Gulliver effect. Edgeworth’s saga of decline covers four generations, a layered succession of absurdly counterproductive actions. The presumably Catholic servant Thady Quirk recounts this dwindling into absurdity of his overlords, who are probably recently converted Protestants. Sir Condy fails, in effect, even to fail splendidly: in the depths of its whimpering futility, his incremental undoing is a Gulliver effect. Like the ever-​declining Struldbruggs, Sir Condy lives a life at the zero degree of meaning, entirely at the mercy of contingencies. Ensuring that his life means nothing, he flips a coin to decide whether to marry for love or for wealth. As the generations of Rackrents come and go, embodying layer upon successive layer of irresponsibility, entropy prevails—​degeneration with a vengeance. A key issue for Castle Rackrent has specifically Gulliverian overtones: whether or not the old servant Thady is a reliable narrator. Thady, after all, helps his son Jason consolidate financial control of the Rackrents. Jason Quirk, an attorney who is coldly calculating but competent, eventually wrests legal ownership of the Rackrent estate from Sir Condy. Does Thady’s oral history intimate that, abandoning his feudal servility, Quirk père in fact has chosen Quirk fils over the Rackrents? Was this an accident, a conscious strategy, or even an unconscious one? Thady and his ‘simple’ discourse appear to be layered by divided loyalties. This interpretive issue recalls the peculiar sort of irony that results, for example, when such interlocutors as the King of Brobdingnag or the Master Houyhnhnm interrogate Gulliver about English history. Despite himself, Gulliver invariably manages to disgust his interlocutors. Whereas Gulliver seems to be decentred by what he thinks of as ‘his’ story, however, the seemingly marginal Thady tells us how the Quirk family displaced the Rackrents and moved into the great house. Such reversals make written history what it often is: spells of domination by one group over others, as recounted by layers of successive ‘winners’. The triumph of the unscrupulous Jason Quirk—​concomitant with the inevitable fall of the old order—​has a considerable historical resonance. Jason embodies a dog-​eat-​ dog ethos, individualism at its most ruthless. Jason’s economic behaviour is rational, and that seems like an improvement on the Rackrents; but his is the instrumental rationality of a wolf stalking a lagging lamb. The selfish rationality of Jason Quirk promises a more efficient exploitation. Such is ‘progress’: Edgeworth’s open-​ended fiction highlights the ironies tied to epochal transformations. Jason is without conscience: that is precisely his strategic advantage.

24 

Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), 244.

Gulliver Effects   203

Conclusion: Nobody Here But Us Revolutionaries A final instance of Gulliver’s eighteenth-​century influence on the novel—​its impact in blending the real with the fantastic—​also brings out the revolutionary energy in Swift’s text. Such is Robert Paltock’s The Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750). Long before the advent of such self-​consciously progressive novelists as Robert Bage, William Godwin, and Thomas Holcroft, revolutionary themes entered into the genre’s history by way of Peter Wilkins. Paltock chooses, when it comes to empire, to extend the rejection of Swift rather than the enthusiasm of Defoe. He extrapolates in particular from Swift’s charged ‘Rebellion-​of-​Lindalino’ episode in Part III of Gulliver’s Travels. Paltock describes a successful rebellion of African slaves. What lingers in the memory from Peter Wilkins, however, is the trope of a flying woman, as well as a subterranean civilization, possibly based on speculation that the earth was hollow.25 Peter Wilkins thus serves very early on to link the anti-​gravity side of Gulliver’s Travels (the Flying Island) to fantasy fiction as such and, indeed, to science fiction. Peter Wilkins looks forward to the vast fiction of interplanetary travels. We see the history of the novel with fresh eyes by recognizing fully the impact of Gulliver’s Travels. Cousin Gulliver belongs to a fiction from, as it were, the curmudgeonly branch of the novel family: a veritable negation of the triumphalist celebration of ‘progress’. Swift does not so much affiliate with the more optimistic genre as traverse and sabotage its conventions and commonplaces. Few texts in the history of the novel have been so challenging to its assumptions, so evocative of alternative ways of seeing, or—​by way of creative destruction—​so astonishingly generative. Reality ever since has been Gulliveresque.

Select Bibliography Clingham, Greg, Johnson, Writing, and Memory (Cambridge: CUP, 2002). Hawes, Clement, The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Keymer, Thomas, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 2003). Mack, Ruth, Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009). Olney, James, Memory and Narrative:  The Weave of Life-​Writing (Chicago:  U of Chicago P, 1998). Richetti, John, The English Novel in History, 1700–​1780 (New York: Routledge, 1998). Samuel, Raphael, Theatres of Memory, vol. 2: Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, ed. Alison Light with Sally Alexander and Gareth Stedman-​Jones (London: Verso, 1998). 25 

See David Standish, Hollow Earth (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006), 65–​6.

204

204   CLEMENT HAWES Schmidgen, Wolfram, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction and the Law of Property (Cambridge: CUP, 2002). Smallwood, Philip, Critical Pasts: Writing Criticism, Writing History (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Aperçus, 2004). Wahrman, Dror, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-​Century England (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2004). Zimmerman, Everett, The Boundaries of Fiction:  History and the Eighteenth-​Century Novel (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP, 1996).

Chapter 13

‘L ab ou rs of th e  Pre s s ’ The Response to Pamela Peter Sabor

In 1796, William Beckford, famous as the author of the oriental novel Vathek, but now writing obscurely under the female pseudonym of Lady Harriet Marlow, published Modern Novel Writing, or the Elegant Enthusiast. This satire would be followed a year later by another, written under the pseudonym of Jacquetta Agneta Mariana Jenks, entitled Azemia: A Descriptive and Sentimental Novel. Both books looked back over the previous seventy years of novel-​writing, surveying and parodying a wide range of works from the 1720s to the 1790s. Modern Novel Writing and Azemia were designed for readers who would, ideally, be as conversant with the modern novel as Beckford himself. This, after all, is the whole point of parody, written by and for those who have an intimate knowledge of the target. Although Beckford was primarily concerned with sentimental and Gothic fiction of the 1780s and 1790s, he also drew on canonical novels of the mid-​century for his comic purposes: Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne all figure prominently in his two satires. Only one of their novels, however, receives extensive attention: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Beckford’s keen interest in Richardson’s first novel, fifty-​six years after its initial publication, is one of many indications that the intense controversy engendered by Pamela in the early 1740s was not merely a temporary phenomenon. In January 1741, two months after Pamela’s initial appearance, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported that it was ‘judged in Town as great a Sign of Want of Curiosity not to have read Pamela, as not to have seen the French and Italian Dancers’.1 By 1796 the dancers had long since been forgotten, but Richardson’s novel was still both delighting and infuriating new generations of readers. Beckford devoted an entire chapter of Modern Novel Writing to Pamela, entitling it ‘The Struggles of Virtue Prevail’, with a knowing nod to Richardson’s notoriously

1 

Gentleman’s Magazine, 11 (January 1741), 56.

206

206   PETER SABOR mercantile subtitle. In this chapter the heroine, Arabella, receives a letter from a friend, ‘the valuable suffering Amelia’, recounting her attempted rape at the hands of Lord Mahogany and his accomplice, ‘the wicked Marchioness’.2 The account parodies the most fervid of the ‘warm scenes’ of Richardson’s novel: a sexual assault on the heroine by her master Mr. B., willingly aided by his villainous housekeeper, Mrs. Jewkes.3 Beckford heightens the quasi-​pornographic qualities of the original by making the marchioness an enthusiastic participant in the attempted rape, rather than a servant in her master’s pay. He also increases the already considerable disparity in rank between the serving-​ maid Pamela and her employer by ennobling both of Amelia’s persecutors. With very few exceptions, however, he leaves Richardson’s language unaltered; Pamela’s breathless, colloquial prose is simply transferred wholesale to her counterpart. Giving Amelia the name of the eponymous heroine of Henry Fielding’s final novel, and thus alluding to the famous rivalry between Fielding and Richardson, is another deft comic touch by Beckford. He returns to the charge in Azemia, in which the chastity of the Turkish-​born heroine is also under assault. Azemia, however, is said to be ignorant of books that show ‘how damsels have been spirited off, and shut up by sundry evil-​disposed gentlemen—​a circumstance which is hardly omitted in any novel since the confinement of Pamela at Mr. B—​’s house in Lincolnshire’.4 Beckford’s claim that the English novel, from the publication of Pamela onwards, had been devoted to the abduction and sequestering of women by ill-​intentioned men is of course wildly exaggerated. But the impact of Pamela on novel-​writing, in its own time and throughout the eighteenth century, can hardly be overstated. The extent of the immediate response, within a year of the first appearance of Pamela, is suggested by a letter to Richardson from Solomon Lowe, who remarked ironically that the novel had been ‘of so much Service to your very Brethren; witness the Labours of the press in Piracies, in Criticisms, in Cavils, in Panegyrics, in Supplements, in Imitations, in Transformations, in Translations, &c, beyond anything I know of ’.5 Towards the end of his life, Richardson annotated Lowe’s comment with a marginal note that ‘the History of Pamela gave Birth to no less than 16 Pieces under some of the above or the like Titles’. There is a strong element of pride in Richardson’s enumeration: the number of responses to Pamela suggests how unexpectedly influential his best-​selling novel had been. It was published when he was 50: one of England’s leading printers, but not yet a creative writer. The novels that he would write subsequently, Clarissa (1747–​8) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753–​4), were both considerably longer, more complex, and more ambitious. They were acclaimed throughout Europe, but they never eclipsed the fame of Pamela.

2 

Robert J. Gemmett (ed.), Modern Novel Writing (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2008), 73. See Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Albert J. Rivero, the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), 2: 183–​9. 4  William Beckford, Azemia, ed. Robert J. Gemmett (Kansas City: Valancourt, 2010), 185. 5  Victoria and Albert Museum Library, Forster Collection, XVI, 1, fol. 78: Solomon Lowe to Richardson, 21 December 1741. 3 

‘Labours of the Press’: The Response to Pamela   207 Fictional responses to Pamela, which included several rival continuations, were only part of the mass of material noted by Lowe: literary critics, moralists, versifiers, dramatists, and visual artists were all attracted to the novel. The booksellers, writers, and artists involved in this phenomenon were not concerned merely with interpreting and reinterpreting a text. The obsession with Pamela took the form of what Terry Eagleton terms a ‘cultural event’, a ‘multimedia affair, stretching all the way from domestic commodities to public spectacles, instantly recodable from one cultural mode to the next’.6 The affair took place in newspapers and magazines, as well as in more permanent forms of print, and as William B. Warner observes, it quickly took on a life of its own. In his suggestive analysis of the Pamela ‘media event’, Warner notes that interest in the controversy ‘feeds upon itself ’, becomes ‘an ambient, pervasive phenomenon’, and eventually ‘the focus of critical commentary and interpretation’.7 What began as a debate over the intentions, significance, and merits of a single novel extended over a protracted period to become a much larger issue: one that Jürgen Habermas has identified as formative in the emergence of the public sphere.8 The Pamela controversy soon crossed into Ireland and France and then further into continental Europe, where the Danish dramatist Ludvig Holberg characterized the debate over the novel’s merits as one between ‘two different Parties, Pamelists and Antipamelists’. The main issue was the heroine herself. As Holberg, in Peter Shaw’s English version of his remarks, wrote: ‘Some look upon this young Virgin as an Example for Ladies to follow; nay, there have been those, who did not scruple to recommend this Romance from the Pulpit. Others, on the contrary, discover in it the Behaviour of an hypocritical, crafty Girl, in her Courtship; who understands the Art of bringing a Man to her Lure.’9 Many of the Antipamelists extended the charge of hypocrisy to Richardson himself, contending that his ostensibly didactic novel was pornographic and that the various scenes depicting Mr. B.’s sexual assaults on the heroine were designed to arouse, rather than reform, the reader. Other criticisms of the novel were aimed at the vulgarity of its style and at its potential to damage the fabric of society by encouraging marriages between the high-​born and the lowly. At the vanguard of the assault on Pamela was Henry Fielding’s brilliantly witty parody, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, published anonymously in April 1741, three weeks before the appearance of an anonymous critique entitled Pamela Censured. Both works set out to show that Pamela’s much-​vaunted ‘virtue’ is a sham. The aptly 6 

Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 5. 7  William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–​1750 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998), 178. For another stimulating overview of the Pamela controversy, see James Grantham Turner, ‘Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela’, Representations 48 (1994), 70–​96. 8  See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 43, 49–​50. 9  Peter Shaw, The Reflector (London, 1750), 14, adapting Ludvig Holberg’s introduction to Moralske Tanker (1744).

208

208   PETER SABOR named Shamela boasts repeatedly of her ‘vartue’, while exercising her formidable sexual skills in getting her master to marry her. Conversely, Mr. B., here renamed Squire Booby, is no longer a menacing sexual predator but instead a blundering oaf, easily dissuaded from advances on Shamela by techniques she has learned from her mother, an experienced London bawd. In addition to attacking Richardson’s morality, Fielding mocks his prized technique of ‘writing, to the moment’.10 Thus Shamela purports to be writing at the present moment even as she describes Squire Booby entering her bedroom—​the door of which she has cagily left unlocked: ‘if my Master should come—​Odsbobs! I hear him just coming in at the Door. You see I write in the present Tense, as Parson Williams says.’11 Fielding is also merciless in his parody of the cumbersome introductory letters that Richardson had unwisely added to the second edition of Pamela; the copious framing material in Shamela, which satirizes Conyers Middleton and Colley Cibber as well as Richardson, is almost half the length of the epistolary fiction itself. In Richardson’s view, both Shamela and Fielding’s next work of prose fiction, Joseph Andrews (1742), were merely tawdry copies of his novel: ‘The Pamela, which he abused in his Shamela, taught him how to write to please, tho’ his manners are so different. Before his Joseph Andrews (hints and names taken from that story, with a lewd and ungenerous engraftment) the poor man wrote without being read.’12 Like most of Richardson’s carping comments on his rival, this grossly underestimates the ingenuity of Fielding’s fictional responses to Pamela and misinterprets the nature of their debt to their target. In Shamela, Fielding did not abuse Richardson’s novel gratuitously; he wished to show that both its morality and epistolary narration were fundamentally flawed. But there is also an element of truth in Richardson’s claim. Thanks to Pamela, Fielding was able to turn from writing successfully for the stage and for magazines to writing still more successfully as a novelist.13 In Joseph Andrews, his first fully-​fledged novel, Fielding produced not an ‘engraftment’, a term more aptly applied to Shamela, but rather a comic antithesis to Pamela. Fielding does, of course, appropriate the characters and plot of Pamela for his purposes. His eponymous hero is introduced as ‘the only Son of Gaffar and Gammer Andrews, and Brother to the illustrious Pamela, whose Virtue is at present so famous’,14 but in Fielding’s novel Joseph is truly the paragon of chastity that Pamela had (in Fielding’s view) only purported to be. Lady Booby, the aunt of Pamela’s husband, plays a leading 10  Richardson first uses the phrase in a letter to Lady Bradshaigh of 14 February 1754 (Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964], 289). 11  Henry Fielding, Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Shamela and Occasional Writings, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: OUP, 2008), 165. All further quotations from Shamela will be from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text. 12  Selected Letters, ed. Carroll, 133. 13  As Thomas Lockwood observes: ‘the epistolary narrative method he copied from Richardson made it possible for him to write himself into his character with a totalizing power he had never experienced with play-​scripts or journal essays’ (‘Shamela’, in Claude Rawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding [Cambridge: CUP, 2007], 47). 14  Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford and Middletown, CT: OUP and Wesleyan UP, 1967), 20.

‘Labours of the Press’: The Response to Pamela   209 role as one of two female sexual predators, both with designs on Joseph. Pamela and Booby also appear in minor parts, but they are reprehensible snobs. Unlike Shamela, however, Joseph Andrews does not parody Richardson’s epistolary technique; instead it is told from a wittily detached position by an omniscient narrator, as are both of Fielding’s subsequent novels, Tom Jones (1749) and Amelia (1751). Noting the ‘pervasive presence’ of Pamela in Joseph Andrews, Paul Baines observes that Richardson’s novel is there ‘partly as a source of parody and partly as a foil against which to test new solutions for problems (sexual, social, literary) raised by that fiction’.15 All of Fielding’s novels, in fact, are in a sense, anti-​Pamelas: each one giving a dominant role to the narrator, and thus turning its back on Richardson’s ‘writing, to the moment’. It is striking that even in writing a preface for Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple (1747), an epistolary novel by his sister Sarah Fielding, Henry declares that ‘no one will contend, that the epistolary Style is in general the most proper to a Novelist, or that it hath been used by the best Writers of this Kind’.16 The first item in Solomon Lowe’s inventory of ‘Labours of the press’ devoted to Pamela is ‘Piracies’. There were four in 1741 alone. In January, less than three months after the first edition of Pamela, a pirated edition was published in Dublin by George Faulkner and George Ewing; it went into a second edition six weeks later.17 From about March 1741 until November 1742, Pamela was serialized in a farthing newspaper, Robinson Crusoe’s London Daily Evening Post, allowing readers to dip into whichever parts of the novel they chose, at a much lower cost than that of the six-​shilling authorized volumes. From about May to September, a pirated edition of Pamela was published by the London bookseller Mary Kingman in three instalments. It included a seven-​page addition to Richardson’s novel, entitled ‘The Parentage of Pamela’, which purports to account for the poverty of her parents and to explain the circumstances in which she was first employed by Mr. B.’s mother. At about the same time, another piracy was issued in forty-​ eight numbers, under the title Pamelia; or Virtue Recompenc’d. Being a Choice Collection of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful young Virgin to her Parents. The text of this edition follows Richardson’s closely, while omitting his prefatory matter and changing ‘Pamela’ to ‘Pamelia’ throughout.18 It concludes with ‘The Parentage of Pamela’, impudently lifted from Kingman’s edition, followed by verses, written by Aaron Hill, that Richardson had included in his introduction to the second edition of the novel. Yet another piracy began publication about a year later, in 1742: Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia edition, which competed for sales with authorized imports of Richardson’s editions and was the first English novel to be printed in North America.

15 

Paul Baines, ‘Joseph Andrews’, in Rawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding, 55.

16 Fielding, Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Shamela and Occasional Writings, 476. 17 

For the dates of these and other contributions to the Pamela controversy, see Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-​Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 216–​24. 18  An apparently unique copy of Pamelia survives at Trinity College, Cambridge; see Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, ed. Albert J. Rivero (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), 3: xxxv.

210

210   PETER SABOR Richardson could do nothing about the piracies, but he did respond vigorously when he learned, in April 1741, that an unauthorized continuation to Pamela, by John Kelly, was ‘in great Forwardness’.19 The news prompted him to set to work on a sequel of his own, while also posting a series of newspaper advertisements denouncing what he regarded as literary theft and announcing that he was now continuing Pamela himself. Kelly’s publishers, Richard Chandler and Caesar Ward, responded vigorously with advertisements of their own; London newspapers and magazines for much of 1741 were thus enlivened by a paper war between Richardson and those he termed, with a sneer at the title of Kelly’s novel, the ‘High-​Life Men’. After the first volume of Kelly’s Pamela’s Conduct in High Life appeared at the end of May, Richardson reprinted an especially odd scene from the rival novel in the Daily Gazetteer, together with a mocking commentary. More counter-​advertisements by Chandler and Ward followed suit, together with the second volume of Pamela’s Conduct in September, and a second edition of the first volume a month later; the paper war was presumably aiding sales. Further confusion for would-​be purchasers was created by the rapid publication of two more non-​ authorial continuations and reworkings of Pamela: the anonymous Life of Pamela, a third-​person retelling of the story that began serialization in weekly parts in August, followed by the first of three fortnightly instalments of the anonymous Pamela in High Life in September. Among the many objections made to Pamela in works such as Shamela and Pamela Censured was that it encouraged marital misalliances. Pamela’s Conduct in High Life deftly removes the problem of Pamela’s low birth by making both her paternal and maternal families of ancient stock. Kelly’s Mr. B.  proudly tells his wife that his own family ‘cannot boast a Descent from more ancient, more virtuous Ancestors than my Pamela’s on either side, whether the Andrews or the Jinks, for they both came with the Conqueror’.20 The subversive element in Pamela—​that of a misalliance producing a happy marriage—​is thus removed, and Mrs. Jewkes is dismissed for cheating to elevate further the tone of the B. household. No such upgrading of Pamela’s birth takes place in The Life of Pamela, but the anonymous author does furnish an impudent note at the beginning of the novel, declaring that only he, not Richardson, is able to tell Pamela’s true story: ‘Whoever put together the other account that has been published of Pamela, was entirely misinformed of the cause of Mr. Andrews’s misfortunes … We shall rectify a thousand more Mistakes that have been made in that Work, as will plainly appear in the following Sheets, for which we have the best grounded Authority from the original Papers.’ Like Fielding in Shamela, the author considers that Richardson’s obsession with minute detail produces excessive triviality and mentions a coffee-​house conversation in which a gentleman ‘wondered the Author had not told the exact number of Pins Pamela had about her when she set out for Lincolnshire, and how many Rows of these Pins she 19 

Selected Letters, ed. Carroll, 45. John Kelly, Pamela’s Conduct in High Life (London, 1741), in Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor (eds.), The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, 1740–​1750 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), 4: 202–​3. 20 

‘Labours of the Press’: The Response to Pamela   211 bought for a Penny’.21 Pamela in High Life, the last of the three unauthorized continuations to be published, lives up to its title by making Pamela and her husband among the wealthiest couples in the land. She holds a week-​long feast at a cost of some £5,000, spends £1,000 per annum on her wardrobe and a further £2,000 on ‘Incidentals’, and is supported in style by Mr. B.’s astonishing annual income of £15,000. In Richardson’s novel, Mr. B. refuses a title; in Pamela in High Life he is elevated to a dukedom and made a Knight of the Garter. Pamela lives to the age of 76, produces ten children, and bequeaths them £220,000; virtue could ask for no greater reward. A notable feature of both piracies and continuations is their use of engravings to illustrate the text. Mary Kingman’s pirated edition has five engravings, one of which, entitled ‘Pamela going to Service Attended by her Father and Mother’, illustrates the passage on Pamela’s parentage that an unknown hack had added. Another of the piracies, Pamelia, has a single illustration, of Pamela’s wedding. The Life of Pamela, more ambitiously, has ten engravings, including a frontispiece, by John Carwitham, allowing the title page to boast of the ‘great Number of COPPER-​PLATES describing [Pamela] in the different Stations of Life’. One of these plates shows the heroine bare-​breasted, undressing for bed, closely observed by a recumbent Mrs. Jewkes.22 Pamela in High Life has a single illustration, of Pamela in country dress, closely modelled on Carwitham’s engraving of the same scene. The publishers of the piracies and continuations were at least even-​handed, always ready to take material from one another as well as from Richardson. Richardson’s own two-​volume continuation, Pamela in her Exalted Condition, was published in December 1741, a year after the original novel. It was designed to supplant the three spurious sequels, but the author played a curious double game. On the one hand, he eschewed any specific mention of the rival continuations, following the advice of one of his many correspondents that ‘no Allusion, nor the most distant Hint relating to the Imitation, can be admitted in Pamela’s story of herself, without being a blemish’.23 Richardson does supply a preface, in which he admits that he had been forced to alter his original intention of completing the novel in two volumes, but adds darkly that he is ‘willing to decline saying Any-​thing upon so well-​known a Subject; lest his Interest might appear more concern’d, than the Satisfaction of the Publick’ (Preface). On the other hand, his objections to the unauthorized sequels, and in particular to Pamela’s Conduct, are manifested throughout the novel. Thus in Richardson’s continuation, Pamela makes a point of forgiving Mrs. Jewkes, who had been dismissed from her position in Kelly’s version. Similarly, Mr. B. finds that Lord Davers ‘improves upon me every 21 

The Life of Pamela (London, 1741), 2, 186. Lynn Shepherd, who reproduces this illustration, notes that Carwitham’s depiction of Mrs. Jewkes as predatory lesbian accords with an observation in Pamela Censured (50–​1) that ‘there are at present … too many who assume the Characters of Women of Mrs. Jewkes’s Cast, I mean Lovers of their own Sex’ (Clarissa’s Painter: Portraiture, Illustration, and Representation in the Novels of Samuel Richardson [Oxford: OUP, 2009], 69, 71). 23  Victoria and Albert Museum Library, Forster Collection, XVI, 1, fol. 52: anon. to Richardson, July 1741. 22 

212

212   PETER SABOR time I see him’ (3: 279): an implicit response to the charge in The Life of Pamela that the original depiction of Mr. B.’s brother-​in-​law ‘plainly betrays the Mechanick; for such, knowing nothing of the Behaviour and Conversation of the Nobility, imagine every Lord is a Fool’.24 Although Pamela in her Exalted Condition was never as popular as the original, it was pirated in Dublin a mere three weeks after its first publication by the remarkably efficient Faulkner and Ewing—​just as Oliver Nelson had pirated Shamela within a fortnight and Faulkner and Nelson had pirated the first volume of Pamela’s Conduct in High Life within three weeks of its publication. Anna Laetitia Barbauld does less than justice to Richardson in describing his sequel as ‘less a continuation than the author’s defence of himself ’.25 It extends the range of the original by taking the heroine and her husband out of England on a two-​year European tour and it permits Pamela to offer her thoughts on a surprisingly wide range of subjects, including the advantages of breastfeeding, the dangers of polygamy, the shortcomings of comedies by Ambrose Philips (The Distressed Husband) and Richard Steele (The Tender Husband), and the merits of Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education. While English and Irish pirates were reprinting Pamela and both the author and others were providing it with a sequel, a number of novelists were producing responses of various kinds. Most of these spin-​offs were indebted to Shamela, with writers from Eliza Haywood onwards developing, or refuting, Fielding’s critique of Richardson. Haywood’s Anti-​Pamela: Or, Feign’d Innocence Detected appeared only two months after Shamela, in June 1741, but it clearly takes aim at Fielding. Her heroine, Syrena Tricksy, as her name suggests, is more akin to Shamela than Pamela, but Haywood does not merely imitate her predecessor. Consider, for example, the famous scene in which Pamela, a prisoner at Mr. B.’s Lincolnshire house, contemplates suicide by drowning herself in his ornamental pond: a passage in turn indebted to one in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.26 Richardson’s Pamela at first dwells on the image of her wretched persecutors: ‘when they see the dead Corpse of the unhappy Pamela dragg’d out to these slopy Banks, and lying Breathless at their Feet, they will find that Remorse to wring their obdurate Hearts, which now has no place there’ (2: 159). Soon, however, she rejects the planned suicide as the promptings of Satan, and the consolations of vengeance give way to considerations of Christian ethics and filial responsibility. In Fielding’s witty recasting of this passage, Shamela imitates Pamela’s actions but without undergoing any such inner turmoil: ‘it came into my Head to pretend as how I intended to drown myself; so I stript off one of my Petticoats, and threw it into the Canal; and then I went and hid myself in the Coal-​ hole, where I lay all Night; and comforted myself with repeating over some Psalms, and other good things, which I had got by heart’ (174). Where Shamela is merely vacuous, 24 

Life of Pamela, 249 n. The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 vols. (London, 1804), 1: p. lxxvii. 26  For Richardson’s debt to Sidney, see Gillian Beer, ‘Pamela: Rethinking Arcadia’, in Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (eds.), Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 23–​39. 25 

‘Labours of the Press’: The Response to Pamela   213 Haywood’s Syrena is coldly calculating. Rather than meditating, like Pamela, on the spiritual consequences of suicide, she uses it as a means of blackmail in her negotiations with her lover, Mr. D.:  Thus, added the young Dissembler, I  am abandon’d to the World—​Destitute of Friends, of Lodging, or any Means of supporting a wretched Life; and what encreases my Misfortune, I fear I am with Child?—​What then can I do but die? And die I will. The Minute I go from you, I will seek out some private Stairs that lead to the Thames, and throw myself in.27

For Shamela, feigning suicide is a game; for Syrena, it has something of the seriousness that it has for Pamela, but only for her own egotistical purposes. Both Shamela and Syrena are predators, rather than prey, but unlike Shamela, Syrena finds all of her suitors repulsive; she seeks to marry upwards not to combine marital respectability with sexual fulfilment, but simply to enjoy the wealth and power of a suitable union. Shamela was not the only response to Pamela to provide Haywood with material for her novel. Three weeks before Anti-​Pamela appeared, James Parry had advertised as forthcoming his Memoirs of the Life of Mr. James Parry … being the Anti-​Pamela of Monmouthshire, and then, making the connection with Richardson more explicit, as Anti-​Pamela; or, Memoirs of Mr. James Parry. Haywood seems to have lifted her title from Parry, who then changed his own once again, finally issuing the book, just eleven days after Haywood’s, as The True Anti-​Pamela; or, Memoirs of Mr. James Parry. Thus while Richardson’s advertising war with Chandler and Ward was raging in the Daily Gazetteer and elsewhere, Haywood and Parry were engaged in a dispute over their respective claims to authorship of the ‘true’ anti-​Pamela story. In Parry’s version, the counterpart to Pamela is the author himself, while his heroine, Parthenissa, is much indebted to Richardon’s Mr. B. The gender inversions here, as Terri Nickel observes, resemble those in Fielding’s Shamela, which plays almost as large a role in Haywood’s and Parry’s works as Pamela itself.28 In November 1741, several months after the publication of Haywood’s and Parry’s novels but in time to capitalize on the imminent appearance of Richardson’s continuation of Pamela, Charles Povey, at the age of 90, produced one of the oddest contributions to the controversy: The Virgin in Eden; or, The State of Innocency. Although Povey’s main title makes no mention of Pamela, his crowded subtitle finds space to proclaim that Pamela’s letters are ‘proved to be immodest Romances painted in Images of Virtue: Masquerades in Disguise, that receiv’d Birth now Vice reigns in Triumph, and swells in Streams even to a Deluge’. Povey continues his diatribe in the opening paragraphs of the Preface: ‘Good God! What can Youths and Virgins learn from Pamela’s Letters, more than Lessons to

27  Eliza Haywood, Anti-​Pamela, and Henry Fielding, Shamela, ed. Catherine Ingrassia (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004), 137. 28  See Terri Nickel, ‘Pamela as Fetish: Masculine Anxiety in Henry Fielding’s Shamela and James Parry’s The True Anti-​Pamela’, Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture 22 (1992), 37–​49.

214

214   PETER SABOR tempt their Chastity; those Epistles are only Scenes of Immodesty, painted in Images of Virtue; Disguises in Masquerade, as I shall prove, both from Truth and Reason, in the Conclusion of this my Work.’29 Like Fielding in Shamela, Povey directs much of his criticism towards the egregious introductory material that Richardson added to the second edition of Pamela, and like Fielding too, he reworks parts of this material for his own satirical purposes. Born in 1651, at the height of the Cromwellian era, Povey wrote his onslaught on Pamela inspired by the same Puritan zeal that characterizes his many other publications, actual and projected, with resonant titles such as The Composition of licentious Authors justly censur’d and The supercilious Humours of Mean Persons raised to high Stations. Within a fortnight of its publication, however, Povey’s hectoring work had to compete for attention with yet another fictional response to Pamela: the anonymous Memoirs of the Life of Lady H—​, The Celebrated Pamela, from her Birth to the Present Time. As its title suggests, the author wished to profit from the continuing public obsession with Pamela by purporting to reveal the true identity of Richardson’s heroine. ‘Lady H—​’, a transparent abbreviation for Lady Hesilrige, née Hannah Sturges (1709–​65), was an astute choice. Sturges, a coachman’s daughter, had married Sir Arthur Hesilrige (1705–​63), seventh Baronet, when she was 16, the same age as Pamela when she married Mr. B.; Sir Arthur, ‘Sir A—​H—​’ in the novel, was, like Mr. B., several years older than his bride. Their wedding date, 1725, also fits with the chronology of Pamela. Omitting what its author terms, with a hit at Richardson’s bloated introductory matter, ‘the usual Formalities of a dull and tedious Preface, or an unprofitable Introduction’, the author compresses the events of the first two volumes of Pamela into a mere fifty-​nine pages. To compensate for the loss of many of the most substantial characters, including Mrs. Jervis, Mrs. Jewkes, and Lady Davers, the author includes a ‘warm scene’ more salacious than anything in Pamela. When Sir A—​first sees Pamela at his country seat, washing dishes in the scullery: ‘the Weather being very hot, her Bosom was naked; for she imagined no body saw her but the Cook-​maid. Sir A—​could not help taking notice of the Beauties he there espied; which suddenly inflamed his Imagination, and caused a Tumult in his Spirits’.30 With its focus on the ‘Beauties’ of Pamela’s breasts, akin to that of Carwitham’s illustration for The Life of Pamela, this is clearly an opportunistic publication. In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt makes the memorable claim that Pamela ‘gratified the reading public with the combined attractions of a sermon and a striptease’.31 His remark is truer of Memoirs of the Life of Lady H—​than of Richardson’s novel, and truer still of John Cleland’s underground best-​seller, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–​9). Cleland, however, for all his notoriety as the author of a scandalously erotic novel, was surprisingly sympathetic to Pamela. His heroine, Fanny Hill, is a country girl, like Pamela, and although she becomes a highly successful London prostitute, she has 29 

Charles Povey, The Virgin in Eden (London, 1741), p. [i]‌. Memoirs of the Life of Lady H—​(London, 1741), 13. 31 Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1957), 173. 30 

‘Labours of the Press’: The Response to Pamela   215 more in common with Richardson’s heroine than with Shamela or Syrena Tricksy. At the beginning of the novel, as Fanny is preparing to travel to London, her more experienced friend Esther Davis advises her ‘as how several maids out of the country had made themselves and all their kin for ever, that by preserving their VARTUE, some had taken so with their masters, that they had married them, and kept them coaches, and lived vastly grand and happy’.32 The vulgar diction, faulty syntax, and distortion of ‘Virtue’ to ‘Vartue’ are all obvious allusions to Shamela’s characteristic speech. Shamela’s role, however, is played not by Cleland’s heroine but by her false friend, who leaves her to her own devices as soon as they arrive in London. Several passages in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure have counterparts in both Pamela and Shamela. Among them is the scene in which Fanny, after spying on two homosexuals, knocks herself out as she jumps down from a chair in an attempt to ‘raise the house upon them … and must have lain there some time e’er any one came to my relief ’ (183). Pamela also loses consciousness after falling during an escape attempt: ‘In this dreadful way, flat upon the Ground, lay poor I, for I believe five or six Minutes’ (2: 157). Fielding had earlier mocked Pamela’s propensity for fainting by having Shamela feign unconsciousness after one of Booby’s attempted assaults: ‘I kept my Eyes wide open, and pretended to fix them in my Head. Mrs. Jervis apply’d Lavender Water, and Hartshorn, and this, for a full half Hour’ (166). Cleland, in contrast, is not parodying Pamela but paying a curious homage to Richardson’s novel—​ as he does when his heroine imitates Pamela’s ‘writing, to the moment’ near the end of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Fanny here, reunited with her beloved Charles at last, describes the moment of penetration in unexpectedly Richardsonian fashion:  ‘I see! I feel! the delicious velvet tip!—​he enters might and main with—​oh!—​my pen drops from me here in the extasy now present to my faithful memory!’ (159). The first and most intense phase of the Pamela controversy lasted for about ten years, from 1740 to 1750; Memoirs of a Woman of a Pleasure came at the end of this initial wave of responses to the novel. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, novelists drew on Pamela as a touchstone, especially where debates over marital misalliance were concerned. Thus in Francis Coventry’s Pompey the Little (1751), a social-​climbing milliner ‘used to lock herself up … in a little Closet, to read Cowley’s Poems, and the History of Pamela Andrews’.33 In Susan Smythies’s The Brothers (1758), similarly, Pamela is used as a warning to a wealthy baronet, who is cautioned to ‘have some regard to parity of birth in your choice; and remember every beautiful outside does not contain the soul of a Pamela’.34 In Eliza Haywood’s final novel, The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753), paintings of scenes from Pamela at Ranelagh pleasure gardens are used to point 32 

John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor (Oxford: OUP, 1985), 3. See also Edward Copeland, ‘Clarissa and Fanny Hill: Sisters in Distress’, Studies in the Novel 4 (1972), 343–​52; and Ann Louise Kibbie, ‘Sentimental Properties: Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’, ELH 58/​4 (1991), 561–​77. 33  Francis Coventry, The History of Pompey the Little, ed. Nicholas Hudson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2008), 155–​6. Hudson notes that ‘some eighteenth-​century moralists condemned the poems of Abraham Cowley (1618–​67) as lascivious, particularly The Mistress’. 34  [Susan Smythies], The Brothers, 2 vols. (London, 1758), 1: 238.

216

216   PETER SABOR up a different moral. Recounting the story of her marriage to the son of a baronet, Mrs. Welby reports that at Ranelagh he took ‘all the opportunities the place would admit of to declare his passion to me, which he did in the most pathetic terms, while looking on the story of Pamela, painted on the walls’.35 Mr. Welby follows the example of Mr. B. in asking the hand of a woman of no fortune, rather than attempting to make her his mistress. Like Haywood, Cleland also returned to Pamela in one of his later fictions, ‘The Romance of a Morning’, one of four novellas published together as The Surprises of Love (1764). Here a wealthy gentlemen, Vincent, in love with a virtuous but impoverished young woman, Isabella, uses Pamela’s story to justify his own desire to marry well below his rank: ‘The ridicule of falling in love with a Pamela would, it is true, have nearly appeared as much a ridicule to him as to any one: But such is the nature of the Passions, while they trample on Reason, to keep, however, all the measures they can with her.’36 ‘The Romance of a Morning’, however, is in fact thoroughly conventional, since Isabella turns out to be the estranged granddaughter of Lord Firenew. At the end of the novel, when she marries Vincent, she is given most of his large fortune. This is a much tamer version of Pamela than Cleland’s subversive first novel; birth, rather than virtue, is rewarded. In addition to comparing their heroes and heroines to Pamela and Mr. B., several later-​eighteenth-​century novelists create scenes in which a copy of Pamela is taken up and read. In many instances, the reading experience does nothing but harm. A typical case is that of the heroine of ‘Jenny: Or, the Female Fortune Hunter’, the final story in an anonymous collection entitled The Theatre of Love (1758). Jenny, a farmer’s daughter, reads Pamela repeatedly. A second reading of the novel ‘created some new Thoughts in her Head. She thought, that to put herself in Fortune’s Way, she must go into Service; and then undoubtedly, if she persevered in the Road of Virtue, as Pamela did, she should meet with the same Fortune.’ After a third reading of Pamela, Jenny starts to live in a Richardsonian fantasy land, in which ‘the Squire, her Master, after having in vain attempted her Virtue and Innocence, now breathing an honourable Passion, she was marry’d to him, and tasted some of the supremest Pleasures IMAGINABLE’. In the event, Jenny’s dreams come to nothing; she returns from London to her native village and is happily married to Ralph, the son and heir of Farmer Hodge. The author, however, makes a point of blaming Jenny, rather than Richardson, for her delusions; his heroine ultimately ‘wonders at her mistaking the true End and Design of those excellent Books’.37 Two novels from the 1770s, Henry Brooke’s Juliet Grenville:  or, The History of the Human Heart (1774) and The Sylph (1779), probably by the Duchess of Devonshire, contain scenes more hostile to Pamela. In Juliet Grenville, the heroine reads the novel aloud

35  Eliza Haywood, The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, ed. John Richetti (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2005), 390. Since these Pamela paintings at Ranelagh are not recorded elsewhere, Haywood might be confusing them with those that Francis Hayman painted for the supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens in 1742. 36  John Cleland, The Surprises of Love (London, 1764), 178. 37  The Theatre of Love (London, 1758), 235, 240–​1, 248.

‘Labours of the Press’: The Response to Pamela   217 to the Countess of Cranfield, who asks her for her views on the novel. Juliet responds with a lengthy critique. She objects to Richardson’s licentiousness and blushes ‘at the manner in which he undresses our sex’. She also believes that Mr. B. makes an unworthy husband for Pamela and that the novel’s morality is fundamentally flawed:  can virtue be rewarded, by being united to vice? Her master was a ravisher, a tyrant, a dissolute, a barbarian in manners and principle. I admit it, the author may say; but then he was superior in riches and station. Indeed, Mr. Richardson never fails in due respect to such matters; he always gives the full value to title and fortune.38

Juliet, in contrast, will marry only for love—​and proves to be of nobler descent than her husband. In The Sylph, reading Pamela has a more insidious effect. Here a young woman is given a copy of Richardson’s ‘pernicious volumes’, and from them ‘first learnt to disrelish the honest, artless effusions of her first lover’s heart. His language was insipid, after the luscious speeches, and ardent but dishonorable warmth of Mr. B—​.’39 In both novels an old charge against Richardson’s heroine is revived; there is, they suggest, nothing admirable in winning the hand of a would-​be rapist, however wealthy he may be. The prominent part played by Pamela in Beckford’s Modern Novel Writing and Azemia is a sign of its continuing currency in the 1790s, although Mary Robinson, at the turn of the century, suggested that it was by now hopelessly passé. In The Natural Daughter (1799), a servant is sent by her mistress to ask a bookseller for a half-​remembered title, ‘something about Virtue Rewarded’. The bookseller, Mr. Index, advises her to choose a more fashionable title: ‘ “O, child! that is a work of such gothic antiquity, that we have not had one copy in our shop these twenty years. Nobody would think of dosing over such dull lessons.” ’40 But the evidence is all against Mr. Index, and Robinson. The real-​life bookseller James Lackington noted that four popular novels from the 1740s and 1750s—​Fielding’s Tom Jones, Smollett’s Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, and Pamela—​were still best-​sellers in the 1790s: ‘when Dolly is sent to market to sell her eggs, she is commissioned to purchase “The History of Pamela Andrews” ’.41 The later publication history of Pamela supports his claim. In addition to the numerous authorized and unauthorized editions, Dolly would have had a plethora of cheap abridgements to choose from at the market. She could also, with sufficient patience, have read the novel in weekly instalments in the New Lady’s Magazine, which published Pamela over a sixteen-​month period, from July 1794 to November 1795. Tellingly, Pamela was the first novel to be serialized in the magazine, and its editor, Alexander Hogg, claimed that it had increased the number of subscribers. Even 38 

Henry Brooke, Juliet Grenville, 3 vols. (London, 1774), 3: 91–​2. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, The Sylph, introd. Amanda Foreman (York: Henry Parker, 2001), 137. 40  Mary Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter, ed. Sharon M. Setzer (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003), 210–​11. 41  James Lackington, Memoirs of the First Forty-​Five Years of the Life of James Lackington (2nd edn., London, 1791), 386–​7. 39 

218

218   PETER SABOR the notoriously vain and touchy Richardson, however, might have blushed at Hogg’s remark that Pamela was ‘the most valuable and entertaining Novel ever written’.42 A more judicious assessment of Pamela was made by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, in the incisive biographical and critical essay prefixed to her six-​volume edition of Richardson’s correspondence in 1804. Assessing the novel’s strengths and weaknesses, Barbauld observes that its morality was ‘more dubious than, in his life time, the author’s friends were willing to allow’. She objects to the ‘excessive humility and gratitude’ that Pamela and her parents display towards Mr. B. after the marriage, which show ‘a regard to rank and riches beyond the just measure of an independent mind’, and she concedes that the ‘indelicate scenes’ are ‘totally indefensible’.43 Significantly, Barbauld’s reviewers were divided over her assessment of Pamela: the Critical Review, for example, asserted that ‘of the rising generation few have heard of Pamela’, while The Sentinel claimed that Barbauld ‘does the grossest injustice’ to Richardson.44 The continuing lack of a consensus over the merits of Richardson’s first novel shows that the Pamela controversy was still alive after the turn of the century. One more novelist’s contributions to the debate over Pamela remain to be considered: those of the author himself. Richardson’s continuation, Pamela in her Exalted Condition, and his paper war with Chandler and Kelly over their rival sequel, played a central part in the controversy. So too did his compulsive revising of both parts of Pamela. As his own printer, Richardson could readily alter the texts of his novels in each of his authorized editions, allowing him to answer objections by removing or changing offending passages. In the case of Pamela, this propensity for revision soon involved him in difficulties: the egregious introductory letters by Aaron Hill that he added to the second edition were an easy target for satirists such as Fielding. In a 1742 octavo edition of the four volumes, published on better paper, with more generous margins and leading, and intended for wealthier buyers, Richardson replaced the introduction with an elaborate, thirty-​six-​page ‘Epitome of the Work’. He also commissioned twenty-​nine engravings by Hubert Gravelot, the leading book illustrator of the day, and the English painter and illustrator Francis Hayman. Their visual interpretations of the novel competed with those already undertaken by Carwitham and others, and would in turn compete with engravings made in 1745 from a series of twelve paintings of Pamela by Joseph Highmore. Richardson’s octavo edition, however, by no means concluded the process of revision, which he continued in the subsequent duodecimos. Oddly, these editions dropped the new table of contents and restored the introductory material, although in consider­ ably amended form. Thousands of stylistic alterations were made to remove charges of ‘lowness’, to correct errors in the use of titles and forms of address, and in general to make the novel more refined. The protracted series of revisions continued even beyond 42 

New Lady’s Magazine, 9 (1794), 346, 298. Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Barbauld, 1: pp. lxiii, lxvi, lxvii. 44  Critical Review, 3rd ser., 3 (1804), 162; The Sentinel, 1 (1804), 372. 43 

‘Labours of the Press’: The Response to Pamela   219 a posthumous edition of 1762, published shortly after Richardson’s death, since he left further indications for changes in manuscript form. These changes, more extensive than those of any previous edition, finally appeared in an edition of 1801, which was further corrected in 1810. This edition constituted a virtual rewriting of the novel, but at the cost, as Thomas Keymer observes, of losing ‘all the most provocative features of style and content that distinguish the original text’.45 Further complicating matters, many of the stylistic alterations of 1801 and 1810 were probably made by Richardson’s daughters, Anne and Martha, who had long been discussing their project of re-​revising their father’s revision. In the event, Richardson’s attempt to control the Pamela controversy through textual revision proved to be chimerical; his last and most drastic revision would not be the text read by nineteenth-​or twentieth-​century readers. Instead, the most widely available edition was a heavily revised abridgement, originally issued by the London bookseller Charles Cooke in 1811 and then reprinted on at least ten occasions before 1838. The text, which contains numerous unauthorized alterations and deletions, was in turn used for the Everyman edition of 1914—​the edition of Pamela most widely available in Britain for much of the twentieth century.46 If anyone emerged triumphant from the Pamela controversy, and from the labours of the press that it engendered, it was the entrepreneurial Cooke and his heirs—​and eventually Joseph Dent, publisher of the ubiquitous Everyman’s Library—​rather than Richardson or his adversaries.

Select Bibliography Beasley, Jerry C., Novels of the 1740s (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982). Doody, Margaret Anne, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). Eaves, T. C. Duncan, and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Fysh, Stephanie, The Work(s) of Samuel Richardson (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1997). Keymer, Thomas, and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-​Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: CUP, 2005). Keymer, Thomas, and Peter Sabor (eds.), The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, 1740–​1750, 6 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001). McKillop, Alan Dugald, Samuel Richardson:  Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill:  U of North Carolina P, 1936).

45 

Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: OUP, 2001), p. xxxi. See Peter Sabor, ‘The Cooke-​Everyman Edition of Pamela’, The Library, 5th ser., 32/​4 (1977), 360–​6, and Philip Gaskell, From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 63–​79. Gaskell concludes grimly that ‘for the past half-​century most British students and general readers of Pamela have had to use a text that differs grossly and misleadingly from any version authorized by Richardson’ (78). 46 

220

220   PETER SABOR Michie, Allen, Richardson and Fielding:  The Dynamics of a Literary Rivalry (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1999). Shepherd, Lynn, Clarissa’s Painter: Portraiture, Illustration, and Representation in the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: OUP, 2009). Warner, William, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–​1750 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998).

Chapter 14

Samuel Richa rd s on a nd the Epistol a ry Nov e l John Dussinger

Despite having turned 50 before publishing his first novel, Samuel Richardson’s literary career began already in his youth as a precocious letter-​writer and developed during the 1720s after launching his printing business in Salisbury Court, off Fleet Street, London. When his Dutch translator Johannes Stinstra asked him how he acquired so much knowledge of human behaviour, Richardson responded that it was from his early penchant for writing letters. With rare detail about his early life, which he kept secret from even his own family, he mentioned to Stinstra that when hardly more than 13 he gained the confidence of three young women, who imparted their ‘Love-Secrets, in order to induce me to give them Copies to write after, or correct, for Answers to their Lovers’ Letters’.1 While at school, when his classmates nicknamed him ‘Serious and Gravity’, instead of enjoying the usual sports, he much preferred the voyeuristic indulgence in these women’s intimate feelings towards men and playing out vicarious roles in letters for their perusal.

‘Writing from the Heart’ A primary motive of letter-​writing is confessional, uninhibited revealing of the self. Ironically, Lovelace is the spokesman for the theory that Richardson himself endorses: ‘It was writing from the heart (without the fetters prescribed by method or study) as the very word Correspondence implied. Not the heart only; the soul was in it. Nothing of body, when friend writes to friend; the mind impelling sovereignly the vassal-​fingers. It was, in 1 

The Richardson–​Stinstra Correspondence and Stinstra’s Prefaces to Clarissa, ed. William C. Slattery (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1969), 27: 2 June 1753.

222

222   JOHN DUSSINGER short, friendship recorded; friendship given under hand and seal.’2 In probably the first letter to Sarah Wescomb, Richardson uses almost the same words: ‘This correspondence is, indeed, the cement of friendship: it is friendship avowed under hand and seal: friendship upon bond, as I may say: more pure, yet more ardent.’3 Although a means of revealing innermost feelings, the familiar letter depends on absence as a catalyst. As if elaborating on Lovelace’s cryptic assertion—​‘Nothing of body, when friend writes to friend’, Richardson asks rhetorically: ‘Who then shall decline the converse of the pen? The pen that makes distance, presence; and brings back to sweet remembrance all the delights of presence; which makes even presence but body, while absence becomes the soul’ (3: 246). Richardson’s claim here about the ontology of the written word as itself a material object whose mimetic value is to represent the absent other is remarkably abstract and uncharacteristic of his prose. But such metaphysics may derive from a philosopher-​ poet who is cited once in Pamela and fifteen times in the third edition of Clarissa—​John Norris of Bemerton (1657–​1711). It is Norris’s Collection of Miscellanies: Consisting of Poems, Essays, Discourses and Letters (1687) that Anna Howe uses as a cover to send her friend some money after she has been carried off to London with only the clothes on her back. Anna also invokes Norris as an authority on the bonds of friendship.4

‘Writing, to the Moment’ The ‘pen that makes distance, presence’ requires a special epistolary method of reporting events, particularly speech events. Centuries before the technology of electronic audio recording, techniques for capturing the phenomenon of a ‘live event’ were being invented in the eighteenth century, and like other contemporaries Lovelace was adept at shorthand: ‘And now I have so much leisure upon my hands, that, after having informed myself of all necessary particulars, I am set to my short-​hand writing in order to keep up with time as well as I can’ (5: 64). Whether Richardson himself had mastered this art of ‘keeping up with time’ cannot be documented, but as a printer he was well aware of its enormous value to the journalist. In a unique copy of a book found at the University of Illinois Library and confirmed to have come from his press, the title page specifically informs us that the text was produced by this new method of writing: An Oration on the Oppression of Jailors: Which was spoken in the Fleet Prison, on the 20th of February 1730/​1 (as advertised in the Daily-​Post of that Day) and carefully taken 2 

[Samuel Richardson], Clarissa. Or, The History of a Young Lady, 8 vols. (3rd edn., London, 1751), 4: 269. 3  The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 vols. (London, 1804), 3: 245: 27 August 1746. Unless indicated otherwise, all subsequent references to Richardson’s Correspondence are to this edition and will be included in the body of the essay. 4 [Richardson], Clarissa, 3: 263 and 1: 174, respectively. See E. Derek Taylor, Reason and Religion in Clarissa: Samuel Richardson and ‘The Famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel    223 in Short-​Hand by one of the Audience, who hopes he shall not incur the Displeasure of the Orator in publishing a Thing so manifestly tending to the Good of the Publick.5

Perhaps Richardson or one of his employees recorded this speech. In the same issue of a newspaper that he was printing, juxtaposed with a notice of An Oration on the Oppression of Jailors is a prominent advertisement for James Weston, a master of shorthand. Besides Weston as a possible source, Richardson was also well acquainted with the diarist and poet John Byrom (1692–​1763), who taught shorthand in London during the 1720s and 1730s. But since Byrom had demanded that his pupils swear an oath of secrecy about their competence in shorthand, even if a practitioner Richardson would never have revealed his expertise in this art. As a means of bringing the distant and past to the present time and place, Richardson’s letter-​writing style emphasizes continual flux as living experience. Already in the first edition of Pamela, the French translator Jean Baptiste du Freval, perhaps with some prompting from the author, caught the essential feature of Richardson’s narrative art:  the Letters being written under the immediate Impression of every Circumstance which occasioned them, and that to those who had a Right to know the fair Writer’s most secret Thoughts … Nature may be traced in her undisguised Inclinations with much more Propriety and Exactness, than can possibly be found in a Detail of Actions long past, which are never recollected with the same Affections, Hopes, and Dreads, with which they were felt when they occurred.6

Temporality is the basis of narrative realism, and thus whatever can give the illusion of the flux of time is essential. By the 1750s, Richardson came to designate his innovation as ‘writing, to the moment’. His clearest statement appears in the preface to the third edition of Clarissa: All the Letters are written while the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects (The events at the time generally dubious): So that they abound not only with critical Situations, but with what may be called instantaneous Descriptions and Reflections (proper to be brought home to the breast of the youthful Reader); as also with affecting Conversations; many of them written in the dialogue or dramatic way. (1: p. viii)

As usual, Richardson tested his new method of narration by correspondence with his readers before and after publication. The state of uncertainty about the consequences of a present action in the story, as he well understood, had the advantage of creating suspense but it also disguised authorial intention. 5 

An Oration on the Oppression of Jailors (London, [1731]). Not in ESTC, this book has the following printer’s ornaments from Richardson’s press that appear in Keith Maslen, Samuel Richardson of London, Printer: A Study of His Printing Based on Ornament Use and Business Accounts (Dunedin, NZ: U of Otago P, 2001): R243, R468, and R383. 6  [Samuel Richardson], Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, 2 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1741), 1: p. vii.

224

224   JOHN DUSSINGER Unfortunately, little correspondence by Richardson survives from before he turned novelist, but it is probable that his temporally focused narrative technique was already second nature to him as early as those vicarious love letters that he composed while a youth on behalf of his women friends.7 In any case, ‘instantaneous Descriptions and Reflections’ occasionally appear in his extant correspondence. His cameo of the various ‘flutterers’ at Tunbridge Wells is comparable to anything in his novels:  Miss Banks (Miss Peggy Banks) was the belle when I came first down—​Yet she had been so many seasons here, that she obtained but a faint and languid attention; so that the smarts began to put her down in their list of had-​beens!—​New faces, my dear, are more sought after than fine faces. A piece of instruction lies here,—​that women should not make even their faces cheap. Miss Chudleigh next was the triumphant toast: a lively, sweet-​tempered, gay, self-​ admired, and, not altogether without reason, generally admired lady—​She moved not without crowds after her. She smiled at every one. Every one smiled before they saw her, when they heard she was on the walk. She played, she lost, she won—​all with equal good-​humour. But, alas, she went off, before she was wished to go off. And then the fellows’ hearts were almost broke for a new beauty. (3: 314–​15)

As a reluctant resident of this fashionable and concupiscent resort-​cum-​medical spa, forced there to seek relief from his nervous disease by drinking the mineral waters, Richardson implicitly casts himself as John Bunyan’s Christian wandering through Vanity Fair as an alien observer. Already in Pamela the biblical parallel between the heroine’s captivity and the Jews in bondage in Egypt reminds us of the pilgrim’s essential alienation from the world, flesh, and devil:  I think I was loth to leave the House. Can you believe it?—​What could be the Matter with me, I wonder!—​I felt something so strange, and my Heart was so lumpish!—​ I wonder what ail’d me!—​But this was so unexpected!—​I believe that was all!—​Yet I am very strange still. Surely, surely, I cannot be like the old murmuring Israelites, to long after the Onions and Garlick of Egypt, when they had suffer’d there such heavy Bondage?—​I’ll take thee, O lumpish, contradictory, ungovernable Heart, to severe Task for this thy strange Impulse, when I get to my dear Father’s and Mother’s; and if I find any thing in thee that should not be, depend upon it, thou shalt be humbled, if strict Abstinence, Prayer and Mortification will do it! (2: 35)

Almost immediately after the birth of his last child and the publication of his first novel, the years of composing Clarissa, when increasingly poor health and advanced age probably ended his sexual life, seem to have brought on a gloom that makes the orthodox Augustinian contemptus mundi all the more urgent. Thus from the beginning of the story, Clarissa has a foreboding of death as a welcome alternative to suffering bondage 7 

See John Dussinger, ‘Samuel Richardson’s “Elegant Disquisitions”: Anonymous Writing in the True Briton and Other Journals?’, Studies in Bibliography 53 (2000), 195–​226; and ‘Fabrications from Samuel Richardson’s Press’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 100/​2 (2006), 259–​79.

Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel    225 in her world. Richardson’s method of rendering in minute scenic detail her conflict with her family offers little hope of any other escape.

Free Indirect Discourse ‘Instantaneous Descriptions’ depend heavily on reported speech to convey the sense of the dramatic moment. Perhaps the simplest form is exact repetition of the original speech or written statement followed by critical response, a frequent rhetorical strategy in Richardson’s personal correspondence: Expose yourself!—​At your own Expence!—​What Words are these!—​Do you think, that there is not a Justice due to one’s self, as well as to the rest of the World?—​And can you, who are so quicksighted to the Merits of others, be allowed to be blind to your own?8 But to your words—​‘Do you look upon it, Sir, as a Matter of small Consequence to draw a young Woman into a Correspondence, and then to leave her in so contemptuous a Manner, as you have done me’ [I leave Miss Grainger in a contemptuous manner! What a Charge is here?] ‘without any other Provocation than that of not striving, as you, I presume, expected!’—​And so, Madam, you resolve to quit the milder glare and blaze!—​‘Victim of Revenge!’—​Where pick’d you up, Whence collected you, such Words—​But I think you refer me, in another place, to the natural Haughtiness of your Temper!—​If Miss Grainger is just in the Use of these Five Words, I confess, that I have indeed been deceived in outward Appearances.9

The act of quoting enables the interlocutor to bring the expression of sentiment into the present time of the letter in process. Similarly, in his exchanges with Belford, Lovelace quotes directly from his friend’s letter to provide material to digest:  ‘The Virtues and Graces are this Lady’s handmaids. She was certainly born to adorn the age she was given to.’—​Well said, Jack—​‘And would be an ornament to the first dignity.’ But what praise is that, unless the first dignity were adorned with the first merit?—​Dignity! gewgaw!—​First dignity! thou idiot!—​Art thou, who knowest me, so taken with Ermine and Tinsel?—​I, who have won the gold, am only fit to wear it. For the future therefore correct thy style, and proclaim her the ornament of the happiest man, and (respecting herself and Sex) the greatest conqueror in the world. (4: 19)

As a printer who compiled numerous texts for anonymous publication, Richardson obviously felt at home with this method of sifting through quoted material for an updated, and sometimes significantly revised, text.

8 

Pierpont Morgan Library MA 1024 (2): Richardson to Frances Grainger, 20 December 1748. Beinecke Library, Osborn Collection, Yale University: Richardson to Frances Grainger, 9 November 1749. 9 

226

226   JOHN DUSSINGER If this counterpoint of past statement and present commentary is effective for argumentative discourse, a more complex combination of direct and indirect quotation is also typical of Richardson’s ‘instantaneous descriptions’. A  remarkable episode in Pamela, usually overlooked by the novel’s detractors, is the depiction of the heroine’s father in quest of what he fears to be a seduced and morally abandoned daughter:  on Friday Morning, he got to the neighbouring Town; and there he heard, that the Gentry in the Neighbourhood were at my Master’s, at a great Entertainment. He put on a clean Shirt and Neckcloth, that he brought in his Pocket, at an Alehouse there, and got shav’d; and so, after he had eat some Bread and Cheese, and drank a Can of Ale, he set out for my Master’s House, with a heavy Heart, dreading for me, and in much fear of being browbeaten. He had, it seems, asked, at the Alehouse, what Family the ’Squire had down here, in hopes to hear something of me; and they said, A Housekeeper, two Maids, and, at present, two Coachmen, and two Grooms, a Footman, and a Helper. Was that all? he said. They told him, There was a young Creature there, belike, who was, or was to be, his Mistress, or somewhat of that Nature; but had been his Mother’s Waiting-​maid. This, he said, grieved his Heart, and made out what he fear’d. So he went on, and, about Three o’Clock in the Afternoon, came to the Gate; and ringing there, Sir Simon’s Coachman went to the Iron-​gate; and he ask’d for the Housekeeper; tho’ from what I had wrote, in his Heart, he could not abide her. She sent for him in, little thinking who he was, and ask’d him, in the little Hall, what his Business with her was?—​Only, Madam, said he, whether I cannot speak one Word with the ’Squire? No, Friend, said she; he is engaged with several Gentlemen and Ladies. Said he, I have Business with his Honour, of greater Consequence to me than either Life or Death; and Tears stood in his Eyes. (2: 100–​1; my emphases)

The poor father’s effort to put on a respectable appearance before the squire by going to the trouble of getting a shave and donning a clean shirt and neckcloth, and finally taking the precaution of drinking that can of ale with his bread and cheese before leaving the lowly road house for the grand estate, is exemplary of the ‘formal realism’ described by Ian Watt. But such detailed description is enhanced by reported speech in various forms. When Goody Andrews asks about the various servants at Mr. B.’s estate and hears the roster without any mention of his daughter, his growing anxiety culminates with the question, ‘Was that all?’ Upon the further intelligence that the squire has made a mistress of his mother’s maidservant, the worst appears to have happened and justifies his tears while requesting to see his supposedly corrupted daughter. As we see in the passage just quoted, there were no clear conventions for printing direct quotations. Sometimes single quotation marks or italics were used to set off reported speech. But even as exacting a printer as Richardson could not ignore punctuation marks altogether. One of the most compelling scenes in all of his fiction is the one rendering Clarissa’s traumatic public arrest for debt for her stay at Mrs. Sinclair’s. After having been raped while drugged and then making her escape from that brothel, Clarissa undergoes more humiliating exposure by being arrested in public for debt, where the

Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel    227 competing views of the legal authorities, the crowd, and the prostitutes all have their share in the dialogue about this event. The whole passage lacks narrative commentary and relies primarily on discourse but without any of the usual indicators (6: 256–​60). At issue is whether the prostitutes can coerce Clarissa into returning to Mrs. Sinclair’s and submitting to the financial pressure of joining the rest of the professionals there. Throughout the dialogue Sally and Polly maintain a pretence of polite concern for the runaway victim but their repeatedly addressing her as ‘Miss Harlowe’ only exacerbates her plight as a ‘fallen woman’ in the world’s view. Clarissa’s responses to each attempt at persuading her to accept their offer of freedom are gems of dramatic irony. In a print culture with such loose standards of punctuation, it was perhaps easier to slip into a yet more complex style of reported speech that Richardson failed to mention as part of his ‘writing, to the moment’: free indirect discourse (FID), which was hardly recognized until early twentieth-​century philologists gave it a name. Basically, it is a style that combines grammatical features of a character’s direct discourse with the narrator’s privileged indirect discourse. The main advantage is that it allows a third-​person narrative to render a character’s first-​person point of view ironically.10 The following passage renders by insinuation Arabella’s jealous rivalry with Clarissa over catching Lovelace as suitor: My Sister made me a visit there the day after Mr. Lovelace had been introduced; and seemed highly pleased with the gentleman. His birth, his fortune in possession, a clear 2000l. a year, as Lord M. had assured my Uncle; presumptive heir to that Nobleman’s large Estate: His great expectations from Lady Sarah Sadleir and Lady Betty Lawrance; who with his Uncle interested themselves very warmly (he being the last of his line) to see him married. ‘So handsome a man!—​O her beloved Clary!’ (for then she was ready to love me dearly, from the overflowings of her good humour on his account!) ‘He was but too handsome a man for her!—​Were she but as amiable as Somebody, there would be a probability of holding his affections!—​For he was wild, she heard; very wild, very gay; loved intrigue—​But he was young; a man of sense: Would see his error, could she but have patience with his faults, if his faults were not cured by Marriage.’ (1: 6–​7)11

Throughout this scene is the implicit tension between the homely elder sister who feels pressured to be the first to marry and the beautiful younger sister, who would prefer to remain single for life, whatever the apparent attractions this wealthy aristocrat may have once had for the upstart Harlowe family. Although usually employed as a contracted form of reported speech, in his last novel Richardson occasionally uses FID to convey psychological conflict—​something approaching the interior monologue of modern fiction: 

10  Chris Baldick, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (3rd edn., Oxford: OUP, 2008); Gérard Strauch, ‘Richardson et le style indirect libre’, Recherches anglaises et nord-​américaines 26 (1993), 87–​101. See John Dussinger, ‘ “The Language of Real Feeling”: Internal Speech in the Jane Austen Novel’, in Robert M. Uphaus (ed.), The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1988), 97–​115. 11  Only the underlined words are Richardson’s emphasis; the rest in italics are mine to illustrate FID.

228

228   JOHN DUSSINGER Of your happy Harriet, I had like to have written: But the word happy, in this place, would have looked as if I thought these jewels an addition to my happiness. How does his bounty insult me, on my narrow fortune!—​Narrow, unless he submit to accept of the offered contributions of my dear friends—​Contributions! —​Proud Harriet! how art thou, even in thy exaltation, humbled!—​Trifles, he called them! The very ornamenting one’s self with such toys, may, in his eye, be thought trifling, tho’ he is not above complying with the fashion, in things indifferent: But, the cost and beauty of these jewels considered, they are not trifles. The jewel of jewels, however, is his heart! How would the noble Clementina—​Hah, Pen! Heart, rather, Why, why, just now, this check of Clementina?—​I know why—​Not from want of admiration of her; but when I am allowing my heart to open, then does—​Something here, in my inmost bosom [Is it Conscience?] strike me, as if it said, Ah, Harriet!—​Triumph not; rejoice not! Check the overflowings of thy grateful heart!—​Art thou not an invader of another’s rights?12

As in the passage from Clarissa quoted earlier, here again we have the situation of two women competing for the same man but now internalized and heavily filtered by the protagonist’s moral qualms against ‘triumphing’ over her Italian rival.

‘Reading for the Sentiments’ Just as ‘writing, to the moment’ renders all of the uncertainty of present time, when the consequences remain in doubt, so in contrast to this sense of the ‘lived moment’ is the felt need of an atemporal form of control over events. The basic strategy of creating temporality, in fact, is to prepare the way for the atemporal language that Richardson and his age understood as ‘moral sentiments’. Against complaints about the tediousness of Richardson’s story­telling, with almost the same words used by the novelist Johnson underscored the proper approach to his fiction: ‘Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment.’13 Apparently on Johnson’s advice, Richardson spent many hours while compiling yet another manual for the sake of helping his readers catch those pithy observations on life that arose during the storytelling. Such sympathetic readers of Richardson as Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Jane Austen, however, thought that his project of reducing the novels to what often amounts to a textbook for parents and children was a dismal failure.14

12 

[Samuel Richardson], The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 7 vols. (London, 1753–​4), 6: 200. Only the underlined words are Richardson’s emphasis; the rest in italics are mine to illustrate FID. 13  James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, introd. Pat Rogers (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1980), 480. 14  Victoria and Albert Museum Library, Forster Collection, XII, 1, fols. 145–​6: Richardson to Thomas Edwards, 4 August 1755; Correspondence, ed. Barbauld, 1: p. cxxxv. Without naming the Collection of Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Jane Austen’s parodic conclusion to Northanger Abbey implies that the time had come

Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel    229

Clarissa: Temporality versus Eternity As a ‘dramatic’ novel, Clarissa exploits the resources of theatrical presentation as direct discourse and of narrative storytelling as indirect and free indirect discourse. Its epistolary form obviates an omniscient narrator and except for an occasional ‘editor’, depends wholly on the individual voices that comprise piecemeal the story. Richardson’s dread was a ‘dry’ narrative point of view—​too detached from the participants’ inner life to represent it at all. So while aware of the risks Richardson depended heavily on making the most of keeping the narrative in flux without a sense of closure. His mimetic purpose emphasized the inevitable self-​deception of all the characters struggling under the pressure of momentary experience. This focus on temporality, however, has ultimately a religious and moral dimension: beyond the sound and the fury of present time is an intimation of eternal order. Richardson’s obsession with time-​oriented narrative/​dramatic storytelling in Clarissa included an actual calendar to date all the events of this story. Angus Ross observed that the whole text was based upon the calendar for the year 1732.15 But why did Richardson choose 1732 for Clarissa? Perhaps it was merely a random choice. If not, 1732 would be memorable to Richardson as the year when John Wesley first visited William Law in Putney and also wrote the letter to Richard Morgan about the untimely death of his son, William, on 26 August 1732. William Morgan was the leading spirit of the so-​called Oxford Methodists, which included John and Charles Wesley, and George Whitefield. Although William was suffering from a fatal lung disease, his detractors blamed the cause of his passing on his ascetic religious discipline. After obtaining a copy of Wesley’s letter to William’s father, Richardson compiled a pamphlet in the form of a letter and printed it in early 1733.16 Morgan’s religious devotion may have been the precedent for Clarissa’s early death from following the way of the cross. Another connection may have been Mary Astell, who died on 9 May 1731. In her correspondence with John Norris of Bemerton, Astell proved to be a formidable religious and moral thinker. Richardson printed and apparently edited the fourth edition of her Some Reflections upon Marriage in 1730.17 One of her projects for the improvement of

to get beyond such potted moral instruction: ‘I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.’ 15  Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 23–​4. 16  The Oxford Methodists: Being some Account of a Society of Young Gentlemen in that City, so denominated; Setting forth their Rise, Views, and Designs. With Some Occasional Remarks on a Letter inserted in Fog’s Journal of December 9th, 1732, relating to them. In a Letter from a Gentleman near Oxford, to his Friend at London (London, 1733). This pamphlet had been erroneously attributed to William Law. See John Dussinger, ‘The Oxford Methodists (1733; 1738): The Purloined Letter of John Wesley at Samuel Richardson’s Press’, in Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy, S.J. (eds.), Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2012), 27–​48. 17  See John Dussinger, ‘Samuel Richardson’s Probable Influence on Mary Astell’s Revisions of Some Reflections upon Marriage (1730)’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 107/1 (2013), 49–79,

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230   JOHN DUSSINGER English women was the establishment of a nunnery as an alternative to married life. In the height of her family conflict Clarissa observes that if they were Roman Catholics ‘a Nunnery would answer all their views’ (1: 84). While preparing for her death Astell had her coffin brought into her bedroom, and Ruth Perry draws the parallel to Clarissa’s similar practice (ODNB). It could well be that the name Mrs. Norton in Clarissa is intended to be a reminder of both John Norris and Mary Astell in their Neoplatonic theology that informs this novel.18 After printing without permission Elizabeth Carter’s ‘Ode to Wisdom’ in the second volume of Clarissa, in his apology Richardson explained that he had assumed her to be a relative of Norris.19 An even earlier antecedent than Astell may account for Richardson’s choice of the name for his heroine. If not mainly suggesting the pastoral world as in his first novel, Richardson seems to have in mind the thirteenth-​century Italian St. Clare of Assisi, who rebelled against her family’s attempts to force her into marriage and begged St. Francis of Assisi for help. Subsequently Clare and her sister Agnes founded a convent at the church of San Damiano, where the women were dubbed the ‘Poor Ladies’ because of their austere habits.20 The Abbey of the Order of St. Clare was founded in London by Edmund Crouchback in 1293 for Spanish Clare nuns, who became known as the Minoresses by their association with the district, Minories. The remnants of the Holy Trinity, Minories, were close to Richardson’s residence and press at Salisbury Court. His printing of Maitland’s history of London in 1739 is enough evidence to establish his probable awareness of this historical site.21 Clarissa as St. Clare is thus the antonym of Mrs. Sin-​clair, the leader of a very different kind of nunnery. Among the many religious works from Richardson’s press is a small prayer book that has a bearing on this novel. In the Weekly Miscellany (1 December 1733), a letter signed ‘R.F.’ endorses the Select Manual of Devotions for Sick Persons (1733) together with Richardson’s Apprentice’s Vade Mecum. Especially recommended is an addition to the manual: An Office for Malefactors under Sentence of Death; an excellent Office, and a pious and charitable Design of the Author, who has extended his kind Endeavours to an unhappy Set of Wretches, who are no more consider’d as a living Part of Mankind, as they are dead in Law, and though in full Health, launching out into the dreadful Ocean of Eternity.22

and Jocelyn Harris, ‘Philosophy and Politics in Mary Astell and Samuel Richardson’, Intellectual History Review 22/​3 (2012), 445–​63. 18  Robert Erickson, Language of the Heart, 1600–​1750 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997), 211. 19  See Taylor, Reason and Religion in Clarissa, 81–​2. 20  The Catholic Encyclopaedia: [http://​www.newadvent.org/​cathen/​]. 21  William Maitland, The History of London, From its Foundation by the Romans, to the Present Time (London, 1739); Maslen, Samuel Richardson, 461. See Maitland, History, 512–​13, for the Trinity Minories. 22  See John Dussinger, ‘Another Anonymous Compilation from Samuel Richardson’s Press: A Select Manual of Devotions for Sick Persons (1733)’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 102/​3 (2008), 363–​85.

Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel    231 The language here is a chilling reminder of Clarissa’s plight after the rape and her withdrawal from the world that she is no longer ‘consider’d as a living Part of Mankind’ and must prepare herself for ‘launching out into the dreadful Ocean of Eternity’. That it paraphrases John Norris’s ‘The Meditation’ is hardly a pure coincidence: ‘When Life’s close Knot by Writ from Destiny … | The Soul stands shivering on the Ridge of Life; | With what a dreadful Curiosity | Does she launch out into the Sea of vast Eternity!’ This is the poem that Belford quotes at length to the despairing Belton on his deathbed. Belford’s rhetorical question encapsulates Richardson’s admonition through this poet:  And now let me ask thee, Lovelace, Dost thou think, that, when the time shall come that thou shalt be obliged to launch into the boundless ocean of Eternity, thou wilt be able (any more than poor Belton was) to act thy part with such true Heroism, as this sweet and tender blossom of a woman has manifested, and continues to manifest! (7: 167–​9)

At one level of interpretation, Richardson’s second novel is yet another manual from his press—​a means of preparing for that ‘dismal and Mysterious Change … | When Time shall be Eternity’.23 Reaching that ideal state of spiritual enlightenment, however, is fraught with difficulties, and most characters, of course, succumb to the confusion of their sensual lives. As the complex narrative strategy reveals, from the very first letter of the first volume the concern with the present events demands everyone’s attention and creates continual anxiety about the course of action to follow. Throughout the chronological year, all the characters, including Clarissa, are victims of self-​deception based on false appearances; but after the rape and retirement from the world the protagonist reveals in her ‘posthumous’ letters at last an enhanced power of truth beyond the grave. Although to the end self-​deceived, Lovelace at least partially redeems himself. His dying words, ‘LET THIS EXPIATE!’ (8: 249), seem to be addressed to Clarissa as if begging for her divine intercession at the last moment. In defence against the many readers who objected to the death of the heroine, the Postscript to the third edition argues by lengthy quotations from Addison and Rapin on tragedy that the ‘Author of the History (or rather Dramatic Narrative) of Clarissa, is therefore justified by the Christian System, in deferring to extricate suffering Virtue to the time in which it will meet with the Completion of its Reward’ (8: 280). Following the design of a five-​act tragedy, the eight volumes of the third and updated edition of Clarissa apportion narrative time to historical time staged at six houses associated with the story’s action: (1) Harlowe Place; (2) Mrs. Sinclair’s House; (3) Mrs. Moore’s House; (4) The Smiths’ House; (5) The Rowlands’ House; and (6) Her Father’s House.24 Because of the ‘writing, to the moment’, narrative time greatly outweighs the chronological time, and in the process it demands the reader’s attention to details of the narrator’s point of view as opposed to the action itself. 23 

John Norris, ‘The Meditation’, in A Collection of Miscellanies (4th edn., London, 1706), 24–​5. For detailed analysis of this scheme, see Victor Lams, Clarissa’s Narrators (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 10–​20. 24 

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232   JOHN DUSSINGER Thus Clarissa is the main narrator throughout the first two volumes while Lovelace secretly controls events like a puppeteer as he cooperates with the Harlowes in isolating her from the family and posing as her deliverer. Clarissa has difficulties judging events because of inadequate information but also because of her pride as the family’s exemplar. Despite manipulating events here Lovelace deceives himself about her own state of mind. After all of her absorption with her family’s attempts to force her into a marriage with Mr. Solmes, all the while Lovelace is pulling strings to entrap her, by the end of the second volume, with her abduction on 9 April from Harlowe Place to St. Albans, she has crossed the Rubicon and enjoys much less freedom of choice than while a prisoner of her family. In the second act of the novel (third and fourth volumes) the conflict at times resembles a play that Lovelace entitles ‘The Quarrelsome Lovers’ (4: 48), when it seems possible that they will somehow become reconciled and be married. Although as early as the first of March Clarissa declared to a sceptical Anna: ‘Indeed I would not be in Love with him’ (1: 63–​4), and ten days later admitted only that she had been ‘driven into a conditional kind of liking’ (1: 83), her excitement whenever confronting him directly implies an involuntary attraction. While still completely duped by Lovelace’s machinations, at the time of her transfer to Mrs. Sinclair’s Clarissa can confess: ‘I was not displeased to see him in his riding-​dress’ (3: 304). Such weak moments of flesh keep her from appearing to be a ‘frigid woman’ or in Lovelace’s own words, a ‘Frost-​piece’ (4: 330). As if to imply the dangerous temptations and deceptions involved at Mrs. Sinclair’s, after her continuing narrative dominance in the third volume, suddenly in the fourth volume Lovelace takes over as principal narrator as well as manipulator. But by the end of the fifth volume, however, Lovelace has completely lost control over the narrative, the action, and himself. After her escape on 8 June to Mrs. Moore’s at Hampstead Heath, opening the third act, Clarissa enjoys merely four days of physical freedom while Lovelace dominates both narrative and action. Yet, despite his apparent power, he continues to imagine that his passion for her will somehow eventually deliver him from his libertinism. Once drugged and returned to Mrs. Sinclair’s to be ritualistically deflowered, Clarissa loses at last all worldly power and even has to undergo the further humiliation of being arrested for debt for her unpaid lodgings at Mrs. Sinclair’s. But at this point, Lovelace is likewise bereft of any power and mirroring the victim’s post-​rape condition suffers madness and loss of direction. In the sixth volume, after the rape, neither Clarissa nor Lovelace enjoys viable social identities:  ‘I am ruined, undone, blown up, destroyed, and worse than annihilated’ (6: 99). Lovelace’s words, but in a worldly way applicable to Clarissa as well. While confined at Mr. Rowland’s house she undergoes legal as well as physical imprisonment, a concrete experience that forces her into spiritual withdrawal all the more. But at the Smiths’, in the language of the soul’s aspirations in the New Testament, she at last finds the needed refuge to prepare herself for her eventual ‘wedding’ to the ‘heavenly bridegroom’. The seventh volume comprises the fourth act, where the protagonist gains self-​ knowledge and hope. Yet from here to the end it is the reformed Belford who presides over the narrative.

Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel    233 By way of final act, concerning Clarissa’s heavenly ‘Father’s house’, the eighth volume is mostly a funereal survey of the heroine’s brief life ending with the execution of Lovelace by Col. Morden (Morte, ‘Death’). For many readers, including Richardson’s contemporaries resistant to any thoughts about death while in pursuit of worldly happiness, the last two volumes are difficult to bear. Richardson decried such readers relentlessly:  Calamity is the test of virtue, and often the parent of it, in minds that prosperity would ruin. What is meant, think you, Madam, by the whole Christian doctrine of the Cross? Ask the people who frequent Vauxhall and Ranelagh if they found themselves fiddled and danced and merry into virtue? What meant the Royal Prophet when he said that it was good for him to be afflicted?25

Within the context of the Christian ideology, Clarissa’s death is meant to be ‘happy’—​as happy, say, as William Law’s, who cheerfully sang hymns on his deathbed. At this stage Anna Howe recedes completely as a relevant correspondent, and Mrs. Norton steps in to speak the proper language for Clarissa’s spiritual adventure, urging her to ‘Chear up’ and not despair: ‘and what … is this poor Needle’s point of NOW to a boundless ETERNITY?’ (6: 136). In yet another allusion to Norris, to his poem The Aspiration, Richardson is again raising the stakes for the reader to comprehend the ultimate uncertainty of individual efforts to find stability in a world of flux and the ultimate hope in a moral compass to draw the pilgrim by divine grace toward the haven of timelessness.26 At her deathbed levee (7: 420–​1), Clarissa has gained the power to speak from the vantage point of Eternity. In her grand gesture of refusing others to mourn in this last scene of her life, Clarissa also triumphs over her family and demonstrates her complete faith in a higher power. Her release at last from the continual pressure of temporality is a moment of ecstasy. In contrast to all of the narrative conflict rendered in scenes, Clarissa’s spiritual development occurs mostly offstage. As if to generalize her experience as the pilgrim’s progress, Richardson returns to his Select Manual of Devotions as a guide for the sick and dying; instead of a personal voice, we hear echoes of the Old Testament and Book of Common Prayer. For his most trusted readers, in late 1749 Richardson printed Meditations Collected from the Sacred Books; And Adapted to the Different Stages of a Deep Distress; Gloriously surmounted by Patience, Piety, and Resignation. Being those mentioned in the History of Clarissa as drawn up by her for her own Use.27 Only five of these meditations appear in the first edition and were included in the third edition of 25  Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 151: Richardson to Frances Grainger, 29 March 1750. 26  See Lams, Clarissa’s Narrators, 108–​12. 27  These are reproduced and well annotated by Thomas Keymer in Samuel Richardson’s Published Commentary on Clarissa 1747–​1765, gen. ed. Florian Stuber, vol. 1: Preface, Postscripts and Related Writings, introd. Jocelyn Harris, texts ed. with footnotes by Thomas Keymer (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), 154–​248.

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234   JOHN DUSSINGER Clarissa. Belford produces three of them in his letters to Lovelace (6: 392; 7: 93–​4 and 126–​7). A fourth is attached to a letter from her uncle (7: 100–​1), and the fifth Lovelace reads at the Smiths’ (7: 152–​3). As Thomas Keymer observes: ‘By documenting a period in which Clarissa as narrator becomes sparing and withdrawn, retreating instead into private study of scripture’s “useful places” … the volume gives special access to internal struggles which in the novel itself are mainly reported by uncomprehending external witnesses (notably Belford).’28 As in the many anonymous compilations of religious and moral texts that issued from his press, here again Richardson seems to prefer the role of editor. Rather than having to portray the mind of an individual suffering inner turmoil and seeking respite, instead he invokes the appropriate moral sentiments for the reader to contemplate. More than one reader, however, fails to comprehend their meaning: ‘tho’ I have read in some of our Perfectionists enough to make a better man than myself either run into madness or despair about the Grace you mention; yet I cannot enter into the meaning of the word, nor into the modus of its operation’. Lovelace’s allusion to the Perfectionists here may include an array of such authors as John Norris, Mary Astell, William Law, and John Wesley, all of whom, we know, were familiar to Richardson. To the end, despite Clarissa’s efforts, Lovelace fails to understand the ‘modus’ of grace.29

‘To live like Sir Charles, and to die like Clarissa, what a full complement of felicity would that be!’30 One unifying theme in all of Richardson’s novels is surely the issue concerning the freedom of conscience for the individual struggling through a continually uncertain temporality. In most critical commentary, it has usually been taken for granted that the female protagonists had to worry about their freedom to choose the course of life open to them. But a secondary theme throughout Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison focuses on the conflicted male actors in these stories. Mr. B., Lovelace, and Sir Charles all have to 28 

Samuel Richardson’s Published Commentary on Clarissa, gen. ed. Stuber, 1: 155. Clarissa, 3: 112. Besides John Norris and Mary Astell, who stressed grace as the inner light, their major successor, William Law, greatly influenced the early evangelical movement that began with the Oxford Methodists. Richardson printed the following books by Law: A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection (2nd edn., 1728); The Way to Divine Knowledge. Being several Dialogues between Humanus, Academicus, Rusticus and Theophilus (1752); The Spirit of Love (1752); and An Earnest and Serious Answer to Dr. Trapp’s Discourse of the Folly, Sin, and Danger, of being Righteous Over-​much (3rd edn., 1756). On the influence of William Law, see John Dussinger, ‘Conscience and the Pattern of Christian Perfection in Clarissa’, PMLA 81/​3 (1966), 236–​45; and Gerda J. Joling-​van der Sar, ‘The Spiritual Side of Samuel Richardson: Mysticism, Behmenism and Millenarianism in an Eighteenth-​Century English Novelist’, unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of Leiden, 2003), 111–​41. On the influence of Norris, see Lams, Clarissa’s Narrators, 111–​12; and Taylor, Reason and Religion in Clarissa, esp. 111–​54. 30  Correspondence, ed. Barbauld, 3: 70–​3: Thomas Edwards to Richardson, 28 January 1754. 29 

Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel    235 endure trials to test their privileged identities as ‘gentlemen’. Given that context, despite Pamela’s foregrounding her resistance in captivity, Mr. B.’s predicament of losing his authority through this servant-​girl’s reports to the world is also an essential part of the central psychomachia. Similarly, despite all of his bluster as a stage rake, in his letters Lovelace reveals deep and often incoherent anxieties of his class in failing to possess his prey, an offspring of an upstart (‘Harlowe’ = harlot) family in contrast to his pedigree. Instead of mastering her, at least while at St. Albans he finds himself in the role of acolyte and by the moment of his death, a desperate suppliant. In Richardson’s third novel the gentleman hero exerts power not as a philanderer but as a philanthropist. Yet this franchise of imposing beneficences creates almost a similar problem for those women who have no way of repaying their incurred debts. In contrast to Clarissa, both Pamela and Harriet Byron succumb to the gentleman’s beneficence. Before suspecting her donor’s feelings for her, without any means of responding to Charles’s kindnesses, Harriet feels desperate:  ‘But what shall I  do with my gratitude? O my dear, I am overwhelmed with my gratitude.’31 Years before turning novelist, Richardson stressed the ideal state of being creditor as opposed to debtor. In the name of moral goodness, he took an almost perverse delight in the role of the all-​powerful donor who reduces his recipient to helpless, passive (feminine!) admiration. As Marcel Mauss observed: ‘charity wounds him who receives, and our whole moral effort is directed towards suppressing the unconscious harmful patronage of the rich almoner’.32 Besides Harriet’s problems, however, the good-​ natured Sir Charles suffers the dilemma of being in love with two women (the one, an Italian Roman Catholic of a proud aristocratic family, and the other, a relatively poor English Protestant woman) at the same time. If Richardson fails to bring out this conflict convincingly, at least he attempted a rather daring experiment in early fiction. While focused on negotiating a marriage that would suit Clementina della Porretta, Sir Charles’s main role is as international diplomat and philanthropist, serving ultimately the interests of the British dominion over the world. Because of his irresistible power to do good, Sir Charles inadvertently drives Clementina into temporary madness while trying to overcome her passion for him and remaining true to her Roman Catholic beliefs. Despite its low status among many twentieth-​ century historians of the novel, Grandison was doubtless the most admired of Richardson’s novels by nineteenth-​century critics, including Jane Austen.33 Even if without the overall effect produced by the dialectic of writing, to the moment in Clarissa, Richardson continued to experiment with reported speech and of course accumulated further moral sentiments in this last 31 

Sir Charles Grandison, 1: 235–​6. With superhuman speed and efficiency Sir Charles immobilizes all resistance from either male or female contenders. 32  Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison, introd. E. E. Evans-​Pritchard (New York: Norton, 1967), 63. On the worldly advantage of being the creditor, see John Dussinger, ‘Debt without Redemption in a World of “Impossible Exchange”: Samuel Richardson and Philanthropy’, in Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar (eds.), The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-​Century England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 55–​75. 33  James Edward Austen-​Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 89.

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236   JOHN DUSSINGER narrative. As in Clarissa, he worked with an actual Julian calendar, beginning with the year 1749 and ending with Wednesday, 4 July 1750. By a twist of fate, while having tea with Joseph Highmore, Richardson suffered a stroke and joined Clarissa on the Gregorian Saturday, 4 July 1761.

Select Bibliography Bueler, Lois, Clarissa’s Plots (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1994). Doody, Margaret Anne, A Natural Passion: A Study in the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). Dussinger, John A., ‘Truth and Storytelling in Clarissa’, in Margaret Doody and Peter Sabor (eds.), Tercentenary Essays on Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: CUP, 1989). Eaves, T. C., and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Erickson, Robert, Language of the Heart, 1600–​1750 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997). Flynn, Carol Houlihan, Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982). Harris, Jocelyn, Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: CUP, 1987). Joling-​van der Sar, Gerda J., ‘The Spiritual Side of Samuel Richardson: Mysticism, Behmenism and Millenarianism in an Eighteenth-​Century English Novelist’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Leiden, 2003. Keymer, Thomas, Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-​Century Reader (Cambridge: CUP, 1992). Kinkead-​Weekes, Mark, Samuel Richardson, Dramatic Novelist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1973). Lams, Victor, Clarissa’s Narrators (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). Maslen, Keith, Samuel Richardson of London, Printer:  A  Study of His Printing Based on Ornament and Business Accounts (Dunedin, NZ: U of Otago P, 2001). Strauch, Gérard, ‘Richardson et le style indirect libre’, Recherches anglaises et nord-​américaines 26 (1993), 87–​101. Taylor, E. Derek, Reason and Religion in Clarissa: Samuel Richardson and ‘The Famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1960).

Chapter 15

He nry Fieldin g a nd t h e Pro gress of Roma nc e Scott Black

Henry Fielding’s novels are not flat plains. You neither ride through them at a steady gait nor read through them at a single rate. They are composed of elements from many genres and crowded with allusions to the full range of eighteenth-​century British culture: classical learning, modern European novels, popular theatre, partisan newspapers, urban masquerades, country puppet-​shows. And if Fielding’s richly cosmopolitan and densely intertextual novels are busily compounded of his own reading, they also reach out self-​consciously to engage their readers in turn, reminding us that books are commodities that are bought and sold, objects that are loved and harmed, and texts that are read in various ways, at various paces, and with varying degrees of sophistication. Fielding’s loud, lively style parades the conditions of its mediation and dissemination, breaking the spell of the stories he tells, but also creating the enchanting effect of an interlocutor, a storyteller, a voice on the page—​or echoing in one’s head—​that is beguilingly real, or at least realized in the activity one undertakes to keep up. Much depends on the pace of the prose. When Joseph Andrews is sent off on his travels, Fielding wryly comments on literary conventions and readerly expectations:  Those who have read any Romance or Poetry antient or modern, must have been informed, that Love hath Wings; by which they are not to understand, as some young Ladies by mistake have done, that a Lover can Fly: the Writers, by this ingenious Allegory, intending to insinuate no more, than that Lovers do not march like Horse-​ Guards; in short, that they put their best Leg foremost, which our lusty Youth, who could walk with any Man, did so heartily on this Occasion, that within four Hours, he reached a famous House of Hospitality well known to the Western Traveller.1

1 

Henry Fielding, The History of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford and Middletown, CT: OUP and Wesleyan UP, 1967), 49.

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238   SCOTT BLACK As Fielding tosses off such series of witty conceits, silly juxtapositions, and rapid dismissals, the particular references come to seem less important than the accumulation of them, the rapid fireworks of associations and undercuttings that court the reader, challenging you to be as alert and literate as the page. Modelling a skill of elastic literacy appropriate to a polyvocal print culture, Fielding’s narratives work through both wide-​ranging textual and local historical contexts. But though the texts and figures (and mistakes in reading) are no less of their moment than the roads and inns, in his refusal to limit his prose to the realism of the latter, Fielding’s works have been considered marginal to histories of the novel as a modern genre.2 In this essay I’ll argue that Fielding was not eccentric to the development of the novel because the novel was not that modern. Fielding’s novels haven’t fit the narrative of the rise of the novel because of their failure to be realistic or original, their opportunistic adaptation of old forms and recycling of familiar stories, their conservatism, and their neoclassical understanding of the genre. But these are just the terms in which the eighteenth-​century novel is now described. Fielding fits centrally into recent accounts of a ‘remapped’ history of the novel, which seek in Franco Moretti’s phrase ‘to make the literary field historically longer, geographically larger, and morphologically deeper’.3 The novel in eighteenth-​century Britain was not a new English genre but an ‘Englished’ one; a sizeable proportion of novels published were translations, and the genre itself, Mary Helen McMurran suggests, was defined by the process of translation.4 Fielding’s novels self-​consciously participated in this international culture of the novel. Their referential fields are long and wide, and they exhibit in themselves the morphological diversity that Moretti finds in the genre more generally. They may help us reorganize our histories of a less modern genre. We don’t have far to look to find a genre organized by translation and variety. This is the standard profile of romance.5 And though we adopt the nineteenth-​century name, romance is the common eighteenth-​century term for prose fiction. Recent work on romance characterizes it as intertextual, self-​conscious, and critical.6 Indeed, the origins of romance are bound up with the translation and adaptation of old works (the ‘matters’ of Rome and Britain) into the vernacular; as Simon Gaunt reminds us, ‘romance’ comes from metre en roman (to translate into the vernacular).7 If both eighteenth-​century print culture and the 2  See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1960), 30, 32; John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700–1780 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 133, 125. 3  Franco Moretti, ‘The Novel: History and Theory’, New Left Review 52 (2008), 111. 4  Mary Helen McMurran, ‘National or Transnational? The Eighteenth-Century Novel’, in Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (eds.), The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002), 51–3, 57. 5  Corinne Saunders, ‘Introduction’, in Corinne Saunders (ed.), A Companion to Romance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 3, 5; Barbara Fuchs, Romance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 50, 3. 6  Clive Probyn, ‘Paradise and Cotton-mill: Rereading Eighteenth-Century Romance’, in Saunders (ed.), Companion to Romance, 252; Jonathan Crewe, ‘Believing the Impossible: Aethiopika and Critical Romance’, Modern Philology 106/4 (2009), 601–16. 7  Simon Gaunt, ‘Romance and Other Genres’, in Roberta Krueger (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 45.

Henry Fielding and the Progress of Romance    239 novel are defined in significant part by translation—​both publishing and literary contexts organized by adaptations of texts from other times and places—​romance may offer not just a contemporary generic name but also a suitable critical framework for the study of both. Pierre-​Daniel Huet’s ‘Letter … Upon the Original of Romances’ provides an influential contemporary account of the genre. Huet defines romance as ‘Fictions of Love Adventures artfully form’d and deliver’d in Prose, for the Delight and Instruction of the Readers. I call Romance a Fiction to distinguish it from History, and a Fiction of Love Adventures, because Love ought to be the principal subject of a Romance.’8 This definition combines both generic structure (adventures) and modal force (love), and offers the standard Horatian defence of fiction. Romance’s ‘Probability’ situates it between factual histories and false ‘Fables’ (p. v), and its focus on love distinguishes it from martial epics (p. iii). The bulk of Huet’s account traces the history of the genre from its ancient Asian origins to his present time. Towards the end he speculates:  This Inclination to Fables, which is common to all Men, is not the effect of Reasoning, nor does it arise from Imitation, or Custom; it is natural to them, and is riveted in the very Frame and Disposition of the Soul. For the desire to learn, and to know, is peculiar to Man, by which he is as much distinguish’d from other Creatures, as by his Reason. Nay, the Sparks of an imperfect rough hewn Reason are observable in some Animals, but the desire of Knowledge is found no where but in Man. And this is, according to my Opinion, because the Faculties of our Mind are of too great an Extent, and of a Capacity too large to be fill’d and satisfied with present Objects, for which reason she searcheth into what is past, and to come, into Truth and falsehood, into imaginary Spaces and even Impossibilities, to find out wherewithal to exercise and satisfie those Faculties. Brutes find in the Objects present to their Senses sufficient to answer the Powers of their Mind, and go no farther; insomuch that we never observe in them that impatient Thirst, which incessantly incites the Mind of Man to search after new Discoveries, and proportion, if it be possible, the Object to the Faculty. (pp. xliii–​xliv)

For Huet, the restlessness of human curiosity creates romance, which uses, magpie-​like, whatever it can find—​from the past and future (a strange temporality), from the true and false and even impossible—​to satisfy ‘the desire to learn, and to know’. From this expansive perspective, the aspiration to realism, which seeks to confine the imagination to present objects, looks facile, even brutish. Romances are stimulants, and in stretching the mind form it: ‘Nothing quickens the Mind so much, or conduces more to the forming and finishing of it, than good Romances’ (p. li). Huet’s account of romance lines up with recent accounts of the eighteenth-​century novel, a genre neither realist nor modern nor English nor defined exclusively by present concerns, but rather international, trans-​ historical, formally diverse, and stimulating because of that variety. By now it should be clear my title is a joke. Romance is not progressive, at least not in the usual modern sense; it doesn’t move forward in time but ‘progresses’ in the older 8 

Pierre-Daniel Huet, ‘Letter . . . Upon the Original of Romances’, in Croxall’s Select Collection of Novels (London, 1722), 1: p. ii.

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240   SCOTT BLACK spatial sense, in loops rather than lines. Against the standard story of the novel rising as it moves away from romance, Fielding’s novels develop as they approach romance. His art increases in power and sophistication as he more fully explores the possibilities of romance, both structural and modal. As Fielding moves from Jonathan Wild to Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, the productive tension between satire and romance that organizes all his novels is increasingly resolved by integrating the satire into the structures of romance; love is increasingly explored and not just assumed; and the romance heroine becomes increasingly central. Fielding uses the modal forces of romance to address the issues raised by its expansive, dialogic, and intertextual generic structures. As Huet says, good romance pleasurably ‘quickens’ the mind, and Fielding’s novels work best when they deploy the genre’s full dynamic range. Fielding’s engagement with romance starts unpromisingly. Mrs. Heartfree’s travels are written in the mode of romance and they are a strange counterpoint to the satire that organizes the rest of Jonathan Wild (1743), Fielding’s first piece of extended prose fiction.9 Jonathan Wild is a topical satire that figures the prime minister, Walpole, as the eponymous ‘great’ hero, as thief and thief-​catcher. The work depends on a strict and ironic separation between Wild’s greatness—​which authorizes and excuses all corruption and dishonour in the name of expediency—​and his dupe Heartfree’s goodness. The novel rocks back and forth on this axis, ironically celebrating the immoralities of greatness and ironically bemoaning the feebleness of goodness in a Machiavellian world. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of the work’s simple satiric inversions are those places where the balance fails, where Wild breaks type and becomes more than a little creep with a loud patter; where his girlfriend, Laetitia, is given the kind of snappy dialogue Fielding developed in his plays; and where the satire veers off course and enters the wilds of romance. If Heartfree, the normatively good, bland man is the necessary thematic counterpart of Wild, Mrs. Heartfree is the counterpart of the delightfully bitchy Laetitia. Mrs. Heartfree’s travels have largely been ignored by critics, and indeed these chapters are perfunctory as they duly ring the standard changes of romance: storm and shipwreck, pirates and kidnapping, and the requisite threats of imprisonment and rape that dog the romance heroine. The reason for sending Mrs. Heartfree on her travels is clear. If she’s to be Laetitia’s counterpart, her constancy and chastity must be proven, and Fielding does this in the usual way, subjecting her to an increasingly elaborate series of seductions; in good romance fashion, every man who meets her tries her. The case against Laetitia is emphasized when Mrs. Heartfree’s narrative is interrupted by the bellowing Wild, who’s just found out that Laetitia has been sleeping with his lieutenant. (In Joseph Andrews, Fielding uses to better effect this strategy of interrupting a story with another in a contrasting register.) But though structurally necessary, the elaborate romance of Mrs. Heartfree’s travels fits awkwardly in a book organized by the different concerns of political satire. The interplay of satire and romance will remain a constant feature of Fielding’s novels, but the relative weight shifts from satire to romance. 9 

Jonathan Wild, first published in 1743 in Fielding’s Miscellanies, appeared after Joseph Andrews (1742), but was probably written before it (see Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life [London and New York: Routledge, 1989], 281–2, 655 n. 37).

Henry Fielding and the Progress of Romance    241 Joseph Andrews (1742) is the story of Joseph’s several births. Originally a cross-​ gendered parody of Pamela, the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s best-​selling novel, Joseph is reborn when the satiric claim that Joseph’s chastity was motivated by Pamela’s lessons is undercut by the revelation that it is motivated by love (48). Lady Booby, stunned to hear Joseph talk of his virtue as she’s trying to seduce him, cries: ‘Did ever Mortal hear of Man’s Virtue!’ Joseph answers: ‘that Boy is the Brother of Pamela, and would be ashamed, that the Chastity of his Family, which is preserved in her, should be stained in him’ (41). Fielding’s joke about a young man chastely resisting the overtures of a half-​naked woman because of a lesson learned by reading Pamela’s letters mocks the efficacy of Richardson’s moral project. Neither young men nor reading, it’s suggested, really works like that. But if the initial satire comically parodies the situation of Pamela, the novel shifts tracks when its claims are undercut by the revelation that Joseph’s chastity is not an effect of reading but of love for his hitherto unknown sweetheart, Fanny. In one sense, by undercutting Joseph’s fatuously pious claims, the text comically exposes his own ridiculousness (and the novel’s too); the ‘ridiculous’ depends on the exposure of affectation, Fielding announces in the Preface, and is the basis of the kind of ‘comic Romance’ or ‘comic Epic-​Poem in Prose’ he’s writing (7–​8, 4). But in another sense, by providing Joseph with another motivation, Fielding begins to answer Pamela, not just mock it. By shifting into romance Joseph moves beyond the ridiculous parody that initially defines him. But if the novel seems to trade the motivation of Pamela’s chastity for an erotic drive towards Fanny, Fielding then recuperates what he seems to reject, folding chastity into love by stating that Joseph was using Pamela’s lessons to save himself for Fanny (58). His motives are interlocked not undercut, and the work concerned with balancing divergent pressures instead of choosing between them. As the full title indicates, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, And of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams is organized by two intertwined stories, each with its own mode and structure. For the rest of the novel, Joseph practises the arts of love that define his new role as a romance hero, apostrophizing Fanny, singing pastoral songs, dallying in romantic vales, mourning the loss of his beloved, and rescuing her from insult. Meanwhile, Adams takes over from Joseph the role of satiric butt and moral touchstone, a role Joseph momentarily assumes in the stagecoach scene just before handing off the novel’s satiric duties to Adams. No longer targeting a single text and the problem of individual chastity, Fielding uses Adams to critique a broad cross-​section of English society and a wide range of claims and affectations. Adams’s position as a learned and conversable curate allows Fielding to link questions of hypocrisy to a series of debates, political, moral, critical, and theological. Through a series of satiric exposures of people with generous tongues but empty hands—​a nationalist chickenhawk, a porcine faith-​based Christian, a promising patron—​the novel explores the limits of the epistemology of empiricism and the theology of grace, both of which depend on an individual integrity that is shown comically to fail to deliver at every turn. But this satiric lesson in doubt is balanced by the quixotic figure of Adams himself. Adams’s trustingly naive literalism is necessary to the exposure of his interlocutors and ridiculous in itself, but also vindicated by his active applications of the lessons of charity. If Joseph answers chastity with romantic love, Adams suggests the answer to naive reading is not to spurn such pleasures for

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242   SCOTT BLACK the wary sophistries of doubt, where nothing is trusted enough to be enjoyed, but to love what you laugh at too. Joseph strides through the complex world tested by Adams without really being of it. He offers worldly insight to the naive Adams (about the existence of false promises and true generosity), and he battles and borrows his way through a contentious and often cruel landscape (and his battles are often in the borrowed dress of mock-​ heroic, as in the fight with the dogs). But Joseph himself is never tested. It’s Adams who goes off to look for charity and Adams who argues his way through the inns of England, while Joseph’s attention is centred on Fanny. The question of Joseph’s identity is neatly resolved with a literary trick out of early romance, a telling birthmark that’s the result of his mother’s desire being imprinted on him in the womb. And though he’s used as occasion for satiric and literary play, Joseph is chiefly motivated by the modal force of the romance into which he was reborn as the novel moves beyond parody, an identity confirmed by the final revelation about his birth. If Adams wanders and argues, satirically widening and slowing the novel (Adams’s journey is his destination), Joseph’s love supplies its propulsive force as his generic destiny makes the various difficulties, narrative and moral, feel like the generative readerly frustrations of romance. Joseph and Adams travel together but they inhabit different narrative universes at odds with each other. Adams offers facile—​and hypocritical—​Christian answers to the cruces of romance, urging submission to the divine will when Fanny is kidnapped and when the incest twist occurs, and preaching a dry Christian love that his own wife rejects, and says he does too in practice. The two plot-​lines dovetail and braid, but they do not blend. Though Adams is given a living in the happy ending of Joseph and Fanny’s romance, the novel never really resolves the tension between its two generic strands. Perhaps to want such a resolution at all is to think in terms of romance, and the novel’s suspension of the theoretical debates raised by the satire works, in turn, as the satire does, even as the narrative resolves into romance. If that’s so, both the critiques of Adams’s journey and the pleasures of Joseph’s arrive at the same point, though each at an end appropriate to its genre, the romance conventionally resolved, the satire ironically suspended. But if the challenges of caritas aren’t really answered by the pleasures of erotic love, eros can be a first step up the ladder of love. The double helix of Joseph Andrews evolves into a single capacious arc of romance in Fielding’s next novel, Tom Jones (1749). Though even broader in its survey of eighteenth-​ century Britain and even sharper in its critique of the culture’s hypocrisy and vanity, Tom Jones integrates its satire within a strongly motivated plot of romance that turns on Tom’s adventures of love and the discovery of his proper identity. Like Joseph, Tom is centrally motivated by love, but he must earn what Joseph is given. Both Tom and Sophia, his beloved, are situated within a complex world of corruption, affectation, and cruelty, and their love story provides a contrapuntal strand that, as in Joseph Andrews, offers an alternative to it. But it’s less automatic and understanding Tom becomes the central problem of the novel, both for its characters and its readers.

Henry Fielding and the Progress of Romance    243 The mystery of Tom’s birth narratively bookends the novel, but most of the novel asks about Tom’s social status and moral fitness. Tom’s social position is ambiguous at best (he’s a foundling taken in by Mr. Allworthy), and when his status is revealed at the end it is validated by his moral qualities, not vice versa. Tom serves as an answer to the world of affectation and hypocrisy critiqued by Fielding’s satire. He and Sophia are formed of ‘the plain simple Workings of honest Nature’ that worldly characters like Mrs. Western, who are well versed in ‘Disguise or Affectation’, can’t understand.10 And Tom’s exuberant goodness drives the novel as he generously, impetuously, and imprudently saves a series of characters from harm—​Black George, the Man of the Hill, Mrs. Waters, the Merry Andrew, Mr. Enderson (twice), and Nancy Miller. But though these actions are admir­ able, the novel is troubled by the relationship between Tom’s charity and lack of chastity. Joseph retains the imprint of his initial parody as the chaste brother of Pamela, but Tom’s good nature serves both to answer to the novel’s satire and to raise a question about its romance, fleshing out the moral complications of erotic love. Blifil’s meanness is associated with his moderate sexual appetite and self-​satisfaction, and Tom’s generosity goes with generous appetites, which he indulges with Molly, Mrs. Waters, and Lady Bellaston. Love here is as complicated as charity, and indeed hard to separate from it; Tom’s ability to help Mrs. Miller’s family depends on the wages he receives as Lady Bellaston’s gigolo. The novel suggests that Tom’s generous nature finally validates his social position, but it also finally argues that Tom must learn to manage the passions that underlie his compassion. It’s not clear the novel can have it both ways. Indeed, it shows the consequences of Tom’s generosity always coming back to help him in the end. And chastity always turns out to be a red herring, something that gives a handle to rigid or hypocritical moralists like Thwackum and Blifil, but is less significant to those who matter. If Tom is an enlarged Joseph who tests us with the kind of questions raised by Adams, Adams himself dwindles into Partridge, a vaguely learned schoolmaster and quixotic literalist who ironically takes the role of Sancho. Like Adams, Partridge is bookish in a couple of senses, formed of books and associated with them. After Tom’s exile Partridge reappears in the guise of Benjamin, a barber out of Arabian Nights and Don Quixote, who owns a library as small and scattered as his learning. But if Partridge inherits from Adams only a smattering of his learning, he is compensated with a greater share of Adams’s superstition. An amusing fool, simple-​minded, superstitious, and a Jacobite, Partridge is loaded with all the bad habits in reading and politics Fielding wants to laugh away. Partridge is foil both to Tom, whose politics are anti-​Jacobite, and to Tom Jones, which depends on a less superstitious practice of literacy. In answer to Partridge, Fielding explains that in his novel he will not employ either the ‘Furniture of the infernal Regions’, which is no longer even fit for the theatres, or the adventures of ‘Fairy Land’, which are no longer even fit for children; instead he is ‘an Historian, who professes to draw his Materials from Nature only’ (666). If Partridge himself is drawn out of books, Fielding 10 

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 274.

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244   SCOTT BLACK is careful to make sure we don’t make Partridge’s mistakes in reading. Fielding writes in similarly demystifying terms about Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s story. Her lover, the noble peer, is described:  To say Truth, it was by his Assistance, that she had been enabled to escape from her Husband; for this Nobleman had the same gallant Disposition with those renowned Knights, of whom we read in heroic Story, and had delivered many an imprisoned Nymph from Durance. He was indeed as bitter an Enemy of the savage Authority too often exercised by Husbands and Fathers, over the young and lovely of the other Sex, as ever Knight Errant was to the barbarous Power of Enchanters: nay, to say Truth, I have often suspected that those very Enchanters with which Romance everywhere abounds, were in reality no other than the Husbands of those Days; and Matrimony itself was, perhaps, the enchanted Castle in which the Nymphs were said to be confined. (607)

Does Mrs. Fitzpatrick think in these romantic terms or more generally the readers of heroic stories? Mrs. Fitzpatrick is an avid reader, whose wide-​ranging tastes are probably intended to mock her chaotic mind (though the novel itself is equally varied and wide-​ranging in its tastes). Discerning the social reality beneath the mystifications of enchantment—​the knight’s self-​interest, the savage authority of men, the prison of marriage, a proto-​feminist critique of patriarchy’s ideological enchantments—​demystifies romance. The characteristic gentility and aggression of chivalry exhibited by Mr. Fitzpatrick is shown by Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s story to be just the false front of a scam behind which affectation, self-​interest, and finally cruelty do their work. But rather than simply demystifying such forms in modern terms, as Eric Rothstein argues, Tom Jones also works within those inherited structures.11 Fielding doesn’t redefine every genre he adopts or even critiques. And though Mrs. Fitzpatrick intends her story as a warning to Sophia, it does not, in fact, forecast Sophia’s. Fielding redeploys as well as redefines the dynamics of romance. He distinguishes his ‘extraordinary history’ from others by both its truth and its play. As Truth distinguishes our Writings, from those idle Romances which are filled with Monsters, the Productions, not of Nature, but of distempered Brains; and which have been therefore recommended by an eminent Critic to the sole Use of the Pastry-​ cook: So, on the other hand, we would avoid any Resemblance to that Kind of History which a celebrated Poet seems to think is not less calculated for the Emolument of the Brewer, as the reading of it should always be attended with a Tankard of good Ale … That our Work, therefore, might be in no Danger of being likened to the Labours of these Historians, we have taken every Occasion of interspersing through the whole sundry Similes, Descriptions, and other kind of poetical Embellishments. These are, indeed, designed to supply the Place of the said Ale, and to refresh the Mind, whenever those Slumbers, which in a long Work are apt to invade the Reader as well as the

11 

Eric Rothstein, ‘Virtues of Authority in Tom Jones’, in Albert J. Rivero (ed.), Critical Essays on Henry Fielding (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 156, 160.

Henry Fielding and the Progress of Romance    245 Writer, shall begin to creep upon him. Without Interruptions of this Kind, the best Narrative of plain Matter of Fact must overpower every Reader. (150–​1)

Fielding separates his work both from ‘those idle Romances’ that are the products of overheated heads and from ‘that Kind of History’ that can’t sustain the reader’s interest without the aim of stimulants. If romances are only good for pastry-​cooks to reuse for pie-​linings, and histories for brewers whose beer makes them palatable, Fielding will reuse the embellishments of romance to make his history palatable. His middle course between fancy and fact replaces the enchantments of superstitious belief with the embellishments of literary play. What is the relationship between such refreshment and the meal of the real? Hesitation and mediation between kinds occurs throughout Fielding’s novels. (His compound categories, ‘comic Epic-​Poem in Prose’ and ‘Prosai-​comi-​epic Writing’, stress the hybridity of his genre.) So while Fielding is anxious to distinguish his work from the ‘too common and vulgar … Romances, Novels, Plays, and Poems, with which the [book] Stalls abound’ (32), the tone of such distinctions is often, as here, a way of mocking the precious taste of ‘the Epicure’ and those people elsewhere satirized for affectedly disdaining the ‘low’ (638). Later, Fielding again distinguishes his ‘historic Kind of Writing’ from the ‘Swarm of foolish Novels, and monstrous Romances’ (487) that are written without any thought or reflection and indeed, it seems, without any consciousness at all: ‘to the Composition of Novels and Romances, nothing is necessary but Paper, Pens, and Ink, with the manual Capacity of using them’ (489). But Fielding equivocates in his refusal to associate his work with romance. It is ‘monstrous Romances’ and ‘those idle Romances which are filled with Monsters’, not romances per se, that are condemned. Fielding notes the ‘universal Contempt which the World, who always denominate the Whole from the Majority, have cast on all historical Writers who do not draw their Materials from Records. And it is the Apprehension of this Contempt, that hath made us so cautiously avoid the Term Romance, a Name with which we might otherwise have been well enough contented’ (489). In the dedication to Lyttelton, Fielding thanks him for his help with ‘this History’ but assures him he doesn’t mean to draw on him ‘the suspicion of being a Romance Writer’ (3–​4), which suggests that Fielding’s history may indeed be a romance. At least it’s more than the usual ‘history’: ‘Matters of a much more extraordinary Kind are to be the Subject of this History, or I should grossly mispend my Time in writing so voluminous a Work; and you, my sagacious Friend, might, with equal Profit and Pleasure, travel through some Pages, which certain droll Authors have been facetiously pleased to call The History of England’ (38).12 Both ‘history’ and ‘romance’ are flexible categories. If an unprejudiced use of ‘romance’ could name Fielding’s true work, ‘histories’ can also be false. John Allen Stevenson and Nicholas Hudson argue that Tom Jones’s political and social contexts are themselves organized by the dynamics of romance, the persistence of old forms, and ‘the interlarding of traditional imagery and new social realities’.13 In these 12  Fielding here attacks Thomas Carte’s Jacobite History, which he elsewhere calls a romance (Tom Jones, ed. Battestin and Bowers, 38 n. 2). 13  Nicholas Hudson, ‘Tom Jones’, in Claude Rawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 84.

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246   SCOTT BLACK terms the formal patchwork of Fielding’s novels looks like a version of their historical situation, as both text and context are organized by a clash of forms without any definitive new ground of reality or realism. For this reason, both Stevenson and Hudson argue that Fielding answers political crisis and social impasse with a characteristic ‘double irony’ in which one has ‘imaginative sympathy for two codes at once’.14 This suggests that the demystifications of Partridge’s superstitions and Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s story are not the key to Fielding’s general procedures. Neither Fielding’s ‘history’ in the text nor the history of his context works like a ‘history’ of ‘plain matter of fact’. Rather, both are organized by a mix of history and romance that invites an ironic judgement suspended between forms rather than the supersession of residual forms. Tom Jones has moments of realist demystification (in judging Partridge) and moments of ironic scepticism (in judging Tom), but neither of these dynamics fully explicates the novel. Tom’s and Sophia’s stories do not work like their foils’. Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s story offers a warning to Sophia, but it works as a false feint, a path not taken in a love story based on different narrative premises. Likewise, the Man of the Hill’s story is parallel to Tom’s—​the Man too was ‘high-​mettled … and extremely amorous’ (453), and his story works through both extraordinary coincidences and a Jacobite rebellion—​but Tom critiques the Man’s misanthropic isolation. Fielding does demystify one kind of romance, but he never demystifies love. And it’s precisely love that Tom says is missing from the Man’s moral scepticism. The central organizing structure of Tom Jones, Tom and Sophia’s adventures of love, addresses both the novel’s realistic demystifications and its sceptical moral irony. Fielding argues against the characteristic modern reductions of love to hunger and interest, and the denial of love is integral to Fielding’s satire on modern epistemology. In the chapter ‘Of Love’ that opens Book VI, Fielding attacks the ‘modern Doctrine, by which certain Philosophers, among many other wonderful Discoveries, pretend to have found out that there is no such Passion in the human Breast’ (268). Fielding associates this move with Swift’s satiric modern spiders and with philosophers like Mandeville; the former spin their philosophy out of their guts and ‘by the mere Force of Genius alone, without the least Assistance of any Kind Learning, or even Reading, discovered that profound and valuable Secret, That there is no G—​’, and the latter ‘very much alarmed the World by showing there were no such things as Virtue or Goodness really existing in human Nature, and … deduced our best Actions from Pride’ (268). In a Swiftian gesture, scathing, scatological, and witty, Fielding compares this kind of thinking to night-​soil men (‘Finders of Gold’). Introspection, searching for truth in your own guts, like searching for gold, is raking out shit. The move cleverly enacts as comedy what is seriously proposed as the basis of the philosophy it attacks, reducing an abstract claim to a bodily referent in the same way love is reduced to hunger. Fielding sarcastically grants that there might be some who don’t feel anything but hunger in their hearts, but argues that 14  John Allen Stevenson, The Real History of Tom Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 46; Hudson, ‘Tom Jones’, 92, 80. For ‘double irony’ see William Empson, ‘Tom Jones’, in Ronald Paulson (ed.), Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 132.

Henry Fielding and the Progress of Romance    247 one’s heart is not an adequate basis on which to judge others. However, if he’s spun out his satire by enacting the kind of modern reduction he critiques, Fielding finally vindicates his own position by invoking the introspection he’s just condemned: ‘Examine your Heart, my good Reader, and resolve whether you do believe these Matters with me’ (271). If the modern mistake is taking your own corruption as proof, how is taking your own love as proof any different? When Fielding asks readers to look into their hearts for love, the rhetorical gesture is meant to solicit the answer it assumes. If you can’t see what he means he has nothing to say to you. It’s a passive-​aggressive joke, of course, and transparently designed to rally the reader to the side of the angels. (Is your heart just full of shit? Or is there room for another voice in it?) But the joke also addresses a mode of response that plays, like the novel more generally, between the poles of fantasy and fact. For both Fielding the narrator and Fielding the novelist, love is occasion for literary play. Fielding invokes and deploys a range of literary and rhetorical effects that certainly inflate his prose in order to pop it, but also work in their own terms beyond those satiric deflations. He argues for ‘poetical Embellishments’ when he’s preparing to introduce Sophia, who is, despite the amusingly hyperbolical rhetorical excess, indeed presented with decorum appropriate to her role. Likewise, when Tom apostrophizes Sophia in a ‘most delicious Grove … so sweetly accommodated to Love’ (255), his diction is laughably overwrought and then comically undercut when he crawls into the bushes with Molly.15 But Tom really does love Sophia, and the novel recuperates what it mocks. Sex with Molly is the punchline that satirically deflates Tom’s language of love. But if the novel jokes about love it doesn’t finally dismiss it. Sex is beside the point for Sophia in the Upton scene. ‘Sophia was much more offended at the Freedoms which she thought, and not without good Reason, [Tom] had taken with her Name and Character, than at any Freedoms, in which, under his present Circumstances, he had indulged himself with the Person of another Woman’ (651). Sophia doesn’t confuse love with sex, caring more about Tom’s delicacy than his appetites, but she is confused about Tom, who is innocent of that indelicacy. It was Partridge who was guilty of exposing Sophia’s name at Upton, a farcical repetition of Blifil’s tragic tattling that got Tom expelled from Paradise Hall. Fielding defends (somewhat defensively) the ‘unnatural’ appearance of Sophia’s response, saying he is ‘not obliged to reconcile every Matter to the received Notions concerning Truth and Nature’ (651). Besides, he insists, there’s something for everyone in the situation. Moralists will be happy that Tom is punished for his sexual misconduct despite the lack of correlation between the punishment and the sin, and libertines will take comfort in that lack of correlation to justify their own misconduct. Fielding says his own reflections, which he withholds, would contradict both these positions but ‘confirm the great, useful and uncommon Doctrine, which it is the Purpose of the whole Work to inculcate’ (652). An alternative to both the reductive empiricism of moralists (who focus on sex) and the reductive scepticism of libertines (who focus on accident), Tom 15 

I discuss Fielding’s introduction of Sophia and Tom’s romance idiom in Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 109–18.

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248   SCOTT BLACK and Sophia are defined in other terms. If rhetorically teased and narratively challenged, they are not fully defined in social or even moral terms but rather in the half-​idealized terms of romance, the literary embellishments that sponsor love. Both are called ‘angels’ by other characters, and though fully embodied, encased in flesh, and taxed with desire, they are finally driven by different motivations than other characters and invite a different kind of response.16 Sophia cares less about the sexual vices that threaten Tom or even the social virtues that save him than Tom’s delicacy and respect. One last time the novel threatens to expose one of Tom’s sexual improprieties to Sophia, this time his egregious relationship with Lady Bellaston, which embodies the modern nexus of money, sex, and urbanity (he sleeps with her for cash, clothes, and status) and which offers a counterweight to the main love story. Again the novel finesses the problem. Tom’s guilt looms large in his mind, and in the reader’s, but when he accidentally meets Sophia in Lady Bellaston’s drawing room she is still concerned with having her ‘Name traduced in Public’ at Upton, not with Tom’s strange appearance in that house. Tom has ‘no very great Difficulty to make her believe that he was entirely innocent of an Offence so foreign to his Character’ (732), and indeed in the betrothal scene that immediately follows he proves his character by refusing to act in any way that could harm Sophia. The tissue of love, tact, and respect that joins Tom and Sophia is close cousin to the goodness that defines Tom socially and of course it piggybacks on the hot-​ bloodedness that defines him sexually, but it is distinct in its particularity, and probably because, as Fielding says in ‘Of Love’, it balances Tom’s own desire with concern for Sophia’s welfare. Tom is defined by the love that answers the reductions of modernity, the love we’re asked to find in our own hearts. If Tom’s role in the romance grants him love, can reading romance grant it to us? As Tom has to earn what Joseph was given (complicating Joseph’s untested motivations), we have to earn what Tom is given (testing Tom’s complicated motivations). We do so through a reading adequate to the mixed modes of his adventures. Fielding certainly satirizes the genres he writes through and his satire often arrives at a savage irony, but equally his novels depend on an ironic salvage of genres that continue to work even after being self-​consciously adapted, satirized, and mocked. If judging Tom leads to a moral irony, loving Tom offers one way to address that modern impasse by inviting the reader to experiment with less modern ways of being in the world. When Fielding teases readers to recognize in themselves the love that will prove the existence of love, we’re being asked not to identify but to stretch ourselves. Perhaps the novel is operating in bad faith by offering a fictional experience of what it wants to presume as fact in your imagination. But romance is finally a modality of pleasurable tact, not epistemological naivety. Fielding quotes straightforwardly from Pope’s satiric Peri Bathous: ‘The great Art of all Poetry is to mix Truth with Fiction; in order to join the Credible with the Surprizing’ (406). This echoes Huet’s account of romance, and Tom Jones most fully exploits the possibilities of romance when it asks you to take 16 

See my ‘Adventures of Love in Tom Jones’, in J. A. Downie (ed.), Henry Fielding in Our Time (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008), 47–50.

Henry Fielding and the Progress of Romance    249 its self-​conscious fictions as one coordinate of a complex reality that can’t be resolved neatly into fact or fiction, world or mind, but is recognized in reading. At the opening of the last book of Tom Jones Fielding announces, ‘if I have now and then, in the Course of this Work, indulged any Pleasantry for thy Entertainment, I shall here lay it down. The Variety of Matter … will afford no room for any of those ludicrous Observations … All will be plain Narrative only’ (913). Fielding’s last novel, Amelia (1751), continues this emphasis on plain narrative, and many readers (myself included) have rectified the absence of comedy by laughing at the novel since they can’t laugh with it.17 Tom Jones returns to the countryside, the site of literary resolutions, for Tom and Sophia’s marriage, but Amelia remains in London and explores the long morning after the wedding celebration. Amelia’s husband, Booth, realizes some of the directions Tom hints at. He is the soldier Tom flirted with becoming, and he’s as sexually promiscuous in his marriage as Tom was before his. The novel continues its predecessor’s examination of love’s complications, and even intensifies those complications, but there are fewer compensations for undertaking that work. Fielding’s narrative voice is thinned to an often weepy sentimentality, as in the apostrophes to innocence or when earnestly warning about the dangers of love. And though engaged with a wide range of texts (from Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Shakespeare to Milton, Dryden, and Swift), the echoes tend to be flat and perfunctory. When Booth gives a learned dissertation on Fielding’s favourite comic writers, Lucian, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, one wishes Fielding would invoke more than their names. The cranky pedagogue and surrogate patriarch, Dr. Harrison, asks whether one could really prefer Ovid to Virgil, and the novel as a whole is self-​ consciously written in the form of the Aeneid, trading the exuberant pleasures of the Metamorphoses, those stories of transformative love, for the moral asperities of epic. Amelia is often read in the context of Clarissa, an attempt to write in a Richardsonian mode, sentimental and more realistic.18 This is true, though as always Fielding engages a range of interlocutors, foreign as well as native, past as well as contemporary. The novel also extends the trajectory of Fielding’s own experiments in romance, examining constancy and testing chastity in a dark world. Amelia herself is the fullest realization of Fielding’s increasing interest in the romance heroine. If Mrs. Heartfree and Fanny were structurally necessary but relatively marginal, Sophia and Amelia are more fully explored heroines. But while Sophia shares centre stage with Tom, Amelia headlines her novel, which turns centrally on her trials and her responses. Sophia is an image of ‘Female Perfection’, and so is Amelia, as other characters regularly remark. But Sophia was tested just once, while Amelia is an object of desire for ‘all Mankind’,19 as Mrs. Ellison says, and she’s threatened by almost every man she meets: Bagillard; the noble 17 

For contemporary reactions to Amelia, see Simon Dickie, ‘Amelia, Sex, and Fielding’s Woman Question’, in Claude Rawson (ed.), Henry Fielding: Novelist, Playwright, Journalist, Magistrate (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2008), 115–16. 18  Claude Rawson, ‘Henry Fielding’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (New York: CUP, 1996), 146–7. 19  Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford and Middletown, CT: OUP and Wesleyan UP, 1974), 246.

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250   SCOTT BLACK peer; Colonel James; Atkinson; the two rakes at Vauxhall. Amelia triumphs, of course, though the novel does ask whether such a standard of fidelity is a bit too prudish. In making Amelia central Fielding arrives in his last novel at the organizing structure of late classical romance, which revolves around a long-​suffering but dynamic heroine with a betrothed lover who is an accessory (if not trial) to her. Amelia completes the progress of Fielding’s work with romance, from a sidebar to the satire of Jonathan Wild to the soft, sentimental centre of his last novel. Fielding’s experiments with romance are both generic and modal, experiments in mediating a variety of genres and experiments in exploring love. Amelia continues the latter without the energy of the former, flattening out the complexities of the earlier novels. Without the challenges of the ‘ludicrous Observations’ of the former novels—​those places of literary play and moral irony—​its love story is flat, existing only on one plane. The various interpolated tales (Miss Mathews’s, Booth’s, Mrs. Bennet’s, and Trent’s) are all back-​stories, as if Fielding can only manage variety by folding it directly into the main story, or no longer trusts himself or his readers to hold more than one thing in mind at once. When Joseph was said to be beyond description it was the punchline to an elaborate joke about the limits of poetry and the force of imagination, but when Amelia’s meeting with her children is said to be beyond description it’s just melodramatic confirmation of the dull prose of convention. The challenges of romance, which in the earlier novels soar, crash, and yet still fly, are here reduced to a series of exams before a stolid board of conscience. Standard histories of the novel read the genre for the separations and purifications of modernity, a new form for a new world. But the novel has never been that modern, that free of the defining concerns of romance, the interplay of generic adoption and adaptation, the stimulating adventures of love, and the anachronistic pleasures of reading. In the preface to her canon-​forming collection The British Novelists, Anna Laetitia Barbauld notes that love is central to novels: ‘Love is a passion particularly exaggerated in novels. It forms the chief interest of, by far, the greater part of them. In order to increase this interest, a false idea is given of the importance of the passion.’20 That Barbauld (1810) echoes Huet (1680) shows the continuity of the generic profile of the novel or romance or epic in prose (Barbauld uses the three terms synonymously). Like Huet, Barbauld defends novels from the charge of over-​exciting febrile imaginations by arguing that though indulging in such fantasy can mislead readers, it can also refine the hearts it softens. For both, novels do their work when they mediate the ‘present Objects’ of modern realism and objects proportioned to ‘that impatient Thirst, which incessantly incites the Mind of Man to search after new Discoveries’,21 and which I take to be expressed paradigmatically by the exaggerations of romantic love. Fielding’s novels too are organized by the irreducible interplay between these kinds of reading. Their critical

20  Barbauld, ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’, in William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (eds.), Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002), 411. 21  Huet, ‘Letter . . . Upon the Original of Romances’, 1: p. xliv.

Henry Fielding and the Progress of Romance    251 demystifications don’t trump the pleasures of the adventures of love, and perhaps even enable them. Fielding’s realistic mise en scène allows him to salvage the pleasures of romance from the critical operations of modernity. When Joseph flies to Fanny we’re teased to mock the excesses of ‘Romance or Poetry antient or modern’, but also to recognize their place in that world, and if we still read them, in ours too.

Select Bibliography Alter, Robert, Fielding and the Nature of the Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1969). Battestin, Martin C., with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding:  A  Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Campbell, Jill, Natural Masques:  Gender and Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995). Downie, J. A., A Political Biography of Henry Fielding (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009). Hunter, J. Paul, Occasional Form:  Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975). Knight, Charles, ‘Joseph Andrews and the Failure of Authority’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 4/​2 (1992), 1–​16. Rawson, Claude (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding (Cambridge: CUP, 2007). Rawson, Claude, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal Under Stress (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). Rawson, Claude (ed.), Henry Fielding: Novelist, Playwright, Journalist, Magistrate (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2008). Rothstein, Eric, ‘Virtues of Authority in Tom Jones’, in Albert J. Rivero (ed.), Critical Essays on Henry Fielding (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 141–​63. Stevenson, John Allen, The Real History of Tom Jones (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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Chapter 16

Novels of t h e  1 7 50s Simon Dickie

The 1750s have always seemed like a blank decade in the history of English fiction, a low point between the great works of Fielding and Richardson and the Tristram Shandy craze. Amelia (1751) and Sir Charles Grandison (1754) both showed their authors in decline. Smollett was there, with Peregrine Pickle (1751), Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), a translation of Don Quixote (1755), and reprints of Roderick Random (1749), but he was recognized as a secondary talent even in his own day. Coventry’s Pompey the Little (1751) and other ‘it-​narratives’ were cited as early examples of an enduring fad. Detailed studies gave a nod to other oddities like Robert Paltock’s bestselling Peter Wilkins (1751), an extraordinary South Sea fantasy with airborne natives floating about on silken membranes. Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) seemed like an isolated wonder in one of the drearier phases of early women’s writing. As for the minor fiction of the age, it was all improbable trash, the sort of thing that fed the circulating libraries and sent young ladies running away with sailors. With the publication of James Raven’s catalogue of 1987, the extent of this terra incognita became clear: 231 entirely new novels and a similar number of reprints, producing a total of 523 novels for the years 1750–​9.1 We have since filled many gaps. We may now know more than enough about the sentimental and erotic fiction of these years. ‘Lives’ of criminals and prostitutes, travel-​ writing, and explorer narratives have provided invaluable raw material for changing scholarly questions. It-​narratives have become particularly interesting as commentaries on new forms of subjectivity, imperial commerce, and the new world of commodities.2 Identifiably Scottish, Irish, or transatlantic texts have found their places in 1 

James Raven, British Fiction 1750–​1770: A Chronological Check-List of Prose Fiction Printed in Britain and Ireland (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1987). For corrections and further analysis, see also James Raven, ‘The Material Contours of the English Novel’, in Jenny Mander (ed.), Remapping the Rise of the European Novel (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2007), 101–​25. 2  For a valuable selection of this scholarship, see Mark Blackwell (ed.), The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-​Narratives in Eighteenth-​Century England (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2007).

Novels of the 1750s    253 specialist studies. Thomas Keymer has demonstrated Sterne’s debt to a large number of self-​reflexive novels—​whimsies like Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756), and imitations of Fielding like The History of Charlotte Summers, the Fortunate Parish Girl (1750), and The Adventures of Captain Greenland (1752).3 Most significant of all, feminist scholars have recovered large numbers of novels by or about women. The old three-​stage model of early women’s fiction—​in which the mid-​eighteenth century figured as a dull conformist period between Behn, Manley, and Haywood and the radical feminism of the 1790s—​now looks immensely more complex. Lennox, Sarah Fielding, Sarah Scott, and the later Eliza Haywood now represent a moment of particular experimentation in the development of women’s writing. The Female Quixote, The History of Betsy Thoughtless (1751), and The Adventures of David Simple (1744–​53) have been recognized as uniquely rich documents of women writers’ ambiguous status in the mid-​century literary marketplace.4 Of all the newly canonized authors of this decade, the biggest winner must be Sarah Fielding, whose innovations both anticipate the evolution of the genre and offer possibilities that later writers would not pursue. David Simple and The Countess of Dellwyn (1759) skilfully fuse the rival narrative modes of Fielding and Richardson, setting individual moral dilemmas in complex social environments. Yet neither makes any compromises: readers were shocked by the final volume of David Simple (1753), in which the provisional harmony achieved at the end of the novel’s first instalment is horribly destroyed. The Countess of Dellwyn (1759) remains the most mordant of all early seduction novels, its young heroine being unhappily married to an old debauchee. Two centuries later, it is still a stunningly tough-​minded novel in which everyone is to blame and even the heroine attracts little sympathy. The blend of historical fiction and first-​person psychological realism in The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757) was unprecedented in its time and would long remain unmatched. Most unconventional of all was The Cry (3 vols., 1754), Fielding’s extraordinary collaboration with Jane Collier. A mixture of allegory and dialogue, The Cry records an exhausting debate between the virtuous Portia and an implacably hostile audience. In its mingling of genres, its refusal of the usual mechanisms of readerly pleasure, and the very fact of co-​authorship, this text might stand as an emblem for a brief period of imaginative independence, a moment at which the new genre could so easily have taken other directions.5

3  Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 2002), exploring territory first charted by Wayne C. Booth, ‘The Self-​Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy’, PMLA 67/​2 (1952), 163–​85. 4  For recent commentaries, see Felicity Nussbaum, ‘Women Novelists 1740s–​1780s’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–​1780 (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 745–​67; and Betty S. Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Cambridge: CUP, 2005). 5  On this experimental moment, see J. Paul Hunter’s exploratory essay, ‘Novels and History and Northrop Frye’, Eighteenth-​Century Studies 24/​2 (1990–​1), 225–​41; and, more recently, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-​Century English Fiction (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2006).

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254   SIMON DICKIE On top of older preconceptions about the 1750s, then, we now have a decade of pre-​ Sterneian self-​consciousness, of Sarah Fielding’s most important experiments, and a crucial moment in the long-​term professionalization of women writers. New-​historicist projects have used further texts to great effect. But it is striking to discover how little we still know about the minor fiction of these years. The urgency of feminist scholarship, for example, has tended to overestimate the proportion of novels by women. Women authors can positively be identified for just thirty-​three texts between 1750 and 1759, 14 per cent of all new titles. Even if half of all anonymous publications are attributed to women (already an improbably high proportion), this adds only a few dozen more texts.6 And the established women’s list itself makes some striking omissions—​witness the case of Susan Smythies of Colchester (b. 1720). Smythies’s The Stage-​Coach (1753) went through four editions. The Brothers (1758) and Lucy Wellers (1754) both went through two, with the latter becoming a best-​seller in Germany. Generally closer to Tom Jones than Clarissa, Smythies’s novels are harder to assimilate to feminist concerns and therefore have no champions.7 So let us say we now have, from the old list and new additions, a combined canon of twenty texts for these ten years. This is already at the limit for most specialists, and it still leaves out more than 200 novels—​everything less definable, appealing, or polemically useful. Someone may eventually produce a detailed study of these texts, the sort of thing that Jerry Beasley did for the 1740s, John Richetti for the early eighteenth century, and J. M. S. Tompkins for later fiction. In the meantime, it certainly seems important to dig around a bit more.8

Novels Lost and Found One need not dig far to find some prolific male authors, familiar as participants in the literary controversies of the age but otherwise of little interest to modern critics. Smollett is the best known of a large group of hot-​tempered scribblers. The bitter John Shebbeare (1709–​88)—​Dr.  Ferret, as Smollett caricatured him in Launcelot Greaves (1760–​1)—​ produced two novels along with his blunter satires. The Marriage Act (1754) was an attack on Hardwicke’s reforms that landed Shebbeare in prison. Lydia, or Filial Piety (1755) was equally full of strong opinions, this time in the form of a miscellany held together by a noble savage narrator named Cannassatego. Smollett also hated the opportunistic John Hill (1714–​75), ‘Inspector’ Hill of the London Daily Advertiser, another irascible hack who 6 

Statistics from Raven, British Fiction 1750–​1770, 19. See F. G. Black, ‘A Lady Novelist of Colchester’, Essex Review 44 (1935), 180–​5, and Arthur Sherbo, ‘Susan Smythies’, ODNB. 8  Jerry C. Beasley, Novels of the 1740s (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982); John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–​1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); and J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–​1800 (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1961). Of necessity, I put aside vexing questions about what does or does not qualify as a novel. I have generally followed James Raven’s definitions. 7 

Novels of the 1750s    255 tried his hand at fiction. Hill made large sums of money from his writings, which for that reason alone merit attention: he knew what the market wanted. Hill’s Adventures of Mr Loveill (1750) is an interminable account of a year in the life of a serial libertine. Just twelve months later, he was ready with The Adventures of George Edwards, A Creole (1751), a sort of West Indian Tom Jones with a prolonged desert island phase. Also at work in these years was the pornographer John Cleland (1709–​89), striving to repeat the success of Fanny Hill (1749) with Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1751). Then there is William Dodd (1729–​ 77), the high-​living Macaroni Parson who was eventually hanged for forgery. Combining sentimentalism and low realism, Dodd’s The Sisters (1754) seems to be imitating Amelia. Just a bit more obscure are figures like William Guthrie (1708?–​70), a sort of Grub Street historian who also did sentimental fiction with The Friends (1754) and The Mother (1759). Guthrie may also have produced the anonymous Life and Adventures of a Cat (1760), one of the sloppier it-​narratives, preposterously attributed to ‘the late Mr. Fielding’. In this company of male commercial novelists, we also find one spectacular success:  the forgotten Edward Kimber (1719–​69). Kimber’s Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson (1750) went through at least six editions before 1800, reprints into the nineteenth century, and translations into French and German. He published seven other novels while working as a contributor to the London Magazine and its editor from 1755.9 Along with Tom Jones and Smollett’s early fiction, Joe Thompson inspired a large body of episodic comic novels (of which more in a moment). Kimber’s other novels followed in quick succession and further exemplify the range of profitable genres in this culture. The Life of Mr. Anderson (1754) is a transatlantic picaresque, a sequence of North American scenes stitched together with hackneyed romance devices. The Life and Adventures of James Ramble (1755) is a loose historical novel, set in the 1715 Jacobite uprising and making time for an expedition to Cuba and repeated sexual assaults upon the heroine. The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger (1756) is different again: a heavily fictionalized life of David Garrick (Ranger, the rake in Hoadly’s Suspicious Husband, was one of Garrick’s most famous comic roles). The Adventures of Capt. Neville Frowde of Cork (1758) seems to find Kimber growing tired: another kidnapped youngster, dismal adventures at sea, an Indian captivity narrative, sudden reunions, and constant poetic excerpts to pad out the volume. His final publication of the decade tells us still more about the mainstream fiction of the age. Kimber’s Happy Orphans (1758) is a close translation of Crébillon fils, whose Heureux orphelins (1754) was itself an adaptation of Haywood’s Fortunate Foundlings (1744), which in turn took its inspiration from La Vie de Marianne (1731–​41). This constant to-​and-​fro between English and European authors is only now being sufficiently recognized.10

9  See F. G. Black, ‘Edward Kimber: Anonymous Novelist of the Mid-​Eighteenth Century’, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 17 (1935), 27–​42; and Jeffrey Herrle, ‘Edward Kimber’, ODNB. 10  See, most recently, Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010) and Gillian Dow’s essay, ‘Criss-​Crossing the Channel: French Influences and English Translation’.

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256   SIMON DICKIE To keep digging is to find much that is predictable or derivative but also to marvel at all the variabilities and innovations. With its disorienting jumble of rogue tales, spiritual biographies, scandal memoirs, pornography, fable, and romance, every book-​selling season reminds us that a handful of canonical texts and the teleologies of literary history never give us more than a partial and selective picture of this genre. The forbidding bulk of Sir Charles Grandison sits, in the season of 1753–​4, alongside translations and native productions pretending to be translations, secret histories, spy novels, larky trickster narratives, and oriental tales like Mirza and Fatima (‘An Indian Tale’).11 Kimber’s James Ramble turns out to be one of many historical novels, a genre also represented by The Siege of Calais (1751) and Barbarossa, the Usurper of Algiers (1754), the latter one of many narratives worked up from contemporary plays. Anti-​Catholic fiction remained as prominent as ever, from lurid rape and murder narratives like Clarinda (1751) to lighter productions like The Amorous Friars (1758) and The Cloister, subtitled ‘the Amours of Sainfroid, a Jesuit and Eulalia, a Nun’ (1758). One notable surprise is the predominance of Robinson Crusoe, which remained the most widely-​reprinted novel throughout this period—​a point well made by book historian William St Clair.12 Crusoe’s influence, so clear in Kimber, also appears in dozens of obscurer voyages and castaway narratives. Don Quixote, too, remained a formidable presence, with Smollett’s new translation, reprints of older ones, and a long line of Quixotic characters. Fielding’s Parson Adams, Lennox’s Arabella, and Smollett’s Launcelot Greaves coexist with shabbier heroes like Sawney and David, a Yorkshire cobbler and his friend who think themselves rightful heirs to the Scottish and Welsh thrones.13 Emily, Louisa, Julia:  the Marivaux–​Richardson beleaguered virgins are everywhere. Lennox’s Henrietta (1758) tones down the sentimentality, but otherwise follows La Vie de Marianne. Lower down the social scale we find Betty Barnes (born in a barn) and legions of similarly artless country maids.14 Yet the tradition of sentimental passivity combines more than one expects with older traditions of heroic femininity. Majestic heroines—​ women who take up swords and set fire to castles in order to protect their virtue—​came into English in the seventeenth century and survived in such authors as Penelope Aubin. Fielding’s Sophia Western is also a definite influence: an explicit anti-​Clarissa who escapes her father’s house at midnight and successfully fights off a would-​be rapist. Smythies’s Lucy Wellers tirelessly outwits her various attackers. The eponymous heroine of Patty Saunders (1752) bravely defends her chastity against Scottish lords, Portuguese sailors, and the lustful natives of several continents. Helpless on a ship in mid-​Atlantic, Lennox’s Harriot Stuart stabs the lascivious captain with his own sword—​‘Die, villain! by her hands whom you have sworn to ruin’—​before grandly justifying her act to the entire crew.15 11 

[Bernard J. Saurin], Mirza and Fatima. An Indian Tale. Translated from the French (London, 1754). See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 507–​8. 13  The Mock Monarchs: Or, the Benefits of High Blood, 2 vols. (London, [1754?]). 14  The History of Betty Barnes, 2 vols. (London, 1753). For valuable commentary on this text, see Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–​1818 (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), passim. 15  Charlotte Lennox, The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself, 2 vols. (London: no publisher, 1751), 1: 201. 12 

Novels of the 1750s    257 Another surprise is just how much goes on as if formal realism had never happened. This is most obvious in genres like the eastern romance, with its surrounding cast of evil sultans, eunuchs, sorcerers, and speaking animals.16 ‘European’ romances may dispense with the magic, but neither their settings nor their representations of emotion come much closer to realism. Lovers from rival kingdoms, pirates and banditti, outlandish coincidences, birthmarks and sudden recognition scenes: no convention goes unused. All emotions are as extravagant as possible—​undying love, hyperbolic grief, eternal vengeance. But even such a firmly anglicized text as Sarah Scott’s History of Cornelia (1750) makes no attempt at interiority, merely transferring the conventions of the nouvelle galante into an English setting. Other violations of verisimilitude—​ oriental spies, imaginary voyages, letters from the dead to the living—​were of course transparent narrative conventions, but contemporaries were routinely taken in, as they had been by Gulliver’s Travels. Domestic events are casually linked to the supernatural in texts like Adventures Under-​ground, A Letter from a Gentleman Swallowed up in the late Earthquake (1750). Amidst the ostentatious empiricism of voyage narratives, one suddenly finds straight-​faced descriptions of fantastic creatures like the ‘Dog-​Bird’, a ferocious oversized griffin that had everyone talking in the winter of 1753–​4.17 The culture that delighted in Peter Wilkins also absorbed translations of Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyage dans la Lune (1753, 1754) and the native Adventures of John Daniel (1751), the tale of a rural blacksmith who also makes it to the moon. Tastes for the arcane were as strong as ever, with such texts as The History of Israel Jobson, the Wandering Jew (1757), a kooky astrological fantasy (‘translated from the Original Chinese by M.W.’). Entirely contrary questions are raised by the bizarrely detailed circumstantiality of so much early fiction. Again and again, some individualizing detail makes us realize we are meeting real people and hearing their speech, with all their quirks and verbal tics. Real-​ world sources are clear enough with scandal novels or with the torrents of sensational fiction that accompanied notorious crimes (the Mary Blandy poisoning case of 1751–​2 is a prominent example). Bastard children wrote maudlin ‘histories’ intended to shame the alleged parent into paying up.18 The first-​person Memoirs of Harriot and Charlotte Meanwell, subtitled ‘who from a State of Affluence are reduced to the greatest Distress’ (1757), is clearly a plea for charity. But altogether more trivial novels also seem to emerge out of everyday events or local rumours. A young lady’s disputes with her father (as overheard by a disaffected servant), low-​level jealousies in a country town, what went on in Tunbridge Wells last month: Mary Cooper and the Noble Brothers snapped up amateur fictions on all these topics. What to make of Cooper’s The Eunuch: Or, The

16 

For a wide-​ranging study of these texts and an argument for their formative influence on the English novel, see Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–​1785 (Oxford: OUP, 2005). 17  The Travels and Adventures of William Bingfield, Esq; … With An accurate Account of the Shape, Nature, and Properties of that most furious, and amazing Animal, the Dog-​Bird, 2 vols. (London, 1753). 18  See, for example, The Unnatural Father, or the Persecuted Son … Written by Himself (London, 1755), an attack on the politician Robert Nugent by his self-​proclaimed son, then imprisoned in the Fleet.

258

258   SIMON DICKIE Northumberland Shepherd (1752), with its cryptic invitation: ‘apply it who may’? Another curiosity from the widow Cooper is The History of Pudica, A Lady of N—​rf—​lk (1754). In this case, the facts have been recovered by an expert local historian: Pudica is a mildly malicious satire on a Norfolk gentlewoman and her five suitors, the work of the obscure Richard Gardiner (1723–​81). Gardiner casts himself as the unsuccessful first suitor and caricatures his four rivals, from the simple Squire Fog to the lucky Miles Dinglebob (short and thin with the most unfortunate ‘gooseberry’ eyes). One imagines that similar sources could be located for many apparent ‘fictions’; approached with caution, such texts would seem to offer a unique and unexplored body of historical sources.19 With no small number of texts, the taxonomic drive just grinds to a halt. Every season contains its cluster of wholly uncategorizable fictions. Unless they bear relation to Sterne, for example, playful and self-​conscious fictions confound easy analysis. The typographical antics of John Kidgell’s The Card (1755) look forward to Tristram Shandy, but what to do with intentionally trivial productions like The Humorous History of Dickey Gotham, and Doll Clod (2 vols., 1753)? What of The Jilts (3 vols., 1756), the deliberately lumbering saga of two social-​climbing shop-​girls named Kitty and Dolly? Shorter exercises in silliness include The Memoirs of Lydia Tongue-​Pad, and Juliana Clack-​It (1750), an utterly uneventful history of two garrulous young ladies. And beyond these forgotten oddities are enigmatic traces of texts that have not survived at all. Many novels discussed in this essay are exceptionally rare (just a couple of copies or a single imperfect one). A sizeable proportion, perhaps 12 to 15 per cent, have gone for ever.20 The Adventures of William B—​DS—​W, Commonly Styled Devil Dick (1754) was presumably some sort of rogue tale, but what to make of The Female Apothecary Deprived of Her Office (1753), advertised as ‘a dose of French physic to de ladies’? The Double Intrigue: The Adventures of Ismael and Selima (1751) could be a thinly disguised account of some contemporary scandal or an entirely detached oriental romance. What to make of Memoirs of Miss M—​ P—​, a Celebrated Bristol Toast (1752) or The Life and Adventures of an Amorous Animal (1760)?

Ramble Fiction By far the most neglected genre of mid-​century fiction, and meriting special attention, are the dozens of episodic comic novels that appeared in the wake of Tom Jones and Roderick Random. The recent scholarly interest in sentimentalism has obscured this comic tradition and the extent to which mid-​century readers turned to fiction for amusement. Plainly brilliant as it is, Clarissa was in its time far less of a commercial 19 

R. W. Ketton-​Cremer, Norfolk Portraits (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), c­ hapter 7. This estimate is based on Raven, British Fiction, 1750–​1770 and comparison with the 90 per cent survival rate for the next three decades. For this second statistic, see Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 1: 18. 20 

Novels of the 1750s    259 success than Tom Jones, which went through four authorized editions within the first year alone (a total of 10,000 copies).21 Tom Jones also elicited a torrent of imitations; by 1756, as the Critical Review complained, the book had ‘fill’d half the world with imitating fools’.22 Fielding himself had turned towards sentimentality in his final novel, but it was Tom Jones and not Amelia that established his reputation as ‘the English Cervantes’, the greatest humorist of his age. ‘Now the Humour, or Manners, of this Age are to laugh at every Thing,’ he complained when everyone scoffed at Amelia, ‘and the only Way to please them is to make them laugh.’23 Making people laugh often seems like the primary goal of these Tom Jones knock-​ offs. Kimber’s Joe Thompson (1750) was the most successful of them; Peregrine Pickle is about the only canonical example, but behind these two are dozens more. A  few titles: The Adventures of Shelim O’Blunder, The Irish Beau (1751); Adventures of the Revd. Mr. Judas Hawke (1751); Young Scarron (1752); The Adventures of Dick Hazard (1754); The Adventures of Jerry Buck (1754); The History of Jasper Banks, Commonly Call’d the Handsome Man (1754); The History of Will Ramble (1754); Adventures of Jack Smart (1756); The Adventures of a Rake. In the Character of a Public Orator (1759); and The History of Tom Fool (1760). ‘Ramble’ novels, these texts were often called, after the name of so many central characters and their careless progress through the world. And this category seems preferable to a term like picaresque, which too easily connotes the bleak survivalism of Defoe and his predecessors. Ramble fiction is firmly rooted in the metropolitan culture of its day and altogether lighter in tone. Certainly closest to Fielding is Joe Thompson (a title that pays tribute by reversing the syllables of Tom Jones). Thompson is a slightly coarser version of Tom Jones, a good-​ natured but impulsive young man who takes several years and many changes of fortune to come round. Intrigues with maidservants and married women, bad company in London, reckless gambling, and a spell in debtors’ prison are succeeded by periods of melancholy reflection and an entire volume of misfortunes in the East Indies before Joe recovers Miss Louisa Rich, the suitable heiress who has waited in the wings all along. All this is interspersed with Fielding’s trademark comic incidents: brawls and swearing matches, humiliations and misunderstandings, uproarious night scenes at roadside inns. It was a profitable formula, something every hack in need of a few guineas could try their hand at. There were comic lives of sailors, apprentice linen-​drapers, wandering curates, and students sent down for blasphemy. Will Ramble is a wandering practical joker, skilled from an early age with laxatives and itching powders. Dick Hazard is one of many ingratiating Irish rascals. Jack Smart and Jerry Buck are riotous London bucks. Young Scarron is a lively anglicization of Le Roman comique, the story of Bob Loveplay 21  On Richardson’s disappointment, see T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 306. See also Tom Keymer, ‘Clarissa’s Death, Clarissa’s Sale, and the Text of the Second Edition’, Review of English Studies 45/​3 (1994), 389–​96. 22  Critical Review 2 (October 1756), 276. 23  Henry Fielding, The Covent Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-​Office, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 58 (no. 7 [25 January 1752]).

260

260   SIMON DICKIE and his troupe of hapless actors in the north of England. As the years went on, authors adapted the formula to an increasing range of protagonists and narrative voices. Shelim O’Blunder is a blustering Irish fortune hunter, far too stupid to do much harm. Judas Hawke is an astonishingly depraved clergyman who reads pornography, prostitutes his wife for a living, and takes particular joy in literally terrifying nice people to death. Tom Fool is the deliriously silly story of a handsome simpleton by George Stevens, the comic orator (running joke: ‘You’re a fool.’ ‘Thank you, Sir, I certainly am.’). These patterns easily lent themselves to comic memoirs of public figures. Kimber’s David Ranger bears little resemblance to the historical Garrick (for extra fun, the book even turns him into an Irishman). But readers evidently enjoyed the sequence of childhood pranks, amours, and strolling player adventures (all of it ending with his marriage to the enchanting Miss Tulip). In the same category is Christopher Anstey’s Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse (1756), a fanciful ‘life’ of the prizefighter John ‘Buckhorse’ Smith (fl. 1720–​50). By 1756 Buckhorse had retired from the ring, but he remained a familiar sight in Covent Garden, working as a linkman and so fantastically ugly that provincial visitors came to gawk at him. Anstey himself would eventually become famous for his New Bath Guide (1766); Buckhorse sheds light on his apprentice years and situates ramble fiction alongside the jumble of odes, epistles, dialogues, and periodical essays with which aspiring authors tried to earn their living. The jumble also included a surprising range of comic novels about women. This general category has inevitably attracted greater attention in recent years, with cheerful ‘lives’ of actresses, pickpockets, female soldiers, and courtesans proving invaluable to feminist criticism. But between these transgressive heroines and the equally familiar sentimental ones stretched a range of more ambiguous figures: witty, vocal, and independent women who are nevertheless not sexually compromised (characters like Anna Howe in Clarissa or the unforgettable Charlotte Grandison, so fond of remarking that her brother ‘still kept his Maidenhead’).24 Charlotte Summers (1750), Sophia Shakespear (1753), and other feminized versions of Tom Jones create consistently enjoyable protagonists—​plucky, determined, and lively reporters of the social scene. Beset by her sex-​crazed mother and a villainous quack named Potion, Sophia Shakespear is an endearing survivor. In a similar vein are the many histories of French adventuresses that appeared in these years. Somehow the combination of French absolutism, nunneries, and tyrannical parents seemed to license an otherwise unwomanly independence and kept the cross-​ dressing at a distance. Thus The Female Foundling (1750) or The Fair Wanderer: or the Adventures of Ethelinda (1751), where the heroine’s reckless pursuit of a handsome Englishman is contained by her final retreat to a convent. The Female Rambler (1753), its title explicitly announcing a connection to all those male protagonists, sends the heroine on a gloriously improbable frolic across Europe, even if it does then marry her off to a Spanish nobleman. 24 

For contemporary commentary on Charlotte Grandison, see Francis Plumer, A Candid Examination of the History of Sir Charles Grandison (3rd edn., London, 1754), 49.

Novels of the 1750s    261 These are heterogeneous texts—​stuffed, like so many early novels, with all manner of incongruous contents. There are passages of literary criticism and accounts of London actors. The action suddenly stops for five chapters about Abyssinia or some gloomy reflections on mortality. Didactic claims come and go. But what really sticks in the mind is the raucous, anarchic comedy of these books. The flimsy plots soon fade, but one long remembers the collective cast of high-​written comic characters. The foul-​mouthed Merry Andrew in Will Ramble, so good at kicking people in the jaw.25 Mrs. Thrumm, the village shopkeeper in Tom Fool, who wants to redecorate the parish church ‘in the Chinese manner’.26 Buckhorse putting out a fire with his chamber pot and then angrily insisting ‘the Water could not smell, as it had not been long made’.27 Long after the volumes have gone back to the stacks, one can still hear the shrieks, thuds, and wallops. The action is repeatedly interrupted by wholesale kitchen brawls, all curses, spitting, and volleys of cooking pots or half-​picked pork bones. Cries of ‘Fire!’ bring everyone into the corridor with nothing on. There are runaway bulls and mad dogs on the loose. One cannot overstate the vitality that such scenes bring to each text. Joe Thompson takes on an appalling gusto once the hero starts tormenting Mr. Prosody, that novel’s obligatory schoolmaster. Suddenly the household wakes in terror: pistols, firecrackers, brimstone in the fire, and tomcats darting about like crazy from pepper up the anus. Convinced that Satan and his angels have invaded the house, Prosody collapses into defecating convulsions on the floor (‘doing buttered eggs’ was the eighteenth-​century term for this mishap, a Kimber speciality that also shows up in David Ranger).28 Much of this humour is distasteful if not repugnant to modern readers. Blind men are led into walls. The vicar throws up his dinner when our hero convinces him he’s eaten a dead dog. Fight scenes end with exquisitely detailed catalogues of all the bruises and flesh wounds, scaldings and broken noses. Yet these books, a major part of the fiction market, were in no way distinguished from what we now accept as ‘literary’ novels. They appeared in the same duodecimo format and sold for the same price of 3s. per volume as the canonical fiction of the age. At 6s. for two volumes, Joe Thompson and Will Ramble cost the same as Pamela or The Countess of Dellwyn. They appealed to readers with considerable disposable income. One easily imagines a readership of idle young men—​boozy templars like the young James Boswell, who kept himself ‘well supplied’ with novels throughout his first stay in London (1762–​3).29 It comes as no surprise to find that Laurence Sterne owned David Ranger, The Adventures of a Valet (1752), and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb, or that he read the unendurable History of Two Orphans (4 vols., 1756), which turns out to have demonstrable influences on Tristram Shandy.30 25 [Anon.], The History of Will Ramble, A Libertine, 2 vols. (London, 1754), 1: 230–​43. 26 

[George Stevens], The History of Tom Fool, 2 vols. (London, 1760), 1: 22. [Christopher Anstey], Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse, 2 vols. (London, 1756), 1: 20. 28  [Edward Kimber], The Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson. A Narrative founded on Fact. Written by Himself, 2 vols. (London, 1750), 1: 15–​22; The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger, Esq;, 2 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1757). 29  Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–​1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (London: Harborough, 1950), 187. 30 Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, 59–​60. 27 

262

262   SIMON DICKIE More surprising is the evidence that these novels were read as much by women as by men. Empirical work on book-​trade data has now shown us just how wrong we were to infer male or female readers from a book’s content: eighteenth-​century men read romances, domestic fiction, and sentimental lyrics, and eighteenth-​ century women read bawdy farces, low comic periodicals, and all the coarsest comic fiction.31 All these novels are there on the list of 200 books that George Colman attaches to his preface to Polly Honeycombe (1760)—​the ‘greasy’ and ‘much thumbed’ ‘Catalogue of the Circulating Library’.32 Women like Polly ran away with rascals like Mr. Scribble not just because of all the inflaming romances, but because they were so charmed by bluff male heroes like Dick Hazard and Jerry Buck. Most of these books are also on surviving lists of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s reading. During her Italian years (1746–​61), Lady Mary scoured the English newspapers for recent titles, which would then be sent by her dutiful daughter. Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett are on the lists, but Lady Mary also ordered a striking proportion of the ephemeral fiction that appeared each year. ‘Wiser people may think it trifling,’ she concedes to one of her daughter’s routine objections, ‘but it serves to sweeten Life to me.’33 Ramble novels thus confound some deep-​seated assumptions about eighteenth-​century fiction and how it was read. Circumstantial realism and the representation of consciousness—​the characteristics that made other early fictions significant to Watt’s The Rise of the Novel—​were manifestly less important than amusement. Packed with diverse contents and so frankly inviting readers to pick and choose, ramble novels also support recent findings about early modern reading practices. Novels, we now know, were read in bits and pieces, intermittently and in combination with other texts—​a far cry from the legendary young ladies glued to their romances.34 Above all, it seems to me, these long-​scorned texts shed light on otherwise unaccountable moments in more canonical fiction. This is certainly so with Fielding, Smollett, and Burney—​with the old woman’s foot race in Evelina, or the villagers’ attack on the pregnant Molly Seagrim in Tom Jones. One thinks of the grotesque ‘Feast in the Manner of the Antients’ in Peregrine Pickle, not to mention the stupefying gay-​bashing episode that follows. And then one starts to notice odd comic traces in more didactic and sentimental novels. Yorick’s encounter with the dwarf in A Sentimental Journey—​an archetypal squabble 31 

See Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England (Oxford: OUP, 2006); and Barbara Benedict’s essay, ‘ “Male” and “Female” Novels? Gendered Fictions and the Reading Public, 1770–​1832’. 32  Polly Honeycombe: A Dramatick Novel of One Act. As it is now Acted at the Theatre-​Royal in Drury-​ Lane (London, 1760), pp. [v]‌–x​ iii. 33  The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–​7), 2: 473 (24 December 1750). For a wide-​ranging discussion of Lady Mary’s reading, see Isobel Grundy, ‘ “Trash, Trumpery, and Idle Time”: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Fiction’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 5/​4 (1993), 293–​310. 34  For two distinct stages of this developing scholarship, see James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), and Stephen Colclough, Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–​1870 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Novels of the 1750s    263 between a slow-​witted giant and an increasingly peevish dwarf. The enclosure of rescued freaks in Millennium Hall (five dwarfs, one giantess, one case of premature ageing, and one 7-​foot hunchback who is happy enough to be bent down to a normal size). And what to make of the farcical rape accusation in Sarah Fielding’s History of Ophelia (1760)? This dire piece of comic business is a way of humiliating the nasty Mrs. Herner, first when the alleged rapist insists that the lady had actually got into bed with him, and then when a candle comes in and the man announces that Mrs. Herner was too ugly to rape anyway. Confounding and deeply unpleasant as they are, such episodes have multiple analogues in the minor novels of the age. And in this context they start to make an appalling kind of sense.

Select Bibliography Blackwell, Mark (ed.), The Secret Life of Things:  Animals, Objects, and It-​ Narratives in Eighteenth-​Century England (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2007). Butt, John, and Geoffrey Carnall, The Mid-​Eighteenth Century, Oxford History of English Literature, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Dickie, Simon, Cruelty and Laughter:  Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011). Keymer, Thomas, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 2002). Mander, Jenny (ed.), Remapping the Rise of the European Novel (Oxford:  Voltaire Foundation, 2007). Nussbaum, Felicity, ‘Women Novelists 1740s–​1780s’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–​1780 (Cambridge: CUP, 2005). Raven, James, British Fiction 1750–​1770: A Chronological Check-List of Prose Fiction Printed in Britain and Ireland (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1987). Schellenberg, Betty S., The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Cambridge: CUP, 2005). Spacks, Patricia Meyer, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-​Century English Fiction (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2006). Spencer, Jane, The Rise of the Woman Novelist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

264

Chapter 17

St erne’s Fict i on a nd t h e Mid-​C entu ry Nov e l The ‘Vast Empire of Biographical Freebooters’ and the ‘Crying Volume’ Tim Parnell

Placing Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey in relation to the fiction written by Sterne’s contemporaries has proved problematic for generations of readers. For all his familiarity with works as diverse as A Tale of a Tub, Clarissa, and Peregrine Pickle, the shopkeeper and diarist Thomas Turner was baffled when he encountered Sterne in 1762: ‘In the even Mr. Tipper read to me part of a—​I know not what to call it but Tristram Shandy.’1 Notwithstanding her admiration for his ‘originality, wit, and beautiful strokes of pathos’, Anna Barbauld excluded Sterne from her British Novelists (1810) because his ‘singular’ works were ‘made up of conversations and detached incidents’ and therefore lacking in the novelistic requisites of ‘plan or adventure’.2 If modern commentators have been more confident in identifying the genres and traditions to which Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey are perceived to belong, the extent of his knowledge of, and engagement with, the seminal successes of Richardson and Fielding, and the many ‘Modern Histories, Lives, Memoirs, Adventures, and such like’3 published in their wake, continues to be a matter for critical debate. While A Sentimental Journey regularly finds a place in accounts of the ‘sentimental novel’,4 doubt remains about such fundamentals as to whether it is an example of the 1 

The Diary of Thomas Turner, ed. David Vaisey (Oxford: OUP, 1984), 258. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, The British Novelists; with An Essay; and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical (London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington, et al., 1810), 1: 38. 3  William Goodall, The Adventures of Capt. Greenland, 4 vols. (London, 1752), 1: 2. 4  John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700–​1780 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 244. Interestingly, Richetti includes both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey in his chapter on sentimental narrative. 2 

Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-Century Novel    265 genre or its parodic debunker. Tristram Shandy’s obvious quirkiness together with its demonstrable debts to ‘ludicrous writers’5 of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has, since John Ferriar began the process of chasing down the sources and identifying their traditions, led to an emphasis on its pre-​novelistic heritage. For the general editor of the Florida edition of Sterne’s Works, Melvyn New, his affiliations with satirists from Rabelais to the Scriblerians clearly and decisively ‘separate’ him ‘from the novelists with whom he has been chronologically joined’.6 Seeking to reconcile such a view of the author as satirist with an equally strong sense of his place in the culture of the 1760s, Thomas Keymer suggests that in Tristram Shandy Sterne reinvents and updates Swift’s Hack and turns a Scriblerian ‘satirical arsenal’ on the freshest of fresh moderns, the mid-​ century novelists. ‘If Tristram Shandy is a satire,’ he argues, ‘it is above all a satire on the novel.’7 Remarkably, apart from a pioneering essay published by Helen Sard Hughes in 1918, and Wayne C. Booth’s ‘The Self-​Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy’,8 Keymer’s is the solitary sustained attempt to read Sterne in relation to the fiction written by his contemporaries. We have thus only just begun to sketch a context that surely merits far more attention. There are a number of reasons why Booth’s cogent essay remained an isolated statement for so long, but among them the difficulty of verifying Sterne’s familiarity with mid-​century fiction has loomed large. Yet too much can be made of the fact that Sterne does not refer explicitly to either the major or more minor novels of the period. As Keymer sensibly insists, the novel was too prominent a phenomenon in Sterne’s culture for him to have been unaware of it. If we accept this deceptively simple fact, we will better understand the place of his fiction in its own time and, ultimately, in the complex, and still only partially mapped, history of the ‘rise’ of the British novel. Partly because of the shrillness with which Sterne’s first readers reacted to his perceived violations of decorum and partly because their judgements have rarely squared with our own, modern critics have paid little attention to the early reception of Sterne’s fiction. If, however, we slough off some accrued critical wisdom about it, the responses of its first readers can tell us much about its location in mid-​century literary culture. The reviews of A Sentimental Journey present a challenge to the now widely held, if characteristically vague, sense that Sterne’s last work is a response to the ‘rise of sentimental fiction’.9 Indeed, no one seems to have thought of it as being of the same kind as, still less as an ironic or parodic response to, what we now understand as novels of sentiment and sensibility. As we shall see when we come to consider the nature of Sterne’s 5 

John Ferriar, Illustrations of Sterne (London, 1812), 21. Melvyn New and W. B. Gerard (eds.), The Miscellaneous Writings and Sterne’s Subscribers, an Identification List (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2014), 155. 7  Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 7. 8  Helen Sard Hughes, ‘A Precursor of Tristram Shandy’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 17 (1918), 227–​51; Wayne C. Booth, ‘The Self-​Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy’, PMLA 67/​2 (1952), 163–​85. 9 Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, 9. 6 

266

266   TIM PARNELL ‘pathetic vein’,10 there are good reasons to see A Sentimental Journey as even more distinctively original than the remarkable comic novel that is Tristram Shandy. As is clear from the London Magazine’s oft-​quoted reaction to the appearance of its first instalment, surprise was a key element of the latter’s impact:  ‘Oh rare Tristram Shandy! … what shall we call thee?’11 Even so, its first readers were more willing and able than is often supposed to accommodate its innovations within horizons of expectation substantially informed by the significant body of comic fiction published in the 1740s and 1750s. The Monthly Review, with ten years of experience reviewing ‘things of that kind’, assumed that the author was ‘some young Genius in Romance’, and it greeted Sterne as ‘a writer infinitely more ingenious and entertaining than’, but nonetheless belonging to, ‘the present race of novelists’.12 Notwithstanding the modern critical debate about his status as a satirist, such contemporary perceptions of Sterne as a novelist or writer of romance were formed in spite of a widespread recognition of the ‘satire with which’, as Burke put it, ‘this work abounds’.13 Similarly, when reviewers and readers such as Warburton picked up on Tristram Shandy’s acknowledged associations with the classics of what John Ozell termed ‘satyrical Romance’,14 Gargantua and Pantagruel and Don Quixote, they did so with no suggestion that they placed it outside the literary contexts of its day or in any way qualified its up-​to-​dateness. Horace Walpole’s discovery of ‘a contradiction’ in Warburton’s observation that Tristram Shandy ‘was quite an original composition, and in the true Cervantic vein’15 misses the point insofar as the bishop is quite reasonably pointing to a characteristic that it shares with Fielding’s and Smollett’s comic novels. Just as modern novelists such as Calvino and Perec learn from Joyce, so all three writers take inspiration from the eighteenth century’s most important model of comic fiction, Don Quixote. But they do so while producing strikingly original works of their own. Although Sterne is alone in the period in the extent to which he draws on and acknowledges his ‘dear Rabelais’ as a model, his avowed debt to his still ‘dearer Cervantes’16 locates 10  Monthly Review 38 (March–​April 1768), in Alan B. Howes (ed.), Sterne: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 200. 11  London Magazine 29 (February 1760), 111, in Howes (ed.), Sterne: The Critical Heritage, 52. 12  Monthly Review 24 (February 1761). This review begins by repeating the phrase about Sterne being ‘infinitely more ingenious’ than his peers, which first appeared in the review of the first instalment. See Howes (ed.), Sterne: The Critical Heritage, 119, 120, 47–8. 13  Annual Register 3 (1760), 247. 14  Don Quixote, trans. Peter Motteux, rev. John Ozell (7th edn.), 4 vols. (1743), 1: p. xi. Ozell refers to Don Quixote as a ‘satyrical Romance’ in a footnote to Cervantes’s Preface. An engraving of ‘The Inside of Rabelais’s Chamber in which he wrote his Satyrical Romance’ is included before the prologue to the first book in the first volume of The Works of Francis Rabelais, M.D., trans. Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux, with notes by John Ozell, 5 vols. (1750), between pp. cxxii and cxxiii. 15  From a letter to Sir David Dalrymple, in Howes (ed.), Sterne: The Critical Heritage, 56. 16  Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, 3 vols. (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1978–​84), 3.19.225. Subsequent references to Tristram Shandy are to page numbers from this edition and are given in the text by original volume and chapter followed by the page number in the Florida edition.

Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-Century Novel    267 him not in a recherché Renaissance tradition, but rather, as Keymer reminds us,17 in the mainstream of the living genre of the British comic novel written ‘in Imitation of the Manner’ of the Spanish master that blossomed after Fielding’s example in Joseph Andrews. In spite of the reviewer’s desire to assert Smollett’s greater claims to originality of invention and credentials as the more authentic inheritor of Cervantes’s mantle, the Critical Review’s response to Tristram Shandy points to the relatively conventional nature of Sterne’s penchant for what he called ‘cervantik Satyr’18 while alerting us to a more local debt that further speaks his familiarity with, and place within, the field of contemporary fiction. Toby, Trim, and Slop are, the reviewer observes, ‘excellent imitations of certain characters in a modern truly Cervantic performance’.19 If something of the spirit that saw Smollett combing Tom Jones for thefts from Roderick Random may be evident here, then the kinship between Captain Shandy and Corporal Trim and Commodore Trunnion and Lieutenant Hatchway is strong enough to suggest that their conception did indeed owe something to Peregrine Pickle.20 Favouring the episodic life-​and-​adventures model adopted by many mid-​century novelists, Smollett is less obviously innovative than Sterne, but the Prebendary of York also surely follows the Scottish novelist’s lead in naming his protagonist. Like Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, Tristram has, as Robert Folkenflik observes, ‘a romance given name … undercut by a commonplace, even comic or satirical, surname’.21 Although Keymer argues that the idea of debunking literary conventions was central to mid-​century readings of Don Quixote, it is noteworthy that the Critical’s conception of the ‘Cervantic’ seems to be confined to character types and there is no suggestion that either Smollett or Sterne are concerned with the ‘Fall and Destruction’ of the modern equivalents of Cervantes’s ‘monstrous Heap of ill-​contriv’d Romances’.22 If, as Keymer further maintains, Sterne’s explicit references to Don Quixote together with ‘implicit invocations of modern fiction’ were meant to signal that Tristram Shandy is ‘doing to the “new species of writing” what [Cervantes] had done to romance’,23 then the dearth of contemporary comment on so seemingly crucial an aspect of Sterne’s design is remarkable. Indeed, the idea that Tristram Shandy might be, in Shklovsky’s famous 17 Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, 32.

18  Laurence Sterne, The Letters, Part One: 1739–​1764, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2009), 165. 19  Critical Review 9 (January 1760), 73–​4, in Howes (ed.), Sterne: The Critical Heritage, 52. 20  Although the ‘performance’ in question is not named, Howes’s identification of it as Peregrine Pickle seems exactly right. Keen to point out Sterne’s lack of originality, George Gregory observed, according to Anna Seward, ‘that Toby Shandy is the Commodore Trunnion of Smollett’ (Howes (ed.), Sterne: The Critical Heritage, 270). For Smollett’s combing of Tom Jones, see Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne, A Life (Oxford: OUP, 2001), 115. 21  Robert Folkenflik, ‘Tristram Shandy and Eighteenth-​Century Narrative’, in Thomas Keymer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 49. 22 Cervantes, Don Quixote (1743), p. xviii. 23 Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, 26, 33.

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268   TIM PARNELL phrase, a ‘parodying novel’24 finds no more than a glimmer of support among the extant responses of its earliest readers. William Kenrick begins the first published review with the suggestion that Sterne’s title may allude to a stale formula, but he is notably cautious when it comes to assessing its significance:  ‘Of Lives and Adventures the public have had enough, and, perhaps more than enough, long ago. A consideration that probably induced the droll Mr. Tristram Shandy to entitle the performance before us, his Life and Opinions.’25 While the comment usefully draws attention to a contextual resonance of the title that has generally been missed by modern commentators, the adverb is telling, and it is far from clear Kenrick is going as far as to suggest that Sterne is, as Folkenflik has it, ‘parodying’ the ‘tradition of novels’.26 Rather than elaborating on his speculation, Kenrick simply adds a second: ‘Perhaps also, he had, in this, a view to the design he professes, of giving the world two such volumes every year, [because] adventures worth relating, are not every day to be met with … but his opinions will … afford him enough to write about, tho’ he should live to the age of Methusalem.’27 Among the other reviews of Tristram Shandy, there is nothing to indicate that it was read as a satire on contemporary fiction, but there is a possible anticipation of Shklovsky’s formulation in James Fitzpatrick’s review of Hall-​Stevenson’s anonymously published Fables for Grown Gentlemen. Previously unnoticed, Fitzpatrick’s designation of Tristram Shandy is perhaps more significant than its passing nature suggests. Finding the fables ‘Shandean’, Fitzpatrick wonders if Sterne himself wrote them: ‘As we do not pretend, however, to the mystery of decyphering the names of Writers, who chuse to have none, we submit our suggestion in this point to the judgment of the Reader; though we should think it not unlikely, that the Author of a burlesque novel might chuse to try his hand at some mere connected sketches in odd rhymes.’28 While ‘burlesque’ may be no more than a variation on other adjectives commonly used to describe Sterne’s work and comic fiction in general such as ‘ludicrous’, ‘facetious’, or ‘humorous’, travesty and parody are among the meanings available to Fitzpatrick and it may just be that he saw Tristram Shandy as in some sense a mock-​novel.29 Did Sterne see himself as a writer of novels, burlesque or otherwise? Frustratingly, he left no statement of intent of the kind found in Fielding’s preface to Joseph Andrews or Smollett’s to Roderick Random. Like them, however, he nowhere describes his fictions as novels. 24 

Viktor Shklovsky, ‘A Parodying Novel: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy’, in John Traugott (ed.), Laurence Sterne: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 66–​89. 25  Monthly Review, appendix to no. 21 (July–​December 1759), 561–​7 1, in Howes (ed.), Sterne: The Critical Heritage, 46. 26  Folkenflik, ‘Tristram Shandy and Eighteenth-​Century Narrative’, 49. 27  Monthly Review, appendix to no. 21 (July–​December 1759), 561–​7 1, in Howes (ed.), Sterne: The Critical Heritage, 46–​7. 28  Monthly Review 26 (1762), 69. Emphasis added. 29 Johnson’s Dictionary has burlesque as the first synonym for ludicrous. For other connotations of burlesque available in the period, see OED, s.v. burlesque.

Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-Century Novel    269 He refers to A Sentimental Journey by its title or the quality he clearly hoped would most strike its first readers. A year before its publication, he promises Isaac Panchaud that it will be ‘an Original’ and talks to his daughter of having ‘laid a plan for something new, quite out of the beaten track’. Six months later, Sterne proudly tells Becket that ‘some Geniuses in the North declare it an Original work’.30 Such confidence in the distinctiveness of A Sentimental Journey was justified and surely bespeaks an assured grasp of what constituted ‘the beaten track’. That he was rumoured to be ‘writing an extraordinary book’31 in the winter of 1759, similarly suggests an awareness of run-​of-​the-​mill, ordinary fiction. When, at the end of the same year, Sterne sent the Marquis of Rockingham ‘8 sets of Tristram Shandy’, he described his ‘Book’ as a ‘ludicrous Satyr’32 and partially glossed the label by placing it in the company of Don Quixote and Scarron’s Comical Romance. That he continued to conceive his fiction in similar terms is suggested by one of his last letters in which he tells Elizabeth Montagu that he is writing a comic ‘Romance’, which he again associates with Cervantes’s ‘humourous Satyre’33 and Scarron. We cannot be sure exactly how he understood the category, but ‘ludicrous Satyr’ seems to have been synonymous for Sterne with Ozell’s ‘satyrical Romance’ or what his contemporaries more typically referred to as simply ‘comic’ romance. The oxymoronic quality of the conjunctions tells us something about a literary kind whose ‘realism’ finds its thrust in deflating various manifestations of unworldly idealism and perceived delusion. As Folkenflik observes, comic romance defines ‘itself in opposition to romance proper’ and is consequently ‘inherently parodic’.34 Interestingly, Sterne also includes the author of Le Moyen de parvenir, François Béroalde de Verville, in his list of ludicrous satirists,35 and this reminds us of distinctive elements in his conception of both comic romance and the ancestry of his fiction. Nonetheless, the fact that both Fielding and Smollett saw themselves working in the same broad genre points to a shared milieu of literary assumptions and practices. That all three writers seek to associate their works with the established classics of European comic fiction warns us against reading Sterne’s allusions to ‘ludicrous Satyr’ as evidence that he ‘belongs’ to a tradition distinct from the burgeoning novel form. Invocations of the canon of comic fiction were commonplace after Fielding, and while the influence of Rabelais, Cervantes, Scarron, and Le Sage was real enough, such genealogies also served the purpose of ‘de-​emphasizing’, as J. Paul Hunter puts it, ‘the new and unusual aspects’ of the genre at a time when its cultural status was by no means assured. Tristram Shandy, like Roderick Random and Tom Jones, is more new species than old, but there were good

30 

Laurence Sterne, The Letters, Part Two: 1765–​1768, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2008), 553, 536, 616. 31 Sterne, The Letters, Part One: 1739–​1764, 105. 32 Sterne, The Letters, Part One: 1739–​1764, 107–​8. 33 Sterne, The Letters, Part Two: 1765–​1768, 658. 34  Folkenflik, ‘Tristram Shandy and Eighteenth-​Century Narrative’, 49. 35 Sterne, The Letters, Part Two: 1765–​1768, 658.

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270   TIM PARNELL tactical reasons for Sterne, like the other pioneers of the developing form, to place it in what Hunter calls ‘a framework of familiarity’.36 The absence of explicit references to Fielding and Richardson in Sterne’s public and private writings has sometimes been seen to suggest his ignorance of both their novels and the new kind of fiction for which they were in no small part responsible. Yet their profile by the end of the 1750s was such that no one with even a passing familiarity with the review journals and the novels they appraised could have been unaware of their reputation and influence. For the reviewers, they were often the benchmarks against which other writers were judged and found wanting, and for many of the novelists who followed them into print in the fifties, Fielding and Richardson were willingly acknowledged models for, respectively, comic fiction and the serious novel of sentiment. Efforts to prove that Sterne read the work of the two leading exponents of the new species fail to convince because they stake their claims on tenuous verbal echoes and unremarkable coincidences.37 Yet there is too much evidence of Sterne’s awareness of the literary debates and developments of his time to sustain a view that he wrote in ignor­ ance of their achievements, and it is unlikely that he would ever have turned to prose fiction without the market created by their successes. He entered that market, however, nearly twenty years after the appearances of Pamela and Joseph Andrews with, as we have seen, a clear sense that he was writing ‘out of the beaten track’. Wanting to be seen as an innovator rather than an imitator in the developing form, it is thus unsurprising that he should write without alluding to, or acknowledging, his powerful predecessors. Insofar as Fielding pioneered a highly influential form of comic romance, Sterne is his debtor, but the influence is diffuse and generalized rather than direct. This is as true of the many quixotic characters inspired by Parson Adams as it is of the intrusive and self-​ conscious narration which, as Booth puts it, ‘everyone was borrowing from Fielding’38 in the 1750s. Others, of course, borrowed from Richardson but Sterne’s outlook and practice as a writer of comic fiction is so different from the author of Clarissa that we must search very hard for more than local grounds of comparison. The differences between what Brean Hammond calls the latter’s ‘static, sedentary didacticism’39 and the poetic of comic fiction that we can glean from Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey are striking enough to have led to suggestions that Sterne sometimes takes Richardson on through parody.40 Convincingly tangible signs of direct engagement are again, however, wanting and we must surely ask both why Sterne would

36 

J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​Century Fiction (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1990), 18, 19. 37  See, for example, Ian Campbell Ross, ‘Did Sterne Read Tom Jones?’, Shandean 13 (2003), 109–​11, and Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, 42–​8 and passim. 38  Booth, ‘The Self-​Conscious Narrator’, 176. 39  Brean Hammond, ‘Mid-​Century English Quixoticism, and the Defence of the Novel’, Eighteenth-​ Century Fiction 10/3 (1998), 252. 40  See Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, 42–​5 and passim.

Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-Century Novel    271 want to mock Richardson seven years after the publication of his last work and, if he did, why he would do it in so coded a manner as to escape the notice of his first readers. By the end of the 1750s, Richardson’s impact on other writers, like Fielding’s, was so widespread that it becomes very difficult to identify direct sources of influence with certainty. There is something, nonetheless, in Alan Dugald McKillop’s suggestion that ‘Richardson passed on to Sterne’ a way of handling gesture. For McKillop, the legacy is best seen a passage from Sir Charles Grandison: Mr. Grandison was in the midst of a fine speech, and was not well pleased. He sat down, threw one leg over the knee of the other, hemmed three or four times, took out his snuffbox, tapped it, let the snuff drop thro’ his fingers, then broke the lumps, then shut it, and twirled it round with the fore-​finger of his right-​hand, as he held it between the thumb and fore-​finger of the other, and was quite like a sullen boy …41

Hard as it is to imagine Sterne ploughing his way through Grandison, and whether or not his own attention to the ‘minutiae of gesture’ owes something to Richardson, the important point is that comparable descriptions in Tristram Shandy have a non-​parodic integrity of their own in the imagined world of his comic novel. When Sterne describes Walter twisting Elizabeth Shandy’s thread paper and biting her pin-​cushion or ‘surveying’ his pipe ‘this way, and then that, in all possible directions and foreshortenings’ (281), he is not mocking techniques found in Richardson and many who took their cue from him, but rather drawing on and using them for his own purposes. While we will look in vain for signs of direct engagement with Richardson and Fielding in Tristram Shandy, its first two instalments do include a number of hitherto unnoticed but significant references to the dominant mid-​century trend in comic fiction, the tradition of fictional ‘Biography’ inaugurated by Joseph Andrews. As is the case with many of Sterne’s most topical allusions, they are subtle enough to be easily missed, but their import would have been clear to attentive contemporary readers familiar with the many novels produced by what the Monthly Review in 1755 called the ‘common class of modern biographers’.42 The influence of the ‘King of Biographers’43 was such that the Critical Review could complain in the following year that Fielding had ‘done in romance what Pope attributes to lord Burlington in architecture, “Fill’d half the world with imitating fools.” ’44 And notwithstanding John Cleland’s objection to the ‘false idea’ conveyed by the improper application of the generic category to the

41 

Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison (1754), quoted in Alan Dugald McKillop, ‘Laurence Sterne’, in Traugott (ed.), Laurence Sterne, 38. 42  Monthly Review 12 (1755), 117. 43  Francis Coventry, The History of Pompey the Little, ed. Nicholas Hudson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2008), 131. William Goodall repeats the epithet while mocking Coventry as the ‘Archbishop of Romance’ for so dubbing Fielding (Goodall, The Adventures of Capt. Greenland, 4. 143). 44  Critical Review 2 (1756), 276.

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272   TIM PARNELL ‘new species of writing’, writers embraced Fielding’s model to the extent that he was talked of as the founder of a ‘new Sect of Biographers’.45 Three of Sterne’s six allusions to the ‘sect’ playfully draw attention to breaches of plausibility typically suppressed by its members and brought into sharp focus by Tristram’s refusal to adhere to the conventions of the many fictional lives which proliferated in the wake of Fielding’s successes. Touching on the novelistic staples of characterization and the relationship between plot and story in the handling of time, Sterne highlights the gap between the complexities of life as it is lived and the improbable simplifications of what Walter Scott, in his review of Emma, called the ‘land of fiction’. The ‘fixure [sic] of Momus’s glass, in the human breast’ which would render character transparent is ‘an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this planet’ (1.23.82–​3), and the conflicting time schemes of Tristram’s present life as an author and the past of the family history he seeks to recount create a situation ‘never before applicable to any one biographical writer since the creation of the world’ (4.13.341). Alert to the hypercritic’s likely objection to a discrepancy between reading time and story time as readers and characters await the arrival of Dr. Slop, Tristram’s defence, for all its mock-​seriousness, shows that Sterne was well aware of some of the contested generic labels for the new species: If my hypercritick is intractable,—​alledging, that two minutes and thirteen seconds are no more than two minutes and thirteen seconds,-​ -​ -​when I have said all I can about them;—​—​and that this plea, tho’ it might save me dramatically, will damn me biographically, rendering my book, from this very moment, a profess’d ROMANCE, which before was a book apocryphal:—​—​If I am thus pressed—​I put an end to the whole objection and controversy about it all at once … (2.8.120)

That Sterne is indeed gesturing towards ‘modern biographers’ rather than the broader and older tradition of what Cleland called ‘real lives’,46 and doing so with ironic intent, is made clear in the third volume when Tristram encounters a still-​thornier problem of emplotment. Finding that the stories of Trim’s tryst with Bridget on the bowling green and the ‘anecdotes of my uncle Toby’s amours with widow Wadman’ vie for a place with the ongoing narrative of his unfortunate birth, Tristram appeals for guidance from the muses, and more specifically, the ‘powers … who preside over this vast empire of biographical freebooters’ (3.23.244). Passing though the thrust is, its implication is clear: Fielding’s many imitators are literary thieves. The swipe allows Sterne both to draw attention to his own creative independence and originality in the hackneyed field of biographically-​based comic fiction, and to signal, clearly if quietly, that the freebooters fall within Tristram Shandy’s satiric range. Lest we miss the point, and the particular bite of ‘freebooters’, Sterne has Tristram look back in the fourth volume at those knocked and ‘splash’d’ by the ‘curvetting and frisking’ of his 45  Monthly Review 4 (1751), 355; An Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Mr. Fielding: with a Word or Two upon the Modern State of Criticism (London, 1751), p. [i]‌. 46  Monthly Review 4 (1751), 356.

Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-Century Novel    273 satirical horse and ‘biographers’ join a list of more obvious targets such as ‘lawyers, logicians … schoolmen … connoisseurs … and engineers’ (4.20.356–​357).47 For all that they are clearly disparaging, there is a lightness of touch about these allusions to the ‘biographers’ which warns us to be cautious in our reading of the extent of Sterne’s satirical agenda and its importance to his conception of Tristram Shandy as a whole. He was obviously unwilling to swell the ranks of Fielding’s or, for that matter, Smollett’s many imitators and he might well have felt that the public had had, in Kenrick’s words, ‘more than enough’ of formulaic ‘Lives and Adventures’. Among reviewers at least, there had long been a sense that such works were barely distinguishable from each other, so that the Monthly could greet the publication of William Goodall’s The Adventures of Capt. Greenland (1752) with a crushing refusal to treat it on its own terms: ‘To avoid a repetition of the same characteristics, we refer the reader back to our accounts of John Daniel, Howel ap David Price, Charles Osborne, esq; and Patty Saunders; to whose distinguished names, we may add that of ’.48 If Sterne agreed with such assessments, he kept it to himself, but his ‘burlesque novel’ often implicitly mocks any number of ‘late performances in the novel way’, which, as the Monthly has it in its review of The Life and Adventures of Sobrina (1755), were ‘full of strange vicissitudes, and dire disasters, but special good luck at last’.49 In place of the dramatic adventures of a Sobrina, David Price, Captain Greenland—​or, indeed, a Roderick Random, Tom Jones, or Peregrine Pickle—​ Sterne gives us Tristram’s ‘pitiful misadventures and cross accidents’ (1.5.9). Strange vicissitudes and dire disasters find their reductio ad absurdum in an interrupted conception, a painful encounter with Slop’s forceps, a botched christening and accidental circumcision. Instead of romantic love interest, we are offered the shadowy presence of ‘dear Jenny’ with whom something did ‘not’ (7.29.624) pass on at least one occasion and the anti-​love story that is the narrative of the amours of uncle Toby and widow Wadman. Indeed, the denial of the expected closure in the ‘choicest morsel of [Tristram’s] whole story’ (4.32.401) is paradigmatic of the novel’s broader refusal to conclude any of its narrative strands with the conventional satisfaction of ‘special good luck at last’. While, however, aspects of Tristram’s mock-​memoir resonate particularly with the recent novels of the ‘biographical freebooters’, the narrative tradition of action and adventure is a long one, and Sterne’s generation could trace a modern line back at least as far as The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Moreover, there is no evidence in Tristram Shandy that he was targeting particular novels or that the general burlesque of some of the formal and thematic conventions of the new species of comic fiction is informed by anything approaching the kind of cultural politics that underpins and gives coherence to the satire of Swift and Pope.

47  Perhaps following Sterne’s lead, Charles Churchill also aims a thrust at Fielding’s imitators in The Ghost. Among the authors who ‘sit together in a ring’ laughing and prattling are ‘BIOGRAPHERS, whose wond’rous worth | Is scarce remember’d now on earth, | Whom FIELDING’s humour led astray’ (The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956], 94). 48  Monthly Review 6 (1752), 311. 49  Monthly Review 12 (1755), 383.

274

274   TIM PARNELL If Tristram Shandy were, as Keymer suggests, a thoroughgoing satire on the novel in the Scriblerian mode, why would Sterne make his purposes so opaque? Certainly, there is a Scriblerian-​like disdain for presentism in the novel’s only other direct allusion to the ‘modern biographers’. Possibly glancing parodically at the most recent intervention in the ancients versus moderns debate, Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition,50 Sterne includes ‘biographical’ and ‘romantical’ among the branches of human endeavour ironically seen to be approaching the ‘Ακμη of their perfections’ (72). But if he had wanted to attack the authors of the many fictional ‘biographies’ published in the 1750s as the modern incarnations of Swift’s and Pope’s hacks and dunces he would surely have done so explicitly and sustainedly. Instead, he aims passing and glancing blows at a generalized category of freebooters and the parodic, anti-​novelistic aspects of Tristram Shandy flicker in and out of focus as other matters take centre stage. Both Martinus Scriblerus and A Tale of a Tub are among the many books from which Sterne drew ideas and inspiration. Yet nothing indicates that in drawing on them he saw himself joining a tradition of satire in opposition to, or in some sense outside, the necessarily more amorphous and disparate literary culture of his own time. Sterne’s sources are many and varied and he is just as willing to learn from the practice of the writer who has come to stand as the archetypal Scriblerian dunce, John Dunton, as he is from Swift.51 Writing with an awareness of both older traditions of narrative satire and the recent flowering of indigenous comic fiction, Sterne made the most of an unpre­ cedentedly eclectic and rich heritage. He took from Martinus Scriblerus and the Tale not a campaigning zeal against modern culture, but rather what he borrowed from Dunton’s Voyage round the World and various mid-​century novels, germs of ideas, situations, and narrative strategies, which he then developed in inventive ways. Part of Cervantes’s legacy to the eighteenth-​century novel was a degree of self-​ consciousness about, and an element of mockery of, the conventions and motifs of the ‘land of fiction’, and Sterne’s play with the methods and concerns of biographers and historiographers is closer in spirit and kind to the novels of Marivaux, or such home-​grown products as The History of Charlotte Summers (1750) and Capt. Greenland than it is to Swift’s Tale. As Booth has shown, Sterne picks up and develops the tendency towards self-​conscious and intrusive narration in novels of the 1750s, and he similarly extends to brilliant effect the new genre’s leaning towards parodic self-​reflexivity. In this and other respects, Sterne’s novel can be meaningfully compared to Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little: or the Life and Adventures of a Lap-​Dog (1751). Published eight years before the appearance of the first instalment of Tristram Shandy, it ran to four more editions by 1761. As its title implies, one aspect of the novel is its ironic relation to the life-​and-​adventures tradition, and in particular the novels of ‘this Life-​writing Age 50 

See Tim Parnell, ‘From Hack to Eccentric Genius: Tristram Shandy and A Tale of a Tub, Again’, Swift Studies 22 (2007), 158. 51  See Tim Parnell, ‘Laurence Sterne, Author of the Tale?’, in Kirsten Juhas, Hermann J. Real, and Sandra Simon (eds.), Reading Swift: Papers from The Sixth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013), 581–​93.

Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-Century Novel    275 … where no Character is thought too inconsiderable to engage the public Notice, or too abandoned to be set up as a Pattern of Imitation’.52 Coventry is much more explicit in his targeting of Fielding’s imitators, and he does not come close to the ingenuity and complexity of Sterne’s games with narrative conventions, but, like Tristram Shandy, Pompey the Little is at once a burlesque novel and a comic novel in its own right, replete with incidental satire on all that its author finds ‘Laugh-​at-​able in [his] way’.53 For Coventry, the work of burlesque is principally achieved by the simple device of having a lap-​dog as protagonist, but the heroes and heroines of the unspecified novels he is mocking—​‘Vagrants, Parish-​Girls, Chamber-​Maids, Pick-​Pockets, and Highwaymen’—​ are further kept in view with the running joke that ‘Fortune’ is Pompey’s ‘constant Enemy’. ‘How deplorable’, thinks the lap-​dog, after losing yet another owner, ‘is my Condition, and what is Fortune preparing to do with me? Have I not already gone through Scenes of Wretchedness enough[?]‌’54 Such pleas, mutatis mutandis, are common to the protagonists of lives-​and-​adventures such as Roderick Random, who describes his story as ‘little more than a recital of misfortunes’,55 as well as his less sophisticated cousins, like Silvius Greenland, about whom Goodall’s narrator observes (without apparent irony): had he not been deprived of an education suitable to his Genius and Capacity, he might probably have made a very great Figure in the World; either at the Bar, or in the Pulpit, or in the Army, or in the Navy, or in Painting, or in Architecture, or in Physic, or in Mathematics; or in some other of the most shining Arts and Sciences. But alack-​a-​day! Fatal for poor Silvius … his stars decreed him to a quite different Fortune.56

From such laments it is, of course, only a small step to Tristram Shandy’s fifth chapter, where Sterne’s hero bemoans his lot in hyperbolic terms that only make full sense in light of the convention being mocked: On the fifth day of November, 1718 … was I Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, brought forth into this scurvy and disasterous [sic] world of ours.—​I wish I had been born in the Moon, or in any other of the planets … for it could not well have fared worse with me in any of them … than it has in this vile, dirty planet of ours,—​which o’ my conscience, with reverence be it spoken, I take to be made up of the shreds and clippings of the rest … for I can truly say, that from the first hour I drew breath in it … I have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune … in every stage of my life … the ungracious Duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small HERO sustained. (1.5.8–​9)

52 Coventry, The History of Pompey the Little, 41. 53 Sterne, The Letters, Part One: 1739–​1764, 80.

54 Sterne, The Letters, Part One: 1739–​1764, 107. 55 

363.

Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. Paul-​Gabriel Boucé (Oxford: OUP, 1981),

56 Goodall, Capt. Greenland, 1: 9–​10.

276

276   TIM PARNELL As well as a parodic handling of such characteristic motifs, Sterne and Coventry share a number of other satirical targets. Sterne’s attack on the ‘cant of criticism’ and the type of the connoisseur, who measures Garrick’s soliloquy, Tristram Shandy, ‘epick’ poems, and ‘grand’ pictures with ‘rules and compasses’ (3.12.213–​14) is anticipated by Pompey’s master, Hillario, who returns from the Grand Tour spouting the terms of art criticism and by the coffee house wits who ‘call Mr. Garrick to Account every Evening for his Action’. In a chapter concerned with debates about the immortality of the soul, Coventry alludes liberally to Locke, refers to Descartes’s location of the soul in the pineal gland, and quotes the same passage from Chambers’s Cyclopædia about Borri’s discovery of the ‘residence of the soul’ in ‘a certain very subtil fragrant juice’57 which Sterne uses in his analogous, though typically more elaborate (and bawdy), account of the ‘certain very thin, subtle, and very fragrant juice which Coglionissimo Borri, the great Milaneze physician, affirms, in a letter to Bartholine, to have discovered in the cellulae of the occipital parts of the cerebellum’ (2.19.174). Later in the prefatory chapter to his second volume, headed ‘A Dissertation Upon Nothing’, Coventry includes ‘the mighty Mr.’58 Warburton’s Divine Legation among a number of examples of the vacuity of modern thought. To some extent, of course, the parallels between Coventry’s and Sterne’s preoccupations tell us no more than that they shared a culture. But given the tendency to treat Sterne as if he wrote in cultural isolation, this in itself is significant and no one reading Tristram Shandy alongside Pompey the Little and other more obscure novels of the 1750s is likely to contend that Sterne is not of his time. Too many of his concerns are found elsewhere for this to be the case. The hero of The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756) is strikingly Toby-​like in his obsession with ‘Doubts, Rideouts, Ravelins, Javelins, Half-​moons, Whole-​moons, Carps, Counter-​carps, and the Lord knows what’,59 but he is only one of many soldiers, military men, and Marlborough veterans who inhabit the novels of the period. Tristram-​like claims of freedom from critical rules are commonplace, as are pre-​emptive strikes against pedantic criticism. Thus, the narrator of William Toldervy’s History of Two Orphans (1756) anticipates Tristram’s playful defence of inconsistencies in his characterization of Toby with his own rejoinder: ‘There are some, who having a certain malady attendant on their understandings, called captious criticism, will be inclined to wonder at this seeming inconsistency in the turn of Humphrey Copper.’60 Although it may not be clear from such a short excerpt, Toldervy’s defence of his methods is flat-​footed and humourless and time and again we find that Sterne’s hand­ ling of commonplaces and conventions is of a kind and quality that largely justifies the

57 Coventry, The History of Pompey the Little, 48–​9, 100, 71.

58 Coventry, The History of Pompey the Little, 132. Coventry removed this chapter from the third

edition. 59  The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (London, 1756), 18. 60  William Toldervy, The History of Two Orphans, 4 vols. (London, 1756), 1: 165–​6. For Tristram’s play with the ‘Gentle critick’, see Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 2.2.96–​101.

Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-Century Novel    277 Monthly Review’s assessment of him as ‘infinitely more ingenious and entertaining’ than his fellow novelists. Rather than satirizing their concerns and methods, however, Sterne seems to have learnt from them to the extent that Tristram Shandy often finds him playing variations on themes and devices found in such novels as Capt. Greenland and Tristram Bates. A case in point is the typographically inventive handling of Yorick’s ‘epitaph and elegy’ (1.12.17). As Hughes pointed out in 1918, Tristram’s account of the passers-​by who read over Yorick’s ‘monumental inscription’ and sighingly repeat its Shakespearean apostrophe is anticipated in Tristram Bates, where the narrator describes the responses to the ‘Broken-​hearted’ soldier’s grave thus: The Stone Mason at the Savoy tells me, he can scarce go on in his work, on account of the numberless Questions ask’d him; and scarce an Hour of the Day passes, but Strangers inquire for his Tomb; and, striking their Breasts, Cry! Alas! Poor Bates.61

The language is close enough to Sterne’s to indicate that he probably did know the novel, but if he did the relationship between the texts cannot be explained in terms of parodic appropriation. If satire were Sterne’s aim, to echo an obscure element of an obscure novel would hardly serve his purposes, and the fact that typographically distinct monumental inscriptions, laid out so as to mimic their real-​world models, are also to be found in Toldervy’s History of Two Orphans and Edward Kimber’s The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger (1756) suggests rather that he is making imaginative use of an idea that he came across in his reading. Sterne trumps his models in every way from the choice of his alter ego’s name, through the text box which frames Yorick’s epitaph, to the black page itself, but for all his surpassing excellence he is, in such instances, clearly working broadly with materials familiar in other novels of the period. To some extent this is true, too, of Sterne’s much-​debated ‘sentimentalism’. Although he was distinctive enough to be credited by the Sentimental Magazine as having introduced the new ‘mode of sentimental writing’,62 he shares something of a stock of sentimental idioms, concerns, and motifs with contemporaries from Fielding and Smollett through to their numerous biographical progeny. Pathos has a place in Tristram Shandy from the beginning, and the privileging of feeling in the relationships between Walter and Toby and Captain Shandy and Corporal Trim and in such celebrated set pieces as the death of Yorick and the ‘The Story of LE FEVER’, finds parallels in most comic fiction of the period. Similarly, Tristram Shandy’s striking combination of robust comedy with what Sterne called stories ‘painted to the heart’ (3.Preface.233) is partially anticipated in many comic lives published in the 1750s. As Simon Dickie notes in his illuminating discussion of mid-​century ‘ramble novels’, such works are full of ‘baffling heterogeneities’, 61 

62 

Tristram Bates, 238; Hughes, ‘A Precursor of Tristram Shandy’, 244. The Sentimental Magazine; or, General Assemblage of Science, Taste, and Entertainment (1774), 4.

278

278   TIM PARNELL so that ‘bawdy stories can appear alongside grave sermons or condensed theological discourses’ and the crudest and cruellest humour cohabits with ‘genuinely sentimental episodes’.63 This is not to level Sterne’s typically nuanced handling of the relationship between feeling and morality with the formulaic virtue-​in-​distress narratives found in the likes of Christopher Anstey’s Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse (1756) or John Slade’s The Adventures of Jerry Buck (1754), but it does make it harder to argue that his juxtapositions of pathos and humour or abrupt transitions from the one to the other signal the kind of irony in which satire necessarily triumphs over sentiment. At the same time, the ubiquity of conventional sentimental idioms and situations in novels of the 1750s means that we need not look exclusively to Richardson or writers of the 1760s such as Frances Brooke or Frances Sheridan, who were widely perceived to be imitators of his ‘manner’, for possible targets of what modern commentators have sometimes assumed to be Sterne’s parody. Certainly, the tendency towards unexamined cliché and sentimental excess in mid-​ century fiction is ripe for mockery and provides a stark contrast to Sterne’s practice. This is as true of a decorous ‘novel of sensibility’64 such as Frances Brooke’s The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763) as it is of the incidental sentimentalism found in otherwise comic novels. Brooke’s catastrophe in which Harry and Julia are denied their longed-​for union by death (the former in a duel that he need not have fought, and the latter through grief at her lover’s demise) is gratuitous insofar as its primary aim is to move the reader with the spectacle of virtue in extreme distress rather than to point to any larger moral. Similar in intention, if more bizarre in effect, because less in keeping with the tone and thrust of the novel as a whole, and more excessive still, is the rapid series of tragic deaths which afflict the 16-​year-​old Davy in the second chapter of David Ranger. First his sister dies, which so affects their mother that she also dies three days later. Having penned a mawkish poetic tribute to them both, Davy tells his father of his hitherto secret love for Sophy whilst she too is ill. A tearful Mr. Ranger approves the prospective union and goes to tell Sophy’s father, Mr. Birch, who is overcome with tears of joy. Moments later, the parents are awakened from ‘this dream of bliss’ by the announcement that both Davy and Sophy are dead: ‘The voice of a cannon bursting into the room could not have fill’d then with such terror—​the blood forsook their cheeks and Mr. Birch swoon’d away, whilst Mr. Ranger fell back in a chair—​his bosom heaving with unutterable swellings of sorrow.’ Thankfully for the continuance of the novel of which he is the hero, the report of Davy’s death proves an exaggeration, but ‘Poor Sophy overcome with the view of her promis’d felicity—​her senses all wandering and wild—​her body all weakened with her disorder—​Oh! Pity, pity, all ye chaste and faithful lovers—​expir’d in Davy’s embrace, with 63 

Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2011), 269. 64  For a useful distinction between the ‘moral novel of sentiment’ and the ‘novel of sensibility’, see Janet Todd, The Sign of Angelica: Women, Writing, and Fiction 1660–​1800 (London: Virago, 1989), 176 and passim.

Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-Century Novel    279 her dear arm round his neck—​and sighing forth his name in broken accents.’65 After a tearful deathbed scene, Mr. Birch dies of grief and Davy erects a monument. All this within ten emotionally febrile pages. What Sterne might have thought of Brooke’s and Kimber’s handling of the deaths of their ‘faithful lovers’ is suggested by the succinct narrative of the ill-​fated Amandus and Amanda, which has such an effect on Tristram’s ‘tender and fibrillous’ (7.31.627) brain as he travels through Lyons. Similarly, the humour that qualifies the account of Yorick’s death and the self-​conscious question and answer with which Tristram ends Le Fever’s story are clearly at odds with the practice and assumptions of the likes of Brooke and Kimber. But while such comparisons enable us to identify the distinguishing characteristics of Sterne’s pathetic rhetoric, there is nothing to suggest that he was targeting particular writers through parody or offering a broader critique of the sentimental strain in contemporary fiction. Indeed, the story of Amandus and Amanda resonates with any number of pre-​novelistic tales of love and Sterne’s treatment of feeling is as relevant to the sentimental drama of the early eighteenth century as it is to the mid-​century novel. Unalloyed feeling is incompatible both with the anti-​idealizing thrust of Tristram Shandy’s brand of ‘satyrical’ or comic romance and with the Sternean conviction that, as the Yorick of A Sentimental Journey puts it, ‘there is nothing unmixt in this world’.66 Nonetheless, Sterne contributes his own distinctive idiolect to his period’s languages of feeling, often working in the same terrain as his contemporaries while adding a level of wit, invention, and ethical complexity which is his own. The handling of the announcement of Bobby Shandy’s death in Tristram Shandy’s fifth volume is a good example. The situation is commonplace and typically calls for some conventional pieties of the kind found in the History of Two Orphans when Honeyflower consoles his sister on the sudden death of her husband: But, alas! He was born to die; and so, O! My Henrietta, must we, and even the good Lord Digby must die! Why, not thy husband? To die is to follow the common path of nature, we must all tread it, but when or how, we know not; let us, therefore, be cheerful, for he whose feet could not slide here, we may rest well assured, will be happy for ever.67

The same essential message is to be found in Tristram Shandy, but the contrast between Walter’s and Trim’s orations enables Sterne to combine humour and pathos while making a larger point about the language of feeling which has an integrity of its own. Drawing on ‘Cato, and Seneca, and Epictetus’, Walter proceeds ‘from period to period, by metaphor and allusion’, while Trim ‘without wit or antithesis, or point, or turn’ goes ‘strait forwards as nature could lead him, to the heart’ (5.6.428–​9).

65 

Edward Kimber, The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger, 2 vols. (London, 1756), 1: 55, 56. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal, ed. Melvyn New and W. G. Day (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2002), 116. 67 Toldervy, The History of Two Orphans, 1: 28. 66 

280

280   TIM PARNELL Did Sterne develop his ‘pathetic vein’ under pressure from the reviewers and with an eye on the popularity of such ‘crying volume[s]‌’68 as Frances Sheridan’s Sidney Bidulph, Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and Sir George Ellison, Brooke’s Julia Mandeville, and Henry Brooke’s Fool Of Quality? The answer is surely no. Humour and pathos cohabit in Tristram Shandy from the outset, and Sterne never reins in the bawdry that the reviewers deplored. The Maria episode in Tristram Shandy is preceded by off-​colour allusions to venereal disease and the encounter with ‘Poor Maria’ is typically Sternean in its demonstration of the decidedly mixed feelings informing what Tristram disingenuously figures as ‘the full force of an honest heart-​ache’ (9.24.783). A Sentimental Journey is perhaps more replete with sexual puns and double entendres than Tristram Shandy and to read it alongside Sidney Bidulph or Julia Mandeville is to be struck not by similarities but by what a very different kind of book it is. Sexuality is incompatible with sensibility as conceived by Sheridan and Brooke, and the latter’s ideal of a passionless love ‘independent of the charms of … person’69 is implicitly contested again and again in a book which insists on the inseparability of ‘amour’ and ‘sentiment’.70 A Sentimental Journey clearly belongs to its time insofar as it joins contemporary debates about the social virtues and the ethical dimension of feeling, but where Tristram Shandy is in part, as Booth puts it, the ‘product of the novels that were published as [Sterne] was maturing his own methods’,71 it stands out from other novels of the 1760s in ways which support his sense of it as ‘something new, quite out of the beaten track’. Tellingly, the most likely model that has come to light for the broad structural design of A Sentimental Journey and a number of its scenes is an obscure pamphlet published in 1711, Occasional Reflections In a Journey from London to Norwich & Cambridge.72 To read Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey in the context of mid-​eighteenth-​ century fiction, is not to explain away their complexities and idiosyncrasies, nor to diminish Sterne’s achievement in conceiving and producing his ‘extraordinary’ books. Doing so, however, enables us to see him meaningfully as a writer of his time who made a significant contribution to the novel form. If such a statement sounds blindingly obvious, it has not generally been perceived as such in the history of Sterne’s critical reception, or, indeed, in accounts of the ‘rise’ of the novel.

68  [Thomas Bridges], The Adventures of a Bank Note, 4 vols. (London, 1770), 3: 5. As the proprietor of a circulating library has it: ‘A crying volume … brings me more money in six months than a heavy merry thing will do in six years.’ 69  Francis Brooke, The History of Lady Julia Mandeville, 2 vols. (London, 1763), 1: 186. 70 Sterne, A Sentimental Journey and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal, 63. 71  Booth, ‘The Self-​Conscious Narrator’, 184. 72  The possible link was first mentioned in 1797 in the European Magazine and two years later in the Gentleman’s Magazine. See Arthur Sherbo, ‘More from the Gentleman’s Magazine’, Studies in Bibliography 40 (1987), 167.

Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-Century Novel    281

Select Bibliography Booth, Wayne C., ‘The Self-​Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy’, PMLA 67/​2 (1952), 163–85. Dickie, Simon, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Folkenflik, Robert, ‘Tristram Shandy and Eighteenth-​Century Narrative’, in Thomas Keymer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009), 49–​63. Hammond, Brean, ‘Mid-​ Century English Quixoticism, and the Defence of the Novel’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 10/​2 (1998), 247–68. Howes, Alan B. (ed.), Sterne: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). Hughes, Helen Sard, ‘A Precursor of Tristram Shandy’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 17 (1918), 227–51. Hunter, J. Paul, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​Century Fiction (New York and London: Norton, 1990). Keymer, Thomas, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). New, Melvyn, Laurence Sterne as Satirist (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1969). Richetti, John, The English Novel in History 1700–​1780 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

282

E pil o gu e: Th e E ng l i sh N ovel at th e E nd of the 1 7 6 0s J. A. Downie

At the end of the 1750s, Samuel Richardson reported that two leading London booksellers, Andrew Millar and Robert Dodsley, were of the opinion that ‘the Day of Novels is over’. ‘Other Booksellers have declared the same thing,’ Richardson maintained. ‘There was a Time, when every Man of that Trade published a Novel, ’till the Public (in this Mr. Millar says true) became tired of them.’1 Whether The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, was largely responsible for the turnaround in its fortunes which took place in the 1760s, Richardson’s report of the death of the novel proved to be greatly exaggerated. By the end of the decade novels were appearing in sufficient numbers to suggest that the growth in the market which was to take place in the final thirty years of the eighteenth century would not have been entirely unexpected. The graphs reproduced in The English Novel, 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles clearly indicate that there were peaks and troughs during these decades rather than a steady upward curve, but by the end of the century getting on for a hundred new novels were appearing annually as opposed to the forty listed for the year 1770. Anyone picking up a volume described as a ‘novel’ on the title page in a bookseller’s shop or a circulating library in 1769 knew with a fair degree of certainty what sort of entertainment was likely to be found between its covers. ‘Novels’ were quasi-​realistic accounts of the ‘adventures’ of fictitious characters. They neither stretched the credulity of their readers by offering fantastic descriptions of ‘any thing which the wildest Imagination could suggest’,2 nor were they any longer located exclusively in the upper 1  Richardson to Lady Barbara Montagu, 17 February 1759, quoted in Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: OUP, 1971), 434. 2  An Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Mr. Fielding: With a Word or Two upon the Modern State of Criticism (London, 1751), 13.

Epilogue: The English Novel at the End of the 1760s    283 echelons of society. Instead, what was being offered to the reading public were ‘Probable Feign’d Stories’,3 satisfying the most basic requirements of what Ian Watt was eventually to call ‘formal realism’. It is difficult to assess the extent to which Fielding’s influence was responsible for this development, but Francis Coventry was in no doubt that Fielding was the author ‘who unquestionably stands foremost in this species of composition’,4 nor that it was ‘this new kind of Biography’ which had altered readers’ horizons of expectation. ‘As this Sort of Writing was intended as a Contrast to those in which the Reader was even to suppose all the Characters ideal, and every Circumstance quite imaginary,’ Coventry explained, ‘’twas thought necessary, to give it a greater Air of Truth, to entitle it an History.’5 In giving their novels titles such as The Fool of Quality, or, the History of Henry Earl of Moreland, or The History of Emily Montague, therefore, a number of authors continued to follow the example set by Fielding. True, in the middle of the 1760s Horace Walpole argued that because ‘the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life’, The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story was ‘an attempt to blend the two kinds of Romance, the ancient and the modern’,6 while Oliver Goldsmith exploited the newly fashionable vogue for sentimental fiction in The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale. Supposed to be written by Himself, while apparently working, at the same time, within the older satirical tradition which Sterne had done much to resuscitate. In this context, it is not always easy for a modern reader to appreciate that, as an anthology such as The Beauties of Sterne (1782) makes readily apparent, one of the strongest reasons for Sterne’s appeal as far as the later eighteenth-​century reading public was concerned was not his bawdy humour, much less his supposed anticipation of later fictional techniques, but his sentimentality. Throughout the 1760s, Sterne came up with different forms for writers to imitate, and contemporaries played variations on themes made popular by Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. It is noteworthy, however, that a significant proportion of the prose fiction which has survived from 1769 displayed little reluctance about following, on the title page, the formula which was to become increasingly familiar over the succeeding decades: a two-​or three-​word title followed by a punctuation mark (whether a colon, semicolon, or full stop), concluding with the bald description, ‘A Novel’.7 From 1770 onwards until the end of the eighteenth century, as The English Novel, 1770–​1829 makes perfectly clear, it gradually became more and more usual for long prose fiction to be described on the title page as ‘a novel’.8 However, if there was increasing certainty about the sort of entertainment to be found in ‘novels’, there was as yet little uniformity about structure and format. This came about only 3 

For the phrase, see The Works of Mrs. Davys: Consisting of, Plays, Novels, Poems, and Familiar Letters (London, 1725), p. iii. See further J. A. Downie, ‘Mary Davys’s “Probable Feign’d Stories” and Critical Shibboleths about “The Rise of the Novel”’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 12/​2–​3 (2000), 309–​26. 4  Francis Coventry, ‘To Henry Fielding, Esq.’, in The History of Pompey the Little or, The Life and Adventures of a Lap-​Dog (3rd edn., London, 1752), p. iii. 5  An Essay on the New Species of Writing, 16, 18. 6  The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story (2nd edn., London, 1765), Preface, p. vi. 7  Examples from 1769 include The Cottage; A Novel; The Delicate Embarrassments. A Novel; and The French Lady. A Novel. 8  On this point, see above, p. xiv.

284

284   J. A. Downie when the ‘triple-​decker’ began to dominate the market from the 1820s onwards. In the 1760s, works of prose fiction were usually published in one or two volumes unless, as in the case of A Series of Genuine Letters, between Henry and Frances, or Tristram Shandy, or The Fool of Quality, further volumes were issued subsequent to the title’s initial appearance in print in two-​volume form. At the end of the 1760s, the price of a volume sewed (i.e., unbound in paper wrapping or in boards) was normally 2s. 6d., and 3s. per volume if it was bound. For the next twenty to thirty years, this continued to be the usual price per volume, as the following review of a novel published in 1789 clearly indicates: ‘Whatever may be the cost of a two-​volume novel we at least expect two neat pocket volumes, printed on fine paper, price 5s.’9 At the end of the 1760s, then, a decade after Richardson made his gloomy prediction that ‘the Day of Novels is over’, the novel was patently flourishing. Forty-​four new titles were published in 1769 according to British Fiction 1750–​1770—​four more than The English Novel, 1770–​1829 lists for 1770—​but the upward trend is clearly discernible. There is, however, something of a paradox in that, as a proportion of the total number of new ‘novels’ published in the last thirty years of the century, until recently barely a handful would have been regarded as ‘canonical’ in the sense that they enjoyed extensive or sustained critical attention. Over eighty years ago, in her classic account, The Popular Novel in England 1770–​1800 (1932), Jane Tompkins remarked upon the general decline in the quality of prose fiction after the achievements of ‘the great “Quadrilateral” ’, while more recently, in the process of claiming ‘a Romantic rise of the novel’, Clifford Siskin has drawn attention to ‘one of the stranger twists of literary history: the moment the novel actually did rise—​rise literally in quantitative terms—​is the moment that we have paid it relatively little attention’.10 That, for a range of reasons, the picture has changed quite markedly in the past decade or so is scarcely surprising. Burgeoning interest in both cultural studies and ‘the history of the book’ has resulted in scholarly investigation into what was actually published during the eighteenth century rather than critical attention being restricted to a ‘great tradition’ of novels, plays, and poems. The publication of The English Novel, 1770–​1829 is itself part of this trend. Women’s studies have also led to increased interest in eighteenth-​ century fiction. ‘Between 1756 and 1776,’ Susan Staves points out in A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–​1789, ‘identifiable women published about eighty-​ seven novels, roughly four each year.’11 Although she adds the important rider that ‘[i]‌n all the available bibliographies the category “novel” is not perfectly clear, translations still masquerade as original fiction, and journalistic narratives about real people are 9  Review of The Young Lady of Fortune (1789), quoted in Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel, 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 1: 96. 10  Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–​1830 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), 155. 11  Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–​1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 335, 479. Professor Staves arrives at the figure of eighty-​seven by combining the bibliographical statistics from James Raven, British Fiction 1750–​1770: A Chronological Check-List of Prose Fiction Printed in Britain and Ireland (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1987) and Garside et al. (eds.), The English Novel, 1770–​1829.

Epilogue: The English Novel at the End of the 1760s    285 sometimes sorted as fiction’, Professor Staves’s focus is on novels published by women and this, in turn, is clearly connected to the concept of the ‘professionalization’ of the female author which has preoccupied a number of recent critics.12 Instead of assuming, with earlier critics, that there was ‘a qualitative decline’13 between the 1760s and the 1810s, when the novels of Austen and Scott began to appear in print, it is perhaps more fruitful to consider the 1760s as a decade in which the publication of several innovative forms of prose fiction breathed new life into the format. Whether works as diverse as Tristram Shandy, The Castle of Otranto, and The Vicar of Wakefield served to stabilize, or to undermine, ‘the novel’ as a genre in the minds of contemporary readers, there can be little doubt that, in their different ways, both the Gothic and the sentimental novel provided the impetus for the substantial amount of new prose fiction published in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

12  For example, Betty A. Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Cambridge: CUP, 2005). 13  This description is to be found in Clive T. Probyn, English Fiction of the Eighteenth-​Century 1700–​ 1789 (New York and London: Longman, 1987), 149.

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17 7 0 –​1832 :  T H E M A K I N G OF T H E E N G L I SH  N OV E L

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Literary Production, 1770–​1832

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Chapter 18

T he B o ok Trade , 1 7 7 0–​1 832 John Feather

Introduction The history of the novel is inextricably linked with the history of its publication. Drama is rooted in the theatre with the printed form of a play as a secondary product. Even poetry retained some of its connections with its oral and semi-​private origins in the circulation of manuscript verses which continued well into the eighteenth century, and in the private and public readings by poets which continue to this day. The novel, however, as it has been understood in the West since the early eighteenth century, is a genre created for printed publication. Most novelists have always followed Samuel Johnson’s advice and avoided the folly of writing for anything other than money. The majority of novels follow an established formula with relatively few exceptions and only occasional changes to reflect changing fashions. In brief, the novel is a commercial form, which exists in the marketplace as much as it does in the study or the drawing room. Knowledge and understanding of the commercial channels through which novels reached their readers is essential to an understanding of the genre itself. This essay will consider

• • • •

the structure of the book trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the physical forms in which novels were published the channels of trade through which they were distributed and sold the material rewards which accrued to their authors and publishers.

The starting point, however, must be to ask how many were published, where, and by whom.

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292   JOHN FEATHER

Quantifying the Novel It is always difficult and sometimes impossible to give a statistical account of book publishing in early modern England. Although our sources improve as time goes on, even during the decades of the Industrial Revolution with which we are concerned here they are neither comprehensive nor wholly reliable. Nevertheless, from a combination of contemporary sources and modern bibliographies and databases, we can arrive at some reasonable estimates which at least allow us to sketch an outline of the scale of production.1 In 1773, 523 titles were published in Britain which can be categorized as ‘Literature, classics and belles lettres’; for 1783 and 1793 the equivalent figures were 422 and 604 respectively. Of course not all of these books were novels, and not all of those which were novels were new publications. We can get some idea of the output of novels at the beginning of the period by comparing these data with those for a slightly earlier period. In 1769, eighty-​eight books which can be categorized as novels, including reprints, had been published in London and Dublin. A decade earlier, the comparable figure had been sixty. In the 1770s, the annual average output was about thirty; in the 1780s it rose to forty, and in the 1790s to seventy. Annual variations ranging from sixteen in 1778 to ninety-​nine in 1799 cannot disguise the fact of a steady increase in the number of novels published at the end of the eighteenth century, with a typical annual output of about eighty by 1800.2 In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, there were peaks and troughs of production which reflect general economic conditions as well as some events specific to the book trade such as the so-​called ‘crash’ of 1826. The peak year was 1808 when 111 new novels were published; the lowest was 1815 with fifty-​four. Over the whole period the average was just over seventy-​five a year, but a more useful indicator is that there was an average of seventy-​seven in the 1800s, sixty-​six in the 1810s, and eighty-​four in the 1820s. The novel was gaining in popularity and from the late 1810s onwards this is reflected in a steadily rising annual output, although with some fluctuations.3

1 

For this problem, see Michael F. Suarez, ‘Towards a Bibliometric Analysis of the Surviving Record, 1701–​1800’, in Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695–​1830 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 39–​65. 2  For the mid-​eighteenth-​century data, see James Raven, British Fiction 1750–​1770: A Chronological Check-List of Prose Fiction Printed in Britain and Ireland (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1987), 7–​10. For 1770–​1800, see Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 1: 25–​8, including table 1 and fi ­ gure 1. For 1800–​30, see Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, 2: 38. 3  Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, 2: 40–​9 (41, table 1, for the data). For the events of 1826–​ 9, see Simon Eliot, ‘1825–​1826: Years of Crisis?’, in Bill Bell (ed.), The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. 3: Ambition and Industry 1800–​1880 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007), 91–​5; Jane Millgate, Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1987), 28–​40; Jane Millgate, ‘Archibald Constable and the Problem of London: “quite the connection we have been looking for”’, The

The Book Trade, 1770–1832    293

The Structure of the Book Trade In 1770, the book trade was spread unevenly across the British Isles, albeit less so than had been the case a hundred years earlier. The major centres of book production and publication were London, Dublin, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, but since the beginning of the eighteenth century bookshops and printing houses had opened, and in many cases flourished, in most provincial cities and towns. In some of those places, there was some publishing activity as well as book retailing and printing. These included Newcastle upon Tyne, Bristol, York, Birmingham, and Manchester and of course Oxford and Cambridge as well as a number of smaller places in England; Aberdeen in Scotland; Belfast in Ireland; and Carmarthen in Wales.4 Nevertheless, London overwhelmingly dominated the trade not only in England but throughout the kingdom. Again, statistical data are of variable quality and must be treated with extreme caution, but it seems to be the case that in London there were between 100 and 120 book-​trade businesses in the early 1770s, rising to 270 or more in the mid-​1780s, rather more than 450 in 1802, and well over 700 by 1822.5 The record is almost certainly incomplete, but the trend is clear. The London book trade was growing, and by the end of our period was growing fast. Comparable data for the provinces are even less comprehensive, but information derived from imprints suggests that in a sample of twenty-​eight towns about 1,500 people were engaged in the trade at some time in the twenty-​five years from 1775 to 1799, between 2,000 and 2,500 in 1800–​25, and nearly 4,500 between 1825 and 1849.6 The London and provincial data are not strictly comparable, but the overall picture is clear: there was growth across the country, but it was greater in London than elsewhere where it was building on a disproportionately larger base. The domination of London is reflected in the patterns of fiction publishing in our period. Between 1800 and 1830, more than 90 per cent of novels were published in London, despite the example of Scott from 1814 onwards.7 For much of the eighteenth century, the trade was dominated by a small group of London booksellers—​to use the term which they used to describe themselves—​who

Library, 6th ser., 18/​1 (1996), 110–​23; and J. A. Sutherland, ‘The British Book Trade and the Crash of 1829’, The Library, 6th ser., 9/​2 (1987), 148–​61. 4  For the basic data, and invaluable maps, see F. J. G. and J. M. Robinson and C. Wadham, Eighteenth-​ Century British Books: An Index to the Foreign and Provincial Imprints in the Author Union Catalogue (Newcastle upon Tyne: Avero, 1982). See also Maureen Bell and John Hinks, ‘The English Provincial Book Trade: Evidence from the British Book Trade Index’, in Suarez and Turner (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book, 5: 335–​51. The BBTI itself is available at [www.bbti.bham.ac.uk]. 5  Data from Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades 1775–​1800 (Folkestone: Dawson, 1977), pp. xxi–​xxvi. For this purpose, I have taken the book trade to include traders and firms described as any one or more of printers, booksellers, and publishers. These data need to be understood in the light of Maxted’s own caveats about the various sources from which they are derived. 6  Bell and Hinks, ‘English Provincial Book Trade’, 336–​9, and their fi ­ gure 15.1. Again it is critical to read the authors’ caveats about the data. 7  Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, 2: 76–​9, with data from table 6.

294

294   JOHN FEATHER functioned as publishers. They selected or commissioned material for publication; they organized production; and they managed the processes of sales, warehousing, and distribution. Most of them were also retail and wholesale booksellers, usually working from premises in the City of London or in the newly established but rapidly developing area between the City and Westminster where the terraces and squares which came to typify Georgian London were being built. The businesses of the publishing booksellers were underpinned by their ownership of copyrights. Only a small percentage of those engaged in the trade were copy-​owners, but it was they who effectively dominated the whole. In 1770, there was more than a century of law, custom, and practice which lay behind the trade’s understanding of the ownership of copies. Rights in copies had been bought and sold since the late sixteenth century. These rights were ill-​defined, but it was generally accepted in the trade that ownership of a copy gave the owner the unique right to publish it. By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, there were well-​established patterns in which a bookseller bought rights (a ‘copy’) from its author, and then had sole control over what happened to it. The author’s income was, in the vast majority of cases, limited to the single payment which the bookseller made when the copy was acquired. Thereafter it was the bookseller’s property. Even before the Civil War, these properties—​ known as ‘rights in copies’—​had been bought and sold, bequeathed, and inherited and occasionally subdivided between several owners. In the second half of the century the trade developed internal conventions which effectively regulated how such transactions could take place. The most important of the unwritten rules was that copies and shares in copies could only be sold to other members of the book trade. Originally, this had probably been intended to confine copy-​ownership to members of the Stationers’ Company, the trade guild to which all members of the trade were expected to belong, but in practice it became even more restricted than that. By the middle of the eighteenth century, many of the most profitable copies were divided into multiple shares which were traded at sales which were open only to invited members of the book trade. The trade had created an oligopoly in which no more than about twenty booksellers between them owned the most valuable copies, and were therefore able to manage the retail market which depended on them for supplies while also extracting maximum benefit from their dealings with book printers who were dependent on them for much of their work.8 These cosy arrangements depended on the assumption that rights in copies, once acquired, existed in perpetuity like any other property. It was on this point that the historic practices of the book trade came into conflict with the law. The outcomes of a number of Chancery cases in the late seventeenth century essentially supported the booksellers’ view of the world, but these were civil suits at common law with no statutory basis. There was no legislation until 1710. The Copyright Act of that year was largely promoted by the copy-​owning booksellers for their own purposes. But it contained within it the seeds of a major problem for them. Although it was barely noticed at the 8 

See James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–​1850 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007), 118–​53.

The Book Trade, 1770–1832    295 time, the Act placed a time limit on the existence of rights. This was to be twenty-​one years from 1710 for rights which existed before the Act came into force, and a maximum of twenty-​eight years for books first published after that date. The London booksellers, however, assumed that what the Act actually meant was that the penalties prescribed in it for infringement of rights were limited in this way. This became an issue in the 1730s when the twenty-​one-​year copyrights expired, but for forty years thereafter the English courts agreed with the booksellers and upheld the principle of continuing, or perpetual, copyright. The Scottish courts, however, took a rather different view, leading to final determination of the issue by the House of Lords in 1774. This action—​Donaldson versus Becket—​had the effect of establishing that the existence of rights in copies was indeed time-​limited under the 1710 Act, and that by inference that after the expiry of the twenty-​eight years copies came into what was to come to be called public domain. In other words, anyone could lawfully print and publish any book twenty-​eight years after its first publication.9 The Lords’ decision in Donaldson versus Becket had a significant impact on the book trade. The ultimate danger was of undermining its stability by destroying an important part of its capital base. The rights in books first published before 1745 which immediately came into public domain, and the growing number of public domain copies which would now come into existence on an annual basis, included some of the most popular (and therefore most saleable) titles from Shakespeare onwards. Indeed, from the late 1770s onwards, we find a number of booksellers—​including some of the former copy-​ owners—​issuing series of cheap reprints intended for a popular market. This was a significant phenomenon, both commercially and culturally. Commercially, the spate of reprinting in the 1770s and 1780s had the effect of reinforcing the proposition that the booksellers could no longer depend on a steady income from existing rights. The market was in danger of being saturated by the reprints, and new titles were needed. It was out of this necessity that a new generation of entrepreneurs restructured the British book trade.10 Between the mid-​1780s and the end of the century, we find new men coming into the trade whose primary business was that of publishing, while a handful of existing firms reconfigured their businesses to operate in this different environment. Of those who made the transition, perhaps the most important was the firm which in the 1780s was owned and managed by Thomas Longman, son of the founder of the business, and father of Thomas Norton Longman who took it over in 1793. The significance of this was that the Longmans had been at the heart of the share-​book system, as the complex joint ownership of copies had come to be known. The firm had been a typical successful 9 

See Mark Rose, ‘Copyright, Authorship and Censorship’, in Suarez and Turner (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book, 5: 18–​31; and John Feather, Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain (London: Mansell, 1994), 64–​96. 10  See Thomas F. Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765–​1810 (Oxford: OUP, 2008); John Feather, A History of British Publishing (2nd edn., London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 71–​84; and William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 43–​65, 158–​76.

296

296   JOHN FEATHER mid-​eighteenth-​century bookseller, owning shares in profitable copies, publishing new titles in some of which shares were sold in due course, and operating a retail bookshop, as well as managing its own wholesaling to other retailers in London and the provinces. During the long career of T. N. Longman (he did not die until 1842), the firm was transformed. The retail business was allowed to peter out in the first decade of the nineteenth century. When new blood was brought in it was not as shareholders in particular copies, but as partners who would help to provide additional capital for the business as a whole. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars the house of Longman was a recognizably modern publisher.11 It was not alone. The even older house of Rivington went through a similar and perhaps slightly earlier series of changes at the end of which a business which had historically been that of a bookseller and publisher had become a publishing house. At the same time, other branches of the trade were also undergoing significant change. Retail bookselling, at least in London, became a specialism in its own right and became commercially and geographically dissociated from publishing. While Longman and Rivington continued to work from their historic premises in the City, the retail booksellers followed their customers westwards to Mayfair. The opening of John Hatchard’s new shop in Piccadilly in 1797 can be taken to symbolize this change. Hatchard did publish a few titles, but he was always primarily a bookseller, and it was on that basis that he built a firm which flourished until the late twentieth century as the epitome of the high end of the trade. At the other end of the scale, and in the same decade, James Lackington at his bookshop (the Temple of the Muses) in Finsbury Square bought books in bulk and sold them at the lowest possible price to attract the largest possible number of customers. Like Hatchard in the aristocratic West End, Lackington had chosen his location with care. Finsbury and Islington were the preferred destinations of a generation of businessmen and clerks who were moving away from the City towards suburban bliss. They were Lackington’s customers. To sustain the new style of retailing, a new style of wholesaling also developed, notably in the business of George Robinson, a contemporary of Hatchard and Lackington and something of a protégé of T. N. Longman. With some initial capital from Longman, Robinson established an extensive wholesaling business through which the London publishers could reach retailers both in London itself and in the rapidly developing provincial market. Wholesale bookselling is, in its very nature, less prominent than retailing, but the wholesalers (of whom there was never more than a handful even in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries) were a critical link in the trade’s supply chain. During the forty years from 1770 to 1810, the book trade underwent profound, if not always highly visible, change. It can be credibly argued that this was the culmination of a process of specialization which not only had deep roots in the trade itself but also reflected what was happening in other trades and industries at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the book trade, the move towards specialization began in the late sixteenth century when the ownership of copies first began to be concentrated in the hands of a 11 

See Asa Briggs, A History of Longmans and their Books 1724–​1990: Longevity in Publishing (London: British Library and New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2008), 89–​147.

The Book Trade, 1770–1832    297 relatively small number of family firms which survived through two or more generations. At the same time, printing became separated from the other book trades, as it has largely remained ever since. By the middle of the eighteenth century the trade was dominated by the copy-​owning booksellers, but there were hundreds and perhaps thousands of retail bookshops both in London and the provinces and a distribution system which enabled the public to obtain books. In the last twenty years of the eighteenth century the process of separation between bookselling and publishing was largely completed, at least in the case of the major London (and hence national) players in the trade. In the next generation, new entrants to the trade came in as booksellers or publishers (or for that matter wholesalers), but not usually as all three. This was a modern trade, reflecting the trend towards division of labour which was becoming common in the factory-​based production industries which were now an important part of the British economy. For centuries, the British book trade had been something of a closed shop, an oligopoly originally deriving from an exclusive trade guild. Even when the power of the guild declined, the oligopoly was sustained by the stranglehold of the copy-​owning booksellers and the systems of production and distribution which they developed. The opening-​up of the trade, first through the ending of the ‘perpetual’ copyrights and then by social change in the customer base, made the book trade an attractive proposition for entrepreneurs, but it also made it more risky. By the late 1780s, new entrants included some who sought to build their businesses around publishing rather than any other branch of the trade. Perhaps the most famous of these was John Murray, a Scot who came to the trade relatively late in life after a career in the navy. He bought the business of William Sandby in 1768, and almost immediately engaged with the copyright controversy. He was a witness against Becket when he appealed the decision against him. Murray was firmly committed to time-​limited copyrights. He was the first of seven generations (all confusingly called John) who ran the family firm until the beginning of the twenty-​first century. From the beginning, the Murrays were publishers not booksellers. Murray was perhaps the most successful new publisher of his generation, but he was far from being alone. He built a general trade business, but some others were more specialized and were seeking niche markets. One of these was the publication of fiction, which, as we have seen, was going through a period of expansion. Two notable late eighteenth-​century entrants to the trade who specialized in fiction were the Noble brothers and William Lane. The Nobles did have a small retail business, but they abandoned it to concentrate on their publishing, primarily aimed at the circulating libraries (including their own), which were by then becoming a very significant market.12 Lane was a publisher of Gothic novels at the height of their popularity. This pioneering version of genre fiction was the foundation of Lane’s fortune in the business which he started in 1790 under the name of the Minerva Press. 12  James Raven, ‘The Noble Brothers and Popular Publishing’, The Library, 6th ser., 12/​3 (1990), 293–​345; and James Raven, ‘Libraries for Sociability: The Advance of the Subscription Library’, in Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 2: 1640–​1850 (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 251–​6.

298

298   JOHN FEATHER In that decade, Lane published no fewer than 217 novels; in the 1810s, the Minerva Press published nearly 25 per cent of all new novels, with their nearest competitor (in statistical terms) being Longmans with a mere 9 per cent.13 The Nobles and Lane can be taken to exemplify the changes in the structure of the book trade at the turn of the nineteenth century. They were entrepreneurs, unashamedly oriented to profitable markets, and publishing to meet the demands of popular taste and current fashion. This established a pattern which persisted through much of our period and beyond. Some of the general trade publishers, including both Murray and Longman, published fiction; indeed many lesser publishers did so as well. But a small number of houses specialized in fiction, especially in fiction aimed at the contemporary equivalent of the mass market. In addition to Lane and the Nobles, Thomas Hookham and Thomas Lowndes were both fiction specialists. All of them had circulating libraries of their own and a large market among other libraries both in London and elsewhere in Britain.14 It is in this context that we should see the well-​known work of Colburn and Bentley in the early nineteenth century. Henry Colburn entered the trade in the first decade of the century, primarily as the owner of a circulating library. As he learned more about the library market he began to publish fiction, which like the Nobles’ books before him, were aimed at precisely that market which had now become national. In the mid-​ 1820s, when his business was at its height, he was publishing about twenty titles a year, the majority of them fiction, and representing some 12 per cent of total output of novels for the decade.15 He ran into financial troubles in the late 1820s, but by that time he had gone into partnership with Richard Bentley whose business survived the end of the partnership and who himself went on to become a major publisher of fiction, not least through his famous series of Standard Novels which lasted from 1831 to 1854.16 By the time of Scott’s death, the publication of fiction had become a significant part of a rapidly growing book trade. The failure of Constable—​and indeed of Colburn and many others—​should not be allowed to disguise the fact that a prudently managed publishing house could make fiction publishing into a lucrative business. Above all, it had become a distinctive business. As a relatively new but extremely popular genre, the novel was both one of the causes and a beneficiary of the great transformation of the book trade. The fiction publishers of the early nineteenth century were precisely that: they were businesses engaged in the practice of publishing. Despite the importance of some Scottish and provincial publishers, the trade was largely based in London, the centre of its wholesaling and distribution systems as well as being the largest single retail market. Indeed, it can be argued that Constable’s problems in the 1820s were in large part a result 13 

See Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, 1: 73 (table 12), and (for Lane) 79–​80; 2: 84 (table 7.2). The Minerva titles were almost exclusively Gothic novels; Longmans were aiming at a wider market sector. This merely emphasizes Lane’s dominance of his field. 14  Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, 1: 84–​6. 15  Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, 2: 84 (table 7.3). 16  The history of Colburn and the Colburn–​Bentley partnership is complicated, but the details need not concern us here. See J. A. Sutherland, ‘Henry Colburn, Publisher’, Publishing History 19 (1986), 59–​84; R. A. Gettman, A Victorian Publisher (Cambridge: CUP, 1960); and the entries for both men in ODNB.

The Book Trade, 1770–1832    299 of not being in London and the consequently high costs of advertising and distribution when he wanted to trade in the English market.17 The British publishing industry was a London business, the consequence of over 300 years of legalized oligopoly. New players came on to the stage in the late eighteenth century, and their roles were more clearly defined, but the underlying dynamics, driven by economic logic and geography, remained essentially unchanged.

The Forms of the Novel The evolution of the novel as a genre was intimately linked to its manifestation as a physical entity. As an essentially commercial literary form, its appeal to readers depended on its price and even its visual appearance, as well as its content. By 1770 a number of conventions had evolved but they were far from being either unchanging or universal. The typical English novel of the late eighteenth century was a multi-​volume duodecimo or small octavo. It was usually, although not invariably, the case that there was an engraved frontispiece of either a portrait of the author or a scene or character from the story. The book was printed at the expense of the publisher, and then stored in a warehouse; sometimes it was stored as unbound sheets (although they would normally have been collated and perhaps stitched), or sometimes in a cheap leather binding (typically sheep), or, by the 1790s and commonly thereafter in paper-​covered boards or a paper wrapper.18 The retail price in 1770 was typically about 3s. 0d. per volume, rising towards the end of the century. By the 1820s, a new novel for the middle-​class and circulating library market was priced at 10s. 6d. per volume, while Bentley charged 6s. 0d. a volume for his Standard Novels intended for the popular market.19 Multi-​volume novels were published throughout our period. The great change was in the number of volumes in which the work appeared. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a novel was published in as many volumes as were needed for the length of the text. The first edition of Tom Jones (1749), for example, was published in six volumes; Clarissa had been published in seven volumes in the previous year; Roderick Random was a modest four volumes in 1751. While seven was at the upper end of the range, anything from two to five was fairly normal although by the end of the century two or three volumes was typical for a novel primarily aimed at the growing circulating-​ library market. The three-​volume novel emerged as a standard format towards the end of our period, partly because of the example of Scott, and partly because of the 17 Feather, History of British Publishing, 79–​80.

18  For bindings, see David Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles 1450–​1800 (London: British Library, 2005), 154–​63. See also Raven, The Business of Books, 276–​7. 19  These are merely typical figures, which conceal considerable variation between publishers and titles. For further data (some of it contradictory) see St Clair, The Reading Nation, 202–​6; and David McKitterick, ‘Introduction’, in McKitterick (ed.), Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 6: 1830–​ 1914 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 6–​7.

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300   JOHN FEATHER commercial imperatives of the libraries. While we certainly cannot underestimate the influence of the fact that Waverley was in three volumes, nor should we overestimate it. Other authors and publishers naturally sought to imitate the greatest commercial and literary success in the history of English fiction, but Scott himself continued to publish in variable numbers of volumes according to the exigencies of a particular novel. It was only towards the later part of his career that he fixed on three volumes as the standard. Kenilworth, published in 1821, is closer to being the model for the future. Scott could now charge almost any price he chose, and he and Constable chose 31s. 6d., or 10s. 6d. per volume on this occasion. Within little more than a decade, the three-​decker at 1½ guineas (£1. 11s. 6d.) had become the format of the middle-​class novel. For the commercial circulating libraries, the multi-​volume novel was an unmitigated boon. They charged their customers by the number of volumes borrowed, not by the number of works, with an obvious commercial benefit to be gained from multi-​volume novels. The symbiotic relationship between the three-​decker and the libraries is a story of Victorian rather than Regency enterprise, but it has its roots in the period when the book trade was taking on its modernity through specialization and by identifying and serving specific markets.20 The development of the format for the middle-​class commercial circulating libraries should not be allowed to disguise the fact that most continued to be published in other, and usually much less expensive, formats. Bentley’s 6s. 0d. volumes were more typical of the trade’s products, and some of these were indeed complete works in a single volume. Moreover, many novels which were successful were reprinted in cheaper formats, sometimes in a series with a standard format and modest price. Again, this is perhaps more characteristic of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, but books were becoming cheaper by 1830 and it was in that decade that this began to have a serious social, cultural, and educational impact.21 At a different level of both society and literature, we can also see the beginnings of the publication of novels for a working-​class market where many readers’ hold on their literacy was at best tenuous. This is often presented as a mid-​nineteenth-​century development, perhaps beginning in the late 1830s.22 Even in the eighteenth century, however, there were some books which were directed at this market. These included the chapbooks which have a history going back to the late seventeenth century. Although they were important in the children’s market, they were also undoubtedly read by less well-​ educated working-​class adults in both the towns and the countryside. The chapbook tradition vestigially survived, especially in the more remote parts of England and in 20 

Simon Eliot, ‘Circulating Libraries in the Victorian Age and After’, in Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 3: 1850–​2000 (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 125–​46. 21  See Scott Bennett, ‘John Murray’s Family Library and the Cheapening of Books in Early Nineteenth-​Century Britain’, Studies in Bibliography 29 (1976), 138–​66. 22  See, for example, Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man 1830–​1850 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974); and Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2002), 92–​115.

The Book Trade, 1770–1832    301 Scotland and Ireland, well into the nineteenth century.23 The overlap between children’s books and fiction for barely literate adults is perhaps only a footnote to the history of literary fiction, but it is not unimportant for it opened the way for the cheap working-​ class novels which were characteristic of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. By the very end of our period, some of this material was being published and circulated in serial form, either in separately published parts, or incorporated into cheap magazines and popular newspapers. The serial novel, familiar to students of Victorian literature, has a long and varied history before Dickens. Some fiction had been published serially in the eighteenth century. Indeed, stories published in the magazines became something of a subgenre in its own right.24 Serial publication of fiction became a familiar device, convenient to the reader because it spread the cost over several weeks or months, and to the publisher because it meant that income was generated before the costs of producing and distributing the whole work had to be met. Serial publication even took the form of multi-​volume novels which were published over a period of time rather than simultaneously, again spreading the capital investment for publisher and reader alike. The various forms of publication had their own mechanisms for production and distribution. The formal middle-​class fiction with which most literary scholars and historians are most familiar was, of course, created and distributed though the normal channels of the book trade. The separation of publishers and booksellers, and the modest but significant influx of new publishers who specialized in fiction, made this possible. The mainstream publishers and the wholesalers and booksellers through whom they sold their wares worked with novels just as they did with other books. Novels were produced and distributed in the same way, with perhaps the main difference being the critical importance of the circulating library market for the commercial success of many novels. The serials, on the other hand, increasingly came through different channels. Newspaper, magazine, and book publishing had significantly overlapped throughout the eighteenth century, in that some booksellers and printers were involved in all three. But from the early nineteenth century, the publication of newspapers, with its very different culture and economy from that of book publishing, began to become truly distinctive. With the introduction of steam-​powered presses from 1814 onwards, the distinction became more marked than ever as the newspaper owners were able to produce substantial daily newspapers in large numbers and at high speed. This was neither possible nor particularly necessary for the book publishers. Serial publication of fiction developed substantially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.25 Reprinting of novels as part-​books (sometimes with each part being a whole volume) began in the late eighteenth century, and continued on a lesser 23 

See Victor E. Neuburg, Popular Literature: A History and Guide (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 120–​1. 24  See Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines 1740–​1815 (London: OUP, 1962). 25  See Michael F. Suarez, ‘Publishing Contemporary English Literature, 1695–​1774’, in Suarez and Turner (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book, 5: 665.

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302   JOHN FEATHER scale after 1800. Some newspapers carried serial fiction from time to time, some of it original, some of it reprints of novels which had already been published as books. The same was true of some general interest magazines. By the late 1820s, however, the wider availability of the steam presses meant that there was some capacity for producing long print runs of cheap serially published new fiction. Sketches by Boz was just such a work, planned by a publisher and a printer and drawing on the talents of an aspirant young writer. It was only when the young hack revealed his true genius in the commercial follow-​up to Sketches, in the publisher’s speculative investment which we now know as Pickwick Papers, that the serial novel finally became respectable. But the foundations were laid long before Mr. Pickwick set off on his travels, or indeed before his creator was born. Serial publication—​both of middle-​class and working-​class fiction—​was a key to opening up the market to less wealthy readers.26 Although part-​books, newspapers, and magazines were all sold in bookshops, they also benefited from wider channels of distribution. These included newsagents and newspaper sellers in both London and the provinces, and distribution by post against subscriptions. These became important supplements to, and even substitutes for, distribution through conventional book-​trade wholesaling and distribution mechanisms, and contributed substantially to the widening of the market and the availability of the product.

The Profits of Publishing The customer who buys a book in a retail bookshop is at the end of a long chain of supply in which every other participant expects to make a profit. The bookseller has bought the book for less than the retail price. The publisher has fixed the price to the bookseller at a level which will both cover costs and yield a profit on each copy sold. The publisher’s own costs have been incurred by printing (and usually binding) the book, and by paying the author and perhaps a number of clerks or other employees who are necessary to manage and account for the process. In turn, the publisher’s suppliers—​printers and bookbinders in the foreground, and behind them papermakers, suppliers of ink and type, producers of leather and cloth, and so on—​each charge prices which allow them to make a profit. Authors stand at the beginning of this long chain, and there is an expectation that they also will derive some income from their work. At the heart of the process is the publisher. Indeed, the very essence of the publisher’s role is the provision of the capital which allows authors’ work to take a physical form in which it can be disseminated and sold. The growing recognition that this was a very special branch of the book trade was the underlying cause of the separation of bookselling 26  Simon Eliot, ‘Mass Markets: Literature’, in McKitterick (ed.), Cambridge History of the Book, 6: 419–​ 21; Bill Bell, ‘Fiction in the Marketplace: The Victorian Serial’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Serials and Their Readers (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies & New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1993), 125–​44.

The Book Trade, 1770–1832    303 and publishing at the turn of the nineteenth century. Publishers and booksellers have different roles and different markets. In the structure which was emerging between 1790 and 1820, the relationship between these two major groups of players underwent a fundamental change. By 1820, a publishing house—​whether large or relatively small—​had a market which was comparatively easy to define. Publishers sold books to booksellers. By 1830, this included a small number of major wholesalers as well as some retail booksellers both in London and the provinces, including some in the major provincial towns who acted as regional distributors. In essence, the publisher’s market can be characterized as consisting of fellow professionals who, like the publishing houses, were engaged in the book trade. The retail booksellers were of course in a wholly different position. Their customer base consisted of a large number of individual book buyers, the vast majority of whom bought only a few books a year, and almost none of whom bought more than one copy of the same book. This is, of course, a highly simplified description of the supply chain, in which there were many other participants, not least—​and particularly important in fiction publishing in our period—​the owners of the circulating libraries. Nevertheless, as a summary version of how the trade operated, it is sufficiently accurate to reveal some key commercial considerations. From the publisher’s perspective the most important of these was the need to recoup the investment in a title, and then to go on to make a profit. This was not merely a matter of generating a surplus over the direct costs of publishing a particular title. Publishers also needed to generate a sufficient cash flow to enable them to keep the business going and to support themselves and their dependants. To do this, they had to invest in some highly speculative ventures. In effect, they were speculating on their authors. The authors, on the other hand, were investing their time, creativity, and knowledge in the writing of books. The growing acknowledgement of the implications of this throughout our period found its formal expression in the Copyright Act of 1814. For several decades before that, however, authors had been becoming more demanding, and publishers, up to a point, had acceded to some of their wishes. This was reflected in how authors were paid. Historically, it had been the normal practice for authors to receive a single one-​off payment for their work. This custom went back to the sixteenth century and possibly earlier. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, we begin to find occasional examples of authors receiving a further payment for a book when it went into a second or subsequent edition. There are also instances of authors revising their work and presumably receiving an additional payment at that point. The documentation which would enable us to be certain about this simply does not exist (if it ever did) and we can only make inferences from what little we know. The 1710 Copyright Act laid the foundations for change. Despite the views of the London booksellers, the Act clearly gave some rights to authors even if these were badly defined. What was clear, however, was that the rights in the copy—​the property with which the booksellers were so concerned—​could only originate at the moment of creation, and their originator could only be the author. As this critical fact came to be more widely understood, authors began to make more demands.

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304   JOHN FEATHER By the 1780s, there were some clearly established patterns of payment. Patronage was no longer a major factor; the ‘purchased dedication’ against which Dickens later railed had barely survived into the nineteenth century,27 and long before then the patron who had been so important a part of the literary scene in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had all but vanished.28 There was some support from public funds for authors, not least in the form of pensions, but many of these were political rather than literary gestures. The foundation of the Literary Fund in 1790 provided a small source of income for indigent authors from money given by wealthy subscribers, including the Prince Regent, but this was no more than peripheral to the mainstream of the publication of imaginative literature.29 The most important single reason for the move away from private patronage was that authors could now make a living from writing. Surviving documents from the period show that a variety of forms of payment were in use. George Robinson, whose active life in the trade covered the first half of our period (he died in 1801), followed what were probably normal practices for his generation. Most of the copyrights he acquired were bought outright from their authors. He also commissioned translations, revised editions, and indexes, and he occasionally bought existing rights from others in the trade. He seems to have dealt fairly with his authors, but there is no suggestion that they had any say in what happened to the book once it was in print.30 The outright sale of the copyright to the publisher was still the normal practice at the end of the century. Although fees ranged from the £800 paid by Cadell and Davies to Ann Radcliffe for The Italian in 1797, to the measly 3 guineas which Hookham gave to William Godwin for Damon and Delia in 1784, the normal range (within which most of Robinson’s transactions fall) was between £20 and £60.31 Pope had few if any successors in retaining control of his work after it had been published. By 1810, however, things were beginning to change. The growth of the periodical and newspaper press over the previous hundred years had put authors in a stronger position. They may have been hacks, but at least some of them were comparatively well-​paid hacks and some became respected writers. Even novelists were benefiting from these developments. Writing serial novels attracted the same sort of payments as writing other material for the magazines. Novels published in book form were less generously rewarded. At the turn of the century, Lane was usually paying between £5 and £30 for a new novel, with the author’s reputation probably being the determining factor in fixing the size of the fee.32 But a new form of payment was emerging, which was probably encouraged by the impetus 27 

Bell, ‘Fiction in the Marketplace’, 126–​7. Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–​1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 246–​85. 29  The Fund became ‘Royal’ (as it still is) under the patronage of Prince Albert in 1842. See Janet Adam Smith, The Royal Literary Fund: A Short History (2005), [http://​www.rlf.org.uk/​documents/​]. 30  See G. E. Bentley, Jr., ‘Copyright Documents in the George Robinson Archive: William Godwin and Others 1713–​1820’, Studies in Bibliography 35 (1982), 67–​110. This is a different Robinson from the wholesaler previously mentioned. For this Robinson, see Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, 1: 76–​7. 31  Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, 1: 21–​54 (with data from table 7). 32  See Rose, ‘Copyright, Authorship and Censorship’, 126; and Patrick Leary and Andrew Nash, ‘Authorship’, in McKitterick (ed.), Cambridge History of the Book, 6: 172–​213. 28 

The Book Trade, 1770–1832    305 given to the status of authors by the 1814 Act. This was the so-​called ‘half-​profits’ system, whose name is a clear indication of how it usually worked. Author and publisher took equal shares of the profits from an edition once all the costs had been met.33 Always open to abuse, the ‘half-​profits’ system was certainly abused by some unscrupulous publishers. The division of the spoils depended on calculations based on information known only to the publisher (such as the cost of printing, paper, and binding, and the number of copies sold), and on the keeping of accurate accounts which itself was not yet a notably strong point in the book trade. Nevertheless, despite some of the horror stories which were told, ‘half-​profits’ worked reasonably well for both sides. For the publishers, it meant that their payments to authors were related to the success of the book, and the risk of failure was partly mitigated; for authors it meant that an exceptionally successful book brought exceptional rewards. Half-​profits survived for much of the century; Hardy’s first novels were published by this method, although by then many novelists were benefiting from the royalty system which was to become all but universal in fiction publishing in the twentieth century. Neither the outstanding successes nor the notorious failures should be mistaken for the average. Scott made a fortune from his writing (before he lost it through no fault of his own), but he was as exceptional in his generation as Dickens was to be in his, or for that matter as Pope had been sixty years earlier. Some publishers at the shadier end of the trade demanded money from authors before they would publish their books and then did little or nothing to promote them (Trollope and the Brontës were victims as late as the 1840s),34 but this was vanity publishing which happens to be mitigated in a handful of cases by the quality of the work or of subsequent work by the same authors. Most English novels published between 1770 and 1830 were published by businessmen who were in business to make money but to do so honestly. The sums of money which changed hands, and the agreements within which this happened, varied between publishers and authors. Half-​profits can probably be regarded as the norm for literary fiction by 1830, but for popular (especially serially-​published) fiction, one-​ off payments remained common. Royalties were almost unknown. It is important to remember that for everyone involved, the writing of fiction was first and foremost a business. The exceptions should not be given too much prominence. Austen was no more typical than was Scott.

Conclusions: The Novel in the Marketplace It is a truth universally acknowledged that two of the greatest British novelists published their work in the period under consideration in this essay. But the vast majority of the 33  We occasionally find that the proportions are 60:40 (in favour of the author) rather than 50:50, but this was unusual for fiction and the practice probably dates from after 1830. 34  Leary and Nash, ‘Authorship’, 177.

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306   JOHN FEATHER more than 5,000 novels which were published in one form or another neither were, nor were intended to be, literary masterpieces. They were commercial ventures, speculations in a rapidly developing and increasingly competitive market. The book trade was going through a period of profound change. The inward-​looking and complacent oligopoly of the mid-​eighteenth century was displaced from its long-​established eminence. The entry into the trade of new men not steeped in its historic and enervating traditions made it more entrepreneurial. Drawing a line under the mythical perpetual copyrights forced those most deeply engaged in the trade to reconsider how they worked. Some were able to do this, and prospered; others fell by the wayside. One of the strategies that many adopted was to specialize in a particular activity rather than try to function across two or three sets of activities as had been so often the case in the past. Out of this, there emerged the modern publishing house, already visible by the turn of the nineteenth century and the normal mode of operation by 1830. The growth of the fiction market was both a cause and a consequence of these changes. The market for fiction was less well defined than many of the traditional fields in which the book trade had operated. By the end of the eighteenth century, fiction had an appeal which spread far beyond the traditional reading classes. It included women (indeed women were probably more avid readers of novels than men) and people from lower social classes and less wealthy households, as well as people with a relatively low level of education. While few authors crossed class and income boundaries quite as spectacularly as Scott (or as Dickens was to do a generation later) many novels had a wider appeal than either the serious or the popular literature of earlier periods. The trade developed new modes of production to meet the economic necessities and demands of this market. Serial publication, part-​books, and cheap reprints were all important elements in the promotion of commercial fiction. While the distinction between middle-​class and working-​class books was becoming clearer by the end of the period, the boundary was always a porous one. The need for a continual supply of new novels—​not least to satisfy the all-​important circulating library market—​forced publishers to adopt new modes of production and new relationships with authors. The authors themselves were clearly part of this profit-​oriented chain of supply and demand and they expected their own share of the rewards. The development of half-​profits, which was mutually beneficial to authors and publishers, as well as the evolution of the Grub Street hack into the semi-​ respectable penny-​a-​liner, grew out of the seemingly insatiable demand for print. The traditional ways of the book trade were no longer adequate, and had to be reconstructed. The response to external legal, social, and economic pressures dominates the history of the late eighteenth-​and early nineteenth-​century British book trade. The process of change was by no means finished by 1830. Indeed even greater changes were on the horizon. It was in 1830 that the world’s first intercity railway line was opened. Within less than twenty years, the railways had transformed the economy, and for the book and newspaper industry had opened up previously unimaginable vistas of distribution and sales. In the same 1830s, as the stresses of the wartime and post-​war traumas of Britain began to find political and social resolution, a greater sense of prosperity and safety created a vast new middle-​class market with both money and leisure in sufficient

The Book Trade, 1770–1832    307 quantities to underpin the further development of the market for print. Fiction, like so much else that was successful in Victorian Britain, was industrialized; as in so many other trades, the foundations of industrialization were laid in the late eighteenth century. The Minerva Press may not have been as spectacular as Arkwright’s mill or Watt’s steam engine, but it and its contemporaries were, in their own way and their own domain, just as much of an omen of the future.

Select Bibliography Bonnell, Thomas F., The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765–​ 1810 (Oxford: OUP, 2008). Erikson, Lee, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing 1800–​1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). Feather, John, A History of British Publishing (2nd edn., London and New York: Routledge, 2006). Garside, Peter, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000). Millgate, Jane, Scott’s Last Edition:  A  Study in Publishing History (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh UP, 1987). Raven, James, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–​1850 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007). Rose, Jonathan, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2002). Rose, Mark, ‘Copyright, Authors and Censorship’, in Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695–​1830 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 118–​31. St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). Sutherland, Kathryn, ‘British Literature, 1774–​1830’, in Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695–1830 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 667–83.

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Chapter 19

The Rise of t h e Illustrated E ng l i sh Novel to 1832 Robert Folkenflik

The illustrated eighteenth-​century novel is a paradox: novels were cheap; illustrations expensive. Therefore illustrated novels were typically not first editions, and it is easy to prove that illustrated editions of some of the best-​known novels are anomalies—​ Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Tobias Smollett’s Sir Launcelot Greaves, for example, which contained first-​edition illustrations. Another way in which they, along with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, are anomalous is that all were designed by English artists, whereas foreign artists dominated the field, and even three of these novels had French engravers. I discuss these canonical works at the outset because the first three appeared roughly twenty years apart, and they tell us much about the development, practice, and high points of illustrating British novels before the explosive publication of book illustrations following the end of perpetual copyright in 1774. The single engraved illustration of Crusoe is no more the first illustration of a novel than Robinson Crusoe is the first novel, but it is highly significant and much about it has been misunderstood. The fact that Robinson Crusoe (1719) contains a first-​edition illustration suggests its role as a counterfeit autobiography rather than a novel, as the first-​edition illustrations of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) accompany its parody of Crusoe to suggest a travel book or autobiography. The first illustration in Gulliver’s Travels is a frontispiece portrait of the ‘author’—​not Swift—​and the four others are maps. Typically, a frontispiece of this sort appeared before the collected works of an author, often posthumously, as in the case of William Hogarth’s engraved portrait of Fielding for the Works (1762), not illustrating the novels, for it would break the illusion in a fiction. Richardson’s sixth edition of Sir Charles Grandison (1770), with its portrait by Charles Grignion, was posthumous. Relatively few novels followed the ploy of using a frontispiece portrait of their fictional first-​person narrators. Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1764) has a

The Rise of the Illustrated English NOVEL TO 1832    309 first-​edition frontispiece illustration, a handsome one of the male narrator and friend looking through trees at the eponymous utopian country house, though it may be attempting to ape a travel book. One example is Edward Kimber’s Joe Thompson (1750), whose ‘author’ appears in an unsigned engraving of a portrait oval unframed, draped, and precariously perched on a plinth, surrounded by books propped against the portrait, a lute, an anchor, and an inkwell with quill pen below. Kimber was one of the ten most popular novelists (judging by editions printed) during the two decades from 1750 to 1770. Janine Barchas has claimed that ‘If this frontispiece pays homage to any prior image, it may very well be Hogarth’s famous Self-​Portrait with Pug.’1 But this bland visage (Fig. 19.1) is not drawn from Hogarth’s pugnacious self-​portrait. The portrait of ‘Joe Thompson’ is an anonymous reversed version of S. F. Ravenet’s engraving of a portrait by John Patoun (1746) of Joe’s namesake, the poet James Thomson—​in his own words, ‘more fat than bard beseems’ (Fig. 19.2). Since the engraving, which appeared as the frontispiece to the posthumous Works (1750) of the highly popular poet, who died two years earlier, is identical in most respects to the Joe Thompson frontispiece, the identification is certain, and it makes the audacious reuse a playful part of the novel’s fictionality rather than an attempt to deceive: many readers would have been aware of what the poet Thomson looked like and even have seen the imitated engraved portrait. To return to Robinson Crusoe, a clever case of the frontispiece portrait as part of the illusion, Clark and Pine’s engraving of Robinson Crusoe in furs, fully armed, with the weight resting on his right foot and the other slightly raised like an Italian statue of a militant St. John the Baptist wearing a conical hat has a ruggedness appropriate to the tale (Fig. 19.3). Clark’s identity is not clear, though he may be John Clark, an engraver, and whoever he was, he certainly worked with the well-​known John Pine (1690–​1756), singled out by David Bland as ‘the best native engraver during the first half of the century’.2 The two also provided a frontispiece for the second sequel, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720). The influential first illustration has raised some questions. As David Blewett puts it: ‘What time during Crusoe’s twenty-​eight years on the island does the scene portray? What ship is in the background? Why does Crusoe face inland, away from the ship? What mood does Crusoe’s expression convey? Why are there discrepancies between Defoe’s description of Crusoe and the details of clothing and armaments that we see here?’ These are good questions, and I think the answers are different from those given by Blewett, Janine Barchas, and other interpreters to date. Blewett rightly notes that ‘the ship is not wrecked but is under sail and headed out to sea’. He deduces from this that it is not the ‘original shipwreck, and, if it is a passing ship (not mentioned by Crusoe) or the English ship by which he is delivered, it is more than a little strange that Crusoe 1 

Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-​Century Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 2003). Although I have taken issue a few times with things she says, Barchas considers a number of relevant frontispieces to novels in her highly original book. 2  David Bland, A History of Book Illustration: The Illuminated Manuscript and the Printed Book (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1969), 216.

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310   ROBERT FOLKENFLIK

Figure 19.1  Anonymous, after S. F. Ravenet, frontispiece, Joe Thompson, 1 (1750). Courtesy of The Huntington Library.

pays no attention to it’. Rejecting the idea that the artist, lacking the manuscript, was instead using an account of Alexander Selkirk, famously marooned on one of the Juan Fernández Islands, he instead attributes the portrait and its elements to the old-​ fashioned but still current ‘practice… of compressing various events into a single picture, particularly appropriate in a frontispiece’.3 3 

David Blewett, The Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe, 1719–​1920 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995), 27–​9.

The Rise of the Illustrated English NOVEL TO 1832    311

Figure 19.2  S. F. Ravenet, frontispiece, The Works of James Thomson, 1 (1750). Courtesy of The Huntington Library.

I think rather that the frontispiece is based on a particular episode and that Defoe, who was very interested in art, probably gave the designer a copy of the relevant passage and possibly additional directions and text. The passage is not the famous description midway through the book when Crusoe, as though giving instructions to a painter, extends an invitation to the reader: ‘Be pleas’d to take a Scetch of my Figure as follows.’4 The details there include his arms and accoutrements: ‘Instead of a Sword and a Dagger, 4 

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. Donald Crowley (Oxford: OUP, 1981), 149.

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312   ROBERT FOLKENFLIK

Figure 19.3  John Clark and John Pine, frontispiece, Robinson Crusoe (1719). Private Collection. Courtesy of Geoffrey Sill.

hung a little Saw and a Hatchet… I had another Belt not so broad, and fasten’d in the same Manner, which hung over my Shoulder; and at the End of it, under my left Arm hung two Pouches, both made of Goat’s-​Skin too; in one of which hung my Powder, in the other my Shot: At my Back I carried my Basket, on my Shoulder my Gun.’ This does not correspond to the portrait, but later in the book a description of him ‘fitted… up for a battle’ is much closer: ‘my Figure indeed was very fierce; I had my formidable Goat-​Skin Coat on, with the great Cap I have mention’d, a naked Sword by my Side, two Pistols in my Belt, and a Gun upon each Shoulder’ (253). Although Crusoe in the engraving has but one pistol in his belt, here is the ‘naked Sword’ and ‘a Gun upon each Shoulder’. The correspondence to this dramatic moment is close. An ‘English ship’ in no danger of wrecking points away

The Rise of the Illustrated English NOVEL TO 1832    313 from shore. Crusoe refers to ‘my castle’, which is close to ‘my Place of Observation, near the Top of the Hill’, observable in the right corner of the engraving. The ship, then, is not emblematic of the shipwrecked soul but represents Crusoe’s deliverance in this novel of guilt and redemption—​a complete reversal of how the image is normally read. Bernard Picart, the excellent engraver of the first French edition (1720) and probably Pine’s master, is not more accurate; he just engraves the better-​known description of Crusoe with his ‘Mahomatan Whiskers’ and ‘Muschatoes’, saw rather than sword, and umbrella. Although Clark and Pine have given us Crusoe as he appeared in a particular episode before changing clothes for his journey back to England, the frontispiece represents him alone, not with Friday, the sailors, or the mutineers because it is akin to the portraits representing, say, a general in the foreground and his greatest victory in the background rather than during the battle itself: with this difference, Crusoe is depicted before he leaves on the boat in the background, and we can only know that he is on it after we have read the book. The action takes place at some time during a four-​day period following the description of himself so dressed and his changing clothes to go on board. Robinson Crusoe, given its early position among eighteenth-​century novels and its popularity, was illustrated again and again throughout the period. Blewett even speaks of the illustrations as keeping Crusoe and other Defoe novels alive during years when his work was less remarked upon.5 Thomas Stothard’s fourteen plates, for example, engraved by Thomas Medland (1790), include Crusoe finding the footprint, saving Friday, building the boat, and one that imitates Clark and Pine’s 1719 frontispiece. That frontispiece is arguably the most iconic book illustration of an eighteenth-​century novel. Beyond the frequent reprintings of this sole illustration of the first edition, it became the model, as with Stothard, for the visualization of Crusoe. Even Picart’s elegantly placed feet and a few other details in the portrait largely drawn from the novel’s earliest description of Crusoe on his island attest to its influence. Hubert-​François Bourguignon (1699–​1773), known as Gravelot, and signing himself often H. Gravelot, was born and died in Paris but spent ten important years in London, where he practised and taught several of the most important painters and engravers of the period (Francis Hayman, Thomas Gainsborough, and Charles Grignion) at the St. Martin’s Lane Academy, founded by Hogarth, a second major figure for the development of book illustrations. Hogarth was important in raising the professional status of engravers. The Engravers’ Act (1735), known as ‘Hogarth’s Act’ for his role in petitioning Parliament, was analogous to the Copyright Act of 1710. Through Gravelot, who had been a student of Boucher, the Rococo came to English painting (Gainsborough) and English book illustration in its most convincing form. Hayman and Gravelot were jointly responsible for the elevation of English book illustration.6 One of the best of their collaborations was the illustrations for Richardson’s four-​volume Pamela, volumes 1 and 2 (1742, the sixth and third editions respectively), the latter two volumes being the lesser-​known sequel, which presents the heroine ‘in 5 Blewett, Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe, 46. 6 

Brian Allen, Francis Hayman (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1987), 10.

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Figure 19.4  Francis Hayman, Pamela (1742), drawing. © Trustees of the British Museum.

her exalted condition’, as the title page has it. The volumes contain twenty-​nine plates of which Hayman designed twelve and Gravelot, who engraved them all, designed seventeen (Figs. 19.4 and 19.5). Although novel illustrations do not bulk large in Hayman’s practice as a book illustrator, he also designed the two frontispiece plates for the second edition of Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), engraved by Grignion. It is worth remembering that an artist like Hayman painted portraits, historical and mythological paintings, decorative paintings, as well as designing prints, and no shop sign identified an engraver as a book illustrator, let alone as an illustrator of novels. James Raven estimates there were sixty-​three book-​trade engravers in 1763.7 7 

James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and English Book Trade 1450–​1850 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007), 137. Raven also discusses the role of book illustrations (250–​6).

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Figure 19.5  Francis Hayman and Gravelot, Pamela, 1 (1742). © Trustees of the British Museum.

Many important artists, such as Reynolds and Gainsborough, despite the latter having Gravelot as his teacher, did not design or engrave book illustrations. Reynolds and other well-​known artists painted commissioned pictures that were illustrated in books, for example for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. Reynolds’s sinuous portrait of Laurence Sterne served as book illustration first for Sterne’s Sermons and later for his Works, though Reynolds did not intend it for such purposes. Some who illustrated books, such as John Flaxman, whose neoclassic style made him an apt illustrator of the classics and other ancient works, and Thomas Bewick, whose exquisite engravings illustrated natural histories and a range of other books, did not illustrate novels. Richardson had originally commissioned William Hogarth to engrave plates for the second edition of Pamela, as he explained in the Preface:

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316   ROBERT FOLKENFLIK [I]‌t was intended to prefix two neat Frontispieces to this Edition, (and to present them to the Purchasers of the first) and one was actually finished for that Purpose; but there not being Time for the other… and the Engraving part of that which was done (tho’ no Expence was spared) having fallen very short of the Spirit of the Passages they were intended to represent, the Proprietors [Richardson, Osborn, and Rivington] were advised to lay them aside.8

A  number of things are interesting about this notice. Although published in the second edition, the buyers of the first edition would have received the plates as well if Richardson had carried out the intention as he claims. The plates would be frontispieces to the two volumes, and one of the two had been completed. And as we shall see he absorbed the cost of the plates without publishing them. Richardson stresses the expense, but we don’t know what he gave Hogarth, nor do we know what the completed series of Hayman and Gravelot cost, though they were given £150 and £300 respectively for the thirty-​one plates of Thomas Hanmer’s edition of Shakespeare (published 1744, but designed 1740–​1). The letters of Aaron Hill to Richardson are the sort of things that give sycophancy a bad name, but the paragraphs on the subject of the Hogarth plates for Pamela, the last two sentences of which Richardson published in the Preface to the second edition, are of interest both for this specific project and for the subject of book illustration more generally. In the midst of his customary lavish epistolary praise of Richardson, Hill voices one attitude towards book illustrations that has appeared with variations over the centuries. First, he writes: ‘The designs you have taken for frontispieces, seem to have been very judiciously chosen; upon presupposition that Mr. Hogarth is able (and if any-​body is, it is he), to teach pictures to speak and think.’9 Two months later, he added: I am glad your designer falls to work on the bundles; because there is something too intensely reflective in the passions[,]‌at the pond, that would make such significant calls for expression and attitude, as not to allow the due pardon, for those negligent shadows of form, which we commonly find, in a frontispiece. Nay, I am so jealous, in behalf of our inward idea of Pamela’s person, that I dread any figur’d pretence to resemblance. For it will be pity, to look at an air, and imagine it hers, that does not carry some such elegant perfection of amiableness, as will be sure to find place in the fancy.10

In the Preface, Richardson gives Hill some of the credit for his decision not to use the Hogarth plates, though it did not stop him from commissioning Hayman and Gravelot the following year. Henry James summed up most memorably the novelist’s objection to illustrations in his book: ‘Anything that relieves responsible prose of the duty of being, while placed 8  Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded, 2 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1741), 1: p. xxxvi, font reversed. 9  The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 vols. (London, 1804), 1: 56. 10  The Works of the Late Aaron Hill, 4 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1754), 4: 164–​5.

The Rise of the Illustrated English NOVEL TO 1832    317 before us, good enough, interesting enough and, if the question be of picture, pictorial enough, above all in itself, does it the worst of services, and may well inspire in the lover of literature certain lively questions as to the future of that institution.’11 But the objections of Hill are very characteristic of the eighteenth century. As Tristram Shandy puts it: ‘no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.’12 To ‘imagine’ had pictorial force: it was to make images. A whole range of eighteenth-​century writers, including Samuel Johnson and the philosopher Dugald Stewart, insisted, less humorously, on the role of the reader’s imagination.13 Ultimately, their position derived from Locke on words, but as with Tristram Shandy the variability of human imagination (pace Locke) is taken to be a good thing in the context of literature. Words are not pictures, though the widespread belief that literature and painting were sister arts is also characteristic of the century. It is not accurate, however, to see the Pamela illustrations as ushering in the depiction of social life. Delarivier Manley’s The Adventures of Rivella (1714), for example, illustrated an aristocratic London house before even Defoe’s novels appeared (Fig. 19.6). Her publisher, Edmund Curll, reused the image in Jane Barker’s Exilius (1715). In the same year that Richardson planned his Hogarth prints, 1740, Fielding denigrated the state of English book illustration as a whole:  ‘our Booksellers have often manag’d so dexterously, that the Words, adorned with Cuts [engravings, woodcuts], are so far from conveying any Idea of Excellency, that they generally bespeak our Contempt’.14 He later praised the work of Hayman and Gravelot on the Hanmer Shakespeare. A few years before Hill and Richardson commented upon the proposed engravings for Pamela, an unusual document, Dr John Oldfield’s ‘Advertisement concerning the Prints’, appeared in a London Spanish edition of Don Quixote (1738) before prefacing Charles Jarvis’s translation (1742). Quixote, though neither English nor eighteenth century, was frequently illustrated in Great Britain throughout the century.15 (Hogarth was paid for six plates rejected for the 1738 edition.) Contrary to Aaron Hill’s emphasis on the necessary adequacy of representation and questioning of the need for illustrations, Oldfield sees illustrations as contributing in an entirely different way: Though prints to books are generally considered as mere embellishments… they are, however capable of answering a higher purpose, by representing many things 11  Henry James, Preface to The Golden Bowl, in Richard P. Blackmur, The Art of the Novel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), 332. 12  Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Robert Folkenflik (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 83–​4. 13  Robert Folkenflik, ‘Wolfgang Iser’s Eighteenth Century’, Poetics Today 27/​4 (2006), 675–​91. 14  The Champion, 2 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1743), 2: 221–​2. 15  See Johannes Hartau, Don Quijote in der Kunst: Wandlungen einer Symbolfigur (Berlin: Mann, 1987).

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Figure  19.6  P. Lavergne and Michael Van der Gucht, frontispiece, The Adventures of Rivella (1714). Courtesy of The Huntington Library.

which cannot be so perfectly expressed by words… For this reason, an incident that is in itself of no great consequence, and that makes no great figure in the book, by giving occasion for some serious and entertaining expression, may better deserve to be taken notice of in this way, than many of the more material and formal occurrences, which do not so well admit of being drawn, or, if they do, yield little or no additional pleasure to that of the written account.

Perhaps this argument is best made in a volume that portrays Cervantes in the allegorical frontispiece as Hercules, a topic that receives special attention. But Oldfield also sees the artist as supplying ‘the imperfections of the reader’s imagination, and the deficiency

The Rise of the Illustrated English NOVEL TO 1832    319 of the description in the author’.16 Oldfield is an obscure figure, and his remarks did not prove influential, but his eight-​page, closely printed essay is of interest, in part for its detailed attention to what he perceives as defects in earlier illustrations of Quixote and the moments he recommends as suitable for illustration. The directions Sir Thomas Hanmer contractually gave Hayman for the Shakespeare designs specified the exact scene, the activity, details about the figures and their responses.17 Tristram Shandy (1759–​67) is another clear case of the author dictating the choice of subject, and Sterne chose the same English artist whom Richardson initially selected, William Hogarth. The first engravings of Tristram Shandy are the results of Sterne’s audaciously angling for them by sending a letter to Richard Berenger: ‘I would give both my Ears (If I was not to loose my Credit by it) for no more than ten Strokes of Howgarth’s witty Chissel, to clap at the Front of my next Edition of Shandy.—​… The loosest Sketch in Nature, of Trim’s reading the Sermon to my Father &c; wd do the Business—​& it wd mutually illustrate his System & mine—​’.18 The first edition of the first two volumes was already out. In the second edition Hogarth’s design, engraved by Simon François Ravenet, appeared as the frontispiece to volume 1 (Fig. 19.7). As the standing Trim reads the sermon, at roughly the eighty-​five-​and-​a-​half-​degree angle called for by the text, the somnolent Catholic Dr. Slop, his protuberant belly occupying much of the left foreground, sits with his hand thrust into his waistcoat, his riding boots beside him, not hearing the Church of England sermon. In the back corner Walter lights his pipe with the fire tongs and Toby, a crutch under his right arm, rests his foot on a stool, reminders of his war wound. Smoke curls above each of their heads. A map of the fortifications at Namur, part of Toby’s hobby-​horsical military obsessions, is on the wall. In the second state Hogarth added, as his drawings show, Trim’s hat on the floor and the clock in the corner. The hat is called for in the text (‘laying down his hat upon the floor, and taking up the sermon in his left hand, in order to have his right at liberty’), as is the accurate representation of Trim’s holding the book in his left hand and not standing perpendicular to the floor. The clock is not mentioned in the chapter, but Tristram’s father Walter’s forgetting to wind the clock leads in the famous opening chapter of the book to his mother’s reminder at the most inauspicious of moments and, as Tristram believes, to his oddness. Sterne may have remembered the prominence of the hat upon the floor in the 1760 frontispiece in writing volume 5 (1761) where Trim’s dropping his hat causes the self-​absorbed servants in the kitchen to apprehend communally the death of Tristram’s brother Bobby. Hogarth also designed the frontispiece for volume 5, Tristram’s baptism (with a name his father abhorred), which appeared in the first edition of that volume, published at the same time as volume 3. Walter bursts through the door still fumbling with his trousers, too late to avert the christening of Tristram by the curate, who gapes 16  John Oldfield, ‘Advertisement concerning the Prints’, in The Life and Exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha (London, 1742), 1: [p. xxv]. 17  Marcia Allentuck, ‘Sir Thomas Hanmer Instructs Francis Hayman: An Editor’s Notes to his Illustrator (1744)’, Shakespeare Quarterly 27/​3 (1976), 288–​315. 18  The Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2009), 130–​1.

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Figure 19.7  William Hogarth and Simon Ravenet, frontispiece, Tristram Shandy, 2nd edn., vol. 1 (1760). Courtesy of The Huntington Library.

upon the man in his nightcap and nightshirt. The fateful clock, or its twin, is again in the corner. These two engravings are at the pinnacle of English comic novel illustrations. The first engraving embodies a good deal of knowledge about the novel. In choosing Hogarth, Sterne follows out the implications of his description of Trim rendered in pictorial terms (volume 2, ­chapter 17). His mildly satiric allusion to Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’ there (first mentioned in volume 2, ­chapter 6) follows his description of Dr. Slop’s ‘four

The Rise of the Illustrated English NOVEL TO 1832    321 feet and a half perpendicular height’ and ‘sesquipedality of belly… which,—​if you have read Hogarth’s analysis of beauty… you must know, may as certainly be caractur’d, and convey’d to the mind by three strokes as three hundred’ (volume 2, ­chapter 9), providing the model for Hogarth’s subsequent caricature. Hence, this engraving, as Sterne says in his letter, is a way to ‘illustrate his System [in the Analysis of Beauty] & mine’. The map is mentioned a number of times in the first volume, as is Toby’s wound. This engraving represents not just the scene but the novel. From the outset and throughout the book Tristram Shandy contains a number of different sorts of visual materials—​black pages, blank pages, marbled pages, and even an invitation to draw one’s own portrait of the Widow Wadman in the space provided. The marbled pages, for example, comprising a leaf in full colour and different in every copy of the first edition, though it typically appears in black and white and is the same in each copy of modern editions, relocates in the interior of the book a visual element that was limited to the binding or endpapers. In doing this, it becomes part of Sterne’s dislocation of expected features and conventions of the book. The preface and dedication also appear at unexpected moments in the book. Sterne, who, like his hero Tristram, is both ‘fiddler and painter’, is undoubtedly the designer of the visual representation of the plot of Tristram Shandy at the end of volume 6, which Tristram himself signs as designer and engraver (‘Inv. T. S.’, ‘Scul. T. S.’), and of the visual representation of the flourish of Corporal Trim’s walking stick (volume 9, ­chapter 4).19 Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey became the most often illustrated novel of the century outside the pages of the novels themselves. Angelica Kauffman’s oval paintings (now at the Hermitage), which look like large versions of designs for book illustrations, were frequently reproduced in various forms. Paintings of scenes from novels only began to appear with frequency around the time Tristram Shandy was published because the newly established Royal Academy (1760) began annual exhibitions which provided a public venue in which to see them. To give some idea of the frequency with which A Sentimental Journey was illustrated, between 1800 and 1811 there were ten illustrated editions, and Thomas Stothard illustrated editions for different publishers in 1782, 1792, and 1811. The year after the first edition of Tristram Shandy, Tobias Smollett began his serial publication of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760–​1) in his new journal, the British Magazine. As frontispiece to the second issue (­chapter 1) he published a representation of Sir Launcelot and his squire, Timothy Crabshaw, and in the ninth (­chapter 9) one of Sir Launcelot excoriating the Whig and Tory opponents on the hustings. Smollett was ‘the chief art critic’ of the Critical Review, the important journal that he partially owned.20 Hence, his choice of Anthony Walker, perhaps the most underrated artist-​engraver of the time,

19  See Peter de Voogd, ‘Sterne and Visual Culture’, in Thomas Keymer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 142–​59; W. B. Gerard, Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 20  James Basker, Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1988), 110.

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322   ROBERT FOLKENFLIK who died young in 1765, is unlikely to have been unconsidered.21 Although Walker was apprenticed to the unimpressive John Tinney, his work suggests that he was influenced by Hayman and the St Martin’s Lane Academy. Sir Launcelot Greaves is the shortest of Smollett’s novels, but it was the longest serial at the time, and has generally been taken to be the first illustrated serial novel.22 But this is a seriously misleading notion. Smollett was basically illustrating his journal with about two full-​page engravings and two fold-​ outs per issue during the first year of publication, but with only a single fold-​out the following year. Walker designed and engraved a number of full-​page illustrations for the British Magazine in its first year, but none after the ninth issue. Lesser engravers came on board as the journal continued. The engravings of Sir Launcelot Greaves did not appear in the first book edition (1762) or thereafter. The frontispiece of Sir Launcelot and Crabshaw (Fig. 19.8) again suggests that the designer is probably dependent upon the author for knowledge of the novel registered in the engraving. Lengthy descriptions of both characters appear in this chapter, though Sir Launcelot’s armour is not described as ‘laquered black’ until the fifth chapter (the May issue), where we also find the details of the crescent and motto on his shield. This suggests either that Smollett gave Walker the manuscript of his novel up to that point, or extra information on how Sir Launcelot should be represented. Since the first five chapters form a unit, Smollett had probably completed them before commencing the British Magazine. Tim at once resembles Mr Punch and Hudibras. The crescent on Tim’s hat, ‘bandaliers’, buskins (which come to the calf, as buskins did, rather than nearly to the knee, as in the description), and sword are all in the text, though the comical conical hat looks nothing like the marine caps of the time. The description of Sir Launcelot, wearing his own hair, gives us stereotypical handsomeness, except that ‘his grey eyes shone with such vivacity as plainly shewed that his reason was a little discomposed’, a detail which Walker has captured effectively. Walker’s work could be both elaborate and fastidious. His use of etching before engraving, filling up the picture space, led sometimes to engravings that wore out early, but the frontispiece and to a lesser extent the second plate for Sir Launcelot Greaves capture both the charm and the humour of Smollett’s novel in the juxtaposition of characters set in an attractive landscape. Later engravers, such as Anthony Walker’s brother William (after Stothard) and George Cruikshank, illustrated, among other scenes, the much-​admired entrance of Sir Launcelot in this chapter, carrying the near-​drowned Crabshaw. The new copyright regime that came into effect in 1774 led to a great change in the number of illustrated books. It brought into play a paradoxical corollary to the opposition of cheap novels and the expense of illustrations: in the third quarter of the eighteenth century the cheapest books were often illustrated. William St Clair claims it has been unnoticed that ‘after 1774, one point stands out… Of the millions of volumes which 21 

Robert Folkenflik, ‘Tobias Smollett, Anthony Walker, and the First Illustrated Serial Novel in English’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 14/​1 (2002), 1–​18. 22  Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines 1740–​1815 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).

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Figure 19.8 Anthony Walker, frontispiece, Sir Launcelot Greaves, British Magazine 1/​2 (February 1760). Courtesy of James G. Basker.

became cheap and plentiful, almost every one is illustrated with at least one engraving, and some with many.’23 In terms of the novel, the ‘copyright window’ encouraged the development of numerous series of novels or of series that included novels, such as Cooke’s Select British Classics. The first and most important of these was Harrison’s Novelist’s Magazine (‘magazine’ in the older sense of repository), which published sixty-​ one complete novels and collections of tales, mainly British, in twenty-​three volumes in weekly parts between 1779 and 1788. The end of perpetual copyright meant that 23 

William St Clair, The Reading Nation and the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 134.

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324   ROBERT FOLKENFLIK publishers paid nothing to authors for out-​of-​copyright books. Hence, they were able to afford to pay illustrators money to support original engravings. Perhaps even more importantly, large runs made the costs of illustrations a smaller part of total cost. At its height, the Novelist’s Magazine sold ‘10,000 copies or more’ a week.24 It published all of Fielding’s, Richardson’s, and Smollett’s novels, both of Sterne’s, three by Eliza Haywood, two each by Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Frances Sheridan, along with (among many others) novels by Edward Kimber, Robert Paltock, Francis Coventry, and John Hawkesworth, whose Almoran and Hamet was the first in the series, followed by two Fielding novels to make the first volume. The tales tended to be foreign. All were illustrated. James Harrison speaks of ‘cuts’ (standard language not just for woodcuts but for engravings) and ‘Copper-​plates’ in his advertisements: ‘The Original Novelist’s Magazine… comprehends all the larger Novels and Romances of eminence, Foreign as well as English… at Prices more than two hundred per cent. less than the very same works are usually sold for, even without Copper-​plates.’25 Harrison’s Prospectus to the second volume of the Novelist’s Magazine (1780) stressed the quality of the series: its ‘superfine’ paper, its Caslon type, its ‘truly elegant and original’ copperplates.26 In reality, the paper was not good, the double-​columned pages were printed in tiny print, but the illustrations appearing in a standard format within an elaborate engraved frame were indeed original. Thomas Stothard became the main designer of the engravings early on. An avid reader of novels, the prolific Stothard designed 244 plates for Harrison, and this was just part of his practice. Some of Stothard’s designs are extant. A pen-​and-​wash drawing for ‘Lovelace’s Dream’, which appeared as a plate in Richardson’s Clarissa, is at the Huntington Library. His drawing, ‘Sophia being rescued from the Stream by Burchell’ (from Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield) is at the Castle Museum, Nottingham.27 In the eighteenth century, the author or publisher (Richardson was both) was likely to dictate the passage to be illustrated, and most engravers would be happy not to wade through manuscripts to discover passages they wanted to design. Two stories of how Stothard began working for Harrison suggest opposed possibilities. An anecdote told by Thomas Stothard’s daughter-​in-​law, student, and biographer, Anna Bray, claimed that Harrison caught sight of his uncommissioned designs from literary works and asked him to read a novel and ‘when he met with a subject that struck his fancy to make a design for it in Indian ink’. This is not implausible: back in France Gravelot enjoyed reading the novels and plays he illustrated in order to find the dramatic moment for an engraving. Stothard’s early friend Samuel Boddington told a plainer tale: the engraver

24 Raven, The Business of Books, 245. 25 

The New Novelist’s Magazine, 2 vols. (London, 1786–​7), 1: [p. i]. Quoted in Richard C. Taylor, ‘James Harrison, The Novelist’s Magazine, and the Early Canonizing of the English Novel’, Studies in English Literature 33/​3 (1993), 633. 27  Shelley M. Bennett, Thomas Stothard: The Mechanisms of Art Patronage in England circa 1800 (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1988), 34–​5. 26 

The Rise of the Illustrated English NOVEL TO 1832    325 James Heath asked Stothard to ‘improve’ his plate after Daniel Dodd for the first volume of the Novelist’s Magazine and gave him five shillings. Boddington had the story from Richard Corbauld, one of the other engravers on the project.28 Heath went on to engrave roughly one hundred of Stothard’s designs. Admiration of Stothard’s work was widespread. Charles Lamb, a child of the eighteenth century (b. 1775), paid tribute to his book illustrations of novels in Harrison’s series in a poem addressed to him with an emphasis on his illustrations of novels, though the occasion was Stothard’s illustrations of the Poems of Samuel Rogers: In my young days How often have I with a child’s fond gaze, Pored on the pictur’d wonders thou hadst done: Clarissa mournful, and prim Grandison! All Fielding’s, Smollett’s heroes, rose to view; I saw, and I believed the phantoms true. But, above all, that most romantic tale Did o’er my raw credulity prevail, Where Glums and Gawries wear mysterious things, That serve at once for jackets and for wings.29

The novel he praises most is Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins (1783; first published 1750, though dated 1751). Louis Philippe Boitard’s original six engravings of the fantastic creatures in the novel include ‘The Front of a Glumm Drest’, the male of the species, and ‘A Gawrey Extended for Flight’, a female, nude but for a shell-​like monokini, looking rather like a long-​haired Greek goddess with kite-​like wings (Fig. 19.9). The engravings after Stothard have a greater sense of the action of the novel (Fig. 19.10). In general Stothard was highly realistic, but his admirers overlooked his occasionally faulty draftsmanship and enjoyed his frequent sentimentality. This is not to say that there were no collections or anthologies of novels, even illustrated novels, earlier. There were over a hundred such collections, some illustrated. Samuel Croxall’s Select Collection of Novels (1729) was well illustrated by John Vanderbank and Gerard Van der Gucht, but consisted of short translated stories by Cervantes and other foreigners. And it is worth remembering that throughout the period foreign engravers were doing excellent work illustrating both novels in their own language and English novels. In France, the exquisite engravings of Moreau le Jeune for Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse are examples of the former; in Germany, Daniel Chodowiecki’s highly accomplished illustrations of Richardson’s Clarissa are examples of the latter. In England the production of sets of novels and those that included novels burgeoned with the overthrow of perpetual copyright. Harrison was followed by his recent collaborator Joseph 28  Anna E. Bray, Life of Thomas Stothard (London: John Murray, 1851), 9; Bennett, Thomas Stothard, 90–​1 n. 23. 29  The Works of Charles Lamb, ed. Thomas Noon Talfourd, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1838), 1: 418.

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Figure 19.9  Louis Philippe Boitard, ‘A Gawrey Extended for Flight’, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, 1 (1751), facing p. 162. Courtesy of The Huntington Library.

Wenman’s Entertaining Museum, or Complete Circulating Library (1780s, at least twenty-​six illustrated volumes), which followed the earlier pocketbook format of Bell’s Poets, but included novels and other genres. His first books were novels—​Sir Launcelot Greaves and Tom Jones. An advertisement later offered the books at ‘Six-​Pence sewed or Nine-​Pence bound’ each volume per week. Each volume contained a frontispiece. Dodd

The Rise of the Illustrated English NOVEL TO 1832    327

Figure 19.10  Thomas Stothard and William Walker, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Novelist’s Magazine 12 (1783), facing p. 150. Courtesy of The Huntington Library.

was the designer, and the plates were engraved by William Walker, John Goldar, and others. Wenman prided himself on ‘Cheap, and Elegant Editions’.30 In the 1790s, John Cooke’s Select British Classics and his Pocket Edition of Select Novelists continued the pattern of illustrated books in weekly parts at sixpence. William Hazlitt and others testified to the importance of these novels for them. The New Novelists Magazine, or Lady’s and 30 

Alain René Le Sage, Gil Blas, trans. T[obias] Smollett, 8 vols. (London, 1780), 3: [p. i].

328

328   ROBERT FOLKENFLIK Gentleman’s Entertaining Library of Cooke’s journeyman Alexander Hogg also appeared in this decade. These series, sold in parts, became known collectively as ‘Paternoster Row numbers’, for the street where some of them had shops. Hogg was at No. 16. To this point we have not encountered William Blake. We think of him as an individual genius working on his own, using a method all his own, printing his hand-​ coloured plates for his own engraved books in a few copies of each work. But he began as a reproductive engraver, and the lesser known work he performed as a book illustrator included poetry and English novels: David Simple; A Sentimental Journey; Sir Charles Grandison; and Sir Launcelot Greaves—​all eight plates after designs by Thomas Stothard, who obtained the job for him, for Harrison’s Novelist’s Magazine (1782–​3). This was not congenial work. Blake illustrated a reissue of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1791) for John Johnson (Fig. 19.11). These are more satisfactory and characteristic, for Blake is both designer and engraver of the six plates (signed ‘d. & sc.’ on the frontispiece). In mentioning the guinea per plate he was receiving in 1799 for designing and engraving, he asserts that this was not just more congenial but easier for him than reproductive engravings after another designer.31 Essick notes appositely that in a series like Harrison’s Blake was ‘part of a team subordinating their individual styles to the project’.32 Typical costs throughout the century vary at historical moments, by quality of the artist, by the individual artist’s stage of development, and with all that said, we often find standard payments and differences between the designer (del. or inv.) and the engraver (sculp. or fec., often used for an etching). Stothard began at six shillings and sixpence per drawing but quickly moved to charge double that amount. In 1797 he received two-​and-​a-​half guineas a design. Blake, his friend until 1806 and fellow radical, was paid, as we have seen, a guinea for both designing and engraving at the same time. Hayman was paid about the same amount sixty years earlier. But here too there are technical differences that point to differences in labour:  Gravelot’s designs show him to have made a number of preliminary drawings (varnished for transparency, squared for transfer); Stothard after the turn of the century was drawing directly on woodblocks. Thomas Rowlandson, one of the three greatest eighteenth-​century English satiric artists, along with Hogarth and James Gillray (whose two splendid illustrations for Tom Jones [1780] make us wish for more), designed book illustrations, and sometimes engraved his own designs. In a number of ways he was an ideal illustrator of Fielding and Smollett and the Sterne of Sentimental Journey. When engraved by others, the actual results in books are often less satisfactory than the promise of his vivacious drawings, which combine French delicacy and English robustness. His designs for Smollett’s Miscellaneous Works (1790), engraved by J. Kirkwood, include frontispieces for Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom, Sir Launcelot Greaves, 31 

The Letters of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 32. Robert N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations: A Catalogue and Study of the Plates Engraved by Blake after Designs by other Artists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 6. 32 

The Rise of the Illustrated English NOVEL TO 1832    329

Figure 19.11  William Blake, frontispiece, Original Stories from Real Life (1791). Courtesy of The Huntington Library.

and Humphry Clinker. The engravings by Charles Grignion after Rowlandson done for a separate edition of Humphry Clinker (1793) are better than the illustrations of the comic novel in the series of Harrison and others. Most of Rowlandson’s work appeared in the nineteenth century. His happiest results are the aquatints for James Sibbald (Edinburgh). These large illustrations have a vitality and atmosphere that make us feel the constrictions of the small illustrations published in typical parts

330

330   ROBERT FOLKENFLIK ventures, such as Harrison’s. They unite humour and elegance. The riotous dinner scenes draw on Hogarth and the Dutch. ‘General Engagement in the College of Authors’ (1796) gives us ‘engagement’ in the punning sense as battle, for a riot has broken out at table. ‘Rod: Random discovers his uncle Bowling in distress’ is basic­ ally a Dutch tavern scene filled with smoke clouds and drinking men, as a barmaid casts a wanton eye on the handsome young Roderick. Others display an air-​filled French vivacity: ‘Rod: Random joins a party of French Soldiers’ is a fête champêtre. Bare-​bosomed young women appear in a number of his illustrations: ‘Lady Booby attempts to seduce the immaculate Joseph’ (1792; Fig. 19.12), ‘Tom Jones rescues Mrs. Waters’, ‘Palette’s odd scheme of Revenge’, ‘Fire at the Inn—​Peregrine rescues Emelia’, ‘Peregrine relieves a distressed family’ (the young mother has turned from nursing the baby in her lap). In the Joseph Andrews plate Slip-​Slop is gazing voyeuristically from the door, a nude statue is on the mantel, a teapot, ignored, boils on the fire with liquid spurting from the spout, a portrait of the late Lord Booby glares down from the wall. Lady Booby in bed, bare-​breasted with a mobcap, gestures with her open hand and holds Joseph’s hand with the other. These illustrations of Smollett and Fielding (he would later illustrate Sterne and Goldsmith) are peaks in the illustration of the comic novel. Some of these illustrations titillate, though others by Rowlandson depicting male and female genitalia, possibly done for the Prince Regent after 1811, would today be

Figure  19.12  Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Lady Booby attempts to seduce the immaculate Joseph’ (1792). Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, College of William and Mary.

The Rise of the Illustrated English NOVEL TO 1832    331

Figure 19.13  George Cruikshank, Robinson Crusoe (1731). Courtesy of Geoffrey Sill.

called pornographic. Of course voyeurism, one of Rowlandson’s staples, models the relationship of the viewer of pornographic illustrations to what he sees (his depiction of ‘connoisseurs’ eyeing a painting of Susannah and the Elders doubles the effect and complicates the response). Throughout the eighteenth century a number of pornographic (erotic, libertine) novels were published with illustrations. A republication of Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1766) contained twenty-​eight plates, most of them obscene. Even Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey were both republished with pornographic illustrations bearing such captions from the text as ‘Right end of a Woman’ and ‘Tom’s had more gristle in it’.33 George Cruikshank illustrated a number of comic novels, including those of the following generation. His best work on the eighteenth-​century novel, such as some of his Robinson Crusoe illustrations (1731), is memorable. Crusoe coming upon the footprint shows him literally, almost cartoonishly, taken aback (Fig. 19.13). The dog in Cruikshank’s animated plate responds to Crusoe’s startled response. Birds fly agitatedly above the cresting wave in the background. The wavy wood lines seem highly appropriate for the story. Stothard’s Crusoe peers intently at the footprint, arrested 33  Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (Amsterdam: P. van Slaukenberg, 1771; false imprint for 1785); Sentimental Journey (New York: John Reid, [1795–6]). See Gerard, Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination, 182, 196–​7 for details.

332

332   ROBERT FOLKENFLIK

Figure 19.14  Thomas Stodhart and Thomas Medland, ‘Robinson Crusoe discovers the Print of a Man’s Foot’, Robinson Crusoe, 1 (1790), facing p. 194. Courtesy of The Huntington Library.

at its appearance (Fig. 19.14). Waves billow in the background. His dog immediately behind him is unconcerned, attracted more by a seabird. Cruikshank’s visceral response is more compelling. In another of his designs, Crusoe entering the circular cave with his back to us brandishing an axe and holding a torch which lights up the scene of the dying goat is suitably crepuscular, not to say creepy. Cruikshank’s later illustrations, engraved by Fox (1837), were not as good.

The Rise of the Illustrated English NOVEL TO 1832    333 One important genre of the late eighteenth century has less prominence than the texts deserve. Early Gothic novel illustrations are mainly jejune, but they need not have been. Four drawings for The Castle of Otranto, by Bertie Greatheed, son of the Della Cruscan poet of the same name and a skilled amateur artist, were sent to Horace Walpole by his father. In one the angular figure of Frederick would do credit to Henry Fuseli, and the tall, stark skeleton in the centre is as fearsome an eighteenth-​century Gothic novel illustration as one can find (Fig. 19.15). It’s a pity it remained unengraved. These were literally book illustrations, for Walpole had the four bound in his own copy of Otranto. Surprisingly, the first printed illustration of the novel written by one of the period’s greatest connoisseurs of art resulted from a drawing sent him of the actual Castle of Otranto in Naples. It first appeared in an

Figure 19.15  Bertie Greatheed, Castle of Otranto (c.1781–​4), watercolour. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

334

334   ROBERT FOLKENFLIK

Figure 19.16  William Hamilton and John Royce, The Old English Baron, 4th edn. (1789), facing p. 129. Collection of Robert and Vivian Folkenflik.

Italian edition of the novel (Parma, 1791); in England it first appeared in the collected works of Walpole (1798), the year after his death.34 John Carter’s 1790 watercolour, The Entry of Frederic into the Castle of Otranto, is an impressive crowd scene filled with medieval turrets and a chapel tower. Again unengraved, Fuseli’s only novel illustration was a frontispiece for the fourth edition of Smollett’s Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1768). Fuseli’s student Theodore Von Holst was responsible for the 34 

John Riely, ‘The Castle of Otranto Revisited’, Yale University Library Gazette 53/​1 (1978), 1–​17.

The Rise of the Illustrated English NOVEL TO 1832    335 famous 1731 frontispiece to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Gothic chapbooks earlier in the century were stiff and crude. Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron contains the earliest Gothic novel illustrations of which I am aware. The first-​edition frontispiece by William Hamilton and James Caldwell of The Champion of Virtue (1777), as the work was originally known, focused on a dramatic but sentimental scene. A second engraving by the pair (1778) is much better as design and suitably Gothic in its use of gloom and light (Fig. 19.16). The ghost of Lord Lovel shining in ‘compleat armour’ stands stiffly in a Gothic doorway with light streaming into the dark room and falling on the cowering young villains Wenlock and Markham as he points them towards the other door. The ‘rise’ of the illustrated British novel featured the development of native artists and new technologies, as well as a strong increase in the number of novels illustrated, but it is not a progressive story in terms of quality. Some of the very best work, such as the Gravelot engravings of Pamela from Hayman’s designs, was printed early in the century, and such technological developments as steel engravings (from the second decade of the nineteenth century onwards) increased the print runs without a need for re-​engraving, but usually without leading to better engravings. One can only regret the virtual absence of Fuseli, Gillray, and Bewick—​Hogarth, for that matter, despite the cardinal importance of his published work for the illustrated comic novel—​from the ranks of the illustrators of novels in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet a period that saw illustrations by John Pine, Hayman and Gravelot, Rowlandson, Blake, and the influential Hogarth, not to mention prolific artists of importance, such as Stothard and Cruikshank among numerous others, was responsible for the tradition of illustrating novels in Great Britain.

Select Bibliography Allen, Brian, Francis Hayman (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1987). Barchas, Janine, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-​ Century Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 2003). Bennett, Shelley M., Thomas Stothard: The Mechanisms of Art Patronage in England circa 1800 (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1988). Blewett, David, The Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe, 1719–​1920 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995). Essick, Robert N., William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations: A Catalogue and Study of the Plates Engraved by Blake after Designs by other Artists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Folkenflik, Robert, ‘Tobias Smollett, Anthony Walker, and the First Illustrated Serial Novel in English’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 14/​1 (2002), 1–​18. Hammelmann, Hanns, Book Illustrators in Eighteenth-​Century England, ed. T. S. R. Boase (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1975). Paulson, Ronald, ‘The Tradition of Comic Illustration from Hogarth to Cruikshank’, in Robert L. Patten (ed.), George Cruikshank: A Revaluation (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1974), 35–​60.

336

336   ROBERT FOLKENFLIK Ray, Gordon N., The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914 (New York: The Pierpont Morgan Library and OUP, 1976). Stewart, Philip, Engraven Desire: Eros, Image & Text in the French Eighteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992). Taylor, Richard C., ‘James Harrison, The Novelist’s Magazine and the Early Canonizing of the English Novel’, Studies in English Literature 33/​3 (1993), 629–​43. Voogd, Peter de, ‘Sterne and Visual Culture’, in Thomas Keymer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 142–59.

Authors, Readers, Reviewers, and Critics, 1770–​1832

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Chapter 20

So cia l Struct u re , C l as s , and Gender, 1 7 7 0–​1 832 W. A. Speck

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are generally seen as witnessing the emergence of the modern three-​class society in Britain. It was during these decades that the traditional hierarchical model of social structure, based on a vertical scale of ranks, degrees, and other specifications of status, was gradually superseded by a horizontal model of different layers comprising classes. This transition was as much a political as a social process. From the French Revolution to the Reform Act of 1832 politics came to be perceived more and more in terms of class struggle. Some posited a simple contest between two classes, the rich and the poor, or the patricians and the plebs. Increasingly, however, a political role was assigned to what was perceived as the middle class between the two, which was eventually to be enfranchised with the Reform Act of 1832. Thus ‘it was not so much the “rising middle class” that was the crucial factor in bringing about the Reform Bill of 1832; rather, it was more the Reform Bill of 1832 that was the crucial factor in cementing the invention of the ever-​rising “middle class” ’.1 The ruling elite was seen as forming an aristocracy which could be regarded as the upper class. Below them there had long been a rural middle class made up largely of freehold and tenant farmers, while increasing urbanization brought into existence an urban bourgeoisie. The years 1770 to 1832 also witnessed, according to E. P. Thompson’s classic thesis, ‘the making of the English working class’. This came about, in his view, largely because the issues raised by the French Revolution politicized those who were previously regarded as comprising ‘the lower orders’, giving them a class consciousness which created a mass movement for reform. Thompson’s work set the agenda for studies of social structure and class, inspiring research which criticized and modified the model he had set up. Recently there have been objections that Thompson only examined working-​class men, leaving women out of the account. He himself claimed to have 1 

Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780– 1840 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 18.

340

340   W. A. SPECK written ‘a biography of the English working class from its adolescence until its early manhood’.2 There have been several attempts of late ‘to infuse gender … into the analysis of class’.3 The ruling class by 1800 consisted of the titled nobility—​the 300 or so peers who attended the House of Lords—​and the 14,000 or so landed gentry. Legally and socially they were distinct, for the dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons who were summoned to the upper house had privileges which distinguished them even from baronets and knights, let alone the mere gentlemen below them. However, economically they were mostly indistinguishable, almost all deriving their incomes from rents paid by tenant farmers. This landowning elite formed an aristocracy which was at the apex of society. It was their status rather than their wealth which made them aristocrats, as their incomes extended over a vast range. Patrick Colquhoun calculated the average income of peers in the opening years of the nineteenth century at £8,000, but this average conceals great discrepancies.4 Some peers were fabulously wealthy. The Dukes of Bedford, Devonshire, and Westminster were probably the richest men in England, worth fortunes. At his death in 1811 the fifth Duke of Devonshire had an income of about £125,000 a year. By contrast some lesser peers were in receipt of incomes way below the average. When Lord Byron sold Newstead Abbey in 1817 to clear off his debts the rents paid by tenants on the estate came to £1807. 14s.5 There was an overlap between the incomes of the peerage and those enjoyed by the landed gentry. Colquhoun estimated the average annual incomes of baronets at £3,000 and of knights and esquires at £1,500. He did not have a category of country gentlemen below that, for his ‘Gentlemen and Ladies living on income’ who earned £700 a year could include all those with investments in stock as well as in land. But if we assume that £1,000 per annum would be the cut-​off point for landed incomes which divided the landed gentry from those beneath them we would probably not be far out. The heroes and heroines of Jane Austen’s novels fall well within this range, as Alan Downie rightly observes. ‘It is certainly true that Austen’s central characters are not members of the nobility’ he readily acknowledges, ‘but Sir Thomas Bertram and Sir Walter Elliot are baronets, Darcy is the owner of an extensive estate in Derbyshire, and many of her other characters own sizeable landed estates.’ He establishes that the social world of Austen’s novels is genteel rather than bourgeois.6 Jane Austen herself was the daughter of a clergyman, the rector of Deane and Steventon in Hampshire. The clergy were members of one of the polite professions entered by graduation from Oxford or Cambridge, which gave them the status of 2 

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), 11. Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1995), 2. 4  Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 127. 5  J. V. Beckett, Byron and Newstead: The Aristocrat and the Abbey (Newark, DE: Delaware UP, 2001), 283. 6  J. A. Downie, ‘Who Says She’s a Bourgeois Writer? Reconsidering the Social and Political Contexts of Jane Austen’s Novels’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 40/1 (2006), 69–84. 3 

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1770–1832    341 gentlemen. The Reverend George Austen was one of about 18,000 Anglican clergymen, ranging from the twenty-​six bishops of the Established Church who sat in the House of Lords to impoverished curates. Colquhoun divided those below the bishops into eminent clergymen, whose annual incomes he estimated at £500, and lesser clergymen whose livings were worth only £150. Nevertheless they would all be regarded as gentlemen. Their counterparts in the Roman Catholic and Nonconformist churches, however, especially the lowly preachers among the Baptists and Methodists, would not automatically qualify for that status. Barristers and physicians certainly did, whereas attorneys and apothecaries were marginal. Those who obtained commissions in the army and navy were known as ‘officers and gentlemen’. Commercial as well as professional men could also aspire to gentility. The business elite of eighteenth-​century Leeds, for instance, were known as ‘gentlemen merchants’. In rural areas freeholders below the level of the gentry could aspire to the status of ‘gentlemen farmers’. The middle class became increasingly significant with the growth of towns. London, with a population of roughly one million in 1800, was the largest city in Britain if not in Europe. Only four English cities contained more than 50,000 inhabitants in that year—​ Liverpool with 82,000, Manchester with 75,000, Birmingham with 71,000, and Bristol with 61,000. The next fifty years, however, were to see unprecedented urban growth. By 1851 Liverpool’s population had increased to 376,000, Manchester’s to 303,000, Birmingham’s to 233,000. The most phenomenal increases occurred in the woollen textile area of the West Riding of Yorkshire, where Bradford grew from 13,000 in 1801 to 104,000 in 1851. Urbanization brought into being a provincial middle class which provided the main readership for newspapers and periodicals. Most big towns had at least one local newspaper, while some had two or even three. The press emerged as yet another profession in English society. Boyd Hilton sees the development of a distinct class consciousness, at least among the more substantial business and professional men of the period. In the 1780s, he claims, ‘such people began to identify themselves as like-​minded, or presumed to formulate public opinion independently of … aristocratic norms’. What contemporaries came to call ‘the public mind’ was formed largely, according to Hilton, by ‘new periodicals such as The Quarterly, Edinburgh, London, Westminster, and British and Foreign’.7 Davidoff and Hall’s seminal study of the middle class between 1780 and 1850, Family Fortunes, claims that it too developed a collective consciousness in those years which took the form of a domestic ideology summed up by the word ‘respectability’. This distinguished members of the middle class from what they perceived as the raffish aristocracy above it and the disreputable working class below. Those between who strove to be respectable placed the family at the heart of society. Extolling family values led to the emergence of the ideal of separate spheres for men and women. The husband as ‘head of the household’ was ideally the ‘breadwinner’ who went out to work while his wife, ‘the

7 Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous People?, 151.

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342   W. A. SPECK angel of the house’, stayed at home. The growth of ‘respectable’ suburbs, like Edgbaston in Birmingham, which separated middle-​class families not only from the workplace but also from working-​class neighbourhoods, was a sign of this trend. Davidoff and Hall do not confine their study to the urban middle class but extend it to rural areas of Essex and Suffolk, showing how the evangelical movement influenced them too. Thus they investigate the Congregational Church at Witham in Essex, where ‘the congregation comprised the families of shopkeepers, maltsters, millers, schoolmasters, farmers, some doctors, an exciseman and even the master of the workhouse’.8 The membership of a church or chapel was a significant element in the development of middle-​class ideology, according to Davidoff and Hall, since it was largely inspired by the Evangelical Revival. Their emphasis on the Revival’s appeal to the professional and business classes, however, has been questioned. As G. M. Ditchfield observes, ‘a high proportion of Methodist adherents were skilled artisans and tradesmen, with more than a sprinkling of the labouring classes. The aristocratic and gentry involvement in evangelical endeavour, though very much a minority affair, cannot be ignored either.’9 Family Fortunes stresses the influence of such evangelicals as the poet William Cowper and the propagandist Hannah More on the middle classes. According to Davidoff and Hall, Cowper’s poem The Task was a favourite with evangelicals in Edgbaston and East Anglia. Although Hannah More’s target audience in her cheap repository tracts was the working class, her novel Cœlebs in Search of a Wife (1807) targeted a more affluent readership. Indeed the protagonist, ‘of an ancient and respectable family, and considerable estate’ in Westmorland, is clearly a member of the upper rather than the middle class. He gives Sir John Belfield a description of Lucilla Stanley, the woman he has singled out to be his ideal wife: ‘First,’ replied I, ‘I will, as you desire, define her by negatives—​she is not a professed beauty, she is not a professed genius, she is not a professed philosopher, she is not a professed wit, she is not a professed any thing; and I thank my stars she is not an artist!’—​‘Bravo, Charles: now as to what she is!’—​‘She is,’ replied I, ‘from nature—​a woman, gentle, feeling, animated, modest.—​She is, by education, elegant, informed, enlightened.—​She is, from religion, pious, humble, candid, charitable.’

More’s insufferably smug and sanctimonious novel emphasizes that of all these feminine virtues that of modesty was paramount. Thus of Mrs. Carlton she observes: ‘her natural modesty prevented her from introducing any subject herself, yet when any thing useful was brought forward by others, she promoted it by a look compounded of pleasure and intelligence’.10

8 

Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (2nd edn., London: Routledge, 2002), 133. 9  G. M. Ditchfield, The Evangelical Revival (London: UCL Press, 1998), 105. 10  Hannah More, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, ed. Patricia Demers (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007), 46, 144, 245.

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1770–1832    343 The use of such sources to document middle-​class marriages has been criticized on the grounds that they are, like conduct books, prescriptive rather than descriptive.11 They advocate a domestic ideal which was not necessarily realized in practice. Even Cowper and More did not realize it, since neither of them married. Family Fortunes, however, investigates the reality as well as the ideal. Thus the authors point out how ‘some enterprises were premised on the steady use of female family labour’. The wives of shopkeepers assisted in the shop. Lawyers employed their female relatives as clerks. Farmers’ wives could be responsible for preparing refreshments for agricultural labourers and taking it out to the fields for them. Some took farm produce to market. However, according to Family Fortunes, ‘as the period reached mid century, teaching became the only profession in which middle-​class women could preserve something of their status’.12 Employment opportunities were more abundant for lower-​class women. Even for these, however, claims have been made that they were confined to separate spheres from their menfolk. For agricultural labourers this had always been the case, except at times like haymaking and harvest where there was a temporary demand for unskilled labour which was sometimes met by women. Otherwise the scene conjured up by William Cobbett in his Cottage Economy (1822) was timeless, as he imagines ‘the labourer, after his return from the toils of a cold winter day, sitting with his wife and children round a cheerful fire’.13 In this period, however, it is asserted that working men found employment in factories while their wives worked at home. This is even more of a myth than the concept of separate spheres is for the middle classes. ‘The creation of a cultural identity of men as worker and breadwinner’, maintains Katrina Honeyman, ‘occurred despite the prevalence of women’s employment.’14 It also rested on an assumption that an industrial revolution took place in this period which replaced domestic manufacturing with factories, and brought into being a coherent working class. Although The Making of the English Working Class took the form of a political narrative, constructed round the alleged development of class consciousness, it at least implicitly assumed that industrialization was creating a mainly urban proletariat. Thompson wrote when the idea of an industrial revolution was largely taken for granted by historians. They also engaged in the so-​called ‘standard of living controversy’.15 This was a debate about the impact of the revolution on the lives of industrial workers and

11  Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal 36/2 (1993), 383–414. Cf. Jane Rendall, Women in an Industrializing Society: England, 1750–1880 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990), 3: ‘it is too easy to take such prescriptive works as indicating the realities of middle-class women’. 12  Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 293. 13  Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998), 36. 14  Katrina Honeyman, Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700–1870 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 101. 15  For an introduction to the debate as it stood when Thompson wrote, see P. A. M. Taylor (ed.), The Industrial Revolution in Britain: Triumph or Disaster? (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., 1958).

344

344   W. A. SPECK whether or not it adversely affected them. The protagonists were very roughly divided into pessimists, who claimed that the effect was to depress their standard of living, and optimists, who argued that it brought about increased prosperity. The debate became entangled in data on prices and wages and arguments about the relative impact of seasonal and cyclical unemployment on rural and urban workers. The outcome, though far from conclusive, rather upheld the view of the optimists who maintained that real wages were higher for industrial workers than they were for farm labourers. Though there was no increase in real wages for industrial workers in the years 1825 to 1850, those of agricultural labourers actually declined. While the optimists were apparently winning the statistical argument, the pessimists had the edge when it came to evaluating the relative qualities of life in villages and towns. Although the optimists accused them of painting a Christmas-​card view of the countryside, comparing idyllic villages with unsanitary towns like Manchester, it was indisputable that living conditions in the latter were worse than they were in the former. For instance, urban death rates were much higher than those in rural areas. The latest conclusion on the statistics seems to be a consensus that, while the onset of industrialization increased the overall wealth of the country, it did not distribute it evenly between the classes, so that the gap between rich and poor widened rather than narrowed between 1780 and 1850.16 Robert Southey can be said to have anticipated this pessimistic assessment when he wrote of the effects of industrialization that ‘wealth flows into the country, but how does it circulate there? Not equally and healthfully through the whole system; it sprouts into wens and tumours, and collects in aneurisms which starve and palsy the extremities.’17 In a way Southey was the first pessimist and Thomas Babington Macaulay the first optimist. Southey’s view of the manufacturing system was summed up by Macaulay thus: ‘there is nothing which he hates so bitterly. It is according to him, a system more tyrannical than that of the feudal ages, a system of actual servitude, a system which destroys the bodies and degrades the minds of those who are engaged in it.’18 Macaulay was referring to Southey’s criticism of the impact of industrialization in his Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829). He had previously published his condemnation of it in the description of Manchester he put into the mouth of his fictitious Spaniard, Don Manuel Espriella in 1807: ‘Here in Manchester a great proportion of the poor lodge in cellars, damp and dark, where every kind of filth is suffered to accumulate, because no exertions of domestic care can ever make such homes decent.’19 Macaulay dismissed contrasts between the living conditions of industrial workers and those of agricultural workers. ‘Does Mr Southey think that the body of the English peasantry live, or ever lived, in substantial or ornamented cottages,

16  For a review of the current state of play on ‘the condition of England’ question see Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous People?, 572–88. 17  Robert Southey, Letters from England, ed. Jack Simmons (London: Cresset, 1951), 210. 18  Critical and Historical Essays contributed to the Edinburgh Review by Lord Macaulay (London: Methuen, 1903), 1: 215. 19 Southey, Letters from England, 210.

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1770–1832    345 with box-​hedges, flower-​gardens, bee-​hives and orchards?’ He went on to assert that ‘it is a matter about which scarcely any doubt can exist in the most perverse mind that the improvements of machinery have lowered the price of manufactured articles and have brought within the reach of the poorest some conveniences which Sir Thomas More or his master [Henry VIII] could not have obtained at any price’.20 Despite Macaulay’s confident assertion, enough doubt existed to keep a controversy on the subject alive for two centuries. The debate still rumbles on, but it has to a large extent been superseded by a radical re-​evaluation of the whole concept of an industrial revolution. The notion of rapid industrialization assuming revolutionary proportions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been seriously undermined. Econometric historians have established that growth rates were insufficiently spectacular to justify the claim.21 Industrial output increased at less than 3 per cent per annum until 1830. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary change in the economy is now stressed. There had been changes in the agricultural, financial, and transport sectors in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which laid the foundations for industrialization. While some forms of manufacturing did see mass production in factories during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most notably in textiles, many industries retained their traditional forms of production. Some had been concentrated in large units long before, such as brewing, glassmaking, and shipbuilding. Others remained largely confined to households. Even where industrialization did occur domestic industry continued to exist side by side with factories. The metal industry was organized around the family rather than the factory until well into the nineteenth century. Crowley’s ironworks at Winlaton in the North-​East, which employed ‘several hundred hands’ in 1770 according to Arthur Young, and Boulton and Watt’s Soho Manufactory in Birmingham which in the same year employed a thousand, were exceptional. Domestic production persisted even in the textile industry. Thus spinning was mechanized before weaving, which led to a boom in hand loom weaving before power looms dealt it a death blow. The survival of household manufacturing meant that most work was still done in the family, which in turn meant that the perception by workers of being involved in a collective class enterprise was limited to certain industries and regions.22 It also meant that the concept of separate spheres, however much it influenced the middle class, scarcely affected the working class. Even where mass production in factories occurred there were jobs for women. In Lancashire, ‘38 per cent of women were 20 

Critical and Historical Essays, 1: 217, 237–8. The leading revisionist is N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). While his conclusions have been widely adopted there have been dissentient views. See Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review 45/1 (1992), 24–50. 22  Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). Calhoun’s conclusions have been questioned, e.g., Tony Clark and Tony Dickson, ‘The Birth of Class?’, in T. M. Devine and Rosalind Mitchison (eds.), People and Society in Scotland, vol. 1: 1760–1830 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 299. 21 

346

346   W. A. SPECK employed in the cotton industry’—​a slight majority of the workforce. ‘In the Yorkshire woollen industry separate spheres worked in reverse as the men wove at home while women and children carded, spun and finished in the mills.’23 By and large most jobs for women in factories were unskilled or semi-​skilled. This has led to another myth, that the system of domestic industry before the alleged Revolution was a ‘golden age’ for women. In fact ‘men’s work was central and women’s less specialized. Women performed a variety of tasks which consigned them to the position of “eternal amateurs”.’24 Where feminist historians have insisted that this was due to the perpetuation of patriarchy, which sought to keep women subordinate to men, others have argued that it was due to the market. Men could command a higher wage on the job market than women. One reason for this, perhaps, is that employers were wary of employing women because their employment could become sporadic due to childbearing and raising. Though most children were born to married mothers, nuptiality rates were high. ‘Bachelors and spinsters went out of fashion in eighteenth-​century England,’ Martin Daunton observes. ‘The proportion of people unmarried in their early 40s slumped to about 7 per cent in 1801.’25 Moreover the numbers of children per couple were rising as the age of marriage for brides fell significantly, from an average of 26.9 at the beginning of the eighteenth century to 23.7 at the end. This was a much more potent motor of the unprecedented population increase that occurred during these years than any decrease in the death rate. Between 1781 and 1831 the population of England rose from 7,050,000 to 13,300,000. In the sample of middle-​class marriages analysed by Davidoff and Hall ‘the average of seven plus children borne [sic] to a family absorbed the married woman’s life span from her late 20s (average age at birth of first child was 27.3) to her 40s (average age at birth of last child was 40.6), with birth intervals of fourteen to twenty months’.26 Given no effective birth control beyond abstinence (though breastfeeding might have lengthened the gap between births), ‘most wives spent almost their entire married lives pregnant or caring for children. Women bore on average 6–​7 live children.’27 Moreover, despite Malthus’s gloomy predictions that this would lead to catastrophe, people still obeyed the biblical exhortation to ‘be fruitful and multiply’. Childbearing on this scale was almost bound to confine most young wives to the matrimonial home. This was just the kind of wife idealized by Hannah More in 1818: ‘a woman sees the world, as it were, from a little elevation in her own garden, whence she makes an exact survey of home scenes, but takes not in that wider range of distant prospects which he, who stands on a loftier eminence, commands’.28

23 Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous People?, 362.

24 Honeyman, Women, Gender and Industrialisation, 24.

25  M. Daunton, ‘The Wealth of the Nation’, in Paul Langford (ed.), Short Oxford History of the British Isles: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 144. 26  Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 281. 27  Tanya Evans, ‘Women, Marriage and the Family’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds.), Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 70. 28  Quoted in Rendall, Women in an Industrialising Society, 2.

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1770–1832    347 That ideal was criticized by Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In it she had denounced the kind of relationship between a husband and wife advocated by Rousseau in Émile (1762), wherein Rousseau outlined a plan of education for Émile and his future wife Sophie. By the time he reached the age of 15 Émile had been taught, in addition to geography, history, and physics, subjects which were essentially useful, like astronomy. He had also been introduced to commercial concerns which would be advantageous when he started a career. By contrast Sophie at the same age had acquired knowledge of subjects which were more agreeable than useful, such as the arts, singing, and dancing. This is because her sole raison d’être is to be agreeable to her future husband. Sophie is almost a fantasy of male desire, a beautiful, docile, submissive sexual playmate, a kind of eighteenth-​century Stepford wife. Wollstonecraft was utterly opposed to this model of femininity, which treated women as children. She wanted wives to have the same education as their husbands in order to be intellectual companions to them. This was scarcely feminist in the sense of advocating separate careers for women, although she came close to this when she took equality between the sexes as far as stipulating that women should be economically independent of men. It was nevertheless regarded as a radical agenda, part of the debate over the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft had been among the first to respond to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France with A Vindication of the Rights of Men. The Vindication of the Rights of Woman was another contribution to the debate. In it she proclaimed that ‘the divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger’. The fact was that she made very few converts in the Revolutionary era. Her views were held to be too subversive, an opinion that was reinforced when her husband, William Godwin, published Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman following her death in 1797. This revealed her infatuation with the artist Fuseli, a married man, and her affair with Gilbert Imlay, which had produced an illegitimate daughter. Even admirers of Mary reacted adversely to this revelation, while it was grist to the mill of those who regarded her, wrongly, as an immoral libertine. Though she herself was in fact very religious the rev­elations in the Memoirs led to her being widely condemned for immorality and irreligion. One of the ‘divine rights’ of husbands, that his wife’s property became his on marriage, was not successfully contested in this period. The only concession to women that occurred was in 1790, when they were allowed to manage a separate business provided their husbands consented. Otherwise the legal principle of coverture, by which wives had no independent legal status, continued to operate. As Margot Finn observes, ‘references to William Blackstone’s celebrated assertion that “by marriage the very being or legal existence of a woman is suspended” have become a historiographical commonplace’.29 However, as she also demonstrates, there were ways round it. One way for affluent women was the creation of a trust to manage their own finances when they married, which was based on equity rather than common law. Another was a prenuptial 29 

Margot Finn, ‘Women, Consumption and Coverture in England, c. 1760–1860’, Historical Journal 39/3 (1996), 705.

348

348   W. A. SPECK agreement, which women below the level of the elite could and did employ. Even when there was no overt arrangement, the ‘law of necessaries’ recognized women as their husbands’ agents for purposes of purchasing goods and services for the matrimonial home. Thus Lady Westmeath’s estranged husband was actually imprisoned for debts she had run up during the 1820s. The only legal way out of a broken marriage was divorce, an option which very few could choose since it required an Act of Parliament. The double standard was another constant of these decades. A husband had only to prove his wife’s adultery to be granted a divorce, and could sue her lover for ‘criminal conversation’ into the bargain. By contrast a wife had to prove not only infidelity, but some other breach of the marriage vows, such as cruelty or desertion. Otherwise separation was the only legal choice available to the aristocracy and middle class, though the sale of wives was resorted to, apparently on an increasing scale, by the working class. Although the practice seems to have demonstrated male hegemony it appears to have been accepted by at least some of the women involved, many of whom were ‘sold’ to their lovers. In 1795 a receipt was produced in a magistrates’ court in Westminster for a guinea ‘received of James Clark … for Joseph Chipman’s wife’.30 Another way out of wedlock was by the death of a spouse. The death rate was so high in all classes in this period that it effected for married couples then what the divorce rate does today. Many women died in childbirth, while those who survived stood a fair chance of becoming widows. There might have been relatively few single people in their forties in the early nineteenth century; but there were relatively many widowed. Both single women and widows enjoyed an independence which raises the question of why so many became wives. Many widows even married for a second time. One who did to great advantage was surely the most upwardly mobile woman of the age, Harriot Mellon. She was born in 1777, the illegitimate daughter of an Irish wardrobe keeper in a company of strolling players, ‘the lowest level of the theatrical world’, as Joan Perkin puts it, ‘regarded in law as rogues and vagabonds’. At the age of 10 Harriot played a part in a farce put on in a barn. By 1795 she was an actress at Drury Lane and a popular player until 1815. She then married the 79-​year-​old banker Thomas Coutts. ‘The pre-​marriage contract specified that Harriot should retain control of her own estates and properties.’ Coutts died in 1822, leaving everything to her. ‘Harriot Coutts proved to be an excellent businesswoman and banker, taking an active role in investments and management decisions.’ In 1827 at the age of 49 she married again, this time to the 26-​year-​old Duke of St Albans, thereby becoming a duchess. When she died in 1837 she was worth £1,800,000. Harriot thus climbed up the social ladder from one of the lowest rungs to the highest below the royal family. How far she encountered different roles for women between the working, middle, and upper classes is still a question that provokes dispute. As an actress she can scarcely be said to have occupied a separate sphere. But then she was unmarried. There were thousands of single women, for instance domestic servants who were not

30 

Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society (Oxford: OUP, 1997), 53.

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1770–1832    349 allowed to marry, and who formed the single biggest occupational category until recent times, for whom the whole concept of separate spheres was irrelevant. As the wife of a prosperous banker Harriot wisely took care of her own independent business interests with a specific prenuptial agreement. Most middle-​class wives did not make such arrangements. Nevertheless the notion that they came to inhabit separate spheres from their husbands has been disputed. Some gender historians observe no significant difference emerging in the lifestyles of middle-​class men and women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from earlier periods. Conduct books such as The Whole Duty of Man, which went through sixty-​four editions between 1659 and 1842, reiterated the same message about the relative roles of the two sexes. Their precepts were more honoured in the breach than in the observance at all times. Middle-​class men did not abandon their domestic duties but played a role in the upbringing of their children, paying special attention to the education of their eldest sons. Middle-​class wives continued to take part in the world outside their front doors, for instance in the social activities of their churches or chapels. To argue that there was more continuity than change in the spheres in which men and women operated between 1700 and 1850 seems to have been generally agreed. But to insist that there was no change at all is to go too far. The ‘two spheres’ thesis does not merely draw a distinction between home and work; it also posits a dichotomy between the private and the public. The idea of a public sphere is associated with the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas. He put forward a Marxist thesis of a victorious commercial and industrial bourgeoisie triumphing over a feudal aristocracy in the Civil Wars and Revolution of seventeenth-​century England. Thereafter the financial and manufacturing interests came into conflict with each other. While no historian today would agree with his interpretation of the political struggles of Stuart England, a corollary which he advanced, that a bourgeois public sphere emerged as a result, has been surprisingly widely accepted, with modifications. For example his stress on the importance of new public meeting places such as coffee houses is now almost universally acknowledged, though their appearance has been put back to earlier in the seventeenth century. If one includes taverns, inns, and the significantly named public houses, then an even earlier dating is possible. However, the essence of the public sphere was not just a site for assembling groups of people but for providing them with opportunities for discourse about newsworthy events. This only became permanently possible after the expiry of the Printing or Licensing Act in 1695 was followed by the proliferation of newspapers and other mass-​produced printed materials. Women were to some extent precluded from the public sphere so defined since, although some were proprietors of coffee houses and even licensed premises, they did not frequent them as customers. At least middle-​class ladies, though they might appear in coffee houses, were rarely seen in public houses, though alehouses and gin shops in the East End of London were frequented by working-​class women. During the eighteenth century the public sphere expanded with the establishment of clubs and societies of all kinds. Many were exclusively male, such as the Freemasons who made their appearance in Hanoverian England with membership confined to men

350

350   W. A. SPECK only. Agricultural societies and mechanics’ institutes were also confined to men. So were on the whole the literary and philosophical societies which proliferated in England towards the close of the eighteenth century. Association for charitable, philanthropic, and religious purposes, on the other hand, provided increasing opportunities for women to participate in public ventures as the period progressed. ‘By the 1840s,’ according to Robert Shoemaker, ‘most charities which sought nationwide support set up female branches.’31 Women from all walks of life, from peeresses to paupers, also took an active part in religious affairs. The most prominent peeress among them was the redoubtable Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. She led a strictly Calvinist Methodist connection which seceded from the Church of England in 1782 and established its own Dissenting chapels, twenty-​three of which still exist. She also spent a fortune founding Trevecca College for her ministers in Breconshire, and Bethesda, an orphanage in Georgia which did not survive American Independence. Joanna Southcott, though not quite a pauper, was born in poverty in Devon and at one time worked as a farm labourer. She achieved notoriety with her practice of ‘sealing’ at least 20,000 disciples into her following. Although she did not begin publishing until she was 50 she produced twenty-​six pamphlets, her writings being mixtures of everyday stories and mystic prophecies. Her womanhood was at the very centre of her prophesying that, as a woman whose ‘seed would bruise the serpent’ (Genesis) had brought sin into the world, so one ‘clothed in the sun’ (Revelation) would redeem it. In 1814 she astounded her followers, and earned ridicule from her many, mostly male, detractors, by announcing that, at the age of 64, she was pregnant with the redeemer Shiloh. Her lying-​in became a nine-​day wonder, which ended when Joanna unexpectedly died. Between Selina and Joanna were a host of more obscure women, mostly of humble origins, who became lay preachers in the Primitive Methodists, Bible Christians, and other religious organizations. One such was Mary Porteous, the daughter of a Tyneside joiner, who worked in a factory at the age of 11. Previously a Presbyterian, she became a Wesleyan Methodist in 1807. Although the Wesleyans had banned women preachers in 1803 unless in exceptional circumstances, Mary’s case was regarded as such, and she went on to serve as a local preacher in several towns in the north of England between 1824 and 1839. When Harriot Mellon became duchess of St Albans she joined an exclusive society where women even exercised political influence. The most celebrated exponent of this in the period was Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who acquired notoriety for her canvassing exploits on behalf of Charles James Fox in his campaign at Westminster during the general election of 1784. Below the level of peeress few women had any political clout. They could not vote in parliamentary elections, a fact finally recognized by statute in the Reform Act of 1832 which limited the right to ‘male persons’. They were even deprived of the right to vote in local elections by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. Although the reform agitation of the period did not advocate extending the franchise to

31 Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650–1850, 246.

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1770–1832    351 them, seeking at most manhood suffrage, women did become involved in it. There was a brigade of working-​class females at Peterloo in 1819. The Queen Caroline affair of 1820 galvanized their middle-​class sisters into action on behalf of their heroine. Caroline’s female supporters organized petitions on her behalf all over the country, over 11,000 signing in Bristol and 7,800 in Nottingham, while a petition from the ‘married ladies of the metropolis’ obtained 17,652 signatures. The political campaign which really engaged the middle class of both sexes was that for the abolition of slavery. The agitation for the ending of the slave trade, which culminated in an Act banning it in 1807, had not involved a significant number of women. However, the launching of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions, usually known as the Anti-​Slavery Society, in 1823 started a campaign which was to be spearheaded by them. William Wilberforce, the main promoter of the society, disapproved of women taking an active part in its activities as being ‘unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture’. Nevertheless their involvement began in 1825 with the foundation of the Birmingham Ladies Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves. By the end of the decade one-​third of all such societies were organized by women, contributing more to the national society than did those run by men. In December 1832, the American William Lloyd Garrison wrote in The Liberator that ‘the ladies of Great Britain are moving the sympathies of the whole nation in behalf of the perishing slaves in the British Colonies’.32 A national petition against slavery in 1833 was an exclusively female affair, generating 187,157 signatures. The participation of women in the anti-​slavery campaign played a significant part in obtaining an Act abolishing it in the British Empire in 1833. As Clare Midgley points out, ‘female petitioning represented the first large-​scale intervention by women in Parliamentary politics’.33 There were many other political arenas in which women played a significant part. A review of their activities concluded that ‘women at all levels of society took part in politics’. They became involved in food riots, machine breaking, protests against the New Poor Law, even in elections. ‘Francis Lady Irwin maintained her hold upon the borough of Horsham in East Sussex from 1787 until her death in 1807.’ The redoubtable Anne Lister of Shibden Hall Halifax canvassed for Tory candidates in 1835 and 1837.34 Anne Lister is now better known for her lesbian than for her political activities. The decoding of her diaries has revealed that she had physical relationships with other women in early nineteenth-​century Yorkshire. How widespread lesbianism was in this period is impossible to say. Companionate relations between women were commonplace. Widows were well known for them. Mary Wollstonecraft accepted the position of companion to Mrs. Dawson, a widow in Bath in 1778 and held it for two years. This was 32 

Louis and Ros Billington, ‘ “A Burning Zeal for Righteousness”: Women in the British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1820–1860’, in Jane Rendall (ed.), Equal or Different: Women’s Politics 1800–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 92. 33  Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1970 (London: Routledge, 1992), 69. 34  Elaine Chalus and Fiona Montgomery, ‘Women and Politics’, in Barker and Chalus (eds.), Women’s History, 219, 233.

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352   W. A. SPECK despite the fact that Mrs. Dawson ‘had had a variety of companions in succession, and that no one had found it practicable to continue with her’.35 Two women living together could therefore be for nothing more than companionship. This appears to have been the case, despite rumours to the contrary, with Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, who lived together in Wales for over fifty years and became celebrated as the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’. While women could keep same-​sex partnerships private under the guise of being female companions, however, it was more difficult for men. Male homosexuality was a criminal offence, because men could be prosecuted for sodomy, which theoretically carried the death penalty. Byron, facing a charge of buggery, not to mention incest, wisely fled abroad in 1816. Despite the legal risks, a homosexual subculture existed, especially in London, although it is doubtful whether many men were prepared to risk their lives by practising as male prostitutes. By contrast female prostitution flourished in broad daylight. There was a hierarchy among whores, headed by the courtesans and mistresses of the aristocracy. Below them came, according to the experienced James Boswell, ‘the splendid Madam at fifty guineas a night, down to the civil nymph with white-​thread stockings who tramps along the Strand and will resign her engaging person to your honour for a pint of wine and a shilling’. He himself went lower than that, negotiating sex with a streetwalker for a mere sixpence.36 How many streetwalkers there were in London cannot be calculated. Reformers claimed that there were many thousands, though they probably exaggerated. That they could be a public nuisance is undoubted. A German visitor in 1773 complained that he was accosted in Fleet Street every ten yards by ‘lewd females’.37 By the 1830s there were nearly 1,000 brothels in London. Nor was prostitution confined to the capital. Most urban centres would cater to the sex trade. Again there was a great social gulf between the brothels which provided sexual partners for the upper classes in such leisure towns as Bath and other spas, and working women who sold their bodies to supplement low wages. There was a myth about the harlot’s progress, one perpetuated by Hogarth’s series of prints on the subject. ‘Moll Hackabout’, the harlot in the series, treads a well-​worn path from being a young girl arrived in London fresh from the country to be intercepted by a brothel keeper who hires her services. She then becomes the kept mistress of a merchant until she cheats on him with a lover and is cast out on to the streets. From there it is but a short steep descent into degradation, disease, and death. The moral was clear—​the first step from virtue to vice was one which led inexorably to a dreadful fate. It was to interfere in this life cycle that the Magdalen hospital for penitent prostitutes was founded in 1758, the aim being to get them out of the clutches of brothel keepers by providing a safe haven. A prestigious list of subscribers, headed by the royal family, launched the scheme.38

35 

William Godwin, Memoirs of the author of A vindication of the rights of woman (London, 1798), 25. Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (London: Heinemann, 1950), see index sub ‘casual fruition’. 37  Wilfrid R. Prest, Albion Ascendant: English History, 1660–1815 (Oxford: OUP, 1998), 183. 38  W. A. Speck, ‘The Harlot’s Progress in Eighteenth-Century England’, British Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies 3/2 (1980), 127–39. How successful the Magdalen proved to be cannot be gauged, although it 36 

Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1770–1832    353 The phenomenon of downward social mobility experienced by whores was by no means confined to the oldest profession. Movement up and down the social ladder was a common occurrence at all times. It might even have been more marked in these years, however, which witnessed more than the usual economic, political, and social upheavals. The strains of the long wars against France, with scarcely a respite from 1793 to 1815, distorted the country’s finances, necessitating high taxation and a degree of unprecedented borrowing. Revenues rose from £18 million to £80 million. Expenditure far exceeded this income, which caused the national debt to increase from £243 million to £750 million. It continued rising during the peace, peaking at £845 million in 1819. There were commercial crises in 1793, 1803, 1807–​8, 1810–​11, 1816, and 1819. The value of shares fell in 1793 and 1797, while in the latter year the Bank of England suspended cash payments. All these trends combined to make many winners and losers in the lottery of state finances. Among the winners was Nathan Mayer Rothschild. He was sent to England in 1798 by the family firm, a leading financial house in Frankfurt, to take care of its English cotton interests in Manchester, which had been disrupted by the war. Nathan set up a business in Manchester trading in cotton and other goods which flourished enough to enable him to move to London in 1808. There he established a financial enterprise which also made enough, particularly in the bullion trade, for the business in Manchester to be wound up in 1811. The House of Rothschild became so prosperous that the British government commissioned it to supply coins to pay its army and its allies, with a 2 per cent commission. At the end of the war his financial dealings with the state had earned Nathan over £1,000,000. His clout in the City was such that in 1826 when the Bank of England was threatened by another run on its assets he staved off the threat. For every Rothschild, however, there were many failed foreign business ventures in early nineteenth-​century England. ‘Ninety per cent of London’s Continental houses … were eliminated within twenty years of the battle of Waterloo.’39 The end of the War of American Independence had also led to the bankruptcy of 80 per cent of London merchants. The roller-​coaster ride of the decades between the outbreak of that war and the onset of mid-​Victorian prosperity symbolized by the Great Exhibition of 1851 was an unnerving one for men and women of all classes.

Select Bibliography Barker, Hannah, and Elaine Chalus (eds.), Women’s History: Britain, 1700–​1850: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Clark, Anna, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1995). Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–​1850 (2nd edn., London: Routledge, 2002). survived until the twentieth century when it was changed into an approved school. The hospital kept records of its inmates which would be a superb source for the history of prostitution if they could be located. 39 Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous People?, 155.

354

354   W. A. SPECK Honeyman, Katrina, Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700–​ 1870 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). Rendall, Jane, Women in an Industrializing Society:  England, 1750–​1880 (Oxford: Wiley-​ Blackwell, 1990). Shoemaker, Robert B., Gender in English Society, 1650–​1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998). Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963).

Chapter 21

‘Male’ and ‘ Fe ma l e ’ Novels? Ge nde re d F ict ions and th e Re a di ng Public, 1 7 70–​1832 Barbara M. Benedict

Introduction ‘The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.’1 So asserts Henry Tilney, the hero of Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s spoof of Regency fiction. Tilney is asserting a sensible medium between the two extremes that were crudely correlated with gender by the end of the eighteenth century. Men, according to popular discourse, never read novels: ‘Oh! Lord! Not I: I never read novels; I have something else to do,’ blusters Austen’s boorish John Thorpe, striking a masculine posture. He is exhibiting the male ideal defined by vigorous sportsmanship and disgust for feminine fictions with their minute details of conduct, morality, and love. Women, on the other extreme, were believed to read little else. Mocking this cliché, Austen depicts the naive heroine Catherine Morland, who is addicted to Gothic novels, confessing that she can barely endure poetry, plays, and travels, and hates history because ‘the men are so good for nothing, and [there are] hardly any women at all’ (109–​10). How real was this distinction between what men and women read? A minute later, Thorpe continues:  Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except the Monk; I read that t’other day; but as for all the 1 

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Barbara M. Benedict and Deidre Le Faye (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 107.

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356   BARBARA M. BENEDICT others, they are the stupidest things in creation [except] Mrs. Radcliff ’s; her novels are amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun and nature in them. (43)

Austen’s joke is that Thorpe—​and by extension men in general—​actually do read novels, and not only those with roguish male heroes, like Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), or lurid scenes of rape and corruption, exemplified by Lewis’s The Monk (1796). As Thorpe confesses, men even read Gothic mysteries centred on persecuted women, like Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1796). His attitude sketches out the battle-​lines in the gendering of literary culture: whereas women read fantasy, ‘stuff and nonsense’, so ran the common claim, men read ‘fun and nature’, tales about violence, adventure, and real life. In fact, John Thorpe and Catherine admire precisely the same books: Gothic romances set in the dark past, depicting sensitive heroines mystified by traces of bloodshed and ghostly noises, and besieged by tyrannical murderers in remote castles. These novels exemplified cheap fiction for the audience at the turn of the nineteenth century and were publicly identified as women’s novels because of their feminine heroines and plots, and because of the places and ways they were read. However, Gothic novels were only one subgenre of fiction during the period from 1770 to 1820. They came to exemplify flawed, female fiction because they grew to be highly popular in the years following the French Revolution in 1789, when England was reeling with horror at the French violations of law, social convention, and gender roles. England’s defensiveness, indeed panic, during the period centred on who read, how and why they read, and especially what they read, and women seemed to be not only the targeted audience, but feminine ways of using the novel seemed to exemplify social decay. This prejudice was mainly based on fictions about fiction, and reflects not the reality of the reading public but a gendered discourse that centred on the novel. Fiction became the flashpoint for these gender anxieties because the novel was the central, prominent signal and symptom of a changing society, because the new kinds of novels focused on sexualized sensibility, and because of the rising female cultural presence. The novel’s feminization in public culture had a reputable heritage. From the early eighteenth century, novels suffered a tradition of evoking elite sneers. These neophyte novels are mainly adventure tales. Some star hyper-​masculine heroes engaged in warfare, hazardous travel, and rambunctious behaviour; others describe women beleaguered by hunger, desertion, greedy relatives, and lustful men. Smollett’s rollicking tale of picaresque urban adventures and wartime exploits, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), for example, was so popular that it ran through eighteen English editions by 1800, not to mention the many foreign ones. At the same time, translations of novels rooted in seventeenth-​century Continental romances were becoming increasingly widely read, despite—​or because—​they had long been associated with female depravity, particularly self-​love and sexual profligacy. As early as the mid-​eighteenth century, female novelists attempted to dissociate themselves from such works. Notably, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) satirizes the novel-​addicted Arabella for believing herself a princess in a romance and loading her sensible lover with mad expectations of chivalry. Similarly, in Roderick Random, Miss Williams blames her descent

Gendered Fictions and the Reading Public, 1770–1832    357 into prostitution on an addiction to romantic fiction and poetry that leads her to identify with novelistic heroines. Novels became a byword for insane or dangerous female rebellion because they were seen to encourage sexual passion: even as early as 1761, in George Colman’s satirical play Polly Honeycombe, A Dramatic Novel, the heroine contradicts her parents, rejects housework, and resolves gleefully to dominate her future husband since, addicted to novels, she has ‘conquer’d Fear—​And almost conquer’d Shame’ like all ‘Girls of Reading, and superior notions, | Who from the fountain-​head drink love’s sweet potions’.2 Although the well-​read Polly is female, the novels she reads are written by both men and women, as the play’s catalogue of novels from a circulating library shows.

Sentimental and Epistolary Novels Although Lennox, Colman, and Smollett were deploying a literary cliché by lambasting learned ladies for violating their appropriate roles, during the 1770s with the surge of sentimentalism, novels broached new ground. These novels made emotion central to character and plot by deploying the new sentimental philosophy that held that human instincts were naturally benevolent, and that sympathy for fellow creatures demonstrated moral virtue. Such novels came by the end of the eighteenth century to be identified as ‘female’ partly because they followed the format set by the most influential innovator of epistolary fiction:  Samuel Richardson. Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) partly constitutes the letters of an innocent and exemplary young woman to her parents, as she is besieged by her amorous guardian Mr. B., but also includes a large number of her journal-​entries, supposedly written entirely for herself and thus artlessly unselfconscious. It became enormously popular, spawning sequels, imitations, and translations, and it stamped the mode of private and epistolary writing as the means for the unveiled revelation of the female self—​an association confirmed by Richardson’s subsequent epistolary novel about a young lady’s rape, madness, and death, Clarissa (1748). However, sentimental private writing could certainly express male sensibility: Laurence Sterne composes his immensely popular, nine-​volume sentimental fiction The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–​68) as the first-​person narrative of his troubled protagonist, Tristram, writing to intimate readers conjured in his mind. Opening with the instant of the interrupted orgasm that gave Tristram life, Tristram’s spiralling, stream-​of-​consciousness narrative enacts the novel’s very plot by recording Tristram’s sexual and emotional dysfunctionality, manifested by the circling writing itself. The unconventionality of this structure and the sexually explicit topic made Sterne notorious in a way only a man could live down, or live with: both in form and 2 

George Colman, Polly Honeycombe, A Dramatic Novel of One Act (Edinburgh, 1741), Epilogue, ll. 3–4, 12, 30.

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358   BARBARA M. BENEDICT topic, women had perforce to be more conventional in order to preserve their authority as authors. Sterne, however, did provide the model for Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), in which an unidentified narrator records for his own benefit his observations of Harley, the titular sentimental hero—​a youth whose sensibilities are so acute that he expires of a suppressed love that he is too shy to declare and that hence mutates into physical disease, and although the protagonist is a man, the novel became a byword for the sort of sexually titillating fiction that women, especially young women, purportedly adored. By the 1770s, indeed, many male protagonists were manifesting sentimental delicacy. Smollett’s most successful, final novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), for example, constitutes the correspondences between a group of characters, both men and women, but centres on the ruminative accounts of the prickly Matthew Bramble. Like Sterne, Smollett chooses a male narrator with quirky sensibilities, using his epistolary form to recreate the privacy of intimate and unedited communication. Nonetheless, perhaps partly because of Smollett’s gender and the rambunctious, masculine protagonists of his earlier work, reviewers perceived the book as broader and more significant than a fiction of feeling. They aver that its dramatization of regional manners gave it a geographical reach unattempted by most women novelists. In the anonymous review in the London Magazine of Humphry Clinker, which appeared the year of its publication, for example, Smollett is commended for providing fact rather than fancy: instead of ‘much of the dreadful dangers, the surprizing escapes, the deep distresses and the romantic passions which characterize our modern novel-​writers’, the reviewer remarks, Smollett’s book provides ‘something greatly preferable to a novel: it is a pleasing, yet an important lesson on life; and that part of it which describes the Scotch nation, is at once calculated to entertain the most gay, and to give the most serious a very useful fund of information’. Other reviewers commend an epistolary breadth that permits a variety of perspectives in place of the stifling atmosphere of Richardsonian letters.3 Sentimental epistolarity suggested a style and structure that would reflect the unedited and spontaneous feelings and reflections of private writing:  journals and letters. Epistolarity became increasingly identified with women because since, traditionally, women were less well educated than men and largely ignorant of the classical writers, they were perceived as writing in an informal manner that was simpler, less allusive, and more spontaneous than men’s. Henry Tilney observes ironically: ‘it is [their] delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Every body allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female.’ When Catherine doubts whether ladies write letters better than men, he asserts that their only faults are: ‘A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar’ (19–​20). Although artlessness was becoming fashionable for Romantic poetry, women’s weak education exposed them to charges of bad writing. While ‘incorrectness’ or grammatical 3 

Quoted in Lionel Kelly (ed.), Tobias Smollett: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 208, 23.

Gendered Fictions and the Reading Public, 1770–1832    359 and usage errors were rare in published works, the accusations of ignorance, simplistic characterizations, borrowed and stale plots, and stylistic ugliness remained, especially as women were perceived as preferring the derogated, formulaic Gothic and romantic novels of circulating libraries. Susan E. Ferrier, for example, sidesteps this prejudice in Marriage (1818) by a preface citing Cato’s apology for writing with ‘imperfect knowledge’ of the language.4 Following Richardson’s model in Pamela and the tragic Clarissa, epistolarity especially smacked not merely of female identity, but of sexualized female interiority. Although men obviously wrote letters, they were women’s most common form of writing since women were discouraged from writing in the public sphere, at least openly. As a consequence, letters bore the stamp of secrecy, illegitimacy, and the expression of forbidden love: the famous twelfth-​century love letters between the priest Abelard and his pupil, popularized by Alexander Pope’s heroic poem Eloisa to Abelard (1717), stood as the archetype of the genre. Many sentimental novels of the period use the epistolary form to reproduce the spontaneity and privacy of sentimental feeling: Frances Brooke translated Marie-​Jeanne Riccoboni’s Letters of Juliet Catesby, To Her Friend Lady Henrietta Camply (1760), which garnered a large audience, before writing the epistolary novels, The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1764), and The History of Emily Montague (1769). Mackenzie’s highly sentimental Julia de Roubigné, a tale. In a series of letters (1777) interweaves letters from a range of sympathetic characters to centre on romantic love even when the correspondents are describing their feelings to a friend, rather than to the beloved. The epistolary form itself embodies the intimate relations between two people, which was increasingly regarded as a female concern. By the late 1770s, sentimental novels also increasingly featured women heroines and themes of female feeling. This translated in fiction into characters whose emotional responses to any acts of kindness or cruelty or violence and to scenes of beauty testified to their heroism. Indeed, sentimentalism promoted literature as an avenue for virtuous education through feeling and sympathetic identification. Such characterizations seemed to fit women, who were screened from the violence and machinations of war, politics, and public life, better than men, who were conventionally lauded for military heroism and public success. Nonetheless, if men and women both wrote sentimentally, the treatment of sex itself still became a main dividing line between genres and between audiences. The more explicit the treatment, the less women were involved—​as authors or, presumably, audiences. Some texts were supposedly forbidden to women, which does not mean that they did not read them. For example, the Duchess of Devonshire read Choderlos de Laclos’s scandalous account of seduction Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), notorious in England for its immorality, albeit her husband edited it for her.5 At the same time, sentimental heroes gradually changed gender: such titles as Henry Brooke’s The Fool of 4  [Susan E. Ferrier], Marriage, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1818), Preface (n.p.). Ferrier quotes the cleric Jeremy Taylor’s translation of the extract. 5  Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 3.

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360   BARBARA M. BENEDICT Quality (1766) and The Man of Feeling receded before a gush of those like Sophia Briscoe’s Fine Lady (1772) and Frances Burney’s Evelina, or a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778). Eight Julias and at least four Emmas had appeared by 1816.6

Gothic and Conduct Novels Sentimental and epistolary fiction may have drawn readers’ tears, but the subgenre that followed them, the Gothic novel, won different responses. Gothic novels solicited gasps of fear and shock—​not merely reactions to the horrible events portrayed in the novel, but outraged responses to the horrible techniques of novels themselves. Gothic novels, with their exaggeratedly villainous and virtuous characters, improbable and tangled plots, themes of violence and violation, and sensationalistic techniques, obviously defied the realistic conventions governing earlier fiction. Critics’ disparagements, however, also resulted from the added weight novels bore as vehicles of emotional training for young readers. This emphasis on the instructiveness of fiction, itself a dramatic shift in literary aesthetics and philosophy, was largely caused by contemporary events. Novels in the 1790s were perched uneasily at the crux of a storm of ideas about politics, education, gender roles, and social practices as England, following the French Revolution, experienced a fierce, moralistic backlash that segregated and solidified gender roles. Novels came especially under attack because women’s education sprang into the forefront of cultural concerns with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): the manifesto for a new philosophy that stressed the need for women’s intellectual self-​determination and moral training in place of the outdated accomplishments of music, painting, dancing, and embroidery. Indeed, so anxious was the novelist Maria Edgeworth to prove the morality of her fiction that she prefaced her novel Belinda (1801) by denying that it actually was a novel: Every author has a right to give what appellation he may think proper to his works. The public have also a right to accept or refuse the classification that is presented. The following work is offered to the public as a Moral Tale—​the author not wishing to acknowledge a Novel … so much folly, errour, and vice are disseminated in books classed under this denomination, that it is hoped the wish to assume another title will be attributed to feelings that are laudable, and not fastidious.7

Echoing contemporary comments, Edgeworth opposes morality to the very genre of the novel itself. 6 

Barbara M. Benedict, ‘Sensibility by the Numbers: Austen’s Work as Regency Popular Fiction’, in Deidre Lynch (ed.), Janeites (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), 72. 7  Maria Edgeworth, ‘Advertisement’, Belinda, 3 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1801), 5–6. Edgeworth makes exceptions for the works of Madame de Crousz, author of Caroline of Lichfelt [sic], Elizabeth Inchbald, Frances Burney, and Dr. Moore.

Gendered Fictions and the Reading Public, 1770–1832    361 Edgeworth here voices the new role claimed for the novel. In opposition to the deliberately emotive, non-​rational emphasis of sentimental fiction, and the excitingly improbable plots of the Gothic novel, the new didactic fiction features exemplary heroines who model perfect behaviour: they display—​or learn to display—​perfect manners and unwavering self-​discipline, suffering misrepresentation, misuse, and mistrust without complaint, to be rewarded with noble husbands and fat fortunes. They experience this as all the while they disdain novels in favour of poetry, morality, and history, for as Austen points out in Northanger Abbey: ‘there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist’ (31). In 1802, Lady Pennington, urging her daughters to read, declares:  ‘Novels and Romances, very few of them are worth the trouble of reading; some of them may … contain good morals, but they are not worth the finding where so much rubbish is intermixed … [They lead] to errors of judgment and [I]‌therefore advise you scarce ever to meddle with any of them.’8 Yet the arguments that, first, only women read novels at all, and yet, secondly, that only bad women read novels whereas good women read good works—​particularly sermons and conduct manuals—​were manifestly untrue. By defining her novel as a ‘Moral Tale’, Edgeworth herself collapses the distinction between fictional tale-​telling and morality, and reflects the fact that, since so many women read novels, neither all the women nor all the novels could be bad. Moreover, new novels had been a central topic of fashionable conversation for half a century, and novel-​reading women were becoming increasingly visible as cultural consumers. Gender nonetheless remained a vital element in the construction, reception, and analysis of the form, and the issues it raises illuminate the development of the genre.

‘By a Lady’: The Gender of Authors and Aesthetics What genders a novel? Is a ‘female’ novel so defined because it is written ‘By a Lady’, for ladies, or about ladies? Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), albeit written by a man, is certainly presented by a female narrator, and it is about a woman, but its tale of promiscuity and theft appealed as much to men as women. So did his cautionary tale purportedly for women, Roxana (1724), which chronicled its protagonist’s descent into whoredom, murder, and madness. By the late eighteenth century, however, more women than ever before were writing novels, and recent research has shown that they produced about a third of those published.9 From 1770 to 1800, novels identified as female on their title pages crested, but so, indeed, did all novels, rising to 100 new 8  Lady [Sarah] Pennington, An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters, in a Letter to Miss Pennington (London, 1802), 61–3. 9  Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 12.

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362   BARBARA M. BENEDICT fictions a year in 1800.10 Still, the prominence of the attribution ‘By a Lady’ indicates a shift in the relationship of gender to literature, particularly fiction: it signals that gender was becoming an aesthetic or formal aspect of fiction-​writing—​a matter not of the author’s sex but of the book’s.11 Books that centred on women’s lives were not necessarily woman-​authored, but they were perceived as probably so: on reading Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Annabella Milbanke (who became Lady Byron) speculated that it might have been written by Charlotte Smith, author of the popular Emmeline (1789), commenting to her mother: ‘I wish much to know who is the author or ess I am told.’12 Fiction ‘By a Lady’ constituted only a part of the novels on offer in part because many authors of both genders remained anonymous, at least in their first efforts: of the 1,421 novels published between 1770 and 1799, the vast majority lacked any authorial attribution—​no less than 71.3 per cent—​since, as William St Clair has pointed out, anonymity both intensified the reader’s curiosity and protected authors and publishers from legal redress demanded by offended high-​society figures who believed themselves satirized. Moreover, anonymity permitted publishers to issue novels of uneven quality in a format that suggested they were all equally rewarding to read, a development exemplified by the formulaic fiction published for circulating libraries by the Minerva Press. Critical reviews also paid specific attention to whether novels were suitable female fare, and in effect doomed any deemed too racy for the ladies.13 However, reviews of women’s fiction eventually helped to elevate the status of women authors as writers equal to men, and in her important theorization of the novel, The Progress of Romance (1778), Clara Reeve defends the genre itself against masculine contempt: her spokeswoman declares that ‘The learned men of our own country have in general affected a contempt for this kind of writing … and looked upon Romances, as proper furniture only for a Lady’s Library’, but in fact they are equivalent to ‘Epic poems’.14 Women authors were still a relatively new phenomenon in the later eighteenth century. While women since the seventeenth century had, of course, published poetry, drama, and fiction—​notably the Restoration playwright Aphra Behn, whose novel-​ cum-​travelogue Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (1688) remained famous throughout the period—​ female publication was strongly associated with public females, that is prostitutes. Such a stigma prohibited many women from confessing their authorship, and doubtless dissuaded others from writing at all. Moreover, Behn was 10  James Raven, ‘Historical Introduction: The Novel Comes of Age’, in Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, vol. 1: 1770–1799 (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 27. 11  William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 174. 12  Quoted in B. C. Southam (ed.), Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Barnes & Noble, 1968), 8. 13  Raven, ‘Historical Introduction’, in Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–1829, 1: 27; St Clair, Reading Nation, 174–5, 220. 14  Laura Runge, ‘Momentary Fame: Female Novelists in Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews’, in Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (eds.), A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 295; Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries, and Manners, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1785), 1: 5.

Gendered Fictions and the Reading Public, 1770–1832    363 herself notorious for sexual liaisons, and since Defoe’s Moll Flanders, novels recounting female experience supposedly from a woman’s pen seemed guaranteed to supply sexual anecdotes—​particularly since female narratives by definition related the experience of femininity, that is sexual or at least romantic experience. The term ‘Lady’, however, carries not only gender but also class associations that helped to soften the sexual innuendo of female authorship into a rather mistier sentimentalism. Jane Austen uses this designation, and contemporary readers, as she gleefully noted, verified her class signature by pointing out the writer’s intimate knowledge of genteel social manners. Her first published fiction, Sense and Sensibility, was advertised in The Star (31 October 1811) and the Morning Chronicle (7, 9, and 28 November 1811) as written by ‘A Lady’, ‘Lady —​’, and ‘Lady A—​’.15 In contrast, Moll Flanders is no lady, nor is John Cleland’s joyously promiscuous Fanny Hill, the narrator of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749). The term ‘Lady’, rather than ‘woman’, hints that the author knows scandalous stories about high life, but has concealed her name in order to write more candidly—​that is, more about the misdeeds of the mighty. This implication dates at least from Delarivier Manley’s notorious and thinly veiled roman à clef satirizing sexual corruption in the Whiggish nobility, The New Atalantis (1709), but it was probably Eliza Haywood’s erotic tales of female desire, particularly Love in Excess (1719), that solidified the association of novels and female sexual experience. Indeed, the very notion of an autobiographical tale by a ‘lady’ implies sexual scandal since no lady worthy of the name would have any tale to tell: her story ought to be ‘A blank, my lord,’ as the virtuous Viola declares to her Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Furthermore, since many of the Romantic novels ascribed to ‘a Lady’ use an epistolary format, they imply that they have an autobiographical basis, and thus intensify the identification of female-​authored fiction with stories of women’s sexual feelings. Promising both sentimental titillation and the heady aroma of high class, the designation of ‘By a Lady’ promised readers fashionable and exciting feeling. Women also were understood to have a different sensibility from men. More protected and delicately built, they were attributed with trembling sensibilities centred on domesticity and romance. With greater private time and fewer distractions than men, women were also thought to brood upon the nuances of emotion and behaviour. Whereas early sentimental novelists saw this as a virtue, later writers found it dangerous because it could cause either self-​destructive despair, or sexual excess. Jane Austen’s pensive and faded heroine in Persuasion (1818) maintains that, although men can act heroically while they ‘have an object’ in view, women suffer longer: ‘All the privilege I claim for my own sex … is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.’16 By the end of the eighteenth century, several novels contrasted the two plots of feminine feeling: hazardous passion and virtuous self-​restraint. In Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791), the impulsive Miss Milner wins the love 15  David Gilson, ‘Introduction to Sense and Sensibility’, in Jane Austen: Collected Articles and Introductions (Wiltshire: privately printed, 1998), 2. 16  Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Janet Todd and Antje Blank (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 256.

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364   BARBARA M. BENEDICT of her tyrannical guardian and weds him, only to succumb to adultery and die in poverty, rejected and despised by her madly jealous husband. In the novel’s second half, her self-​denying, dutiful daughter Matilda wins true love and the inheritance. In case readers miss the point, Inchbald explains at the end that the novel advocates ‘A PROPER EDUCATION’ for women.17 Similarly, Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) contrasts the responses of the two heroines when rejected by their suitors:  Elinor Dashwood’s silently suffering but disciplined ‘sense’ allows her dignity whereas her younger sister Marianne’s passionate, indulged ‘sensibility’ almost kills her. Indeed, the dangers of women’s sentimental susceptibility prompt a flow of didactic novels featuring heroines who either model an admirable restraint of their natural passions, like Burney’s Evelina, or pay the price for failing to do so, like Burney’s Camilla Tyrold, who, in Camilla, or a Picture of Youth (1796), suffers five volumes of frustrations, culminating in a bout of madness, before winning her suitor. Works such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary (1788) and Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) illustrate the need for women to use their minds to control their hearts, and later novels by Hannah More, Jane West, Ferrier, and Edgeworth advocate a rational balance of love and thought.18 Their confined experience also appeared to allow women unique access to psychological depth. This psychological approach particularly flourished in the subgenre of the female Gothic, which emphasized the uncertainties of perception that heroines suffer in an obscure, dangerous, patriarchal world. Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels exemplify the genre by portraying heroines fleeing male violence or confined by tyrants, and entangled in murky plots featuring nefarious outlaws, madness, and murder. The suspense arises less from the dramatic action than from the technique of representing the scenes entirely through the protagonist’s consciousness. For example, when in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) Emily St. Aubert’s guardian, the ferocious Montoni, compels her to leave her aunt’s house and accompany him to an obscure location, Radcliffe records not the causes but Emily’s speculations on them. After a terrified night fearing Montoni means to murder her:  It appeared, upon calmer consideration, that Montoni was removing her to his secluded castle, because he could there, with more probability of success, attempt to terrify her into obedience; or, that, should its gloomy and sequestered scenes fail of this effect, her forced marriage with the Count could there be solemnized with the secrecy, which was necessary to the honour of Montoni.19

Radcliffe’s plot unravels through the fears, confusions, and superstitions of her heroine, so that readers can never clearly see where the truth lies. 17 

Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story, 4 vols. (London, 1791), 4: 157. Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 188–9. 19  Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonomy Dobrée (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1970), 224. 18 

Gendered Fictions and the Reading Public, 1770–1832    365 However, the very narrowness of women’s experience was also credited with giving them an insight into social dynamics that translated into social realism. Especially as, after the publication of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, women were tutored in the skills and duties of self-​regulation, moral judgement, child-​rearing, and maintaining the household, they were seen as attuned to the nuances of social interaction. Austen’s narrator in Northanger Abbey opposes male and female reading primarily on the basis of relevance:  novels are fresh mirrors of contemporary life whereas conventional male reading creaks with stale portraits of bygone manners and dead topics. Scott himself admired less his own, sweepingly historical style than the delicate precision of Jane Austen’s aesthetic: in his Journal on 14 March 1826, he noted:  Also read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow wow strain I can do myself like any now going but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-​place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early.20

Despite his praise, Scott in the second decade of the nineteenth century identifies here another consequence of the widening gap between novels identified as female and those seen as male. Remarking that ‘the women do this better’, he implies that historical sweep is male territory, details of ordinary life, female.21 Indeed, the replication of genre fiction correlated with female topics and a feminine aesthetic may have contributed to the sinking of the novel’s status after the mid-​eighteenth-​century praise for the fictions of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. Even Jane Austen’s works were considered by some contemporary reviewers ‘far too good to have been written by a woman’. Not until the surge of enthusiasm and praise for Scott’s works and the peaking of Romanticism, with its emphasis on authorial individuality and genius at the start of the nineteenth century did the novel climb back into critical favour. Even when the critical establishment gave women authors serious reviews in the early nineteenth century, these tended to evaluate their work as the result of ‘rote learning and obsessive scrutiny of their limited surroundings’ rather than as evidence of the ‘sustained attention and inborn genius’ of male novelists.22 Frequently, female authors apologize for their impertinence in writing at all: Jane Austen derogated herself as ‘the most unlearned, & uninformed Female who ever dared to be an Authoress’ in a letter to the Prince Regent’s Librarian, James Stanier Clarke.23 This cliché, however, already over a century old, also works to advertise the text’s readability, and assures readers that it is written with etiquette, as well as about it.

20 

Quoted in Southam (ed.), Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 106. Quoted in Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism, 190. 22  Runge, ‘Momentary Fame: Female Novelists in Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews’, 295. 23  Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deidre Le Faye (new edn., Oxford: OUP, 1995), 306. 21 

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‘I Never Read Novels’: The Gender of Readers and Reading Among the fictions about fiction that stoked the fires of moral panic in the early Romantic period was the visibility of women reading novels. In fact, most novel-​readers were male, as most readers always had been. By the mid-​eighteenth century, only about 60 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women could read at all, and, while works of religion, history, geography, and travel outstripped novels in most libraries, provincial novel-​readers and library-​borrowers were primarily male.24 In fact, men and women read largely the same books: the Prince Regent and his court admired Jane Austen’s novels, for example; she herself read purportedly immoral fictions by Fielding and Sterne, whom she parodies in her juvenilia; and Tristram himself reveals that he expects women to read his narrative by adjuring his reader on one famous occasion as ‘Madam!’. The poet and fiction reviewer Anna Laetitia Barbauld, wife of a minister, even commended the delicacy of Sterne’s sentimental touches.25 Several factors fed this delusion that women constituted the market for fiction and that this was dangerous. Women who read were seen as derogating their household duties, and fiction appeared less educational than other genres.26 Certainly men, given their education, had generally read more kinds of works than women: in Jane Austen’s Emma, the respectable, rising yeoman farmer Robert Martin reads Vicesimus Knox’s compendium of lauded literature Elegant Extracts (1790) aloud to his family after his day’s labour has ended, but forgets to bring his beloved, if dim-​witted, Harriet Smith the novels she asked for from the library, and she sulks about the omission. If novels require less formal education and very little, if any, classical training to enjoy, they do take a long time to read, and women, at least middle-​and upper-​class women freed from housework, had the leisure. Moreover, since far more women were reading (and writing) than ever before, and far more novels were tumbling off the press, women and novels seemed sisters-​in-​crime. In 1773, the Monthly Review sneered that women always have entertained a ‘keen relish for novels, as they have for green apples … or unwholesome food’: as daughters of Eve, women plucking the forbidden fruit searching for sexual knowledge. Since novels were by definition ‘new’, they were fashion items, ephemeral and thus trivial: hence the Monthly Review’s remark, ‘Novels generally usher in the Winter as Snow-​drops do the Spring, and like them, have little beauty to recommend them, besides an early appearance.’27 Novelty

24 Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, 12–13, 36; Paul Kauffman, ‘In Defense of

Fair Readers’, Review of English Literature 8/1 (1967), 69, 70. 25  Alan B. Howes, ‘Introduction’, in Howes (ed.), Laurence Sterne: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Barnes & Noble, 1971), 15–16. 26 Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, 72. 27  Quoted in Devendra P. Varma, The Evergreen Tree of Diabolical Knowledge (Washington, DC: Consortium Press, 1972), 106–7; John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London, New York, and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988), 97.

Gendered Fictions and the Reading Public, 1770–1832    367 and transience were qualities associated with women. The proliferation of circulating fiction was seen to parallel the proliferation of female readers, and, indeed, publishers like the Minerva Press deliberately targeted women as their audience. The change in the sexual and social composition of the audience was a cultural shock. Women readers in great numbers, especially middle-​class women, were a new audience, and as such, like servants, shook the status quo by which literacy had demarcated the elite. By reading, women penetrated the public sphere as they never had before. Much of the anxiety concerning women reading resulted from where they read: places that seemed sequestered, improper, private, and fed a solitariness and secrecy that seemed to breed illegitimate fantasies. In adjuring his youthful, female audience towards self-​improvement, the Rev. Henry Kett nervously declares: ‘Reading may be made a social, as well as a solitary occupation.’28 In fact, as book prices began abruptly to climb in the final quarter of the century, reaching 10s. 6d. for a typical three-​volume novel, sharing reading matter became more common.29 Both circulating and private libraries were places of entertainment and display, with billiard tables, spinets, important paintings, card tables, and spaces for private and public reading. However, the circulating library most visibly stood as the emblem of unmonitored, excessive consumption of the ephemeral fiction demanded by female readers: if they chose the books publicly, they consumed them privately, and obsessively.30 There were other venues for reading—​coffee houses, shops, and private libraries—​but some 75 per cent of the run of a popular novel landed in a circulating library at some point.31 In fact, these institutions provided a huge range of texts to lenders from the city and countryside, but their signature stamp in the public consciousness was the three-​decker novel. Despite the fact that most patrons were male, circulating libraries thus became identified with women’s appetite for titillating reading. How people read also caused anxiety. Most important to Romantic critics was the fear that by reading about heroines who defied convention to follow their hearts, female readers would rush into the arms of the nearest half-​pay officer. This worry had to do with the notion that reading was an exercise in uncritical identification: that readers learned by imitation, just as they ought to learn Christian virtues by reading the Bible. In The Progress of Romance, Reeve’s spokeswoman commends Richardson’s Pamela for literary beauties that ‘find a short way to the heart, which it engages by its best and noblest feelings … There need no other proof of a bad and corrupted heart, than its being insensible to the distresses, and incapable to the rewards of virtue.—​I should want no other criterion of a good or bad heart, than the manner in which a young person was affected by reading Pamela’ (1: 135). Even Barbauld, in her fifty-​volume edition of The British 28  Rev. Henry Kett, Emily, A Moral Tale, including Letters from a father to his Daughter upon the Most Important Subjects, 2 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1809), 1: 218–19. 29  John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), 178. 30  Peter De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 253–4. 31 Varma, The Evergreen Tree of Diabolical Knowledge, 79.

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368   BARBARA M. BENEDICT Novelists (1810), needs to refute the charge that novels lead women astray by admitting that although love forms the focus of most fiction, few readers believe it anything but fiction: life, by contrast, is an indecipherable work-​in-​progress. While the model of moral reading remained devotional—​the medieval study of a few texts, the daily conning of the Bible, the memorization and contemplation of selected, venerable works—​the rush to read the newest novel required readers to speed through hundreds of pages. They seemed to read for the plot rather than the moral, for the sentimental vignette rather than the intellectual conception, for the quick fix of feeling instead of the lesson for life. There were so many books that they thus seemed to demand extensive rather than intensive reading: Kett, for example, attempts to counter this tendency by instructing young women to read attentively rather than gobbling up texts the way they do novels: ‘Give your mind to your author,’ he exhorts, for ‘If you read too hastily you will learn nothing, and the ideas of an author will glide before your mind like the visions of a dream’ (222). Moreover, while men clearly also identified with heroes (and, indeed, heroines), they were trained in scepticism, judgement, and restraint whereas it was thought that women read corporeally, and thus experienced the physical effects of sympathy like blushing and fainting. Fiction thus seemed to feed their anti-​intellectual instincts. The novel appeared to embody a new and gendered way of consuming literary culture itself.

Conclusion: The Gender of Novels Novels from 1770 to 1830 change style, theme, and mode. In the 1770s, sentimental epistolary fiction dominates; the 1780s see the beginning of conduct novels that last well into the Victorian period; the 1790s witness a thunderclap of Gothic; and by the 1810s, Romantic fiction was becoming the latest subgenre. Yet to readers from 1770 to 1830, individual novels also appear to have, or at least to hint at, a gender themselves. This identification of a text with a sex was manufactured from the combination of the gender of their heroes, their plots and settings, their aesthetic techniques, and a moral tone that solicited either male or female readers. As many women novelists at the beginning of the nineteenth century transformed conduct literature into a fictional form, proving lessons in social etiquette and self-​discipline woven into love stories, Romantic fiction, spurred on by Scott, made extreme characters and epic scope the novel’s province. ‘Interesting’ stories—​that is, stories with a love interest—​and stories of familial relations, female roles, and women’s behaviour were considered ‘female’.32 Conduct fiction that placed the sentimental heroine not in situations of deadly danger in faraway lands, but plumb in the middle of upper-​echelon English society similarly seemed instructions for women alone, whereas Romantic fiction that placed her—​or more often, him—​on the margins challenged social conventions in a fashion that undermined social mores. Thus, according to 32 

Jane Spencer, ‘Women Writers and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 233.

Gendered Fictions and the Reading Public, 1770–1832    369 Reeve, didactic texts which advance virtue and morality were coded as ‘female’, whereas texts like Fielding’s or Scott’s with roistering heroes, adventurous plots, and promiscuous heroes, previously considered fare for both genders, were considered male. The supposed division between a male and a female book is particularly clear in the contrast between Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Scott’s Waverley; or ’Tis Sixty Years Since, both published in 1814. Scott’s novel, set in the previous century, relates the military, political, and romantic adventures of Edward, the heir to the baronet, Sir Everard Waverley, after he leaves his family to join a regiment of dragoons bent on fighting the Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland. Mansfield Park concerns the sufferings of a penniless heroine immured as a poor relation in the mansion of a grand family. In both novels, the heroes are distracted by inappropriate suitors but find true love, and in both a quarrel in the family—​between brothers, in Scott’s case, and sisters in Austen’s—​stimulate the complications of the plot. In the man’s novel, however, the male hero leaves home and, despite misadventures, regains his honour and wins a pardon through military action; in the woman’s, the heroine earns status and reward by moral self-​discipline and passive resistance. In both manner and matter, Scott’s novels go where women’s fiction generally feared to tread. Whereas most women avoided stylistic crudity for fear of ‘incorrectness’, Scott gave his characters a Scottish dialect. Even Edgeworth’s illiterate narrator, the servant Thady, who speaks in an Irish brogue in Castle Rackrent (1800), functions to satirize Irish regionalism and the very antiquarian solemnity that Scott embraced, not as a Romantic model. Most significantly, Scott’s fictions sketched a historical past in accurate detail. The first reviewer emphasized Waverley’s historical accuracy, declaring that: ‘We are unwilling to consider this publication in the light of a common novel whose fate is to be devoured with rapidity for the day, and afterwards forgotten forever; but as a vehicle of curious accurate information upon a subject which must at all times demand our attention—​the history and manners of a very, very large and renowned portion of the inhabitants of these islands.’33 Albeit contentious, Scott’s use of history also worked to gender his novels since women’s interest in history was perceived as slight, given, as Catherine Morland points out, that it features so few women. A novel’s subgenre also implies its gender. Scott himself contrasts his real history with the stale female fantasy version, and his originality with the formulaic fare of circulating libraries. In the preface to Waverley, he declares:  Had I, for example, announced in my frontispiece, ‘Waverley, a Tale of other Days,’ must not every novel-​reader have anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing has been long uninhabited, and the keys either lost or consigned to the care of some aged butler, or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts? … Would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title-​page? … Or if I had rather chosen to call my work a ‘Sentimental Tale,’ would it not have been a sufficient presage of a heroine with 33 

British Critic (August 1814), quoted in John O. Hayden (ed.), Scott: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 68.

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370   BARBARA M. BENEDICT a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of her solitary hours, which she fortunately finds always the means of transporting from castle to cottage … Or again, if my Waverley had been entitled ‘A Tale of the Times,’ wouldst thou not, gentle reader have demanded from me a dashing sketch of the fashionable world, a few anecdotes of private scandal thinly veiled, and if lusciously painted so much the better; a heroine from Grosvenor Square, and a hero from the barouche Club or the Four-​in-​Hand … the object of my tale is more a description of men than manners.34

As the Romantic regard for literary originality and genius rose, genre fiction became stamped as conventional female entertainment. Nonetheless, ‘male’ and ‘female’ novels of the period share themes and plot lines. Foremost are the themes of the discovery of identity and recovery of inheritance. In Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, the servant Humphry is discovered miraculously to be the natural son of his irascible but tender-​hearted master, Matthew Bramble, while, among many other examples, Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian (1797), not to mention Eleanor Sleath’s Minerva Press novel Orphan of the Rhine (1798), all concern the heroine’s recovery of her identity and fortune. By the nineteenth century, in fact, reading and readers of novels began to escape gender-​identification as the genre became a respected part of British literary heritage, legitimate—​even laudable—​reading-​matter for both genders. Significantly, Barbauld’s British Novelists, itself an emblem of the rise of the novel’s prestige in the Romantic period, does not differentiate authors by gender or novels by subgenre: Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and Ann Radcliffe conclude the series, but her list includes French and German titles, satirical and historical fictions, even a Chinese novel, as well as the by-​then canonical productions of Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, and a host of works now forgotten. In fact, Barbauld uses the new prominence of women writers to prove the genre’s probity, declaring that: ‘A very great proportion of [good writers] are ladies: and surely it will not be said that either taste or moral have been losers by their taking the pen.’35 By the end of the Regency, as Romanticism began gradually to shift into what would become a Victorian moral aesthetic, it was still Scott’s Waverley that grew so madly popular with both genders that it sold out its 1,000 copies in five weeks, and appeared in six editions by the end of the year.36 The novel had become a genderless literary genre.

Select Bibliography Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–​1900 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957).

34 

[Walter Scott], Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1814), chapter 1: ‘Introductory’, 5–8. 35 Barbauld, The British Novelists; with An Essay; and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical (London, 1810), 415. 36  Hayden (ed.), Scott: The Critical Heritage, 3.

Gendered Fictions and the Reading Public, 1770–1832    371 Armstrong, Nancy, Desire and Domestic Fiction:  A  Political History of the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 1987). Benedict, Barbara, Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–​1800 (New York: AMS Press, 1994). Clery, E. J., The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–​1800 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995). Ellis, Markman, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 1996). Ezell, Margaret J. M., Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993). Fergus, Jan, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England (Oxford: OUP, 2006). Gallagher, Catherine, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–​1820 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994). Garside, Peter, James Raven and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, vol. 1: 1770–​1799 (Oxford: OUP, 2000). Klancher, Jon P., The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–​1832 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987). Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Pearson, Jacqueline, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–​ 1835:  A  Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). Richardson, Alan, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–​ 1832 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). Todd, Janet, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986).

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Chapter 22

Reviewing th e  Nov e l Antonia Forster

Every attentive observer of the present times will have remarked, that the taste for novel-​reading pervades almost all orders of the people, and is neither confined to age, sex, rank, or profession; we have even been told of persons of distinguished eminence, and dignified stations in life, who have considered it as an innocent and salutary relaxation from severe studies, particularly that of the law; while, on the other hand, many divines and other devout persons, as well as several celebrated moral writers, have condemned this loose branch of literature as tending to vitiate the mind, corrupt the morals, and to produce a pernicious influence on the conduct of human life, in its ordinary occurrences.

This opening sentence, from a 1798 review of Mary Ann Hanway’s novel, Ellinor; or, the World as It Is (EM 33, 1798: 187),1 summarizes many of the issues that concern the reviewers of eighteenth-​century fiction. The early reviewers write often about their struggles to fulfil the wishes and needs of their readers, ‘engaging their attention to such books as are really worth reading, and preventing people from throwing away their money and time, on such as are either hurtful or useless’ (MR 19, 1758: 400). Simultaneously, while usually proclaiming themselves to be the servants of the public, they are trying to form public taste. A particularly contentious area within which reviewers demonstrate the complexity of their attitudes to and perceived relationship with their readers is the reviewing of fiction. The beginning of modern reviewing had come in 1749 when Ralph Griffiths’s Monthly Review had taken the revolutionary step of extending reviewing beyond books of scholarly interest to virtually all publications and thus to the ever-​expanding field of popular literature. Griffiths had explained the role of the reviewer in simple, practical terms to a reading public unused to the phenomenon of purchasing literary judgements or descriptions of books that might pre-​empt any necessity of reading the books themselves:  1  All references to the principal Reviews and magazines with review sections—​the Monthly Review (MR), the Critical Review (CR), the London Review (LR), the English Review (ER), the Analytical Review (AR), the British Critic (BC), Anti-​Jacobin Review (AJR), European Magazine (EM), Monthly Mirror (MM), Monthly Visitor (MV)—​will be thus abbreviated and given parenthetically in the text.

Reviewing the Novel   373 When the abuse of title-​pages is obviously come to such a pass, that few readers care to take in a book, any more than a servant, without a recommendation; to acquaint the public that a summary review of the productions of the press, as they occur to notice, was perhaps never more necessary than now, would be superfluous and vain. The cure then for this general complaint is evidently, and only, to be found in a periodical work, whose sole object should be to give a compendious account of those productions of the press, as they come out, that are worth notice; an account, in short, which should, in virtue of its candour, and justness of distinction, obtain authority enough for its representations to be serviceable to such as would choose to have some idea of a book before they lay out their money or time on it.2

The selectiveness of ‘those productions of the press … that are worth notice’ lasted only two months and after that the determination to ‘register all the new Things in general, without exception to any, on account of their lowness of rank or price’ (MR 1, 1749: 238) meant that the often-​lowly category of novels was covered too. Coverage of fiction varied enormously between Reviews. When expanding the general field of reviewing to ‘all the new Things in general’, the Monthly Review established a two-​tier system of main articles and catalogue items, generally far briefer, for works of less importance.3 This procedure was followed by most subsequent Reviews. The Critical Review, which began, like all the succeeding ones, by assuming the necessity of reviewing but attempting to argue that it was much in need of reform, started without a catalogue but a few months later claimed public demand for one. Prompted, they say, by many letters from ‘sundry discontented writers, who are greatly offended at our passing over their several productions in silence, without the least mark of censure or approbation’, and ‘to render [their] work more compleat and entertaining’, they propose to begin a catalogue, and they desire readers to consider it as ‘the impedimenta exercitus, or baggage of [the reviewers’] army’ (CR 1, 1756: 480). Even as early as 1758 the Monthly Review was referring to the hackney writers as ‘the wretches whose worthless labours so amply shew the utility of our Monthly Catalogues’ (MR 18, 1758: 420). One of the most famous early outbursts about fiction and the public contempt in which it is held is Jane Austen’s. In Northanger Abbey she suggests leaving it ‘to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans’.4 With an average of thirty-​one new novels published each year in the 1770s, forty in the 1780s, and seventy in the 1790s, with rough averages of twenty-​seven in the 1750s, and thirty-​four 2  This ‘Advertisement’ is bound following the table of contents at the beginning of volume 1 of the Monthly Review in the Bodleian Library’s copy (Griffiths’s own annotated set; the annotations identify most of the reviewers up to 1815, whereas most reviewers in other journals are not identifiable) but is bound at the end of the first number, i.e., between pp. 80 and 81, in the British Library’s copy. 3  For more detail of the complexities of the division between main articles and monthly catalogue articles, see Antonia Forster, ‘Book Reviewing’, in Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695–​1830 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 634–​6. 4  Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Barbara M. Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 30.

374

374   ANTONIA FORSTER in the 1760s,5 there is plenty of opportunity for such abuse, and examples abound in all the periodicals reviewing fiction. The Critical Review’s complaint in June 1777 is fairly typical: ‘The abuse of novel writing is so great, that it has almost brought that species of entertainment into discredit. Meagre stories, flatly told, and drawled through many tedious volumes with no other view than a little dirty emolument, have overwhelmed us like a flood’ (CR 43, 1777: 473). Twenty-​five years earlier Ralph Griffiths had exclaimed in a similar mood: ‘From the number of contemptible productions with which our novel-​ makers have complimented the public this season, one may almost be tempted to conclude that these writers have combined to try whether the age may not be cured of its peculiar taste for this species of amusement, by an excessive surfeit’ (MR 6, 1752: 75). There are numerous references to, as the Monthly Mirror puts it in 1795, ‘the vast profusion of trash perpetually crowding on the public, under the form of a Novel’ (MM 1, 1795: 358). Sometimes the outbursts are more heartfelt, as when Andrew Becket cries in the Monthly Review in November 1788: ‘How long, O Novelist! wilt thou abuse our patience? How long wilt thou continue to persecute us by the publication of “Nothings,” and those too in “so strange a style”—​So nonsensically, so stupidly written, that even Laughter is unable to exercise his functions on them’ (MR 79, 1788: 467). ‘There cannot be a greater tax on a Reviewer than to read through the generality of modern Novels, which multiply every year’ (GM 57, 1787: 909), complains the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1787, and the English Review goes even further in 1789: ‘We often consider, in these our literary labours, whether most writers of modern novels be not destined for the sole purpose of punishing the sins of Reviewers, as it is hardly possible, on any other principle, to find an apology for their existence’ (ER 14, 1789: 386). It was not only in public that they complained either; Ralph Griffiths’s correspondence has grumbles and protests from his reviewers, with, for example, Samuel Badcock’s complaining in 1782: ‘I have no partiality for such Kind of Reading’;6 and William Enfield in 1795: ‘at my time of life, moderate novels are very tedious reading’.7 On the other hand, Robert D. Mayo argued convincingly in 1962 in The English Novel in the Magazines that it was the eighteenth-​century review journals’ regular attention to prose fiction which ‘helped beyond any other single agency (outside the obvious merits of the better novels themselves) to ensure for prose fiction a recognized place in the total eighteenth-​century consciousness’.8 Whatever their attitudes, the reviewers did cover fiction extensively and their thousands of comments, even when short and insulting, 5 

Figures for the 1750s and 1760s are approximate, based partly on James Raven, British Fiction, 1750–​1770: A Chronological Check-​List of Prose Fiction Printed in Britain and Ireland (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1987) and Antonia Forster, Index to Book Reviews in England, 1749–​1774 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990). For the later figures, see Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 1: 26. 6  Bodleian Library Add. MS C90 fol. 79v : Samuel Badcock to Ralph Griffiths, 6 April 1782. 7  Bodleian Library Add. MS C89 fols. 86r–​86v : William Enfield to Ralph Griffiths, 7 January 1795. 8  Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines 1740–​1815 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1962), 201.

Reviewing the Novel   375 provide insights into literary and social attitudes, as well as a certain amount of information about those novels which appear not to have survived (about 9 per cent of the novels first published between 1770 and 1799). In the first half of the 1750s, when there was only one review journal and the magazines were doing very little reviewing, just eight novels were reviewed in two journals and none in more. Some of the eight are by well-​known authors—​Charlotte Lennox (The Life of Harriot Stuart and The Female Quixote), Henry Fielding (Amelia), and Samuel Richardson (Sir Charles Grandison)—​and the others are not. In all but one case the additional review is in the Gentleman’s Magazine; the exception is the anonymous Adventures of a Valet reviewed in 1752 in the London Magazine. In 1756, after the Monthly was joined by the Critical, edited by Smollett in its earliest years, it is not surprising that the number of novels reviewed in two journals was suddenly transformed from a tiny minority to five times the number of those reviewed in only one, although this disproportion wavered wildly, lessening from five times to twice in 1757 and rising again to five times in 1758, the first year in which two novels (Chiron: or, the Mental Optician and The Cloister: or, the Amours of Sanfroid) were reviewed in three journals. Numbers of reviews rose with the expansion of magazine reviewing in the late 1750s and 1760s, with four reviews given to three of the novels published in 1759, five of those published in 1760, and four in 1761. The first work of fiction to be reviewed in five journals was Richard Griffiths’s Something New in 1762; a high point of seven reviews was reached by one work of fiction in 1768 (Alexander Dow’s Tales, Translated from the Persian of Inatulla of Delhi) and one in 1769 (Tobias Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom). As the numbers increased, we see repeatedly that the attention paid to novels in reviews is often at variance with the judgements of later literary history. In 1767, for example, while the final volume of Tristram Shandy was reviewed in three journals, Frances Sheridan’s The History of Nourjahad was reviewed in six, as was The Ants: a Rhapsody, possibly by Philip Withers. As the number of Reviews expanded with the advent of the London Review in 1775, the English Review in 1783, the Analytical Review in 1788, the British Critic in 1793, and the Anti-​Jacobin Review in 1798, together with new magazines and the expansion of reviewing in existing ones, so too did the number of reviews a novel might expect to get. Six reviews was the highest score in the decade from 1770 to 1779, achieved by seven novels (Henry Brooke’s Juliet Grenville, Louis Sebastien Mercier’s Memoirs of the year Two Thousand Five Hundred, and, interestingly, five anonymous novels:  The Explanation; or, Agreeable Surprise, The History of Miss Dorinda Catsby, and Miss Emilia Faulkner, The Memoirs of an American, The Trial:  or, the History of Charles Horton, Esq., and The Younger Brother), none of them the best-​known novels from this decade, whereas from 1780 to 1789 two had as many as nine reviews (one the eagerly anticipated Cecilia of Frances Burney and the other the much less famous The Young Widow by William Hayley), and three (Mme de Genlis’s Adelaide and Theodore, John Moore’s Zeluco, and William Thomson’s The Man in the Moon) had eight. Top score in the 1790s was ten reviews, achieved by two novels (Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian and Helen Maria Williams’s Julia), and a relatively large list of eleven works of fiction reached nine reviews. Of these

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376   ANTONIA FORSTER eleven only one (Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho) has enjoyed lasting fame; most of the rest, including Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia, Mary Robinson’s The False Friend, and Jane West’s A Tale Of The Times, are now little known. Catalogues notwithstanding, by the end of the 1790s the Monthly and the Critical were failing to keep up with the supply of novels and many reviewed novels did not appear there but in one of the other journals; Eliza Parsons’s 1797 novel, An Old Friend With a New Face, for example, was reviewed only in the British Critic, as was Regina Maria Roche’s 1796 The Children of the Abbey, Mary Pilkington’s 1797 Edward Barnard only in the Gentleman’s Magazine, George Bellamy’s 1799 Lessons from Life only in the New London Review, and Mary Margaret Sherwood’s 1799 Margarita only in the Analytical Review. Some novels even by known authors and published by mainstream booksellers were not reviewed at all, as was the case with Mary Meeke’s sixth novel, Ellesmere, brought out by William Lane, but most received some acknowledgement by the review journals and reviewing magazines. The existence of the monthly catalogues or other provisions for very brief reviews in the review journals—​reviews in the magazines were almost always brief—​means that many novels appearing in the lists of reviews in fact received very little comment. It was appearance in the main articles that brought some distinction and gave the reviewers the opportunity to illustrate their views on what constituted a good novel. Of the eight novels mentioned here as receiving two reviews in the first half of the 1750s, only three (The Female Quixote, Amelia, and Adventures of a Valet) were reviewed as main articles; other major novels reviewed only once but as main articles included Francis Coventry’s History of Pompey the Little and Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle and Ferdinand Count Fathom. During the period from the first real catalogue in December 1750 to the beginning of the Critical Review in 1756 the Monthly reviewed seventeen novels as main articles; the Critical, which paid more detailed attention to fiction than the Monthly and reviewed six novels as main articles in its first volume, surpassed that number in its first two years. A comparison of main article coverage of fiction in the review journals at ten-​year intervals—​1756, 1766, 1776, 1786, and 1796—​shows a great deal of variation. In the first of those years the Monthly reviews only two novels as main articles (Emily: or, the History of a Natural Daughter and Thomas Amory’s The Life of John Buncle, Esq;) where the Critical reviews eleven (these two and nine others of little subsequent note, including The Fortune-​Teller, or footman ennobled and The life and surprizing Adventures of Crusoe Richard Davis). In 1766 the numbers are somewhat closer; the Monthly’s main-​ article reviews of fiction increase to five (including Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality and Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison) and the Critical’s number increases only slightly to twelve (three of those chosen by the Monthly and nine more, including Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield). From this point on new review journals joined in and in 1776 there was a third, the London Review, established in 1775. It is a year when only seventeen new novels were published, however, and the Monthly Review covered only one novel as a main article, Memoirs of Maitre Jacques, of Savoy, a novel not covered at length by either of the others. At this stage the London Review formally divided its reviews only intermittently, but

Reviewing the Novel   377 I have included in consideration all those novels reviewed at length, amounting to eight, three of them by the prolific Samuel Jackson Pratt; the other five include Voltaire’s Young James and Elizabeth Griffith’s The Story of Lady Juliana Harley. The Critical’s five main articles include the three Pratt novels and two others. By 1786 the London Review had been gone for six years, surviving its original editor, William Kenrick, by only a year, but John Murray’s English Review had been publishing for three years. The English Review offered eleven main-​article novel reviews in this year, as opposed to the Monthly’s two and the Critical’s five. Only one novel, Sophia Lee’s The Recess, appears in all three; the Critical’s other four (including William Beckford’s An Arabian Tale [Vathek]) all also appear in the English. The others selected by the English for more extended attention are no longer well known and include Harriet Chilcot’s Moreton Abbey and Phebe Gibbes’s Elfrida. The new additions in 1796 were Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review (1788) and the Rivingtons’ British Critic (1793). The Analytical Review did not divide formally into main articles and monthly catalogue items and did not review many novels at length; as a review, attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft,9 of Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle argues: ‘Few of the numerous productions termed novels, claim any attention’ (AR 1, 1788: 333). Including those novels reviewed at length in the Analytical, and following the same procedure with the English Review which had stopped separating main articles and catalogue items in 1794, we get a list of seven in the Analytical and nine in the English, with five in the British Critic, seven in the Critical, and six in the Monthly. Of the British Critic’s five, only one (Burney’s Camilla) is reviewed as a main article in all five journals and two (Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art) in four. There is substantial variation in the rest, with twelve novels appearing as a main article in only one journal, although one of these, Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, is seriously misleading as it was published in December 1796, although dated 1797, and reviewed in a total of ten journals over a three-​year period beginning with the English’s December 1796 one. Charlotte Smith’s Montalbert makes only one appearance too, in the British Critic, although it was reviewed at some length in the Monthly Mirror and the Register of the Times; the reason given in the Monthly Review may well apply to the others: ‘The public have so frequently borne witness to the superior abilities of Mrs. Smith as a novel writer, that there is now little left for us to say, more than merely announcing the work before us, and adding that it does not by any means disgrace its parentage’ (MR ns 19, 1796: 87). The rest of the list making a single appearance as a 1796 main article includes Sarah Harriet Burney’s Clarentine (in the Monthly Review, although it received a long review in 1797 in the British Critic), Mary Champion De Crespigny’s The Pavilion (in the English), Mary Robinson’s Angelina (in the Critical), and Georg Philip Wächter’s The Black Valley (in the Analytical). Those making two appearances include The Story of Dooshwanta and Sakoontalā, Elizabeth Gunning’s The 9 See The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), 7: 14–​18. As I have mentioned, most reviewers in journals other than the Monthly are not definitely identifiable.

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378   ANTONIA FORSTER Foresters, and John Moore’s Edward. Overall, the number of novels receiving the more detailed attention afforded by a main article is small, but then, as the British Critic writes of Richard Cumberland’s Henry: ‘If we do not often give to a novel so extensive an examination, it is because we do not often meet with one from such a pen’ (BC 5, 1795: 487). If novels were a never-​failing cause of complaint, how much greater on occasion were novels by women. In 1788 the English Review epitomized within the same volume the contradictory opinions about women writers, complaining in one review: ‘Another lady!—​Dear scribbling damsels, we hope you are all duly skilled in the mystery of pudding-​making’ (ER 11, 1788: 68); and in another, offering this comment in a completely different spirit: ‘the Carters, the Montagues, the Burneys, the Brookes, the Piozzis, the Williams’s, and many other respected names … have made the laurels tremble round the brows of masculine genius, and have extorted from us a respect for the female sex, which could never have been done but to such merits and such exertions’ (ER 11, 1788: 434). The notion that rampaging hordes of women were taking over the presses was often expressed, as when the Monthly Review in 1762 complained: ‘the number of Authoresses hath of late so considerably increased, that we are somewhat apprehensive lest our very Cook-​wenches should be infected with the Cacoethes Scribendi, and think themselves above the vulgar employment of mixing a pudding, or rolling a pye crust’ (MR 27, 1762: 472). In February 1773, commenting that The History of Miss Pamela Howard ‘seems to be the product of a female pen’, the Monthly Review declared that: ‘This branch of the literary trade appears, now, to be almost entirely engrossed by the Ladies’ (MR 48, 1773: 154). ‘From the number of novels that daily appear, and the few good, or even tolerable, which are to be found amongst them, it seems obvious that to write a good novel requires uncommon abilities’ (AR 3, 1789: 67), the Analytical Review complains, and the blame for ‘the numerous productions termed novels’ (AR 1, 1788: 333) is easily assigned: ‘From reading to writing novels the transition is very easy; and the ladies, of course, take care to supply the circulating libraries with ever varying yet still the same productions’ (AR 1, 1788: 208). It was not only the male reviewers who maintained this view; Hannah More expressed herself with force in 1799 in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education about ‘those ever multiplying authors, that with unparalleled fecundity are overstocking the world with their quick succeeding progeny’. The problem, as More puts it, is that ‘Such is the frightful facility of this species of composition, that every raw girl while she reads, is tempted to fancy that she can also write.’10 In fact there were far fewer new novels published altogether than the sometimes hysterical comment suggested (the largest number was ninety-​nine in 1799, with fewer than half of them known or claimed to be by women, and reviews of all works known to be by women represent only 5.57 per cent in the Monthly and 5.8 per cent in the Critical; in 1773 the number of novels is thirty-​ nine, with six known or claimed to be women),11 but the perception was popular and 10  Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. With a view of the principles and conduct prevalent among women of rank and fortune, 2 vols. (London, 1799), 1: 169–​70. 11  For more detailed analysis of some of the figures relating to the reviewing of women’s publications, see Antonia Forster, ‘ “A considerable rank in the world of Belles Lettres”: Women, Fiction and Literary

Reviewing the Novel   379 indestructible.12 The British Critic could still complain in 1797 about ‘the multitude of novels which the press every day, we might almost say, every hour produces’ (BC 10, 1797: 115), despite the fact that in the whole of 1796 there were ninety-​one new novels published and in 1797 a mere seventy-​nine. The reviewers are fond of various watery metaphors to describe the floods, torrents, or inundations of novels, ‘that flood of novels, tales, romances, and other monsters of the imagination’ (MR 4, 1750–​1: 355) that are ‘poured out in such torrents from the press’ (MR ns 29, 1799: 89), even if they were sometimes more like trickles. At different times they also used a mixed bag of catchy phrases to describe their roles, including ‘tasters to the public’ (MR 13, 1755: 399), literary ‘thief-​catchers’ (CR 17, 1764: 439), ‘beadles of Parnassus’ (MR 38, 1768: 248), ‘officers of the literary police’ (CR 21, 1766: 60), ‘monitors to the public’ (MR 46, 1772: 97), ‘literary pruners’ (MR 65, 1781: 390), and ‘caterers for the public’ (MR 77, 1787: 495). All of these functions—​informing, warning, and saving the public, together with keeping writers in order and trying to improve public taste—​can be seen very clearly in their comments, short and long, on what the English Review in 1783 called ‘the dreadful deluge of novel-​writing’ (ER 1, 1783: 14). While the public in general needed, in Griffiths’s words, ‘some idea of a book before they lay out their money or time on it’, the readers of novels were a special case for a number of reasons. In 1750 Samuel Johnson’s essay on modern fiction published in The Rambler, no. 4 had spelt out part of the problem:  These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life. They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account.13

Much of the time the reviewers would agree with this, although on this, as on almost every point, they are sometimes contradictory. If, as the reviewers often assume, many novel-​readers are simply looking to kill time, critical comment is likely to be largely superfluous, but we still see many repetitions of observations that various novels are adequate to ‘fill up the vacancies of time’ (MR 44, 1771: 498), ‘beguile the tædium of a rainy day, or the pain of a fit of the toothache’ (CR ns 10, 1794: 472), to ‘amuse a reader in those idle moments when he is not disposed to exert either his feelings or his judgment’ (CR ns 28, 1800: 236). Sometimes the judgements may be somewhat more elaborate while still conveying the same idea, as when the Critical Review observes of the Misses Purbeck’s novel, Matilda and Elizabeth: ‘To those History in the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century’, in Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood (eds.), Feminist Literary History Re(Dis)Covered (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2003), 106–​18. 12  For further information about women novelists of this period, see Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 13  The Rambler. Volume the First (London, 1752), 29.

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380   ANTONIA FORSTER who seek only to beguile the passing hour, who read only for amusement, and do not discriminate too nicely, the present production may afford a perfectly innocent entertainment’ (CR ns 18, 1796: 342). Contempt for much of the novel-​reading public finds frequent expression in the reviews. Charles Burney the younger writes in the Monthly Review in 1796 that ‘Novel readers in general are not fastidious critics’ (MR ns 19, 1796: 453), and this assumption, no doubt a correct one, underlies many flippant references to ‘the generality of readers’ (MR ns 8, 1792: 341). ‘The incidents on which this story is founded are improbable’, writes the Critical Review of Elizabeth Helme’s The Farmer of Inglewood Forest, ‘but that is no objection with the generality of those readers, for whose entertainment these productions are intended’ (CR ns 19, 1797: 227). After all, as the London Review points out in 1777, it is ‘the unlearned, who are by far the more numerous part of novel-​readers’ (LR 6, 1777: 527). According to Andrew Becket in the Monthly Review, ‘the ordinary novel-​ reader looks for nothing but a train of love adventures, with elopements, duels, and all the various et cetera thereunto belonging, and not for any thing like rational investigation, or philosophical truth’ (MR 81, 1789: 78); in the opinion of the British Critic, ‘the appetite of novel readers is gluttonous’ (BC 5, 1795: 664), and in that of the Monthly Review, there are ‘few novel-​readers who are competent judges of what they read’ (MR 33, 1765: 490). At times the reviewers make a distinction between different kinds of novel-​readers, generally dividing them into two groups but varying in the designation of those groups. Reviewing Female Friendship, for example, the Critical Review distinguishes between ‘readers of sentiment or taste’ who will not think much of it, and ‘Those who devour books of this kind, without digesting them’ who ‘may possibly be of another opinion: they may fall to with a good appetite to dishes which would turn our stomach. Such feeders have ideas too gross for a literary entertainment’ (CR 29, 1770: 148). Gilbert Stuart in the Monthly Review differentiates between the ‘vulgar readers’ on the one hand, who may like The Advantages of Deliberation, and ‘those who can judge of what may happen in real life, and who know the principles and motives of human conduct’ who will not (MR 46, 1772: 79). Elizabeth Helme’s The History of Ned Evans is, according to the Monthly Mirror, ‘too intelligent, too meditative, too rational for readers in general’, but will be very well received by ‘such as know how to value good writing, sound observation, respect for religion, and unexceptionable moral tendency’ (MM 2, 1796: 478). For Arthur Aikin, reviewing The Inquisition in the Monthly Review, the distinction is between ‘those who make a general practice of novel reading’, who may find it acceptable, and those ‘who occasionally peruse works of fiction as a recreation from severer studies [who] will be but little satisfied with this’ (MR ns 23, 1797: 211). The ‘babes and sucklings of literature’ (MR 69, 1783: 439)—​Johnson’s ‘the young, the ignorant, and the idle’—​a category in which women were naturally prominent, are the focus of frequently expressed concern. As the Critical Review explains when reviewing The Child of Nature, ‘we think it our duty to warn our fair readers, looking upon ourselves, with respect to them in particular, as watchmen engaged to give notice of whatever is likely to injure them’ (CR 38, 1774: 273). A reviewer in the Monthly Mirror also

Reviewing the Novel   381 speaks for many when he (it usually was ‘he’) reminds readers that: ‘As an amusing vehicle for the inculcation of morality and the reprehension of bad habits, novels are, and must be, useful’ (MM 2, 1796: 160). With this in mind, there are innumerable recommendations of novels as ‘to young ladies, in particular, these volumes afford many salutary lessons’ (CR 65, 1789: 239), or because they are ‘adapted to afford a useful warning to young females, at their entrance upon the world’ (MR 73, 1785: 153). Endorsements are frequently made of novels ‘likely to be of some service in teaching young persons’ (CR ns 22, 1798: 349), or which may have ‘a tendency to promote the cause of religion and virtue, and may convey much useful instruction to young readers’ (MR ns 30, 1799: 467). Warnings also abound against novels ‘unfit for the eye or ear of a modest and virtuous reader’ (MR 44, 1771: 262), or in which ‘some parts manifest a glow and licence of description, which will not be suitable to every class of readers’ (MR ns 33, 1800: 207–​8). The repeated assumption that the reader of novels was female is made clear in many different ways.14 When criticizing George Brewer’s 1791 novel, The History of Tom Weston, in the Monthly, John Noorthouck and George Edward Griffiths spell this out: ‘His present work, too, is not so chastely written, as every publication intended for general reading, ought to be; and particularly as novels should be, which are now so universally, and almost exclusively, perused by females’ (MR ns 5, 1791: 466). Twenty years earlier, reviewing The Favourite. A  Moral Tale, Noorthouck simply takes the readership for granted: ‘If one of these compositions will afford an afternoon’s amusement to a novel-​reader, and do her no harm, it is as much good as can be expected from it’ (MR 44, 1771: 497). Reviewing, three years late, Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, published in 1797, the conservative Anti-​Jacobin Review explains that Radcliffe’s success has at last brought the reviewers to pay it some attention: ‘For we, grave Reviewers, very seldom look into novels or romances for any other purpose than to discover and point out their moral tendency, and offer to the sex our serious admonitions; which, we fear, are for the most part, unavailing’ (AJR 7, 1800: 27). References abound to ‘our fair novel-​readers’ (CR ns 16, 1796: 472), ‘some fair readers’ (MR 52, 1775: 186), ‘its fair perusers’ (AR 10, 1791: 289), ‘the fair readers’ (LR 9, 1779: 428), and there are many variations on the same theme. If, as William Enfield argues in the Monthly Review, ‘a novel is a proper vehicle for the communication of moral truth’ (MR ns 15, 1794: 149), it is, of course, necessary to grab the reader’s attention, and much reviewer comment is concerned with this. The reader’s tendency to go to sleep is often mentioned, and there are many remarks that in one novel ‘the reader’s curiosity is kept awake through the whole narration’ (CR 31, 1771: 305), and in others that there are ‘incidents sufficient to keep the Reader’s attention awake’ (MR 48, 1773: 243). There is a great deal of discussion of novelists’ successes and failures in the essential elements of interesting readers’ feelings and rousing their interest. Elizabeth Blower’s The Parsonage House, for example, is praised for having a ‘story sufficiently interesting to 14  For useful information about women readers, see Jan Fergus, ‘Women Readers: A Case Study’, in Vivien Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–​1800 (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 155–​76. See also Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain 1750–​1835 (Cambridge: CUP, 1999).

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382   ANTONIA FORSTER engage the attention, without too deeply affecting the hearts and passions of its readers’ (CR 50, 1780: 373), and others gain approval for being ‘constructed in a manner properly adapted to interest the feelings of the Reader’ (MR 63, 1780: 388). If ‘the attention of the reader is fatigued before he can get to the end of the second volume’ (MM 5, 1798: 31), clearly the novelist has failed, and there are numerous complaints from the reviewers, who are, as they like to remind readers, ‘obliged to read all [the novelists] write’ (CR ns 8, 1793: 54). More positively, they comment less frequently on the successes, on the narrative ‘intermixed with incidents and tales, which engage the attention of the reader’ (MR ns 31, 1800: 428), or the ‘degree of vivacity, which supports the attention of the reader, and renders it interesting’ (MR 45, 1771: 144). Reviewing Anecdotes of a Convent in the Monthly Review in 1771, Gilbert Stuart offers high praise: ‘The ingenious Author does not depart from the road of nature to excite surprize and wonder by bold and improbable fictions. The attention of the reader is kept up by other methods;—​by characters delineated in just and expressive colours, by incidents conceived with propriety and taste, and by an interesting and artful arrangement’ (MR 45, 1771: 144). As the century went on, ‘bold and improbable fictions’ became increasingly common, inspiring many complaints from the reviewers. Near the end of the century, reviewing Catherine Selden’s The Count De Santerre, the Monthly Mirror grumbles that: ‘The author of these volumes has suffered herself to be misled by the prevailing taste for the mysterious and the horrid; which, unless they are managed with great dexterity, do not even answer the purpose of amusing the fancy; but, on the contrary, provoke the laughter, if not the contempt of the judicious reader’ (MM 4, 1797: 346). The Critical Review wishes that authors ‘would cease to build castles in the air, and return to terra firma, to common life, and common sense’ (CR ns 21, 1797: 354). Another related area was the problem of mixing fiction and history. While ‘history’ had long been a popular word in the titles of novels—​in 1770 and 1771, for example, twenty-​seven new novels contained the word ‘history’ in their titles, and it continued to be popular throughout the century—​it was late in the century that reviewers began expressing with some regularity their dislike of what the British Critic, reviewing The Minstrel, calls ‘the common but dangerous practice of interweaving fictitious narrative with historical fact’ (BC 2, 1793: 275). Reviewers tended to vary between, on the one hand, expressing alarm that readers were being misled by the wildly inaccurate versions of history, and on the other noting with some satisfaction that readers might at least be gaining something resembling information. Historical novels may be ‘a pleasing species of composition, when well executed’ (CR 63, 1787: 307), and there is always the possibility that ‘the idle readers of these works might, in this way, have some remote chance of information’ (CR 68, 1789: 409). Often, of course, reviewers may find themselves wishing that ‘the writers, who mingle history with fiction, would pay a little more regard to truth’ (CR ns 16, 1796: 222), and noting that: ‘It requires more reading than commonly falls to the share of our novel writers, to give to an historical tale the characteristic features of the age in which it is placed’ (MR ns 17, 1795: 108). Other reviewers are disturbed by the tendency of historical fiction ‘rather to confound than to illustrate history’ (MR ns 15, 1794: 466), and argue that mixing fiction and history ‘is an indirect violation of

Reviewing the Novel   383 the dignity of truth, and may have a mischievous operation’ (BC 8, 1796: 181). William Enfield explains this at some length in a review of Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Marcus Flaminius:  Even a reader already well acquainted with history may find some difficulty in marking the exact line, which separates dramatic fiction from historic truth: to a tyro in historical learning, the task would be wholly impracticable. Still greater objections seem to lie against those prose writings which undertake at once to amuse by fiction, and to inform by a relation of facts; except when the narrative is authenticated by means of accurate and minute references to authorities. (MR ns 9, 1792: 164)

The reviewers too were authorities in their way from an early period, and although their verdicts on fiction were often harsh, they also offered enough positive comment to feature from an early period in booksellers’ advertisements. There are many hundreds of examples of the simplest use of review material in an advertisement, as when The History of Sir Harry Herald is advertised by Francis Noble with a five-​line quotation followed by ‘Monthly Review, for December 1754’.15 At other times a review quotation may be preceded by a simple introductory phrase, as when Agenor and Ismena is advertised with a brief quotation preceded by ‘The Authors of the Critical Review, speaking of this Performance say’.16 An elaboration of this procedure is seen in a review of Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia which quotes an observation from the English Review preceded by: ‘In the English review for January 1791, published on the 1st of the present month, the following just and very forcible character of this most respectable production is given by the liberal and learned Authors.’ Following the fifteen-​and-​a-​half-​line quotation is further detail: ‘To this might be added the very high character already given of EUPHEMIA, both by the Monthly and the Critical Reviewers, if they did not exceed the limits of an advertisement; or if, indeed, the superior merits of Mrs. LENNOX, the Literary Friend of Fielding, of Richardson, and of Johnson, stood in need of farther recommendation.’17 Many advertisements give no precise reference and simply append ‘Monthly Review’ or ‘Critical Review’ to a quotation; on at least one occasion, nine lines of comment on The Solicitudes of Absence are followed by ‘Critical, Monthly, and other Reviewers’.18 At other times the booksellers are much vaguer, preceding a quotation about The Trifler with ‘The Reviewers, speaking of this Work, say’,19 or following a quotation concerning Saint Julian’s Abbey with nothing more than the word ‘Review’.20 More elaborate but equally vague is an advertisement for William Wennington’s translation The Man of Nature mentioning the ‘degree of notice somewhat uncommon’ excited by the work: ‘By 15 

Whitehall Evening Post, 11–​13 February 1755. Whitehall Evening Post, 1–​4 December 1759. 17  Lloyd’s Evening Post, 16–​18 March 1791. 18  St. James’s Chronicle, 25–​7 August 1789. 19  Public Advertiser, 16 January 1778. 20  Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 24 January 1789. 16 

384

384   ANTONIA FORSTER certain of the Reviewers it has been extravagantly applauded; by others as extravagantly (he believes) condemned.’21 Like this one, there are also many advertisements which do not quote but offer statements ranging from the grand claim in an advertisement for the fourth edition of Baron Munchausen’s Adventures that ‘All the Reviewers, and other Monthly Publications, unite in speaking of these entertaining Adventures in Terms of the greatest Approbation’,22 to the simple and precise: ‘For a character of this Novel see the Critical and Analytical Reviews for Feb. 1798’ (of Anne Plumptre’s The Rector’s Son).23 Even after the number of review journals and magazines expands, the great majority of review-​citing advertisements cite the Critical or Monthly Review or both, but some muster a list, as in the case of John Sewell’s advertising James Thomson’s The Denial with six supporting quotations of between three and six-​and-​a-​half lines from three Reviews and three magazines.24 The time and space constraints of newspaper advertising do not apply to advertisements in books, and many booksellers take advantage of the opportunity afforded by leftover blank pages in a volume’s final gathering (and occasionally at the beginning) to advertise their other publications, including novels. They proceed in much the same way as in newspapers, but sometimes take advantage of the additional space available, as when an advertisement at the end of the third volume of Clara Duplessis uses nearly a whole page to advertise Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Family Secrets with quotations from three reviews.25 There are many other examples. Mme de Genlis’s Rash Vows, for example, has six pages of advertisements for novels, containing quotations from reviews, at the end of the third volume.26 Adam Beuvius’s Henrietta of Gerstenfeld, the first volume of which was published in 1787, has in volume 2, facing the title page, quotations from reviews headed: ‘Opinions of the Reviews on the First Part of this Work’.27 Although there is little evidence that readers paid much attention to reviews,28 it is clear from the mass of advertising and attacks on reviewers that booksellers and authors thought or feared that they did. Indeed, the Monthly Review complains about the practice of some unblushing Publishers, who, in their puffing advertisements, scruple not to insert pretended commendatory extracts from the Reviews, in praise of books, or pamphlets, of which the Reviewers have either not given any character at 21 

Morning Herald, 11 November 1799. St. James’s Chronicle, 10–​12 August 1786. 23  Star, 19 March 1798. 24  London Chronicle, 6–​8 January 1791. 25  August Heinrich Julius La Fontaine, Clara Duplessis, And Clairant: the History of a Family Of French Emigrants. Translated from the German. In three volumes (London, 1797), 3: [278]. 26  [Stéphanie Félicité Brulart de] Genlis, Marquise de Sillery, Rash Vows, or The Effects Of Enthusiasm. A Novel. Translated from the French of Madame de Genlis, author of the Theatre of Education, Adelaide and Theodore, &c. &c. In Three Volumes (London, 1799). 27  [Adam Beuvius], Henrietta of Gerstenfeld; a German Story. Vol. II (London, 1788). 28  See Jan Fergus and Ruth Portner, ‘Provincial Subscribers to the Monthly and Critical Reviews and their Book Purchasing’, in O. M. Brack, Jr. (ed.), Writers, Books, and Trade: An Eighteenth-​Century Miscellany for William B. Todd (New York: AMS Press, 1994), 155–​76. 22 

Reviewing the Novel   385 all or of which they have spoken in terms very different from those used in such false quotations. (MR 80, 1789: 288)

Support for the view that reviews influenced sales is offered when the English Review writes in 1783 that ‘a writer in a Review of extensive circulation has it in his power, (since nothing is exempt from plausible misrepresentation) materially to hurt the credit, and impede the sale of the most valuable productions’ (ER 2, 1783: 362), and an advertisement, masquerading as editorial comment, for Lord Winworth in 1787 says that ‘since the great character given of it in the Critical Review, the sale of this excellent novel has (if possible) increased in its sale [sic]’.29 As far as novels are concerned, Frances Burney’s comment to her father about the Reviews appears logical and in accordance with the reviewers’ frustration that all of their insults are insufficient to kill off bad fiction: ‘There are two species of Composition which may nearly brave them; Politics & Novels: for these will be sought & will be judged by the various Multitude, not the fastidious few.’30 When Alter et Idem, A New Review argued in its first issue in 1794 that review journals ‘have certainly a tendency to raise a spirit of enquiry, to form the taste of those who read, and to excite an emulation in those who write’, it was presenting the highly optimistic view of their function that the reviewers liked to put forward.31 With fiction they are torn. Reviewing Ann Emelinda Skinn’s The Old Maid, the Critical Review says wearily: ‘If we had a desire to inflict a punishment upon those that hate us, we could not think of any more severe than to oblige them to go through the drudgery of reading the wretched writings which pass under the name of Novels, Adventures, and what is called a Series of Letters’ (CR 30, 1770: 478). Similarly, the Monthly Review opens its review of The Adventures of William B—​ds—​w with an often-​repeated statement of dissatisfaction and demand for recognition of reviewers’ suffering: ‘The public are, really, more obliged to us Reviewers than they imagine. We are necessitated to read every thing that comes out, and must, consequently, submit to the vile drudgery of going through those loads of trash, which are thrown in upon us under the denomination of Lives, Adventures, Memoirs, Histories, &c.’ (MR 11, 1754: 470). On the other hand, John Berkenhout, reviewing Emily: or, the History of a Natural Daughter two years later, argues for recognition of the importance of novels:  We are far from joining in opinion with those who condemn all kinds of Romances, as frivolous, insignificant, uninstructive books … But were there even something faulty in the very nature of novels, yet from their almost universal circulation, a

29 

General Evening Post, 22–​4 May 1787. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Joyce Hemlow (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 3: 222: Frances Burney to Charles Burney, 8 November 1796. 31  For further information about the connection between reviewing and writers’ careers, see Frank Donoghue, The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-​Century Literary Careers (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996). See also Joseph F. Bartolomeo, A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-​Century Discourse on the Novel (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1994). 30 

386

386   ANTONIA FORSTER strong argument may be drawn to induce men of virtue and understanding to employ their pens in that kind of writing. (MR 14, 1756: 289)

Thomas Holcroft, reviewing Robert Bage’s Man as He Is in 1793, reminds his readers that: ‘When we consider the influence that novels have over the manners, sentiments, and passions, of the rising generation,—​instead of holding them in the contempt which, as reviewers, we are without exception held to do,—​we may esteem them, on the contrary, as forming a very essential branch of literature’ (MR ns 10, 1793: 297). Their never-​ ending attention to this ‘very essential branch of literature’ and its readers is one of the most interesting areas of eighteenth-​century criticism and represents an immense resource for the study of the novel.

Select Bibliography Bartolomeo, Joseph F., A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-​Century Discourse on the Novel (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1994). Basker, James G., Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1988). Benedict, Barbara M., ‘Readers, Writers, Reviewers, and the Professionalization of Literature’, in Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740–​1830 (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 3–​23. Bloom, Edward A., ‘ “Labors of the Learned”: Neoclassic Book Reviewing Techniques’, Studies in Philology 54/​4 (1957), 537–​63. Donoghue, Frank, The Fame Machine:  Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-​Century Literary Careers (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996). Forster, Antonia, ‘Book Reviewing’, in Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695–​1830 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 631–​48. Forster, Antonia, ‘ “A considerable rank in the world of Belles Lettres”: Women, Fiction and Literary History in the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century’, in Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood (eds.), Feminist Literary History Re(Dis)Covered (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2003), 106–​18. Forster, Antonia, Index to Book Reviews in England 1749–​1774 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990). Forster, Antonia, Index to Book Reviews in England 1775–​ 1800 (London:  The British Library, 1997). Forster, Antonia, ‘Review Journals and the Reading Public’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England: New Essays (London and New York: Leicester UP, 2001), 171–​90. Graham, Walter, English Literary Periodicals (New York: Nelson, 1930). Jones, Claude E., ‘The English Novel: A Critical View’, Modern Language Quarterly 19/​1–​2 (1958), 147–​59, 213–24. Nangle, Benjamin Christie, The Monthly Review First Series 1749–​1789: Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). Nangle, Benjamin Christie, The Monthly Review Second Series 1790–​ 1815: Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). Roper, Derek, Reviewing before the ‘Edinburgh’ 1788–​1802 (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1979).

Reviewing the Novel   387 Siskin, Clifford, ‘Eighteenth-​Century Periodicals and the Romantic Rise of the Novel’, Studies in the Novel 26/​2 (1994), 26–​42. Spector, Robert D., English Literary Periodicals and the Climate of Opinion during the Seven Years’ War (The Hague: Mouton, 1966). Sullivan, Alvin (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson, 1698–​1788 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983). Sullivan, Alvin (ed.), British Literary Magazines:  The Romantic Age, 1789–​1836 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983).

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Chapter 23

‘ Ordering ’  Nov e l s Describing Prose Fiction, 1770–​1832 Peter Garside

Viewed traditionally, the period under view has been figured as a chasm in the history of the novel, a period of nondescript overproduction, flanked on either side by the ‘classic’ novelists of the mid-​eighteenth century and the Victorian fiction of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and others. Even J. M. S. Tompkins, in her pioneering The Popular Novel in England 1770–​1800 (1932), felt obliged to acknowledge a ‘sociological’ rather than critical motivation: ‘During the years that follow the death of Smollett [in 1771], last of the four great novelists of the mid-​eighteenth century, the two chief facts about the novel are its popularity as a form of entertainment and its inferiority as a form of art.’1 Not dissimilarly the Romantic period in terms of fiction has been regarded as primarily the age of Scott and Austen, with critical studies and university coursework mainly focusing on poetry as the defining literary genre of the era. In more recent years an interest in specific fields, notably Gothic and women’s studies, has led to a number of advances being made, albeit in ways which sometimes arguably have the effect of highlighting to the point of exaggeration, while risking further obfuscation of other (often interrelating) modes. Scholars have also benefited from the existence and increased accessibility of specialist collections of original editions, though the assembly of these has naturally been subject to external conditions such as availability of copies as well as the collectors’ own preferences in selection. Until recently, then, the prose fiction of 1770–​1832 might be likened to a large territory, colonized and exploited in a number of places, but still lacking a comprehensive ground map: one making it possible to survey the full range of authors, publishers, and novel genres. Owing to a major bibliographical breakthrough, it is now possible to cover that territory more fully, over the full timespan in question, and in ways which potentially take us closer to earlier forms of ordering fictional output. The English Novel

1 

J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770–​1800 (London: Methuen, 1932), 1.

‘Ordering’ Novels: Describing Prose Fiction, 1770–1832    389 1770–​1829:  A  Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (2000) includes in its two volumes as a whole 3,677 main entries for new titles published during the sixty years covered. In each case details are taken from a surviving first edition, where available, with ‘reconstituted’ entries being provided from secondary sources where no copy appears to have survived. The transcription of details from original title pages among other things allows a much clearer view of the ways in which novels were first projected at their readers: all entries include the full title given to the work, the imprint of the original publisher(s), and unmediated information as to how authorship was first signified. Other details provided include volume structure, price, format, and (in the case of the first volume) extracts from contemporary reviews. The bibliographical record has since been reinforced by the online British Fiction 1800–​ 1829: A Database of Production, Circulation, and Reception [DBF], first made publicly available in 2004. On one level this adds new primary information, including some fresh author attributions, an improved record of subsequent editions, and several newly discovered titles (increasing the full count for these years from 2,256 to 2,272 titles). The database also provides a range of subsidiary materials for entries, including information from newspaper advertisements, reviews, publishing archives, anecdotal accounts, contemporary library catalogues, and lists of subscribers when found, making it possible to examine with new precision factors such as production costs, impression numbers, and author remuneration. One further online resource, The English Novel, 1830–​1836 (2003), which follows the procedures of its printed predecessors, now completes the record to 1836, in the process adding some 265 novels for the three years from 1830 to 1832.2 In all, the novels included within these three related publications for the years 1770–​1832 amount to 3,958 titles, and the statistical information in this essay is mainly taken from these listings, the online DBF taking precedence for the years 1800–​29. The period under view also itself saw a number of historical accounts of fiction, ranging from Clara Reeve’s dialogic The Progress of Romance (1785), to the extensive Enlightenment overview offered by John Dunlop’s History of Fiction (1814). As Cheryl Nixon observes, in their construction of a trajectory from Asian-​Graeco-​Roman origins to a modern more ‘realistic’ quotidian English fiction, these contributions are not dissimilar to some modern narratives of the ‘rise of the novel’.3 Whether such accounts had any tangible influence on the ordering of fiction as it unfolded in its time is open to question. Rather one suspects that readership was mainly confined to intellectual circles, and any wider impact limited even among critics, not least the more day-​to-​day reviewers. Instead of dealing more fully with such accounts, this essay will concentrate on ways in 2 

P. D. Garside, J. E. Belanger, and S. A. Ragaz, British Fiction, 1800–​1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & Reception, designer A. A. Mandal, [www.british-​fiction.cf.ac.uk]; and Peter Garside, Anthony Mandal, Verena Ebbes, Angela Koch, and Rainer Schöwerling, The English Novel, 1830–​1836: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, [www.cardiff.ac.uk/​encap/​journals/​ corvey/​1830s]. 3  Cheryl Nixon (ed.), Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688–​1815 (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2009), 335.

390

390   PETER GARSIDE which contemporary fiction was embodied, distributed, and received ‘on the ground’ during the period as a whole, with special attention to more immediate kinds of generic and qualitative categorization.

Naming the Form A key component in ordering fiction as it first emerged was the title of the individual work, which could consist of main title, subtitle, and a generic label. The fullest form was generally found in the main title page, which, along with other preliminaries, was usually printed last in the production process. At a time when a high proportion of novels were issued anonymously, titles were especially important for the management of circulating libraries, allowing works to be arranged both generically as fiction and with an indication often also of the type of novel being offered to customers ordering from library catalogues. The most basic component in titles was the basic generic tag or label. During this period three descriptive labels, ‘Novel’, ‘Romance’, and ‘Tale(s)’ eventually became predominant, as illustrated in Figure 23.1, showing their percentage usage relative to total output of new titles annually. This, however, had not always been the case, nor is it particularly evident in some of the earlier years under view, when hitherto dominant prefixes such as ‘[Life and] Adventures of ’, ‘History of ’, and ‘Memoirs of ’, with their inbuilt 60% Novel Romance Tale(s)

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0% 1770

1775

1780

1785

1790

1795

Figure 23.1  Keywords in titles, 1770–​1832.

1800

1805

1810

1815

1820

1825

1830

‘Ordering’ Novels: Describing Prose Fiction, 1770–1832    391 ambiguity as to whether the narrative in question was fictitious or not, are still very much in evidence. Among thirty-​one titles belonging to 1775, just prior to a fairly steep drop in output for the remainder of that decade, nine instances of ‘History’, and five of ‘Memoirs’, outweigh two cases of ‘Novel’, and just one involving ‘Romance’. However, by the 1800s these three terms are found in up to 70 per cent of new titles (with over 80 per cent in imprint year 1806). As a result, their different histories and interrelationship with each other help throw valuable light on changing perceptions of prose fiction, and the nature of its ordering, over the period as a whole. In the earlier eighteenth century the term ‘Novel’ appears to have been most commonly applied to shorter works, chiefly of an amatory nature, many of these being translations from French. Collections of novels, such as Samuel Croxall’s A Select Collection of Novels (1720), formed a significant component in the early production of fiction, continuing well into the second half of the century, with magazine compilations such as Lane’s Annual Novelist (1786). None of the ‘classic’ male English fictions of the mid-​century appears to have described itself as a Novel in its titles. The term is, however, found in a number of single female domestic fictions between 1720 and 1750, as in Mary Davys’s The Reform’d Coquet. A Novel (1724) and the anonymous The Fair Adulteress. A Novel (1744). All, however, were relatively shorter pieces, easily containable within a single volume. A distinct shift is noticeable i  n 1769, with five new titles including the term, of which four are two-​volume productions. This process continues into the 1770s, during which decade just over one-​fifth of new works describe themselves as novels. The preponderance, however, is more noticeable during the relatively buoyant years of 1770–​4, with circulating library proprietors such as Thomas Lowndes specializing in sentimental-​domestic fiction prominent amongst the publishers. Even so, as suggested, such titles still tend to be heavily outweighed by works where ‘History of ’ or ‘Memoirs of ’ provide the main indicator. Between 1775 and 1779 the imbalance is if anything more noticeable, with just seventeen new titles during these years describing themselves as novels. It is only during the later 1780s, at a time of accelerating production (see Figure 23.2), that ‘Novel’ becomes fully established as a term, with nearly half of new titles in the year 1785 (twenty-​three out of forty-​seven) featuring it as a main generic denominator, often in alliance with an indication of epistolary content. As the century progressed, it was not unusual for works by popular authors to appear with just the simple tag ‘A Novel’, as in Anna Maria Bennett’s five-​volume Juvenile Indiscretions. A Novel (1786) and Francis Lathom’s four-​volume Men and Manners. A Novel (1799). Where secondary indicative signs are found, like ‘Modern’, ‘Recent’, and ‘Fashionable’, or in combinations such as ‘A Novel Founded on Facts’, these generally indicate content of a social and contemporary nature, in opposition to the exotic or far-​flung (though there are exceptions). Some later novel titles spell out an almost ideological involvement in such nomenclature, as in Margaret Cullen’s Home. A Novel. In Five Volumes. Expect Not a Story Deck’d in the Garb of Fancy,—​But Look at Home (1802), or in the anonymous Diurnal Events; or the Antipodes to Romance. A Novel (1816). As a whole the use of the term ‘Novel’ remained resilient over three decades, with 39.7 per cent attained in the 1790s, dipping slightly to

392

392   PETER GARSIDE 120

100

80

60

40

20

0 1770

1775

1780

1785

1790

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1800

1805

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Figure 23.2  Publication of new novels, 1770–​1832.

36.8 per cent in the 1800s, and then again to 35.5 per cent in the 1810s. The subsequent decline in the use of the term, with just 15 per cent of new works in the 1820s calling themselves novels, is a complex matter, intimately connected with the alternative labels of ‘Romance’ and ‘Tale(s)’, as I now go on to discuss. Notwithstanding Horace Walpole’s now well-​known declaration apropos his Castle of Otranto (1765) about blending ‘two kinds of Romance, the ancient and the modern’, any practical use of Romance in the titling of new fiction is rare for much of the later eighteenth century, with less than ten new novels featuring the term in their titles between 1770 and 1789, representing barely 1 per cent of output. One underlying factor appears to have been a continuing association with the outdated heroic prose romances of French writers such as Madeleine de Scudéry in the seventeenth century. Such certainly seems to underlie the Monthly Review’s withering dismissal of The Captive; or, the History of Mr. Clifford. Translated from the French (1771) as ‘A romance, of the old exploded sort … all extravagance, improbability, and absurdity’.4 A sense of new possibilities is nevertheless implicit in the same Review’s more measured and approving response to William Godwin’s early novel, Imogen; A Pastoral Romance (1784): ‘Though Romance rises beyond the level of common life, yet it should not shock probability; and though its language may be highly figurative and splendid, yet it should not be turgid and extravagant.’5 Even so, it was not until the 1790s that Romance was employed in any widespread 4  5 

Monthly Review 43 (Nov. 1770), 400. Monthly Review 72 (Mar. 1785), 233.

‘Ordering’ Novels: Describing Prose Fiction, 1770–1832    393 way. A major factor undoubtedly was the unprecedented popularity of Ann Radcliffe, all of whose novels from A Sicilian Romance (1790) onwards featured the term either in their main title or as an end descriptor, as most famously in The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance (1794). A similar foregrounding of the term in M. G. Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (1796), the most notorious novel of its era, furthered the association with the Gothic mode, encouraging a host of Radcliffeian and Lewisian offshoots describing themselves as romances. In the new century, a wider tendency for novels set in the past and/​or painted on a sweeping canvas to call themselves romances becomes apparent, notable examples being the blockbusters written by the two sisters, Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The optimum point occurs during the years 1809–​11, when nearly 25 per cent of new titles called themselves romances. This, however, was followed by a sharp decline in 1813–​15, the time of Walter Scott’s advent as a novelist, leading to a fairly steady petering out thereafter, with ‘Romance’ taking third place behind ‘Novel’ and ‘Tale(s)’ in all but one year to 1832. The use of the term ‘Tale(s)’ to distinguish both single items and multiple collections was relatively well established by 1770, with works such as Johnson’s The Prince of Abissinia. A Tale [Rasselas] (1759), Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale (1766), and Marmontel’s Moral Tales (first translated in the mid-​1760s) enjoying frequent reprinting throughout the century. Most of the twenty or so new titles in the 1770s calling themselves tales follow in much the same mould, while claiming familiar oriental, moral, or pastoral attributes. One outstanding instance here is Henry Mackenzie’s two-​volume epistolary work, Julia de Roubigné, A Tale (1777), where the choice of suffix appears to be more than averagely calculated, tallying as it does with the author’s later objections to ‘the common herd of Novels’ in his periodical The Lounger.6 The use of ‘Tale(s)’ for substantial single works of fiction becomes more common in the 1780s and 1790s, when at certain high points as many as 20 per cent of new titles described themselves this way. Above all the label appears to have acted as a magnet for authors wishing to accentuate the un-​novel-​like natural qualities of their works. Indicative titles belonging to this phase include Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte. A Tale of Truth (1791) and Helena Wells’s The Step-​Mother: A Domestic Tale, from Real Life (1798). At the same time oriental tales and collections of tales continued as fairly hardy perennials, encouraging a variety of offshoots. One telling feature of the 1790s is the more frequent use of ‘Tale’ in relation to a growing number of ‘German’ titles (as in ‘A Tale, From the German’), whereas in the case of French counterparts the choice of ‘Novel’ would be more usual. A considerable impetus to the production of collected new tales also came from the widespread popularity of Harriet and Sophia Lee’s Canterbury Tales, stretching in its five volumes from 1797 to 1805. ‘Moral’, ‘Artless’, and ‘Plain’ tales continue to provide a steady if minor strand in fiction during the 1800s. The largest surge by far, however, occurs in the later 1810s, most obviously as a result of the influence of Walter Scott, and more particularly of his Tales

6 

Nixon (ed.), Novel Definitions, 238.

394

394   PETER GARSIDE of My Landlord series, initially planned in 1816 as a collection of four regional Scottish tales in four volumes. In 1819, the year of the third series, containing ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’ and ‘A Legend of Montrose’, output of works titled ‘Tale(s)’ exceeded those calling themselves ‘Novels’ for the first time (twenty-​three as opposed to twenty-​ two instances from a sum total of seventy-​three). This is followed by a clear dominance throughout the 1820s, when almost 35 per cent of all new titles bore this label, far outweighing novels (15 per cent) and romances (9.6 per cent) even when taken together. Two distinct types can be seen as contributing to this situation. The first is the collection of a number of long tales assembled under a unifying mantle: a form which proved equally accessible to male and female writers, even ones as diverse as Amelia Opie and James Hogg, whose Tales of the Heart and Winter Evening Tales both appeared in 1820. The second is the shorter one-​volume evangelical/​moral tale, often exemplifying single virtues, as found in the popular sequence provided by Barbara Hofland, running from Integrity. A Tale (1823) to Fortitude. A Tale (1835). Entering the 1830s, ‘Tales(s)’ is still dominant enough to well outweigh its rivals together, an additional boost coming from the success of the new monthly magazines, such as Blackwood’s and Fraser’s, a fertile source of material for compilations describing themselves in this way. It is also possible to discern distinct patterns amongst individual authors, indicating a more than arbitrary adoption of the main terms available. Amongst writers whose works are described as novels in the original titles can be counted: Charlotte Smith, all of whose main fictions in the 1790s carried the simple tag ‘A Novel’; Robert Bage, whose six titles between 1782 and 1796 are similarly named; Mrs. Meeke, producer of almost thirty potboilers for the Minerva Press between 1795 and 1823, all but one of which describe themselves as novels, regardless of the different modes adopted; and Jane Austen, where the inclusion of the term in the case of all the works published in her lifetime, from Sense and Sensibility: A Novel (1813) to Emma: A Novel (1816), reflects a personal willingness to stand up for herself and her family as ‘great Novel-​readers’.7 Walter Scott, more wary of contamination, avoided the term for his individual titles, notwithstanding his growing reputation as the founder of a new kind of historical novel. None of his works in their original form featured in the titles the word ‘Novel’, though three belonging to the early 1820s, starting with Ivanhoe, describe themselves as romances, presumably in an effort to mark themselves off from the preceding run of ‘Scottish’ titles. As a whole, seven other of Scott’s original titles are called ‘Tale’ or ‘Tales’, a further thirteen involving no generic indicator at all. Writers whose work appeared primarily under the category of ‘Tale(s)’ include Maria Edgeworth and Amelia Opie, both of whom expressed an early preference for the term, the first in Belinda (1801), the latter with The Father and Daughter, A Tale, in Prose (1801), her first acknowledged work of fiction.8 To the names of Radcliffe and Lewis as authors of romances can be added that of Charles Robert Maturin, three 7 

Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (new edn., Oxford: OUP, 1995), 26. ‘Advertisement’ to Belinda offering the work as ‘a Moral Tale—​the author not wishing to acknowledge a Novel’; ‘To the Reader’, Father and Daughter, offering not ‘a Novel’ but ‘a Simple, Moral Tale’ (p. vii). 8 

‘Ordering’ Novels: Describing Prose Fiction, 1770–1832    395 of whose six titles call themselves ‘A Romance’. There is also fairly ample evidence of authors and/​or their publishers shifting judiciously between the three terms, sometimes as a reflection of length, but also as a means of denoting the nature of content. It is equally true that generic labels could be bandied around fairly arbitrarily on occasions. Some titles indicate unwillingness on the part of the author to be tied down by any of them, as in the case of Mary Ann Cavendish-​Bradshaw’s Memoirs of Maria, Countess of D’Alva: Being Neither Novel Nor Romance, but appertaining to both (1808), or the anonymous ‘All is Not Fable’. A Tale, Novel, Grave Dissertation or Romance, as it is each reader’s option to consider it (1830). Reviewers frequently use them interchangeably, as if synonymous: the Critical Review in this fashion appraising John Potter’s The Curate of Coventry: A Tale (1771) as a ‘novel … superior to the common run of romances’.9 Even so the gradual dominance of three main descriptors undoubtedly aided reviews such as the Critical in categorizing works of fiction in their monthly catalogues of new works, an exercise which had evidently caused some difficulty in the earlier 1770s, when reviewers pondered over whether Letters and Memoirs were fictive or not, or hesitated whether to place a work under ‘Novels’ or ‘Miscellaneous’, sometimes making the wrong decision. The same applies to circulating library catalogues, where the baggier subheadings used by the longer-​established libraries, such as ‘Novels, Romances, Imaginary Histories, Lives, and Adventures’, generally give way to tighter versions, expanding no further than ‘Novels, Tales, and Romances’. One last feature worth noting is a tendency at the end of our period for novels to include no main generic label at all, with titles held back to the simplest of forms. In the years 1830–​2, from a total of 265 novels, sixty titles (22.6 per cent) describe themselves without any guiding label, indicating that, in its standard forms at least, the genre no longer needed to engage so much in self-​identification.

The Growth of Subgenres As previously indicated, the often fairly extensive titles at this period offered a variety of means for communicating the kind of novel on offer. At its simplest this could be done through the expansion of the generic label with a single epithet (as in Satirical Novel/​ Tale). One of the most durable over the period proved to be ‘Domestic’, which is found most commonly in conjunction with ‘Story’ or ‘Tale’, themselves connoting material of an unadorned and familiar nature. In some cases, an epithet could operate in negative form, as in the case of Mrs. Johnson’s Francis, the Philanthropist: An Unfashionable Tale (1786), published at a time when ‘Fashionable’ can be found as a buzzword, used approvingly or not, in front of a number of titles (e.g., Fashionable Life, Fashionable Follies, Fashionable Infidelity, all of which would have been clustered together in alphabetical listings). Subsidiary help also came in the form of subtitles, usually following after ‘or’,

9 

Critical Review 31 (Apr. 1771), 305.

396

396   PETER GARSIDE the additional words allowing for ampler and more precise information to be given. In certain years as many as half of new titles appeared in this way, with a falling-​off in later years, though the practice was still common in the earliest decades of the nineteenth century. The colonic double-​title also held out the possibility for some circulating libraries to feature the same work twice in their catalogues; or, if the primary title proved unsuccessful, to turn instead to the secondary one in hope of a reinvigorated response. It was also possible for unscrupulous publishers to issue the same work twice by transposing optional titles by means of variant title pages. The development of a number of distinctive subgenres of fiction, notably during the period of high production in the later 1780s and 1790s, helped make titles more crucial than ever in directing readers towards their favourite kind of reading, or in tempting them to try ‘something new’. As the majority of these subgenres are discussed individually in the final part of The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel, this account will deal not so much with inherent characteristics as with the external packaging which helped works stand out within certain groupings. In actuality, the titles of works at this period not infrequently prove on examination to be far more distinctive than the more hybrid narratives which follow them, and there is plenty of evidence of more arresting titles being superimposed over those originally intended by the author. This in itself points to an increasing pressure on certain publishers, especially those directing material at the circulating libraries, to attract the attention of readers by a distinct title, while avoiding unnecessary associations with outdated modes. Notwithstanding the initial resilience of titles of the ‘History/​Adventures/​Memoirs’​ type, one leading feature of the later eighteenth century is a steady decline in the flow of new fiction offering a picaresque and/​or bawdy content. In the case of works leading with ‘History’, over thirty titles in the relatively unproductive 1770s are succeeded by less than twenty in the 1780s, and a mere handful in the 1790s. When found, moreover, such works can prove consciously deferential to past masters, as explicitly so in George Brewer’s The History of Tom Weston, A Novel. After the Manner of Tom Jones (1791). A brief re-​emergence of ‘Adventures’ is evident in 1794, in Thomas Holcoft’s The Adventures of Hugh Trevor and (as a secondary title) Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, though the appropriation of the term by these two ‘Jacobin’ novelists is calculated for a special purpose, and not indicative of the start of a trend. It was also fairly common practice in catalogues to truncate or manipulate these titles into alternative forms, such as ‘Caleb Williams (Adventures of)’ or just ‘Caleb Williams’, avoiding the need for long and impenetrable sequences in their alphabetical listings. Some publishers took on this task themselves: David William Paynter’s The History and Adventures of Godfrey Ranger (1813) in this way becoming simply Godfrey Ranger when reissued by A. K. Newman in 1816. One effect of the decline of an older kind of peripatetic narrative, however, was to allow fuller exposure to a species of object-​centred ‘It-​narratives’, centring on inanimate objects, after the fashion of Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (1760–​5), a species which enjoyed a new prominence in the 1780s, albeit from a relatively marginal position. In this context, ‘Adventures’ became virtually a brand

‘Ordering’ Novels: Describing Prose Fiction, 1770–1832    397 name, introducing accounts of the various experiences and ruminations of a Hackney Coach (1781), a Rupee and Irish Smock (1782), Gold-​Headed Cane (1783), Watch (1788), Shilling (1794), and Pin (1796). Combining with a version of the equally long-​standing ‘secret history’, in which the follies of society are exposed from the perspective of supposedly ingenuous observer, this mode of writing also comes into view again during the scandalous days of the Regency, with titles such as Ann Mary Hamilton’s The Adventures of a Seven-​Shilling Piece (1811) and the anonymous The Adventures of an Ostrich Feather of Quality (1812). Finally the ‘Adventures’ tradition can be seen adapting to new conditions in the 1820s by taking on new forms: as in the perambulatory Hermit titles by Felix Macdonogh (1819+), exotic tales in the style of James Justinian Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba, of Ispahan (1824), and the man-​about-​town exploits of ‘Tom and Jerry’ in Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821) and its various offshoots. One of the most potent phrases found in fiction of the later eighteenth century is ‘In A Series of Letters’, indicating an epistolary content: a practice which itself must have greatly reduced the number of titles beginning ‘Letters of …’. At least forty instances of its use in titles are to be found in the 1770s, followed by over seventy cases in the 1780s, with a falling-​off to just twenty or so in the 1790s. The largest clustering by far is found during the years 1785–​9, at a time when in the region of 40 per cent of all new novels were epistolary.10 Especially noticeable here in the earlier phases is a strong conjunction with novels also proclaiming their ‘sentimental’ credentials, and often focusing on the emotional responses of their young letter-​writing protagonists, instances in the 1780s including the anonymous Anna: A Sentimental Novel. In A Series of Letters (1782) and Edward and Harriet, or The Happy Recovery; A Sentimental Novel (1788). The term ‘sentiment/​al’, given prominence by Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), is not itself found in a large number of titles at this time; but a number of other evocative adjectives such as ‘Affecting’ and ‘Pathetic’ assisted in identification, as did the prominent positioning of heroines’ names, at a time when an increasing number of women writers were associating themselves with the sentimental novel. Coexisting with this mode there is the more intense ‘sensibility’ school of fiction, stimulated by translations of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Goethe’s Werther (1774), though numerically this always represented a minority field, and the term ‘sensibility’ tends to have a problematic or pejorative edge to it when found in indigenous titles. A considerable boost to the domestic variety undoubtedly came through the outstanding success enjoyed by Frances Burney’s Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), which, though not itself strictly speaking a sentimental fiction (owing more to the conduct-​novel tradition), had an immense influence through the centring of its narrative on a single female protagonist. One fairly immediate effect is a marked recurrence of the use of ‘Memoirs of ’ in secondary titles of novels, one of the earliest and more significant instances being Anna Maria Bennett’s first novel Anna; or, Memoirs of a Welch

10 

Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 1: 31–​2.

398

398   PETER GARSIDE Heiress (1785). As a whole the optimum period for the production of sentimental novels in English appears to have been between 1787 and 1790, when at least 30 per cent of new titles are categorizable as belonging to this mode. The form also at this time received a considerable fillip through the popularity of Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline, The Orphan of the Castle (1788) and Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake (1789): both of which titles are characteristic in foregrounding their heroine’s Christian name in close association with words suggesting an outcast or orphan status in remote parts of the country (here, respectively, Wales and the Lake District). Although historians of the Gothic have claimed a fairly unbroken genealogy from Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (first issued 1764; subtitled ‘A Gothic Story’ in its second edition of 1765) to late exponents such as Radcliffe and Lewis, the fully-fledged Gothic romance only really coalesced as a recognizable form in the later 1790s, absorbing in the process several characteristics of the sentimental novel. It is also one of the ironies of literary history that what we now think of as Gothic fiction rarely called itself by that name: over the whole period under view ‘Gothic’ features in titles on only ten of the occasions, four of these through the adoption of ‘A Gothic Story’ as its main descriptor. In terms of density of production the optimum years for the mode were between 1794 and 1807, with at points over a third of new titles exhibiting Gothic characteristics. In the process a number of keywords became vital as a means of identifying both type and provenance. Between 1794 and 1810 as many as twenty-​five new novels employ Mystery/​ ies (or variations such as ‘Mystic’) as the lead main word in their titles, thus ensuring a likely bunching alongside The Mysteries of Udolpho in circulating library catalogues. A combination of ‘Romance’ with a number of other keywords, including ‘Cavern’, ‘Forest’, and ‘Abbey’, would likewise have pointed to a Gothic novel in the relatively decorous Radcliffeian ‘terror’ tradition. ‘Romance’ and ‘Castle’, for example, feature together in some ten new titles between 1794 and 1800, with at least another twenty cases to 1826. Some titles of this nature appear to crowd in as many signifiers as possible in order to attract attention, one of the more egregious instances being The Mysterious Baron, or the Castle in the Forest, A Gothic Story (1808) ‘by Eliza Ratcliffe’ (probably a pseudonym). In contrast, titles following the ‘horror’ school of M. G. Lewis’s The Monk, characterized by its sadism and voyeurism, tend to be far more aggressive in their nomenclature, with visible ghosts and demons upstaging haunting spirits, brutal robbers outnumbering banditti, and nunneries supplanting convents. Not surprisingly, ‘Monk’ is the most common signifier by far, appearing in a leading position in some fifteen titles, with the greatest concentration between 1802 and 1809. In a few instances, titles jumble together Radcliffeian and Lewisian components, as in T. J. Horsley Curties’s The Monk of Udolpho (1807), whose naming (Curties claimed in his foreword) had been largely determined by the priorities of his publisher, J. F. Hughes, the original appellation having been ‘Filial Piety’. Another jangling of signs can be sensed in the case of the eye-​catching Manfroné; or, The One-​handed Monk (1809), likewise published by Hughes, where the ascription to ‘Mary Anne Radcliffe’ may again be a fabrication. Another noticeable feature of the years leading up the publication of Scott’s Waverley (1814) is the large number of novels claiming to be historical fictions, an aspect of literary

‘Ordering’ Novels: Describing Prose Fiction, 1770–1832    399 output which until recently has been relatively ignored. In fact, in its time, perhaps no other subgenre made a greater effort through titling to make its presence known. Though Thomas Leland’s antiquarian novel Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762) was the first to call itself ‘An Historical Romance’, it was not until the later 1780s that labels of this kind begin to be found in numbers, a particularly strong stimulus here coming from the success of Sophia Lee’s The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times (1783–​5), with its influential juxtaposition of the private lives of its fictitious characters and a larger historical backdrop. Between 1786 and 1814 some seventy titles can be found describing themselves as Historic(al) Novels, Romances, or Tales, or close variations of the same (such as ‘A Tale Founded on Historic Fact’). This number is also at least doubled if a number of other key words and phrases are brought into consideration: such as ‘Legend’, ‘Tradition’, ‘Records’, and ‘Other Times’. Admittedly some of the earlier of these novels can on examination prove to be little more than sentimental or Gothic-​type fictions in period costume; while in the early 1810s especially there are instances of the mode being appropriated as a fairly thin veil for contemporary scandalous matter. A good number, however, evidently represent genuine attempts to recreate the ‘manners’ of an earlier period, and/​or to imagine individual lives caught up in larger historical events. Others clearly offered themselves as having an allegorical signification at times of national crisis, the two main peaks in production, between 1789–​91 and 1810–​12, coinciding respectively with the early Revolutionary period and the Peninsular War. Another interesting feature of this mode is its original willingness to appear under all three main generic labels. Between 1800 and 1814, however, ‘Romance’ became by far the main descriptor. In some instances the use of ‘Romance’ by itself appears to have been enough: contemporary readers taking up Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs. A Romance (1810) are hardly likely to have had doubts that a narrative set in the fairly distant national past was on offer. Another indication of resilience is found in the number of established authors making a shift in this direction in the new century, including both the sentimentalist Elizabeth Helme (St. Clair of the Isles: or, The Outlaws of Barra, A Scottish Tradition [1803]) and arch anti-​sentimentalist Jane West (The Loyalists: An Historical Novel [1812]). At this point, the historical romance (though largely overwritten by subsequent developments) stood in a much stronger position than both sentimental and Gothic novels, themselves eventually outnumbered even by their parodies, and either absorbed into other modes or, in unmediated form, consigned to the lower ‘trade’ end of the market.

‘High’ and ‘Low’ Fiction The rapid growth of new titles and proliferation of subgenres in the later eighteenth century created a number of new pressures, affecting both critics wishing to discern literary value and authors whose ambition was to stand out from the common level of production. During the 1770s the atmosphere is noticeably less charged in these respects

400

400   PETER GARSIDE than in following decades. Early review notices indicate a fairly pervasive recognition that a golden age of novel-​writing had been succeeded with one marked by mediocrity, and not infrequently new novels are viewed as being imitative of past masters such as Richardson while lacking their creative spark. At the same time, there is rarely any indication of the possibility of descent beyond the second-​rate; and the monthly reviews’ practice of allocating moderately-​sized single reviews to a few selected works, and briefer catalogue notices for the majority of titles, appears to have operated without too much stress into the following decade. A distinct shift in this situation, however, becomes noticeable from the later 1780s, following a large surge in production. One fairly immediate sign is a new impatience bordering on intolerance to be found in the established monthly reviews, still committed to commenting, however briefly, on all titles issued by the London trade. Symptomatic of this is a new tendency to figure novels in metaphorically grotesque terms, with the circulating library increasingly depicted as a breeding ground for such monstrosities, in terms often indicative of uncontrollable female reproduction. Also perceptible is a general hardening in the sense that previous novelists had set an unattainable standard, making comparison with the more ephemeral productions of the present day pointless. One result is a kind of three-​tier system of grading, with those works picked out for special praise usually being consigned to second-​rate status, ahead of the morass of ‘common’ novels. With the next surge of production in the later 1790s the system of comprehensive reviewing was stretched to breaking point, making the policy of all-​ inclusion well-​nigh untenable in the new century. A number of material factors stood in the way of authors and publishers wishing to surmount these conditions. With impressions generally limited to about 500 copies (most of which went to the circulating libraries), there would have been little profit for publishers, especially those not directly involved in library proprietorship themselves. Authors of reputation were also unlikely to be drawn to a genre where the standard remuneration was in the region of £5–​£10 for the surrender of copyright. Only exceptionally did a novel aimed primarily at the libraries generate large sales. To achieve anything otherwise, it would have been essential to achieve additional sales to private customers: something for which the main crop of early 1770s novels, such as those published by the Noble brothers (who normally displayed library proprietorship on their imprints), seemed singularly ill-​equipped. Later in the century, however, a number of more broadly-​based publishing houses entered into the market, eventually between them capturing most of the prominent authors. Thomas Cadell managed all three of Henry Mackenzie’s titles, advertising them alongside a number of high-​profile books stemming from the Scottish Enlightenment.11 Later his firm was involved in the publication of novels by (among others) Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, and Ann Radcliffe, 11  For a fuller account, see Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment & the Book: Scottish Authors & their Publishers in Eighteenth-​Century Britain, Ireland, & America (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 2006). An interest in Mackenzie’s novels was also held by Cadell’s Scottish-​born partner, William Strahan. Cadell’s firm succeeded that of another Scot, Andrew Millar, publisher of Fielding’s Tom Jones.

‘Ordering’ Novels: Describing Prose Fiction, 1770–1832    401 a position which no doubt encouraged Jane Austen’s father to approach the firm in 1797 as suitable publishers for his daughter’s First Impressions. Other established houses taking on novels at this time include Robinsons, publishers of (among others) Harriet and Sophia Lee, Elizabeth Inchbald, and John Moore; and Longmans, who entered the field during the later 1790s, with works by Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Anna Maria Porter, building up from there to make fiction a regular component in their extensive listings during the new century. A variety of methods could also be employed by publishers wishing to make individual titles stand out, including extensive advertising, the setting of a premium price, and the use of the larger octavo (8vo) format (inviting comparison with genres such as history and biography), compared with the duodecimo ‘twelves’ by which novels were still organized in some circulating libraries. Nonetheless, discriminating marks of this kind were relatively rare at this juncture; while the gap between circulating library fiction and more upmarket products was by no means as clear as it would become by the 1820s. William Lane of the Minerva Press, for example, included novels by Godwin and Bage in his earlier lists, and was capable on occasions of producing items similar to those at the higher ‘carriage-​trade’ end of the market. Several practical means of advancement were available for individual authors, even those choosing to remain anonymous on their title pages. Frances Burney’s sequence of novels after Evelina (1778) were linked only by mention of preceding titles (‘by the Author of ’), though one suspects the author’s identity and family connections were reasonably well known by the time of Cecilia (1782), and in the case of Camilla (1796), financed by a widespread public subscription, there can have been no doubts at all. Cecilia itself provides a singular example of a contemporary novelist being rated by the reviewers on an (almost) equal footing with past masters, the Critical reviewer placing it ‘among the first productions of the kind’.12 Another sign of the prominence achieved by authors such as Mackenzie and Burney is the large number of imitations generated in their wake. By the 1790s it was not unusual for authors to change publishers, in seeking out advantages, Charlotte Smith switching between Cadell, Robinson, John Bell, and Sampson Low; Ann Radcliffe moving from Thomas Hookham (at the higher end of the circulating library trade) to publish The Mysteries of Udolpho with Robinson and The Italian (1797) with Cadell, the former advertised as comprising ‘four very large volumes’ and both set a premium price. Almost invariably it was such authors who managed to claim larger payments and whose works most regularly entered into subsequent editions. In the 1790s the novel showed signs of a new confidence, one noticeable factor being the increased proportion of authors acknowledging their works. Certain authors and titles also enjoyed new status in the heady post-​Revolutionary ideological climate, which gave fresh purpose to the sentimental novel, while encouraging open interventions into the genre by Godwin and other ‘Jacobin’ writers. The leading reviews 12 

Critical Review 54 (Dec. 1782), 420. The review also reports that ‘It is supposed to be written by Miss Burney, author of Evelina, and daughter of the ingenious Dr. Burney’ (414).

402

402   PETER GARSIDE proved surprisingly commendatory in their responses, almost to the end of the decade: Godwin’s Things As They Are (1794), according to its Critical reviewer, ranked ‘greatly above the whole mass of publications which bear the name of novels’, excepting perhaps ‘the productions of Fielding, Smollet [sic], and Burney’.13 The inclusion here of Burney matches a tendency at this stage for more general observers to link different generations of novelists with some degree of equality: Alexander Thomson’s Essay on the Novel. A Poetical Epistle (1793), for instance, traces a seemingly uninterrupted line from Fielding and Richardson, through Goethe and Rousseau, to Mackenzie, Burney, and ‘ingenious Smith’.14 However, by the turn of the century much of this buoyancy had gone, deflated by the anti-​Jacobin movement’s targeting of both sentimental fiction and the Godwinian novel, which at its height could be mistaken for an all-​out assault on the genre itself. A parallel realignment of the canon is also perceptible in novels such as Robert Bisset’s reactionary Douglas; or, The Highlander (1800), with Fielding granted precedence over Richardson, Burney being separated off from Radcliffe and Smith, and Godwin and his circle excoriated out of existence in the most violent of personal attacks. The early 1800s show the reputation of fiction at one of its lowest points. At the same time, as a form of popular reading matter the genre by now was palpably unstoppable, with an optimum peak of 111 new titles being reached in 1808. A leading producer of low-​ grade fiction in the later 1800s was J. F. Hughes, whose output for a while exceeded that of the Minerva Press (itself undergoing a change of proprietor from Lane to Newman), reaching nearly 25 per cent of production in the bumper year of 1808.15 With M. G. Lewis representing the only well-​known author in his lists, Hughes’s output in the years 1807–​9 consisted primarily of lurid Gothic ‘horror’ novels and a new acerbic kind of scandal fiction, the latter feeding on the success of T. S. Surr’s A Winter in London (1806) and sometimes using similar ‘season’ type titles (Winter in Dublin, Summer at Brighton, etc.). As far as can be ascertained only a handful of Hughes’s later titles received reviews of any kind. The idea that fiction had reached an absolute nadir, demanding radical reformation, can be found in a number of key texts at this point. One major intervention came in the form of Hannah More’s evangelical Cœlebs in Search of a Wife (1808), whose multiple editions indicate a large take-​up amongst book-​purchasing supporters, and which incorporates numerous observations on the parlous state of contemporary novel-​reading. More significant still, when its full ramifications are understood, is Scott’s review of Maturin’s Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio (1807) for the Quarterly Review of 1810. Claiming to have received a hamper of fashionable novels from his publisher, Scott skims a thin layer of ‘insipid’ sentimental fictions, before biting on the new scurrility: ‘we have now the lowest denizens of Grub-​street narrating, under the flimsy veil of false names, and through the medium of a fictitious tale, all that malevolence can invent 13 

Critical Review, ns 11 (July 1794), 290. Alexander Thomson, Essay on Novels: A Poetical Epistle (Edinburgh, 1793), 3–​4. 15  For an overview, see Peter Garside, ‘J. F. Hughes and the Publication of Popular Fiction, 1803–​1810’, The Library, 6th ser., 9/​3 (1987), 240–​58. 14 

‘Ordering’ Novels: Describing Prose Fiction, 1770–1832    403 and stupidity propagate’. Delving further, he confronts a number of formulaic imitations of Radcliffe and Lewis, amidst which the Fatal Revenge stands out as the product of a gifted, if misdirected, writer.16 In the early years of the following decade, marked by a new austerity, a significant boost was given to the novel’s reputation by both the polite moral-​evangelical novel and the Irish ‘national tale’ of Edgeworth and Lady Morgan. The most significant reordering of the novel, however, undoubtedly occurs within the pages of Scott’s Waverley (1814), beginning with the opening chapters, which were most probably written sometime between 1808 and 1810 (the 1805 narrative starting point representing a fictional device).17 The introductory sequence, mockingly speculating possible subtitles, parallels the Maturin review in proceeding through the Radcliffeian Gothic (‘a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing has been long uninhabited’), a more Lewisian ‘Romance from the German’, a ‘Sentimental Tale’ (‘sufficient presage of a heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp’), and a ‘A Tale of the Times’ ( ‘a dashing sketch of the fashionable world, a few anecdotes of private scandal thinly veiled’).18 Eschewing such possibilities, Scott then settles on a tale of men and manners, set just within living memory, adopting at first a narrative tone strongly reminiscent of Fielding. In the main body of the narrative, romance famously collides with the historical actualities of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion. Yet alongside this Scott can be seen redeploying fictional tropes of a kind supposedly discarded, Waverley’s state of cultural disorientation in the Highlands matching the perplexities of the Radcliffeian heroine, the auburn-​haired Flora Mac-​Ivor echoing not only countless sentimental forebears but more immediately Lady Morgan’s Glorvina in her Wild Irish Girl (1806). The final act of manoeuvring is found in the closing ‘Postscript, which should have been a Preface’, which sidesteps Morgan while praising Edgeworth, then briefly touches on intervening contributions in the field of Scottish ‘manners’ by Elizabeth Hamilton and Anne Grant, before culminating with its dedication to Henry Mackenzie ‘by an unknown admirer of his genius’. Through such means Scott advantageously realigns the recent history of fiction, reconnecting with an older classic tradition while emerging with a formulation viewed as strikingly new by his readers. The unprecedented success of the Waverley Novels played a major part in transforming the fiction industry, taking the reputation of the genre to new heights.19 By the time of Rob Roy (1818), its Edinburgh publisher Archibald Constable was prepared to hazard a first impression of 10,000 copies, a fabulous number by contemporary standards, indicative of a significant return to the genre by purchasing male readers. (The relatively large survival rate of Scott’s novels in their original editions, often in fine bindings, likewise points

16 

Quarterly Review 3 (May 1810), 440–​1. See Walter Scott, Waverley, ed. Peter Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007), 367–​83. 18  Waverley, ed. Garside, 3–​4. 19  For an account of the ‘extraordinary success of the Waverley Novels’, and their effect in creating a golden era for other authors of fiction, since in decline, see James Grant, The Great Metropolis, 2nd ser., 2 vols. (London, 1837), 1: 122–​3. 17 

404

404   PETER GARSIDE to a willingness to display copies on private shelves, a factor also applying to other upmarket titles belonging to the 1820s.) From the start ‘the author of Waverley’ received close attention from the new-​style quarterly reviews, such as the Edinburgh and Quarterly, which were otherwise highly selective in accepting novels for review, and inclined even in the 1820s to bundle prominent titles together under group headings. In the January 1820 issue of the Edinburgh Review Francis Jeffrey welcomed a new departure, the medieval/​ English Ivanhoe (1820), alongside Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley (1819), a collection of Scott’s novels up to that point, likening the author to Shakespeare as a model of canon-​forming male potency.20 Impression numbers for first editions reached as high as 12,000; while the introduction of the octavo format with Ivanhoe soon offered the excuse for pushing up prices to 31s. 6d. (half a guinea per volume) with Kenilworth (1821): a combination which had become a hallmark for upmarket fiction by the end of the decade. As sales started to recede with The Fortunes of Nigel (1822)—​one of no less than three Scott novels bearing that year on their imprint—​new markets were sought out through the issue of collected sets in a variety of formats, Novels and Tales being fairly rapidly followed by Historical Romances, Novels and Romances, and finally Tales and Romances, a series bringing into play all three main generic labels discussed earlier. The final recognition of Scott’s having achieved classic status in his own lifetime came with the ‘Magnum Opus’ collected edition of his novels, offering single volumes in cloth-​covered boards at 5s. published monthly, starting with a double issue in June 1829, whose sales rapidly rose as high as 30,000, attracting new kinds of reader to the genre. In bearing the lead title of Waverley Novels on its spine labels and title pages this employed the same mantle descriptive term as the main body of post-​1774 collected sets of ‘classic’ fiction, ranging from Harrison’s Novelist’s Magazine (1780–​8), through Barbauld’s British Novelists (1810), to Scott’s own Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (1821–​4).21 As such it offered infallible proof that the genre, collectively known as the novel, had now in its contemporary form come to full fruition.

Select Bibliography Downie, J. A., ‘The Making of the English Novel’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 9/​3 (1997), 1–​18. Ferris, Ina, The Achievement of Literary History: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP, 1991). Garside, Peter, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000).

20 

Edinburgh Review 33 (Jan. 1820), [1]‌. For a valuable commentary on these collected sets, made possible by the 1774 House of Lords decision that ended perpetual copyright in Britain, see Michael Gamer, ‘A Select Collection: Barbauld, Scott, and the Rise of the (Reprinted) Novel’, in Jillian Heydt-​Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman (eds.), Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780–​1830 (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2008), 155–​91. 21 

‘Ordering’ Novels: Describing Prose Fiction, 1770–1832    405 Heydt-​Stevenson, Jillian, and Charlotte Sussman (eds.), Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780–​1830 (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2008). Kelly, Gary, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789–​1830 (London: Longman, 1989). Killick, Tim, British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century:  The Rise of the Tale (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Mandal, Anthony, Jane Austen and the Popular Novel:  The Determined Author (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Maxwell, Richard, and Katie Trumpener (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2008). Nixon, Cheryl (ed.), Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688–​1815 (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2009). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). Stevens, Ann H., British Historical Fiction before Scott (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Tompkins, J. M. S., The Popular Novel in England 1770–​1800 (London: Methuen, 1932). Williams, Ioan (ed.), Novel and Romance 1700–​1800: A Documentary Record (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).

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Novels and Novelists, 1770–​1832

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Chapter 24

The Rise and De c l i ne of the Epistol a ry Nov e l , 1 7 70–​1 832 Ros Ballaster

Mr Villars to Lady Howard Dear Madam,

March 18.

This letter will be delivered to you by my child,—​the child of my adoption, —​my affection! Unblest with one natural friend, she merits a thousand. I send her to you, innocent as an angel, and artless as purity itself: and I send you with her the heart of your friend, the only hope he has on earth, the subject of his tenderest thoughts, and the object of his latest cares. She is one, Madam, for whom alone I have lately wished to live; and she is one whom to serve I would with transport die! Restore her but to me all innocence as you receive her, and the fondest hope of my heart will be amply gratified! A. Villars1

In 1778 the novel in letters was, like the eponymous heroine of Burney’s fiction, a thriving, indeed blooming, product circulating in the reading world with great success and especially prized for its much-​vaunted unselfconsciousness. However, the story often told in the epistolary novel was a familiar one by this point, a story of corruption in and by the world resulting in disgrace and death. Villars’s missive reminds us that letters have destinations or destinies and at this point Evelina’s destiny seems ‘written’ for the reader; Burney, of course, turns that destiny in a different direction, rewarding her heroine with a wealthy, aristocratic, and admiring husband, and a restored legitimacy in a reunion with the father who has been duped into raising a suppositious child in her stead. Villars’s 1 

Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: OUP, 1970), 20.

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410   ROS BALLASTER language characterizes Evelina not only as ‘letter’ (‘I send her to you’) but also as agent of delivery (‘This letter will be delivered to you by my child’). The conscious pun on ‘delivery’ and ‘child’ makes us aware of the conceit that the letter is an artificial substitute for the person, sent when correspondents cannot be together in person, just as Villars and Evelina have an ‘artificial’ connection not of blood kinship. So too, the epistolary novel created powerful feelings in its readers of affection and kinship with its invented protagonists. However, by the early nineteenth century, the epistolary novel was in bad shape. The exquisite pleasures of participating in a lingering death afforded by Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748–​9) and rehearsed in subsequent letter novels were substituted by the frustrations of pursuing the ghostly presence of letters curtailed, silenced, intercepted, unread, or simply abandoned in midstream. Thus the second volume of Scott’s Redgauntlet (1824) opens with the interruption of the exchange of letters between two young male friends by an editor; he pronounces that the advantage of laying before the reader, in the words of the actors themselves, the adventures which we must otherwise have narrated in our own, has given great popularity to the publication of epistolary correspondence, as practised by various great authors, and by ourselves in the preceding volume. Nevertheless, a genuine correspondence of this kind, (and Heaven forbid it should be in any respect sophisticated by interpolations of our own!) can seldom be found to contain all in which it is necessary to instruct the reader for his full comprehension of the story. Also it must often happen that various prolixities and redundancies occur in the course of an interchange of letters, which would only hang as a dead weight on the progress of the narrative. To avoid this dilemma, some biographers have used the letters of the personages concerned, or liberal extracts from them, to describe particular incidents, or express the sentiments which they entertained; while they connect them occasionally with such portions of narrative, as may serve to carry on the thread of the story.2

Scott’s case—​that the epistolary novel’s unfolding of character was at odds with the public taste for narrative incident—​has proved compelling for historians of the novel. As Clare Brant reminds us, deciphering ‘character’ is a preoccupation of the novel in letters in both a physical and hermeneutic sense (working out handwriting as well as working out the creditworthiness of the one who writes): letters are ‘forms of writing which in the eighteenth century were understood to be never far from character’.3 Nevertheless, the interest in character at the expense of plot was on the wane, at least with publishers who claimed to be serving the tastes of their readers. Elizabeth Lefanu was apologetic in the preface to her India Voyage of 1804 for the epistolary style as ‘more favourable to the development of character than the narrative’.4 ‘[O]‌ne suspects’, writes Peter Garside, ‘that the mechanics

2 

Walter Scott, Redgauntlet: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century, ed. G. A. M. Wood with David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997), 125. 3  Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 27. 4  Elizabeth Lefanu, The India Voyage (London, 1804), 1: 39.

The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–1832    411 of the epistolary form had become an impediment to a readership eager for the thrills and escapades available in newer direct narrative modes, notably the Gothic novel. In these circumstances, publishers are likely to have discouraged unmediated epistolary structures.’ He gives as an example the ‘Advertisement’ to The Irishwoman in London (1810), in which the author, Ann Mary Hamilton, complained that the publisher, J. F. Hughes, had altered the text ‘from Letters to Chapters’, ‘conceiving it not so saleable’.5 It is incontrovertible from the publishing evidence that the epistolary mode did undergo a new surge in the general output of novels in the 1770s and a decline in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Godfrey Frank Singer estimates from reviews and notices of fictional works published between 1741 and 1800 that one-​fifth of the 1,341 titles he identifies are epistolary. Although half of the sentimental novels that appeared in 1785 are, by his calculation, epistolary, ‘after 1786 the epistolary mode suddenly goes out of fashion, and is used decreasingly as the years go on’.6 As Garside notes, the comprehensive bibliography published in The English Novel 1770–​1829 (2000) added only a small number of titles to Frank Gees Black’s ‘Chronological List of Epistolary Fiction’.7 The story of the rise and decline of the epistolary novel begins to look less like an organic passage from innocence to experience and more like a conspiracy. The epistolary novel did not fall; it was pushed. Histories of genres tend to reach for generic explanations for the rise and decline of genres. Three persuasive critical works have paid full and careful attention to the generic habits of the epistolary mode but have drawn their conclusions about its decline from the 1790s onwards from non-​literary or non-​generic evidence. Thomas O. Beebee asserts that epistolary fiction is a ‘function rather than a thing’, a mode of writing and reading in which the reader adopts the place of the fictional addressee. For Beebee, the rise of epistolary fiction in the early modern period is the result of its connection to non-​literary forms such as the letter-​writing manual and the letter itself, which enables it to appear more capable of connecting with the real than previously dominant fictional modes such as epic and romance. The decline of epistolary fiction is in turn explained as a function of the emergence of a distinct category of the ‘literary’ in the early nineteenth century: ‘As Literature constitutes itself more and more as a unique discursive practice with language and representation as its objects, the letter-​ form which had previously tied fiction to the realm of ethics, religion, and information begins to burden rather than empower.’8 Nicola Watson sees the decline of the 5  Peter Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era: Consolidation and Dispersal’, in Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 2: 54. 6  Godfrey Frank Singer, The Epistolary Novel: Its Origin, Development, Decline, and Residuary Influence (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 99–100, 101. 7  Garside, ‘The English Novel’, 53. Black’s count of English epistolary fictions was as follows: 160 (1780s); 155 (1790s); 62 (1800s); 38 (1810s); 26 (1820s). See Frank Gees Black, The Epistolary Novel in the Late Eighteenth Century (Eugene, OR: U of Oregon P, 1940), 160–8. 8  Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500–1850 (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 8, 168. For a similar approach, see Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1982).

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412   ROS BALLASTER epistolary novel as rather the outcome of a long struggle to respond to a single example of the genre, Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s Julie; ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761). This for Watson is a political and ideological contest over the meaning of revolution in the last decade of the eighteenth century; she identifies a series of different strategies and structures on the part of both pro-​and anti-​Jacobins evolved to contain the potentially revolutionary force of the Héloïse plot—​strategies which see letters ‘insistently intercepted, scrutinized, and redirected in censored form’.9 Mary Favret also explores the ideological anxieties in England over revolution. She observes that the decline of epistolary fiction in the 1790s coincides with the rise of the Post Office (the mail coach comes under its control in 1798) and increasing state regulation of correspondence amid rising fears of ‘secret’ correspondence between revolutionary insurgents. The ‘fiction’ of the feminine and private nature of the letter is increasingly revealed as a sophisticated form of drapery to conceal or write over the political potentials of the letter and the containment of its incendiary potential through publication, the making public of conspiracy and correspondence.10 Letters are a common feature in most novels of the eighteenth century and continue to feature in prose fiction up to the present day; our interest in this essay is in novels which deliver both plot and character wholly through letters whether from a single correspondent, a couple, or many. My focus throughout is on the changing fortunes of ‘character’ in relation to narrative. Just as letter fictions depict characters whose discourse is shaped by the correspondent to whom they write, I will argue that the novel in letters is highly responsive to its predecessors in the mode: that individual novels and authors are ‘writing back’ or ‘co-​responding’ to powerful generic predecessors. Difficulties and tensions between character and plot/​narrative recur throughout the epistolary novel’s not-​so-​long history; it is not a conflict in which ‘plot’ eventually triumphs but rather one in which alternative techniques for weaving the representation of character into the representation of event prove more effective and resilient, indeed come to define themselves consciously by negating the epistolary vehicle.11 This is then a story about how a particular generic experiment failed to survive, a story of a life not-​lived, but a life of considerable if invisible influence. We will look at successive attempts to ‘redirect’ the form. These are attempts both of personality (presenting new kinds of voice and main protagonist) and geography (sending letter-​writers to parts of the globe ‘new’ to English readers). We will look in turn at examples of novels in letters from 1769 to 1780, the 1790s, and the first two decades of the eighteenth century.

9  Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825: Interpreted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 26. 10  Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). 11  See especially Favret, Romantic Correspondence, 133–96, in which she charts Jane Austen’s representation of the letter as impediment to ‘reading’ character in her major novels.

The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–1832    413

Healthy Signs: 1769–​1780 Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–​8) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753–​4) raised the game of the epistolary novel considerably in the mid-​eighteenth century. The letter in fiction had previously served as a device for the delivery of a narrative or series of narratives to one or more correspondents but often with one or very few correspondents. Richardson’s novels produce a community of mutual readers and writers variously privy to different parts of the correspondence circulating among them. The network novel instigated by Richardson remains a continuing influence in the 1770s but the epistolary novel received new impetus from two significant publications translated swiftly into English from France and Germany. Jean-​Jacques Rousseau revived and exploited the success of two earlier letter fictions in the voice of a passionate nun: the 1669 Lettres portugaises (translated as Five Love-​Letters of a Nun into English by Sir Roger L’Estrange) of Mariana Alcoforado to a cavalier-​lover, and the translation from Latin into French in 1713 of the letters of the twelfth-​century Héloïse d’Argenteuil to her tutor and lover Peter Abelard following their separation and his castration by her vengeful family. The first English translator’s choice of the title Eloisa: or a Series of Original Letters Collected and Published by J. J. Rousseau (4 vols., 1761) reminded readers of Alexander Pope’s still-​ popular 1717 poem ‘Eloisa to Abelard’. William Kenrick’s slightly modified translation of Rousseau’s novel was not published under the French title of Julie until an Edinburgh edition of 1773. Rousseau concentrates on the presentation and analysis of intense feeling and its suppression as Julie struggles to overcome her first passion for Saint-​Preux in an honourable and successful marriage to her father’s choice, Baron Wolmar. Nonetheless, on her deathbed as a result of a cold caught saving one of her children from drowning, Julie confesses her undimmed love for Saint-​Preux. The Richardsonian network novel is now tied to the amatory intensity of the ‘Portuguese’ style. Rousseau’s novel was one of the greatest publishing successes of the eighteenth century, its fifteenth French edition appearing in 1812. By contrast Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), translated as The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1779, transferred the intense and repetitive expression of unfulfilled desire associated with the voice of the abandoned female anchorite, to a young and sentimental male. In the course of eighty letters, Werther describes to his friend, Wilhelm, his encounter with and passion for the country girl, Lotte, already betrothed to the worthy Albert, in the remote and lovely countryside of the fictional area of Waldheim. The novel concludes with the hero’s suicide in despair at his unrequited love. Robyn Shiffman persuasively argues that Goethe’s short novel reverses and stalls the circulatory optimism of the Richardsonian novel and its imitators, revealing that the circulation and exchange of the epistolary mode has become stagnant and illusory.12 The energy associated with the voice of active desire is the special quality 12 

Robyn L. Schiffman, ‘Werther and the Epistolary Novel’, European Romantic Review 19 (2008), 430.

414

414   ROS BALLASTER of the epistolary fictions in the 1770s and 1780s. This energy may be located in the transformative power of sentimental connections often but not always amatory. The optimism about the power of the circulating letter to connect and reform individuals is demonstrated in two very different epistolary novels, Elizabeth Griffith’s The Delicate Distress (1769) and Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). The former locates that circulating virtue in the country estate and the tested loyalty of a virtuous wife, the latter in the picaresque encounters of a travelling family with a variety of characters who, like themselves, are tested to discover whether eccentricity cloaks or, indeed, indicates virtue. As Griffith’s novel was published with another by her husband, Richard (The Gordian Knot), under the title Two Novels in Letters. By the Authors of Henry and Frances, capitalizing on the success of the publication of the first four volumes of their courtship and marriage letters, A Series of Genuine Letters Between Henry and Frances, readers were already accustomed to see the couple as models of epistolary success. In the Genuine Letters they had already extrapolated the idea of different and complementary epistolary styles male and female as productive of marital balance.13 The plot of The Delicate Distress unfolds through the exchange of letters between groups of correspondents who have different access to information. Responsibility for delivering the main threads of the narrative shifts, not always easily, between the epistolary circle of the heroine, the recently married Emily Woodville (whose major correspondent is her sister, Lady Straffon), and that of her husband (whose major correspondent is Lord Seymour). Seymour is entangled in a melodramatic love affair with an illegitimate French girl, Charlotte Beaumont. Meanwhile, Emily comes to suspect her husband of a continuing attachment to his first love, the exotic Isabella, Marchioness de St. Aumont, ‘a true Calypso’.14 To save her heroine from expressing so indelicate a suspicion, Griffith strategically transfers the unfolding of plot to the letters of Lord Woodville himself, not returning it to Emily until after the crisis is averted and the husband returns to his long-​suffering wife. Seymour, however, cannot be united with Charlotte who, despite her continuing passion, like Éloïse and Mariana, embraces the role of nun, in this case because her lover has killed her brother in a duel. The story of the good wife’s patient suffering when her husband is attracted to an exotic foreign or foreign-​educated mistress revives in later sentimental epistolary novels (see, for example, the subsequent discussion of Leonora). The letter enables the reader to see the depth of emotion and attachment, indeed passion, in the English wife who is a model of decorum and serene maternity in public. Smollett also counterpoints correspondent pairs but for comic effect. In the course of a journey from Wales to the Scottish Highlands via Bath and London, letters from 13 

I am particularly grateful to the work of Debbie McVitty on Elizabeth Griffith. See her ‘Familiar Collaboration and Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Elizabeth Griffith, Sarah Fielding and Susannah and Margaret Minifie’ (unpublished Oxford DPhil thesis, 2007), chapter 4 (archived at ORA [Oxford Research Archive] [http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/objects/ uuid:626a7d25-a7b8-448c-acef-cba199e63f54]. 14  Elizabeth Griffith, The Delicate Distress, ed. Cynthia Booth Ricciardi and Susan Staves (Lexington: Kentucky UP, 1997), 19.

The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–1832    415 the older spinster vulnerable to the excitements of a Methodist religiosity and desperate to secure a suitor at any price, Tabitha Bramble, are contrasted with those of her lovely niece, Lydia Melford, pursued by a suitor, Wilson, from whom she has been separated by her hot-​headed Oxford student brother, Jery, and her eccentric, hypochondriac uncle, Matthew Bramble; the correspondence of the uncle and nephew reveals not contrasts but similarities, exposing both as flawed men of sensibility. The novel concludes with the disclosures of true gentility behind apparent lowness and reformed virtue from apparent vice familiar from the comic dramas of intrigue of the eighteenth-​ century stage and the comic novels of Henry Fielding. Humphry Clinker proves to be the illegitimate offspring of Matthew Bramble and is united with his somewhat fickle sweetheart, Tabitha’s servant, Winifred Jenkins. Lydia is united with Wilson, revealed to be the disguised and wealthy George Dennison. Tabitha marries her quixotic-​suitor, Obadiah Lismahago, a retired Scottish soldier. Character is not, however, ‘proved’ in this novel, as it is in The Delicate Distress, through disclosure of hidden feelings and sentimental energies in the letter. It is, rather, performed through orthographic renderings of particular styles: the hilarious errors of spelling and lexis in the letters of Tabitha and Win, the sensitivity and familial loyalty betrayed in small slips of the pen by Jery and Matthew. Where The Delicate Distress weaves its plot through the exchange of letters by a network of correspondents, each letter-​writer in Humphry Clinker has their own silent addressee: Matthew to his doctor, Dick Lewis; Jery to his fellow student and friend, Watkin Philips; Tabitha to Mrs. Gwyllim the housekeeper at Brambleton-​hall; Liddy to her friend, Laetitia Willis, of Gloucester; Win to her fellow servant, Mary Jones, at Brambleton-​hall. Character passes through these silent conduits and the filaments of connection and affection of the travelling group are made apparent to the readers of the novel while they remain invisible to the members of the party or those addressees. In these two examples we see the expression of two powerful trajectories for the epistolary novel, picaresque (Humphry Clinker) and domestic (Delicate Distress). The former revived some of the potentials and pleasures of the ‘spy’ letter sequence of the eighteenth century, providing descriptive accounts of spaces and places encountered in travels, the re-​narration of contemporary or recent political and national scandals, satirical comment on social and political abuses. Both, however, set in train the expectation that the epistolary novel represented the ‘familiar’ world in the sense of the relations between members of a ‘family’, both servants and masters. And both works imply that the careful balance of power between those members—​not always requiring submission to obvious hierarchy but rather mutual respect and interdependence—​could provide a model for other power relations, especially those between neighbouring states or governing state and its colonies. Two further epistolary novels of this earlier period can serve to indicate the robustness of the mode in the 1770s. Henry Mackenzie’s last novel, Julia de Roubigné. A Tale. In a Series of Letters (1777), is described on its title page as a work by the already celebrated ‘author of The Man of Feeling and the Man of the World’, whereas Frances Burney’s Evelina or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778) was a publishing sensation which in a few months identified its authoress as, like its heroine, an untried

416

416   ROS BALLASTER figure of considerable attraction in a crowded market. Rather than providing a network of correspondents, these novels make the major correspondent an innocent and intelligent woman assiduously courted by more than one man but romantically committed to a single preferred suitor; in each case, the addressee/​confidante is removed from the action of the text and largely incapable of influencing the unfolding of the plot. Julia, a French girl, obliged to accompany her parents into country retirement following the collapse of her father’s fortune through a lawsuit, nurtures an undeclared passion for her childhood friend, Savillon, who has gone to Martinique to make his fortune under the care of a plantation-​owning uncle. However, when a generous Spanish-​educated neighbour, Montaubon, relieves her father of debts likely to result in imprisonment following the death of her mother, Julia (believing reports of Savillon’s planned marriage to a plantation heiress) accepts Montaubon’s marriage proposal. Julia proves a model wife but Savillon returns, reveals his own long-​standing passion through her friend and major correspondent, Maria, and requests an interview. Montaubon, through the covert investigations of his servant, intercepts Julia’s letters and, believing her unfaithful, poisons her shortly after the interview only to discover her innocence on her deathbed. He kills himself with laudanum. Evelina’s fate is, quite explicitly, a more ‘English’ one despite her unfortunate connections through a vulgar grandmother, Madame Duval, with the French world of violent passions never perfectly suppressed and sudden death rehearsed in Julia de Roubigné and most familiar from Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse. Evelina leaves the guardianship of the country clergyman, Villars, to whom her dead mother has entrusted her, to visit his friend Lady Howard who, in turn, obtains permission for her daughter’s family, the Mirvans, to conduct Evelina to London. Here, Evelina encounters the polite and upright Lord Orville to whom she is powerfully attracted, the fascinating and persistent Sir Clement Willoughby who pursues her relentlessly, and her vulgar relations, Madame Duval and the Branghton family. Evelina goes first to the country, then finds herself subject to a series of mortifications in London in the company of her grandmother but here she also befriends a suicidal young poet Macartney. Our heroine falls ill when she receives an insulting letter from Orville (in fact a forgery by Sir Clement) and returns to Villars and Berry Hill to recuperate. Macartney becomes the subject of Lord Orville’s jealousy when they all meet again at the resort of Clifton Heights to which Evelina has travelled with her bold and outgoing neighbour, Lady Selwyn. Evelina proves her innocence and love to Orville, however, and he brings about a reconciliation with her estranged father, Lord Belmont, heretofore deceived by a wetnurse into raising a suppositious child, Polly Green, in Evelina’s place. Evelina Anville and her lover, Orville, can now be happily united. Julia and Evelina are preoccupied less with judging others than the difficulties of managing the ways in which their characters are understood and circulate in the societies they enter and inhabit. The fact that their stories are rendered through their own letters not only ensures that the readers are left in no doubt as to their innocence but it also reveals in Julia’s case the depth and authenticity of her sensibility and in Evelina’s the quickness and charm of her wit. However, we can also see each as developing the

The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–1832    417 two trajectories we have identified in their predecessors: in Evelina, the picaresque satire of Humphry Clinker, and in Julia, the domestic sentiment of The Delicate Distress. Differences of style indicate the difference of emphasis here. ‘In truth,’ confesses Julia in her tenth letter, ‘my story is the story of sentiment.’15

Revolutionary Ills and Imperial Revivals: the 1790s The epistolary novel became a vehicle for response to the extraordinary transformations of the 1790s. The letter serves as a means of bridging distance, of bringing to life for a correspondent ‘at home’ the experiences and worlds encountered by a familiar writer ‘away’ or ‘abroad’. It is perhaps surprising that so many significant examples of the mode until this point had confined themselves to a domestic circle or to action that takes place in a single and familiar European state: Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Germany. In the 1790s epistolary fiction brings domestic lives into contact with state political unrest and its correspondents travel further afield to report on spaces profoundly ‘foreign’ but also intensely interesting to English readers. We can also identify fresh cynicism about the agency of the letter as a vehicle of (purity of) intent, fuelled by the success of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons danger­ euses in 1782. Laclos’s sensational work depicted a corrupt French aristocracy driven by motives of private pleasure, revenge, and competition to seduce the innocent. Whereas Richardson had countered Lovelace’s libertine confidences to his friend Belford with those of the virtuous and intelligent Clarissa to hers, Anna Howe, Laclos’s revolution was to give libertine voices the whip hand throughout his novel. The traditional gap in the network novel between what the reader knows and what the central protagonist knows here narrows so that the reader finds him-​or herself in uncomfortable conspiracy with—​and often indeed admiring—​the villains of the piece. Laclos can be seen as, like Rousseau, an apologist anticipating revolutionary forces designed to restore ‘natural’ desire to a rightful authority undermined by a ‘civilization’ that has become corrupt and self-​serving. By the 1790s, unfolding violence in France led English and French writers alike to view with concern the extent of the revolutionary ‘purges’ which appeared to be overturning authority itself. The story of love in the letter turns to the issue of revolution and its unpredictable outcomes. Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792), written and published before the onset of the Terror in France, opens with its eponymous hero engaged in an impassioned defence of the French Revolution and Enlightenment principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, in correspondence with his older friend and mentor Erasmus Bethel. Lionel Desmond falls in love with the married Geraldine Verney, and proves himself a hero when he saves her and her children from the dangers to which they are 15 Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné A Tale. Told in Letters (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777), 1: 82.

418

418   ROS BALLASTER exposed when her dissolute husband summons her to join him in an unsettled French landscape populated by looters and robbers armed by southern French aristocrats. The death of Geraldine’s husband makes possible their union but not before we discover that Desmond has had an affair and fathered an illegitimate child with the Frenchwoman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Geraldine, Josephine de Boisbelle, sister to his friend Montfleuri. Desmond exhibits the distinctive tension that marks the fiction of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, the authors’ Jacobin fellows. The attempt to produce social criticism, to promote meritocratic principles, and to attack a decadent aristocratic culture sits uneasily with more traditional modes of narrative in which a misjudged hero reveals his true worth through honourable action. For all Desmond’s dislike of inherited wealth and institutional power, he is very much in the mould of the romance hero. Indeed, the lively sister of Desmond’s friend, Fanny Waverley, quips in a reference to her attraction to Desmond that ‘there is but one in the world whom I should select as the hero of my romance, if I were in haste to make one’.16 The instability of ‘character’ in Desmond contributes to the heated debate over whether the French Revolution was a manifestation of ‘true’ (for the Jacobins) or ‘false’ (for the anti-​Jacobins) sympathy and sublimity, but it also found appropriate form in the letter novel where interpretive command is ceded to the reader or produced through the reading of letters which compete for interpretive authority among a network of correspondents. By the time Eliza Fenwick published her ‘revolutionary’ work, Secresy, or, the Ruin on the Rock in 1795, France had undergone a year of terror (June 1793–​July 1794) and Jacobin sympathizers such as Fenwick had been forced to reassess their enthusiasm for the revolution. Secrecy may locate its action in England but it consistently alludes to French precedents and contexts. The evil patriarch who deprives his lovely niece of company and raises her alongside his adopted (later discovered to be his natural) son, Clement Montgomery, on the model of differentiated education of girls and boys found in Rousseau’s Émile (1762), shares a surname with the libertine anti-​hero of Laclos’s work, Valmont. Sibella, the niece, in her unswerving passion for a single man, Clement, is not only another version of Rousseau’s Julie but the occasion for a feminist critique by her author of Rousseau’s educational plans for Sophie in Émile; separation from society results in the indulgence of imagination and an uncontrollable will (she falls pregnant as a result of her infatuation for the undeserving Clement). Fenwick uses the trappings of the Gothic—​the mysterious monk frequenting Valmont’s castle, the ‘ruin’ constructed by Valmont as a tomb which his weak-​willed wife fantasizes will be the place of her live burial—​to criticize aristocratic hypocrisy, self-​interest, and privilege. The main correspondent is Caroline Ashburn and yet, as other critics note,17 she proves impotent,

16 

Charlotte Smith, Desmond, ed. Antje Blank and Janet Todd (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1997), 193. See Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 41–4, and Christopher Bundock, ‘The (Inoperative) Epistolary Community in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy’, European Romantic Review 20 (2009), 709–20. 17 

The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–1832    419 unable—​despite her warm sympathies—​to improve the dismal lot of others in the face of implacable desires and resistant social and familial structures she encounters. A third example of novels written in the wake of revolution alerts us to a different response, pointing to the sense of optimism, liberation, and republican possibility following the American Revolution among enfranchised American writers. Nonetheless we witness a similarly tragic outcome as a result of a discrepancy between the revolutionary ideal and the post-​revolutionary reality. Hannah Foster’s 1797 novel, The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton; A Novel; Founded on Fact, was derived from a sensational newspaper story about the life and death in 1788 in Boston, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Whitman. A short fiction of seventy-​four letters, two-​thirds of them delivered by female correspondents with Eliza Wharton the lead correspondent, Hannah Foster’s novel depicts a heroine with high ideals of marriage who plays with the sincere affections of her honest clergyman suitor, is attracted by a libertine soldier, and realizes too late what advantages she has foregone; despite the best efforts of her mother and friends, Eliza succumbs, more out of loneliness than genuine inclination it seems, to the advances of her now married rake-​suitor, falls pregnant, elopes, and dies on delivery of her child. The plot is both unremarkable and familiar in the history of epistolary fiction but its relocation to America adds a new ideological dimension, communicating considerable anxiety about the capacity of the new republic to live up to the ideals of the state on which it is founded. In this case export of the epistolary plot from England to America (as opposed to the import of French and German texts to England earlier in the century) allows a new society to measure itself against an older one from which it both seeks to depart and to which it remains closely tied in terms of language and culture. The turn to post-​colonial, colonial, and imperial territories in epistolary fiction of the 1790s can be seen as an attempt to revive the epistolary novel by finding ‘new’ material on which to stage its familiar plots (marital fidelity tested, seduction and betrayal, the journey which reconfigures the relationships of travellers while it observes new territories). An earlier epistolary fiction, Charlotte Lennox’s last novel, Euphemia (1790), looks both ways, running parallel plots concerning two female protagonist-​correspondents in the mid-​ eighteenth century. The lively Maria Harley secures the love of her wealthy uncle, Sir John Harley, and that of an eligible young relative, Edward Harley, whose reconciliation with her uncle is brought about when her suitor saves Sir John’s life. Her friend Euphemia Lumley, whose father dies in debt, makes a hasty marriage under pressure from her dying mother. Euphemia’s husband, Neville, attempts to repair the fortune he has dissipated by accepting a commission as first lieutenant with one of the independent companies in New York protecting British colonial interests against the French and the native Americans. Euphemia observes the lives of the impoverished Dutch colonists, the manners of the English military, and the strangeness of the Native Americans, forges bonds with a clutch of solitary sensitive young English boys and girls, bears two children, is imperilled with others in a snowbound house as a result of her husband’s impetuosity, and suffers even more intensely when her young son is lost on an expedition with his father (he is only restored to her as an adult having been raised by Native Americans). When Euphemia returns to England, she nurses her husband’s ailing uncle and is rewarded on his death with the inheritance of a

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420   ROS BALLASTER fortune. Lennox, who had herself spent three years as a child in New York where her father was a captain of an independent company, brought together the picaresque observational tradition of the epistolary novel with the newly exotic and popular captivity narrative in the inset story of the child raised by Native Americans.18 A longer tradition is still in play too in the overriding sentimentalism of the stories of the two women (courtship-​to-​marriage and trial-​in-​marriage) and the correspondence between them. Maria thus writes to Euphemia as the latter prepares to depart to America: be assured, neither time nor absence will be able to weaken my affection. —​Your idea will always be present with me. I shall dream continually of you, and find no image in my memory so pleasing as that which presents me the time of our being together. You shall have letters for me by every conveyance; and thus, through oceans roll between us, our minds may often meet and converse with each other.19

Feeling between women and the reforming power of female sympathy is a preoccupation of these imperial epistolary narratives. Where male imperial writers and apologists often represent indigenous peoples as too weak, worn down by oppression and habituated to despotism—​in other words feminized—​to govern without the support of a ‘liberating’ colonial power, the epistolary tradition’s privileging of female voice often enables the representation of an empowering connection between indigenous people and sympathetic colonial woman. On the sudden death of the benevolent Colonel, Euphemia describes the visit of five Mohawk chiefs to his wife and daughters; the women’s grief ‘drew from them a murmur of sympathising feeling, which was strongly expressed in their looks’ (32). So too in Phoebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), native subjects find relationships with women of feeling and education. In Gibbes’s novel, Sophie, who has travelled to Calcutta with her widowed father, expresses early in the letters she addresses to her friend in England, Arabella, her desire to ‘please a Bramin [sic]’ with her ‘perfections of the mental sort’ so that she may ‘become an humble copy of their exemplary and beautiful simplicity’.20 She befriends a young Brahmin although her affections are won by a noble young Englishman, Doyly; perhaps unsurprisingly the Brahmin is dispatched from the story by a sudden fever and Sophie can chastely promise to ‘raise a pagoda to his memory in my heart, that shall endure till that heart beats no more’ (135). Similarly, in Hamilton’s novel, the first letter from a Hindu Rajah, Zāārmilla, to his male friend and fellow Hindu, Māāndāāra, describes an aesthetic and emotional sympathy with Charlotte Percy, the sister of the young army officer whose injuries from the Rohilla wars he tends. He transcribes for his friend a poem celebrating country retirement and affective familial bonds written by Charlotte and expresses the hope that his care for her

18  Susan Kubica Howard, ‘Seeing Colonial America and Writing Home about It: Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia, Epistolarity, and the Feminine Picturesque’, Studies in the Novel 37/3 (2005), 273–91. 19  Charlotte Lennox, Euphemia, ed. Susan Kubica Howard (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1998), 188. 20  Phoebe Gibbes, Hartly House, Calcutta, ed. Michael J. Franklin (New Delhi: OUP, 2007), 51.

The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–1832    421 brother might ease her grief: ‘Could she be assured, how often my sufferings have been alleviated by the balm of sympathy, and how much the endearing sensibilities of cordial friendship have refreshed my soul, it would be a solace to her affliction.’21 Indeed, the encounter with Charlotte’s poetic voice appears to transform Zāāarmilla’s. Until this point he writes in the characteristically extravagant and metaphor-​laden style which English writers employed for ‘oriental’ intellectuals (he describes Captain Percy, for instance, as possessed of powers of mind ‘deep and extensive as the wave of the mighty Ganges’ [80]). Hamilton’s modern editors conclude that the novel’s optimism about integrating different cultures—​and especially the surprising symmetry of ancient English feudalism and the values of contemporary Hinduism—​are an attempt to demonstrate ‘the possibility that the inhabitants of a small nation can maintain their own culture in harmony with, rather than in hopeless opposition to, the dominant culture of an imperial centre’ (44). This solution, born out of Hamilton’s mixed Scottish and Irish parentage and her establishment in Edinburgh, links her to those writers who, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, turn the sentimental and the epistolary novel to the purposes of the ‘national’ tale and the romance of history: Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson.

Live Burial: 1800–​1824 We have seen that the epistolary novel had shifted its emphasis from plots of domestic intrigue and their resolution to plots of national conflicts and their resolution. The first two decades of the nineteenth century take this process one step further in that the epistolary novel itself becomes a ‘buried’ presence rather than a dominant vehicle in the novel. Few novels retain or sustain the fiction of an entire narrative delivered through the letters of one or more correspondents and when they do so it is with an attitude of nostalgia and indeed in the context of recounting and overcoming an unwanted legacy of the past. In this concluding section we will consider Maria Edgeworth’s Leonora (1805), Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806), and Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet (1824). New life had been breathed into the epistolary tradition—​again from abroad and again from France—​with the success in 1802 of Anne Louise Germaine de Staël’s six-​ volume Delphine. Staël’s intelligent 20-​year-​old widow wins the admiring love of Léonce de Mondeville, the man designed to become the husband of Matilda, the daughter of Delphine’s late husband’s relative to whom Delphine has made over a large part of her fortune. However, her generous role in the unhappy love affair of another friend is misinterpreted by Léonce and results, through the machinations of Matilda’s mother, in his 21 

Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, ed. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999), 93.

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422   ROS BALLASTER casting off Delphine. Their passion resumes when the misunderstanding is cleared up but Delphine interprets the death of another suitor, Valorbe, along with that of Léonce’s wife Matilda and her newborn son as a prohibition on their eventual union. When Léonce is taken up in September of 1792 by revolutionaries and Delphine’s efforts to save him fail she takes poison to ensure that she dies with the man she has always loved. Staël’s novel, like Rousseau’s before it, made sure that the transgressive desires of its heroine were closed down in the novel’s conclusion but it was their freethinking expression—​ and especially the advocacy of divorce—​which made the novel both attractive and scandalous. Thus, Léonce declares in the early stages of the courtship with Delphine: ‘our souls would understand each other, if I were free from restraint’.22 Edgeworth, with her customary facility, both exploits and critiques the French freedoms of Delphine in Leonora. Leonora, like Delphine, is a generous-​hearted woman who, despite the concerns of her high-​principled mother, invites Olivia to stay with her family at their country estate in an effort to repair the latter’s damaged reputation. Olivia’s letters to a French confidante reveal that she is indeed a reckless and rather silly devotee of the European novel who has cultivated a lover and abandoned her child in misguided imitation of the protagonists in the epistolary novels of Goethe and Rousseau. Olivia sets her sights on Leonora’s apparently cold and critical husband; when Leonora realizes her friend’s perfidy, Olivia leaves and the husband follows. His correspondence with his blunt friend, General B., reveals that he has fallen in love with Olivia’s apparently absolute love for him whereas he considers his wife’s superficial calmness of temperament an indication of her lack of feeling. He intends to take up a post with the embassy to Russia and Olivia intends to travel with him but she demands a total break with his wife and young family. Leonora gives birth to a sickly boy who dies, the husband (Mr. L.) also falls ill and is only saved from death when Leonora hastens to his side. When Olivia’s letters to her confidante and amatory conspirator, Madame P., are forwarded to Mr. L., the covering letter is enough to reveal to Mr. L. his mistress’s lightness and he feels free to break with her and return to his devoted wife. Olivia’s addiction to the French and German epistolary novel is represented as the cause of her sexual flightiness and her inability to engage in an authentic and mutual relationship with either man or woman. Mr. L. comes to this realization late and summarizes for the reader:  Rousseau, it has been said, never really loved any woman but his own Julie; I have lately been tempted to think that Olivia never really loved any man but St. Preux. Werter, perhaps, and some other German heroes, might dispute her heart even with St. Preux: but as for me, I begin to be aware that I am loved only as a feeble resemblance of those divine originals (to whom, however, my character bears not the slightest similarity), and I am often indirectly, and sometimes directly, reproached with my inferiority to imaginary models … I am continually reviled for not using a romantic language, which I have never learned; and which, as far as I can judge, is foreign to all natural feeling.23 22 

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, Delphine (London, 1836), 1: 85. Maria Edgeworth, Leonora, ed. Marilyn Butler and Susan Manley (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), 127. 23 

The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–1832    423 Edgeworth’s is not just a critique of the romantic novel; the reference is repeatedly and specifically to its epistolary manifestations. Leonora was Edgeworth’s only epistolary novel. ‘Natural feeling’ is here not best expressed through the medium of the foreign epistolary mode but in the English network novel which announces its separation from its foreign forebears. The epistolary mode itself looks antiquated and backward, a primitive form of expression. Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl is also its author’s only venture into epistolary fiction. The novel opens with an exchange of letters between a father and his self-​indulgent son, Horatio Mortimer, who is banished to an Irish estate to escape a life of indulgence and debt as a young lawyer in London. The remainder of the novel is rendered through letters from Horatio to a silent addressee, ‘J. D. Esq., M.P.’ Young Mortimer falls from a para­pet wall as he peers in at the family of the Prince of Inismore and listens to the witchery of the harp played by the lovely princess Glorvina to her father and his chaplain, Father John. As Horatio recovers, he is extensively instructed in Irish lore and wisdom, plunged into the mythic time of the native Irish to leave behind the tiresome stadial accounts of more or less civilized cultures clashing and requiring forceful appropriation and readjustment which characterized post-​Union representations of Ireland and especially those associated with Edgeworth’s Whiggish Anglo-​Irish fiction.24 The novel concludes with the union in the marriage of Glorvina and Horatio between apparent enemies, two forms of landed aristocracy, ‘Old Irish and New English’.25 If Horatio bears the name of the English hero against the French, Nelson, the name of his beloved, Glorvina, means ‘sweet voice’ in Gaelic; as the novel progresses, Glorvina’s powers of musicality and voice rapidly overtake and consume the device of the letter. Improbably long letters recall long conversations and are punctuated by ever-​expanding explanatory footnotes regarding Irish history and folklore with no pretence that they belong to the time or place of the ostensible narrator, Horatio. Ultimately, however, Glorvina becomes the repository of all Irishness. Indeed towards the close of the novel, Mortimer announces: ‘I cannot promise you any more Irish history. I fear my Hiberniana is closed, and a volume of more dangerous, more delightful tendency, draws towards its bewitching subject every truant thought’ (155). If Edgeworth’s novel declared the supremacy of English epistolarity as the death of the ‘foreign’ epistolary form (in Leonora a concluding letter points to a written form other than the letter as the source of sentimental moral guidance), Owenson’s declares the victory of Irish ‘voice’ in capturing and subduing the summary by letter of Irish wisdom under production by the English hero. Mortimer swiftly follows his introductory salvo to this letter with the information that he is making ‘rapid progress in the Irish language’ in which he proves his capacity by conjugating the verb ‘to love’ for his

24  See Thomas Tracey, ‘The Mild Irish Girl: Domesticating the Irish National Tale’, Éire-​Ireland 39/1–2 (2004), 81–109. 25  Claire Connolly, ‘Introduction: The Politics of Love in the Wild Irish Girl’, in Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, ed. Claire Connolly and Stephen Copley (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), p. lv.

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424   ROS BALLASTER mistress-​instructress. The new ‘volume’ opened at the novel’s close is, it is implied, not a volume of letters but a more flexible combination of voice and narration, a new union of ‘forms’. So, too, Scott, in the only Waverley novel that incorporated a substantial portion of letters, presents narrative rendered solely through letters as a mode of the past, not suited to modern purposes. Redgauntlet is set in the summer of 1765 and revolves around a fictional plot to restore the Stuart line by Scottish Jacobites. The lively literary Darsie Latimer writes to his more sober school-​friend Alan Fairford who is training for the law. In the course of the novel Darsie is abducted and imprisoned by the mysterious Herries (Redgauntlet), is attracted to his lovely niece, Lilias, only to discover that she is his sister, seized by Redgauntlet from their mother, a Hanoverian loyalist, who had kept the true heir from his Jacobite connections. All parties including the Pretender himself come together in an inn on the English border only for it to be revealed that the Jacobite plot has been long known by the Hanoverian government. Herries now abandons his violent plans and retires to a monastery, Alan is married to Lilias, and Darsie can take up his rightful identity. As so often in the history of epistolary fiction the plot of spying and conspiracy is interwoven with the plot of sentimental friendship and heterosexual love. The novel is preoccupied with shaping a reformed masculinity based on mutual friendship and understanding quite different from the violent and wilful loyalty of one male to another idealized in his absence. Herries’s overt displays of authority and cruelty are revealed as signs of weakness whereas the protective love of Alan for Darsie offers the prospect of a future community which finds its strength in sociability and imaginative sympathy. The final nail in the coffin of the epistolary novel is driven by the introduction of a concluding letter by ‘Dr. Dryasdust’ to ‘the Author of Waverley’ who summarizes his researches into the later fates of the characters in the story. History and historiography—​a variety of ‘researchers’ in ‘letters … diaries … or other memoranda’ (378)—​have now firmly replaced the letter mode. Mixed narration, like the mixed unions of these later national tales, proves more comprehensive and more adaptable to the purposes of the early nineteenth-​century novel. Epistolarity remains throughout the history of the novel a significant and lively presence but always framed by other forms of narration. From the 1820s onwards the epistolary novel is invoked as a creation and creature of the past, more often invoked to mark distance rather than proximity to a living present of the modern novel.

Select Bibliography Brant, Clare, Eighteenth-​Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Bray, Joe, Epistolary Correspondences:  Representations of Consciousness (London and New York: Routledge: 2003).

The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–1832    425 Browne, Christopher, Getting the Message: The Story of the British Post Office (London: Alan Sutton, 1995). MacArthur, Elizabeth J., Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990). McKenzie, Alan, Sent as a Gift: Eight Correspondences from the Eighteenth-​Century (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993). Perry, Ruth, Women, Letters and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980). Siegert, Bernhard, Relays:  Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (Stanford:  Stanford UP, 1999). Whyman, Susan, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–​1800 (Oxford: OUP, 2009).

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Chapter 25

Devel opm e nts i n Sentimenta l Fi c t i on Geoffrey Sill

In a letter written in 1783, at the height of the vogue for sentimentalism, the Scots poet Robert Burns declared that his ‘favorite authors are of the sentiml kind, such as Shenstone, particularly his elegies, Thomson, Man of feeling, a book I prize next to the Bible, Man of the World, Sterne, especially his Sentimental journey, Mcpherson’s Ossian, &c. these are the glorious models after which I endeavour to form my conduct’.1 Burns prefers such novels as Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) and The Man of the World (1773), as well as Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), because, he claims, ‘the man whose mind glows with sentiments lighted up at their sacred flame—​ the man whose heart distends with benevolence to all the human race’ is unlikely to ‘descend to mind the pault[r]‌y conccerns [sic] about which the terrae-​filial race fret, and vex themselves’. For Burns, the man of feeling is ‘he “who can soar above this little scene of things” ’2 while the ‘terrae-​filial’ man remains locked in the realities of everyday life. Sentimentalism may be defined many ways, but Burns’s letter highlights one of them: the longing after an imagined world, sometimes but not necessarily utopian or feminocentric, in which sympathy, benevolence, and goodness are the predominant virtues. Sentimentalism is inherently moral for Burns, who endeavours to ‘form my conduct’ according to its models, and it is consistent with (or perhaps a secular substitute for) religion, as Burns implies in prizing Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling ‘next to my Bible’. Though the sentimentalist may profess a belief in Providence, he or she always has faith in the power of an internal monitor, whether it be ‘feeling’ or ‘the heart’ or an 1 

Burns to John Murdoch, 15 January 1783, in The Letters of Robert Burns, ed. G. Ross Roy, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 1: 17–​18, quoted in Brean Hammond and Shaun Regan, Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–​1789 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 237–​8. 2  Adapted by Burns from James Thomson, ‘Winter: A Poem’ (ll. 33–​6), in The Seasons (1726): ‘Then is the Time, | For those, whom Wisdom, and whom Nature charm, | To steal themselves from the degenerate Croud, | And soar above this little Scene of Things.’

Developments in Sentimental Fiction    427 innate or acquired ‘sensibility’, to regulate the passions and conduct. Realism, on the other hand, is often distinguished by the recognition that sensibility is an unreliable, ‘irregular’ power that may need to be assisted by external law, code, or custom. It is difficult to fix a date by which sentimentalism became a dominant element in the English novel; in some ways, it has always been part of the genre. Samuel Holt Monk and others have noted that Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack (1722) may be thought of as ‘a sentimental novel in embryo’ because of its many ‘lachrymose’ scenes, its optimistic view of human nature, its reforming agenda, and its hero’s discovery of his own emotions.3 Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747–​8), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753–​ 4) were all written with the sentimental education of the reader in mind, as Richardson made clear with his volume of extracts from his own works, Moral and Instructive Sentiments … contained in Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison (1755). Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), despite its ambitions to both the comic and the epic, contains as fine an example of sentimentalism as may be found in any English novel in the chapter in which Tom appeals to the suppressed moral sense of Mr. Nightingale in order to save Nancy and the Miller family. Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744) is, as its preface declares, a ‘Moral Romance’, but David Simple, Volume the Last (1753), as Peter Sabor has observed, ‘sets out in a new direction’, intent on testing the truth of the sentiment, ‘ “That solid and lasting Happiness is not to be attained in this World.” ’4 By the end of the 1750s, with Henry Fielding dead and Richardson’s career at its end, it was time for the genre of the novel itself to set out in a new direction, partly in imitation of the ‘new literary models’ of the 1740s,5 and partly through invention of a new form in which the education of the sentiments was the defining element. Just why the novel should have adopted sentimentalism as its defining element in the middle of the century has been the subject of extensive critical debate.6 The eighteenth 3  Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col. Jacque, Commonly Call’d Col. Jack, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (London: OUP, 1965), p. xv. Other critics who have commented upon the moral/​sentimental strain in Colonel Jack include G. A. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971), 106–​10; Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions (Oxford: OUP, 2001), 612–​13; and John Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 258–​9. 4  Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple. Volume the Last, in which his History is Concluded, ed. Peter Sabor (Louisville: UP of Kentucky, 1998), p. xxxi. John Mullan credits Fielding with having made ‘one of the earliest attempts’ to create a sentimental hero, and calls David Simple ‘a sentimental novel avant la lettre’ (‘Sentimental Novels’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-​Century Novel [Cambridge: CUP, 1996], 243). 5  Hammond and Regan, Making the Novel, 124. This essay, however, does not accept the common definition of sentimental fiction as a ‘subgenre’ or ‘subspecies’ of the novel. The ‘subgenre’ premise depends on the underlying notion of the superiority of the realistic novel and its predominance of the genre. In fact sentimental and realistic elements can be found together in many eighteenth-​century novels, and the antagonism between those elements provides these novels with their tension. 6  For a useful recent account of the critical dialogue on the emergence of sentimentalism, see Stephen Ahern, Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 1680–​1810 (New York: AMS Press, 2007), esp. c­ hapter 1, ‘Toward a Genealogy of Sensibility Narrative’, 15–​50. A broad survey of the field is offered in Robert Folkenflik, ‘The New Model Eighteenth-​Century Novel’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 12/​2–​3 (2000), 459–​78.

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428   GEOFFREY SILL century did see an enlarging role for women as readers and writers of fiction, but gender alone cannot account for the change of direction: works by male authors, such as Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, and Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker were popular with readers of both sexes. There were other factors: the development of nerve theory brought a new conception of the body, in which feeling was elevated to an epistemological status not inferior to reason;7 the spread of nonconformity in religion placed new emphasis on the believer’s personal relationship to God and individual responsibility for moral actions; the reformation of male manners, the feminization of taste and consumption, the grounding of ethics in human nature rather than rationalism, the subversion of marriage, class, and parental authority—​all these contributed to what G. J. Barker-​Benfield has called a ‘culture of sensibility’, with its own ideology, or ‘theory’, that was expressed in expository, narrative, poetic, and dramatic forms.8 The most important contemporary exposition of this ideology was Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), built upon the foundation of the ‘moral sense’ philosophy of Francis Hutcheson (1694–​1747), whose treatises on ethics were, at least in part, replies to the moral scepticism of Bernard Mandeville (1670–​1733) and Thomas Hobbes (1588–​1679). Hutcheson held that humans are endowed with a faculty—​the ‘moral sense’—​that renders goodness sensible. Just as the perception of beauty is pleasurable to a man of sense, so is there delight in the observation of a moral action, particularly benevolence. We admire benevolence because it is a public good, even (or rather, especially) when we are not the beneficiaries of it.9 In redrafting Hutcheson’s system and incorporating certain elements from David Hume’s, Smith put new emphasis on sympathy, or the power by which a man (or woman) of sense could conceive imaginatively of the passion or pain felt by another. Sympathy ‘enlivens his fellow-​feeling with the sentiments of the other’, in whose ‘benevolent affections’ he takes pleasure. It is sympathy that allows a man of sense to feel ‘a sorrow of the same kind with that which [sufferers] feel’, so that ‘what he feels seems to alleviate the weight of what they feel’.10 Henry

7 

The earliest account of the eighteenth-​century ‘paradigm shift’ in nerve theory and sensibility is G. S. Rousseau’s 1975 essay, ‘Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility’, reprinted in the context of Rousseau’s other essays on nerve theory and with new introductory material in G. S. Rousseau, Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 157–​84. 8  G. J. Barker-​Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), 16–​22. 9  Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), 22–​9; Frances Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 103–​6. For a discussion of Hutcheson as an ethical humanist, see Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996), 310–​13. 10  Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: OUP, 1976), 321–​7, 38–​9, 15. Smith uses ‘man’ throughout as synonymous with ‘humanity’, which later commentators have noted complicates the discussion of a movement in which gender seems to play a role.

Developments in Sentimental Fiction    429 Fielding describes the workings of such a moral system when, in the scene from Tom Jones previously noted, Tom calls upon Mr. Nightingale to experience ‘the warm, rapturous Sensations, which we feel from the Consciousness of an honest, noble, generous, benevolent Action’ by relieving the suffering of the Miller family.11 It is not necessary to suppose that novelists took these notions of moral sensibility and sympathy directly from the philosophers of benevolence, though Fielding seems to have been familiar with Hutcheson’s animadversions on Mandeville.12 Looking with sympathy upon the suffering of others and responding with sentiments of benevolence had been part of the discourse of poets, novelists, and dramatists from at least the mid-​1720s forwards. The publication of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, however, lent gravity to the emergent sentimental novel and gave it additional cultural significance.13 We will begin our discussion of sentimental fiction by looking at an early example of a novel of moral sentiment that is fully consistent with both Hutcheson’s and Smith’s ethical humanism, Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia (1762). Though the novel received good reviews, and though it may now be read as a prototype for novels to come (particularly Austen’s Sense and Sensibility), it has almost entirely disappeared from the critical canon.14 Lennox is much better known for her satire of romance novels, The Female Quixote (1752), and for her novel Henrietta (1758), both published by Andrew Millar, who was also the publisher of Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. The Female Quixote and Henrietta, which received the praise of Dr. Johnson, together with her translation of several French novels, established a readership for ‘Mrs. Charlotte Lennox’ and provided her with an apprenticeship in the latest literary forms.15 In 1760, she began 11 

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 2: 768. 12  For Fielding’s knowledge of Hutcheson and moral sense philosophy, see my The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 155–​60. 13  Mark S. Phillips writes in Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–​1820 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), 86–​7, that while Smith expressed a preference in the Theory of Moral Sentiments for ‘linear narrative’ in historical writing, he ‘also found something larger—​the possibility of a history registered in the eyes of spectators, a sentimental history’ akin to fiction. John D. Morillo in Uneasy Feelings: Literature, the Passions, and Class from Neoclassicism to Romanticism (New York: AMS Press, 2001), 208, 189, argues that ‘Smith’s theory [in the Theory of Moral Sentiments] teaches us to read people—​sympathetically but with warranted suspicion’, which Morillo illustrates by citing the responses of ‘the sentimental heroes of sensibility’ in Sterne and Mackenzie to the sight of beggars. See also Arthur H. Cash, Sterne’s Comedy of Moral Sentiments: The Ethical Dimension of the ‘Journey’ (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1966), 56–​8; Hammond and Regan, Making the Novel, 191–​2. 14  Sophia is rarely mentioned in surveys of women’s writing, though it is briefly noted by Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel (London: Pandora, 1986), 204, and by Elizabeth Kraft, Character & Consciousness in Eighteenth-​Century Comic Fiction (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1992), 85–​6, 91–​2. Norbert Schürer summarizes the contemporary reception of Sophia in his introduction to the Broadview edition (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2008), 41–​2, and appends six notices, 217–​20. References in the text are to this edition. 15  Lennox’s full name appears on the title page of the Dublin edition of Philander. A Dramatic Pastoral by Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, Author of the Female Quixote, published in 1758 by Richard Smith. For Henrietta, published in the same year, she was identified as ‘the author of The Female Quixote’, though her name appeared on the title page of the second edition in 1761. In the following year, Sophia was published

430

430   GEOFFREY SILL publication of a monthly periodical, the Lady’s Museum, which featured, in addition to articles about natural history, geography, and the education of daughters, a novel told in eleven instalments, The History of Harriot and Sophia.16 Lennox revised this serialized novel for publication as Sophia in one volume, printed by James Hoey in Dublin early in 1762, and in two volumes printed by James Fletcher in London in May of that year.17 Sophia is the story of two sisters, Harriot and Sophia Darnley. Harriot, seduced by her own beauty and her love of expensive adornment, becomes the kept mistress of Lord L—​, while her younger sister Sophia, having refused the attentions of the same lord, lives a life of ‘good sense, modesty, and virtue’ (70). Their mother, Mrs. Darnley, enjoys the gay life and encourages Harriot on her pathway to perdition, while punishing ‘poor Sophia’ for her backwardness. Sophia catches the eye of the rakish Sir Charles Stanley, a man ‘of the strictest honour and unblemished integrity’ who nevertheless looks upon Sophia as ‘a conquest of no great difficulty’ (60). Sir Charles’s interest in Sophia, initially carnal, ripens into love as he becomes acquainted with her virtue, and the ‘man of sense’ in him begins to be altered into a man of feeling. Sophia, on the advice of her ‘censor’ figure Mr. Herbert (Sophia’s father having died), removes into the country to escape the passionate declarations of love from Sir Charles. There, she listens to the inset history of a clergyman’s daughter, Dolly, who is beloved by a young gentleman, Mr. William, whose aunt does not approve of his choice of Dolly as a wife. Sophia, motivated by sympathy and benevolence, meets clandestinely with Mr. William to offer him her assistance. Their meeting is observed by Sir Charles, who has come into the country to propose marriage to Sophia, but who is made mad with jealousy by what he has seen. Sir Charles takes leave of her in a letter, Sophia’s would-​be benefactress Mrs. Howard proves a false friend, and her proud sister Harriot now occupies a house once intended for Sophia, circumstances that cause her to relieve ‘her labouring heart with a shower of tears’ (172). Fortunately, Sophia has not been abandoned by her friend Mr. Herbert, who though deathly ill seeks out Sir Charles and expatiates with him upon his conduct. Sir Charles’s moral enlèvement occurs in a scene that reverses Swift’s poem, The Lady’s Dressing Room, in which Sir Charles snoops through Sophia’s room, inspecting her fire screen, drawings, library, compositions, and a miniature watercolour of himself in a shagreen under the name ‘Mrs. Charlotte Lennox’. The use of Lennox’s name on the title page of Sophia seems to signify the establishment both of Lennox as an author and of the sentimental novel as a legitimate form of literary art. 16 The Lady’s Museum ran essays on the pleasures of sensibility alongside numbers of her serialized novel, The History of Harriot and Sophia, as well as a poem (possibly by Lennox), ‘On Reading Hutchinson on the Passions’ (Lady’s Museum, vol. 2 [1761], 667). The author of the poem may have confused Francis Hutcheson, author of An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728), with John Hutchinson (1674–​1737), a learned divine whose Philosophical and Theological Works … in Twelve Volumes (1749) had recently been abstracted and published as An Abstract from the Works of John Hutchinson, Esquire. Being a summary of his discoveries in philosophy and divinity (Edinburgh, 1753; Dublin 1756). 17  For a discussion of Lennox’s authorship of the Lady’s Museum, her revisions to The History of Harriot and Sophia, and the textual history of Sophia, see the introduction to Sophia, ed. Schürer, 31–​41, 45.

Developments in Sentimental Fiction    431 case, painted by Sophia, which ‘melted him even to tears’ (151). Through his tears, and the moral awakening that they signify, Sir Charles is cured of the disease of sense from which he suffers; in recovery, he acquires a sensibility in which there is a right connection between passion and action. Mr. Herbert also gently chides Sophia for the ‘unrelenting severity’ with which she treated Sir Charles, and persuades her to obey the ‘hand of Providence, which thinks fit to reward you, even in this world, for your steady adherance to virtue’ (195–​6). The novel concludes with three marriages: that of Sophia to Sir Charles, now fully reformed; of Dolly to Mr. William, thanks to Sophia’s intervention with his aunt; and of Harriot, who has been cast off by Lord L—​after her beauty is ruined by yellow jaundice, and has become the ‘prize’ of a young officer bound for the colonies. In this much-​simplified summary of the story, we can observe several characters and structural elements that are typical of sentimental fiction. First, we note the female protagonist: ‘ “Virtue in distress” ’, says G. J. Barker-​Benfield, borrowing a phrase enshrined in critical literature by R. F. Brissenden, ‘was archetypally female.’18 Though Sophia suffers less distress than the heroine of Clarissa, and perhaps no more than her namesake in Tom Jones, her virtue is tested in the usual crucibles of the genre: the disapproval of a corrupted or incompetent parent, the predations of a rich and powerful male, the temptations of a comfortable settlement according to the ways of the world. The testing of virtue is usually conducted in a domestic space—​here, the widowed mother’s ‘private lodging’, the country clergyman’s garden, the rustic cottage rented by Sophia, the rich apartments obtained by Harriot at the cost of her reputation. The reward of passing such a test is generally marriage, not as an act of submission to a ‘psychosexual and social-​moral inevitability’ but as ‘a creative and self-​expansive act’, one that empowers the woman to define what it is to be female.19 The suffering of the heroine deepens her sensibility, not to her own pain but to the predicament of another—​here, Sophia’s friend Dolly—​whom she regards with sympathy and whose unhappiness she alleviates through a benevolent action. Sophia effects a reconciliation between Dolly’s mother and Mr. Williams’s aunt, the comically malapropriate Mrs. Gibbons, a disinterested act of goodness that moves Dolly to tears. Though she acts without expectation of reward, Sophia’s sensibility on this occasion so raises her in the esteem of Mr. Herbert that he persuades Sir Charles to renew his courtship of Sophia. A final proof of Sophia’s goodness is that she brings her improvident mother to accept a course of economy that will, as she says, ‘not only pay your debts, but provide a little fund for present expences, and a reserve for future exigencies; mean while, my industry and care will, I hope, keep want far from you’ (178). The moral elements of Sophia are not merely decorative, but are fundamental to the story. The pathetic mother, the arrogant sister, the meddling aunt, and the malicious 18 

Barker-​Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 219, borrowing the phrase from R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan, 1976). 19  John Richetti, The English Novel in History, 1700–​1780 (London: Routledge, 1999), 210. Richetti adapts the ‘influential thesis’ of Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 1987), 5, to mid-​eighteenth-​century fiction.

432

432   GEOFFREY SILL patron provide contrast to the suffering of Sophia, which they have collectively brought about. Sophia’s suffering is marked by tears when she thinks she has lost the love of Sir Charles, but also by a Stoic resignation: ‘the passion she could not wholly subdue, she regulated by reason and virtue’ (112). The character of Sir Charles, though faulty, is carefully prevented from doing any intentional harm so that he (unlike Richardson’s Lovelace) may be made into a suitable husband through the example of Sophia and the advice of Mr. Herbert. These moral elements distinguish the novel of sentiment from the romance tradition that Lennox had critiqued in The Female Quixote, in which the moral is affixed almost as an afterthought. Sophia indeed represents a new direction for the novel, not for its realism but for the moral vision that infuses it throughout. In the characters of Sir George and Sophia, Lennox (with the example of Richardson before her) introduces two types of considerable importance to the sentimental novel, the man of feeling and the woman of sensibility. The ‘man of feeling’ is one who has ‘sense’ (that is to say, ‘nerve’), but whose capacity for moral action is inhibited or dis­ abled in some way, perhaps by the pride and prejudice of gender, class, or nationality, or by some psychological (or, in the case of Tristram Shandy, physical) injury. Sir Charles suffers from a lack of self-​control, which leads him first into libertinism, then into jealousy, until he undergoes a reformation. In Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), the man of feeling, Sir George, has no personal defects, but he does suffer the effects of a humble birth, which lead him to make an unhappy first marriage; his want of class continues to affect him on his return from the West Indies, and he requires the assistance of the ladies of Millennium Hall in order to learn the role of the benevolent English gentleman.20 In Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), the man of feeling is not the titular hero of the novel, but rather Sir William Thornhill, who roams the countryside as Mr. Burchell. In youth, Sir William had ‘carried benevolence to an excess’, and his soul ‘laboured under a sickly sensibility of the miseries of others’.21 As Mr. Burchell, he is quick to act at the sight of virtue in distress, quick to offer charity to an ‘old broken soldier’ (22), but reluctant to explain his reasons for opposing the sojourn in London of the Vicar’s daughters under the protection of Lady Blarney and Miss Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs (‘I love to give the whole name’ [102]). His benevolence, misunderstood at first as malice, is borne out when he unmasks the villainy of his nephew, Squire Thornhill, and saves the Primrose family. Realism has no place in the world of The Vicar of Wakefield, but if the novel is read in the light of Burns’s ‘sacred flame’ of sentimentalism, its want of credibility almost becomes an asset. By the end of the decade, the character of the man of feeling was in danger of becoming a caricature of itself. Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) and Mackenzie’s The Man

20  Interestingly, the American publisher of an epitome of Sir George Ellison thought it necessary to recast Sir George as The Man of Real Sensibility: Or the History of Sir George Ellison (Philadelphia, 1774), a man free of flaws and not in need of feminizing influences; see Eve Tavor Bannet, ‘Sarah Scott and America: Sir George Ellison, The Man of Real Sensibility, and the Squire of Horton’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 22/​4 (2010), 631–​56. 21  Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, A Tale (Salisbury, 1766), 26–​7.

Developments in Sentimental Fiction    433 of Feeling (1771) are both fragmentary narratives, the first seeming to represent the transient, evolving, to-​the-​moment (though past-​tense) consciousness of its first-​person narrator Yorick, while the second presents the remaining portions of a life that has been sacrificed (in part) to the banal practicality of the world (the manuscript of his life made excellent wadding for a gun), which precludes its third-​person narrator from knowing more than a few incongruous bits of the history of Harley, whose full name is wanting. Both Yorick and Harley are men of feeling, though Yorick’s feelings are primarily comic and erotic, while Harley’s (and his narrator’s) are tragic and ironic. Both Yorick and Harley are ineffectual in accomplishing the stated intentions of their journeys, though Yorick adeptly converts every contretemps into an exquisite sensation, while Harley earns (or at least earned, from his contemporary readers) sympathy through his moral superiority to an unsentimental world. Neither novel alone presents an adequate ideal of masculine sensibility, but together they establish the range of possible states for the man of feeling.22 The woman of sensibility is a somewhat more nuanced figure in the sentimental novel than is the man of feeling. As we saw in the case of Sophia, she may represent either of two senses of the word ‘sensibility’: first, the ethical humanism of Sophia, who embodies the restraint, judgement, and sympathy that Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith distinguished as moral sentiments; and second, the excessively nervous sensibility of Harriot, a creature consumed by self-​interest. We get a good look at Harriot’s selfish sensibility in that moment when Mr. Herbert informs her that Sir Charles has transferred his affections from her to her sister Sophia: Harriot’s face ‘grew pale and red by turns; she fixed her eyes on the ground, her bosom heaved with the violence of her agitations, and tears, in spite of her, were ready to force their way’ (72). Unlike the cleansing tears of Sophia or Sir Charles, these are tears of rage and frustration, from which Harriot finds no relief. Sensibility is in itself an ethically neutral faculty of mind; much depends on the ability and willingness of the subject to control her nerves, and the predicament in which she is placed. The woman of sensibility achieves her fullest and finest expression, prior to Jane Austen, in the works of Frances Burney. The 17-​year-​old heroine of Evelina (1778) is a sentimental type whose ambiguities of name and birth lead to situations that are socially and morally complex. Evelina, disowned by her father and sheltered by her guardian, enters the world with nothing but modesty, beauty, and innocence to recommend her. She displays notable fineness of feeling in her sympathy for the Scotch poet Macartney, a man of feeling unsuited for the rigours of the ‘real’ world. Mr. Macartney, a younger version of Mackenzie’s Harley, writes fragmentary scraps of melancholy verse and suffers the insolence of both fortune and the Branghtons. Evelina preserves his life, extends to him her charity, and keeps his secrets at great risk to her own interests. Evelina is 22  For a study of these two novels in terms of four modes of illustrating sentimental expression—​ social, domestic, pathetic, and erotic—​see W. B. Gerard, ‘Benevolent Vision: The Ideology of Sentimentality in Contemporary Illustrations of A Sentimental Journey and The Man of Feeling’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 14/​3–​4 (2002), 533–​74.

434

434   GEOFFREY SILL a successful sentimental heroine not because she marries the comically perfect Lord Orville, nor because of the recognition scene in which her father acknowledges his sins against her mother that are written in Evelina’s face, but because she sustains the reader’s belief in the possibility of goodness in a world of selfishness and deceit. The success of Evelina, which reached its fourth edition before the end of 1779,23 presents a challenge to Ian Watt’s theory that realism is an essential component of the early English novel. Though Evelina included detailed descriptions of familiar London locations—​the Opera, the Pantheon, Ranelagh, Vauxhall, Cox’s Museum, Drury Lane Theatre—​realism is not counted among the book’s virtues. Evelina impressed early reviewers with its memorable comic characters—​Madame Duval, Captain Mirvan, the Branghtons—​and its Fieldingesque plot, but not by its plausibility. The extraordinary coincidences through which Mr. Macartney is discovered to be Evelina’s brother, and by which the mystery of Evelina’s birth is finally revealed, are the devices of sentimental comedy, not realistic fiction. The Critical Review praised Evelina not for its realism, but for affecting readers in three ways: they ‘will weep and (what is not so commonly the effect of novels) will laugh, and grow wiser, as they read’.24 In her second novel, Cecilia (1782), Burney sought to redress the balance of realism and sentimental comedy. Her heroine, Cecilia Beverley, has a clear title to her name and inherited wealth. She aspires to live a ‘sensible’ life, in the ethical sense: to live ‘according to some plan of conduct’, and ‘to make at once a more spirited and more worthy use of the affluence, freedom and power which she possessed’.25 Though some feminist critics have faulted Cecilia for not becoming the ‘mistress of her own time’ by the end of her story,26 independence in itself is not Cecilia’s goal: ‘her affluence she therefore considered as a debt contracted with the poor, and her independence, as a tie upon her liberality to pay it with interest’ (55). An independent fortune enables one to live an ethically responsible life, not a life without responsibilities. Her conduct is governed by an ‘inward monitor, who is never to be neglected with impunity’ (585), which enables her to negotiate a complex urban environment on the strength of her own sensibility, without the aid of a male monitor.27 Sensibility and its negation, insensibility, are the standards to which all of the characters in the book are held. Cecilia’s lover, Mortimer Delvile, appears at times to be an 23 

For the publication history and early reviews of Evelina, see Joyce Hemlow, The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 97–​101. 24  Critical Review 46 (Sept. 1778), 202–​4, quoted in Hemlow, Fanny Burney, 97. 25  Frances Burney, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 54–​5. 26  Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-​Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1986), 284; Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989), 159. 27  Erik Bond discusses Cecilia’s ‘inward monitor’ in Reading London: Urban Speculation and Imaginative Government in Eighteenth-​Century Literature (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007), which in his view ‘takes the place of an external male reader’ in her epistolary acts (207). The ‘inward monitor’, however, may be Burney’s reading of the ‘supposed impartial spectator … the great inmate of the breast … this judge within’ of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Developments in Sentimental Fiction    435 ‘insensibilist’, like the comic characters who display insensibility in its various forms; but Mortimer is in fact a man of feeling, one whose affections are divided between his duty to his name-​proud parents and his improper passion for Cecilia. Like Sterne’s and Mackenzie’s men of feeling, and like Goldsmith’s Mr. Burchell, Mortimer is traumatized by an excess of sensibility. Cecilia’s sensible plan for her life is severely tested by the selfishness of her guardians, the treachery of her mentor Mr. Monckton, the loss of her fortune, and the unsteady passions of Mortimer, which together plunge her into the literal insensibility of madness. From this abyss she is rescued by her physician of the mind, Dr. Lyster, and by Mortimer’s last-​minute acquisition of some control over his feelings. Cecilia recovers her sensibility, now tempered by experience, and enjoys ‘all the happiness human life seems capable of receiving’ (941). The readers and reviewers did not laugh at this book, as they had at Evelina, but they cried twice as much.28 When Burney was completing the final two volumes of Cecilia, she showed the manuscript to her literary adviser, Samuel Crisp. He approved the plan of the work in general, but objected to the scene in which Mortimer Delvile confronts his mother over her opposition to his marriage to Cecilia, and also to Cecilia’s loss of her fortune, despite which Mortimer marries her without the money, thus preserving the family name. Crisp’s letter to Burney is lost, but we know from her response that what divided them was the vexed question of psychological realism in the sentimental novel.29 Burney responded to Crisp that she meant, in her portrait of Mrs. Delvile, ‘to draw a great, but not a perfect character’. Burney has ‘frequently seen blended in life, noble & rare qualities, with striking & incurable defects’. Mrs. Delvile, she implies without naming names, is drawn from the life, and she will not give her up. Moreover, she says, ‘I think the Book, in its present conclusion, somewhat original, for the Hero & Heroine are neither plunged in the depths of misery, nor exalted to unhuman happiness’, a state that she considers ‘more according to real life, & less resembling every other Book of Fiction’ that may be found in ‘Mr. Noble’s circulating Library’. In short, Burney defends the ending of Cecilia on the grounds that it strikes a balance between realism and romance, between the tragedy of Clarissa and the epic comedy of Tom Jones. In finding this balance, Burney set the parameters for many novels to come.30 28 

For an account of the many sentimental responses to Cecilia, see Hemlow, Fanny Burney, 157–​9. Mrs. Chapone, Hemlow says, read the novel twice—​‘once for the story, and once more for the moral sentiments’. The Dowager Duchess of Portland and Mrs. Mary Delany ‘read and wept together. “Oh, Mrs. Delany, shall you ever forget how we cried?” ’ 29  This reading of the Crisp–​Burney correspondence and the quotations that follow are drawn from Catherine M. Parisian, The Strange and Surprising Adventures of a Novel: A Publication History of Frances Burney’s Cecilia (Farnham, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 8. Parisian quotes from volume 5 of Frances Burney, The Early Journal and Letters of Frances Burney, ed. Lars Troide and Stewart Cooke (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s UP, 2012), 31, 44. 30  See, for example, the extensive discussion of Cecilia and Charlotte Radcliffe’s The Italian in Deborah Ross, The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, and Women’s Contribution to the Novel (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1991), 147–​65; see also Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 98–​9.

436

436   GEOFFREY SILL Burney extended her critique of moral sensibility in her third novel, Camilla, or a Picture of Youth (1796), which reflects the influence of the ‘courtesy books’ or conduct manuals of the time.31 The bare bones of the novel are not unlike those of Sophia: Camilla Tyrold, a rather impetuous young woman, is the middle one of three sisters. The eldest, Lavinia, is compliant but helpless, while the youngest, Eugenia, is a scholar whose beauty has been ruined by smallpox. Each of the girls is noticed in turn by Edgar Mandlebert, an ‘uncommonly spirited and manly boy’ who is heir to the neighbouring estate. He forms an early sympathetic bond with Camilla when he observes her kindness to her sisters, but the family, misled by Edgar’s politeness, decides to marry him to Camilla’s cousin, the beautiful but thoughtless Indiana. His clear preference for Camilla is thwarted by the meddling of two persons: his monitor, the misogynistic Dr. Marchmont, who warns him not to declare his affection for Camilla until he is certain of her ‘actual possession’ of the ‘fair, open, artless, and disinterested character’ that Edgar believes her to have; and Camilla’s adviser, Mrs. Arlbery, who counsels her to spur Edgar’s courtship of her by playing the coquette with Sir Sedley Clarendel. Edgar, a melancholic if not ineffectual man of feeling, departs sorrowfully into a self-​imposed exile. Camilla’s belief that she has lost Edgar’s affection, along with her father’s imprisonment for some debts she has contracted, cause her to suffer an illness that brings her close to a wished-​for death, from which Edgar, returning from exile, calls her back in a tearful scene. In its bones, Camilla is sentimental fiction. Burney’s declared intention for Camilla, however, was much more ambitious than the evocation of tears. In a letter to her father, she baulked at allowing the new work to be advertised as a ‘novel’, which ‘gives so simply the notion of a mere love story, that I recoil a little from it. I mean it to be sketches of Characters & morals, put in action.’32 In its variety of incident and character, Camilla is richer than either of Burney’s two previous novels: Camilla’s sisters and father provide a domestic context that is wanting in Evelina and Cecilia; Edgar Mandlebert has more feeling than Lord Orville, and more sensibility than Mortimer Delvile; Sir Sedley Clarendel has more wit than Sir Clement Willoughby; and Mrs. Arlbery is more wicked in her kindness than Mrs. Delvile. Camilla, like Jane Austen’s protagonists to come, is an ambiguous figure, prone to blunders and misjudgements; she forms questionable friendships with low characters such as Mrs. Berlinton and Mrs. Mittin, against Edgar’s advice, and nearly disgraces the family with her debts, some of which proceed from an incautious benevolence. Beneath this variety of character and incident is a didactic intention, an explicit focus on training the sensibility of young readers, which (more than the supposed Johnsonianism of the prose) cost the novel favour among some reviewers and critics.33 31 

Joyce Hemlow, ‘Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books’, PMLA 65/​5 (1950), 732–​61. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Joyce Hemlow (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 3: 117. 33  J. Paul Hunter rightly says that explicit didacticism was tolerated, even desired, in fiction until nearly the end of the eighteenth century, and that modern readers must ‘suspend their disbelief long enough to embrace the didactic rhetoric’ in these books; see Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), 54–​7. But some contemporary readers also found Burney’s concern for propriety objectionable; see William Hazlitt’s review of The Wanderer in the Edinburgh Review 24 (1815), 320–​38. 32 

Developments in Sentimental Fiction    437 A reading of a single scene from Camilla will provide a glimpse of the novel’s merits, as well as the limits of sentimentalism. In a climactic evening at the public assembly rooms in Southampton, Camilla attempts one last time to encourage Edgar, who she thinks has rejected her. Acting on the advice of Mrs. Arlbery, she had for the past week been keeping company with young Henry Westwyn, whose father desires them to marry. The author reminds her readers that ‘Accident, want of due consideration, and sudden recollection, in an agitated moment, of the worldly doctrine of Mrs. Arlbery’ had conspired to lead Camilla into ‘a semblance of a character, which, without thinking of, she was acting’.34 Though ‘all idea of coquetry was foreign to her meaning’, she appears ‘as if she had been brought up and nourished in fashionable egotism’. She is not in fact such a person, but ‘the ardour of her imagination, acted upon by every passing idea, shook her Judgement from its yet unsteady seat, and left her at the mercy of wayward Sensibility—​that delicate, but irregular power, which now impels to all that is most disinterested for others, now forgets all mankind, to watch the pulsations of its own fancies’ (680). Encouraged by her favour, young Westwyn presses his courtship at the assembly, a fact that is observed by Edgar, who ‘drew from it, with the customary ingenuity of sensitive minds to torment themselves, the same inference for his causeless torture, as proved to his rival a delusive blessing’ (681). Meanwhile, Camilla suffers an agony of conscience drawn straight from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments: ‘not all the guiltlessness of her intentions could exonerate her from blame with that finely scrutinizing monitor to which Heaven, in pity to those evil propensities that law cannot touch, nor society reclaim, has devolved its earthly jurisdiction to the human breast’. In short, Camilla observes Edgar’s gaze upon Henry’s gaze upon Camilla, and her ‘finely scrutinizing monitor’ forms the conclusion that a disinterested spectator would draw: Camilla has, unintentionally, played the coquette. The reader knows, however, that intentions not visible to Camilla, much less to Edgar, have brought this scene to pass: the inveterate hatred of Mrs. Arlbery for Edgar, which has caused her to set this trap; the unhappy experiences in love of Dr. Marchmont, which have led him to raise suspicions of Camilla in Edgar; the trifling flirtations of Lord Valhurst, whom Camilla has countenanced only in an attempt to put off young Westwyn. The ‘schemes of sociability’ fashioned by Hume and Smith, and given life as fictional discourse by Richardson, Sterne, and Mackenzie,35 and which in Cecilia were expected to lead the heroine to ‘an exemplary life’, have become in Camilla so many snares for the youthful and unwary. Sensibility, once a source of steadiness for that internal monitor, is now an ‘irregular power’ driven by ‘the pulsations of its own fancies’. Burney’s language, more like the later Henry James than Dr. Johnson, is by turns arcane, reflexive, keenly penetrating, and coldly analytical, more interested in probing the real bases and limitations of sentiment than in conveying the feelings of pathos, grief, or joy. Camilla was by no means the only 34  Frances Burney, Camilla: Or A Picture of Youth, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford: OUP, 1972), 679. 35  John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 13–​14.

438

438   GEOFFREY SILL literary work of the 1790s to turn away from sensibility, but the embrace of realism in an author of Burney’s prominence signalled the end of the era of the sentimental novel. There are complex historical reasons for the decline of sentimental fiction after the 1790s. Margaret Cohen, writing about the history of the novel in France, suggests that the ‘hostile takeover’ of the genre by such realists as Balzac and Stendhal can be attributed to the need to impose order on the ‘chaos’ of literary and social relations in the early decades of the nineteenth century, a thesis that might also be applied to the English novel.36 Elizabeth Dolan finds in the works of Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley a shift towards ‘seeing suffering unsentimentally’, a focus on poverty, slavery, and gender oppression not merely to evoke sympathy, but to effect social change and relieve distress.37 Stephen Ahern suggests that the excesses of amatory, sentimental, and Gothic fiction that gave these novels their affective power also created ‘anxiety’ among readers and an ‘ambivalence’ among ‘authors writing fiction in the romance mode’ which eventually led to the ‘domestication’ of the form.38 The way forward for studies in sentimental fiction, however, may be not in uncovering the reasons for its decline, but in discovering the ways in which the forms of sentiment have survived, and continue to have an impact on the writing of fiction.

Select Bibliography Ahern, Stephen, Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 1680–​ 1810 (New York: AMS Press, 2007). Barker-​Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992). Brissenden, R. F., Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan, 1974). Crane, R. S. ‘Suggestions towards a Genealogy of the “Man of Feeling”’, ELH 1/​3 (1934), 205–​30. Ellis, Markman, The Politics of Sensibility:  Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 1996). Gerard, W. B., ‘Benevolent Vision: The Ideology of Sentimentality in Contemporary Illustrations of A Sentimental Journey and The Man of Feeling’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 14/​ 3–​4 (2002), 533–​74. Hagstrum, Jean, Sex and Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993). Hammond, Brean, and Shaun Regan, Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–​ 1789 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Hemlow, Joyce, ‘Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books’, PMLA 65/​5 (1950), 732–​61. Kraft, Elizabeth, Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684–​1814 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). 36 

Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), 10. See Elizabeth A. Dolan, Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature of the Romantic Era (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). 38 Ahern, Affected Sensibilities, 203. 37 

Developments in Sentimental Fiction    439 Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability:  The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: OUP, 1988). Mullan, John, ‘Sentimental Novels’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-​Century Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 236–​54. Todd, Janet, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986).

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Chapter 26

Phi l osophica l Fi c t i ons and ‘ Jac obi n’ Nov e l s in the 1 7 9 0s Deidre Shauna Lynch

‘Vehicles of Wider Mischief’ At least since Plato concocted a story about cave-​dwellers, fictions have served as vehicles for philosophers’ disquisitions on ideas. Eighteenth-​ century philosophes such as Voltaire and Montesquieu put literary tools in the service of analytic argument when they made the conte philosophique a central instrument for disseminating an Enlightenment culture of critique. As it recounted the misfortunes of its ludicrously resilient hero, Voltaire’s Candide (1759) debunked theological and philosophical pieties. In Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (also 1759), an English contribution to the conte philosophique, also Johnson’s closest approach to the eighteenth-​century novel, the eponymous hero and his fellow travellers debate the nature of happiness with proponents of various positions from the history of ideas (Stoic, Epicurean, Deist, and so on). But in the last decade of the eighteenth century, as political reformers in England were radicalized by the example of Revolutionary France, philosophy and fiction began to be intermingled to new effect—​alarming effect, according to conservative commentators, vexed, especially, by how figures such as William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft followed up treatises with novels. In the changed circumstances of the 1790s, the effort to yoke novels to more serious and edifying discourses appeared to many an intolerably indecorous act, while the effort to enlarge through this measure the audience for ideas seemed a dangerously democratic one. Those transgressions of discursive boundaries had become all the more alarming because, as this essay will outline, Godwin and Wollstonecraft, like their political fellow-​ travellers Mary Hays, Eliza Fenwick, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Thomas Holcroft, deviated from their predecessors in the way they blended philosophical argumentation about,

Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s    441 for instance, the nature of the polity or the mind, with the lifelike representation—​ meticulous rendering of circumstantial details; heightened attention to the inner lives of individuals—​that had found increasing favour in the age of the novel. The grim humour, irony, as well as propensity for allegory of the contes philosophiques fostered detachment in reading audiences—​books such as Rasselas and Candide are meant to disenchant and not enchant their audiences. By contrast, the 1790s novelists that this essay treats aspired to provide readers with thrillingly absorptive experiences. Their premise was that those experiences might themselves spark the renovation of public opinion they sought. Fascinated by, though wary of, the empathetic relationship linking novel-​reader to novel-​character, they identified in that relationship an untapped political efficacy. Thus Godwin supplemented his reading in theories of government with his study of the craft of the mid-​century sentimental novelists, Samuel Richardson especially, aiming to emulate the technique that had enabled them to create compelling stories in which the ‘passions were roused, & imagination was on tiptoe for events’. (The latter phrase originates in Godwin’s critique of Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives [1792]: an epistolary novel whose political credentials were impeccable, but which Godwin found wanting in imaginative appeal and so wanting precisely as a novel.1) In 1799 Hannah More, the doyenne of England’s conservative counter-​revolution, expressed alarm over how novels, long faulted as the recourse of the idle, illiterate, and lovesick, had recently begun ‘shifting their ground, and enlarging their sphere’, and, infused with a new ambition, were ‘daily becoming vehicles of wider mischief ’.2 This was More’s backhanded acknowledgement that her contemporaries had successfully remade the old philosophical fable into that more compelling form of reading matter, the philosophical novel. Aiming to propel readers into a new political awareness, the novelists of the 1790s had stretched the categories of philosophy and literature into unprecedented, compelling conjunctions. In an era when the French Revolution seemed to many to be a phenomenon caused by a set of authors and the innovative accounts of political authority and human rights they delivered, modern novels apparently also aspired to be among those books that were the agents of change. They too signed up for the Enlightenment effort to develop synthetic accounts of human nature and social organization. The suppressed preface to the first edition of Caleb Williams (1794) reveals Godwin allying himself with just that project. He characterizes his novel, in terms that play up its reach, as ‘a study and delineation of things passing in the moral world … [and] a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism’.3 A similar impulse informs Godwin’s original title for that 1  Godwin’s unpublished critique of Anna St. Ives, cited in Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 4. 2  Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), repr. in The Works of Hannah More (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1840), 318. 3  William Godwin, Caleb Williams, or, Things as They Are, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 3. Godwin’s title was in fact Things As They Are, or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams until the 5th edition of 1831, when he chose instead a title inviting readers to classify his narrative as a story of an individual rather than a story of a society. Throughout this essay I use that more familiar title.

442

442   DEIDRE SHAUNA LYNCH novel, Things As They Are, as it does the titles that Robert Bage gave to his novels of 1792 and 1796, Man As He Is and Hermsprong, or, Man As He Is Not. Novels too aspired to frame systems and/​or demolish those of others. Compounding the challenge such presumptions presented was the increasingly discussed point that the novel as a genre appeared ‘calculated, by its insinuating narrative and interesting description to fascinate the imagination’. Thus Jane West in 1799, as she explained, through this reference to an enchanting psychological realism, why she had been obliged to turn novelist herself; at a time of national crisis, West had no choice, she declared, but to adopt the same ‘offensive weapon’ wielded by her pro-​revolutionary adversaries and intermix ‘serious truths with fictitious events’ in her turn.4 Of all the literary genres, the novel had emerged in the 1790s as the most powerful and/​or menacing. Since their modern critical rehabilitation in the 1970s, the philosophical fictions which were in the vanguard of those new ambitions for their genre have been known collectively as the Jacobin novels. That label, ‘Jacobin’, was initially bestowed on the French republicans who starting in 1789 held their regular assemblies in Paris’s old Dominican convent of St. James. Its usage was subsequently extended to include all variety of Britons to whom such sympathies for republican France might plausibly be ascribed: a deliberately misleading use of the term, stigmatizing even, since across the Channel there was never much support for the extremist agenda spearheaded by Robespierre and Danton, even among the most uncompromising English radicals. As a label that critics have used to identify a genre of 1790s fiction—​a genre constructed by Godwin, Holcroft, Wollstonecraft, Hays, Bage, Fenwick, and Inchbald, as well as (in the most wide-​ranging critical accounts) by Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson—​‘Jacobin’ makes some sense. It rightly acknowledges these authors’ success in involving in the project of reimagining the social order a numerous class of novel-​readers whom the political pamphleteering of the era might well have bypassed. Discussion of political principles is ‘highly worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach’, Godwin stated in his original preface to Caleb, and although that preface, deemed perilously close to treasonable discourse, was ‘withdrawn … in compliance with the alarms of the booksellers’ (3), the thought became a commonplace. Indeed echoes of current pamphleteering are often audible when in these figures’ novels the characters take to arguing politics: something they do in their letters or with strangers randomly encountered at fashionable routs or in city taverns. By incorporating current public debates, these authors bridged the discursive domains of political theory and fiction and gave politics an entrée into private drawing rooms. But to use the label ‘Jacobin’ to group together the fictions with those commitments has disadvantages. To yoke these novels so firmly to the Revolution controversy suggests, for instance, that their interest depends primarily on their topicality. And in reducing literary politics during this period to the formula of Jacobin versus anti-​ Jacobin we fall into just the ideological trap that multiple authors of the period hoped

4 

Jane West, A Tale of the Times, ed. Amanda Gilroy (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), 333, 332.

Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s    443 to elude. Moreover, this account of the place of the novels of the 1790s in literary history risks downplaying the texts’ often self-​conscious engagement with a longer tradition in English, extending backwards to Rasselas and extending forwards to contemporary novels of ideas, in which the disparate knowledge systems of ‘fictitious history’ and ‘the science of man’ are made to converge.5 That set of intertextual relations, rather than the interdependency of Jacobin and anti-​Jacobin fiction, will number among the chief concerns of this essay, its discussions of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Hays especially. For these writers, I shall suggest, made the novel into a forum in which the emotional would be apposed and tested against the rational and scientific, and attachment (readers’ attachment to aesthetic pleasure included) would be apposed and tested against detachment—​and in which, conversely, the limits of rationality might be probed in their turn.

The ‘Empire that Man Exercises Over Man’ To express reservations about the label by which they know them is not, however, to deny that the so-​called Jacobin novels form a coherent group. The friendships linking many writers in the group identified earlier, who are linked as well by their shared religious nonconformity, mean that some resemblance and overlap are to be expected. Alike committed to writing in the service of reform, these writers tend consistently to make novelistic plot do double duty as political denunciation and expose the manifold forms of ‘the empire that man exercises over man’ (188), as Godwin put it in Caleb Williams. Thus, as part of their critique of the current organization of public and private lives in contemporary Britain, and in ways that bespeak their debts to the virtue-​in-​distress plots of older novels of sensibility, they grimly, programmatically, carry their characters from one clash with entrenched opinion to the next and one scene of persecution to another. Scenes of trial are common in their works: means of refuting, since the trials so often eventuate in miscarriages of justice, the loyalist premise that all Britons should feel blessed because in their nation even the humble could claim the protection of the law. Caleb Williams, the servant falsely accused of theft by his aristocratic master, an accusation made in reprisal for Caleb’s discovery of that master’s own guilty past, careens from tribunal to tribunal over the course of his story. His experience of the law confirms, almost syllogistically, his creator’s postulate, expounded in Enquiry concerning Political Justice, the political treatise Godwin published the year before this novel, that ‘Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it’.6 Hannah Primrose, in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1796), 5 

This is Godwin’s description of his aim in Cloudesley: A Tale (New York: Harper, 1830), p. vii. William Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, abridged and ed. K. Codell Carter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 14 (this edition is based on Godwin’s 3rd edition of 1798). 6 

444

444   DEIDRE SHAUNA LYNCH is sentenced to death for forgery, the judge who passes the sentence being the seducer whose abandonment of her years earlier had initiated the callow girl’s fall into crime. He does not remember her, whereas she, still credulous, had anticipated with yearning her court appearance, conceiving of it as the moment that would, no matter what the outcome, at least reunite her briefly with the father of her child. ‘Those hours of tender dalliance were now present to her mind—​His thoughts were more nobly employed in his high office,’ Inchbald’s narrator explains—​using the word ‘nobly’ with some asperity, and registering at the level of syntax the parallelisms and contrasts that have throughout organized this novel about the divergent destinies of the virtuous poor and the vicious rich.7 That Bastilles define the moral landscape of Britain, even when the Bastille of ancien régime Paris is no more, is a premise central to these novels. By extension, some, like Caleb Williams or Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799), present themselves as prison-​writing and invite readers to think of the text they consume as a document somehow spirited away from the jail or madhouse in which its author has been confined. Especially while exploring questions about the relations between the sexes and the elision of women from current vindications of the rights of men and citizens, the philosophical fictions of the 1790s are often intent, as well, on equating the English Bastille and the private domicile. Earlier novelists such as Richardson had, as Michael McKeon notes, long before the 1790s developed ways of using the language of political conflict to deepen their depiction of private engagements and had discovered, so doing, how well ‘the “little” realm of the domestic was able to sustain the “great” themes of public discourse’.8 The 1790s novelists, however, took that discovery and ran with it. In a society organized by tyranny, daughters and wives forever run the risk, these novelists attest, that they will be locked up inside the houses that they thought of as homes. This account of the inescapability of patriarchal coercion in female lives is, of course, equally affirmed by the many Gothic novelists who were also active in the 1790s, who simply substitute for the present-​day Englishman’s home a fifteenth-​or sixteenth-​century foreigner’s castle. In 1792 Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman alluded to that storyline in order to highlight the injustices inscribed in degrading notions of female character and in women’s exclusion from the categories of citizenship: denying women their civil rights forces them, she declared, ‘to remain immured in their families groping in the dark’. The heroine of the incomplete novel, published posthumously in 1798, in which Wollstonecraft began to fictionalize the premises of the Rights of Woman, makes this a first-​person rather than third-​person observation: Wollstonecraft uses the novel form to clarify how the theorems of politics are lived as first-​hand experience. ‘Marriage had bastilled me for life,’ Maria states in the course of the memoir of her life she writes for her daughter. Discriminatory law, compounded by the prescriptions about the female character that informed her upbringing, has left her ‘fettered’.9 7 

Elizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art, ed. Shawn L. Maurer (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1997), 115. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), 643, 645. 9  Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Deidre Shauna Lynch (3rd edn., New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2009), 7; Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 138. 8 

Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s    445 Their commitment to the feminist thesis that the intimate relations that define private life serve to secure domination for men and bondage for women also commits the novelists of the 1790s to repeated revisitings of Richardson’s Clarissa and the sentimental tradition that it distilled. Anna St. Ives for instance, honours Richardson in its epistolary form and in two of its plotlines, involving both its heroine and hero. Anna’s zeal to reform the rake Coke Clifton, her attempt to reason herself out of her prior attachment to Frank Henley, and then her determination, in the name of candour, to be honest about her past, all expose her to rape and confinement at the vengeful Clifton’s hands. When Frank Henley, persecuted in his turn, is entrapped in a madhouse as a result of the machinations of this aristocratic libertine, Holcroft makes it clear that his hero’s experience there chimes with the stories of captivity already unfolded in the sentimental novel. (The very fact that Frank is able to write the letter that reports on his captivity is thanks to his discovery of a quire of paper hidden in a section of wainscot in his chamber and Frank speculates accordingly that the room’s previous inmate may have been ‘some love-​sick girl’ whose experience of imprisonment he repeats.)10 Revisited a half-​century on by the novelists of the 1790s, Richardson’s chronicles of the Harlowe men’s bullying attempts to control the heroine’s marriage choice and of Lovelace’s attempts to conquer her will are retroactively recast, revealed as presciently demonstrating a postulate that, in Godwin’s words in the original preface to Caleb, ‘is now known to philosophers’—​ namely, that ‘the spirit and character of the government’ intrudes everywhere (3). At the same time, the variations on the Clarissa plot one finds in novels of the 1790s signal their authors’ determination to make novelistic fiction reach beyond the genre boundaries set earlier in the eighteenth century and make this fiction assert political positions.

Young Philosophers Godwin’s mention in the original preface to Caleb of what is known to philosophers is telling. Anti-​Jacobin novels exaggerated gleefully when, portraying the commotion of the times, they traced modern daughters’ pursuits of sexual freedom and rebellions against paternal authority back to the popularity of philosophy and to the presence in all corners of the kingdom of wild-​eyed, Frenchified theorists—​the modern philosophers who, these conservatives maintained, were harboured in local circulating libraries, or employed as hairdressers, or lurking in dark woods preparing to ambush the unsuspecting. Still, such representations of modern philosophy’s menacing ubiquity did in some respects take their cue from the novels, like Caleb, that supported liberal causes. In that fiction philosophy does appear a growth industry, judging by the large number of characters who may be identified as thinking, speaking, or acting like philosophers, and who through their diligence in interrogating received thinking are positioned, they

10 

Thomas Holcroft, Anna St. Ives, ed. Peter Faulkner (Oxford: OUP, 1970), 452.

446

446   DEIDRE SHAUNA LYNCH assert, to promote ‘the progress of knowledge, the destruction of error, and the spreading of universal truth’.11 Blending the tradition of Stoic philosophy with the modern celebration of the self-​determining individual’s willpower, those characters often express immense confidence in the power of the individual mind over body, over matter, and over social circumstances generally. Frank Henley believes that once the mind has been set in motion, ‘it is scarcely within the power of accident wholly to impede the progress of enquiry’ (383). ‘These limbs and trunk are a cumbrous and unfortunate load for the power of thinking to drag along with it,’ Caleb reflects during his first term of imprisonment, only to give this thought an optimistic twist: ‘but why should not the power of thinking be able to lighten the load, till it shall be no longer felt?’ (195). As such reflections suggest, and even though he sounds in this passage almost insane in the zealousness of his rationality, Caleb believes himself to be ‘a sort of natural philosopher’ (5–​6).12 During the 1790s Caleb is far from alone in laying claim to this identity. A snobbish relation complains that it is ‘because, forsooth, he is a Philosopher!’ that George Delmont, the eponymous hero of Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher (1798), has refused to follow the paths to social success customarily followed by the younger son of an aristocratic family and has opted for rural retirement instead.13 A young philosopher is found in Bage’s Hermsprong as well, in the person of Hermsprong himself, the stranger from America whose arrival in England begins the novel and who is introduced with the explanation that he has learned his ‘philosophy’ from the ‘sons of nature’, the Nawdoessie Indians. This back-​story enabled Bage to recycle the device, central to the conte philosophique, in which civilized European mores are reseen through the eyes of an outsider: Hermsprong has absorbed his philosophical mentors’ simplicity and indifference to the luxuries of civilization and carried these traits back to Europe with him. While Hermsprong debates with his masculine acquaintance the respective merits of savage vs. civilized understandings of love and happiness, the two heroines of Bage’s novel, new versions respectively of Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe and Anna Howe, likewise occupy themselves with ‘philosophiz[ing]’, the study of the ‘operations of the human mind; the right or wrong of human actions’, and the pleasures of intellectual discussion.14 With chapters given over entirely to conversational sparring, Bage’s novel both advocates and stages the collision of opinion. Its central characters are philosophical in a sense of the term which, modern critic Laura Mandell suggests, is especially widespread in the 1790s: ‘refusing to grant any prejudged notion about the quality or value of things as they are’.15 Hermsprong in addition holds out the prospect that rational dialogue of the kind it

11 Holcroft, Anna St. Ives, ed. Faulkner, 172.

12 Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Hindle, 5–​6. Godwin added this passage’s reference to a ‘natural

philosopher’ in 1797. 13  Charlotte Smith, The Young Philosopher, ed. Elizabeth Kraft (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999), 16. 14  Robert Bage, Hermsprong, ed. Pamela Perkins (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002), 158, 134. 15  Laura Mandell, ‘Bad Marriages, Bad Novels: The “Philosophical Romance” ’, in Jillian Heydt-​ Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman (eds.), Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780–​1830 (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2008), 51.

Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s    447 models, especially when imbued with fearless candour, will be the solvent that dissolves prejudice and secures political conversion.

Riveting Reading The portrayal of reading as a fateful, formative act and a life-​altering event is another identifying characteristic of the philosophical fiction of the 1790s, which often arranges for its protagonist’s encounter with a particular book to serve as the genesis of its plot. Such books get under people’s skins. Caleb Williams’s master, Ferdinando Falkland, for instance, is a Don Quixote redux, so ‘deeply pervaded with the idle and groundless romances of chivalry’ that he will go to extraordinary lengths, including murder, to preserve his reputation as a man of honour. In this passage Godwin intimates that Falkland’s reading habits, in committing him to the unconscious reproduction of an anachronistic world view, are the origin of Caleb’s tribulations. Complicating this interpretation, though, is the fact that Caleb, though a ‘natural philosopher’ (100), describes himself in identical terms—​‘books of narrative and romance … took possession of my soul’ (6)—​ and views his master as a figure out of those books: the sympathetic imagination that attaches Caleb to his reading also makes him complicit in his own victimization, and when, in the course of the novel’s cat-​and-​mouse game, he trades places with Falkland, it makes him over-​ready to identify with his class oppressor’s power to oppress. As such a reduplication of the Quixote figure suggests, the representation of reading in Godwin’s works is intriguingly ambivalent, as it is also in those of many of his contemporaries. On the one hand, this representation registers the Enlightenment confidence that political change will take place—​and philosopher sons and daughters will make reparation for the errors of an older generation—​as soon as freedom of inquiry is secured and books are able to educate the public about the irrationality of political society as it is currently constituted. A ‘valuable book’, Godwin had asserted in Political Justice, could ‘give birth to the most auspicious reforms’, for ‘sound reasoning and truth when adequately communicated must always be victorious over error’ (55). On the other hand, these authors’ depiction of their characters’ formative reading experiences often trouble that faith in the efficacy of rational exchange, instead demonstrating the scary vulnerability of the human mind and demonstrating the ease with which political ideology, the misrecognition of other people’s interests as one’s own, takes hold within individuals’ psychology. For this reason, the story that we began to trace earlier about what Caleb Williams called the ‘power of thinking’—​a story, to the forefront in the relatively optimistic works by Bage and Holcroft especially, that seems to endorse the proposition that life might be lived as a philosophical exercise in rational calculation—​does not line up neatly with the story that the 1790s novels tell concurrently about books’ influence on the mind. The discrepancy is worth pondering. It indexes how often these novelists arrange for the would-​be philosophers within their philosophical novels to confront the limits of rationalistic philosophy. It suggests, too, why this set of novels has been so generative for

448

448   DEIDRE SHAUNA LYNCH psychoanalytic critics and critics looking for premonitions of Althusser’s and Foucault’s accounts of ideology. In the best novels of this set, the writers’ self-​reflexive interest in how our textual experiences can come to mediate or even constitute our real experiences leads them, even as they participate in their milieu’s idealization of reason, to ask hard questions about the autonomy of the reasoning mind. In a retrospective account, written in 1832, of his aims in composing Caleb Williams Godwin made it sound as if a recomposing of his audience was also involved: ‘I said to myself a thousand times, “I will write a tale, that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before.” ’16 An autobiographical fragment of Godwin’s imagined the author’s power to induce mental revolution in even stronger terms: ‘what I say shall be incorporated with the very fibres of the soul of him who listens to me’.17 The troubling undertones here suggest how fine a line separates the book that emancipates and the book that captivates, even or especially through bestowing aesthetic pleasure. A prison in the progressive fiction of the 1790s is often a place of books. As we have seen, in this site a first-​person narrator like Godwin’s Caleb or Mary, Hays’s eponymous ‘victim of prejudice’, determines to vindicate his or her character and to that end composes the memoir that eventually passes into the hands of the reading public. But that prisons are also constructed from captivating books is the hypothesis that comes into view as these novels work through the legacy of the Quixote plot. In the memoir that the protagonist of The Wrongs of Woman writes for her infant daughter she registers this conceptual impasse in a passage that takes pains to explain that the counsel she offers is ‘meant rather to exercise than influence your mind’ (111). Wollstonecraft’s novel as a whole is in fact, as critics have noticed, ‘almost entirely taken up with acts of reading’.18 Wollstonecraft has, of course, left her protagonist few opportunities for action, at least within the portion of her novel that she completed before her death. Her dramatic in medias res opening introduces Maria as an inmate of a madhouse, installed there, as we gradually come to understand, by her husband, George Venables, who through this measure plans to gain control over the fortune his wife’s uncle has bequeathed to their child. ‘[B]‌uried alive’ (77), Maria lives in and through the books of poetry and fiction with which her sympathetic warder furnishes her, consuming them avidly as a substitute for human connection. But despite her intentions those books do not exactly provide her with opportunities for imaginative escape; Wollstonecraft’s suggestion instead appears to be that Maria’s reading further rivets her chains. Maria’s acts of reading almost seem to prepare the ground for this philosophical novel to acquiesce to the conventional genre demands of novelistic fiction and for the novelistic to win out over the philosophical. For as soon as Maria meets the man, Henry Darnford, to whom those books belong, the heterosexual passion that is the traditional material of 16 

‘Godwin’s Account of the Composition of Caleb Williams’, in Caleb Williams, ed. Hindle, 350. Autobiographical fragment, dated 10 October 1824, cited in Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–​1805 (Oxford: OUP, 1976), 183. 18  Daniel O’Quinn, ‘Trembling: Wollstonecraft, Godwin and the Resistance to Literature’, ELH 64/​3 (1997), 767. 17 

Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s    449 fiction comes once again to drive the narrative. ‘What chance … had Maria of escaping, when pity, sorrow, and solitude all conspired to soften her mind, and nourish romantic wishes?’ asks Wollstonecraft’s narrator, casting a cold eye on Maria’s ‘sensibility’ and ‘ardent imagination’ (88–​9). Primed by her reading, the woman who is already acquainted with marriage as a bastille, who has every reason to seek independence, falls back into the delusive snares of love, and Wollstonecraft demonstrates thereby ‘the social, political, and psychological entailments of aesthetic pleasure’.19 The Quixote story at the heart of The Wrongs of Woman suggests that the codes of literary genre themselves help maintain that system of wrongs. The primal scene in Emma Courtney’s autobiographical narrative, Mary Hays’s admonitory story of a woman’s painful efforts to live the truth of her feelings, also sees a woman falling prey to a book that seduces her imagination. By chance Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s sentimental novel, La Nouvelle Héloïse, fell into Emma’s hands when she was a young girl. Emma’s father, anxious that the book will foster her imagination and sensibility, already overactive at the expense of her reason, takes the novel away before his daughter has read beyond the first volume, but even while Rousseau’s seduction plot remains a work in progress, the novel ‘made an impression never to be effaced’, Emma recalls; this moment when ‘all the ardour of [her] character was excited’ has been, she confesses, ‘productive of a long chain of consequences that continue to operate till the day of my death’.20 Critics differ in their interpretations of this passage, in which Emma seems to suggest, as she taps contemporary materialist philosophies stressing the power of circumstance to shape character, that Rousseau’s novel has furnished the ‘narrative template’ for her subjectivity.21 Some commentators read that suggestion as Hays’s indictment of the way the sentimental novel naturalizes and glamorizes demeaning notions of sexual difference. (Hays later included an excoriating account of ‘what men would have women be’ in her 1798 feminist polemic Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women.) Certainly, in the memoir Emma addresses to her adopted son and which we read over his shoulder those notions’ debilitating effects are laid bare in mortifying detail. The older Emma chronicles there her self-​destructive obsession with a man whom she loved without hope of a return. This man represented to the younger Emma, perhaps still represents ‘the St. Preux, the Emilius, of my sleeping and waking reveries’—​an epithet referencing both the hero of Rousseau’s novel and the model pupil featured in the educational treatise that Rousseau published the following year. That the actual name of her reluctant heart-​throb was Harley—​linking him to the hero of that key sentimental novel, Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771)—​further cements this argument about the male novelistic tradition’s role in upholding the gender codes this heroine 19 

Susan Wolfson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Poets’, in Claudia L. Johnson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 184. 20  Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, ed. Eleanor Ty (Oxford: OUP, 1996), 25. 21  See inter alia Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–​1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 46.

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450   DEIDRE SHAUNA LYNCH finds so oppressive. Other critics who have engaged Hays’s allusions to the dangerous effects of the sympathies promulgated by sentimental novels propose, however, that Hays’s intent is in fact to suggest that ‘female sexuality [may have] a material reality only in fiction’. In this interpretation, Hays means to condemn the reality to which Emma as Female Quixote is maladjusted, as much as she means to condemn the delusory, arousing fiction that produces that maladjustment. The order of Things As They Are and of Man As He Is appears entirely unable to accommodate desiring agency on the part of a female individual. For that reason, Hays and her heroine appear finally to concur, ‘the only way to be a free and desiring woman is by living in a novel’.22

‘Comprehensive Conclusions’ No matter how this episode is read, it is certain that Emma Courtney joins a fan club with many members when she is smitten with Rousseau’s ‘dangerous, enchanting, work’ (25): Claire Grogan calculates that between 1790 and 1818 fourteen British novels, from across the political spectrum, incorporated Rousseau’s novel of forbidden passion into their plots.23 Tellingly, Héloïse also makes part of the packet furnishing Wollstonecraft’s Maria with her prison reading, and in an act of Quixote-​like projection she ascribes to Darnford all the ‘feelings and sentiments’ (81) of Rousseau’s hero. Throughout the eighteenth century British novelists had been harried by the charge that their scenes of romance made enflamed readers into Quixotes who, over-​identifying, were also over-​eager to repeat those scenes in their own life. Throughout the century, to parry that charge, they had arranged to combat the erotic effects of reading with the educative effects and had promoted an account of the novel as a vehicle for the delivery of instruction. Samuel Richardson, for instance, all but admitted that the example of his model heroine Clarissa could not on its own secure his didactic ends and so, taking to its logical conclusion his belief that ‘the story or amusement should be considered as little more than the vehicle to the more necessary instruction’, presented the public in 1751 with ‘a collection of the moral and instructive sentiments … reflections and observations as are presumed to be of general use’ that he had extracted from his novel.24 In some ways, the bridge-​building between novels and philosophical discourse that engaged radical writers forty years after Clarissa might be seen as a new measure they adopted to solve this old, familiar problem. To supplement fiction with philosophical argumentation—​the precepts and universal principles that were the building blocks of

22  Katherine Binhammer, ‘The Persistence of Reading: Governing Female Novel-​Reading in Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers’, Eighteenth-​Century Life 27/​2 (2003), 12. 23  Claire Grogan, ‘The Politics of Seduction in British Fiction of the 1790s: The Female Reader and Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 11/​4 (1999), 463. 24  Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 36; Letters and Passages Restored From the Original Manuscripts of the History of Clarissa (London, 1751), title page.

Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s    451 an Enlightenment science of human nature—​could serve as a means of damage control. If it failed to solve the problem of textual seduction it might at least moderate the novel’s libido. Through this supplement, the novelist could displace the usual mis-​education in romantic feelings that bad novels offered and instead enrol the audience in ‘the true school of humanity’.25 Perhaps it is with reference to this sort of project that we should understand Mary Wollstonecraft’s attraction to Rasselas—​which Claudia Johnson has identified as an important prototype for the storyline and narrative voice of Wollstonecraft’s first novel Mary: A Fiction (1788),26 the story, as the Advertisement claims, organized to display ‘the mind of a woman, who has thinking powers’ (5). In the English tradition, Johnson had led the way in developing a kind of fiction that escaped from the observable, empirical world of ‘familiar contingencies into an environment almost hypothetically pure’.27 While bearing fiction aloft into the realm of ideas, Johnson had also, as Claudia Johnson observes, managed to deliver a gender-​neutral account of the human quest after happiness. (In another precedent important for the generic experiments of the 1790s, Rasselas had also eschewed the usual eighteenth-​century marriage plot.)28 Thinking about what the late-​century philosophical novel hoped to achieve in building bridges to the abstractions of philosophical discourse, we might also consider how often in this fiction ‘the psychological interest and emotional power of the stories of individual characters are coordinated with the objective of making a general case’.29 In the 1790s many progressive novelists seem unwilling to take for granted any longer the ‘pedagogical value’ of ‘stories of individual lives’, though these had been the bread and butter of the English novel since Robinson Crusoe.30 They therefore strive to bridge the gap between, on the one hand, the recounting of the fortunes and misfortunes of individuals and, on the other, a comprehensive delineation of the prevailing political order that conveys the fortunes and misfortunes of social groups. And, by extension, when novelists such as Godwin, Holcroft, Smith, Hays, and Wollstonecraft—​the last of whom declared in a preface that The Wrongs of Woman ‘ought rather to be considered [the history] … of woman, than of an individual’ (67)—​represent the beginnings of mental emancipation amongst their would-​be philosopher protagonists, they commence by showing us how these characters learn to make their subjective experiences serve the bases for reflections of a more general, and more social, import. For these novelists, the cognitive operations that are

25 

William Godwin, St. Leon, ed. William D. Brewer (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2006), 94. Claudia L. Johnson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Novels’, in Johnson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, 192. 27  Carey McIntosh, quoted in Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. Thomas Keymer (Oxford: OUP, 2009), p. xxiv. 28  Johnson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Novels’, 192. 29  Jill Campbell, ‘Women Writers and the Woman’s Novel: The Trope of Maternal Transmission’, in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), 163. 30  Jillian Heydt-​Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman, ‘The Ethical Experiments of the Romantic Novel’, in Heydt-​Stevenson and Sussman (eds.), Recognizing the Romantic Novel, 23. 26 

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452   DEIDRE SHAUNA LYNCH involved in learning to trace, as the narrator of The Young Philosopher puts it, the overarching ‘systems’ and ‘laws’ through which some individuals suffer and other individuals inflict suffering—​are also required for the achievement of true virtue (21). Godwin in particular suggests in his Enquiry that the virtuous individual will learn that justice requires that he subordinate to wider, more rational allegiances the intimate affections of private life, for he will remember that ‘we are not connected with one or two percipient beings, but with a society, a nation, and in some sense with the whole family of mankind’ (72): eventually, he proposes, that general philanthropy will be for this individual as ardent a feeling as married love. These novelists mean for readers to break with their usual way of identifying with fictions and learn such lessons as well. In The Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft had decried a system of gendered mis-​education that, she stated, left women lacking the ‘power of generalizing ideas, of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations, [which] is the only acquirement … that really deserves the name of knowledge’ (58): this account is the corollary to her diagnosis of her sex as prey to their over-​exercised sensibilities, ‘blown about by every momentary gust of feeling’ (65), and debilitated by their addiction to novelistic scenes of passion. The former passage from The Rights of Woman in effect laments women’s exclusion from philosophy, which, in a definition tendered by David Hume earlier in the eighteenth century, was in essence a regular and methodical attempt to ‘render our principles … more general and comprehensive’.31 Wollstonecraft’s fictions identify the attaining of mental fortitude with such an attempt. For Wollstonecraft, the typical modern woman—​and typical modern novel-​reader—​needs to be reasoned out of her attachment to particularities. When the Wollstonecraftian heroine with thinking powers begins to use them, then, thought leads her from self-​absorption in her personal plight onward to a position of objectivity and even dispassionate detachment from which she is able to discern how her case is implicated in the fate of her sex, a collectively defined group. Thus, in the memoir she writes for her daughter, the heroine of The Wrongs of Woman represents her achievement of insight into the hopeless state of her marriage as a train of thinking that, once pursued, ‘led me out of myself, to expatiate on the misery peculiar to my sex’ (146); ‘if I execrated the institutions of society, which thus enable men to tyrannize over women, it was almost a disinterested sentiment’ (145). And through the multiplication of subplots involving secondary characters that illustrate, with some redundancy in relation to Maria’s story, the workings of matrimonial despotism and the effects of a sexual double standard, The Wrongs of Woman shifts its critique from a question of individual error to more comprehensive questions about the historical formation of women as a social group. During his first term of imprisonment, Godwin’s Caleb traces a comparable trajectory, proceeding from resentment of Falkland, to reflection on the system of politics that Falkland embodies, to more extensive inquiries into the fates of other victims of that system, and so to the discovery that ‘three fourths’ of his fellow prisoners ‘are persons 31 

David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith (Indianapolis: Bobbs-​Merrill, 1947), 134.

Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s    453 whom … no evidence can be found sufficient to convict’. At the level of style, this evolution in our narrator’s mental life is manifested as a disconcerting mixture of linguistic registers, for Caleb, his political consciousness raised, presents himself as simultaneously autobiographer and social scientist: within Caleb’s discourse the grammatical subjects are not simply the ‘I’ and ‘he’ of interpersonal relations but, more comprehensively, ‘the Englishman’ or quite simply ‘man’. In this same chapter, tellingly, Caleb (or Godwin) feels it necessary to address the reader directly so as to vindicate such features of his narration. He admits that ‘these are general remarks’—​but discourages readers from considering them a ‘digression from my story’ (188–​9).

‘May There Not Be Philosophical Romance?’ Caleb’s/​Godwin’s defensiveness about transgressing the usual decorum of the first-​person memoir suggests that the infusion of philosophizing into the philosophical novel we have discussed was never really on track to be acclaimed in the way that Samuel’s Richardson’s earlier project of genre reform had been. Reviewers of the period by and large were unsympathetic to the political arguments forwarded by these fictions. Particular suspicion was directed at evidence suggesting that the novelists’ forgoing of the marriage plot or their interest in bad marriages might register the influence of the schemes of general philanthropy, in which the individual’s love of the human race would exceed his love of country or family, that Godwin had written up in Political Justice. One reviewer of Caleb Williams, for instance, bemoaned the deficiencies of a novel that contained ‘no tale of rational love, no marked instance of personal attachment’.32 (General philanthropy, admirable in theory, looked to most of Godwin’s contemporaries to be scandalous in practice: hence Charles Lloyd’s novel Edmund Oliver [1798], written, Lloyd averred, to promote the institution of marriage and to counteract ‘that generalizing spirit which seems so much to have insinuated itself among modern philosophers’.33) Furthermore, the generic experimentation engaging these writers really worked two ways. In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the conservative revamping of British public culture in reaction to its excesses, Godwin became a byword for a cold-​blooded scepticism that sought, as William Wordsworth complained in his retrospect on the 1790s in The Prelude, to drag ‘all passions, notions, shapes of faith, | Like culprits to the bar’ (10: 889–​90). But even so, while Godwin and his literary allies stretch the categories of literature and philosophy into new conjunctions, it often feels as if they have not so much de-​libidinized the novel, as libidinized philosophy. 32  Analytical Review 21 (1795), quoted in the ‘Introductory Note’ to Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, vol. iii: Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit (London: William Pickering, 1992), p. vi. 33  Charles Lloyd, Edmund Oliver, ed. Philip Cox (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), 3.

454

454   DEIDRE SHAUNA LYNCH The anonymous reviewer of Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, or, The Ruin on the Rock (1795) who expressed bemusement over the novel’s ‘impassioned style of reasoning—​in which truth itself, losing its chaste sobriety, become impregnated with inebriating qualities’, recognized this, registering, with this strange concept of a ratiocination that operates as an aphrodisiac, the philosophical novelist’s efforts to rearrange the usual relations between reason and passion and between truths known and truths felt.34 The bemusement illuminates a constitutive peculiarity of this fiction: the extent to which progressive writers of the 1790s continued to articulate their concerns through the discursive paradigms of sentimental culture, continuing to exploit like their predecessors the affective powers of narrative and likewise casting—​their interest in collective histories notwithstanding—​the individual psyche as the structuring principle for fiction. For just prior to the moment in the history of the novel when Jane Austen and Walter Scott would publish works that would effectively cast impersonal narration as the novel’s new norm, these writers persisted in an allegiance to the first-​person, confessional voice. For instance, for all her desire to write a social realist story exhibiting the oppression of ‘woman’ and not of ‘an individual’, Wollstonecraft in The Wrongs of Woman counterpointed her third-​person narration with a series of inset autobiographical narratives; Hays mixed memoir and epistolary formats, so that Emma Courtney’s past-​tense, distanced retrospect on her conduct is interrupted by present-​tense epistolary effusions that revive the very passions that Emma believes she has extinguished. At the same time, as we glimpsed when considering the oddities of tone in Caleb Williams, the novelists of ideas also freighted first-​person forms with third-​person content. Sometimes they even endowed their individual character-​narrators with the qualities of omniscient narrators, to strange, fascinating effect. In Godwin’s St. Leon (1799), the eponymous narrator—​who has come to possess the secret of immortality—​claims a historical perspective that is inhuman in its far-​sightedness and detachment: ‘What are … generations of men to me? I shall become familiar with the rise and fall of empires; in a little while the very name of … my country will perish from the face of the earth’ (188). Caleb Williams, for the course of almost a volume of Godwin’s novel, adopts the third person and becomes himself the dispassionate ‘historian’ of the very man whom his opening paragraph identifies as ‘my enemy’ (281). The first-​person memoirist of 1790s fiction thus manages to sound at once histrionic and cerebral, raving and clinical—​the latter because a narrator-​character like Caleb or St. Leon or Emma Courtney brings a veritable science of the passions to bear on the case history of his or her own mind. This protagonist uses, in Godwin’s words in his 1832 retrospect on the composition of Caleb Williams, a ‘metaphysical dissecting knife’ to lay bare his or her own emotional disorders.35 Autobiography doubles as case history and (to cite a self-​reflexive passage of Emma Courtney) ‘hazardous experiment’ (4). With comparably disconcerting effects, such narrators, in 34  Monthly Magazine, ns 18 (1795), quoted in Eliza Fenwick, Secresy, or, The Ruin on the Rock, ed. Isobel Grundy (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1994), 10. 35  ‘Godwin’s Account of the Composition of Caleb Williams’, in Caleb Williams, ed. Hindle, 351.

Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s    455 the female-​authored novels particularly, take the materials of private, intimate life and draw them into the domain of public debate; sexual desire is to become the stuff of analysis, discussed as though it were a public matter, because its privatization contributes to women’s acquiescence in their limited opportunities. Thus Hays’s Emma explains in a letter to Harley that she ‘love[s]‌to class and methodize’ (120):  what Emma classes and methodizes, however, is love, an emotion she observes and feels and, in this strange example of a love letter, declares. Through this account of herself, Emma proposes a new model of selfhood. She engages in the set of complicated negotiations through which she might claim the public identity of philosopher without relinquishing her gendered identity as woman. The ‘female philosopher’, this text explains, links, rather than distinguishes, philosophical knowledge and the individual’s personal experience of desire and heartbreak and loneliness. The genre mixing at stake in this memoir goes further still, however, since the novel incorporates, as though they were Emma’s, Hays’s own letters to the men in her life; as with Wollstonecraft’s novels, whose heroines bear their author’s names (Mary, Maria), Emma Courtney presents itself as at once fiction and displaced autobiography—​a ‘crossing between actual and possible worlds’.36 When Godwin read Emma Courtney in draft and urged Hays to beef up its love story and so conform better to novelistic convention, she parried his criticism with a question: ‘may there not be philosophical romance?’37 Hays’s question involves the conditions of possibility for the very fictional form that she, Godwin, and their friends were seeking to invent. It signals the difficulty of their task, the recalcitrance of the prevailing understandings of the office of the novel and prevailing ways of ordering the relations between reason and desire, that the novelists so often defer to the future and future readers the recognition of this new form. These memoirists address themselves not to their contemporaries but to unknown interlocutors in the future—​Caleb, for instance, to a ‘posterity’ that might render him the ‘justice which [his] contemporaries refuse’ (5)—​or to the next generation—​in Emma Courtney, to an adopted son, on the verge of recapitulating the book’s story of romantic abjection with another Emma; in Wrongs of Woman, to an infant daughter who may or may not be alive. History teaches us that, in the event, the generation that succeeded these novelists’ generation, retreating from the political engagement of the Revolutionary era, thwarted their hope that readers might come along whose response to their books would take the form of a political programme. In tracing these books’ passions, ambivalences, and bold experimentation, this essay has tried to suggest why a twenty-​first-​century audience might wish to fill that role itself.

36  Tilottama Rajan, ‘Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney’, Studies in Romanticism 32/​2 (1993), 171. 37  Mary Hays to William Godwin, 10 January 1796, cited in Mandell, ‘Bad Marriages, Bad Novels: The “Philosophical Romance” ’, 51.

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456   DEIDRE SHAUNA LYNCH

Select Bibliography Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–​1900 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957). Armstrong, Nancy, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 1987). Benedict, Barbara, Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–​1800 (New York: AMS Press, 1994). Clery, E. J., The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–​1800 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995). Ellis, Markman, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 1996). Ezell, Margaret J. M., Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993). Fergus, Jan, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England (Oxford: OUP, 2006). Gallagher, Catherine, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–​1820 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994). Garside, Peter, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​ 1829:  A  Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2  vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000). Klancher, Jon P., The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–​1832 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987). Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Pearson, Jacqueline, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). Richardson, Alan, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780– 1832 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). Todd, Janet, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986).

Chapter 27

The Anti-​J ac obi n Nov e l M. O. Grenby

The anti-​Jacobin novels written in Britain during the 1790s and early 1800s were those which engaged in the debate on the French Revolution on what can be termed the loyalist, or counter-​revolutionary, or conservative, side. Many were published—​over fifty, though questions of definition and the novels’ ephemeral nature have ensured that no final figure has been arrived at. They were written by men and women and young and old, by professionals and amateurs, by both well-​known and deeply obscure figures. They could be printed privately or by the leading publishers of the day, and might be substantial and intricate works appearing in several volumes, or published in a much more succinct and simple format. Some were highly erudite or immersed in contemporary events and debates; others were directed at children. Some were evangelical in inspiration, others entirely secular. The novels varied in the degree of their political commitment. Some are outright propaganda, others include political reflections and imputations only as asides. Typically, those who produced anti-​Jacobin fiction pursued one or more of a limited range of strategies. They might represent rebellion or revolution in a fictional, historical, or contemporary setting, showing its ill consequences. They might attack radical ideas, whether older positions such as liberal Whiggism and religious scepticism, or newer-​minted ideologies such as those articulated in the 1790s by Tom Paine, William Godwin, or Mary Wollstonecraft, or emanating from Revolutionary France. Or they might dramatize threats to the existing social order, from (among others) levellers and feminists and anti-​slave trade campaigners. They routinely criticized anyone who was guilty of neglecting the duties incumbent on them under the existing, hierarchical social order: women who should have confined themselves to the private sphere, the young who should respect and obey their elders, businessmen who should have contented themselves with economic power and not sought social prestige, aristocrats who were not setting an example of moral correctness and paternal care for the less fortunate. As such, anti-​Jacobin novels could be both reactionary and reformist. In fact, rather remarkably, they often contrived to be both. One thing that might also be said of the anti-​Jacobin novel is that it existed only in conjunction with—​or indeed in response to—​its radical counterpart, the Jacobin novel.

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458   M. O. GRENBY In their prefaces, anti-​Jacobin novelists often complained that the radicals had already polluted fiction with politics. They frequently used metaphors of reprisal, speaking of the need ‘to parry the Enemy with their own weapons’, or ‘to convey an antidote by the same course’.1 This tactic allowed them to sidestep the charge that they were themselves politicizing an innocent and susceptible readership—​the young, women, the lower classes: putatively the novel’s audience. Indeed, in the case of many conservative women writers, the claim that their novels were essential to counter the radicals’ prior contamination of fiction provided an apology for their own transgressive entrance into public, political discourse. However, we should be wary of this claim that the Jacobin novel appeared prior to the anti-​Jacobin. Certainly, such a claim is embedded in most literary histories, and indeed in the sequence of chapters in The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel. And it is also true that the radical novel received sustained critical attention much earlier than its conservative counterpart—​Gary Kelly’s foundational study, The English Jacobin Novel, appearing in 1976—​while book-​length studies of anti-​Jacobin novels have been published only since the turn of the twenty-​first century.2 Kelly did date the first Jacobin novels to the 1780s, before the Revolution of course, and before the first anti-​Jacobin novel, but question marks hang over these. Robert Bage wrote them, but being much older, and living in Derby and Birmingham, Bage was isolated from the main Jacobin group, men like Godwin and Thomas Holcroft, and women like Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Inchbald, all living in close intellectual collaboration in London. Moreover, Kelly admits that Bage’s early novels do not exhibit the same ‘unity of design’, based on Godwinian necessitarian philosophy and its deployment in structure and technique, that he uses to define the Jacobin novel. Indeed, the Jacobin novel defined in Kelly’s terms was only to find its mature expression in Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives in 1792 and Godwin’s Caleb Williams in 1794, although other pro-​Revolutionary, but less philosophical, novels were appearing earlier, notably Charlotte Smith’s Desmond, published in 1792. By this time, though, a number of anti-​Jacobin novels had already appeared. Several of these are worth attention, not necessarily as great works of literature, but because they show how quickly loyalists were prepared to commandeer fiction for propaganda (undermining the claim that they were only countering the Jacobins) and because, even as early as 1791, these novels already exhibit what were to become the key techniques that would characterize the classic anti-​Jacobin novel. One of the first was Lindor and Adelaïde, a Moral Tale: In Which are Exhibited the Effects of the Late French Revolution on the Peasantry of France, published in 1791 but apparently 1  George Walker, The Vagabond, A Novel in Two Volumes (3rd edn., London: G. Walker and and Hurst, 1799), 1: p. vi; Jane West, The Infidel Father (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1802), 1: p. ii. 2  Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: CUP, 2001); Lisa Wood, Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism and the Novel After the French Revolution (Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 2003); Kevin Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: CUP, 2007). Some of the most eminent counter-revolutionary novels have recently been republished in W. M. Verhoeven (gen. ed.), Anti-Jacobin Novels, 10 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005).

The Anti-Jacobin Novel   459 written in late 1790. It was by Edward Sayer, identifiable because its title-page proudly announces the novel to be by the author of Observations on Doctor Price’s Revolution Sermon (1790), Sayer’s anti-​radical pamphlet that had slightly pre-​dated Edmund Burke’s more celebrated entrance into the ‘war of ideas’, Reflections on the Revolution in France. In several ways, the novel is typical of a great deal of the anti-​Jacobin fiction that was to follow; but, in comparison, it can also seem rather primitive. The first thing one notices is that its title seems to be split into two competing parts. It would be difficult to think of two more novelistic names for a hero and heroine, and yet the subtitle warns the reader to expect political interventions. These soon arrive in the form of closely reasoned political monologues inserted into the narrative on the flimsiest of pretexts. Indeed, about a third of the ‘novel’ is taken up by dense political debate. One particular passage on the nature of French and British government (prefaced by the ominous words ‘Prepare yourselves therefore for a discourse of some length, and of some nicety, but I trust not unworthy of your attention, nor impossible to understand’) is, at eighty-​six pages, far longer than Sayer’s Observations on Doctor Price’s Revolution Sermon itself. But Sayer nevertheless evidently felt it important that his message was couched in a fictional form, and clearly hoped that his novel would achieve something that his political pamphlet could not. ‘Let example speak what precept would fail to enforce’, he says at the close of the novel.3 This was the foundational principle of both the Jacobin and anti-​Jacobin novels that would follow. Lindor and Adelaïde is set quite specifically in August 1790 in Ermonville, an idyllic village, near which, the reader is informed with a topographical exactness designed to reveal Sayer’s understanding of the proper order of things, ‘was seen the mansion of the Seigneur elevated above the rest of the village upon a rising eminence’ with ‘an alley of tall goodly trees, which led the passenger on in solemn regularity up to the gates of this old and venerable mansion’ (203). This is the ancien régime as it ought to be and as Burke was characterizing it, sanctioned by the wisdom of the ages as well as by the continuing practical utility of the arrangement, for under the benevolent supervision of the noble d’Antin family, the ‘peasant paid the easy and honourable tribute of respect with willingness, nay with zeal, while he received in return the solid advantages of security and peace’ (4). What the rest of the novel proceeds starkly to depict is the overthrow of this felicitous order by the Revolution and its uncomprehending and vicious agents. However, as well as dramatizing the levelling threat to the existing order, Sayer acknowledged that the seeds of their own ruin were sown by the aristocrats of France. In this respect he was perhaps more typical of the British response to the Revolution than Burke, whose too ardent eulogies of the ancien régime were the principal object of scorn to those who criticized his Reflections. It is the dissipation of the Marquise’s family that has forced the d’Antins to sell their home to a Parisian banker, Monsieur Levilles, a name so transparent that it requires no gloss. When these parvenus replace the aristocrats, the villagers almost immediately lose their moral and political compass, metamorphosing from happy peasants into a rampaging mob. As the mansion falls into ruin (an early appearance of another standard anti-​Jacobin motif), the villagers, as if somehow supernaturally in sympathy with the building, forget their customs and duties. 3 

[Edward Sayer], Lindor and Adelaïde, a Moral Tale (London, 1791), 354.

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460   M. O. GRENBY They constitute themselves into a Revolutionary assembly and embark on a campaign of iconoclasm, devastating the church and proposing edicts to the effect that everything that had ‘passed in France for the last five hundred years should be consigned to eternal oblivion’ (264). Against this backdrop a love plot plays itself out. Lindor had been the son of one of the Levilles’ agents, but has been converted into an active conservatism by the words of Adelaïde’s elderly clerical guardian, the Prieur, and, chiefly, by the thought that if no altars remain unbroken, he will not be able to marry his beloved. His is a doomed love in any case though, for having been unable to resist speaking of the virtues of aristocracy and clergy at one of the villagers’ assemblies, Lindor is chased through the village by the mob, overtaken, and killed, the names of his lover, his King, and his God all apparently on his lips as he dies. Adelaïde lasts only a little longer. She is tormented by one of the mob, who attempts rape once his efforts to convince her into his libertine principles fail, and she dies upon hearing of Lindor’s death and the mob’s attack on the chateau, the melancholy event with which the novel concludes. In 1791, when Sayer’s novel appeared, there were still many in Britain who welcomed the French Revolution. Even if not everyone was radical enough to understand it as a good example for Britain to follow, many regarded events across the Channel with nationalistic Schadenfreude, as likely to debilitate the old enemy France, or, more generously, as France’s attempt to ‘catch up’ with British liberty. Sayer was chiefly concerned to disabuse his readers of all of these fantasies. What he had described, Sayer insisted, if it was not immediately resisted, would spread throughout the world: something the Dissenting minister Richard Price had explicitly and excitedly promised in his celebrated 1789 ‘Revolution Sermon’ against which Sayer had written his Observations. Even Britons, such as the visitor Sayer ushers into the action at the end of Lindor and Adelaïde, would be affected. As the Prieur powerfully puts it in his closing peroration (enlisting what would become another recurrent metaphor of loyalist discourse): ‘ “This deluge of reformation, revolution, and confusion, rises higher and higher; it will first reach the cottages, then mount the castles, ascend the palaces, and at last overtop the mountains, till it ends in one wide waste of uniform devastation; a prospect without bounds, a surface without extremity, a sea without a shore” ’ (356). And in the concluding words of the novel, the British visitor is exhorted to let his countrymen ‘ “ponder these things well in their minds, and from a sense of our misfortunes, learn to place a just value on their own happiness” ’ (358). This was an attack on British radicalism, but above all on British complacency. Another novel of 1791 took a different approach to the Revolution crisis, and in doing so prefigured a second major strand of anti-​Jacobin fiction. This was Solyman and Fatima; or, the Sceptic Convinced. An Eastern Tale by the otherwise unknown T. Wright. While Sayer adapted the traditional structure of the romantic novel for the expression of his reactionary ideas and, as Burke had done, set his drama in contemporary France, Wright (although retaining the romantic narrative that was central to almost every eighteenth-​century novel) chose to provide his (or possibly her) readers with a parable, setting the ‘war of ideas’ in a distanced and completely non-​representational setting. To

The Anti-Jacobin Novel   461 do this was not new. The oriental tale had been used to debate moral, social, and political points since its inception as a literary form in the early eighteenth century.4 Indeed, given that there are no specific references to the Revolution in France or its British adherents, it could be argued that Solyman and Fatima might just as well have been written before as after the fall of the Bastille, and that therefore it should not be considered anti-​Jacobin any more than, say, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759). On the other hand, several continuities with the novels that were to appear later in the decade are striking. The first character to whom the reader is introduced is Zadah, a happy and humble shepherd living peacefully in Cassimere (an archaic spelling of Kashmir). It is, the reader is pointedly told, a region protected from the grasp of an ambitious power by a range of encircling mountains (for which we might read the English Channel). But Zadah’s son, Solyman, is guilty of that most socially destabilizing of impulses, ambition, while Zadah’s ward, Fatima, has a tendency to vanity that is equally destructive. This becomes obvious when a religious sceptic, Selim, appears, undermining all the old certainties in their lives. He tempts Fatima to forsake her home and Solyman to forget his father’s wise lesson that ‘the sphere of life allotted by Providence to every individual, is productive of pleasures adapted to the capacity, and affords the proper scope for the execution of moral duties’.5 Solyman soon leaves Cassimere, only ostensibly in pursuit of Fatima. Before the novel catches up with its two young protagonists, Wright gives Selim’s history. He has become disillusioned with all religions and with society as it is currently organized. As a result he has drifted, rather pathetically, into scepticism and misanthropy. Selim fits easily into the tradition of what would come to be known in anti-​ Jacobin literature as a ‘new philosopher’. In subsequent novels, this ‘new philosophy’ (or sometimes ‘modern philosophy’) was a composite—​and often travesty—​of the ideas of older figures, notably Hume and Rousseau, plus the French philosophes, plus contemporary British voices the most notable of which were Paine, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft. The characters who professed such ideas were generally understood either as dupes, deceived into radical ideas and soon becoming victims to them, or as villains, using their ‘new philosophy’ to deceive and exploit others. Selim is a mixture. Like the novelistic rakes from whom he could trace his literary descent he has tempted an innocent young woman away from her home with his sophistry and specious doctrines. But whereas in later anti-​Jacobin fiction such a figure would have hoped to profit from this himself, usually financially or sexually, here Selim remains in Cassimere, entering into a lengthy and rather artificial debate with Zadah. As a result of their discussion he comes to understand the felicity to be found in humility and the wisdom of placing one’s trust in divine Providence. 4 

See Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (Oxford: OUP, 2005); and M. O. Grenby, ‘Orientalism and Propaganda: The Oriental Tale and Popular Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Eighteenth-Century Novel 2 (2002), 215–37. 5  T. Wright, Solyman and Fatima; or, the Sceptic Convinced. An Eastern Tale, 2 vols. (London: John Bew, 1791), 1: 22.

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462   M. O. GRENBY This conversation between Selim and Zadah is reminiscent of nothing so much as the celebrated loyalist tract Village Politics: Addressed to all the Mechanics, Journeymen and Day-​Labourers in Great Britain, published a year after Solyman and Fatima in 1792. Written by Hannah More as a piece of political propaganda, Village Politics was a dialogue between Tom Hod, a mason drawn to radical ideas by reading Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–​ 2), and Jack Anvil, a blacksmith who is eventually able to reassure his friend that one must be content with one’s lot, that the existing order is best, and that the French are to be pitied not envied. Solyman and Fatima makes much the same argument and in much the same way, and it is this resemblance that enables us confidently to position the novel as an early salvo in the ‘war of ideas’. Its conclusion offers further confirmation. Away from Cassimere Solyman discovers a valuable diamond, allowing him to live the life of luxury of which he had always dreamed. Yet he derives only misery from his new life as his inability to govern his household leads it into chaos, and soon he freely gives up his spurious position and returns to Cassimere. Providentially, he encounters Fatima on his way, discovering her to be the daughter of Selim. Solyman marries her, and they live humbly but contentedly in the company of both their fathers. Lest any reader still fail to appreciate the lesson to be drawn from the story, Wright has an angel descend to disclose that ‘the station assigned to each individual is that wherein his happiness is to be found, and … that no condition is restricted from the enjoyment of those things, which conduce to the real benefit of human life’ (2: 87–​8). Whereas this kind of lesson in humility and contentment might have appeared at any time in the eighteenth century—​and it is clearly in the tradition of Rasselas—​its context makes the novel unmistakably anti-​Jacobin. What is evident is that, just as the Jacobin novel can be said to have been developing even before the Revolution actually broke out, the same can be said for anti-​Jacobin fiction. The anti-​Jacobin novel did not appear out of nowhere, but sprung out of an existing tradition of conservative fiction. The Revolution crisis merely gave the form a new impetus, and a new set of pegs—​events, individuals, political ideas—​on which to hang their response. If Lindor and Adelaïde and Solyman and Fatima provide early instances of two distinct anti-​Jacobin strategies—​the representation of revolution and the vilification of new philosophy—​then a further novel published in the same year, 1791, exhibits a third. This is The Siege of Belgrade: An Historical Novel, an anonymous four-​volume work probably not, as its title page claimed, ‘translated from a German manuscript’. Set in 1789, against the background of Catherine the Great’s war against the Turks, the novel has a convoluted plot and a cosmopolitan cast of characters: Russians, Poles, French, and Irish. Viscount Leinster brings grim news from Paris. He tells of all the ‘sanguinary proceedings’6 he has witnessed there, and of the Revolutionaries’ secret plans to assassinate the King and Queen. However, although he censured the violence committed upon this great occasion, he very forcibly described the abstract virtue and necessity of reformation, alleging that the spirit of the constitution, and the indispensable rights of men, had been totally absorbed in a blind and slavish obedience to despotism. The unparalleled injustice of lettres de cachet, the incredible 6 

The Siege of Belgrade: An Historical Novel. Translated from a German Manuscript, 4 vols. in 2 (London: H. S. Symonds, 1741 [for 1791]), 1: 47.

The Anti-Jacobin Novel   463 horrors of the Bastille, and other state prisons; the oppressions of the ministry; the venality of judges; the wretchedness of the peasantry; the wanton cruelty and barbarism of vassalage and feudal power; the waste of public wealth; the abuse of prerogative: all these he not only described, but illustrated, in colours, strong, glowing, and natural. Evidently the novel’s author was no reactionary, but rather a supporter of reform—​in France, but also in Russia, where the novel is set. Prince Czerskaskoi, the novel’s villain, is a feudal tyrant as well as the obstacle standing in the way of the novel’s romantic plot. It is his abuse of power that finally provokes the people to take justice into their own hands and attack and attempt to burn down his ‘prodigious gothic pile’, exactly as if it were the Russian Bastille. Paralysed with fear he sits in the innermost chamber of his castle, ready to kill himself and the ‘innocent young creature, whom injustice and sensuality had forced into his power’—​a local peasant girl whom Czerskaskoi had ‘seized and brought to the castle for his meretricious gratification’ (4: 132–​3). But fortunately for him, Leinster and the novel’s hero, Count Zamoiski, arrive in time to restrain the angry and well-​warranted peasantry. Reluctantly, they order their troops to fire upon the rioters, for ‘compassion must give place to duty’ (4: 130). The novel mixes, then, Burkean hostility to rebellion with an insistence that some kind of sociopolitical change is necessary. This might be called ‘Girondin’, in sympathy with the early stages of the Revolution, except for the fact that The Siege of Belgrade quite clearly reprehends any degree of popular rebellion, or indeed any structural change in the way society is organized. Revolution is to be shunned, but the reformation of the elite is the surest way to avoid it. The Siege of Belgrade thus prefigures a number of anti-​Jacobin novels that offer a similar critique, though more usually in a British setting. These would insist that a reactionary defence of ‘things as they are’ was too complacent in such dangerous times, and that all sections of society, most particularly the rich and powerful, had to ensure that they were fulfilling their side of the social compact if political strife was to be avoided. In short, institutional change was to be prevented by the reform of manners. What The Siege of Belgrade shows is how blurred the line could be between Jacobin and anti-​Jacobin fiction. Here was a novel that offered a social protest but remained firmly anti-​revolutionary. From these beginnings, the anti-​Jacobin novel developed. Of those which followed Lindor and Adelaïde in depicting the horrifying effects of revolution notable examples include Charlotte Smith’s The Banished Man (1794), in which a liberally-​inclined émigré nobleman returns to France to witness the destruction the Revolution has wrought (particularly interesting since Smith was reconsidering the more optimistic view of the Revolution presented in her 1792 novel, Desmond, and because, unusually for an anti-​Jacobin novel, in 1799 it was translated into French), Helen Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne (1800), a highly Gothic tale set amid the royalist Chouan movement in western France in the mid-1790s. The latter cleverly incorporated real people and events into its plot —Charlotte Corday’s assassination of Jean-​Paul Marat for example—​a strategy followed by several novelists who found it easy to portray the Revolutionary leaders as libertines who used political upheaval to effect their lustful schemes. Of those which followed Solyman and Fatima in presenting the ‘new philosophy’ for ridicule perhaps the most remarkable are the anonymous History of Sir George Warrington; or, the Political Quixote (1797), which has its hero’s wits disordered by inordinate devotion to abstract, radical political and social thought rather than tales of chivalry

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464   M. O. GRENBY (which had been the ruin of the original Quixote), and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), which included a number of satirical portraits of contemporary radicals: Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and others. Many of those which followed The Siege of Belgrade in pressing for the reform of manners were religious in tone, taking their lead, perhaps, from Evangelicalism. Mary Anne Burges’s curious updating of John Bunyan, The Progress of the Pilgrim Good-​Intent, in Jacobinical Times (1800), was one; others included the novels of Jane West, such as The Infidel Father (1802). Sometimes written under the pseudonym ‘Prudentia Homespun’, West’s novels, like many others, seem to have chiefly aimed at upholding rules of gender propriety that were, they said, too often being flouted in the modern world. Yet if West and others urged women to confine themselves to the private sphere, they also recommended coherent and rather progressive systems of education for both girls and boys. For them, education was the best means of reforming (and thus preserving) society, whereas for radicals, like Wollstonecraft, education was the best means of changing it. But either way, education was understood as a desirable alternative to revolution: for the conservatives it prevented it; for some radicals it could do revolution’s work. Given this focus on education it is unsurprising to find that politics found its way into the children’s novel. West, in her own children’s book, The Sorrows of Selfishness (1802), has a young girl lament this:  A great many very entertaining books are made, but my mamma will not let several of them come into the nursery; for she says, that they are written by people who call themselves philosophers, and teach very naughty doctrines: I am almost afraid to tell you, but she actually says that she has read in these books that, when little children say their prayers, they talk nonsense; that kings are generally bad men; and that we need not obey our parents and tutors unless we like it.7

This is the same rhetoric used in so many prefaces to anti-​Jacobin novels for adults: West apologizing for her politicization of children’s literature with the claim that she was only fighting fire with fire. Yet in fact, although many radicals were interested in children’s literature, and actually wrote numerous children’s books, there was little attempt to produce material for young people that was openly Jacobin.8 There was rather more in the way of avowedly anti-​revolutionary children’s literature though. Novels about child émigrés were popular from the later 1790s. They contained an implicit, and often very explicit, criticism of the Revolution for breaking families apart and making innocent children into refugees. An early example was The Journal of a French Emigrant, Fourteen Years Old (1795), putatively a diary but actually heavily fictionalized (and, oddly, printed in French and English side by side). In 1799 Madame de Genlis’s The Young Exiles was published in English (a translation of her Les Petits Émigrés, 1798) along with Lucy

7  [Jane West], The Sorrows of Selfishness; or, The History of Miss Richmore. By Mrs. Prudentia Homespun (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1802), pp. xiii–xiv. 8  See M. O. Grenby, ‘Politicizing the Nursery: British Children’s Literature and the French Revolution’, The Lion and the Unicorn 27 (2003), 1–26.

The Anti-Jacobin Novel   465 Peacock’s The Little Emigrant. Among the more notable children’s novels to appropriate the same plot and themes were Mary Pilkington’s New Tales of the Castle; or, The Noble Emigrants, a Story of Modern Times (1801) and George Richard Hoare’s The Young Traveller: or, Adventures of Etienne in Search of His Father (1812). For Adriana Craciun these amount ‘to a juvenile literature that complements the antiJacobin novels directed at adults’, and she notes that in depicting children callously separated from their parents they cleverly dramatize ‘the organic family’s revolutionary crisis as predicted by Burke’.9 Besides representing revolution and its consequences, children’s fiction could pursue the other principal anti-​Jacobin strategies too. As well as including a classic émigré narrative, ‘The Vicissitudes of Life’, Mrs. Ives Hurry’s Artless Tales (1808) contains another story, entitled ‘The Bastile’, more in the tradition of The Siege of Belgrade. For having ‘uttered some bold insinuations against the governing powers in France’, a headstrong young marquis is imprisoned by a lettre de cachet in the Bastille. Although the novel is set in the 1760s, the analogy to the recent Revolution is clear, but what the marquis learns is that the ‘despotic power’ of the state can only be successfully resisted—​or at least ameliorated—​by individual kindness and generosity, as shown by older, wiser characters, even including the Bastille’s governor. The marquis’s own reform restates the anti-​Jacobin formula that, however flawed the political system may be, personal virtue was a better antidote than institutional upheaval.10 George Walker’s The Adventures of Timothy Thoughtless (1813) was more in the tradition of Solyman and Fatima, adapting the ‘new philosopher’ character to children’s literature. An early school story, telling of the ‘Misfortunes of a Little Boy who ran away from Boarding-​School’, Walker traces all of his hero’s tribulations to an ‘evil-​disposed boy’ at school who ‘found fault with a number of things which had never before thought hardships’. Timothy’s father explains that his son’s folly was to ‘adopt his opinions, and became discontented’. In ‘real life’, he says, meaning when one is an adult:  You will find discontented people, who will not let others alone, but strive all in their power [sic] to disaffect them towards their country and their government, till they become incapable of enjoying real blessings, from a sense of imaginary wants. Let what you have suffered, from listening in childhood to the insinuations of your school-​fellow, guard you in youth from the evil suggestions of those dissatisfied spirits, and then you will become a man worthy to live in civil society.11

Jacobinism was not mentioned, and indeed by 1813 the radical threat had receded, but the continuities between The Adventures of Timothy Thoughtless and the anti-​Jacobin novels of the 1790s are clear. Although it can be useful to identify the major strategies of anti-​Jacobin fiction, dividing it into three basic categories underrates the sophistication of which some authors were capable. 9 

Adriana Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 148. 10  Mrs. Ives Hurry, Artless Tales, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 3: 17–18, 20. 11  G[eorge] Walker, The Adventures of Timothy Thoughtless: or, the Misfortunes of a Little Boy who ran away from Boarding-School (London: no publisher, 1813), 108–9.

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466   M. O. GRENBY Not all anti-​Jacobin novels were formulaic or predictable. The best of them could combine different elements in interesting ways, producing genuinely enjoyable and complex novels, mixing entertainment and erudition, pathos and pasquinade. One of the most complete is The Vagabond, produced for the adult market in 1799 by that same George Walker who later wrote The Adventures of Timothy Thoughtless. According to one critic, Walker has ‘perhaps the distinction of being the only novelist between Sterne and Jane Austen who succeeded in being funny when he tried’.12 Certainly the novel has a sharp satirical edge and an enjoyably intricate plot. The hero is Frederick Fenton, a likeable enough character except that he has become a slave to the new philosophy taught to him by his tutor, a man named Stupeo and a thinly disguised portrait of Godwin. We first encounter Frederick as he attempts to rob Dr. Alogos (a name derived from the Greek word for ‘unreasoning’, and a representation of the scientist and political radical Joseph Priestley). Impressed by Frederick’s disdain for personal property, a core principle of his own political philosophy, Alogos invites Frederick home and asks him to tell his life story. Acting under Stupeo’s influence, Frederick had seduced the fiancée of his best friend Vernon, prevented her from being rescued from a burning house, fled to London where he became a leader of the Gordon Riots (anti-​Catholic disturbances that brought mob rule to London in 1780), and become a highwayman, in which guise he had inadvertently killed his own mother. Alogos takes him in, whereupon Frederick attempts to seduce Alogos’s daughter, Laura. But when a mob rises up to attack the house—​as had happened to Priestley during the ‘Church and King riots’ of 1791—​the whole group depart for America (as indeed Priestley had done). They attempt to set up a pantisocratic community in Kentucky based upon their enlightened principles of equality and free love (much as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey had planned to do on the banks of the Susquehanna River in 1794). But the plan fails, for they find the land to be barren and riddled with as many swindlers as rattlesnakes, and they contribute to their own downfall by appropriating each others’ partners and hypocritically purchasing slaves. Going further west in pursuit of Laura, who has been kidnapped by the Miama Indians, they are quickly disabused of their belief in the Rousseauian idea of the ‘noble savage’, for they come to see the Native Americans as thieving, incestuous, and barbarous. Then, when they happen upon a ‘perfect Republic on the principles of equality and political justice’,13 all except Stupeo come to understand the folly of the philosophy, for this community is a dreadful dystopia where Godwinian axioms have been applied literally, resulting in ruin and cruelty. Their tribulations are not quite over, for more Native Americans capture the party, burning Stupeo at the stake. A number of anti-​Jacobin techniques are in play here. Revolution, slightly distanced to London in 1780, has been represented and shown to be necessarily disastrous and led only by men eager to profit from the disturbance. From his experiences in America, Frederick learns that ‘coercion and laws are necessary to restrain the arm of destruction and violence’ (2: 264), but Walker makes sure that his readers realize that this is a lesson applicable to 1790s France and Britain too, noting that ‘savages are much alike, all over the world’ (2: 263n). Even the more theoretically inclined Jacobins, like Frederick, are shown to be 12 

A. D. Harvey, ‘George Walker and the Anti-Revolutionary Novel’, Review of English Studies 28/111 (1977), 292. 13 Walker, The Vagabond, 2: 264.

The Anti-Jacobin Novel   467 actuated, at base, by avarice or lust. Individual radical opinions are casually and comically mocked. During the Gordon Riots, for example, a woman in labour dies when the rioters take the bed she is lying on for their bonfire. Frederick’s comment that it ‘could not be helped’, for ‘it is the ill-​education of women which introduces all sorts of nervous affections’ (1: 158), is an offhand attack on Wollstonecraft’s claim in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that it was only education that caused inequalities between the sexes. On other occasions, specific doctrines are travestied, such as Godwin’s suggestion, expressed in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), that if only everyone in society contributed, no one need work more than half an hour per day. This is the system in place in the ‘Perfect Republic’, but the settlement is failing fast. ‘It is astonishing,’ Walker writes in a note, candidly explaining his satirical methods, ‘how ridiculous and even irrational the new doctrines appear, when taken from the page of metaphysics, and contrasted with practice’ (2: 187n). Laura, on the other hand, is a model of virtue, very like Rousseau’s Sophie in Émile (1762): someone whose natural good sense informs her that modesty, softness, and deference are the chief requisites of a good woman. Yet interestingly, Laura, despite being what Wollstonecraft would have called an ‘Object of Pity, Bordering on Contempt’,14 forthrightly and cogently argues her case against her father, who urges her to exhibit less of this traditional femininity, even to the extent that she might be thought to compromise the filial reverence and acceptance of male authority that she claims to value. Laura is also, in a way, a rebel against the logic of the conventional novel plot. Following Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), it would have been standard practice for Laura to reform Frederick, and for the novel to conclude with their marriage. Walker seems deliberately to have invited the reader’s frustration by derailing this narrative, charting Frederick’s increasingly vicious radicalism and Laura’s rising antipathy towards him. Even if Walker does dredge up Vernon, a long-​lost character from the first volume, to rescue Frederick, Alogos, and Laura from the Native Americans in the nick of time (though he is too late to save Stupeo), and has Vernon and Laura marry in a nicely symmetrical denouement (for Frederick had seduced Vernon’s first sweetheart), he might still be congratulated for cleverly integrating the structure and the tendency of his novel. Frederick reforms, and comes to realize that the ‘tender smile of a modest woman, has more real pleasure than the most wanton blandishments of promiscuous intercourse’ (2: 272), but he—​and his readers—​ have been deprived of their happy ending on account of his radicalism. The Jacobin disruption of society has been yoked together with the disruption of fictional convention. It might be said, then, that in The Vagabond Walker deliberately capsized the Pamela plot to emphasize the Jacobin threat to the proper order. Indeed, the ‘anti’ of ‘anti-​Jacobin novel’ can be read in two ways. Conventionally, anti-​Jacobin novels have been defined in terms of their ‘anti-​novels’, fundamentally parodic in intent, that have more in common with Northanger Abbey, say, than the philosophical enquiry of Jacobin fiction. This raises questions about the extent to which anti-Jacobin novels were designed to make a genuine contribution to the war of ideas, or indeed were received as such, and whether they actually had any effect. Given their often parodic form, their frequent humor 14  Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 173.

468

468   M. O. GRENBY and their usual travestying of political ideas and events, we might think that anti-Jacobin novels were intended and understood primarily as being jeux d’esprit—witty exercises designed to poke fun at the radical circle—​rather than as serious and genuinely concerned attempts to shore up society against the threat of revolution. After all, the apogee of the anti-​ Jacobin novel came only in the three or four years on either side of 1800, sometime after the threat of revolution in mainland Britain had receded. Recent scholarship has tended to disagree, Kevin Gilmartin arguing that the ‘counter-​revolutionary’, as manifested in pamphlets, sermons, and criticism as well as novels, was a coherent political position, not either a trivial diversion or a hysterical reflex reaction to events and ideas. The evidence, though, is mixed. Reviews of anti-​Jacobin fiction could take the novels seriously, often commending them as an important line of national defence. Or they could treat them much more light-​heartedly. Similarly confusing is the fact that Godwin professed himself very much perturbed by the loyalist assault on him—​including ‘novels of buffoonery and scandal to the amount of half a score’—​but then (as his meticulously kept diary records) happily read many anti-​Jacobin novels.15 Although claiming to be offended, he could even keep on good terms with their authors: Sophia King, for instance, who sent him a copy of her manifestly anti-​Godwinian novel Waldorf; or, the Dangers of Philosophy (1798), but remained a frequent caller at his house, sometimes even borrowing money from him.16 On the other hand, Charlotte Smith, when writing The Young Philosopher (1798), a broadly anti-​Jacobin work though sympathetic to the Godwinian protagonist, took pains to educate herself on Godwin’s thought, reading his Political Justice and Caleb Williams, suggesting that she at least regarded her novels as substantial, serious interventions in an ideological debate.17 As for Godwin himself, there is circumstantial evidence that his opinions may have been influenced by reading anti-​Jacobin fiction. In the preface to his 1805 novel Fleetwood: or, the New Man of Feeling he sought to pre-​empt critics who would ‘remark with exaltation on the respect expressed in this work for marriage’ in contrast with the views expressed in Political Justice. The earlier work, he explained, had been a treatise, written theoretically and about society as a whole, whereas his novel was concerned with an individual. He was ‘the last man in the world to recommend a pitiful attempt, by scattered examples to renovate the face of society’, or to suggest that ‘each man for himself should supersede and trample upon the institutions of the country in which he lives’.18 What we need to remember is that the modus operandi of many anti-​Jacobin novels had been to take the principles of Political Justice and dramatize their disastrous effect on impressionable individuals who sought to apply them to their own lives. One such novel was Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter (1805) by Amelia Opie, a fictionalization of the lives of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, whose close friend she had formerly been. Its hero, the Godwinian Glenmurray, and the eponymous heroine both spurn marriage, in accordance with Political Justice, living openly with 15 

William Godwin, Thoughts Occasioned By The Perusal Of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon, Preached At Christ Church, April 15, 1800 (1801), in The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philip (London: William Pickering, 1993), 2: 171. 16  The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philip (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010): [http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk] [accessed 27 January 2011]. 17  See Pamela Clemit, ‘Charlotte Smith to William and Mary Jane Godwin: Five Holograph Letters’, Keats–Shelley Journal 55 (2006), 29–40. 18  William Godwin, Fleetwood; or, the New Man of Feeling, 3 vols. (London, 1805), 1: p. xii.

The Anti-Jacobin Novel   469 each other. Events, and the prejudices of society, cause them to reconsider. ‘I will own that some of my opinions are changed’, says Glenmurray, adding, ‘though I believe those which are unchanged are right in theory, I think, as the mass of society could never at once adopt them, they had better remain unacted upon, than that a few lonely individuals should expose themselves to certain distress, by making them the rules of their conduct.’19 This is much the same as what Godwin was saying in his preface to Fleetwood, dated 14 February 1805. What is intriguing is that Godwin recorded in his diary that he was reading Adeline Mowbray at exactly the same time, beginning on 9 February and finishing it six days later. That Adeline Mowbray alone changed his views on the purpose and possibilities of the philosophical novel, let alone marriage, is unlikely. But it seems plausible that anti-Jacobin fiction as a whole, by making the political personal, and emphasizing the effects of abstract philosophy on individuals, did make a significant contribution to the war of ideas, influencing the unaligned, and sometimes even the predisposed. Certainly it has been claimed that at least one individual’s anti-matrimonial opinions were overthrown by Adeline Mowbray. This was Godwin’s future son-in-law Shelley, who in 1811 was sent the novel by Harriet Westbrook, the woman soon to become his first wife. ‘Shelley’s reading of Adeline Mowbray is one of the few documented examples of an anti-Jacobin novel actually achieving its intended effect’, writes William St Clair.20 Across the nation, unrecorded, there may have been many more. Adeline Mowbray has, in fact, been the subject of substantial critical controversy. While it has been read as ‘the usual cautionary tale of the anti-​Jacobins’, other critics have pointed to the compassionate treatment Opie affords to her heroine and argued that, behind its ostensible orthodoxy, the book offers a damning critique of a society which constricts female freedom and extinguishes virtue.21 The real question is not who is right—​the two readings are not mutually exclusive—​but rather whether or not the political fiction of the 1790s and 1800s divides cleanly and conveniently into Jacobin and anti-​Jacobin. Many contemporaries thought it did. Samuel Miller, an American writing a history of what he called ‘the Age of Novels’ in 1803, made a clear distinction. ‘The system of opinion usually styled the New Philosophy, has been exhibited with great zeal’ by many novelists, he wrote, naming Holcroft, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Hays. ‘The same delusive and mischievous system has been successfully attacked and exposed in The Highlander, by Dr. BISSET [1800]; in the Modern Philosophers, by Miss HAMILTON [1800]; in the Memoirs of St. Godwin [by Edward Dubois, 1800], in The Vagabond [by George Walker, 1799], in Plain Sense [by Alethea Lewis, 1795], and in various anonymous publications of the novel kind.’22 Yet critical scrutiny has suggested problems with such demarcation. It is evidently the case that some themes appear equally in Jacobin and anti-​Jacobin fiction. For example, Adeline Mowbray is the victim of a faulty education, 19  Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter, ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Oxford: OUP, 1999), 150. 20  William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), 322. 21  Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 121; Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (London: Pandora, 1986), 315–24. 22  Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century. Part First, 2 vols. (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1803), 2: 169–70.

470

470   M. O. GRENBY her mother providing her with freethinking literature but being unable correctly to supervise her use of them. The same motif is to be found in the work of an iconic radical, Wollstonecraft, as well as eminent loyalists such as Hamilton. Equally, even if it is true that anti-​Jacobin novels tend to follow certain basic patterns, there are clear fractures within their ranks. Lisa Wood has pointed out, for instance, that while anti-​Jacobin novels written by men tend to be more satirical and urbane, those written by women are characterized more by ‘domestic realism’.23 Other variations can, naturally, be detected between novels published at different periods, or for different audiences. On the other hand, the anti-​Jacobin novel does have a number of distinguishing features. While Jacobin fiction tends to be metropolitan and cosmopolitan—​ written by London-​based authors, as well as being set there, and with an emphasis on characters being ‘citizens of the world’—​conservative novels were more often written by authors excluded from the ‘literati’ and were set in small communities in the English countryside. There are stylistic differences too. Critics have pointed out that anti-​Jacobin novels tend to rely on third-​person narration (preventing readers empathizing with the duped or villainous protagonists), lengthy dialogues to convey (and control) political positions, embedded authorial statements to convey ideological lessons, and stock, often one-​dimensional characters, drawing on old-​ fashioned ‘ruling passion’ psychology, and typically including a mentor figure to ram home the didacticism.24 Whereas for some critics these characteristics mean the anti-​Jacobin novel should be understood as rather retrograde, it is equally pos­ sible to propose its originality and importance. The anti-​Jacobins ruthlessly mocked gullibility and emotionalism, for example, helping to undermine the novel of sentiment. They drew on anxieties about underground networks—​émigrés-​in-​hiding, the ‘Illuminati’—​to effect a shift in the dominant fictional mode of the 1790s, producing what James Watt has called the ‘loyalist gothic’. Gary Kelly has suggested that the anti-​Jacobins’ preference for detached, witty, and intrusive narrators may have influenced Jane Austen and Walter Scott. Their preference for setting their novels in times of crisis, whether in the past or present, may also have influenced the development of the historical novel in the early nineteenth century. The lines of influence are difficult to trace with exactitude, but it is surely no longer acceptable to say that the anti-​Jacobin novel represents a dead end in terms of literary evolution. Rather than killing off the novel of ideas, as supposedly pioneered only by the Jacobins, the anti-​Jacobin novel contributed to its development. After all, if it did nothing else, by showing how fiction could contribute to social order, rather than to its destabil­ ization, the anti-​Jacobins made the political novel a more approved and orthodox literary form.

23 Wood, Modes of Discipline, 54.

24  See Wood, Modes of Discipline, 66; Miriam Wallace, Revolutionary Subjects in the English ‘Jacobin’ Novel, 1790–1805 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2009), 249; and Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789–1830 (London and New York: Longman, 1989), 63.

The Anti-Jacobin Novel   471

Select Bibliography Butler, Marilyn, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Craciun, Adriana, British Women Writers and the French Revolution:  Citizens of the World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Gilmartin, Kevin, Writing Against Revolution:  Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–​1832 (Cambridge: CUP, 2007). Grenby, M. O., The Anti-​Jacobin Novel:  British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). Johnson, Claudia L., Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988). Verhoeven, W. M., ‘General Introduction’, in W. M. Verhoeven (gen. ed.), Anti-​Jacobin Novels, 10 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), 1: pp. vii–​lxxv. Wood, Lisa, Modes of Discipline:  Women, Conservatism and the Novel After the French Revolution (Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 2003).

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Chapter 28

The Gothi c Nov e l and the Lingeri ng A ppe a l of Rom a nc e David H. Richter

While the origins of most literary genres are lost, either in scholarly controversy or the dark backward and abysm of time, those of the Gothic novel present an admirable clarity. Beneath the papier-​mâché machicolations of Strawberry Hill, the antiquarian and aesthete Horace Walpole, inspired by a nightmare involving ‘a giant hand in armour’, created at white heat the tale published at Christmas 1764 as The Castle of Otranto. Not one but two genres were thus begun. The one established first was the historical romance, which derived from elements in both Otranto and an earlier romance by Thomas Leland, Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762). This form was pioneered by William Hutchinson’s The Hermitage (1772), and developed by Clara Reeve (in The Champion of Virtue, 1777, retitled The Old English Baron in 1778) and Sophia Lee in The Recess (1783); it reached something like canonical status with the medieval romances of Walter Scott. The second, the Gothic tale of supernatural terror, was slower to erupt. The Otranto seed had time to travel to Germany and bear fruit there in the Räuber-​ und Ritter-​romane before being regrafted on to its native English soil. It was not until the last decade of the eighteenth century that the Gothic became a major force in English fiction, so much so that tales set in Italian castles and Spanish monasteries began to crowd out those set in London houses and Hampshire mansions. Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) spawned numberless imitators in a craze whose original impetus carried it into the next century. A very few were works of talent and genius, among which were Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). By then, the original impulse of the Gothic romance had played itself out, although the tale of terror was to survive as an element within and as an influence on mainstream realist fiction through the Victorian era and indeed beyond, and as a minor component of the house of fiction in both high and popular art up to the present.

The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance    473 Such is the story of the Gothic novel, and a narrative such as this one has been retold numerous times in the critical studies of the genre that began to appear in the 1920s, by Birkhead, Railo, Tompkins, Summers, and Varma.1 But to make a necessary distinction, it is a story—​or rather a chronicle, in Hayden White’s terms—​and not a history. It represents the important events and major happenings in order of occurrence, but makes no claim to understand why these events occurred when they did and why others did not occur in their place, nor does it try to understand the context and the backdrop against which they occurred. In the following essay we will briefly sketch out some of these underlying causes in an effort to understand why the Gothic developed when it did and what factors contributed to its decline as a separate genre and the absorption of some of its elements into the prose fiction of the early nineteenth century.

The Alexandrian Romance and Its Successors Whether one agrees with Ian Watt that the English novel rises with Defoe, or with Ralph Rader that it began with Richardson’s Pamela, there is no doubt that long-​form prose fiction goes back more than fifteen centuries to the Alexandrian romances of the first to third centuries ad, texts that include Chaereas and Callirhoe by Chariton, Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, and the Aethiopica by Heliodorus, fictions in which narrativity is generated by the separation of nobly born lovers, who are subjected to tremendous dangers by natural disasters and human adversaries before being finally reunited in erotic bliss. These romances circulated in the early modern period and were adapted, at full length, mixing prose and verse, by English poets such as Philip Sidney (The New Arcadia, 1590)  and Mary Wroth (The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, 1621). Many shorter romances were also published, including Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590) and Robert Greene’s Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588), known primarily today for having supplied plots for Shakespeare’s As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale. The Alexandrian romance is also the primary influence on the lengthy and intricate French romances of the seventeenth century, which were translated into English. The best-​known of these are Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607–​25; translated 1625) and Madeleine de Scudéry’s Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1648–​53; translated 1655). Scudéry’s fictions, which often included veiled references to real ladies and gentlemen of the royal court, clearly inspired English romances à clef such as Aphra Behn’s Love Letters from a Nobleman to His Sister (1685) and Delarivier Manley’s New 1 

See Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror (London: Constable, 1921); Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle (London: Routledge, 1927); J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770–​1800 (London: Routledge, 1932); Montagu Summers, The Gothic Quest (London: Fortune, 1938); Devendra Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England, Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences (London: Arthur Barker, 1957).

474

474   DAVID H. RICHTER Atalantis (1709–​10). The career of Eliza Haywood, who wrote enormously popular erotic/​political romances like Love in Excess (1719), but broke off work in this genre after the 1720s, turning instead to the Richardsonian novel with The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), suggests that the vogue of the romance declined abruptly from 1730. The same point is made by comedies like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), though it also proves that they were still consumed, or at least understood, a generation later, as female reading. Although a strong minority report has been filed by Margaret Doody,2 historians of the English novel generally agree that the romance was in eclipse during the half-​century that separated Haywood and Radcliffe, when Richardson, Fielding, and their successors were developing what they felt to be a new form of writing, more realistic and immediate, and capable of an enormous range of emotional affect from broad comedy to the heights of tragedy. The question is what brought back the romance.

Attitudes towards History One key issue is history. In starting with The Castle of Otranto, the Gothic romance is already wed to a vision of history in ways that earlier genres of fiction, including the romances of the seventeenth century, generally were not. Realistic fiction (with exceptions like Thomas Deloney’s Thomas of Reading or Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year) was generally set in the writer’s own time and place, and such pastiches on history as had been occasionally produced earlier became increasingly rare in the two decades after Pamela. But starting in the 1760s, and continuing for at least fifty years thereafter, romances based on history or at least set in the past, including those by Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee already mentioned, become a significant feature of English narrative. The Gothic novel of Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin fits directly into this growing interest in exciting and melodramatic narratives set in the remote past. Should we speak of two genres or were they really one and the same? Certainly David Punter has argued that ‘the reason why it is so difficult to draw a line between Gothic fiction and historical fiction is that Gothic itself seems to have been a mode of history, a way of perceiving an obscure past and interpreting it’.3 That fascination with actual medieval history and with fictional versions of medieval history seems to have begun around 1760. History had become one of the chief literary genres, while literature itself had become historical. Horace Walpole was certainly one of the great British medievalists, though his standards of accuracy were not high, even for his own time. He boasted of his ignorance: ‘I know nothing of barrows and Danish

2 

See Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1996). David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (New York: Longman, 1980), 59. 3 

The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance    475 entrenchments, and Saxon barbarisms and Phoenician characters—​in short, I  know nothing of those ages that knew nothing.’4 There was even a strain of Augustan contempt for the rude manners of earlier times, when those manners could not be elided by the imagination. After inspecting John Pinkerton’s histories of medieval Scotland Walpole sneered that he himself had ‘seldom wasted time on the origins of nations; unless for an opportunity of smiling at the gravity of the author; for absurdity and knavery compose almost all the anecdotes we have of them’.5 Like Thomas Warton, Walpole delighted in the Gothic taste, but unlike Warton, who insisted on keeping his medieval and modern cultural artefacts strictly separated, he thought little of combining them. Thus in Otranto Walpole produced a farrago of Enlightenment motivation with medieval detail, fabricating peculiar rituals and customs out of his baroque imagination, just as he had begun his restoration of Strawberry Hill by grafting battlements of the very best papier-​ mâché onto a Palladian framework. The political structure of the text has it both ways too: it is simultaneously a revanchist restoration, in which even the passing of four generations cannot keep the heir of Alonso from coming to his throne, and a progressive revolution, which replaces a tyrannical prince with a brave and intelligent shepherd-​ boy. The entail of landed property is attacked through Prince Manfred, whose warped feelings about his wife and daughter, whose hasty and cruel actions, are all driven by the need for a male heir, even as the supernatural manifestations insist, with literal violence, on the same law of male inheritance. The Gothic successors of Walpole were also writing in a mode of history. But by the 1790s the appetite for the medieval that had been going on for a generation had filled it with people and institutions in the public mind, just as surely as the voyages of exploration of the sixteenth century had filled the blank spaces on the maps. The Gothic monsters thus had to find an Otherwhen in which to operate. Novelists adopted the course of representing history through atmosphere and period detail, while avoiding any specific names, places, and dates that would make the story falsifiable against a historical record that, through the efforts of the antiquarians, was losing its dark corners. The key shaper of the Gothic romance, Ann Radcliffe, was neither an antiquary like Walpole nor an unusually well-​educated woman like Clara Reeve or Sophia Lee. Lacking the information on which to base a historical tale, Radcliffe usually avoided being overly particular. Her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), employs an explicitly medieval setting, but period is set only by the weaponry and the architecture, the two Gothic castles of the title, complete with moats, portcullis, sally ports, and deep and complex dungeons. Radcliffe was devoted, not to the Middle Ages as such, but to the picturesque, wherever it might be found. Her medieval and early modern settings demand the descriptions of scenery and architecture at which she excelled. The wife of the wicked Baron Malcolm of Dunbayne, for example, hails from Switzerland (an unlikely venue for 4  Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with the Rev. William Cole, ed. W. S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace, 2 vols. (London: OUP, 1937), 1: 309. 5  Quoted in Thomas Preston Peardon, The Transition in English Historical Writing, 1760–​1830 (New York: Columbia UP, 1933), 144.

476

476   DAVID H. RICHTER a Highland chieftain’s consort) in order to allow Radcliffe to paint ‘one of those delightful vallies of the Swiss cantons’. Radcliffe’s greatest success, The Mysteries of Udolpho, is set in the interstices of history. It begins with a chronotopic annotation (‘On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the province of Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the chateau of Monsieur St. Aubert’), but there is no reference to the historical events of that period, which saw a momentous struggle known as the ‘war of the three Henris’, between the king, Henri III; his overmighty subject Henri duc de Guise; and the Protestant heir to the French throne, Henri de Bourbon, later Henri IV. Rather than move the story into the paths of momentous events, Radcliffe steers away from them, even assuring us that the military action that permanently ends Montoni’s hold on Udolpho occurs with such ‘celerity and ease’ that it never finds ‘a place in any of the published records of that time’.6 Few of Radcliffe’s successors and imitators worked any harder at establishing the authenticity of their portraits. Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk is set in Madrid but at no particular date; the Wandering Jew appears and speaks yet fails to mention how long his tormented eternal life has thus far lasted. Mary-​Anne Radcliffe’s Manfroné; or, the One Handed Monk is set in Italy during a remote but unspecified period in the past. Maria Regina Roche’s Clermont is set in an equally vague France, although notable names such as ‘De Sevigné’ and ‘Montmorenci’ suggest the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But there were exceptions, such as Eleanor Sleath’s unusually witty romance The Nocturnal Minstrel (1810), which is set precisely after the period of the ‘feigned boys’—​the pretenders Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, who troubled the reign of Henry VII—​and located in a barony in the north of England ruled by the widow of a Yorkist partisan. And Charles Robert Maturin’s early novel, The Fatal Revenge, or The Family of Montorio (1807), is placed near Naples around the year 1690. The Gothic novel thus begins with The Castle of Otranto set in medieval history, a history seen as nightmare landscape where the probabilistic strictures of the present day are absent and where anything can happen, but—​partly as a result of helping to stimulate that interest in history—​the Gothic of the 1790s finds the primitive past populated by genuine cultures and customs of its own. The genre is thus pushed out into a never-​ never land of vague otherness, elsewhere and elsewhen, where the drama of suffering can occur on its own terms.

Attitudes towards Suffering If the Gothic is the historical novel minus the details of the history, it might equally be thought to be a later, and more extreme, version of the sentimental novel. This genre is 6  Ann Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789; New York: Arno Press, 1972), 143; The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobree (Oxford: OUP, 1966), 1: 522. Radcliffe’s final novel, Gaston de Blondeville (London, 1826)—​unpublished during her lifetime and pretty much forgotten since—​attempts a more robust confrontation with medieval history, but has a dismally weak narrative.

The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance    477 treated elsewhere, so I will be brief. The mid-​eighteenth century had witnessed a redefinition of the gentleman, who had once been defined in terms of the aristocratic and martial virtues, but now was defined by his restraint rather than by his powers, and by feelings tender to the point of weakness. At his most egotistically sublime, as J. M. S. Tompkins put it, ‘the sensible man feels that he is an advanced type of being, of finer clay than the rest of the world, and though he pays for his superiority by weakness and anguish, he does not find the price too high, but regards with gentle scorn the low pleasures of the unthinking world’.7 This is a basic cultural shift and not merely a literary fashion, although literature was a significant part of the cultural pattern, not just its reflection. That is, the act of reading the texts of sensibility—​sentimental novels like Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771) and Julia de Roubigné (1777), or Thomas Bridges’s Adventures of a Bank-​Note (1770–​1) or Henry Brooke’s Fool of Quality (1764–​70)—​was a sort of spiritual training camp: it taught the reader the proper objects and forms of feeling and trained his or her responses. This was a crucial ideological step in the evolution of bourgeois society. The reform in manners that exalted sensibility as the key quality of the gentleman opened the doors to genteel behaviour to those below. The cult of sensibility, as G. J. Barker-​Benfield argues, was a way not only of reforming the aristocracy but of ‘getting the monied interest to make itself more mannerly’.8 Sentimentality blurs traditional hierarchies, but at the same time the tableau in which the man of feeling confronts the pain and suffering of others and attempts to relieve it, is one that only works de haut en bas. Suffering makes the poor visible to those well off, but only as emblematic individuals, symbols of an underclass that as a class cannot and need not be changed. Sterne’s Parson Yorick relieves the distresses of the poor but betrays, according to Robert Markley, ‘a generic lack of interest in the causes of poverty’.9 This becomes a significant issue when we ask how the sentimental evolved into the Gothic. In Virtue in Distress, R. F. Brissenden suggests that the ultimate collapse of the cult of sensibility came out of the growing sense that widespread misery was a function of the proper working of the economic system.10 As the sentimental novel began to be parodied and to go out of fashion—​the late 1770s—​Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) authoritatively showed that wealth and poverty were the result not of virtue and wickedness (troped in Hogarth’s industrious and idle apprentices) but the mechanical workings of an ‘invisible hand’ of supply and demand. Though John Mullan sees Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments—​published in 1759, just before the height of the cult of 7 Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770–​1800, 102.

8  G. J. Barker-​Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), 146. 9  Robert Markley, ‘Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue’, in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (London: Methuen, 1987), 225. 10  R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress (London: Macmillan, 1974), 82: ‘As the spirit of humanitarianism spread … it was accompanied by a deepening realization … that individual acts of benevolence could not alter a general social condition that was fundamentally unjust; and also that there was perhaps something suspect in being able to derive pleasure from feeling pity and acting charitably in a situation which was irremediable; indeed that real pleasure—​one with which sadness was inextricably blended—​ came from the awareness of the final hopelessness of it all.’

478

478   DAVID H. RICHTER sensibility—​as giving philosophical grounding to that cult by arguing that the social system depends upon the moral spectacle of suffering, Mullan argues that the wind had changed by 1776: ‘In The Wealth of Nations, the race may be the same still, but no such … restraining spectatorial judgment is necessary to the workings of society…. Benevolence and sympathy have no place in this text. The relations enacted in patterns of exchange … are in excess of “friendship” or “benevolence” … Fellow-​feeling might ornament such a society but would not be intrinsic to its proper functioning.’11 Smith’s enormously influential vision of economic society as a system that worked amorally, without heroes and villains, implied that the innocent victims one saw—​and the poor in their millions whom one did not see—​were all produced by the same system that had rewarded with wealth and ease the man of sensibility. If one accepted this vision, the classic tableau of the sentimental novel became unviewable: What moral credit, what gentlemanly self-​fashioning, could lie in assisting the very poverty that had made one rich? This is why Anna Barbauld sought desperately for what she called a ‘new torture or nondescript calamity’ that could recreate the tableau of pleasing distress.12 After Adam Smith, the spectacle of distressed innocence required the complementary spectacle of guilt. To achieve that, one had to reinstate the villain that had been sidelined in sentimental fiction, a demonized version of the rake or the bully who had been demoted from the position of aristocratic hero.

‘New Torture or Nondescript Calamity’: The Psychological Power of the Gothic The insertion of the villain in effect created the Gothic novel of Radcliffe in place of the sentimental novel of Mackenzie. Generically the forms are related but distinct. As David Denby put it in his study of French sentimentalism: ‘The melodramatic and the Gothic are certainly inscribed as latent possibilities in sentimentalism: in contradistinction to sentimentalism they require, perhaps, an insistence on the threat to virtue posed by a strongly personified villain, or principle of villainy, and a heightening of the obfuscation of virtue by various narrative devices, namely peripety and deceit.’13 The result was melodramatic narrative, crude but effective, as we learn from typical addicts of the Gothic like 11  See John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 53–​4. 12  Anna Aikin Barbauld, ‘An Enquiry into Those Kinds of Distress Which Excite Agreeable Sensations’, in Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (3rd edn., London, 1792), 192. Barbauld argues that ‘Poverty, if truly represented, shocks our nicer feelings … the rags, the dirt, the squalid appearance and mean employments incident to that state must be kept out of sight, and the distress must arise from … the shock of falling from higher fortunes’ (203). 13  David J. Denby, Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–​1820 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 87.

The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance    479 Catherine Morland. But although the Gothic was popular literature, it was not esteemed, so that, as Michael Gamer has shown, authors like Wordsworth and Scott, who aspired to inclusion in the canon, downplayed their Gothic productions or even associations.14 Gothic novels took two distinct forms depending on whether, structurally speaking, the protagonist is an exemplary woman (or man) or a morally reprehensible villain. The ‘female Gothic’ is a serious action—​like Pamela—​a melodrama arousing sympathy and suspense through the unwarranted persecution of an innocent. The ‘male Gothic’ is a punitive tragedy—​like Richard III or Macbeth—​in which we are made both to desire and to expect the condign punishment of the central figure. The first subgenre includes The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, and countless imitators. The second includes the main plot of The Monk, sections of Melmoth the Wanderer, and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. These may exist in relatively pure form, but some Gothic novels, including The Castle of Otranto, have incorporated both plots into a mixed form whose focus shifts in different parts of the narrative. The power of the female Gothic resides in the situation of the heroine, which duplicated that of the family romance of its readers. Many of Radcliffe’s readers began their post-​adolescent lives, like Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho, at the mercy of a powerful and coldly incomprehensible older man who had shaped without conscious intention their notions of sexual desire. The most successful Gothic villains, the Montonis and Schedonis, are dark fathers, images of the demon lover or the destroying angel. Within the plot structure of the romance, these figures are frequently the heroine’s uncle—​a displacement from literal fatherhood that underlines the incestuous basis of the fear and love they exact while making more probable the heroine’s terrors of violation or murder. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, Count Murano, attempting to account for the dismissal of his suit, accuses Emily of rejecting him because she hopes to replace her aunt in Montoni’s bed. The accusation is repulsive and ludicrous but, as the reader recognizes, not irrelevant. This is not to say that the Gothic novel explicitly figures the female Oedipus complex. On the contrary, as Coral Ann Howells has noted: ‘There is no overt acknowledgement of sexual feeling in the novel at all; there is merely the recognition of a nameless power which is a frightening, potentially destructive force capable of assaulting both the body and the will.’15 In Gothic romances like The Monk and Melmoth the Wanderer, written by and largely for men, the Oedipal agon often takes the appropriately opposite form, with the male victim in thrall to a maternal woman. The female equivalent of the demon lover is found in Ambrosio’s Matilda—​whose description significantly highlights her voluptuous breasts—​and that of the destroying angel in Juan de Monçada’s mother, who, trading on his filial devotion, coldly consigns her son to be buried alive in a monastery to expiate her sins. There are other significant psychological sources of narrative power in the Gothic. One stems from the perplexity and subsequent revelation of secrets and mysteries—​a 14  Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Reception and Canon-​Formation (Cambridge: CUP, 2000). 15  Coral Ann Howells, Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London: Athlone, 1978), 52.

480

480   DAVID H. RICHTER sort of rudimentary version of the pleasure we seek and find today in the detective story, which stems from the so-​called phallic phase of the pre-​Oedipal period. Another rather perverse pleasure has to do with the motif of imprisonment that runs through most of the important Gothic texts. The motif of confinement in the pleasurable anticipation of release, the intolerable pressures of being held in, and the incomparable pleasure of being let go, seems to be a defended form of anal eroticism. Probably the least well-​understood and most embarrassing source of power in the Gothic romance is the stimulation it gives to the sadomasochistic desires of the implied reader. Like some of the more decadent works of the later nineteenth century, the Gothic stands in what Mario Praz once called ‘the shadow of the divine Marquis’.16 Some Gothic writers included within their tales a hint about the source and significance of the pleasure they were providing. As the parricide monk in Melmoth the Wanderer, for example, tells Juan de Monçada: I was anxious to witness misery that might perhaps equal or exceed my own, and this is a curiosity not easily satisfied. It is actually possible to become amateurs in suffering. I have heard of men who have travelled into countries where horrible executions were to be daily witnessed, for the sake of that excitement which the sight of suffering never fails to give, from the spectacle of a tragedy, or an auto da fe, down to the writhings of the meanest reptile on whom you can inflict torture, and feel that torture is the result of your own power. It is a species of feeling of which we never can divest ourselves,—​a triumph over those whose sufferings have placed them below us.17

We distance ourselves from the parricide monk who recounts his joy in the suffering of others, but it is harder to distance ourselves from the feelings of Juan de Monçada, the narrator, as he describes his sensations watching a Spanish mob beat that same monk to death: ‘It is a fact, Sir,’ he tells John Melmoth, ‘that while witnessing this horrible execution, I felt all the effects vulgarly ascribed to fascination … I echoed the screams of the thing that seemed no longer to live, but still could scream … I actually … believed myself the object of their cruelty.’ And he concludes: ‘The drama of terror has the irresistible power of converting the audience into its victims’ (25–​67). This is the psychological key to Melmoth, and one of the keys to horror Gothic as a whole. But perhaps the most strongly marked source of pleasure in the Gothic romance, particularly the female Gothic, is the pleasure of passivity and irresponsibility. Gothic novels tend to be filled with events, but the events happen to the protagonist; they are seldom ones in which characters choose one course of action over another. If the traditional Gothic heroine is a passive creature, this passivity does not take the form of immobility but of indecisiveness; her choices tend less to be decisions than abdications of the right to decide. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, the heroine’s only decision comes at the end of

16 

Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (2nd edn., Oxford: OUP, 1970). Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale, ed. Douglas Grant (London: OUP, 1968), 207. 17 

The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance    481 volume 1, when she declines to elope with her lover, Valancourt, despite her aunt’s decision to carry her away from him into Italy and despite her suspicions of her aunt’s new husband, Montoni. With eminent propriety, Emily decides that elopement would be precipitate and imprudent, since her aunt, though vulgar and selfish, is in loco parentis, and Montoni, however suspicious, has not yet been proved a villain. Emily, in acceding, has in effect decided not to decide. This pattern Emily continues to follow: when her chateau at La Vallée is rented out, she thinks of protesting, mentions ‘some prejudices … which still linger in my heart’ (196), but again accedes. To further Montoni’s plans for Emily, she is removed to Venice, then to Udolpho. There indeed she, like Pamela, resists all attempts made against her person, her virtue, and her fortune. This resistance is overlaid, however, on to a sense of her own powerlessness that is almost total, and an equally exaggerated sense of the omnipotence of her captor, Montoni. During the central section of the novel, Emily is not immobile: nightly she explores the castle, finding other prisoners, coming upon bloody weapons that convince her (mistakenly) of the violent death of her aunt, and most memorably uncovering the horrendously, hideously anticlimactic mystery of the black veil. But she never takes responsibility for herself or her predicament. The reader spends 300 pages participating anxiously in Emily’s hesitations, observing her nocturnal explorations around the castle, fearing rape and murder at every noise, always looking for an escape until finally, in c­ hapter 9 of Book 3, she and her fellow prisoner Du Pont, together with assorted servants, simply walk out into the Tuscan countryside. ‘Emily was so much astonished by this sudden departure,’ Radcliffe tells us, ‘that she scarcely dared to believe herself awake’ (452). If Udolpho was a dream-​prison, so is Montoni a paper tiger, whose downfall does not make even a ripple in history. This is another regressive aspect of the Gothic. Neither the moral nor the pragmatic vision of the focal characters is trustworthy; like children they tend to exaggerate enormously the power of their opposition, and like children they tend to see adults in black and white. The pleasures of the Gothic novel thus include a return journey to childhood, to a simpler if occasionally terrifying world.

The Role of the Gothic Reader: The Shift to Aisthesis More generally, the Gothic novel sits astride a major shift in the response of the English reader to literature, a shift, in the terminology of reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss, from catharsis to aisthesis, or in basic English, a shift from reading for information, and for the sake of entry into a verisimilar world otherwise inaccessible to the reader, towards reading as an escape from the world one inhabits into an inner site of fantasy.18 Q. D. 18 

See Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Sketch of a Theory and a History of Aesthetic Experience’, in Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), 3–​51.

482

482   DAVID H. RICHTER Leavis, in Fiction and the Reading Public, had posited a shift from active to passive reading at the end of the eighteenth century,19 and we can see this exemplified in the contrast between two reviews of The Mysteries of Udolpho, one by the anonymous critic for the Monthly Review for 1794, and the other by Thomas Noon Talfourd in the New Monthly Review for 1820. In the former, Radcliffe is praised for her ‘correctness of sentiment and elegance of style’, for her ‘admirable ingenuity of contrivance to awaken [the reader’s] curiosity, and to bind him in the chains of suspense’, and for ‘a vigour of conception and a delicacy of feeling which are capable of producing the strongest sympathetic emotions, whether of pity or of terror’. These very same criteria of excellence are applied to Udolpho by the Analytical Review and British Critic, which praised the novel, as well as by the Critical Review, where the young Coleridge attacked it for hyper-​ingenuity of contrivance. Contrast Talfourd: ‘When we read [Radcliffe’s romances], the world seems shut out, and we breathe only in an enchanted region where … the sad voices of the past echo through deep vaults and lonely galleries.’20 With Talfourd stands Hazlitt, who in 1818 stated that Radcliffe ‘makes her readers twice children, and from the dim and shadowy veil which she draws over the objects of her fancy, forces us to believe all that is strange and next to impossible … All the fascination that links the world of passion to the world unknown is hers, and she plays with it at her pleasure; she has all the poetry of romance, all that is obscure, visionary and objectless in the imagination.’21 It is not just the style of writing that is different here: the reviewers of 1794 are standing outside and evaluating a pretty fiction, while the later Talfourd and Hazlitt have entered inwardly into an imagined world. Their notion that the objective of literary art might be to move the reader to a state of ecstatic transport had been announced considerably earlier than Udolpho, when the Gothic vogue was just getting under way. In ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’ (1773), Anna Laetitia Barbauld explains the effect of the tale of horror in the following terms: ‘A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced … our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy, co-​operating, elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement’.22 Years later, in 1810, Barbauld makes such claims in favour of reading for the sake of escape and imaginative play, not merely for the Gothic but for novels in general: The humble novel is always ready to enliven the gloom of solitude … to take man from himself (at many seasons the worst company he can be in,) and, while the moving 19 

Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), 135–​50. Reviews of Udolpho: William Enfield in the Monthly Review, 2nd ser., 15 (1794), 278–​83; Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Critical Review, 2nd ser., 11 (August 1794), 361–​72; Analytical Review 19 (June 1794), 140–​5; British Critic 4 (August 1794), 110–​21; T. Noon Talfourd, New Monthly Review 14 (June 1820), quoted from Critical and Miscellaneous Writings (London: T. Bell, 1852), 195. 21  William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London: Dent, 1890), 195. 22  Barbauld, ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’, in Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (3rd edn., London, 1792), 125. 20 

The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance    483 picture of life passes before him, to make him forget the subject of his own complaints. It is pleasant to the mind to sport in the boundless regions of possibility; to find relief from the sameness of everyday occurrences by expatiating amidst brighter skies and fairer fields; to exhibit love that is always happy, valour that is always successful; to feed the appetite for wonder by a quick succession of marvellous events.23

This sense of the Gothic as demanding an inward projection, as carrying the reader towards states of transport and escape, appears not only in writers who favour and relish the state but in those who do not. Novel-​reading in the late eighteenth century was gendered female, and those attacking it shifted their focus during the vogue of the Gothic. In the 1760s and 1770s it was implied that indiscriminate reading was likely to erode women’s moral principles by providing poor examples of conduct, but in the period after 1795 the anti-​fiction editorial was more likely to attack reading as sapping strength of mind, wasting precious time, and calling the reader into a world whose attractions would lead her to neglect the duties and pleasures of her sublunary existence. Moralists like John Bennett warn as early as 1789 that the passion for literature ‘is dangerous to a woman. It … inspires such a romantic turn of mind, as is utterly inconsistent with the solid duties and proprieties of life.’24 But at the height of the Gothic, ‘castle-​building’, the use of literature as material for fantasy, becomes the moralist’s chief complaint. For example, one ‘Arietta’, a self-​styled castle-​builder, writes in to Literary Leisure to confess that she was in her youth ‘a great reader … so, what between studying Novels and inventing Moral tales for Magazines, my head was stored with marvellous adventures and hair-​breadth ’scapes, such as I trusted to become the heroine of myself when time should have matured the grains still folded up in the bud of youth’. Now having wasted that youth, she finds herself ‘at forty-​seven, filling presently the same situation in the same family’. T.H., in Lady’s Monthly Museum, writes that her daughter ‘reads nothing in the world but novels. I am afraid she will read herself into a consumption … These time-​ killing companions monopolize every hour that is not devoted to dress or sleep … I am afraid,’ she concludes, ‘that the girl will never get a husband’, and she asks the editor for the name of a man willing to wed a beautiful and well-​off young lady with an addiction to romance. On a more hysterical note, a ‘Letter’ in the Sylph for 6 October 1795 claims to have ‘actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread’. And one ‘Rimelli’, writing on ‘Novels and Romances’ for the Monthly Mirror, insists that ‘Romances … serve only to estrange the minds of youth (specially of females) from their own affairs and transmit them to those of which they read: so that, while totally absorbed with … the melancholy situation of … a Matilda, they neglect both their own interests and the several duties which they owe to parent, friend or brother’.25 23 Barbauld, The British Novelists; with An Essay; and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical (London, 1810), 1: 58. 24 

John Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady (Philadelphia, 1818), 136. For ‘Arietta’, see Literary Leisure, or The Recreations of Solomon Saunter, Esq. 1/​42 (10 July 1800), 129–​ 40; for ‘T.H.’, see Lady’s Monthly Museum 2 (March 1799), 218–​20; for the starving babies, see ‘Letter’ in Sylph 5 (6 October 1795), 35–​8; for ‘Rimelli,’ see ‘Novels and Romances’, Monthly Mirror 14 (August 1802), 81. 25 

484

484   DAVID H. RICHTER The notion of such seduction by fiction appears, naturally enough, in the fiction of the period as well. The most famous fictional victim of the Gothic novel is Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (written in some form by 1803, though revised much later and not published until 1817, after Austen’s death). It is Catherine who, after reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, mistakes a laundry list for a fragmentary manuscript and takes General Tilney for a wife-​murderer, when he is in fact only a snobbish and mercenary man of the world. Other victims include Sophia Beauclerc, of Mary Charlton’s novel Rosella, or Modern Occurrences, published in 1799 by the same Minerva Press that furnished such Sophias and Catherines with their favourite reading. Still other Gothic parodies include Self-​Control (1810), by Mary Brunton and The Heroine, or the Adventures of Cherubina, by Eaton Stannard Barrett (1813), both read by Jane Austen. These exaggerated portraits must have been based on something real or the satire could not have been so common or current. One reason why, around the turn of the nineteenth century, the female Quixote reappears again and again as a reader of the Gothic novel has to do with the feelings demanded of readers by the Gothic itself. The implied reader of the Gothic novel is a somewhat different being than the implied reader of Fielding or Sterne, because the Gothic demands for its full effects—​effects not only of terror but of sublimity—​a more empathetic and less sceptical attitude. These demands are implicit in the structure of suspense in Gothic novels. The implied reader of The Mysteries of Udolpho, for example, is expected to retain strong suspense about the secret concealed by the celebrated Black Veil, despite the fact that Emily, after her initial swoon, is not actively threatened by it. The implied reader of The Monk is expected to develop strong tension over the fate of Raymond at the hands of the Bleeding Nun—​despite the fact that Raymond himself is narrating his experience in a self-​conscious fashion that reminds us that he has lived to tell the tale. And they are also implicit in the verbal texture and point of view typical of the Gothic novel. Coral Ann Howells has finely analysed a passage from volume 3, ­chapter 6 of Udolpho, showing how the objective narrator, technically always present, disappears from view so that the reader is forced to accept the ultimately vacuous imaginings and suppositions of Emily at face value. And even Radcliffe’s style contributes to the effect: ‘While the passage is cast in the form of reasoned argument, with one sentence depending on and balancing the other, it has really only the appearance of judiciousness; what we have in effect is the dramatization of a process very close to obsession, going round and round the same point and finding no escape or release from the central anxiety.’26 An empathic mindset tightly focused upon a heroine’s fears was nothing new: it had been demanded of readers by Pamela and by the sentimental novel, out of which the female Gothic developed. And yet if differences in quantity eventually make for differences in quality, the Gothic novel may have had such an impact on a major segment of the British reading public. That there was something like an addiction among the Gothic readers is suggested, not only by cautionary letters to women’s magazines but by

26 Howells, Love, Mystery and Misery, 54–​5.

The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance    485 the receipts from circulating libraries, which show one celebrated bluestocking going through fifty-​five volumes of romance in the space of a month.27 To conclude, there were in the 1790s two very different implied readers:  the first, whom clergymen and journalists of the age personified as older and male, read primarily for factual information, for the reinforcement of ethical values, and for the pleasure of recognizing the persons and things of his world; the second was personified as younger and female, receptive rather than critical, and eager to indulge in the pleasures of the imagination. And the Gothic vogue was partly self-​reinforcing, in that its popularity began to draw in new classes of reader who had not formerly been a significant part of the market for literature. One major result was to pave the way for the reception of Romanticism in poetry as well as fiction, with the result that English bards—​ Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott, at least—​despite a bit of rough handling from Scottish reviewers, were able to stir without conspicuous resistance a public that already looked to literature for the play of fantasy, dream, and desire. The second result was in the Gothic itself, which after 1810 tended to abandon the historical themes of Radcliffe for the more explicitly fantastic imaginative worlds of Mary Shelley and Charles Robert Maturin. By then the Gothic wave itself had already begun to recede, leaving in its ebb two masterpieces, Frankenstein (1818) and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). While the Gothic was to rise again, first with the Brontës, and later, at the end of the nineteenth century, with the supernatural tales of Stevenson, James, Wilde, and Stoker, the romance of Radcliffe was at an end, destroyed, ironically, by that arch-​romantic poet, Walter Scott.

Scott and the End of the Gothic Beginning with Waverley (1814) and continuing for two decades, Scott began to explore a vein of romantic fiction that abutted on to the Gothic novel—​it even featured the superstitions and legends of the border country between Scotland and England. But within all the romance of Scott’s fiction, the banditti, the Highland chiefs, and their clans, there was always an attention to concrete and accurate detail, to probability, to historical forces, that was designed to appeal to a different sort of public. As Ina Ferris has shown, the reviewers of Waverley in contemporary magazines told its potential audience quite explicitly that the novel was designed for a masculine fancy, as opposed to the feminine reading demanded by the Gothic.28 Scott’s relation to the romantic and fantastic tenor of the Gothic novel is complex and not easy to define. Relative to the national novels of Maria Edgeworth, Scott’s main plots tend to be more adventurous and stirring while still keeping within the broad 27 

A. G. K. Lestrange, The Life of Mary Russell Mitford (New York: Harper, 1870), 1: 15. Ina Ferris, ‘Re-​Positioning the Novel: Waverley and the Gender of Fiction’, Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989), 291–​301; see also Ferris’s The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991). 28 

486

486   DAVID H. RICHTER framework of probability. One reason the main action may seem realistic is that, within the novels, intruded as digressions, are short narratives constructed like Gothic tales, and it is by comparison with these that the main plot appears naturalistic and probable. In fact the reader is the more willing to excuse Scott’s heavy use of coincidence in the main plot because we are spared the far grosser suspension of disbelief that would be required to credit the supernatural digressions. Scott’s characteristic employment of romance themes and structures of probability can be seen in one of his typical historical novels, Redgauntlet (1824), his third novel about the Jacobite rebellions. As in Waverley and Rob Roy, it is about a romantic English gentleman, here named Darsie Latimer, who is accidentally caught up in a treasonous plot to put the Pretender on the throne. Unlike the Fifteen in Rob Roy and the Forty-​ Five in Waverley, the Jacobite plot in Redgauntlet, set in the summer of 1765, has no basis in fact. The events of the main plot are—​abstractly considered—​precisely what one might expect in a Radcliffe novel. The protagonist is kidnapped by a nobleman of enormous power and ambiguous morality. The nobleman’s identity seems to shift as he moves furtively but easily around the picturesque landscape, linking up with outlaws and condemned traitors at every turn. The protagonist is becoming inexorably inveigled into a treasonous plot that could easily lead to a violent and ignominious death. At the same time, the prospect is broached of a romantic attachment to an enormously attractive character of the opposite sex who makes what seem to be unambiguous sexual advances, to the protagonist’s shame and disgust. Ultimately the relationship between them is revealed (with a shudder at the incestuous feelings the protagonist harboured) to be that of brother and sister. But the tone of Scott’s novel entirely belies this Gothic summary. The fact that the kidnapped protagonist is a young and adventurous male running away from the longueurs of legal education (and getting a bit more adventure than he had bargained for) suggests at once that the emotional keynote of the Gothic—​terror—​is not significant here. Even the romance of Darsie Latimer’s involvement in the Jacobite plot, and his attraction to the mysterious woman of the Green Mantle, is tempered by the jocular realism of Scott’s narration, and the serious, almost melodramatic pursuit of Darsie by his friend Alan Fairford is balanced by the counter-​pursuit of solicitor Fairford by his ubiquitous legal client Peter Peebles, which gives the romance an undertone of farce. The forms of feeling of the Gothic appear instead in a single interpolated narrative, the justly famous ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ of Steenie Steenson’s encounter with the ghost of Sir Robert Redgauntlet. Briefly, Steenie, who has fallen behind in his rent, borrows the necessary cash on the last possible day, and brings it to the laird, who is thought to have a pact with the Devil. In the midst of a carouse with his familiar (a malevolent pet ape), Redgauntlet takes the silver but suddenly dies in a fit, screaming and wailing, before he can give Steenie a receipt. When the heir, Sir John Redgauntlet, takes over the estate, he finds no record of Steenie’s payment, and is incredulous because Steenie has neither receipt nor human witness. About to be evicted, Steenie is desolated until he encounters in a forest a strange

The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance    487 horseman who offers to help him. Immediately Steenie finds himself at the door of Castle Redgauntlet (though the house is miles away). He enters, and finds his late master carousing once more, this time with a host of dead Scottish patriots (from Lauderdale to Claverhouse). Following the horseman’s advice, Steenie refuses food and drink, and he also evades playing on the bagpipes in homage to the demon (Steenie notices just in time that the chanter is white-​hot with hellfire). He escapes with his receipt, which he takes to Sir John, who is amazed to see its genuine signature dated the previous day; he gives Steenie full credit after finding his silver in a disused turret of the castle, where Sir Robert’s ape had been hiding objects he had purloined in the hall. But ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ is not merely intruded into the main action of Redgauntlet; it recapitulates all its themes. Sir Robert, like the Young Pretender, is determined to have his own again; like Charles Edward Stuart, he has an unbreakable attachment to drink and women that ultimately proves his undoing; and he is associated with the whole band of Scottish patriots whose private immorality clashed with their stern devotion to Scottish independence. Even the national fixation with papers, receipts, and dry legalities appears both in ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’—​as the central nexus of the story—​and in the main plot, with the Peebles case, and with Alan Fairford’s legalistic efforts to discover his friend Darsie. Formally, then, Redgauntlet inverts the situation of Northanger Abbey: instead of presenting a pseudo-​Gothic situation whose absurdity is demonstrated by exposure to quotidian life, here the Gothic tale—​in its chilling apparent plausibility—​exposes the absurd other-​worldliness underlying Scottish revanchism. The popularity of Scott and historical romances like his was immense, because in effect Scott had, by his use of realistic detail, licensed male readers to enjoy the romance, which otherwise they had despised—​or pretended to despise—​as feminine aesthetic experience. But even as males were joining enthusiastically the ranks of the readers of romance, romance itself had been forced to change, to leave the realms of fantasy for the concrete and the historical. Publishers would reject the outworn Gothic novel, with its principally female readership, for the historical romance, whose mixed appeal was broader and therefore more profitable. But in generating a new and even larger audience for romance, Scott had given the Gothic novel of the Radcliffe era its deathblow.

Select Bibliography Brown, Marshall, The Gothic Text (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005). Chaplin, Sue, The Gothic and the Rule of the Law, 1764–​1820 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Duncan, Ian, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: CUP, 1992). Marshall, Bridget M., The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 1790–​1860 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

488

488   DAVID H. RICHTER Richter, David H., The Progress of Romance:  Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1996). Watt, James, Contesting the Gothic:  Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–​ 1832 (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). Wein, Toni, British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, and the Gothic Novel, 1764–​ 1824 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

Chapter 29

Novel and  E mpi re Markman Ellis

In recent decades, critics have observed that the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century is embedded in the ideology of empire. Characteristic aspects of the novel as a form, such as the depiction of time and space, as well as the construction of the individual, are found complicit with an ideology of imperial expansion. Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, argued that ‘the prototypical modern realistic novel is Robinson Crusoe, and certainly not accidentally it is about a European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant, non-​European island’.1 In Said’s reading, Crusoe’s narrative depicts a modern and commercially-​oriented Englishman’s encounter with the wider world beyond Europe, and shows him subjugating its geography, flora and fauna, and native populations to his own commercial advantage, so that by the end of the novel, he is, as governor of the colony, ‘King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly … as compleatly as any Lord of a Mannor in England’.2 Said argues that culture played an important role in the imperial project: empire depends on the idea of having an empire, and that idea is established and nourished in and through culture. The novel, as it emerges in the eighteenth century, but especially in the nineteenth century, therefore makes an important contribution to the cultural imaginary of empire even in novels that do not detail imperial encounters at much length. Said argues that novels treat the locations of home and overseas, metropolis and colony, with a ‘combination of familiarity and distance, but never with a sense of their separate sovereignty’. The phrase Said adopts for this is ‘consolidated vision’, detected in the novel’s characteristic representation of space, as a ‘domestic accompaniment to the imperial project for presence and control abroad, and a practical narrative about expanding and moving about in space that must be actively inhabited and enjoyed before its discipline or limits can be accepted’. By integrating colonial adventures into the narrative of metropolitan novels, the form’s ‘consolidated vision’ suggests that as cultural and political territory, colony and metropolis are coextensive.3 Lennard J. Davis has similarly argued that: ‘Colonialism … not only produced the conditions that made possible the content of 1 

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. xiii. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. D. Crowley (Oxford: OUP, 1972), 80. 3 Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. xxiii, 84–​94. 2 

490

490   MARKMAN ELLIS a novel like Robinson Crusoe, but it produced the narrative techniques that quite literally compose that novel.’4 Davis argues that the imaginative experience of the novel, in particular its representation of space, uniquely (as a form) and historically (in this period) embeds the ideas and experience of colonialism. From the shipwreck Crusoe rescues paper, ink, and books, and after some time on the island, decides to chronicle his experiences in a journal, at least until his ink runs out. His account of his time on the island, which in story time is completed and published following his return to the metropolis, narrates both his experiences and his foundation of a legitimate colony in the Americas. Robinson Crusoe is the thematic model, as well as formal antecedent, of the concatenation of novel and empire as it is played out through the eighteenth century. Defoe’s novel spawned numerous imitations and extensions, known as robinsonades, in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The novel was extolled by Rousseau in Émile (1762) as a complete treatise of natural education, celebrating it as a secular story of adventure and survival using everyday mechanical arts cultivated by a man of ordinary judgement and understanding. The English radical Thomas Spence envisioned the island as Crusonia, a utopia in which all property was held in common.5 In Swiss Family Robinson (1816)—​originally written in German by Johann David Wyss, and translated with many alterations by William Godwin from a French translation—​the island was represented as a kind of Rousseauian university for a whole family, teaching orthodox Christian moral lessons through their encounters with the exotic geography, flora and fauna, and inhabitants.6 Defoe’s novel was repeatedly republished throughout the century, and had a profound effect on colonial readers. Charles Brockden Brown, sometimes known as the first professional American writer, reported having read Crusoe with rapture as a child of ten, then reread it in 1804 as an adult, and commented that: ‘I no longer see in it, the petty adventures if a shipwrecked man, the recreations of a boyish fancy; but the workings of a mind, left to absolute and unaccustomed solitude; and a picture of the events by which the race of man is dispersed over the world, by which desert regions are colonized, and the foundations laid of new and civilized communities.’7 Brown sees in Crusoe the founding moments of the American republic. In a similar manner, Gilbert Imlay’s novel, The Emigrants (1793), presents America as a location hospitable to utopian speculation, an ‘asylum of all unfortunate people’ in which metropolitan society might be rebuilt on more egalitarian lines. 4 

Lennard J. Davis, ‘The Fact of Events and the Event of Facts: New World Explorers and the Early Novel’, Eighteenth-​Century: Theory and Interpretation 32/​3 (1991), 241. See also Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson (eds.), Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). 5  Thomas Spence, A supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe, being the history of Crusonia, or Robinson Crusoe’s island (Newcastle: T. Saint, 1782). 6  Johann Wyss and William Godwin, The Swiss Family Robinson, 2 vols. (2nd edn., London: M. J. Godwin and Co., 1816). 7  Charles Brockden Brown, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, Literary Magazine and American Register 1/​5 (1804), 323–​4, repr. in Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (eds.), Literary Essays and Reviews (Studien und Texte zur Amerikanistik Texte, 7; Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 133.

Novel and Empire   491 The robinsonade was one form by which the novel offered a felicitous way for metropolitan readers to explore the wider world of the British Empire. But the term ‘empire’ here needs careful unpacking, analysing both what constituted ‘empire’ in this period, and in what ways it might be described as ‘British’. In much the same way that historians of literature describe the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century as a set of complex processes and hybrid constructions, so too historians of empire describe this period as one of transformation and complexity. Recent historians such as David Armitage, Kathleen Wilson, and Peter Marshall have pointed to the mid-​eighteenth century as a key moment of transition, a watershed when the term ‘British’ starts to coalesce ideas of national identity, and it becomes possible to conceive a British Atlantic community as an ‘empire’ in which colony and metropolis participated unequally but together.8 In the first third of the eighteenth century, the phrase ‘British empire’, if used at all, would have referred to the British Isles together with the island plantations of the Caribbean, and the diverse colonies of continental North America. This predominantly pan-​Atlantic empire of the early eighteenth century became an increasingly global one by the end of the century. Especially after the Seven Years War in 1763, a broader conception of empire included further diverse outposts and colonies in Africa and Asia, including slave forts, East India Company territory, plantations, and factories. After the ‘loss’ of many of the American colonies following their rebellion and declaration of independence in 1776, the term ‘British Empire’ most often referred to the global entity, especially after the establishment of the penal colony in Australia in 1788. In this later conception, the ‘British Empire’ had acquired a global dimension: but the kind of political entity established by empire was not the same in each place. James Belich suggests that the expansion of empire took three forms: ‘networks, the establishment of ongoing systems of long-​range interaction, usually trade; empire, the control of other peoples, usually through conquest; and settlement, the reproduction of one’s own society through long-​range migration’.9 The eighteenth-​ century British ‘empire’ comprised enterprises and territories conforming to all three forms, overlapping at the same time, in different parts of the globe. The dominant features of eighteenth-​century conceptions of empire, David Armitage argues, were that it was Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free. This view was promoted in Patriotic and anti-​Walpolian satires and verse in the 1730s and 1740s, and became so ingrained in British discourse on empire that it was subsequently considered almost axiomatic. As this suggests, eighteenth-​century British conceptions of empire do not imagine territorial conquest by military adventure of a strongly centralized monarchy, in the manner of the Roman Empire. Rather, empire in the British mode was the product of free-​trading merchant adventurers seeking to establish and protect profitable lines of trade and commerce.

8  David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 170–​98; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–​1785 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995); P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century: I, Reshaping the Empire’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 8 (1998), 1–​18. 9  James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-​World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 21.

492

492   MARKMAN ELLIS Armitage notes that the motive for imperial discourse comes from below, especially amongst those doing well out of the arrangement, such as planters, investors, and officials, primarily in the provinces and colonies, who defend a concept of the British Empire as ‘congeries of territories linked by their commerce, united with common interests and centred politically upon London’. Empire was a concept that emerged out of the debates and polemic of political tracts, newspaper journalism, and patriotic poetry—​that is, as Armitage argues, it was made at the level of ‘language’ or political rhetoric;10 or as Tony Ballantyne observes, it was a ‘cultural project’ as much as a set of political and economic ‘structures of dominance’.11 Modes of imaginative expansion, such as poetry and the novel, are felicitous intellectual strategies for reconceptualizing the world on the grandest possible scale.

Novel, Empire, and the Oriental Tale As the historians of empire suggest, curiosity about the wider world beyond Europe was an instrument of the cultural project of empire, even if the territory so described was not explicitly part of the empire. This is the case with the variety of fiction known as the oriental tale. Taking flight from translations and imitations of Islamic story collections, such as the translation of Antoine Galland’s twelve-​volume Arabian Nights Entertainments (1704–​12), the ‘oriental tale’ was a popular literary form in the mid-​ eighteenth century. The oriental tale in general identified the Orient as the near exotic territories of the Middle East and South Asia—​territory broadly known to European culture since the classical period—​although the genre could be extended to China and Japan where necessary. Virtually none of this territory was colonized by European states, and indeed for most of the eighteenth century, both the Islamic Ottoman Empire and the Qing Empire in China remained powerful and independent rivals to British imperial expansion. In short, although this fiction is not about the world of British ‘empire’, it is about Britain’s relationship to the wider world. A significant set of oriental tales include Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), John Hawkesworth’s Almoran and Hamet (1761), John Langhorne’s Solyman and Almena (1762), James Ridley’s Tales of the Genii (1764), and Frances Sheridan’s The History of Nourjahad (1765). The conventions of such oriental tales, which display broad similarities with the European tradition of the romance genre, include: a setting in Islamic territory and culture, featuring high-​ranking administrators and nobility, the actions of powerful absolutist rulers, and a predilection for extravagant luxury and exotic excess. In many ways, oriental tales sit uncomfortably within the tradition of formal realism now closely identified with the eighteenth-​century novel. While they eschew many features of Defoean fictional modernity, their idiosyncratic features make extended and 10 Armitage, Ideological Origins, 181, 172. 11 

Tony Ballantyne, ‘Colonial Knowledge’, in Sarah Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 177.

Novel and Empire   493 sophisticated attempts to reach out to external worlds beyond the metropolis.12 The oriental tale is outward-​looking—​what anthropologists call ‘exocultural’—​even when it is under-​ researched, lacking in detail, reliant on stereotypes, and not based on any relevant authorial experience.13 The ‘Orient’ of the oriental tale is a free-​floating, literary trope, a mood of the imagination, a place that sustains the supernatural. As Said argues: ‘Sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy: the Orient as a figure in the Romantic, pretechnical Orientalist imagination of late-​eighteenth century Europe was really a chameleonlike quality called (adjectivally) “Oriental”.’14 In eccentric forms such as William Beckford’s The History of the Caliph Vathek (1786), whose complicated plot depicted a Caliph punished for overreaching ambition, the oriental tale was represented as the product of a considerable body of scholarship and historical particularity, carefully presented in detailed annotations, married to hyperbolically extravagant reimagined depictions of Eastern exotica (supernatural beings, luxurious repasts, wire-​drawn emotions). The oriental tale’s deployment of unrestrained supernatural elements excited the imagination of the Romantic poets and Gothic writers: Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1807), although set in sixteenth-​century Venice, makes use of the oriental tale to construct the character of Zofloya, the Moorish demon-​sorcerer who commands the second half of the novel. The idea of oriental difference provides a further perspective on metropolitan culture in the Persian tale genre. In these fictions, the Orient provides a narrator who visits Britain and comments on the customs and manners found there. The oriental commentator, familiar from early eighteenth-​century writing by Montesquieu (Persian Letters [1721]) and George Lyttelton (Letters from a Persian in England, to his Friend at Ispahan [1735]), leverages his (or infrequently her) national difference through the conceit of defamiliarization, by which a well-​known aspect of quotidian life is made to seem ridiculous, to offer morally serious satire on the vices and inequities of metropolitan culture. In The Citizen of the World (1760), a set of periodical essays narrated by a fictional Chinese philosopher Lien Chi Altangi, Goldsmith allows the narrator’s misunderstandings of British culture to launch a thorough if light-​hearted critique of the follies and foibles of mid-​century London. By contrast, in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), which was based on extensive research in orientalist scholarship by herself and her brother Charles, the satire is more biting. Unlike the free-​floating literariness of the early oriental tale, Hamilton’s novel makes much of its scholarship, in an extensive introduction and glossary, and numerous footnotes. Whilst still in India, Zāārmilla the Hindu Rajah is instructed that the governing principle on which British society is based is ‘love of Liberty’. The Rajah Zāārmilla supposes (ironically of course) that it is this love of liberty that has led the British to establish colonies in America and Asia: ‘to enlighten, to instruct … to disseminate the love of virtue and freedom’. Having been permitted to read the Christian scriptures, Zāārmilla 12 

Srinivas Aravamudan, ‘In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as National Allegory’, Novel 33/​ 1 (1999), 10–​11. 13  James Watt, ‘Orientalism and Empire’, in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), 129–​42. 14  Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 118–​19.

494

494   MARKMAN ELLIS expects to find freedom of worship and no distinction of ranks or privilege in Britain: a country in which men praise nothing but ‘the distinctions arising from internal worth, and intrinsic goodness; not thirsting after worldly honours; not given to luxury; stranger to avarice and pride’.15 Yet everywhere Zāārmilla and his Brahmin travel in Britain, they find a country mired in corruption, hypocrisy, and vice, indicating that the British do not have the moral authority to govern their global empire. In a series of set-​piece scenes, the Indian travellers witness British corruption and brutality: corporal punishment in the camp of the army, a cargo of mistreated slaves on a slave ship bound for the Caribbean, the fashionable rage for card-​playing, the arbitrary dispensation of justice in the courts, and so on. A key debate in the novel concerns the status of women, especially with regard to education and marriage mores. Through his reading of the scriptures, and from what he has been told of boarding schools for women, Zāārmilla expects to find in Britain many women of exalted virtue, education, and beauty. He is disappointed by their degraded condition, drowning in the follies of fashion and learning, educated only in ‘useless accomplishments’. But his own attitudes to women and to marriage, explained to and debated with his interlocutor Māāndāāra, reveal him to be a cruel and misogynistic paternalist. Through the reports of the Rajah and his Brahmin, Hamilton launches a pointed critique of metropolitan culture, and as such, a devastating attack on the ideological mission of empire (especially its exalted claims to liberty, law, and Christianity). But while Zāārmilla’s misunderstandings expose serious moral failings within British culture, the novel further constructs his own culture as degenerate and arbitrary, thereby beseeching and justifying the colonial conquest of the British.

Novel, Empire, and Slavery Reiterating the notion of the British Empire as free, commercial, and Protestant throws up complications and contradictions, of course. For many, the lodestone issue was slavery. The plantation economy established in the Caribbean and North America by British traders focused especially on the production of sugar, tobacco, and cotton, all highly profitable commodities that, however, required considerable labour. Sourcing sufficient labour from the British market was very difficult, even when the criminal justice system provided cheap indentured labour. From the mid-​seventeenth century, British merchants developed a profitable trade importing chattel slaves to the Americas from ports on the coast of West Africa, initially exploiting a local trade, but expanding demand considerably. The trade in African slaves to British colonies (as to other European colonies in the Americas) was itself enormously profitable, despite the high financial risk caused by mortality amongst the human cargo in its passage across the Atlantic. The plantations themselves, especially on the sugar islands, were also capable of colossal profits when

15 

Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah written previous to, and during the period of his Residence in England, 2 vols. (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796), 1: 20, 27.

Novel and Empire   495 managed successfully. However, successful labour management on slave plantations was endemically brutal and dehumanizing—​so much so that Adam Smith argued that it was actually inefficient, as well as immoral. Nonetheless, the slave system ensured that endemic violence was integral to colonial profit.16 As this sketch of the slave system suggests, slavery was both crucial to the commercial success of a Protestant maritime empire in the Americas, but was also directly contradictory to oft-​made claims of British liberty. ‘Britons never, never, never will be slaves,’ proclaimed James Thomson famously in ‘Rule, Britannia!’—​unless, it seems, they were African Britons in the American colonies. In the pan-​Atlantic conception of empire, slavery posed an awkward contradiction. The question was not whether slavery was profitable (it certainly was), nor whether it was lawful (it probably was, for most of the century, in most territories), but rather, was it moral? The first literary debate on the moral consequences of slavery—​which was also amongst the first public debates on slavery in any format—​was conducted in sentimental novels. Confronting the moral status of the distressed slave was a felicitous subject for sentimental novels, as their Richardsonian mode and narrative method allowed extended analysis of real-​life moral questions, working through the moral complexities of being a slave-​owning free-​trade merchant. Two novels in the sentimental mode which addressed slavery through inset narratives set on Caribbean sugar plantations were Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison (1766) and Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné (1777). Both stage slave violence as an important test case for the benevolent sentimental philosophy of exemplary characters; both offer imaginative sentimental solutions that ameliorate, but do not resolve, the immoral inequalities of slavery. The psychological dilemma at the heart of these narratives is engineered through complex casuistical moral equations between, for example, the quality of love as between one’s fellow man or in romantic courtship or marriage. Scott’s novel charts the history of Sir George Ellison, advertising his exemplary benevolence and charity. Ellison is modelled on the hero of Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753–​4), and his story is a sequel to Scott’s Millennium Hall (1762), of which he is the narrator. The first of the novel’s four books is mostly located in the colony of Jamaica. Ellison is a young nobleman, whose reduced fortune causes him to be educated as a merchant. Considering himself ‘a citizen of the world’, Ellison emigrates to Jamaica in pursuit of profit and business. This novel, like Defoe’s fictions, imagines a cultural and economic continuity between colonial and metropolitan space: Ellison’s narrative models imperial relations as a pan-​Atlantic community. After some years as a sugar trader in Port Royal, he marries a local heiress, a 33-​year-​old propertied widow who brings to the marriage a profitable sugar plantation, worked by slave labour. Ellison objects to ‘the cruelty exercised on one part of mankind’ in the slave system, ‘as if the difference of complexion excluded them from the human race, or indeed as if their not being human could be an excuse for making them wretched’. Despite his objections to slavery as ‘abhorrent to his nature’ and ‘unjustly inflicted’, Ellison convinces himself 16  James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London: Fontana, 1993); Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967).

496

496   MARKMAN ELLIS it was unavoidable, rationalizing that he had acquired slaves only by the accident of his marriage. Since the colonial economy depended on slavery, ‘he was sensible he could not abolish this slavery, even on his own estate, and saw no means of rendering happy the poor wretches, whose labours were to yield him affluence’.17 Unable to effect abolition or emancipation, Ellison enacts a plan to ameliorate slavery, hoping to ‘render happy’ (1: 19) the slaves of his plantation by initiating a ‘relaxation of the shocking severities’ (1: 21) of slavery. A whole chapter details his reformative ‘regulations’, which include augmenting vegetable allotments to improve slave nourishment, the reorganization of work-​time to improve efficiency, and the mitigation of slave punishment. The successful application of his regulations, Ellison argues, will raise the slaves to the condition of ‘free servants’—​although as the novel reveals, he does not imagine that they would be free to leave his service. Several scenes explore his plan’s reception: in one he stops his steward punishing a group of slaves for being late to return to work, and describes in detail the tearful gratitude with which the slaves thank him for his kindness. The moral complications of a slave-​owning commercial colony are dramatized by Scott through the conflict between Ellison’s love for his wife, and her apparent indifference to the cruel treatment of her slaves. Mrs. Ellison ‘had a reasonable share of compassion for a white man or woman, but had from her infancy been so accustomed to see the most shocking cruelties exercised on the blacks, that she could not conceive how one of that complexion could excite any pity’ (1: 19). Unlike Ellison’s sentimental equality of feeling, Mrs. Ellison has racialized her understanding of the subjects of benevolence. In a subsequent scene, Ellison and his wife are walking in the grounds of their plantation, discussing his plans for reform of the slave regime, in the course of which Mrs. Ellison notes with pride that she ‘never flinched at any punishment her steward thought proper to inflict upon’ her slaves (1: 25). At that moment, Mrs. Ellison’s favourite lapdog jumps out of a window of the house: ‘They soon perceived that it had broken its leg, and was in a good deal of pain; this drew a shower of tears from Mrs. Ellison’s eyes’ (1: 26). The contrast between Mrs. Ellison’s display of sensibility aroused by the injured animal and her hard-​hearted response to the slaves causes Ellison to comment: ‘I confess I am surprised, though agreeably, to see such marks of sensibility in a heart that I feared was hardened against the sufferings even of her fellow creatures.’ This last expression stopped the torrent of Mrs. Ellison’s afflication; and indignation taking place of compassion, as she turned her eyes from her lap-​dog to her husband,—​‘Sure, Mr. Ellison, you do not call negroes my fellow creatures?’ ‘Indeed, my dear,’ answered Mr. Ellison, ‘I must call them so, till you can prove to me, that the distinguishing marks of humanity lie in the complexion or turn of features. When you and I are laid in the grave, our lowest black slave will be as great as we are; in the next world perhaps much greater; the present difference is merely adventitious, not natural.’ (1: 26–​7)

17 

[Sarah Scott], The History of Sir George Ellison, 2 vols. (London: A Miller, 1766), 1: 18.

Novel and Empire   497 This scene of counter-​s ensibility dramatizes the unstable moral economy of colonial slavery. Mrs. Ellison’s devotion to her lapdog signals her allegiance to the elite polite manners of the metropolis; her inhuman indifference to the suffering of her slave labour locates her firmly in colonial culture. Her moral inconsistency, exposed by Ellison, offers the reader insight into the political economy of slavery, but also into the complications of British conceptions of an empire of liberty and commerce.18 Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné, a popular epistolary novel published in 1777 that had eight editions before 1810, offers a significant recapitulation of this episode. Mackenzie’s version, set on the French colony of Martinique, articulates the problem of slavery in a discourse derived from Adam Smith’s notion of enlightened commercial self-​interest. Savillon, a young merchant who manages his uncle’s slave plantation, understands that ‘in these wealthy islands, profit is the only medium of opinion’, but nonetheless seeks to show that ‘self-​interest will often be the parent of social obligation’.19 Savillon reforms the plantation’s coercive slave regime to alleviate distress—​in this manner his analysis is sentimental—​but also because it is inefficient. Savillon feels strongly that the ‘severities’ of slavery are wrong: ‘To a man not callous from habit, the treatment of the negroes, in the plantations here, is shocking’ (2: 18). The violence of the slave system, he argues, should be mitigated so that slaves labour for their self-​interest. Adam Smith famously argued in his Wealth of Nations (1776), that slave labour was both expensive and inefficient: the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.20

Smith’s argument recognizes that violence is endemic to slave plantations, as violence is the only motivation to labour. Savillon argues that slaves have a high purchase price, and have high sickness and mortality rates, caused by despondency, disease, and violent punishments. In Savillon’s phrase, ‘the machine, if it may be so called, of a plantation [is] extremely expensive in its operations’ (2: 24). Mackenzie plays out this argument in a sentimental set-​piece, in which he reforms the labour discipline of his plantation. One of his slaves was formerly a prince from the Guinea coast in Africa: as monarch of his people, he is set free and taught the value of free labour—​or ‘chuse-work’ as he calls it (2: 18 

See Markman Ellis, ‘Suffering Things: Lap-​Dogs, Slaves and Counter-​Sensibility’, in Mark Blackwell (ed.), The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-​Narratives in Eighteenth-​Century England (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2007), 92–​116. 19  [Henry Mackenzie], Julia de Roubigné, A Tale. In a Series of Letters, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777), 2: 12. 20  Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1: 387–​8.

498

498   MARKMAN ELLIS 22). The prince responds with grateful tears, the sentimental rhetoric of bodily display, and leads his people back to free labour. Savillon’s description of his reform of slavery, located in the first edition at the beginning of the second volume, is clearly significant to Mackenzie’s project in the novel: its success redeems him commercially, removing the block to his courtship of Julia in the metropolis (and so precipitating the novel’s violent closure). In these examples from Scott and Mackenzie, the novel as a form is a felicitous tool for negotiating the contradictions implicit in eighteenth-​century conceptions of empire. Further novels explore the question of slavery in the period: the inset slavery narrative in Thomas Day’s History of Sanford and Merton (1789), and Anna Mackenzie’s Slavery, or The Times (1792), again offer comforting narratives suggesting sentimental solutions to the ideological complexities of slavery. Day’s novel replicates the structure developed in the sentimental novels of Scott and Mackenzie, foregrounding the treatment of Africans and slaves as a test of political and social virtue for the central characters, Tommy Merton and Harry Sanford, respectively the sons of a West India merchant and a English rural farmer. In Dorothy Kilner’s The Rotchfords (1786) the experiences of an escaped slave boy named Pompey are used to test and educate children in the virtues of benevolence and the polyvalent injustice of racial prejudice and the slave system. As the political movement for the abolition of the slave trade grew more influential in the 1790s, under the leadership of evangelical Anglicans such as William Wilberforce, it brought the topic of slavery to an ever-​wider audience. Abolitionist rhetoric was articulated in conservative and pious religious discourse as much as it was in radical circles.

Novel, Empire, and the Gothic Resistance to slavery by the slaves themselves was also made the subject of fiction, for example in Maria Edgeworth’s short narrative ‘The Grateful Negro’, published in her Popular Tales (1804). Written without personal knowledge of the Caribbean, or of slave plantations, the tale was one amongst several written by Edgeworth to reinforce a reformist spirit in a plebeian readership supposedly given to sedition inspired by the French Revolution. Like the sentimental slavery inset narratives of Scott and Mackenzie, Edgeworth’s Jamaican tale contrasts two slave-​owning sugar planters: the tyrannical and savage Jefferies, who ‘considered the negroes as an inferior species, incapable of gratitude, disposed to treachery, and to be roused from their natural indolence only by force’, and the benevolent and humane Edwards, who ‘treated his slaves with all possible humanity and kindness’.21 Edwards promotes a series of rational plans for the 21  The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, ed. Elizabeth Eger, Clíona Ógallchoir, and Marilyn Butler, vol. 12: Popular Tales, Early Lessons, Whim for Wham (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 49–​63.

Novel and Empire   499 amelioration of the slaves’ work regime, without actually offering them their freedom in emancipation. The conflict between these two systems of plantocratic government constitutes the first of several sentimentally-​heightened oppositions established by the narrative. Jefferies defends slavery on commercial terms without recourse to moral justification: the state of slavery exists because the agricultural system of the sugar plantations requires slave labour to operate. Jefferies is indifferent to the happiness of his slaves. The first test offered in the tale is Jefferies’s callous treatment of the domestic felicity of his slave Caesar: in order to repay a debt, Jefferies proposes to sell Caesar, so breaking up the loving family life he has with his wife Clara. Their contemplation of their separation offers the second sentimentally overladen choice the narrative develops. The narrative resolves the domestic tragedy threatening Caesar and Clara when Edwards purchases them both—​a resolution that only reinforces their status as slaves. While Caesar’s personal situation had been ameliorated, that of Jefferies’s slaves had not. Under the leadership of another slave, Hector, they conspire to lead a rebellion, both to exact revenge for their cruel treatment, and to emancipate themselves by force. Caesar’s allegiances are now firmly split, between gratitude for the kindness of his new owner, and the loyalty he feels for his fellow slaves still suffering under Jefferies’s regime. In the story’s third sentimentally overdetermined choice, Caesar is unable to reconcile his ameliorated slavery to the murderous liberty of rebellion, and declines to join Hector’s rebellion. To reinforce his position, Hector has recourse to an obeah sorceress called Esther, who is described as ‘the chief instigator of this intended revolution’, and as such had ‘stimulated the revengeful temper of Hercules almost to phrenzy’: ‘Esther, an old Koromantyn negress, had obtained by her skill in poisonous herbs, and her knowledge of venomous reptiles, a high reputation amongst her countrymen. She soon taught them to believe her to be possessed of supernatural powers; and she then worked their imagination to what pitch and purposes she pleased’ (216–​18). In an extended footnote, Edgeworth noted that: ‘The enlightened inhabitants of Europe may, perhaps, smile at the superstitious credulity of the negroes, who regard those ignorant beings, called Obeah people, with the most profound respect and dread; who believe that they hold in their hands the power of good and evil fortune, of health and sickness, of life and death.’ By providing her readers, in this footnote, with a substantial quotation from Edwards’s History of the West Indies (1793) detailing the role of obeah-​men in Tacky’s revolt of 1760, Edgeworth authenticates and heightens the appeal of the supernatural elements of the story. Esther prepared a ‘solemn fetish oath’ and a bowl of ‘magic poison’ for the rebels: furthermore, she drugs Caesar’s Clara into a death-​like trance, and blackmails Caesar to support Hector’s rebellion. Inspired by loyalty and gratitude to Edwards’s paternalistic plantation reform, Caesar decides to expose the conspiracy. His intercession ensures that the rebellion is confined to Jefferies’s plantation. Although his plantation is ruined, Jefferies’s life is saved. The narrator concludes by urging the reader to see in this ‘Grateful Negro’ the ameliorative power of Edwards’s plantation reform. In ‘The Grateful Negro’, Edgeworth co-​opts the sentimental slavery narrative, but redirects its lessons from the plantocracy to the slaves. As she can have had few hopes of actually reaching an audience of slaves, this narrative structure is essentially ironic.

500

500   MARKMAN ELLIS Although Edgeworth’s ameliorationist argument was located in Jamaica, its central valency was in the metropolitan culture of Britain and Ireland, where it was integrated into her reformist anti-​Jacobinism. As a solution to the historical event of Caribbean slavery, it is little more than a fantasy—​in their political philosophy, both Edwards’s amelioration and Jefferies’s tyranny are equally pro-​slavery: in historical practice, numerous slave-​owners in the Caribbean colonies routinely practised versions of Edwards’s proposals. The colony, in this story, is a fictional place where the metropolis attempts to understand more about itself. Later in the eighteenth century, these anxieties about the moral economy of slavery were manifested in Gothic forms of novel-​writing. The ‘discovery’ in the eighteenth century of transculturated religious practices amongst slave populations, created hybrid systems of belief mixing distinct ritual traditions encountered in the Caribbean: African, American-​Indian, and Christian. Long associated with slave rebellions in historical and medical writing on the Caribbean, these slave religious practices, known diversely as obeah and voodoo, became the focus of considerable cultural anxiety from the 1790s. According to one authority, obeah was a medical practice, in which obeah-​men made use of the sympathetic powers of unknown tropical herbs and plants, and a powerful form of superstition and folklore. Gullible slaves, he argued, were susceptible to the influence of the obeah-​men, who taught them ‘the mysteries of sigils [occult signs or devices supposed to have mysterious powers], spells, and sorcery; and illuminated [them] in all the occult science of Obi’.22 Obeah and the obeah-​man proved to be a fertile idea for writers of literature, including those who had no first-​hand experience of the West Indies. Moseley’s account of the obeah-​man included a suggestive narrative anecdote detailing the exploits of a maroon rebel called Three-​Fingered Jack. Known as ‘the terror of Jamaica’, Three-​Fingered Jack was a ‘famous negro robber’ or rebel who deployed Obi to become not only the ‘the dread of the negroes’ but also to ‘many white people, who believed he was possessed of some supernatural power’.23 The story proved a popular récit: it was developed by the Welsh writer William Earle into an epistolary novel called Obi; or, the History of Three-​fingered Jack (1800), circulated further in chapbooks and serial romances, and was reworked for the stage as a pantomime in 1804.24 In Earle’s novel, Jack was more than a simple criminal, but also a powerful sorcerer who deploys mysterious and exotic supernatural powers. Slave regulations in Jamaica proscribed obeah practice as a form of witchcraft. The obeah powers of the sorcerer Jack, such as his oracular ability to predict the outcome of battles, or his fearlessness in the face of death, and his implacable desire for violent 22 

Benjamin Moseley, A Treatise on Sugar. With Miscellaneous Medical Observations (2nd edn., London: John Nichols and G. G. and J. Robinson, 1800), 189. 23 Moseley, A Treatise on Sugar, 198–​9. 24  William Earle, Obi; or, the History of Three-​fingered Jack. In a series of letters from a Resident in Jamaica to his Friend in England (London: Earle and Hemet, 1800). For an account of the play, see Alan Richardson, ‘Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797–​1807’, Studies in Romanticism 32/​1 (1993), 3–​28, esp. 16–​19.

Novel and Empire   501 revenge, all produce a demonized and Gothicized portrait of the rebel slave hero—​ what might be called the trope of the zombie, the former slave brought back to life. Like other Gothic novels of the same period, however, the novel further encourages an Enlightenment reading that exposes the supernatural powers of the obeah ‘sorcerer’ as a combination of pharmaceutical effects wrought by little-​known herbs and botanicals, and the innocent credulity of the peasant slaves. Earle’s depiction of Three-​Fingered Jack in a positive light has a densely allusive quality. Jack is reminiscent of a bandit-​captain, in the manner of the robber Karl Moor in Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers (Die Räuber) (1781), who leads his gang against the cruelty and unfairness of feudal Germany, or again, the bandits like Montoni in Radcliffe’s Gothic fictions. Moreover, like Behn’s Oroonoko before him, Jack is reminiscent of Spartacus, the slave hero of classical Rome who led a widespread uprising against the Roman Republic in 74 bc. In this mould, the rebel slave offered a resonant symbol for radical causes in the metropolis. These concerns with the relationship between the novel and the ideology of imperialism can be located even in a novelist seemingly as far from such concerns as Jane Austen. In the case of Mansfield Park (1814), the novel’s engagement with empire has generated intense debate: first by Avrom Fleishman in 1967 and Warren Roberts in 1979, and most famously, Edward Said in 1993.25 In an Austen novel concerned as usual with courtship and marriage, and therefore inheritance and property, the fate of the landed estate of the Bertram family, Mansfield Park, is a central focus of the plot. In the novel’s opening scene, Austen establishes that the Bertram’s wealth is dependent on ‘West Indian property’. This estate in Antigua, about which little is discovered in the course of the novel, nonetheless exerts an important effect on the plot. As the head of the family Sir Thomas Bertram explains, ‘some recent losses on his West India Estate, in addition to his eldest son’s extravagance’, have placed the family in financial difficulties, and, unable to resolve the problem at a distance, he finds ‘it expedient to go to Antigua himself, for the better arrangement of his affairs’.26 Although the precise nature of the Antigua estate that has made such ‘poor returns’ is not specified, the historical context and internal evidence suggest it would have been a slave plantation, such as produced sugar and rum, or other commodities such as tobacco or cotton. In Said’s argument, Austen establishes a strong connection between the achievement of civilized values and a genteel lifestyle at Mansfield Park with the Caribbean property’s economic prosperity. The novel reveals a kind of ‘moral geography’ that embeds a sense of global space that encodes the values of Western culture. Although Austen had little knowledge or interest in events in the Caribbean, Said argues that ‘by that very odd combination of casualness and stress, Austen reveals herself to be assuming … the importance of an empire to the situation 25  Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park: An Essay in Critical Synthesis (Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1967), 35–​8; Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1979), 97–​8; Said, Culture and Imperialism, 95–​116. 26  Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. John Wiltshire (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 27, 36.

502

502   MARKMAN ELLIS at home … According to Austen we are to conclude that no matter how isolated and insulated the English place (e.g., Mansfield Park), it requires overseas sustenance.’ This spatial blindness to empire and its concerns Said calls the ‘consolidated vision’ of the nineteenth-​century novel, by which means fictions like Mansfield Park ‘participate in, are a part of, contribute to, a slow and often hidden politics that clarifies, reinforces perhaps even occasionally advances perceptions and attitudes about England and the world’.27 The narrative does allow its concerns of empire to play an important role in the novel’s plot. The Bertram family’s ‘pecuniary’ problems in Antigua cause Sir Thomas to withdraw from the scene, allowing the children to play at acting in the absence of his supposedly steadying patriarchal hand. In his absence, the various authorized courtship relationships (such as Maria Bertram’s engagement with Mr. Rushworth and Edmund Bertram’s courting of Mary Crawford) are dissolved and rerouted down less orthodox routes (leading to Maria’s affair with Henry Crawford and the elopement of Julia Bertram and the Honourable John Yates). More importantly perhaps, Sir Thomas’s absence in Antigua allows Fanny Price to achieve something like emotional and social maturity, part of that process which allows her to be eligible to marry Edmund. From a girl unable to ‘put the map of Europe together’ (20) in the opening scenes, by the time of Sir Thomas’s return when the theatricals are suppressed, she has become an important moral compass for the family. At the dinner table, Fanny records her enthusiastic curiosity about Sir Thomas’s experiences in Antigua: ‘I love to hear my uncle talk of the West Indies. I could listen to him for an hour together. It entertains me more than many other things have done’ (230). She even tries to engage him in serious matters of conversation: ‘ “Did you not hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?” ’ Edmund, in reply, says: ‘ “I did—​and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.” ’ In response, Fanny says: ‘ “And I longed to do it—​but there was such a dead silence!” ’ (231). Gathered together in domestic prosperity, the Bertrams have nothing to say about the slave trade, that commerce in human suffering that brings them the comfort of their civilized and genteel life. Austen’s phrase ‘dead silence’ is a resonant one: recalling the kind of silences imposed by slavery on the body of the slave and the construction of slavery as a kind of moral death, or death in life. Sir Thomas’s silence about the slaves, and indeed that of the whole family, indicates their embarrassment about the role of slavery in their family finances. (Jane Austen herself was an enthusiastic supporter of the Abolition campaign waged by evangelical Anglican campaigners like Wilberforce and Clarkson.) Within the novel’s plot, the silence instantiates Fanny’s position as a metaphorical slave within the family system. In a sense then, Austen has Fanny Price speak for the slaves as a way of articulating her position as a woman in patriarchal culture. Fanny’s interest in the status and condition of the slaves reveals the novel’s assessment of one of Austen’s central concerns, the position of women in courtship, marriage, 27 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 106–​7, 89.

Novel and Empire   503 and society. But the phrase ‘dead silence’ resonates further, recalling also the state of slavery itself, a condition of social death, literally and morally beyond the living world of Mansfield Park. In this sense, Fanny’s ‘dead silence’ is redolent of the trope of the zombie, as explored in slave-​rebellion narratives such as Earle’s Three-fingered Jack or Edgeworth’s ‘The Grateful Negro’, and as such, further begins to make sense of Jane Austen mash-​up narratives such as Seth Grahame-​Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009).

Conclusion If readers were to look for the creative legacy of the eighteenth-​century empire in the novel, one answer would be found in that curious combination of sensibility and Gothic. The literary imagination created and refined a series of distinct Gothic properties in the Romantic period: two of the most generative are the vampire (derived from the folk mythology of the eastern periphery of Europe) and the zombie (derived from transculturated slave society in the Caribbean colonies, articulated through obeah and voodoo). Both the vampire and the zombie have left a long and diverse legacy in literature and culture since this period. As first recorded in eighteenth-​ century accounts of the obeah slave religion, the obeah-​man or witch doctor was able, through psychotropic drugs and supposedly supernatural powers, to assert control over another person’s body, rendering them into a state of suspended animation akin to that of the walking dead. The controlled body, the zombie, forced to labour without reward for his sorcerer master, literalizes the state of slavery, which itself is a form of living death in which all the rights and pleasures of human life are subsumed by the master. The zombie is a trope that celebrates, and mystifies, the history of slavery in the American colonies. As a figure of slave resistance to slavery, the zombie figures modern twentieth-​century anxieties about the historical legacy of slavery, coalescing racialized anxieties such as miscegenation and immigration. As the cultural relationship between Britain and its empire became increasingly confident and triumphalist in the early nineteenth century, it set the scene both for Victorian adventure stories, and the increasingly essentialist assertion of British values as white, Christian, masculine, and superior. But as the trope of the zombie reminds us, literature also exploits and records the darker legacies of the human cost of imperial endeavour on individuals, nations, and peoples.

Select Bibliography Aravamudan, Srinivas, Tropicopolitans:  Colonialism and Agency, 1688–​1804 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999). Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 2000). Ballaster, Ros, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–​1785 (Oxford: OUP, 2005).

504

504   MARKMAN ELLIS Ellis, Markman, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 1996). Leask, Nigel, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 1992). Richardson, Alan, ‘Romantic Voodoo:  Obeah and British Culture, 1797–​1807’, Studies in Romanticism 32/​1 (1993), 3–​28. Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). Watt, James, ‘Orientalism and Empire’, in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2008). Wilson, Kathleen, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–​ 1785 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995).

Chapter 30

The P opu l a r Nov e l , 1 790– 182 0 Gary Kelly

From the 1790s to the 1820s the popular novel underwent major transformation. This essay investigates that process by asking what ‘popular novel’ meant then, which novels were then ‘popular’, and why they were. The New Oxford English Dictionary offers several senses of ‘popular’ applicable to the novel and current at that time: ‘liked or admired by many people, or by a particular person or group’; ‘intended for or suited to the understanding or taste of ordinary people, esp. as opposed to specialists in a field; spec. (of literature, etc.) intended for and directed at a general readership’; ‘adapted to the means of ordinary people; low or moderate in price’; and ‘designating forms of art, music, or culture with general appeal; intended primarily to entertain, please, or amuse’. The source of the disdainful undertone in these is suggested in senses ‘obsolete’ by 1790, including ‘of low birth, not noble, plebeian’ (last recorded 1691); ‘vulgar, coarse, ill-​bred’ (last recorded 1641); and (last recorded 1771) ‘aware of or cultivating the favour of the populace; also: supporting the cause of the common people (rather than that of the nobility, etc.)’. ‘Novel’ had a similar history. Since the early seventeenth century it has meant ‘a long fictional prose narrative, usually filling one or more volumes and typically representing character and action with some degree of realism and complexity; a book containing such a narrative’. From 1760 to today ‘the novel’ has designated a genre or class of works. From the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth century a ‘novel’ could be ‘any of a number of tales or stories making up a larger work’, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron. ‘Novel’ also had skeletons in the ‘obsolete’ closet: ‘a novelty’ (last recorded 1719), not necessarily pejorative, the sense being ‘something new and likely to prove ephemeral’; and ‘a story or lie; an invention’ (recorded 1764). Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language in Miniature (1800) defined ‘novel’ as ‘a feigned story or tale’, derived from Johnson’s original 1756 definition, ‘a small tale, generally of love’, regarded by some as pejorative. The 1799 edition of James Barclay’s often reprinted Complete and Universal English Dictionary (first published 1774) defined

506

506   GARY KELLY ‘novel’ as ‘relation of an adventure or intrigue; a romance’, and ‘popular’ as ‘vulgar, or of the lowest order, applied to rank; suited to the capacity of the common people; beloved by, or pleasing to, the people; studious of the favour of the people; prevailing or raging among the populace’. Contemporary usage helps. The following were novels labelled ‘popular’ in various newspapers and magazines from the 1790s to the 1810s: Lazarillo de Tormes (first published 1554), fictions used as sources by Shakespeare, Aleman’s rogue narrative Guzman de Alfarache (in English 1622), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Burney’s Cecilia (1782), Caroline of Lichtfield adapted from French by Holcroft (1786), Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (1791), Charles Dibdin’s Hannah Hewit; or, The Female Crusoe (1792), Herman of Unna from Naubert’s German (1794), Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Robinson’s Angelina (1796), Walsingham (1797), and The Widow (1799), Brewer’s The Motto; or, History of George Woodcock (1795), Lewis’s Monk (1796), Hutchinson’s Exhibitions of the Heart (1799), Pestalozzi’s Leonard and Gertrude (1801), Bayfield’s A Winter in Bath (1807), Peck’s The Young Rosiniere (1809), Nares’s Thinks-​I-​to-​ Myself (1811), Surr’s The Magic of Wealth (1815), and Scott’s Rob Roy (1817), Heart of Midlothian (1818), and Kenilworth (1821). Such testimony may be unreliable: many are cited in advertisements or likely publisher’s puffs. Nevertheless, the phrase suggests a work with both a certain kind of appeal and a certain kind of (large and/​or persisting) readership. In fact, most such works were more often termed ‘modern novels’ at this time. Though found earlier,1 the phrase was used from the 1770s to differentiate a contemporary kind of fiction from earlier ‘romances’ considered characteristically extravagant and improbable. In the Preface to her ‘Gothic Story’, The Old English Baron (1778), Clara Reeve emphasized the ‘modern novel’s’ portrayal of ‘nature’, probability, and affective social relations, following Walpole’s claim that his Castle of Otranto (1765) was ‘an attempt to blend the two kinds of Romance, the ancient and the modern’,2 or medieval and contemporary. According to Reeve: ‘In the former, all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success.’ Accordingly, ‘to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient Romance and modern Novel’ and give it ‘a character and manner of its own’, ‘required a sufficient degree of the marvellous, to excite the attention; enough of the manners of real life, to give an air of probability to the work; and enough of the pathetic, to engage the heart in its behalf ’.3 Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ‘modern novel’ usually referred to the contemporary novel of sensibility or novel of manners, sentiment, and emulation, as suggested by Mary J. Young’s A Summer at Brighton: A Modern Novel (1807); Caroline Burney’s Seraphina; or, A  Winter in Town:  A  Modern Novel 1  Henry Fielding, The History of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford and Middletown, CT: OUP and Wesleyan UP, 1967), 187. 2  Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (2nd edn., London, 1765), p. vi. 3  Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story (London, 1778), pp. iii, v.

The Popular Novel, 1790–1820     507 (1809); Robert Torrens’s Coelibia Choosing a Husband:  A  Modern Novel (1809); Ann Hamilton’s The Irishwoman in London:  A  Modern Novel (1810); and the anonymous and much reprinted Fatherless Fanny; or, The Memoirs of a Little Mendicant and Her Benefactors: A Modern Novel (1811). The label was also applied to forms that now seem dissimilar, including the novel of fashionable life, the novel of common life, the Gothic romance, and the historical novel. By this time, too, a history of the ‘modern novel’ emerged attributing its invention to Samuel Richardson and casting it as the expression and promoter of a popular—​here, middle-​class—​culture, ethos, and will, in a democratizing process of economic, social, cultural, and political ‘progress’, drawing national pride from European writers’ known enthusiasm for Richardson. This narrative was succinctly summarized in 1804, during a national and imperial crisis, in a collection of Richardson’s letters commissioned and published by the reformist Richard Phillips and edited by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, leading woman intellectual, educationist, and religious Dissenter. Here she called Richardson ‘the father of the modern novel of the serious or pathetic kind’, marking ‘a new era’ in the history of ‘fictitious adventures’ after the long formation, through earlier fiction, of ‘a taste for the natural, the graceful, and the simple-​pathetic’ that ‘is generally the late result of a long course of civilization’. For Barbauld, Richardson’s and the modern novel’s achievement was to transpose the sublime from the realm of the marvellous and the aristocratic to common life: ‘The moated castle is changed to a modern parlour; the princess and her pages to a lady and her domestics, or even to a simple maiden, without birth or fortune; we are not called on to wonder at improbable events, but to be moved by natural passions, and impressed by salutary maxims.’ The social location moved ‘down’ from high to middle life but the moral and subjective location remained high: ‘The pathos of the story, and the dignity of the sentiments, interest and charm us; simplicity is warned, vice rebuked, and, from the perusal of a novel, we rise better prepared to meet the ills of life with firmness, and to perform our respective parts on the great theatre of life.’4 For Barbauld, modern-​novel reading produces the meritorious bourgeois subject for both everyday life and national leadership, just as epic and romance once supposedly produced the meritorious aristocratic subject. Barbauld then offers a sociology of authorship by which Richardson, of modest family and little formal and—​she insists—​no classical (or gentleman’s) education, was prepared for this revolutionary task. He exemplified in himself, through providential ‘genius’ and middle-​class habits of hard work and frugality, what his novels promote through literary art. Barbauld sees the ‘modern novel’ as not only democratizing but also feminizing: she stresses the role of Richardson’s ‘female senate’, or circle of women friends and admirers, in his writing, the centrality of women in his novels, their importance in the reception and circulation of his work, and the fact that ‘Mr. Richardson was a friend to mental improvement in women’—​slyly adding, ‘though 4 

The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 vols. (London, 1804), 1: pp. xxi–​xxii.

508

508   GARY KELLY under all those restrictions which modesty and decorum have imposed upon the sex’.5 The association of women and the ‘modern novel’ was commonplace at this point and Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume had argued that women were central to the civilizing process by socializing naturally rugged males to civil society, sympathy, and manners. Some, like Barbauld, assigned the ‘modern novel’ an important role in that process by both its depiction of and its role in such society. Despite this progressive view of the ‘modern novel’, most commentators—​and even modern novelists—​used the phrase pejoratively, to mean ‘popular’ in the sense of widely read, adapted to ‘common’ understandings and tastes, and cheap of access. In a 1791 review it was depicted as a mere formula, concocted to a ‘recipe’, ‘manufactured’ like cheap cotton goods, or recycled from second-​hand material.6 Two years later a correspondent to the Universal Magazine concluded: ‘From the workman-​like facility, with which modern novels are composed, and from their increasing number, it is not, perhaps, too ridiculous to suppose that, in a case where genius is so little consulted, the operation might be performed by a machine.’7 In 1796 this form and the culture, politics, and sex often associated with it were burlesqued in William Beckford’s Modern Novel Writing; or, The Elegant Enthusiast. In 1807 the Satirist deplored ‘the three great qualifications of a modern novel, stupidity, vulgarity, and price!!!’8 A decade later the Anti-​ Jacobin Review and True Churchman’s Magazine and Protestant Advocate averred: ‘The insipidity of modern novels has become almost proverbial.’9 A writer in 1798 insisted that, not only did the ‘modern novel’ ‘have a tendency to mislead the mind, to enfeeble the heart, to represent nature in improper colours, to excite, rather than to suppress, in the young and ardent, romantic notions of love, and to lead the unwary amidst the winding mazes of intrigue, and the flowery fields of dissipation’, it also harmed the domestic and hence the national economy by distracting ‘the families of tradesmen’ from their domestic and commercial tasks and by adding to household expenses by the cost of borrowings from a circulating library.10 It was generally assumed that the ‘modern novel’ was a ‘circulating l​ibrary novel’, and the terms were interchangeable. By the 1790s it was a commonplace that circulating library novels were at best ‘silly’, and more likely ‘pernicious’.11 In 1799 a writer to the Monthly Magazine, referring to novels, deplored ‘the baneful effects of the poison which lurks almost invariably, in every corner of a circulating library’.12 During the 1790s the commonplace association of circulating library novels, erotic titillation, and women writers and readers was given sinister political implications: in Elizabeth Hamilton’s satirical anti-​Jacobin novel, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), the 5 

Correspondence, ed. Barbauld, 1: p. cxliii. Review of The Labyrinths of Life, Monthly Review 5 (July 1791), 337–​8. 7  Lucius, ‘On Novels’, Universal Magazine 93 (July 1793), 8. 8  Review of Charles Sedley, A Winter in Dublin, London Satirist 1 (December 1807), 292. 9  Review of Hardenbrass and Haverill, Anti-​Jacobin Review 53 (October 1817), 127. 10  I—​S—​, ‘On the Reading of Novels’, Monthly Visitor 4 (July 1798), 242–​6. 11  Monthly Review 4 (January 1791), 92. 12  Monthly Magazine 7 (July 1799), 447. 6 

The Popular Novel, 1790–1820     509 ‘English Jacobins’ advance their cause by establishing a circulating library stocked only with novels.13 In fact, some radical reformists, aiming to bring general literature to the people, did run circulating libraries. There were also some defenders of circulating libraries and their novels. In 1800 Charlotte Smith, by now a veteran author of them, denied they were dangerous or even harmless: ‘if they do not instruct, they may awaken a wish for useful knowledge’.14 Austen’s defence in Northanger Abbey (1817) of novels that were, like her own, procured mainly from circulating libraries, is now well known, and her novels engage in rich intertextuality with them.15 An essay on ‘The Influence of Books on the Progress of Manners’ in the liberal New Monthly Magazine of January 1828 argued that the establishment countrywide of circulating libraries with stock ‘chosen for the amusement of the many’ was levelling regional differences and promoting the civilizing process ‘by spreading larger and more liberal views of things, and showing the infinite variety of opinions on all subjects in all ages and nations’.16 That the circulating library novel was popular, for better or, usually, worse, was assumed. The association was closely commercial: most of a new novel’s typical print run of a few hundred copies would be purchased by circulating libraries; prominent library proprietors also published novels. Some modern research suggests that novels were not always the largest proportion of circulating library stock, but at the time it was believed they were. Even if novel titles did not outnumber others in library catalogues, actual borrowings could, since a single novel title might represent numerous copies for the fleeting but intense demand of the ‘season’. Guidebooks to spas and places of fashionable resort routinely noted whether or not a place had a circulating library, its quality and principal stock (usually novels). An 1817 advertisement is typical of many: ‘The Stock of a CIRCULATING LIBRARY to be DISPOSED OF, consisting of almost 4000 Volumes, principally Novels, half-​bound, in excellent condition, price One Shilling per volume.’17 The most notorious supplier of circulating library novels was the ‘Minerva Press’, trading under that name from 1790 to 1820, established by John Lane alongside his own circulating library, and continued by A. K. Newman, first in partnership with Lane and then alone. During this time and for decades afterwards the ‘Minerva Press’, the ‘Minerva Press novel’, and the ‘Minerva Press school’ were by-​phrases for what were considered the worst aspects of the popular/​modern novel, relentlessly disparaged as, according to contemporary newspapers and magazines, badly printed, ungrammatical, formulaic, unrealistic, lacking common sense, a waste of time, a diversion from superior literature, trite, inflated in style, nauseatingly sentimental, erotically titillating, silly, female authored for female readers, an inundation, and so on. As the conservative Blackwood’s Magazine thundered

13 

Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 3 vols. (London, 1800), 2: 42. Charlotte Smith, Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, 3 vols. (London, 1800), 1: p. vii. 15  Mary Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time (Cambridge: CUP, 1999); Anthony Mandal, Jane Austen and the Popular Novel: The Determined Author (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 16  New Monthly Magazine 22 (January 1828), 414. 17  London Morning Post (17 February 1817), 1. 14 

510

510   GARY KELLY in 1818: ‘The reader who is capable of understanding Cervantes, Fielding, and Voltaire, is not likely to be a great patron of the Minerva Press; and vice versa, the consumers of the Minerva Press ware have no relish for any of the great works of fiction, either in poetry or prose.’18 Similar aspersions were repeated for two centuries.19 What, then, of practice at the time? What novels did most people read? Where did they get them? Where did they come from? And—​most important—​how did readers use them in everyday life? Price is a guide, since it conditioned what could become a ‘popular novel’. What was sold or rented cheap could be read by many, and what many would read could be provided cheap thanks to reduced risk and unit cost. ‘Cheap’ at this time and for years before and after meant sixpence or less, when a labourer earned about 10 shillings (or 20 sixpences) a week. For entertainment comparison, until the 1830s a seat in the uppermost gallery of a ‘legitimate’ or licensed theatre typically cost 1 shilling, and in an ‘illegitimate’ or ‘minor’ theatre sixpence. For over a century, innovation in printing, publishing, and distribution was elicited by the need to keep unit price at or below sixpence. There was a sequence of such innovation. First was rental. Most books, including novels, were relatively expensive because of copyright controls, restrictive business practices, and materials and production costs, though these diminished during these decades. A major response was rental by commercial circulating libraries.20 Increasingly numerous through the eighteenth century, by 1800 they were perceived to be almost ubiquitous, ranging from a shelf in a shop or pub or a table in someone’s parlour, through modest concerns combining book and magazine rental with sale of medicines, writing and art supplies, lottery tickets, and so on, to palatial establishments in fashionable quarters of towns. Circulating libraries usually charged by subscription for a fixed period, from a few shillings per quarter to a few guineas per year, allowing a certain number of borrowings per subscription; for a fashionable Brighton library in 1813, this meant a subscriber paid about 2 shillings for each book borrowed over a year. In addition or instead there might be a fixed amount per volume borrowed for a set period of time, perhaps sixpence or less. The consensus then and since, that most circulating libraries stocked novels that were formula escapist ‘trash’ largely by women and for women and servants, is being modified by new quantitative and qualitative research. This finds that the circulating library novel trade was diverse, ranging from J. F. Hughes through the Minerva Press to Henry 18 

‘Extract from M. de Peudemots’, Blackwood’s Magazine 3 (April 1818), 47. See Dorothy Blakey, The Minerva Press, 1790–​1820 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1939). 20  For information on circulating libraries, see K. A. Manley, ‘Booksellers, Peruke-​makers, and Rabbit-​merchants: The Growth of Circulating Libraries in the Eighteenth Century’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (eds.), Libraries and the Book Trade: The Formation of Collections from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2000), 29–​50, 43; Christopher Skelton-​Foord, ‘Economics, Expertise, Enterprise and the Literary Scene: The Commercial Management Ethos in British Circulating Libraries, 1780–​1830’, in E. J. Clery, Caroline Franklin, and Peter Garside (eds.), Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–​1850 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 136–​52. 19 

The Popular Novel, 1790–1820     511 Colburn, and ingenious in its methods, innovative in its products, and knowledgeable about competition and readership.21 Almost 30 per cent of the Minerva Press list was not novels. Though women outnumbered its men authors there were many of the latter, there were about as many novels with male as female protagonists, and many novels show sophisticated awareness of gender stereotypes. Many of its novels were at least as well written as the standard fiction of the day, and there was good variety of sub­genres, including ‘courtship’, ‘didactic’, ‘epistolary’, ‘Gothic’, ‘Gothic elements’, ‘sentimental’, ‘wedlock’, ‘historical’, ‘chivalric’, ‘development/​Bildungsroman’, ‘(auto)biography/​memoirs’, ‘generational’, and various combinations. Many Minerva Press novels referred to contemporary issues and events, though cultural and literary references were mainly from common knowledge. Their predominantly middle-​class readership often preferred to read about characters somewhat above themselves in social rank and set in unfamiliar or exotic locales, but many novels were preoccupied with questions of personal identity and social location and relationships.22 Such traits indicate not escapism and fantasy but interest in practical issues of real life in the onset of modernity. From the 1790s to the 1840s technological and commercial innovations increased availability of novels and other books for purchase by individuals. The ending of perpetual copyright in 1774 would loosen control of the trade by a clique of publishers, and the trade diversified into publisher-​booksellers supplying themselves and other booksellers, booksellers selling mainly what they themselves published, and sellers of others’ publications.23 By the later eighteenth century there was increasing sale of books in serial parts or numbers, distributed by a network of subscription and delivery agents across the country through an improving transportation infrastructure.24 Number selling en­abled publishers to recoup outlay for part of a publication before investing in subsequent parts, increasing efficiency of capital deployment and opening larger-​scale publishing to smaller firms, in the provinces and the metropolis. The number trade spread downmarket, disdained by the upmarket trade and suspected by defenders of high culture, social hierarchy, and the established order. The development around 1800 of an iron (rather than wooden) press with simplified operation increased productivity. This was increased further by invention of stereotyping, or taking a mould from a page of set type which then did not have to be kept standing for possible further impressions or editions but could be redistributed

21  See Peter Garside, ‘J. F. Hughes and the Publication of Popular Fiction, 1803–​1810’, The Library, 6th ser., 9/​3 (1987), 240–​58; Edward Jacobs, ‘Anonymous Signatures: Circulating Libraries, Conventionality, and the Production of Gothic Romances’, ELH 63/​3 (1995), 603–​29. 22  Deborah Anne McLeod, ‘The Minerva Press’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Alberta, 1997), 13, 54, 57, 97, 98. 23  Terry Belanger, ‘From Bookseller to Publisher: Changes in the London Book Trade, 1750–​1850’, in Richard G. Landon (ed.), Book Selling and Book Buying: Aspects of the Nineteenth-​Century British and North American Book Trade (Chicago: American Library Association, 1978), 7–​16. 24  Mihai H. Handrea, ‘Books in Parts and the Number Trade’, in Landon (ed.), Book Selling and Book Buying, 34–​51; James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and the Response to Commerce in England, 1750–​1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 53–​4; Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–​1850 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007), 246–​50.

512

512   GARY KELLY for printing other texts, while further impressions and editions could be printed from the stereotype plates. These innovations best suited works with wide appeal, mostly religious and practical, but including novels of certain kinds. Illustration was similarly facilitated. Popular print was typically illustrated, but copperplate engraving was relatively expensive and woodcuts and copperplates wore out quickly. The development soon after 1800 of engraving on hard boxwood and by the 1820s of engraving on soft steel enabled cheaper yet more refined illustration. In the 1810s would come the rotary press and the steam press, in the 1820s a cloth enabling cheaper and mechanized book-​binding, and in the 1840s paper-​making from wood pulp, greatly reducing cost of the most expensive element in book production. Increasingly sophisticated remainder bookselling, auctioneering, and second-​hand selling increased access to books. Meanwhile, most novels that were popular in the sense of cheap were sold either complete as sixpenny chapbooks or pamphlets or divided in sixpenny periodical numbers or parts.25 Complete sixpenny chapbook novels, comprising less than a dozen to several dozen pages of small type, were of two kinds, old favourites and ostensible novelties. Old favourites came from various sources, rarely named an author, and included Valentine and Orson (from a medieval French verse romance), Fair Rosamond and Jane Shore (history and drama), Jack and the Giants (Elizabethan novel), Guy of Warwick and William Wallace (verse chronicle and history), Robinson Crusoe and The English Hermit (earlier desert-​island novels), and Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin (journalism and the Newgate Calendar). Far from suffering ‘mass extinction’ around 1800,26 the old favourites continued to be published through these decades, alongside novelties and in the same ‘modern’ dress, often retitled to resemble a novelty and typically in a printed coloured paper wrapper with fold-​out frontispiece and set in a modern-​looking font. Some provincial booksellers continued selling them in deliberately old-​fashioned format while other booksellers sold them in small format advertised for ‘juvenile’ readership, though there was no bar to adults buying and reading them. Their powerful ideological bearings were recognized by those from Hannah More to the Religious Tract Society who tried desperately to supplant them with waves of pseudo-​popular novels from the 1790s on.27 Readers, not texts, make meanings, in particular situations,28 and to understand these bearings and how readers used these novels in everyday life we have to speculate from

25  Gary Kelly, ‘Fiction and the Working Classes’, in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), 207–​33. 26  William St Clair, ‘Publishing, Authorship, and Reading’, in Maxwell and Trumpener (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period, 35. 27  Susan Pederson, ‘Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Literature in Late Eighteenth-​Century England’, Journal of British Studies 25/​1 (1986), 84–​113; Gary Kelly, ‘Revolution, Reaction, and the Expropriation of Popular Culture: Hannah More’s Cheap Repository’, in Kenneth Graham and Neal Johnson (eds.), Man and Nature/​L’Homme et la Nature (Edmonton: Academic Printing and Publishing, 1987), 147–​59. 28  See Alec McHoul, Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics (Lincoln, NE and London: U of Nebraska P, 1996), c­ hapter 5.

The Popular Novel, 1790–1820     513 historical reconstruction of their circumstances.29 People limited to sixpenny street literature had long experienced life as a subsistence economy of repeated cycles, subject to natural, divine, or remote human forces which the individual had little power to influence, and with little prospect of improvement except through luck, foresight, magic, or innate gifts of cunning, strength, or beauty. Readers could find this life-​as-​lottery outlook in the old favourites of street literature, thematically in concern with fate, destiny, alert opportunism, fortuitous powers, gifts, and interveners, and formally in paratactic plots, repetitive anecdotal narratives, and socially typical characters. To an extent this world view engaged all classes and was findable in earlier upmarket literature, including full-​length novels of the kind republished from the 1790s to 1820s. In this period, however, it is a world view increasingly attacked by religious, secular, and scientific agencies serving modernization, an investment mentality, and belief in individual and collective ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’. This modernizing world view was increasingly circulated in new kinds of upmarket literature, including popular/​modern circulating library novels. It was findable thematically in concern for self-​identity against social hierarchy, accumulation of moral and intellectual capital, issues of risk and trust, ability to negotiate through changing topographies, and mastery of social codes and prestigious knowledges, and formally in depiction of complex and authentic inner selfhood, cause-​ and-​effect plots, elaborate portrayal of social relations of various kinds, and carefully discriminated and individualized characters. In the developing culture of commercialized consumption at all social levels, these contemporary forms of popular novel were in turn adapted downmarket in the sixpenny chapbook novelties. These included contracted versions of full-​length popular/​modern novels, novellas from earlier collections and contemporary magazines, novelizations of popular contemporary plays, and original works, usually anonymous, from those disdained by upmarket culture as ‘hacks’ writing ‘merely’ for money. Since titles were advertisements and many publishers sold the same or similar works, this market can be indicated by the fiction list of S. Fisher, active for about a decade from the late 1790s. The list included Julia; or, The Adventures of the Daughter of a Village Curate (1798); The True History of Zoa, the Beautiful Indian (1799); The Castles of Montreuil and Barre … A Gothic Story (1799); The True and Affecting History of Henrietta of Belgrave, a Woman Born only for Calamity (1799); The Extraordinary Confession, Life, and Singular Adventures of Wolfe (1799); The True and Affecting History of the Duchess of C * * * * (1799), a story of domestic abuse taken from a novel of education; Gothic Stories (1799), taken from various authors; The History of Emma; or, The Victim of Depravity (1800), from a popular circulating library novel, The Farmer of Inglewood Forest; The Black Castle; or, The Spectre of the Forest, an Historical Romance (1800); The Farmer’s Daughter of Essex (1800), a seduction story; Rodolph; or, The Banditti of the Castle (1801); Three Jacks of Rosemary Lane (1801), ostensibly from Defoe; The Memoir of a Villain (1803) by Isaac Crookenden, one 29  See Robert W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England 1700–​1780 (London: Hutchinson, 1981), ­chapter 4; Bob Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700–​1880 (London: Junction Books, 1982).

514

514   GARY KELLY of the few such authors to claim his work; The Revengeful Turk; or, Mystic Cavern (1802); Tales to Meliorate the Heart (1803); The History of Perourou (1804), from a work by the political tourist Helen Maria Williams; The Ghost of Golini; or, The Malignant Relative: A Domestic Tale (1804), acknowledged by Sarah Wilkinson; and others. Like many, Fisher published different works presumably appealing to this market’s interests, including (in roughly chronological order) a history of printing, accounts of shipwrecks, a risqué poem, a biography of criminal Jack Sheppard, Romaine’s Life of Faith, ‘grammatical exercises’, a jest-​book, a ‘ladies and gentlemen’s musical review’, Aesop’s fables, a manual for making fireworks, an account of Naples and Mount Vesuvius, Mother Goose stories, Daddy Gander’s fairy tales, and a satirical broadside supporting Caroline, Princess of Wales, against her unpopular husband. The list of John Bailey, active from the 1790s to the 1820s, was similar. His chapbook novels may be categorized as Gothic supernatural, Gothic medieval, bandit stories, historical romance, adventures and escapes, seduction narratives, sentimental love stories, prostitute biographies, cut-​down Walter Scott novels, stories from the Arabian Nights, sentimental novellas (Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther), and reprints of old favourites, especially if titillating (Jane Shore, George Barnwell). Bailey’s other sixpenny chapbooks covered popular pastimes and sports (angling, cudgels, broadsword, riding, fencing, swimming, boxing, legerdemain, fireworks-​making, small-​animal field sports), cookery, popular public and domestic entertainments (theatre, songsters), sensational news (political-​sexual scandals, assassination of Prime Minister Perceval, Napoleon, death of Princess Charlotte), sensational occurrences (shipwrecks, Indian captivity, ghosts and hauntings, ‘Frauds of London’), trials various (criminal, treason, ‘crim. con.’ or adultery, Princess Caroline’s ‘trials’), Newgate Calendar (lives of Turpin and Sheppard), practical (letter-​writing manuals, valentine-​writers, ‘Young Man’s Best Companion’ encyclopedia, mensuration, the Way to Wealth), pious (eighteenth-​century Puritan classics, Bunyan’s works, Gessner’s works, Defoe’s History of the Devil), amusing (oddities and eccentricities, jest-​books, comic songsters), children’s entertainment (verse stories), prediction (dream-​books, popular prophecy), and popular rights (reformist addresses, copies of Magna Carta, satires on the Prince Regent, a pirated reprint of Southey’s reformist Wat Tyler)—​political pamphlets proliferated in the Napoleonic aftermath. The lists of Fisher, Bailey, and others taken as a mega-​text indicate a readership with lower-​middle-​class culture and interests—​practical, politically oppositional if not reformist, piously pragmatic in religion, open to sensation and titillation, sceptical about the dominant classes and their political and religious institutions, and tending to the investment mentality but still living the lottery mentality. Thematically the sixpenny novelty fiction often reflects similar interests and attitudes, and materially it represents a cheaper but distinctive version of the culture of fashionable consumption practised by upmarket novel readers. Despite their appearance and sources in current or recent upmarket novels, these novelties were partly assimilated to the themes and structures of the old favourites. Compared to popular/​modern novels, cause-​and-​effect plots are overwhelmed by incident, evocative descriptions truncated, accounts of characters’ subjective states formulized, lengthy dialogues enacting social relationships curtailed, narratorial excursions

The Popular Novel, 1790–1820     515 and reflexivity cut. Novelized dramas were action-​packed melodramas associated with plebeian audiences. As with the old favourites, author was rarely indicated. The major difference from the old favourites was the novelties’ adaptation for their particular lower-​and lower-​middle-​class readers of the identity-​mystery romance, the informing myth of many full-​length popular/​modern novels read by the better-​off middle classes. The period’s other major form of popular novel-​for-​purchase was full-​length but sold in numbers, in a serial collection or single novel. Collections comprised earlier and/​ or recent popular novels, usually in sixpenny numbers but also moving upmarket to expensive whole-​volume or whole-​set collections. Single number-​trade novels were reprints or original. Pioneering the sixpenny-​number serial collection, and giving ‘shape to a body of work that had been largely amorphous, ephemeral’, was James Harrison’s Novelist’s Magazine.30 It appeared in weekly (initially perhaps monthly) double-​column numbers from October 1779, in London and through provincial agents. This was, advertisements proclaimed, ‘beautifully printed on superfine paper, and ornamented with a truly elegant and original copper-​plate, designed and engraved by the most capital artists, in a stile far superior to the embellishments of any work hitherto offered to the publick’.31 Authors or works in the twenty-​three volumes, at a dozen or more numbers per volume, included Henry Fielding, Hawkesworth, Goldsmith, Langhorne, Smollett, Voltaire, Le Sage, Sterne, Gueulette, Dodd, Marmontel, de Mouhy, Kelly, Cervantes, Swift, Sarah Fielding, de Graffigny, Richardson, Lennox, Kimber, Paltock, Haywood, Persian Tales, Avellaneda, Marivaux, Fénelon, de Vergy, the Arabian Nights, Coventry, Peruvian Tales, Gaudentio di Lucca, Longueville, Shebbeare, Frances Sheridan, Goethe, Johnson, Collyer, and Hill. Success prompted competition, but Harrison republished through the next two decades, renewing assurances of elegant format, unexpurgated and uncondensed texts, and—​indicating awareness in a 1790 advertisement that many regarded novels as dangerous—​moral and intellectual benefit: every feeling heart, every susceptible mind, must be sufficiently acquainted with the power of this species of literature. Where is the eye that does not brighten at the recital of injured merit triumphant; or sacrifice its humid libation at the shrine of suffering virtue! Nor is the pleasure by any means to be despised, which arises from the perusal of such ingenious performances as render vicious characters the object of ridicule; and furnish comick amusement for sensible and virtuous minds, from the follies and vices of the depraved part of mankind.32

The series was republished as The Novelist’s Magazine; or, Pocket Library of Select Novels from 1 January 1803, dedicated with permission to His Majesty, but T. Lovewell bought 30  Richard C. Taylor, ‘James Harrison, The Novelist’s Magazine, and the Early Canonizing of the English Novel’, Studies in English Literature 33/​3 (1993), 638. 31  London Evening Post, 9 March 1780. 32  The Diary or Woodfall’s Register, London, 20 May 1790 [2]‌.

516

516   GARY KELLY its remaining stock within the year.33 The collection was valuable and fashionable enough to be advertised regularly over the following decades in auctions of upmarket household effects and of ‘elegant’ libraries of deceased or bankrupt ‘gentlemen’. Rivals probed the market. In the 1790s Wenman and Hodgson proposed weekly Saturday publication of volumes of novelists, essayists, and poets at a shilling or shilling and sixpence, and ‘still farther to accommodate the Public … propose, that all the NOVELS comprised in their plan, shall be published WEEKLY, at the same time as the Volumes, divided into SIXPENNY NUMBERS’.34 The major competitor was number-​ trade specialist Charles Cooke, whose father learned the trade from pioneer Alexander Hogg. Charles took over his father’s business in 1789. He advertised for sale in October 1792 the first sixpenny number, from Tom Jones, of ‘Select British Novels’, ‘embellished’ with ‘A beautiful engraved Vignette Title Page’, ‘A Copper-​plate Dedication, to the Prince of Wales, with his Portrait, and elegant Devices’, and a ‘Representation of an interesting Scene’ in the novel.35 These ‘Cheap and Elegant Pocket Novels’ were also sold in volume form priced by the numbers each contained.36 Cooke’s selection was virtually identical with Harrison’s. In September 1809 Thomas Tegg, already publishing chapbook novels similar to those of Fairburn and others, advertised across the country the first sixpenny thirty-​six-​page number of Tegg’s Miniature Novelist’s Magazine, ‘by the most celebrated English Authors, including also Translations from Foreign Writers’, ‘printed on fine cream-​coloured paper, with new minion type’, each ‘Embellished with a beautiful engraving from an original painting’, and ‘conducted under the immediate direction and superintendance of Miss Burney’, to be ‘had of all booksellers and newsmen’.37 In targeted marketing, Tegg published sixpenny weekly number series such as ‘Tegg’s Collection of New Romances’ and ‘Tegg’s Collection of Gothic Tales’. Tegg would go on to innovate in book-​auctioneering and sale of other publishers’ remainders, to the consternation and disdain of the upmarket trade. They soon responded, making Tegg’s redevelopment of Harrison seem popular and cheap in the sense of vulgar and tawdry. In 1810 a large conger of prominent publishers produced The British Novelists at 12 guineas (£12. 12s.) the fifty-​volume set, with biographical and critical prefaces by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, celebrator of Richardson and the revolutionary force of ‘modern novels’. The series was advertised as ‘uniform’ with The British Essayists38 to reassure customers still doubtful novels could be serious literature, though in a sense popular/​modern novels were narrativized essays on topics of interest and concern to their socially aspiring middle-​class readers. In view of its price and format, the set was often advertised ‘To the Conductors of Circulating Libraries’.39 Authors included Coventry, Lennox, Johnson, Johnstone, Hawkesworth, 33 

London Morning Chronicle, 9 November 1803 [1]‌. The World, London, 27 October 1791 [2]‌. 35  The World, London, 23 October 1792 [1]‌. 36  London Packet, 5 March 1794. 37  Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 30 September 1809 [2]‌. 38  London Morning Chronicle, 23 August 1810 [2]‌. 39  Portsmouth Hampshire Telegraph, 5 November 1810 [2]‌. 34 

The Popular Novel, 1790–1820     517 Frances Brooke, Walpole, Goldsmith, Mackenzie, Smollett, Graves, Reeve, Burney, Moore, Smith, Radcliffe, Bage, Inchbald, and Edgeworth. Compared to the Novelist’s Magazine there were fewer novels, few comic or picaresque novels, more recent novels, more women novelists,40 no French novels, no Cervantes or Le Sage, and a higher proportion of moral and social-​critical novels. Many of the novels had recently been circulating library ‘novels of the day’, were by known reform sympathizers, depicted the conflict of subjective and social identity characteristic of upmarket Romantic literature, and deployed the cause-​and-​effect plot and hypotactic narrative structure of the period’s ‘philosophical’, or social-​critical, novels. Barbauld’s series assembled earlier and recent works in a canon of arguably ‘serious’, artistic, morally reformative, and socially progressive novels. These were ‘modern’ novels in addressing the emergent coalition of educated middle-​class elites leading social, economic, political, and cultural modernization and engaged in refashioning Britain as a modern state. From the late 1810s a new form of single-​volume novel-​in-​numbers issued from number-​trade specialists such as Virtue, Kelly, Jones, Gleave of Manchester, and Fisher of Liverpool, possibly by mutual arrangement. These novels included reprints of circulating library successes, such as Roche’s Children of the Abbey, the anonymous Fatherless Fanny, and Helme’s Farmer of Inglewood Forest and St. Clair of the Isles, and original, perhaps commissioned, novels by Sarah Green, Hannah Maria Jones, and Catherine Ward. As with similar works, each number was rarely and only accidentally complete in itself, usually ending in mid-​chapter or mid-​sentence, continued in the next number, thereby weakening the reader enticement of seriality characteristic of later novels purposely written as instalments. The earlier number-​trade novels appeared alongside their publishers’ usual productions: number-​editions of the Bible, Puritan and Dissenting religious writers, manuals and encyclopedias of practical knowledge, books on contemporary events and personages, and individual ‘classic’ and moralistic or religious poets, novelists, and essayists. Like the chapbook novelties they resemble, the new number-​novels were both titillating and moralistic, predominantly identity-​mystery romances of ‘virtue in distress’. They similarly complemented the rest of their publishers’ lists, fictionalizing the middle-​ class and lower-​middle-​class interests, values, and culture the lists addressed. Republication in 1820 of Barbauld’s British Novelists indicated continuing appetite of the socially aspiring, materially comfortable, aesthetically anxious, and self-​consciously respectable middle classes for a ‘selected’ morally and critically validated set of popular/​ modern novels. But new series also extended Harrison’s and Cooke’s versions. Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library edited semi-​anonymously by Sir Walter Scott began appearing in 1821, in ten double-​column volumes at 28 shillings each, when an upmarket three-​volume circulating library novel might sell for 20 shillings or more. As contrast, Limbird’s British Novelists began appearing late in 1823 in double-​column twopenny weekly numbers or tenpenny parts, and later sixpenny monthly parts. Then in 1831 Barbauld’s version of the

40 

Claudia L. Johnson, ‘ “Let Me Make the Novels of a Country”: Barbauld’s The British Novelists (1810/​ 1820)’, Novel 34/​2 (2001), 163–​79.

518

518   GARY KELLY popular novel was comprehensively refashioned with the appearance of the first six-​shilling, ‘neatly bound’, ‘beautifully embellished’ volume of reprint ‘Standard Novels’ from Colburn and Bentley, leading publisher of upmarket circulating library novels. Each ‘Standard’ novel was revised by the author if living and furnished with a critical preface. Advertisements declared the series ‘uniform’ with the then appearing monthly volumes of Scott’s revised and annotated Waverley Novels. The Waverley Novels were themselves a diverse and comprehensive revision of the kinds of ‘popular’ novels republished by Harrison and Cooke and were the most respected popular (in several senses) novels of the age, and this republication of them was a masterpiece of marketing.41 Advertisements also proclaimed that, unlike works of earlier ‘great masters of fiction’ who were, ‘if not immoral in their aim, exceedingly impure in their details’, the Standard Novels were ‘made subservient to the purposes of instruction, in acquainting us with the hearts and motives of our fellow-​creatures—​in familiarizing us with many-​colored life—​in telling us what is best to imitate—​in warning us what we ought to shun, and in demonstrating, by its almost living examples, the fatal consequences of rashness and vice’.42 Indicating their impact, it was the Standard Novels editions of Austen that enabled her, after some decades of obscurity, to become a ‘classic’ in the early Victorian age. What meanings would their purchasers and borrowers make from collections, individual number-​trade novels, or circulating library novels, as objects and as reading matter? As objects, and like much else at the time, all novels were theoretically both commercial and democratic, available to whomever could pay. As objects, individual circulating library novels contributed to a culture of commercialized consumption, accentuated by rental, in which the meaning and value of objects, like those of paper currency, fluctuated and depended on opinion. To rent and read a ‘novel of the day’ was, among other things, to participate in a fashion system that depicted and articulated social and cultural codes of distinction, difference, and hierarchy. Yet as a class of objects, circulating library novels offered, notoriously (as seen earlier), continuance and sameness in apparent (and actual) diversity and change. By contrast, purchased ‘standard’ novels offered stability and permanence of meaning and value. As objects, purchased novels could be ‘furniture books’ for display in the home alongside similar books indicating, to oneself, family, friends, and professional associates, possession of a certain culture and hence status, and of the knowledge, stable income, and will to acquire the objects—​whether they were read or not. By the late eighteenth century, upper-​and middle-​class homes increasingly included a ‘library’ or ‘parlour’ for family, social, and business use and accommodating furniture books from the family Bible to belles-​lettres.43 Between the 1790s and 1820s it became affordable and acceptable to include novels alongside ‘standard’ poets, essayists, histories, travels, religion and theology, and other ‘solid’ and ‘useful’ knowledge. Circulating library novels were understood to be fashionable and hence ephemeral; as a writer in the Monthly Magazine 41 

Jane Millgate, Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1987). Bury and Norwich Post, 11 January 1832 [1]‌. 43 Raven, The Business of Books, 196. 42 

The Popular Novel, 1790–1820     519 asked in 1829, ‘Who reads a circulating library novel twice?’44 Novel collections and even number-​trade novels represented ‘classic’ or ‘standard’ literature, for rereading, of recurring or lasting value and use to the reader, and indeed, as heritable property, to succeeding generations. Further, novels whether owned or rented participated in a material economy of repetition, the former available for rereading across a lifespan, against changing yet perduring ideas of self and world, the latter offering ever-​varying individual versions of a set of similar themes and forms, against the same changes. As reading matter, all novels could be used as readers wished or required. All novels could ‘entertain’ in a strong sense, enabling readers to ‘admit to consideration’ unlived possibilities and to imagine life and the world otherwise, leading to critical views of them and sometimes to attempts to change them. Taken together, such novels, like both old-​favourite and novelty-​chapbook fiction, could constitute for readers a mega-​ text comprising a world view and set of knowledges. Readers could make from them an encyclopedia of and manual for everyday life in modernity, with its increasing pace and scale of change, reorganization of time and space, enhanced dependence on abstract systems from government to banking, changing conditions of risk and trust, requirement to disembed oneself from inherited community and join different social alignments, and consequent pressure for constant self-​reflexive identity re-​formation.45 Regardless of what was considered ‘literary quality’, then and now, and whether popular/​modern novels were comic, sentimental, satirical, or didactic, or were set in past or present, familiar or exotic locations, ‘high’ or ‘low’ society, they offered examples good and bad of subjective being, aesthetic responsiveness, critical judgement, moral discernment, ethical conduct, social manners, effective speaking and writing, social values and relations, religious or political beliefs, cultural and intellectual knowledges. Most important, readers could make of such novels myths of the everyday, or explanations and aetiologies of their experience and validation of their material interests and aspirations. The myth informing many or most popular/​modern novels was the identity-​mystery romance, extending from Tom Jones to Fatherless Fanny to Oliver Twist and beyond. This took diverse forms but its core was a plot of exile, recognition, and return. A protagonist is ejected from ‘home’, often by hostile conspiracy, forced into a series of adventures ‘on the road’, and reaches a nadir of actual or apparent wrongdoing or even criminality. Just then, however, the protagonist is revealed to the world, by some fortuitously appearing witness or document, to be the meritorious individual that he or she really is (as the reader knew or suspected all along), and is installed in or restored to ‘rightful’ personal identity, family relations, social status, material estate, and true love—​the age’s marker of the subjective absolute opposing merely relative social identities. This form was refashioned for different social formations but derived ultimately from Greek New Comedy and could be found in other ‘popular’ forms, such as Shakespearean comedy, eighteenth-​century sentimental comedy, and Romantic melodrama. Appearing

44  45 

Monthly Magazine 7 (February 1829), 172. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP), c­ hapter 1.

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520   GARY KELLY by the 1740s, the identity-​mystery romance refashioned the earlier picaresque form, from Guzman de Alfarache to Robinson Crusoe, with its similarity to the lottery myth of the old chapbook literature. Emergence of the identity-​mystery romance as found in popular/​modern novels coincided with increase in numbers, wealth, power, and self-​ consciousness of the commercial and professional middle classes, against both the dominant landed class and the volatile labouring classes. Again, historical reconstruction of these middle-​class readers’ lives helps,46 warranting speculation that they read the identity-​mystery romance as a myth, or explanation, aetiology, and validation, of what they saw as their subjective and material worth and consequent ‘rights’ against marginalization by the dominant class, danger of being ‘mistaken’ for the merely plebeian or ‘popular’, and anxiety about falling, through ignorance or inadvertence, mischance or misjudgement, into that condition. This myth had many variations from Tom Jones to Fatherless Fanny, including self-​ misrecognition from Lennox and Graves to Austen and Scott, social misrecognition in sentimental and Gothic novels from Walpole and Reeve to Smith and Radcliffe, moral and social misrecognition in Burney and Austen, social-​political persecution in Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman, misrepresentation in Newgate and ‘Silver Fork’ novels of the 1820s and 1830s, and so on. Whatever the variant, whether found in owned or rented novels, in sixpenny-​chapbook or full-​length format, this myth had to be reread, repeatedly re-​engaged, hence making certain novels ‘popular’, because the conditions the myth addressed continued central to novel readers’ real material interests. It was not the only myth readable into the popular novels of these decades, but it was comprehensive, central, powerful, and adaptable and may well, as contemporary commentators like Barbauld suggested, have helped its readers imagine, desire, pursue, and assume what they saw as their ‘rightful’ place in the emergent modern state.

Select Bibliography Blakey, Dorothy, The Minerva Press, 1790–​1820 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1939). Kelly, Gary, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789–​1830 (London and New York: Longman, 1989). Landon, Richard G. (ed.), Book Selling and Book Buying: Aspects of the Nineteenth-​Century British and North American Book Trade (Chicago: American Library Association, 1978). McLeod, Deborah Anne, ‘The Minerva Press’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Alberta, 1997). Maxwell, Richard, and Katie Trumpener (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2008). Raven, James, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–​1850 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007).

46 

For instance, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1750–​1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987).

Chapter 31

T he Evangeli c a l  Nov e l Lisa Wood

‘Not a few of the evils of the present day arise from a new and perverted application of terms,’1 writes Hannah More in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), and it is a wise warning when approaching the evangelical novel of the eighteenth century. Any discussion of this genre is complicated by a number of considerations. First, evangelicalism itself in the eighteenth century is far from homogeneous and incorporates a range of groups and movements, some within and some outside of Anglicanism. These groups rarely defined themselves using the term ‘evangelicalism’; it is a term often applied retrospectively based on particular sets of characteristics. Secondly, there are challenges in tracing the influence of evangelicalism in literary texts. Identifying the characteristics of a religious movement (or, indeed, a social or political movement) in a secular text defined by the criteria of literature (plot, narration, fictionality) is a slippery task. Thirdly, from the perspective of literary history, the evangelical novel is only truly recognizable at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Evangelicals began to experiment with fiction during the late eighteenth century, in the form of tracts such as those published by the Cheap Repository in the 1790s (1795–​8), but lengthier evangelical narratives were primarily a nineteenth-​ century development. Finally, authors intent on promoting evangelical ‘messages’ in their narratives used a variety of different generic forms, including historical fiction, as in the case of Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810), and the sentimental novel, as used by Barbara Hofland in her novels of piety in distress, making the identification of the formal characteristics of the evangelical novel a critical challenge. In spite of (or perhaps because of) these challenges, this essay will argue that an examination of the evangelical novel during the long eighteenth century is absolutely relevant, and can create a deeper understanding of the history of the novel more generally. Because evangelicalism is affective, a religion ‘of the heart’ as William Wilberforce put it, its primary focus is similar to that of the novel as a form. Evangelicalism uses individual feeling and experience 1 

Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education with a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune (London, 1799), 1: 68.

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522   LISA WOOD as a method for conversion; the novel takes individual experience as its main subject. Similarly, the evangelical suspicion of fantasy as a literary mode that encourages readers to neglect their duties in this world (spiritual development and social utility, or ‘good works’), led writers to adhere to a form of realism that helped to define the novel of the nineteenth century. For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on writers who were professed evangelicals, and who used the novel form to promote an evangelical purpose. My analysis will focus on the work of three key evangelical authors:  Hannah More (1745–​1833), Mary Brunton (1778–​1818), and Barbara Hofland (1770–​1844). All three of these writers shared theological principles—​outlined in letters and non-​fictional texts—​that are closely associated with the evangelical movement of the late eighteenth century. All three were highly respected by reviewers, and their works were well received by the reading public, often going through multiple printings and selling enough copies to qualify as ‘best-​sellers’. The three authors were recognized as sharing common goals by their contemporaries, and were regularly compared to each other in reviews. If we focus on the work of these core writers, we can begin to define the specific characteristics of the evangelical novel as a literary form.

Evangelicalism in the Eighteenth Century When we hear the term ‘evangelicalism’ at the beginning of the twenty-​first century, we commonly associate it with the conservative fundamentalist Christianity of the American South. Forms of evangelicalism currently flourish all over the world, and the religious movement that began in the eighteenth century has proliferated into a bewildering array of local practices and sects. Before we can usefully discuss the evangelical novel, therefore, we need a clear sense of the eighteenth-​century evangelicalism that provided the background for its development. The most widely accepted definition of British evangelicalism was laid out by D. W. Bebbington in 1989, and is commonly referred to as the ‘Bebbington Quadrilateral’. Bebbington’s seminal work, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, identifies four key characteristics of evangelicalism: conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism. In other words, evangelicals privilege the transformative experience of conversion; social action, or ‘the expression of the gospel in effort’; the centrality of Scripture in religious practice; and the significance of Christ’s sacrifice for humanity on the Cross (the ‘doctrine of atonement’). The first three of these characteristics lay particular emphasis on the actions and experiences of the individual: evangelical Christians develop a personal relationship with God through their reading of Scripture, and transform this individual understanding into charitable acts, or ‘good works’. The emphasis on conversion requires intense inward attention

The Evangelical Novel   523 to the individual’s spiritual development, an almost obsessive daily accounting that is referred to as ‘self-​examination’ or ‘self-​discipline’.2 Historically, evangelicalism is first identifiable in the grass-​ roots movement led by John Wesley (1703–​91) and Charles Wesley (1707–​88), in association with George Whitefield (1714–​70), which became Methodism. Methodism proposed the integration—​or reintegration—​of emotion into the practice of Protestantism. The Methodist conversion experience (or ‘sanctification’) was often described in ecstatic terms, as a strong and overwhelming experience of emotional, spiritual, and psychological transformation.3 Through their practice of open-​air itinerant preaching and their targeting of working-​class populations, early Methodists gained the majority of their following among the lower ranks of society. In spite of the fact that the Wesleys and Whitefield were Anglican, from the beginning the movement created controversy within the Established Church. Not only did Methodism condone preaching by non-​ ordained and female believers (as recounted later in George Eliot’s Adam Bede [1859]), but the movement’s clear appeal to the masses raised concerns about potential political subversiveness. By the end of the century, Hannah More’s association with an alleged Methodist escalated into a national scandal known as the ‘Blagdon Controversy’ (1799–​ 1802) and nearly destroyed her career as a conduct-​book writer and moralist.4 The branch of evangelicalism most relevant to this essay is a more conservative movement that positioned itself within the Established Anglican Church, and, though it pushed against the boundaries of Anglican orthodoxy, carefully avoided transgressing them. (Establishment Evangelicalism that developed within the national churches of England and Scotland is generally distinguished from Methodism and other movements by capitalizing the ‘E’; I follow convention here.) This form of Evangelicalism adopted the four characteristics of the Bebbington Quadrilateral, but insisted on the socially stabilizing effects of this religion ‘of the heart’. According to William Wilberforce (1759–​1833), one of Evangelicalism’s major proponents, belief in the central principles of Protestant Christianity was not sufficient; instead, he foregrounded the ‘transforming influence in the heart’ of Christian doctrine. ‘Professed’ or ‘nominal’ Christians—​those who simply observed the external requirements of Anglican practice—​are described as suffering from a ‘palsy at the heart’; Evangelicalism therefore becomes a cure for the ‘disease’ of ‘languid’ Christianity. Not only is it a cure for superficial Christianity, but, claimed central Evangelical thinkers, a method for ensuring the stability of the social formation, reinforcing the power of the elite, and maintaining the status quo. As Wilberforce puts it in his influential Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians (1797), ‘it has graciously pleased the Supreme Being so to arrange the constitution of 2  D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2–​3. 3  Keith Haartman, ‘Religious Ecstasy and Personality Transformation in John Wesley’s Methodism: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations’, Archive for the Psychology of Religion 29 (2007), 3–​35. 4  Mitzi Myers, ‘ “A Peculiar Protection”: Hannah More and the Cultural Politics of the Blagdon Controversy’, in Beth Fowkes Tobin (ed.), History, Gender and Eighteenth-​Century Literature (Athens,

524

524   LISA WOOD things, as to render the prevalence of true religion [i.e., Evangelicalism] and of pure morality conducive to the well-​being of states, and the preservation of civil order’.5 The periodical mouthpiece for Anglican Evangelicalism, the Christian Observer, prefaces its first volume with the following statement: ‘We have no interests to serve but those of true Christianity: no schemes to prosecute, but those of making our fellow-​creatures good subjects, and good Christians; teaching them to fear God and honour the King.’6 Syntactically, the statement argues the inseparability of Evangelicalism and political stability: ‘good Christians’ are ‘good subjects’, and respect for God and King are linked. If the congruence of Evangelical and elite interests is so obvious, however, why is there a need to argue it so vociferously? On the surface, the Evangelicals of the late eighteenth century had every reason to work to maintain the status quo. The most vocal and visible among them were wealthy and socially well positioned, with influential positions at universities (Charles Simeon at Cambridge), in government (William Wilberforce), and within the clergy (Bishop Porteous of London). This powerful group of Evangelicals (who held what Mark Noll calls the ‘patrician position’ within evangelicalism7) was called retrospectively the ‘Clapham sect’ or the ‘Clapham Saints’, as a consequence of a period when many (including Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay, John Venn, and Henry Thornton) lived around Clapham Common, while Wilberforce and his Evangelical colleagues in Parliament were (often mockingly) referred to as the ‘Saints’. Unlike Methodism, which functioned on the periphery of orthodoxy, Anglican Evangelicalism worked to change the Church from within, using powerful political and social influence to ‘convert’ and train Anglican clergy in the principles of Evangelicalism. A trust fund was established to purchase empty clerical livings for suitably trained Evangelical clergy, such as Patrick Brontë in Haworth. High Church contemporaries saw in Evangelicalism’s influence the possibility of a radical destabilizing of the social order. And, despite the insistence of prominent figures like Hannah More and Wilberforce that Evangelical work in fact defends the ‘existing establishments’, many modern historians see in the movement the beginnings of radical social change. Gerald Newman, in The Rise of English Nationalism, includes Evangelicals (whom he calls ‘drastic moral and social revolutionaries’) within a radical nationalist movement that worked to reform the aristocracy according to middle-​class values: ‘an extremely radical process was now working under cover of an extremely conservative one’.8 F. K. Prochaska traces the fight for women’s suffrage back to the activism associated with late-​eighteenth-​century Evangelicalism.9 Evangelicalism created unprecedented GA: U of Georgia P, 1994); Anne Stott, ‘Hannah More and the Blagdon Controversy, 1799–​1802’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51/​2 (2000), 319–​46. 5  William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians (London: David, 1834), 40, 43, 274. 6  Christian Observer 1 (1802), p. vii. 7  Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity P, 2003), 237. 8  Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–​1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 234–​5. 9  F. K. Prochaska, The Republic of Britain: 1760–2000 (London: Allen Lane, 2000).

The Evangelical Novel   525 opportunities for women to engage in activism in the community in the form of charity, and, while Evangelicals did not endorse women’s involvement in politics, ‘good works’ provided a basis and a model for women’s developing influence within the community and the Church. Linda Colley identifies the period at the end of the eighteenth century as one in which the aristocracy came under increasing attack, and were encouraged to reshape themselves according to standards of middle-​class respectability in order to justify their continued existence.10 Evangelicals played a central role in publicizing both the flaws of the ruling classes and the necessity for their reform. Hannah More’s conduct books targeting the elite, Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788), Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), and Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess (1805), went through impressive multiple printings and achieved significant sales for the period. These tensions within Evangelicalism preclude simplistic interpretations of Evangelicals’ actions and texts as either subversive or reactionary; in most cases, the novels produced within this milieu are difficult to categorize politically or ideologically without compromising the complex relationship of Evangelical narratives to their social and historical context.

Evangelicalism and the Novel The recent Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (2007) gives a sense of the critical challenge of analysis at the intersection of religion and literature. In her introductory essay, Elisabeth Jay comments, ‘unlike the serried ranks of biblical commentaries, or magisterial literary histories that thunder forth from the presses, this hybrid venture boasts no unassailable pedigree, or universally acknowledged territory’.11 Studying the evangelical novel poses similar and additional challenges, some created by the processes of canon formation, and others by the influence of postmodernism on contemporary literary criticism. In spite of tremendous popularity at the time of their publication (Barbara Hofland’s The Clergyman’s Widow [1812], for example, went through many editions and sold 17,000 copies, making it a best-​seller in the period),12 evangelical novels have never held a place in the canon of British literature, and rarely appear in the undergraduate curriculum. For the most part, until very recently, evangelical fiction has been buried in footnotes to literary history, where it is appreciated for the light it can shed on the writing of canonical authors like Austen, Wordsworth, and Keats, through the identification of influence, or for the way in which it fleshes out the broader social, political, and religious contexts in which more valued texts were produced. 10 

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-​1837 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1990). Elisabeth Jay, ‘Now and in England’, in Andrew Hass, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 3. 12  Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy (eds.), Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990), 530. 11 

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526   LISA WOOD There are a number of reasons for this exclusion. The evangelical novel, grounded in a movement that privileges conversion and activism, has a spiritual and didactic function: in general, its aesthetic effects are less important than its capacity to effect change in the reader. The inherent didacticism of the form puts it at odds with the theory of the novel that developed over the nineteenth century, in which, to use Henry James’s formulation, a ‘conscious moral purpose’ is inimical to the ‘art of fiction’.13 This approach reached its twentieth-​century critical apotheosis in New Criticism, where the ‘intentional fallacy’ makes an analysis of didactic fiction logically impossible. Similarly, post-​structuralist criticism dismisses the didactic as a mode of literature, preferring instead those texts that exhibit plurality of meaning, heteroglossia, and the ‘free play’ of the signifier. Raman Selden identifies ‘a tendency among recent critics to treat polyphonic and other kinds of “plural” text as normative rather than as eccentric; that is, they treat them as more truly literary than more univocal (monologic) kinds of writing’.14 Susan Rubin Suleiman, whose Authoritarian Fictions takes as its subject this type of ‘univocal’ narrative, notes: ‘Modern criticism has been tremendously wary of any literary work that “means to say something” (that has a “message”)’, preferring instead texts that ‘multiply meaning or … “pulverize” it’.15 Didactic evangelical texts depend for their efficacy on the transmission of a clear ‘message’, or, as Lynne Vallone puts it: ‘Evangelical fiction attempts to organize experience from a consistent, coherent vantage point.’16 The narratives’ transformative purpose is always privileged over considerations of style, and clarity must take precedence over narrative complexity and texture. As such, by post-​structuralist standards, they barely qualify as ‘literary’. Finally, two other factors have affected the critical reception of eighteenth-​century Evangelical fiction: the gender of the authors, and the age of the intended audience. The majority of Evangelical novels were written by women, and were explicitly targeted at the ‘rising generation’, whose members were considered more malleable, and most in need of guidance. The story of women’s exclusion from the literary canon is now well established, and a similar process has occurred in the field of children’s and ‘young adult’ literature. This body of literature has been, and continues to be, marginalized within departments of English and the field of literary criticism more generally, in spite of the efforts of numerous international children’s literature associations. Children’s literature, with some notable exceptions (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [1865] and Peter and Wendy [1911], for example), is often considered too simplistic for serious critical analysis. Evangelical novels like More’s Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, Mary Brunton’s Self-​ Control (1810), and Barbara Hofland’s The Blind Farmer and His Children (1816) were 13  Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, in Charles Kaplan (ed.), Criticism: The Major Statements (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 402. 14  Raman Selden, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 20. 15  Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (Princeton: Princeton UP), 18, 22. 16  Lynne Vallone, Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995), 70.

The Evangelical Novel   527 explicitly written to educate young people on the cusp of adult life, though they were often consumed by readers of all ages. The choice of the novel as a vehicle for Evangelical didacticism was highly strategic, and not without controversy. Evangelicals, who promoted literacy primarily as a method of encouraging an individual relationship to God and Scripture, regularly expressed concern about the potential corrupting influence of the novel genre. Hannah More complained that ‘the corruption occasioned by these books has spread so wide, and descended so low … [that] among milliners, mantua-​makers, and other trades where numbers work together, the labour of one girl is frequently sacrificed that she may be spared to read those mischievous books to the others’.17 Using a metaphor common in the period, Mary Brunton constructs a theory in which the novel becomes a vehicle for ‘poisoning’ the rising generation: ‘The appetite for fiction is indeed universal, and has unfortunately been made the occasion of conveying poison of every description into the youthful mind.’ Yet the metaphor of poison provides the justification for writing fiction as well: ‘Why must the antidote be confined to such forms as are sure to be rejected by those who need it the most?’18 If we recognize that the foremost goal of the evangelical novel was to carry out the spiritual work of evangelical conversion, it becomes apparent that the form of the narrative is of less importance than the effect it has on its readers, and can be highly variable. The choice of the novel for this task was in many ways opportunistic, a strategic method for carrying out the ‘good work’ of religious instruction. The novel was not only popular and likely to attract, and ideally transform, readers, but specific qualities of the realist novel—​in particular, its focus on the individual—​made it an appropriate match for the Evangelical message. The Evangelical novel has been read usefully as a precursor to Victorian literature, as well as in terms of women’s negotiations of the public sphere, marriage, and widowhood. It is only rarely, however, that the texts themselves become the subject of literary analysis. How do we read these narratives, that have so often been found wanting in terms of their literariness, as literary texts? One way is to acknowledge that their didacticism—​ their impulse towards conversion—​is essential to their literary practice. This aspect of Evangelicalism shares qualities with didactic literature and propaganda, and we can usefully draw from criticism in those areas. In all of these critical approaches, the effect of the text on the reader is pre-​eminent, and we cannot begin to understand the evangelical novel without acknowledging the central role of the reader to the general purpose of the text. I will take as a key premise here that evangelical novels construct their ideal readers as malleable subjects for whom the act of reading may become the catalyst for the transformation of conversion—​this is the novels’ central purpose, and the literary structure is dependent upon this religious end. While Evangelical authors wrote for other reasons (notably to support themselves and their families, as in the case of Barbara Hofland), these coexisted with the primary aim of conversion. This is the central characteristic of 17 More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 1: 190–​1. 18 

Mary Brunton, Discipline: A Novel. To which is prefixed, A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Author, including extracts from her Correspondence (London: Richard Bentley, 1849), 59.

528

528   LISA WOOD the evangelical novel. Like satire, evangelical literature depends upon an existing body of knowledge in the reader—​in this case, knowledge of the basic principles of British Protestantism—​and also like satire, it expects to have an effect on the reader, though spiritual rather than intellectual. This is not to suggest that evangelical fiction requires a passive reader; rather, readers are expected to take part in the interpretive process, actively linking the text to past experience and to future behaviour. There are a number of useful ways to approach critically literature with a ‘message’, considerations that may not be as relevant to literature that is less insistently intentional. As Gregory Jackson argues, the ‘ “homiletic novel” … used fictional narrative to motivate real conversions’.19 It does this, in Jackson’s model, through the ‘aesthetics of immediacy’, in which writers appeal to the senses to create a vivid representation of human experience. Readers are expected to put themselves in the position of the protagonist, and learn religiously appropriate behaviour through the success or failure of the characters. Susan Suleiman’s model of propaganda fiction shares similarities:  ‘If the protagonist evolves toward a euphoric position, the reader is incited to follow him in the right direction: the protagonist’s happiness is both a proof and a guarantee of the values he affirms. If the protagonist’s story “ends badly,” his failure also serves as a lesson or proof, but this time a contrario: the protagonist’s fate allows the reader to perceive the wrong road without following it.’20 An alignment between reader and protagonist is vital to the success of this strategy, and one of the ways that authors achieved this goal was through the use of realism. If the novel genre was suspect, romance was even more so, and Evangelical authors without exception chose realism as their preferred novelistic mode. In their care to limit their narrative representations to the possible, some novels, such as Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, read almost as encyclopedias of the mundane. The benefit of this approach is to draw direct comparisons to the reader’s lived experience, maximizing the possibility that the reader will insert herself into the text, potentially leading to a beneficial didactic effect. Since Ian Watt’s seminal study, The Rise of the Novel (1957), it has become commonplace to identify it as a form closely implicated in the development of new concepts of selfhood and the individual during the eighteenth century. It is in the area of individualism that we can most easily identify the overlapping strands in Protestant evangelicalism, philosophy, society, and literature. Evangelicalism’s insistence on the significance of the individual connects to Lockean theories of the development of the self through sense experience, and to the priorities of the increasingly influential middle ranks, for whom individual betterment provided the stimulus for economic and social success, as well as a market for large numbers of self-​help books. With its focus on the particularities of individual human lives, the novel provides a venue in which these concerns can be explored; evangelical novels transfer the intense spiritual self-​examination of evangelical practice into a detailed anatomizing of the internal processes that lead to damnation or salvation. 19  Gregory S. Jackson, The Word and Its Witness: The Spiritualization of American Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009), 3. 20 Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, 73.

The Evangelical Novel   529 In his discussion of evangelical homiletic realism in the United States of the nineteenth century, Jackson observes that the defining characteristic of the mode is that it ‘mediates between the spiritual and the empirical in ways that mirror secular realism’s movement between the typological and the specific’.21 A similar observation could be made of the evangelical novel of the late eighteenth century. In his study of the evangelical conversion narrative—​a form that provided one of the central plot structures for evangelical novels—​D. Bruce Hindmarsh notes that ‘the narrative shape of these evangelical stories was clearly provided by the larger story of salvation history in the Bible’.22 In addition to asking readers to layer their own experience on top of that of the protagonist, evangelical fiction adds the further expectation of a knowledge of the central stories of Christianity, particularly the fall from Edenic innocence and subsequent redemption through Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Jackson notes that for evangelicals this layering does not compromise the principles of realism; instead, ‘religious adherents of homiletics assumed personal experience, illuminated by spiritual insight, to be the measure of reality’.23 In this context, the novel is not, as Lukács argued, ‘the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God’,24 but a record of the continued relevance of Christian theology. For Evangelicals, the reality constructed through the alignment of personal experience and scriptural story is the preferred reality, or the ‘true’ reality that we are blinded to by our concern with worldly issues. Any discussion of the evangelical novel needs to acknowledge the significance of tracts in the history of evangelical fiction. The first sustained attempt to use fiction as a vehicle for the promulgation of evangelical doctrine were the Cheap Repository Tracts produced by Hannah More and several colleagues (including her sisters). The Cheap Repository project began as a specific response to a political event: the publication of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791). Its first issue, ‘Village Politics’ (1792), uses the form of a dialogue between two workers to refute the more revolutionary aspects of Paine’s philosophy. Subsequent tracts, published between 1795 and 1798, most often use the more conventional narrative form of the exemplary tale. Characters in these stories provide either a good example—​like Betty Brown, the ‘St. Giles Orange Girl’, who finds God along with economic success—​or a negative one—​like Mary Wood, the lying housemaid, whose ‘death brought on by grief and shame at eighteen years of age, was the consequence of bad company, false promises, and FALSE EXCUSES’.25 The basic didactic narrative strategies of the evangelical novel are apparent here. The euphoric or dysphoric plots invite an association between reader and character, with the goal of shaping both behaviour and belief. And, though the plots and characterization are simpler and 21 Jackson, The Word and Its Witness, 6. 22 

D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: OUP, 2005), 8. 23 Jackson, The Word and Its Witness, 11. 24  Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-​Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin, 1988), 40. 25  Hannah More, ‘The History of Mary Wood, the Housemaid; or, The Danger of False Excuses’, in The History of Tom White (Smithfield, n.d.), 19.

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530   LISA WOOD less nuanced than expected in a novel, we can see in the tracts the basic plot structures and didactic strategies of the longer narratives. Hannah More’s Cœlebs in Search of a Wife (1808) holds a significant place in the history of the evangelical novel, and incorporates a number of the patterns established in the tracts. Cœlebs was More’s attempt to capitalize on the success of her use of fiction for Evangelical didactic purposes in the Cheap Repository Tracts, and is generally considered ‘the first major effort to combine the forces of two media so volatile as the evangelical idiom and the novel’. It was a wildly successful venture as well: the novel went through twelve editions and earned £2,000 in the first year, and was possibly ‘the most popular novel of the first two decades of the nineteenth century’, outselling even Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814).26 Cœlebs tells the story of Charles, the narrator, ‘a young man, not quite four and twenty, of an ancient and respectable family, and considerable estate in one of the northern counties’, in his search for an appropriate Evangelical wife. The narrative incorporates both negative and positive exemplary models, as Charles makes his way through the world and meets a range of inappropriate women, including an Amazon, a learned lady, a religious hypocrite, and a fashionably accomplished young lady, among others. The narrative is structured to limit possible interpretations, ensuring that readers draw the ‘correct’ conclusion: thus Charles’s responses to the each woman act as a moral guide, and More’s narrative is liberally interspersed with homiletic monologues by various characters which assist readers to reach the required interpretation. The accounts of these negative exemplars function in much the same way as tracts about characters such as Mary Wood, providing models readers are encouraged to avoid. The bulk of the narrative is devoted to the positive exemplary female character, Lucilla Stanley; she is ‘from nature—​a woman, gentle, feeling, animated, modest.—​She is, by education, elegant, informed, enlightened.—​She is, from religion, pious, humble, candid, charitable.’27 The novel ends with Charles endorsing this model of Evangelical femininity by choosing Lucilla as his wife, thereby encouraging the alignment of the reader with her values and characteristics. Hannah More’s tract, ‘The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain’, provides a useful example of evangelical literary strategies, in that it is structured according to a common exemplary plot, and, through its use of religious typology, illustrates the ways in which reality is constructed in the interstices of personal experience and biblical history. The story of the eponymous shepherd is focalized through Mr. Johnson, a travelling gentleman, whose opening ‘reflections’ on the natural scenes establish a model for the interpretation of the text: ‘we might be led by a sight of them to raise our views from the kingdom of nature to that of grace, and that the contemplation of God in his works might

26  Christine Krueger, The Reader’s Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-​ Century Social Discourse (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), 119; Karen Prior, ‘Hannah More, Didactic Tradition, and the Rise of the English Novel’, 1650–​1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 9 (2003), 70. 27  Hannah More, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife: Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals, 2 vols. (London, 1808), 1: 11, 23.

The Evangelical Novel   531 draw us to contemplate him in his word’. The tract provides an account of a shepherd who is disadvantaged by poverty, eight hungry children, a ‘very sickly’ wife, and a leaking roof, among other trials, and yet who ‘can always find out a reason for vindicating Providence’. The narrative itself is liberally interspersed with biblical references introduced by the shepherd, who provides a model of typological hermeneutics by running a continuous comparison between his own reality and the experiences of Abraham, King David, and Moses. When Mr. Johnson comments on his habit of scriptural comparison, the shepherd observes that ‘it applies to everything’, before proceeding, in true Anglican Evangelical fashion, to identify the ways in which adherence to a ‘religion which has its seat in the heart, and its fruits in the life’.28 In this way, ‘The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain’ defends the status quo by encouraging acceptance of adversity. This model of Job-​ like devotion in spite of continued and excessive adversity is a trope that structures a number of Evangelical novels, including Mary Brunton’s Self-​Control (1810) and Barbara Hofland’s The Blind Farmer and His Children (1816). This form of narrative draws on qualities of the sentimental novel, in which the reader’s affections are intended to be engaged through the capacity for sympathy. Brunton’s protagonist in Self-​Control, Laura Montreville, is, like the shepherd, an extraordinary example of piety and virtue who loses her beloved father, supports herself by painting, and is pursued for years by an unscrupulous rake who ultimately kidnaps and ships her to North America, where she improbably escapes by riding a canoe over a massive waterfall to freedom. Her imprisonment in the wilderness of the New World becomes a metaphor for her ‘darkened soul’, and provides the setting for her deepest struggles with her Evangelical faith. Ultimately she learns ‘that the rugged and slippery ways of this dark wilderness shall, at the dawn of everlasting day, be owned as the fittest for conducting us to the house of our Father’. Significantly for the Evangelical purposes of the novel, Laura’s escape is only possible once she struggles through this internal wilderness and rediscovers her faith. ‘The raptures of faith beamed on her soul. By degrees they triumphed over every fear’,29 making her bold escape stratagem possible. Jane Austen, observing the improbability of Laura’s ideal virtue, commented: ‘I declare I do not know whether Laura’s passage down the American River, is not the most natural, possible, every-​day thing she ever does.​‘30 Judged by the standards of secular realism—​with the expectation of what Austen calls ‘Nature’ and ‘Probability’—​the novel is necessarily lacking. A more recent critic has argued that Brunton’s ‘large scale idealizations’, her decision to foreground moral and religious concerns, are the source of ‘real aesthetic and critical weaknesses’.31 To make this argument is to miss the point of Evangelical fiction, where ‘probability’ has less to do with what occurs or may occur in 28 

Hannah More, The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, and Other Tales (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1857), 8, 13, 18, 31, 35. 29  Mary Brunton, Self-​Control (London: Bentley, 1849), 483, 466, 482. 30  Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (new edn., Oxford: OUP, 1995), 234. 31  Katrin R. Burlin, ‘ “At the Crossroads”: Sister Authors and the Sister Arts’, in Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (eds.), Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–​1815 (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1986), 68.

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532   LISA WOOD this world, than in the relationship between the material and the ideal. As with the shepherd of Salisbury Plain, readers are expected to engage actively with the text, reading the gaps between their characters and Laura’s, and to transform this critical exercise into action—​turning their attention from the fiction to God ‘in his word’. Like the shepherd, Hofland’s blind farmer Norton has ‘a house full of children, that keeps him poor’, and a wife who is ‘not over and above strong’. In the trend towards consolidating holdings to create larger farms, Norton loses his farm and begins the inevitable journey towards poverty. A much simpler narrative than Self-​Control, The Blind Farmer is intended specifically for young adult readers. The events in the narrative are notable for their lack of suspense; the inevitable decline is followed by an equally inevitable rise towards moderate success that is the result of the ‘honesty and industry, piety and duty, unassuming modesty, and propriety of manners’ of the family. Like the ‘Shepherd of Salisbury Plain’, The Blind Farmer inculcates the value of pious patience under adversity, and reiterates the Evangelical insistence that ‘true religion’ entails an acceptance of one’s place in the social order. Farmer Norton, like Laura Montreville, is tested and struggles to keep his faith while suffering; while her struggle for faith is represented metaphorically through the wilderness, the defining metaphor in Hofland’s novel is blindness. When Norton recovers his vision through a cataract operation, his wife ‘once more saw his honest countenance illuminated with the light of heaven, and beheld the fullness of joy beam from those orbs so long consigned to darkness’.32 Another important Evangelical plot is based on the evangelical conversion narrative, and again we find examples in tracts as well as novels. During her last days in hospital, Mary Wood, the housemaid in More’s Cheap Repository Tract, ‘meekly applied her whole mind to obtain the forgiveness of God, through the merits of a saviour’.33 The story’s closure comes with Mary’s conversion to Evangelical Christianity, and gestures ahead to her salvation in heaven. Conversion narratives provided a staple of the religious press in the eighteenth century, and have been credited with the rapid spread of evangelicalism as methods of transportation improved, carrying them around the world. These narratives, though nominally non-​fictional, were highly formulaic in their structure and conventions; as Hindmarsh notes, ‘the Bible’s account of fall from innocence and return provided a structure and many topoi for these spiritual autobiographies’.34 The narrative arc, at its simplest level, follows this pattern: sin, crisis, spiritual struggle, conversion, contentment. The conversion is the climax of the plot, and the protagonist achieves, in this moment, a heightened sense of self—​a more authentic self—​grounded in the certainty of salvation. The conversion narrative provides the most entertaining of evangelical plots, in part because of its depiction of sin. One of the inescapable characteristics of this didactic plot is that it is required to represent what it opposes. As Michel Beaujour observes: ‘Although in practice the novel can be made to convey the Christian or Communist messages of self-​oblivion, deferred gratification, desire for the law, its deeper appeal always lies in the 32 

Barbara Hofland, The Blind Farmer and His Children (London: Harris and Son, 1823), 3, 202, 116. More, ‘History of Mary Wood’, 19. 34 Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 73, 8. 33 

The Evangelical Novel   533 depiction of sin, error, disorder, in all that is transgressive, excessive.’35 Representing sin is therefore a fine balancing act: the depiction needs to be alarming enough to prove the need for religious conversion, but not so vivid that it corrupts the young minds the fiction intends to teach. Mary Brunton’s second novel, Discipline (1814), is patterned after this model, and is intended, as her husband describes it in his memoir of her, ‘to show the means through which, when Self-​Control has been neglected, the mind must be trained by suffering ere it can hope for usefulness or for true enjoyment’ (28). The length and depth of suffering here far outweighs the relatively minor sins of the protagonist’s youth, helping to counterbalance the potential allure of vice. Brunton quite deliberately approached the composition of Discipline differently from her earlier novel, particularly in the characterization of her heroine. ‘If I ever undertake another lady,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘I will manage her in a very different manner. Laura is so decently kerchiefed, like our grandmothers, that to dress her is a work of time and pains’ (16). Following the convention of the conversion narrative, Discipline is narrated in the first person by Ellen Percy, whose stated, and very Evangelical, intention is ‘to warn others of the danger of their way’ (64). Also, as in a conversion narrative, the story is recounted by a considerably wiser narrator than the younger self whose flaws she describes in almost excessive detail. Her mature reflections intercede in the narrative through regular apostrophes that remind the reader of the instructive lessons to be learned: ‘How does one disorderly passion place us at the mercy of every creature who will use it as a tool to serve his purpose!’ (106), exhorts one. Ellen’s account begins by tracing the roots of her sinfulness in youth, when ‘I furnished an instance at least, if not a proof, of the corruption of human kind; being proud, petulant, and rebellious’. As in many didactic novels, these flaws are attributed to ‘certain accidents in my early education’ (65). Among other mishaps, Ellen loses her mother in childhood as a direct result of a temper tantrum. After her mother’s death, a close friend, Mrs. Mortimer, a model Evangelical, arrives to act as her unheeded ‘monitress’. Brunton is very careful to make her exemplar a committed Anglican. While young Ellen chooses to ‘sum up all reproach in one comprehensive epithet, a Methodist’, her older self acknowledges: ‘Not that she was really a sectary. On the contrary, she was an affectionate and dutiful daughter of the establishment, countenancing schismatics no further, than by adopting such of their doctrines and practices as are plainly scriptural, and by testifying towards them, on all occasions, whether of opposition or conformity, a charity which evinced the divinity of its own origin’ (84). Later in the novel, Mrs. Mortimer discourages Ellen from experimenting with chapel attendance, citing it as a duty to support the ‘national church’ (284) wherever possible. The narrator’s caution in defining the religious affiliation of her exemplar needs to be placed within the social context in which the novel was written, in which the Blagdon Controversy was in recent memory, and Evangelicals ran the risk of being damned as separatist Methodists. 35  Michel Beaujour, ‘Exemplary Pornography: Barrès, Loyola, and the Novel’, in Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), 348.

534

534   LISA WOOD Conversion narratives are teleological, in that they are structured around the transformative moment of religious conversion or awakening, and Discipline follows this model, comprehensively outlining the many minor sins that lead to Ellen Percy’s fall. ‘But the spirit of prayer had never touched my heart’ (155), she comments on her younger self, and she had no ‘habit of self-​examination’ (102); Ellen’s subsequent fall and religious rebirth form the primary narrative structure of the novel. Ellen’s conversion can only occur after she has lost everything: her wealthy merchant father is ruined and commits suicide, just as Ellen has agreed to elope with a grasping aristocrat (who, fortunately, discovers her financial ruin before he has ruined her honour). The mentorial, and now dying, Mrs. Mortimer takes her in, and it is in the context of Mrs. Mortimer’s tiny cottage and well-​ordered life that Ellen’s transformation begins. If she lacked a ‘habit of self-​examination’ before, this section of the novel fully atones for this flaw, in its obsessive accounting of each small step towards salvation. The conversion itself takes up forty pages in the middle of the novel; here event and plot are subordinated almost entirely to the narration of spiritual change and growth. If we place this within the framework of the conversion narrative, however, these internal indicators, rather than replacing plot, become its most important element. As in The Blind Farmer, the primary metaphors here are vision and light. Prior to her conversion, the narrator comments: ‘When the meteors which I had so fondly pursued were banished for ever, did no ray from the Fountain of Light descend to cheer my dark dwelling?—​No’ (253). Upon reading the Bible, ‘something of my real self was opened to my sight. The view was terrible’ (263), while ‘my examinations of my past conduct were like the descent into a dismal cavern, where every step discloses some terrifying sight’ (271). After Ellen’s metaphoric enlightenment by Christianity, her suffering is far from over. Upon the death of Mrs. Mortimer, Ellen is flung from the site of her conversion—​‘the birth-​place of my better being’ (300), she calls it, employing another central evangelical metaphor—​and suffers poverty, ill treatment by employers and landladies, incarceration in a mental institution in Scotland, before, her atonement at an end, she marries a wealthy Scottish aristocrat and retires to the peace of the paradisal Glen Eredine (a name with echoes of ‘Eden’). She has learned virtue, piety, industry, and charity, and becomes herself an Evangelical exemplar. These novels by Brunton, More, and Hofland provide examples of the primary literary strategies used by authors of evangelical fiction. We find them applied across tracts and other variations on the evangelical novel, such as Jane Porter’s historical fiction. In The Scottish Chiefs, William Wallace’s wife, quite anachronistically, is a model of Evangelical femininity who acts as an exemplar to be emulated, while Wallace himself espouses values of domesticity and piety that would not be out of place in Wilberforce’s Practical View.36 In this version of evangelical fiction, the elements of the historical narrative are exploited for their capacity to promote an Evangelical purpose, creating a more complex text in which history, individual experience, and biblical imperative

36 

Jane Porter, The Scottish Chiefs (New York, n.d.).

The Evangelical Novel   535 work together to achieve the end of religious instruction. Evangelical fiction is protean, and its central purpose—​conversion—​and basic didactic strategies are adaptable to a wide range of fictional forms. The evangelical novel of the eighteenth century amply rewards analysis both in terms of its literary qualities and its historical significance. As an experiment in the use of fiction for the promotion of religious values, it holds a place in literary history as a precursor to the evangelical novel of the Victorian period. As a form of instructive literature, it expands our understanding of didactic fiction more generally. Its deep concern with self-​examination links it to the psychological realism of the nineteenth century, as well as to the rise of individualism in the eighteenth century. Historically, the evangelical novel reflects a period of transformation in British religious history when the groundwork was set for the later separation of High and Broad Church factions. It also carefully negotiates the politics of a post-​revolutionary period during which evangelicalism could be perceived as politically dangerous. As a form that connects with such a wide range of social, religious, political, and literary issues, evangelical fiction helps to complete the story of the novel in the eighteenth century.

Select Bibliography Bebbington, D. W., Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Behrendt, Stephen C., ‘Women without Men:  Barbara Hofland and the Economics of Widowhood’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 17/​3 (2005), 1–​28. Hindmarsh, D. Bruce, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: OUP, 2005). Jackson, Gregory S., The Word and Its Witness:  The Spiritualization of American Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009). Jay, Elisabeth, Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-​Century Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Krueger, Christine, The Reader’s Repentance:  Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-​Century Social Discourse (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992). Noll, Mark, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2003). Prior, Karen, ‘Hannah More, Didactic Tradition, and the Rise of the English Novel’, 165–​1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 9 (2003). Stott, Anne, ‘Hannah More and the Blagdon Controversy, 1799–​1802’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51/​2 (2000), 319–​46. Vallone, Lynne, Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995).

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Chapter 32

‘Pictu res of D ome st i c Lif e in C ount ry V i l l ag e s ’ Jane Austen and the ‘Realist’ Novel Jan Fergus

No one who had ever read Jane Austen in her lifetime, 1775–​1817, would have supposed her born to be the canonical heroine of the nineteenth-​century British ‘realist’ novel. She published only four novels before her death. Pride and Prejudice (1813), the most popular, probably sold just 1,750 copies before being issued in a third edition in 1817.1 By contrast, 8,000 copies of Maria Edgeworth’s four-​volume Patronage (1814) were said to have been snapped up on the day of publication, and many of Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels, including Rob Roy (1817), exceeded that figure within two weeks.2 Edgeworth and Scott were actually the most important as well as the most commercially successful novelists in England during the second decade of the nineteenth century, in which all six of Austen’s works appeared, and yet by the end of the century Austen’s critical and popular success was pre-​eminent while Edgeworth’s novels were hardly read and Scott’s readership was in decline.3 In the twentieth century Austen was elevated to the exalted place in literary history that she now occupies, an exaltation that sees her as the mother of the nineteenth-​century British realist novel. But Austen had foremothers too. One useful way to explore her place in literary history is through the question of ‘realism’ in the novel, including the narrative techniques that both promulgate and challenge it. Novelistic realism, loosely, is the formal attempt to create for readers the illusion that the novel represents ordinary life and that 1 

Jan Fergus, Jane Austen: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 140. Quoted by Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 491; Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 1: 610. 3  For Edgeworth’s earnings and their decline, see Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 49–​3. For Scott’s dominance of the nineteenth-​century novel market, see William St Clair, The Reading Nation and the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 221–​2, 420, and on sales of the Waverley Novels, St Clair, Reading Nation, 636–​43. 2 

Jane Austen and the ‘Realist’ Novel    537 characters in novels (and life) are stable and coherent. Kathryn Sutherland has pointed out that ‘Austen’s canonical eminence in the twentieth century has made it more difficult to trace her contemporary allegiances, her relation to the novel in her own time’.4 But those contemporary allegiances can be identified: even in her narrative techniques, Austen writes out of a tradition that we can examine. Fidelity to ordinary life or ‘real life’ was during Austen’s lifetime a moderately favourable judgement on a novel although in our own time literary realism has become suspect. Not only did serious novelists abandon it at around the turn of the twentieth century (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and others), but more recently critics, especially those influenced by Michel Foucault, find fictional realism oppressive and dangerous. Harry E. Shaw has neatly summarized some of these objections: ‘Naive where it should be subtle, confident because unreflective, realism has become the form which, far from showing the way past illusion, itself perpetuates the illusions on which our blind, ideology-​ridden life in society depends.’5 For D. A. Miller in his well-​known 1989 study, The Novel and the Police, a coherent individual identity is an illusory concomitant of self-​scrutiny (or self-​policing). Miller’s reader of Victorian novels takes on the imaginary identity of a ‘liberal subject’ implicated within a ‘system of carceral restraints or disciplinary injunctions’ in novelistic representation, a representation that forms ‘a subject habituated to psychic displacements, evacuations, reinvestments, in a social order whose totalizing power circulates all the more easily for being pulverized’.6 A no less trenchant condemnation that accords novels, however, somewhat less power in creating citizens who conform to the requirements of capitalism, comes from Margaret Anne Doody, who asserts that ‘ “Realism” is the name that we give to an ideology of tameness and tightening applied to the novel. The novel in England … is especially domesticated … This is a quiet, subservient, inferior form. Its best use and sole justification is that it can inform the young (especially women) of well-​known truths, and teach them their place in the universe.’7 In a sense, then, the realist novel threatens us by having an anaesthetic effect, desensitizing us to the ways in which we are being made to conform to the requirements of our worlds. Amusingly enough, during Austen’s time the dangers of fiction were equally canvassed but seen as quite the reverse: moralists supposed that young people and women (the susceptible) were likely to fail to take up their proper places within society because fiction taught them to find their real lives and duties (and real suitors) unappealing compared to those they read about in both novels and romances. The most ‘realist’ novel has, after all, unrealistic or even ‘romance’ elements, as Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s 1810 preface

4  Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Jane Austen and the Invention of the Serious Modern Novel’, in Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740–​1830 (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 246. 5  Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP, 1999), 3. Shaw’s critique of coercive, totalistic views of realism in the novel is very persuasive. 6  D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: U of California P, 1989), pp. x, xiii. 7  Margaret Anne Doody, ‘A Regency Walking Dress and Other Disguises: Jane Austen and the Big Novel’, Persuasions 16 (1994), 79.

538

538   JAN FERGUS to her edition of The British Novelists reminds us. Indeed, Barbauld’s sophisticated ideas about reading give much credit to readers: Every incident in a well written composition is introduced for a certain purpose, and made to forward a certain plan. A sagacious reader is never disappointed in his forebodings … the personages never turn out differently from what their first appearance gave him a right to expect; they gradually open, indeed; they may surprise, but they never disappoint him. Even from the elegance of a name he may give a guess at the amenity of the character. But real life is a kind of chance-​medley, consisting of many unconnected scenes … In short, the reader of a novel forms his expectations from what he supposes passes in the mind of the author, and guesses rightly at his intentions, but would often guess wrong if he were considering the real course of nature.8

Note, then, that Barbauld finds fiction generally not at all like the course of real life, which is a medley, full of insignificant incident, unlike the novel, itself easily navig­ able by the ‘sagacious reader’. Similarly, Walter Scott writes of the reader’s becoming accustomed to the ‘land of fiction’ as laid out in early novels, whose ‘adventures [the reader] assimilated not with those of real life but with each other’.9 Scott’s remarks arise in his important review of Austen’s Emma, which appeared after his far more successful anonymously-​published novels, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814) and Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer (1815). Critics like Scott and Barbauld do not find realism dangerous to a sensible reader. The literary marketplace between 1810 and 1820 favoured the kinds of novels that Scott and Edgeworth wrote but did not entirely favour Austen’s. Austen wrote domestic novels, not the national tales of Ireland and Scotland that Edgeworth and Scott were known for. Hers were not stories of high life, like Edgeworth’s, nor historical romances like Scott’s. Austen herself coined the phrase ‘pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages’ as a comically self-​deprecating description of her novels’ limited subject matter when she responded to James Stanier Clarke’s fatuous wish that she write a romance. The whole passage is worth quoting in full, for it comes as close to an artistic credo as Austen ever gave us: I am fully sensible that an Historical Romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg might be much more to the purpose of Profit or Popularity, than such pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages as I deal in—​but I could no more write a Romance than an Epic Poem.—​I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure 8 Barbauld, The British Novelists; with An Essay; and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical (London,

1810), 1: 52–​3. 9  Walter Scott, review of Emma, Quarterly Review 14 (March 1816), 188–​201, repr. in B. C. Southam (ed.), Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 60. All further references to this review as reprinted by Southam will be cited by page number in parenthesis in the text.

Jane Austen and the ‘Realist’ Novel    539 I should be hung before I had finished the First Chapter.—​No—​I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way; And though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.10

Austen’s defence of her own style and her genre, the comic and domestic novel, is striking, as is her grasp of the market, the ‘Profit or Popularity’ she was unlikely to reach. In recommending historical romance, Clarke was certainly thinking of the success of Waverley and Guy Mannering, historical novels with large doses of romance. Austen is well aware that she cannot rival Scott’s success, but she believes in her achievement (she implies that she has succeeded previously) and is not to be deflected from her ‘own Way’. It is worth looking at the novel-​market for 1811 in some detail, when Austen entered it anonymously in her ‘own Way’ with her ‘pictures of domestic Life’. ‘Sense and Sensibility: A Novel … By a Lady’ was advertised late in October of that year. Eighty novels altogether were published, above average for the decade but in line with the publication numbers of the previous one.11 The Minerva Press, notable for churning out both sentimental and Gothic fiction, issued almost a quarter of the titles, eighteen, by seventeen different authors, and in fact that percentage is typical for the decade.12 One Minerva title suggests that the rumoured death of Gothic fiction is exaggerated: The Mysterious Hand; Or, Subterranean Horrours! A Romance … by Augustus Jacob Crandolph. Though designations such as adventures, tales, and memoirs are still found in 1811 titles, Peter Garside has indicated that, during the 1810s, overall 35.5 per cent of titles identified themselves as novels, but just 13 per cent as romances.13 In 1811, however, the balance was more equal; that is, many booksellers still considered romances to be competitive with novels. Whereas the Minerva Press published ten works identified as novels in their titles, compared to just six identified as romances, the output of other publishers proved less lopsided, with fourteen romances and thirteen novels out of the fifty-​seven works they issued. Obviously, not all titles identified themselves as either. The five remaining fictions of the eighty published in 1811 were evidently issued by authors for their own profit, including Austen’s. That is, the copyrights of the other seventy-​five works would have been acquired and paid for by the booksellers. Interestingly, however, none of the five works openly issued for the authors’ profit called themselves romances. Four of the five labelled themselves novels, as did Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.14 Whatever booksellers thought, writers like Austen who were investing their own money to sell their works on the market felt that a ‘novel’ was a more saleable commodity than a romance in 1811. 10 

Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (new edn., Oxford: OUP, 1995), 312. Peter Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era: Consolidation and Dispersal’, in Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 2: 38; table 5, 2: 73. 12  Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era’, in Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, table 7.2, 2: 84. 13  Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era’, in Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, table 2, 2: 50. 14  Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, 1811: 16, 52, 56, 63; 1811: 47 uses neither designation. 11 

540

540   JAN FERGUS Two more points about the market at this time are worth mentioning. First, while neither the authorship of novels nor their readership was dominated by women during the second half of the eighteenth century in England to the extent that most literary historians (echoing many eighteenth-​century commentators) have contended,15 by 1811 women were prominent among authors, but not dominant. Although just two of thirteen anonymous writers in 1811 seem to have been female, twenty-​nine others, including Austen, are identifiable as women (and two of them published three novels each during the year, Ann Mary Hamilton and Emma Parker). This substantial showing, however, does not quite equal that of men. In addition to the eleven anonymous authors who reveal nothing about gender, thirty-​two identifiable male authors published novels, though none produced more than one in the year.16 One such writer was 18-​year-​old Percy Bysshe Shelley; his St. Irvyne; or, the Rosicrucian: A Romance. By a Gentleman of the University of Oxford was printed for the publisher John Stockdale. If half of the anonymous authors were male, men outnumbered women as novelists, but significantly, not among the Minerva Press’s publications. Again, its eighteen works included at most only seven by men (one is anonymous). Whether women were equally dominant among the Minerva’s readers is less easy to determine; certainly they were reputed to be so. But the reputation of Minerva Press novels as hack work largely by women, and of women themselves as frivolous readers, is likely to have reinforced their association with one another, whether accurately or not. As for women readers of other novels in this period, there is some evidence that they were prominent among Austen’s audience although reliable information is scarce.17 Second, though not many novels were published by today’s standards, it was easier to have one’s fiction printed in 1811 than it is now. A niece and a nephew of Austen were drafting novels while hers were being issued, and she wrote to both as if she supposed their works would be published when finished, but they were never completed.18 Publications were increasingly expensive, however; Austen’s first novel sold for 5 shillings a volume; a little over four years later, the price for Emma was 7 shillings a volume. Only the reasonably well-​off could subsidize their own book production or could afford to buy novels in the first place. Very recently, self-​publication and web publication have made authorship more available to aspiring writers, but distribution is a problem now, as it was not then: a self-​published book was in Austen’s time as likely to be reviewed and sold in stores as any other. Always, however, getting remunerated for any writing remains problematic. Austen watched her profits and negotiated with her publishers reasonably well, though she made far less money from her works than many of her contemporaries, including Edgeworth and Scott.19

15 

See Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 7–​10, 70–​4. These figures differ from those of Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era’, in Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 1770–​1829, table 5, 2: 73, because I am counting authors, not novels. 17  Jan Fergus, ‘The Literary Marketplace’, in Claudia Johnson and Clara Tuite (eds.), A Companion to Jane Austen (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2009), 49. 18 Fergus, Literary Life, 3. See Jane Austen’s Letters, 268, 319. 19 Fergus, Literary Life, 171. 16 

Jane Austen and the ‘Realist’ Novel    541 With a shrewd eye to this market, John Murray, the publisher of Emma, asked Scott to review it: ‘Have you any fancy to dash off an article on “Emma”? It wants incident and romance, does it not? None of the author’s other novels have been noticed [by Murray’s own periodical, the Quarterly Review], and surely “Pride and Prejudice” merits high commendation.’20 The review, Austen’s best during her lifetime, was published in 1816 and mentioned Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice as well. Taking up Murray’s complaint about Emma’s lack of incident and romance, Scott first enshrined her novels among those that deal with not romance but ‘real life’ (61). He locates Austen’s work within ‘a style of novel [that] has arisen, within the last fifteen or twenty years’, a style characterized by ‘the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him’ (63). The word ‘representation’ is central: Austen finds means to give the effect of the real. As an example of Austen’s realistic effects, we might compare the way that she represents a very ordinary event in real life, shopping, with the treatments of some of her predecessors. In general, eighteenth-​century novelists make shops places of moral threat, of seduction by luxury or by sexuality. Visits to shops thus instigate moral choices in which, generally, the shopkeepers or other denizens are tempters. Laura Montreville in Mary Brunton’s Self-​Control (1811) is so naive and countrified that she feels sorry for a shopkeeper in Edinburgh vainly trying, as she sees it, to market artificial flowers; ‘ “I fear,” said she, looking compassionately at the man, “you will never be able to sell them all. There are so few people who would give seven shillings for what is of no use whatsoever.” ’21 The virtuous Laura is not swayed by the flowers despite the shopman’s seductive spiel, ‘ “the most becoming thing for the hair” ’. Ordinarily, however, shoppers give in to temptation, as when the heroine of Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796) is seduced into spending more money than she can afford. Camilla succumbs because she is young and easily embarrassed, but others are duped into useless luxury by fashion: see Lady Clonbrony’s dealings with Mr. Soho, admittedly a fashionable decorator, not a shopkeeper, in the first chapters of Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812). More commonly, the seductiveness of shopping slides into actual or attempted sexual predation. In Clarissa (1747–​8), Samuel Richardson uses shopping as an occasion for play-​acting by the seductive Lovelace. Clarissa has taken refuge above the shop run by Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which sells ‘Powder, and wash-​balls, and snuff … and gloves and stockings’ and Lovelace appears to charm them by utterly charmless behaviour: taking over their shop, threatening their assistant Joseph, insulting an ugly female customer, and finally drawing in an attractive woman, insulting her footman, and selling her snuff, after which he ‘besought her to walk into the back shop with me’, a salacious 20  Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the late John Murray, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1891), 1: 288. 21  Mary Brunton, Self-​Control: A Novel, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1811), 1: 88.

542

542   JAN FERGUS move that makes her depart, but smiling.22 This scene is transposed into many subsequent novels, though not usually with Lovelace’s delight in masking and role-​playing. In Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1794), the heroine Monimia, in a long explanatory tale to her beloved Orlando, describes being sent as an apprentice to a shopwoman at Winchester (the business is never specified), but the woman’s husband arranges to sell her to her persecutor, Sir John Belgrave. Although Monimia protests that she ‘had often ridiculed the stories in novels where young women are forcibly carried away, I saw great reason to believe some such adventure might happen to me’, and indeed Sir John forces her ‘into a little room behind the shop’, where luckily the shopwoman’s sailor son saves her.23 When in Burney’s Cecilia (1782), Miss Larolles declares of her milliner’s useless luxuries, ‘It is the most dangerous thing you can conceive to go near her; I never trust myself in her room but I am sure to be ruined’,24 her language perfectly suggests both the financial and sexual threat of shopping, in novels at least. Austen’s scenes of shopping avoid such clichés. Her narrator mentions the flirtation of Lydia and Kitty Bennet with officers in the circulating library and Meryton, but we do not hear in Pride and Prejudice that a shop facilitated Wickham’s elopement with Lydia at Brighton; he needs no such emblematic aids. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are forced to wait in Gray’s shop in Bond Street while Robert Ferrars chooses an expensive toothpick case, down to the last detail of ‘The ivory, the gold, and the pearls’, but he is not at all disposed to seduce them, bestowing on them instead a ‘glance … as seemed rather to demand than express admiration’.25 Catherine Morland does not overspend in Bath’s shops in Northanger Abbey, nor does Fanny Price in those of Portsmouth. Charlotte Heywood explicitly stops herself from spending too much in Mrs. Whitby’s shop in Sanditon. When Austen does describe scenes in shops in the last two novels, they are like any other scenes, orchestrated to represent actions on the surface that reveal motives and feelings underneath, and conveniently for a novelist, many characters can gather in a shop who might not easily meet elsewhere. Persuasion permits Elizabeth Elliot in Molland’s shop to behave snobbishly to Captain Wentworth while waiting for Lady Dalrymple’s carriage, but in ­chapter 7 of the second volume Anne and he nevertheless manage to express some of their interest in one another before William Elliot walks off with Anne (choosing her over Mrs. Clay) and local gossips alert Captain Wentworth to the general expectation that Anne will marry her cousin. In Emma, Ford’s shop is as important a social space as Randalls or Hartfield or Donwell Abbey, essential to Highbury village life. The scenes that take place 22  Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 1213, 1215 (letter of Lovelace, 21 August). 23  Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (London: OUP, 1969), 478–​9, 481. 24  Frances Burney, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 29. 25  Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. R. W. Chapman, The Novels of Jane Austen, 5 vols. (1933; repr. Oxford: OUP, 1966–​78), 1: 221. All further quotations from Austen’s novels will refer to this edition and will appear in parentheses in the text.

Jane Austen and the ‘Realist’ Novel    543 there are on the surface wholly ordinary: Harriet speaks of encountering her former suitor and his sisters there (178); Emma doesn’t notice that Frank Churchill proposes entering Ford’s to delay answering her question about how well he knew Jane Fairfax at Weymouth (199), and Frank’s play-​acting in Ford’s, pretending indifference to Jane, is quite commonplace when set against Lovelace’s nasty display; Emma waits for Harriet to choose a fabric and helps her to decide where to send it, and Miss Bates comes with Mrs. Weston to invite them to cross the street for a visit (233–​6). Although all these scenes reveal character and are deeply embedded in the plot, Emma’s meetings and purchases at Ford’s are also wholly integrated into village life, as is evident in her moment of standing at the door to look out while Harriet dithers over her choice, seeing ‘the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-​window eyeing the gingerbread’ (233). The details in this sentence convey the sense of the larger world of Highbury that Emma seldom notices but that the narrator makes readers register, from people who are useful to her (the butcher) to those who lead their own lives removed from Hartfield (the old woman, the children). Another detail in this scene brings us back to Scott’s review. The narrator tells us that ‘Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury’ and concludes, ‘A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.’ No doubt Scott is thinking of such moments when he writes deprecatingly that ‘Emma has even less story than either of the preceding novels’ (65). He evidently does not fully endorse Austen’s representation of the ordinary. In his well-​ known comparison between her technique and that of Dutch painters, he first seems to admire her: ‘The author’s knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize, reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader’ (67). But after quoting a scene in which Mr. Woodhouse and Isabella talk, Scott contradicts himself, maintaining that the author’s merit ‘consists much in the force of a narrative conducted with much neatness and point, and a quiet yet comic dialogue, in which the characters of the speakers evolve themselves with dramatic effect. The faults … arise from the minute detail which the author’s plan comprehends’ (67–​8). The praise of ‘precision’ becomes dispraise of ‘minute detail’. The effect of the real can become too real. With ‘Characters of folly or simplicity,’ Scott writes, ‘such as those of old Woodhouse and Miss Bates … their prosing is apt to become as tiresome in fiction as in real society’ (68). Not every contemporary reviewer agreed: one not only praises the ‘rational pleasure’ that Austen’s work affords in permitting ‘recognitions … of the modes of thinking and feeling which experience every day presents in real life’, but also goes on to quote at some length speeches of Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton. Though agreeing with Scott in finding Mr. Woodhouse to have ‘rather too much license of becoming tedious and prolix’, this reviewer quotes over twenty lines of Miss Bates’s effusions at the Crown, finding them a ‘happy specimen of the eternal larum of disjointed small talk … in the rounds of provincial visiting’, as well as over twenty lines

544

544   JAN FERGUS of Mrs. Elton’s fulsome praise at Hartfield of her own resources and love of music, noting that she never fails ‘to lug [Maple Grove] into the conversation of every half-​hour’s visit’.26 In other words, contemporaries like Scott and this anonymous reviewer conclude that Austen finds ways to make her characters’ talk give the effect of the real, though of course such long speeches are not at all ‘realistic’ in most domestic contexts. Modern critics take a much more formal approach to Austen’s representation of domestic speech, especially to the way her characters’ language can slide unobtrusively into narrative. This slippery relation between dialogue and narrative results from deployment of what is usually called ‘free indirect speech’ or ‘free indirect discourse’, FID for short. Not easily defined (writers make different uses of it), FID stands in Austen for multiple ways in which, according to Daniel P. Gunn, ‘the narrator echoes or mimics the idiom of the character for the purposes of the fiction’. As Gunn summarizes, Austen ‘is generally acknowledged to be the first English novelist to make sustained use of free indirect discourse in the representation of figural speech and thought’.27 What Gunn means by figural speech is language that seems to render the character’s voice, language that appears to originate with or belong to a character rather than to the narrator. Austen’s deployment of free indirect discourse looks forward to the nineteenth-​ century novel and backward as well. When she herself looks backward to her predecessors in Northanger Abbey, however, she writes of novels as characterized not by formal devices but rather ‘genius, wit, and taste’ (37). Notably, Austen constructs there an all-​ female canon:  she cites as models two novels by Frances Burney (Cecilia [1782] and Camilla [1796]) and one by Maria Edgeworth (Belinda [1801]). Austen’s narrator asserts that these are 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’ (38). The only hint that she views ‘best chosen language’ as allied with ‘real life’ in creating the ‘pictures of domestic Life’ that she aimed at occurs when The Spectator is lambasted not only for ‘coarse’ language but for improbability: ‘improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation, which no longer concern any one living’ (38). Although a number of critics have explored Austen’s relation to Burney, her debts to Edgeworth are less studied, no doubt because until very recently, despite the efforts of Marilyn Butler and Mitzi Myers and others, Edgeworth herself has not received the critical attention she merits. Myers makes the strongest case for Edgeworth’s importance

26 

Unsigned review of Emma in The Champion, 31 March 1816, 102–​3, repr. in Nicholas A. Joukovsky, ‘Three Hitherto Unnoted Contemporary Reviews of Jane Austen’, Nineteenth-​Century Fiction 26/​4 (1971–​ 2): 469–​77, 470, 471, 472. In quoting speeches by Miss Bates (322–​3) and Mrs. Elton (276–​7), the reviewer silently alters them, leaving out many of Miss Bates’s asides (e.g., on Mrs. Dixon’s wedding) and adding dashes to her speech as well as to Mrs. Elton’s, where he makes other changes also. 27  Daniel P. Gunn, ‘Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma’, Narrative 12/​1 (2004), 37, 35.

Jane Austen and the ‘Realist’ Novel    545 and originality, the ‘ideologically and formally adventurous’ and ‘astonishingly copious, diverse’ nature of her ‘literary production’. More specifically, Myers insists on an intermixture of realism and romance in her work: the densely textured referentiality of Edgeworth’s realistic moral tales also has a fairy-​ tale layering. As much utopian as it is pragmatic, her representational mode also repeatedly, almost obsessively, enacts private and public fantasies—​reformist and revisionary plots of human happiness which most often involve fetishizing the family. Although the opening epigraphs of this chapter seemingly align with warring notions of fiction, a no-​nonsense realism and an unembarrassed romanticism, both narrative impulses coexist in Edgeworth’s work; both are central to her ambitious tales.28

I would contend that Myers’s Edgeworth, experimenting with narrative, directly influences Austen’s own narrative technique which, like Edgeworth’s, is not entirely realistic in calling attention to itself. And Scott, who himself acknowledged emulation of Edgeworth’s portraiture in his postscript to Waverley, does also specifically mention her in his review of Emma as Austen’s only rival. He praises Austen for producing: sketches of such spirit and originality, that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners and sentiments, greatly above our own. In this class she stands almost alone; for the scenes of Miss Edgeworth are laid in higher life, varied by more romantic incident, and by her remarkable power of embodying and illustrating national character. (63–​4)

Scott is here thinking not just of Belinda, revised and reissued in 1810 in Barbauld’s British Novelists series, but of Edgeworth’s very successful Tales of Fashionable Life. These were published in six volumes, three in 1809 and the rest in 1812; unlike Austen’s novels, the longest tales, Ennui (1809) and The Absentee (1812), feature aristocratic characters in central roles. They also employ free indirect discourse in ways that show that, however supreme Austen is as a stylist, her mastery did not emerge from nothing. In every way, she writes out of a tradition. And that tradition includes FID more than has been acknowledged. In free indirect discourse, language that appears to belong to a character rather than a narrator is not surrounded by quotation marks and is used to create what can be variously known as ‘coloured narrative’ or ‘narrative monologue’, all participating in a ‘stylistic contagion’ by which a character’s language slides into or infects the narrator’s reports.29 That critics invent so many terms for essentially the same device 28 

Mitzi Myers, ‘Shot from Canons; Or, Maria Edgeworth and the Cultural Production and Consumption of the Late Eighteenth-​Century Woman Writer’, in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds.), The Consumption of Culture, 1600–​1800: Image, Object, Text (New York: Routledge; 1995), 196, 201. 29  Gunn usefully rejects notions that Austen’s usage of FID on the one hand serves ‘objective narration’ and on the other serves an ‘innately disruptive and destabilizing’ creation of voices that

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546   JAN FERGUS testifies to its importance in narrative as well as to its complexity. To begin simply, direct discourse is reported speech that is conventionally supposed to be exact, as indicated by quotation marks: e.g., Alice said, ‘I am going.’ In free indirect discourse, exact reportage disappears. Markers like ‘she said that’ and the absence of quotation marks cast the speech into the third person and past tense: e.g., Alice said that she was going. Alice’s actual words seem to disappear into narrative even in this simple example. Not discussed by most critics is a hybrid form employed not only by Austen but at some point within nearly every eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century novel I have ever opened, in which the quotation marks are placed around the altered third-​person past-​tense language as if it represented reported speech: e.g., Alice said ‘she was going’. Her precise words, however, remain ‘I am going.’ Austen used this hybrid form of FID even in her juvenilia; it makes only a few appearances in the novels first drafted at Steventon before 1800, Pride and Prejudice (1813), Sense and Sensibility (1811), and Northanger Abbey (1818), where these may indicate later revisions to earlier drafts; and this hybrid is rife in the later novels, Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818).30 In one of innumerable early examples of hybrid free indirect discourse from Mansfield Park, which Austen began to draft in 1811, Edmund and Fanny exchange speeches after he has persuaded Fanny to talk about her brother William: ‘William did not like she should come away—​he had told her he should miss her very much indeed.’ ‘But William will write to you, I dare say.’ ‘Yes, he had promised he would, but he had told her to write first.’ ‘And when shall you do it?’ She hung her head and answered hesitatingly, ‘she did not know; she had not any paper.’ (16)

Edmund’s words are couched in direct speech; he says ‘I’ in ‘I dare say’; appropriately enough, given her abject position, Fanny has no ‘I’ here. All her words are shifted into the third person and past tense, but quotation marks are retained. Otherwise Austen would have represented Fanny’s last speech as: ‘I do not know; I have not any paper.’ This technique temporarily privileges Edmund’s perspective, as if he has adopted a narrator’s position. Austen’s later novels experiment more notably with other forms of FID than this hybrid. The device appears with the greatest variety and ubiquity in Emma; most analyses of the technique therefore focus on that novel. I would argue that the increased and more experimental usage of the technique in the later novels was inspired by the appearance of the first three volumes of the Tales of Fashionable Life (1809) while Austen was revising her early novels and before she began composing

compete with the narrator’s (‘Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma’, 35). He cites Graham Hough’s usage of ‘coloured narrative’ to describe what Gunn would call FID, narrative that takes on a character’s idiom (39–​40), ‘stylistic contagion’ as used by Dorrit Cohn among others for the same thing (37), and Helen Dry’s similar employment of ‘narrated monologue’, following Cohn (39). 30 Fergus, Literary Life, 96–​8.

Jane Austen and the ‘Realist’ Novel    547 Mansfield Park in February 1811. In these tales, Edgeworth made her own experiments with the form, extending them in The Absentee (1812). We can see Edgeworth’s experimentation at work in Ennui, which comprises the first volume of the 1809 Tales, but because the tale is told by Glenthorn, a first-​person narrator, he seems to be the experimenter. In one passage, he trenchantly describes a meeting with the agent of Lady Ormsby, a Mr. Hardcastle: he considered doubt as a proof of ignorance, imbecility, or cowardice. ‘Can any man doubt?’ was his usual beginning. On every subject of human knowledge, taste, morals, politics, economy, legislation; on all affairs, civil, military, or ecclesiastical, he decided at once in the most confident tone. Yet he ‘never read, not he!’ he had nothing to do with books; he consulted only his own eyes and ears, and appealed only to common sense. As to theory, he had no opinion of theory; for his part, he only pretended to understand practice and experience—​and his practice was confined steadily to his own practice, and his experience uniformly to what he had tried at New-​town-​Hardcastle.31

In quoting Hardcastle’s ‘never read, not he!’, Glenthorn is adopting ordinary hybrid FID, for of course the agent would have said ‘not I’. But in the rest of the passage, Glenthorn seems to characterize Hardcastle in the latter’s own language. If we transpose pronouns and tenses, we hear the voice of this allegedly practical man saying ‘I have no opinion of theory; for my part, I only pretend to understand practice and experience’, but in mid-​ sentence, after the dash, Glenthorn reverts to his own narrative voice and judgement, emphasizing the limited practice and experience of Hardcastle in a way that the agent would not do himself. We have Hardcastle’s favourable judgement of himself embedded in the narrator’s very different, ironic viewpoint: the combination of ironic detachment with intimacy that is characteristic of Austen’s narrators. When Glenthorn incorporates Irish language into his narrative, usually he puts it in italics as he also does Hardcastle’s tag ‘Can any man doubt?’,32 but here he experiments with a more seamless transition between the voice of another and his own narrative voice, pointing to such lines as the sentence that ends the first paragraph of Mansfield Park. We learn there of Mrs. Price’s response to an angry letter from Mrs. Norris to reproach her for an imprudent marriage. Mrs. Price dispatches ‘an answer which comprehended each sister in its bitterness, and bestowed such very disrespectful reflections on the pride of Sir Thomas, as Mrs. Norris could not possibly keep to herself, [which] put an end to all intercourse between them for a considerable period’ (4). While most of this phrase represents ordinary third-​person narrative, often called omniscient, when we reach ‘could not possibly keep to herself ’, we seamlessly hear the echo of Mrs. Norris’s 31 

Maria Edgeworth, Tales of Fashionable Life, 3 vols. (London, 1809), 1: 106–​7. See for example this passage: ‘and half a hundred more came with legends of traditionary promises from the old lord, my lordship’s father that was’ (Edgeworth, Tales, 1: 85). Note the shift from ‘your’ to ‘my’: Glenthorn’s ‘my lordship’s father’, making the phrase of the other his own language; again, Glenthorn is an experimental narrator. 32 

548

548   JAN FERGUS own language to Sir Thomas, justifying her tattling, though we do not hear her actual words themselves. These might have been something like ‘I cannot possibly keep my sister’s letter to myself ’, doubtless followed by fulsome praise of Sir Thomas. We do not hear her voice on a first reading, however; only when readers come to know Mrs. Norris’s spiteful and self-​justifying utterances are they likely on rereading to hear her voice in this language, to read it as figural speech cast in FID. But whether they do or not, the beginning and ending of this phrase belong clearly to a narrator. That FID can be thus introduced then abandoned within one sentence is entirely characteristic of Austen’s flexible, but not unprecedented, use of the device.33 Edgeworth carried her experiments with FID further in The Absentee in the second series of the Tales of Fashionable Life (1812), with a speech of a vulgar comic character, Mrs. Petito. Formerly a servant to the hero Lord Colambre’s mother Lady Clonbrony, Mrs. Petito meets Lord Colambre by chance at the residence of the rich Mr. Reynolds, whose favour she is courting: she, with very easy familiarity … said, ‘she did not know whether she was to congratulate his lordship or not upon miss Broadhurst, my lady Berryl’s marriage, but she should soon have to hope for his lordship’s congratulations for another marriage in her present family—​lady Isabel to Colonel Heathcock, who was come in for a large portion, and they are buying the wedding clothes—​sights of clothes, and the di’monds, this day; and lady Dashfort and my lady Isabel sent me especially, sir, to you, Mr. Reynolds.…’34

Notice the pronoun shift from Mrs. Petito as ‘she’ in the first lines to ‘I’ at the end, as well as the tense shift from ‘did not know’ at the start to ‘they are buying’, as Mrs. Petito’s language becomes more and more characteristic: ‘sights of clothes’ and ‘di’monds’ signal her lower-​class voice. Edgeworth thus experiments here and elsewhere with confusing or blurring the distinction between the language or voice of a character and those of the narrator, and Austen frequently makes similar moves in the novels that she composed from 1811. Harriet Smith’s babbling in Emma is reminiscent of Miss Hunter’s in Edgeworth’s Manoeuvring (1809), except that Harriet is artless and Miss Hunter is trying to be artful by representing herself as attractively malleable, and shows how Austen extended Edgeworth’s narrative experiments.35 On one occasion, Austen’s narrator records one sentence of Harriet’s speech in hybrid FID with quotation marks, switching without warning (after a short exclamation to Emma) to direct discourse and staying there, just as Mrs. Petito does. That is, in one sentence Harriet refers to herself as she, in another as I, in describing her meeting the Martins at Ford’s after she has refused Robert Martin:

33  See Gunn, ‘Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma’, for a fine analysis of Austen’s flexible use of FID in Emma. 34  Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, ed. W. J. McCormack and Kim Walker (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 242. 35  See Edgeworth, Manoeuvring, in Tales of Fashionable Life, 3: 159–​61.

Jane Austen and the ‘Realist’ Novel    549 ‘And so, there she had set, without an idea of any thing in the world, full ten minutes, perhaps—​when, all of a sudden, who should come in—​to be sure it was so very odd!—​but they always dealt at Ford’s—​who should come in, but Elizabeth Martin and her brother!—​Dear Miss Woodhouse, only think. I thought I should have fainted. I did not know what to do.…’ (178; emphases added)

Like Edgeworth, Austen here seamlessly shifts from conventional hybrid FID to reported speech. More interestingly, in another passage dealing with Harriet, in five sentences Austen employs four forms of FID, one of which appears to be her own invention. At the start of ­chapter 7 when Harriet visits Emma to announce Robert Martin’s proposal, the narrative takes on Harriet’s sentence structure, phrases strung together with ‘and’: The very day of Mr. Elton’s going to London produced a fresh occasion for Emma’s services towards her friend. Harriet had been at Hartfield, as usual, soon after breakfast; and after a time, had gone home to return again to dinner; she returned, and sooner than had been talked of, and with an agitated, hurried look, announcing something extraordinary to have happened which she was longing to tell. Half a minute brought it all out. She had heard, as soon as she got back to Mrs. Goddard’s, that Mr. Martin had been there an hour before, and finding she was not at home, nor particularly expected, had left a little parcel for her from one of his sisters, and gone away; and on opening this parcel, she had actually found, besides the two songs which she had lent Elizabeth to copy, a letter to herself; and this letter was from him, from Mr. Martin, and contained a direct proposal of marriage. ‘Who could have thought it! She was so surprised she did not know what to do.’ (50; emphases added)

In the first sentence of third-​person narration, the word ‘services’ offers a fleeting instance of FID, for it represents Emma’s own judgement of her relation to Harriet but can also be read as ironic, expressing the narrator’s contrary view of that relation. The second sentence invents a particularly sophisticated version of FID. It echoes Harriet’s sentence structure, though not generally her actual language, since Harriet would not speak of an ‘agitated, hurried look’ herself. The sentence contains three ‘ands’, the second and third of which could be eliminated without altering the sense of the passage. They serve instead to bring the narrator’s syntax close to Harriet’s, a risky move for any narrator. That is, the conjunctions effect a transition to Harriet’s discourse after a short sentence of ambiguous narration: ‘Half a minute brought it all out.’ Did Emma ask or did Harriet blurt? Harriet’s characteristic reliance on coordinating conjunctions, not to mention minute, trivial details, then appears in the fourth sentence, one of classic FID, boasting five ‘ands’ as well as Harriet’s simple and repetitive language. We seem to hear her own voice in ‘from him, from Mr. Martin’ despite the absence of quotation marks. When these finally arrive for sentences five and six, we have conventional hybrid FID. What differs from Edgeworth’s practice is that Austen is willing to allow her experiments to stand, as in the second sentence, without any markers at all when blurring the distinction between narrative and dialogue; Edgeworth often adds italics. But I would

550

550   JAN FERGUS argue that Edgeworth’s experiments with free indirect discourse inspired and authorized Austen’s. What is important about Austen’s narrative experiments with FID is that the device is so central to the nineteenth-​century novel. Frances Ferguson has gone so far as to call it ‘the novel’s one and only formal contribution to literature’; for her, that contribution involves ‘characters and society speaking the same language’, and she concludes that, particularly in Emma, ‘The brilliance of her deployment of free indirect style is that it recognizes what we might want to think of as a communal contribution to individuals.’36 D. A. Miller makes even more of the complex relation that FID allows between narrator and character: ‘free indirect style gives a virtuoso performance, against all odds, of the narration’s persistence in detachment from character, no matter how intimate one becomes with the other’.37 He elaborates: ‘it grants us at one and the same time the experience of a character’s inner life as she herself lives it, and an experience of the same inner life as she never could’.38 That is, FID connects and detaches characters, narration, and readers in ironic and yet intimate relations with one another. This hallmark of Austen’s style comes to her in part through Maria Edgeworth’s novels, is elaborated and extended by Austen in her novels, is variously deployed by nineteenth-​century novelists, and thus constitutes Jane Austen’s lasting formal contribution to the realist novel.

Select Bibliography Austen, Jane, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (new edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Copeland, Edward, and Juliet McMaster (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (2nd edn., Cambridge: CUP, 2010). Doody, Margaret Anne, ‘George Eliot and the Nineteenth-​Century Novel’, Nineteenth-​Century Fiction 35/​3 (1980), 26–91. Fergus, Jan, Jane Austen: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1991). Garside, Peter, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​ 1829:  A  Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2  vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000). Johnson, Claudia, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988). Johnson, Claudia L., and Clara Tuite (eds.), A Companion to Jane Austen (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2009). Perry, Ruth, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748–​1818 (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). Shaw, Harry, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP, 1999). Sutherland, Kathryn, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Hollywood (Oxford: OUP, 2005). 36  Frances Ferguson, ‘Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form’, Modern Language Quarterly 61/​1 (2000), 159, 170, 164. 37 Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 59. 38 Miller, Jane Austen, 60.

Chapter 33

Au thorizing t h e  Nov e l Walter Scott’s Historical Fiction Ina Ferris

The Waverley Novels were a phenomenon. Officially anonymous but widely assumed to be the product of Walter Scott, a name eminent in the literary field as a highly successful poet and man of letters, these historical romances not only achieved unprecedented popularity but transformed the cultural status of the novel. During the Romantic period ‘the Author of Waverley’ sold more novels than all other novelists of the time combined, while sales of the collected editions of the Waverley Novels, which continued to be regularly produced throughout the nineteenth century, had run into the millions by the end of the century.1 Scott’s output itself was prodigious. Indeed the Quarterly Review claimed in 1821 that it had ceased noticing his novels for the last three years because they followed one another so rapidly (eight novels had appeared in this period); moreover, his volumes were ‘bought, and borrowed and stolen, and begged for, a hundred times more than our dry and perishable pages’. Unable to keep up, the Quarterly fell silent. But it now found it increasingly awkward to pass over ‘works, which, from their number, their merit, their originality, and their diffusion, have more influence than is exercised by any others within the whole scope of our literature’; hence the review opened its October issue with a long omnibus survey of recent Waverley Novels by Nassau Senior, respected economist and soon to become the first professor of political economy at Oxford. In an uncharacteristic personal reminiscence Senior recalls the unheralded start of the now celebrated series, telling readers how he ran across Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since in a box of circulating library novels that did not include any he had actually wanted: ‘We shall never forget the disappointment and listlessness with which, in the middle of a watering-​place long vacation, we tumbled a new, untalked of, anonymous novel out of the box, which came to us from our faithless librarian, filled with substitutes for every thing we had ordered.’ Stuck with this unwanted book, he opened it at random in the 1 

See William St Clair, The Reading Nation and the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 220–​1; for the sales figures, see app. 9.

552

552   INA FERRIS second volume, and instantly found himself ‘with as much surprise as Waverley himself, and with about the same effect, in the centre of the Chevalier’s court’.2 Vivid, absorbing, addictive—​Scott’s novels shared much with the ‘common novels’ scorned by critical reviews, but they also distinguished themselves from this lowly category to occupy a position in the higher reaches of the literary field. As Francis Jeffrey put it, writing in the influential Edinburgh Review a few months after the publication of Waverley, this new novel was ‘already casting the whole tribe of ordinary novels into the shade, and taking its place rather with the most popular of our modern poems, than with the rubbish of provincial romances’.3 But even as the generic hierarchy that assigned novels to the realm of commercial ‘manufacture’ rather than that of literary ‘composition’ remained in place in the early nineteenth century, the novel was increasingly pressing in on the literary field. These were highly bookish decades, witnessing an explosion in publishing and a ‘reading boom’ that made novel-​reading endemic, prompting the critical reviews to pay more serious attention to the genre no matter how reluctantly.4 ‘The habit of romance and novel-​reading has taken such root among us,’ sighed the British Review, ‘that we may as well let alone all attempts to persuade or argue the world out of it.’5 Even as the ‘world’ read novels, the genre was distinctly gendered, linked to women readers, as in the standard trope of ‘the fair romance reader’.6 More important for the reviews, however, was that novel-​writing too was becoming a feminized realm since the most prominent contemporary novelists were women, outpacing male practitioners. It would be ‘impossible’, Scott testified in his essay on Charlotte Smith, to match against the names of the supremely talented women novelists he had just listed ‘the same number of masculine competitors within the same space of time’.7 Such had not always been the case, however, and the entrance of the ‘manly’ Author of Waverley was typically greeted as a recovery of the British novel’s masculinity. His historical fiction was seen as a reactivation of the broader male literary energies that had characterized the genre in the mid-​eighteenth century: one review declared that it ‘revives the animated portraits of Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, and other novellists [sic] skilled in the intricacies of human nature’; another that Scott’s ‘art’ in delineating manners was akin to that of Fielding.8 The thematic of gender comes into especially sharp view in an assessment of the impact of the Author of Waverley in (Gold’s) London Magazine in 1820, which argues that Scott entered the novel at an opportune moment, 2 

‘Novels, by the Author of Waverley’, Quarterly Review 26 (October 1821), 109, 115. ‘Waverley—​a Novel’, Edinburgh Review 24 (November 1814), 208. 4  On the reading boom, see in particular St Clair, The Reading Nation; H. J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of the Marginalia (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2005); and Kathryn Sutherland, ‘ “Events … Have Made us a World of Readers”: Reader Relations 178–​1830’, in David B. Pirie (ed.), The Romantic Period (London: Penguin, 1994), 1–​48. 5  Review of Ivanhoe, British Review 15 (June 1820), 393. 6  For more on this point, see Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991), ch. 1. 7  ‘Charlotte Smith’, Miscellaneous Prose Works, 28 vols. (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1834–​40), 4: 69. 8  Review of Guy Mannering, Critical Review, ser. 5, vol. 1 (June 1815), 600; ‘The Antiquary’, Monthly Review, ns 82 (January 1817), 39. 3 

Walter Scott’s Historical Fiction    553 when the reading public ‘had been completely wearied of the false strain of maukishness and sensibility that had so long held sway’: ‘The Luximas, the Wanderers, and the innumerable spawn of the Mysteries of Udolpho, were gradually sinking into the tomb of all the Capulets, when the author of the Scotch novels first appeared, like a giant refreshed with sleep.’ Ratcheting up the canonizing move, the reviewer sums up: ‘He is all in all; he is Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, and every forcible writer that has preceded or followed them; he is the first and last—​the alpha and omega of novelists.’9 So located within a strong male line of the British novel, Scott’s fiction was poised on the borders of properly literary space in a way the ‘common’ or ‘ordinary’ novel was not, but what moved it decisively inside those borders was its firm alliance with the prestigious discourse of history. The early nineteenth-​century novel in general was becoming ambitious, openly aligning itself with non-​fictional genres such as political economy, travel-​writing, and historiography, but no novelist before Scott had succeeded in effectively placing the fictional genre alongside higher-​status and notably intellectual genres. Registering Scott’s achievement in material form, Scott’s enterprising publisher, Archibald Constable, accompanied the publication of Heart of Midlothian with the simultaneous publication (in exactly the same format as Scott’s novel) of a collection of historical materials titled Criminal Trials, Illustrative of the Tale Entitled ‘The Heart of Midlothian’, Published From the Original Research. Reviewers made the point in more discursive fashion. The Author of Waverley ‘raise[d]‌himself from the general mass of novelists to sit on the same bench with the annalists of his country’ asserted the Monthly Review, while the Edinburgh Monthly Review remarked that his learning made him ‘equally fitted to indite the graver annals of the times as a historian’. Indeed it was in Scott’s coordination of historical and novelistic protocols that the latter located the innovative power of novels which preserved at once the ‘interest’ of fiction and the ‘fidelity’ of history: ‘Our author was the first who tried the effect of engrafting an interesting fiction—​no part of which was at least incompatible with known historical record, and all of which was borne out by the ascertained manners and customs of the times—​upon some great and peculiarly interesting historical event, which he related with all the fidelity of an historian.’10 As the Waverley series developed, the sense that they represented a new kind of historical fiction became ever stronger (Waverley itself had not been immediately seen as an innovation), and the reviews were soon regularly pronouncing the Author of Waverley, as does Francis Jeffrey, the founder of ‘a new school of invention’.11 For John Scott, for example, writing in the London Magazine, ‘the Scotch novels’ combined the generic values of history, travels, poetry, and romance into a synthetic narrative that added ‘a new

9  ‘On the Living Novelists’, (Gold’s) London Magazine 2 (August 1820), 265. This is the lesser-​known of the two magazines with the same title that were founded in January 1820; I reserve the uninflected form of the title for the better-​known London Magazine whose first editor was John Scott. 10  Review of Heart of Midlothian, Monthly Review 87 (December 1818), 362; Review of Ivanhoe, Edinburgh Monthly Review 3 (February 1820), 195. 11  Review of Ivanhoe, Edinburgh Review 33 (January 1820), 1.

554

554   INA FERRIS species to the catalogue of our native literary productions’.12 Even though novels treating historical subjects had been produced for well over a century, Scott’s novels struck their first readers as an unprecedented mix: they were neither ‘historical’ nor ‘fictional’ in the same way. ‘Until he appeared,’ claimed one reviewer, ‘we had no compositions in our language which could fairly lay claim to the title of historical novels.’13 His careful formulation (‘could fairly lay claim’) allows that novels featuring historical figures had existed before Scott but were not somehow properly ‘historical novels’; very soon, however, the idea that Scott had in fact invented the historical novel tout court took hold, so that by 1847 Fraser’s Magazine could state categorically that early nineteenth-​century critics invented the term ‘Historical Novels’ precisely for the Waverley Novels.14 Fraser’s (mistaken) assertion testifies to the way that Scott’s model of historical fiction achieved such dominance in the literary field as to take over the very category of historical novel for the rest of the nineteenth century. But as Scott himself well knew, the Waverley model did not spring full-​blown on to the literary scene but was forged in relation to and out of a novelistic matrix in which historical and national fictions were proliferating at the time he began writing his first novel.

The Novelistic Context: Historical Romance, National Tale Well versed in the tradition of both early romance and modern novel, Scott was an astute and influential reader of contemporary fiction. His 1810 review of Charles Robert Maturin’s first novel, Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio (written under the pseudonym of Dennis Jasper Murphy), for example, launched Maturin’s literary career, while his essay on Jane Austen’s Emma for the Quarterly in 1815–​16 was instrumental in establishing the reputation of the then little-​noticed novelist. He also wrote important essays on his eighteenth-​century predecessors as introductions to the volumes collected in Ballantyne’s Novelists Library (1821–​4), later issued in a separate publication titled Lives of the Novelists (1825). Running throughout Scott’s commentary on fiction is a sense of the novelistic field as made up of differentiated ‘species of composition’ with distinct aims and projects. Thus he argues that the ‘species of romance’ founded by Ann Radcliffe is characterized by a set toward ‘the passion of fear’, and his account of Frankenstein outlines different uses of the supernatural in fiction as a way of finding a place for this odd new novel.15 The quasi-​botanic language of ‘species’ does not, however, imply a formal 12 

‘Author of the Scotch Novels’, London Magazine 1 (January 1820), 16. Review of The Fortunes of Nigel, Monthly Review 98 (1822), 170. 14  ‘Walter Scott—​Has History Gained by His Writings?’, Fraser’s Magazine 36 (September 1847), 346. 15  ‘Mrs. Ann Radcliffe’, Miscellaneous Prose Works (London: Robert Cadell, 1834), 3: 359. For a useful collection of Scott’s commentary on novels, see Ioan Williams (ed.), Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968). 13 

Walter Scott’s Historical Fiction    555 taxonomic understanding of genre; rather, Scott operates within a communicative matrix, understanding literary forms as produced as much in relation to the pragmatic axis of reception as to the expressive or formal axis of production. Genres are importantly contractual, a ‘pledge’ to the reader. This is the sense that governs the opening chapter of Waverley itself, where the anonymous author clears a space for his own foray into the novelistic arena with a playful disquisition separating it from currently popular modes of fiction. As he explains, the choice of a subtitle for his novel was more difficult than that of a title because the ‘second or supplemental title … may be held as pledging the author to some special mode of laying his scene, drawing his characters, and managing his adventures’.16 He then runs through the expectations that would have been generated had he subtitled his novel ‘a Tale of other Days’, ‘a Romance from the German’, ‘Sentimental Tale’, or ‘A Tale of the Times’. In particular, he warns readers that they will not meet with a ‘romance of chivalry’ in his pages, although he is less forthcoming about precisely what they will meet. Drawing on the modes of historical fiction available in his time, in particular national romance and antiquarian romance, he rewrote their typically static narrative structures, investing them with a narrative dynamic that turned the recent past of Sixty Years Since into a historical ‘stage’, and hence brought home to contemporary readers their own historicity. By the time Scott entered the novelistic field, historical fiction (indifferently termed ‘historical novel’ or ‘historical romance’) had coalesced into a distinct if controversial category of novel-​writing. The decades from the 1790s onwards saw the publication of increasing numbers of novels with subtitles like ‘An Historical Tale’, ‘A Historical Romance’, and ‘A Tale of Other Times’.17 This proliferation of stories set in a determinate historical past owed something to shifts in the historical field itself, as historiography began to broaden out in the later eighteenth century from its long-​standing focus on matters of state (military and political) to include matters of social, cultural, and private life which had typically fallen to unofficial genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels.18 History, that is, became popularized both in the sense of expanding its attention to everyday life and in the sense that historical subjects moved into more popular forms such as the novel. But the heightened interest in historical settings answered equally to an intensified national consciousness (not only in Great Britain) in the wake of the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Responding to the turbulence and tension of these years, a historical form of national romance emerged around the turn of the century. Explicitly patriotic, national romance deliberately called up the past to serve as warning, prophecy, or model for the crisis-​ridden present. Jane West, for instance, defines historical fiction in her tale of the English Civil Wars, The

16 

Walter Scott, Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: OUP, 1986), 3. See J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770–​1800 (London: Routledge, 1932); and Anne H. Stevens, British Historical Fiction Before Scott (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 18  On the reconfiguration of the historical genres, see Mark Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–​1820 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000) and Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001). 17 

556

556   INA FERRIS Loyalists:  An Historical Novel (1812), as aimed at ‘conveying instruction to the present times, under the form of a chronicle of the past’. In a discursive opening chapter, she urges those who govern England’s ‘wide extended empire’ in this time of national danger to ‘study the records of our former woes, and shape their political course with such single-​hearted observance for the unerring laws of God, as to become, under his Providence, our preservers from danger’.19 Typically governed by moral and didactic aims, the national romance saw itself as a timely intervention in the present, and promoted a national narrative in which the past was transferred from historical time to politico-​ethical space. The most successful of the national romances, Jane Porter’s story of William Wallace, The Scottish Chiefs, A Romance (1810), is a striking example. An epigraph from James Macpherson’s Ossian on the title page sets the tone: ‘There comes a voice that awakes my soul. It is the voice of years that are gone; they roll before me with all their deeds.’ Summoning up the storied Scottish patriot as exemplary national hero for Porter’s own time, the narrative figures Wallace as a charismatic leader of national resistance, repeatedly putting him on display in spectacular scenes and rousing speeches: ‘From this hour may Scotland date her liberty; or Wallace return no more!’20 As reviewers noted, the Wallace of Scottish Chiefs bore little resemblance to a Lowland Scot of the late thirteenth century, emerging rather as ‘a finished fine gentleman, and the idol of every female heart’.21 Nor was Porter herself much interested in historical accuracy. Notoriously, she drastically altered the historical ending of Wallace’s story, sparing him the ignominious death he in fact endured (the corpse of another man suffers the indignities) and giving him solemn burial in Scotland. Her primary interest lay in animating and renovating national feeling, and her breathless, fast-​moving romance proved immensely popular. Even so, it is a sign of the heightened authority of history at this time that Porter felt bound in her preface to claim she had ‘spared no pains in consulting almost every writing extant, which treats of the sister kingdoms during the period of my narrative’. At the same time she avoided specifying these sources by telling readers it would be tedious ‘to swell this page with a list of these authorities, for they are very numerous’ (i: pp. v–​vi). Neither openly fictional (as in earlier romances) nor documentary (as in newer romances), Porter’s authenticating gesture underlines a key shift in the writing of historical fiction by the early nineteenth century. While historical romances had long activated authenticating gestures, as in the familiar ‘found manuscript’ trope, these were generally understood as the fictional devices they in fact were. By Porter’s time, however, fiction’s claims to historical authenticity had assumed a more serious and scholarly air with even speculative historical romances frequently sporting an elaborate paratextual apparatus in the form of prefaces, notes, and appendices. Witness another of Jane West’s novels, Alicia de Lacy: An Historical Romance (1814). Dealing with the scandal surrounding the marriage of the historical Alice de Lacy to the powerful second Earl of Lancaster at the turn of the fourteenth century, it invents 19 

The Loyalists: An Historical Novel, 3 vols. (London, 1812), 1: 8, 6. The Scottish Chiefs, A Romance, 5 vols. (London, 1810), 1: 125. 21  Review of Scottish Chiefs, Scots Magazine 72 (April 1810), 279. 20 

Walter Scott’s Historical Fiction    557 a dark Gothic double to account for the scandal and preserve the virtue of its eponymous heroine. West prefaces her text with a defence of historical fiction, contending that novelists should be accorded ‘the same liberty of building fictions on the basis of truth’ traditionally granted to epic poets; nonetheless, she is careful to specify that such licence is always conditional, subject to proper attention to ‘the manners and costume of those times’.22 To confirm the seriousness of her own historical credentials, she appends at the end of the novel a set of historical notices to guide readers through what she calls ‘this maze of history and fiction’ (4: 309). Like Porter, West at once claims fictional privilege and accedes to the priority of history, but her documentation and reference to ‘manners and costume of those times’ aligns her novel more immediately with antiquarian history. Antiquarianism’s interest in micro-​forms of social history (‘manners’) and its detailed attention to material remains, including archival documents, was helping to transform historiographical practice and to found new knowledge disciplines such as what came to be called ‘archaeology’. But its influence in the period was pervasive and diffuse, inflecting as well a whole range of artistic and cultural practices. Within the novelistic field, more particularly, it generated a variant of historical fiction, the antiquarian romance, which Scott would revise and transform into the modern historical novel. Unlike national romances, antiquarian romances typically avoided representing well-​ known historical figures such as William Wallace or kept them in the background. Their interest lay in the ‘manners’ of particular periods: the dress, customs, habits, and informal institutions that defined the way people inhabited particular times and places. The foreground of these novels was typically populated by fictional characters embedded in a concrete historical milieu, thereby relocating ‘history’ from the official world of state politics to the informal world of everyday life and manners, most often the medieval life and manners in those ‘romances of chivalry’ to which Scott refers in the opening of Waverley. Working out of a historicist sense of the past as cut off from the present, antiquarian romances typically approached the materials of the past as objects of ‘curiosity’, which they sought to bring close through detailed examination and representation. In terms of the macro-​historical models, different antiquaries adhered to different paradigms, some reading historical time as the progressive supersession of less advanced social orders while others understood it as the loss or suppression of positive social values. But the interest of all antiquaries lay not in models but in particulars, notably those helping to reconstruct the social processes, procedures, and ‘look’ of the periods that claimed their attention. Such is the case with the exemplary antiquarian romance Queenhoo-​Hall: A Romance (1808) by Joseph Strutt, which itself played a formative role in the making of the Waverley Novels. Strutt, an antiquary and engraver, made his reputation as a pioneer in the recording of everyday social life in medieval and early modern England, and Queenhoo-​Hall is his only novel. As he explained in his preface, he turned to fiction in an attempt to reach a broader audience than through his ‘dry’ antiquarian publications,

22 

Alicia de Lacy: An Historical Romance, 4 vols. (London, 1814), 1: pp. vii, viii.

558

558   INA FERRIS and the New Monthly Magazine hailed his novel as ‘the first exact representation, in a work of fancy, of early English manners’.23 But Queenhoo-​Hall failed to find the readers Strutt sought. A markedly awkward work, this episodic tale, set in the time of Henry VI, is thin on narrative and thick not only in period description but in archaic idiom. It ostensibly focuses on a set of high/​low courtships conducted in the baronial hall of the title and the village attached to it, but most of Strutt’s energy is absorbed in detailing material particulars, especially period clothing: ‘Her wimple was wrapped closely about her head, and fastened by the gorget, which was wound round her neck in several small folds, and fastened with a bow in the front’—​and the description goes on.24 When Strutt died leaving the work unfinished, his publisher, John Murray, turned to Scott, whose own antiquarian verse romances were best-​sellers, to complete the project. The experience of doing so (Scott cobbled together the final chapters) proved a valuable lesson in how not to write historical novels. Thus when Scott came to define his own historical romance in the Dedicatory Epistle of Ivanhoe: A Romance (1820), he explicitly invoked his antiquarian predecessor as a cautionary figure. The Dedicatory Epistle is ostensibly authored by Laurence Templeton, one of the fictional author-​editors Scott created in the frames he increasingly attached to his novels, and Templeton’s argument is that Strutt limited the popularity of Queenhoo-​Hall ‘by excluding from it every thing which was not sufficiently obsolete to be altogether forgotten and unintelligible’.25 Intent on preserving the difference of the past, Strutt failed to bridge past and present, for by adhering too intently on maintaining fidelity to the past, he bypassed contemporary readers. By contrast, Templeton advances a model of historical fiction as ‘translation’ of the past rather than fidelity to the past. While he specifies certain limits to the ‘licence’ of fictional translation when it comes to historical ‘keeping’, he places the genre itself under signs of hybridity and impure mediation. Governed by a set to its target audience, its primary purpose is to make the past ‘interesting and intelligible’ to the readers currently on the ground (18). Behind this model of authorial mediation in Scott lies not only the experience of reading historical romances like Queenhoo-​Hall but the example of a very recent entrant into the novelistic field, the national tale. A form of fiction that emerged out of Ireland in the wake of the 1800 Act of Union that integrated Ireland into a new United Kingdom, the national tale was explicitly directed to English readers, who were widely regarded on Irish soil as (at best) woefully ignorant when it came to that country. Hence it was by definition an intermediary genre. As the Dublin Review explained some decades later, such novels served as ‘vehicles for exciting interest and sympathy in the minds of those to whom the nation in question would otherwise have been a name and nothing more’.26 It was also a female-​authored genre, founded by Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and named in the subtitle of Morgan’s highly successful The Wild Irish 23 

‘Ivanhoe: a Romance’, New Monthly Magazine 13 (January 1820), 75. Joseph Strutt, Queenhoo-​Hall, A Romance, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1808), 2: 116. 25  Walter Scott, Ivanhoe: A Romance, ed. Ian Duncan (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1996), 18. 26  ‘Irish Novels and Irish Novelists’, Dublin Review 4 (April 1838), 496. 24 

Walter Scott’s Historical Fiction    559 Girl: A National Tale (1806). Keen to secure Catholic emancipation and to reform the landowning class in Ireland, these two Anglo-​ Irishwomen shared Enlightenment politics (although little else), and their fictions converged with the historical national romance in representing a deliberate intervention in the contentious sphere of public discourse. A  mixture of romance motifs and proto-​ethnographic discourses, the national tale characteristically deployed a plot of initiation to bring English readers closer to Irish space. In the standard plot a male English or Anglo-​Irish figure from the landlord class journeys through Ireland, encountering different manifestations of Irish life; he slowly sheds false preconceptions, begins to engage with Irish experience, and falls in love with a local woman whom he ultimately marries, their marriage representing at once the possibility of reform of the landlord class and the promotion of a more harmonious Irish union with Great Britain. While Morgan’s extravagant The Wild Irish Girl inaugurated this plot, it was Edgeworth’s more rational national tales such as Ennui (1809) and The Absentee (1812) that made her the most respected novelist in Britain before Scott, and it is Edgeworth whom Scott credits as a model in the Postscript to Waverley. His object in his own novel, he explains, has been to describe Highlanders and Lowlanders not through caricature and exaggeration ‘but by their habits, manners, and feelings; so as, in some distant degree, to emulate the admirable Irish portraits drawn by Miss Edgeworth’ (341). Steeped in the political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment, Edgeworth understood the nation under an economic model, an understanding that converged in important ways with Scott’s own sense of the centrality of material determinants in the making of both persons and nations. Both adhered to the ‘stages of society’ model advanced by the Scottish Enlightenment, but with this difference: for Edgeworth, nations were points on the same grid, and national difference was simply a function of uneven development. Ireland in her fictions is basically a badly managed estate; good management will bring it in line with modern Britain. For Scott, by contrast, nations were understood in cultural-​ historical, as well as economic terms, and this understanding has more in common with Morgan (whom he dismissed) rather than Edgeworth (whom he admired). In contrast to Edgeworth’s Enlightenment view of nations as comparable versions of an overarching abstract concept of ‘society’, Morgan’s romantic national tale spoke to an emergent cultural concept of nationality that expressed itself in the differentiated and affective terms of national feeling and belonging. Sustaining this emergent concept lay the new definition of ‘culture’ as the distinctive way of life of a people rooted in a particular history, and both Morgan’s and Scott’s fictions take their place (as that of Edgeworth does not) in the history of the construction of cultural nationalism in the nineteenth century. In Waverley and its successors Scott adapted Morgan’s culturally inflected plot of encounter, presenting heroes initiated into distinct worlds, often residual or off-​to-​the-​side, but each possessing a character and coherence of its own even as it remained tied to larger systems that often threatened its eradication.27 Historicizing the national tale, he turned 27 

On the relationship between Scott’s historical novel and the national tale, see Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), ch. 3.

560

560   INA FERRIS spatial or geographical difference into temporal and historical difference, thickening historical time, adumbrating an emergent historical consciousness, and articulating a sense of history itself as layered and ongoing process.

History as Passage The stadial model of history as the progressive evolution of distinct stages, which Scott absorbed from the Scottish Enlightenment, operates at a high analytic level to bring into view the working of large impersonal forces. The Waverley Novels anchor themselves in this macro-​model to structure their general narrative of history, but the source of their fictional power lies in their responsiveness to the implications of this model at the micro-​level. At this level the abstract category of process turns into the phenomenological notion of passage, and Scott activates both in his often-​quoted comments in the Postscript to Waverley on the extraordinary historical changes in Scotland that had taken place over the last half-​century. A discursive passage of authorial summation, it modulates from notions of impersonal process to felt passage. ‘No European nation’, Scott avers, has undergone ‘so complete a change’ as Scotland in the last fifty years, and he enumerates causes, from the political and cultural fallout of the Jacobite insurrection of 1745 to the ‘innovation’ sparked by the extension of commerce. When underscoring the resulting gulf between ‘the present people of Scotland’ and their grandfathers, however, he shifts from analytic to experiential categories, appealing to the memory of those of ‘the present generation’ who recall the final decades of the eighteenth century and who (as he puts it) ‘will be fully sensible of the truth of this statement’. Reinforcing this turn to personal experience, he brings in his own childhood encounters with old Jacobites, a race now ‘almost entirely vanished from the land’ (340). To become ‘sensible’ of truth and to witness the ‘almost total extinction’ of a community is to underscore not simply that things change but that to live in historical time is to experience time in the participial modality of vanishing and passing, as well as emerging and rising. Alert both to what was on its way in and to what was on its way out, the Waverley Novels embody the understanding that any historical moment is a moment of passage. Scott’s fiction articulates this understanding as much through form as through representation or direct commentary, in particular through its deft manipulation of narrative distance: the interweaving of a distanced narratorial mode (in which the past is known and accounted for) with the intimacy of close-​up views (in which this past appears as a vital present whose outcome is uncertain). This alternation of perspective, the signature of the Waverley mode of historical fiction, was crucial to their impact on their first readers.28 To Scott’s narrative voice the novels owed their historical authority; to their realist 28 

Richard Maxwell traces the roots of this technique to French historical romances, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–​1950 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 47–​58.

Walter Scott’s Historical Fiction    561 power of immersion they owed their fictional power. ‘We do not, as in contemplating the stately narratives of the historian,’ commented the New Monthly Magazine, ‘seem to look on the great occurrences of the elder time from a philosophic eminence, whence we can discern only the vast masses … We live in the eventful days, and mingle among the breathing persons.’29 Scott’s plot of encounter was central to this sense of involvement, setting an inexperienced young protagonist on a journey or set of adventures that exposed him to previously unfamiliar social or national formations within the limits of what he had considered his ‘own’ world. When Edward Waverley travels away from his English base and ever deeper into Scottish space, for example, he runs across forms of life he finds difficult to credit as existing within the same space and time he inhabits: ‘It seemed like a dream to Waverley that these deeds of violence should be familiar to men’s minds, and currently talked of, as falling within the common order of things, and happening daily in the immediate neighbourhood, without his having crossed the seas, and while he was yet in the otherwise well-​ordered island of Great Britain’ (72–​3). The first of Scott’s notoriously passive heroes, Waverley operates less as a narrative agent than as a focalizer, providing the authorial opportunity for intensive descriptions of manners and customs, as in chapters with quasi-​ethnographic titles such as ‘A Scottish Manor House Sixty Years Since’, ‘The Hold of a Highland Robber’, or ‘A Highland Feast’.30 But the hero’s very malleability also allows for initiation into rather than simply a survey of such scenes. Waverley gradually engages with (rather than simply observes) the worlds he encounters, and he eventually plunges fully into the Jacobite insurrection under the spell of the glamorous siblings, Fergus and Flora MacIvor, exchanging the uniform of an English officer for the military garb of a Highland clansman. Waverley’s Scottish excursus turns into an experiment with personal identity, a trying-​on of multiple identities as he assumes various roles (and several aliases), but what he learns is that personal subjectivity is profoundly historical. When he asserts at the end of his military participation in the insurrection that the ‘romance’ of his life was ended and ‘its real history had now commenced’ (283), he signals not just a move out of the adventure time into which he had swerved in Scotland (and gained personal maturity) but a move into a modern subjectivity that recognizes itself as enmeshed in historical-​national time. Bringing into view internal differences within the territory of the nation, Waverley’s travels serve in particular to redefine and expand his understanding of national identity, dislodging the centrality of an Englishness he has taken for granted. The early Waverley Novels played a key role in the forging of a new, decentred ‘Britishness’ that incorporated but did not erase the different national identities (none in itself pure or single) that went into its formation.31 This sense of the British nation as a compound or amalgam

29 

Review of The Abbot, New Monthly Magazine 14 (October 1820), 422. The classic account of Scott’s passive hero is Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1963). 31  On this topic see in particular Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2001) and Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–​1832 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2007). 30 

562

562   INA FERRIS comes into strong play in the final pages of Waverley in which two symbolic actions dominate: the restitution of Tully Veolan to Baron Bradwardine, restored ‘as far as possible’ to its state before its destruction in the civil conflict; and the cross-​cultural marriage of Edward Waverley and Rose Bradwardine. The latter follows the pattern of the national tale but underscores the point about the composite nature of the union, for Waverley himself is no longer simply ‘English’, while Rose has always functioned as a liminal figure operating between terms. She is a Lowlander located on the ‘verge’ of the Highlands; a modern daughter faithful to a feudal father; a literate figure who circulates in preliterate networks of folk culture. At the same time, narrative emphasis falls less on this marriage (which takes place offstage) than on the celebration of the restoration of Tully Veolan, a festive scene Scott sets up as precisely compounded, a mix of Scots (from different regions) and English, as well as a mix of classes and local inhabitants. But not all elements can be incorporated into the new entity: exiled from the mix are the Jacobite clansmen, an absence to which Scott draws attention by dwelling on the stylized portrait of Waverley and the dead Fergus MacIvor in Highland dress prominently placed in the dining parlour of Tully Veolan. Such absence entails loss, as the Postscript goes on to affirm, but it is the necessary condition for the formation of a modern Britain in which Scotland can participate. Broached in this first Waverley novel, Scott’s great subject becomes the hetero­ geneity of historical time. In novel after novel he focuses the way that any particular moment in any given society yields several, often contending, cultural formations with different temporalities. The energy generated by their contentions and tensions is history’s motor, the dynamic that makes history ‘happen’. In Waverley what ‘happens’ is located in terms of a progressive line of set stages, the supersession of clan structures and feudal loyalties; even as Scott juxtaposes different stages in adjacent spaces, one stage gives way to another in standard fashion. However, when he revisits the Waverley plot a few years later in Rob Roy (1818), the Enlightenment model of linear progression comes into question. It is not that the novel rejects the notion of progress but that it complicates the stadial scheme by overlapping and intertwining its stages.32 As in Waverley, Rob Roy is structured around a journey into the hinterland by a young Englishman, this time first to Northumberland and then on to Scotland, where he goes through Glasgow into the Highlands. However, the journey of Frank Osbaldistone functions less as an initiation into cultural difference (although it performs this role) than as a progressive loss of bearings. Taking the form of a first-​person narration (rare in Scott), the novel lacks the anchor of the broad historical perspective generally offered by the Waverley narrator, and this choice of narratorial perspective intensifies the confusion experienced by young Frank Osbaldistone, as he travels northwards to find himself confounded by figures like Diana Vernon (who wishes to be called ‘Tom’) and Rob Roy (who has at least four names). These figures elude the

32 

See Ian Duncan’s reading of the novel, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007), 108–​15.

Walter Scott’s Historical Fiction    563 categories and distinctions on which he has relied, and his grip on the world begins to falter. Exposing him to strange reciprocities and intermixtures, this journey induces a ‘chaos of thoughts’ he likens to ‘those fogs which in mountainous countries are wont to descend in obscure volumes, and disfigure or obliterate the usual marks by which the traveler steers his course through the wilds’.33 Epitomizing the sliding of categorical distinctions in this novel is the figure of Rob Roy himself, who actually existed in the eighteenth century but rapidly became the subject of song and legend. Exploiting his semi-​legendary status, Scott endows him with an almost magical mobility in his narrative, a character who eludes location and moves easily among various sites, from an English inn to the city of Glasgow to a Highland glen. Resourceful and resilient, Rob Roy participates in different economies in which he occupies different roles (cattle dealer, tribal chief, outlaw), and Scott’s 1829 Introduction to the Magnum edition of Rob Roy draws immediate attention to the strangeness of this kind of being operating in Britain during the Augustan age. Addison and Pope, Scott comments, ‘would have been considerably surprised if they had known that there existed in the same island with them a personage of Rob Roy’s peculiar habits and profession’ (5). Within the story the most striking manifestation of the overlap of distinct historical stages is Rob Roy’s relationship with the Glasgow magistrate, Bailie Nicol Jarvie. Nicol Jarvie, the modern man of the city, speaks the language of commerce and exchange, urging the importance of prudence, credit, and improvement; Rob Roy, the archaic man of the glen, speaks by contrast the ‘savage’ language of a warrior order based on physical prowess and the code of honour. Their values clash—​‘Honour is a homicide and bloodspiller’, Nicol Jarvie famously declares (297)—​but the two turn out to be cousins with intertwined lives and dealings. The point is not simply that the two connect at the level of kinship or common humanity but that they represent the imbrication of apparently opposed orders of value that should rule one another out. Moreover, in the end each defies expectation: the prudent city magistrate marries his lower-​class housekeeper in an imprudent action, while the rebel-​outlaw dies unheroically at home of old age despite predictions he will be hanged. Trajectories prove unpredictable. Thus scrambling linear historical models to transfer attention to a tangled nexus that muddies their clarity, Rob Roy epitomizes the way the innovative power of Scott’s early novels depended on the particularities of Scotland as a historical case. A nation marked by sharp internal distinctions while insecurely positioned on/​within the border of Great Britain, it offered in its unevenness at once rich material for fictional exploitation and a lever to dislodge (if not overturn) the broad narratives of general history. Barely five years after launching the Waverley series, Scott himself broadened out, moving from the terrain of modern Scottish history he had written into the literary imaginary of his time to venture into literary-​historical territory more familiar to his English and European readers.

33 

Walter Scott, Rob Roy, ed. Ian Duncan (Oxford: OUP, 1998), 213.

564

564   INA FERRIS

History as Spectacle The publication of Ivanhoe at the very end of 1819 (with an official publication date of 1820) marked a departure that was also an expansion, as Scott launched a new phase of historical novel-​writing in which he rewrote popular genres like the romance of chivalry, and colonized large swatches of English and Continental history under the banner of the Author of Waverley. Deploying the motifs of chivalric romance with gusto in Ivanhoe, Scott brings in popular and legendary figures from the English Middle Ages (e.g., Richard the Lionheart, Robin Hood, Friar Tuck) and peoples his tale with knights, priors, and maidens in distress. But he sets them within an overarching historical narrative of the making of a nation out of a tense and violent matrix of contention, conflict, and interchange. This narrative, by now familiar to Waverley readers in relation to Scottish history, was less familiar when it came to that of England, and Scott foregrounds this point at the very outset of Ivanhoe. In the Dedicatory Epistle Templeton imagines an English reader ‘in his own snug parlour’, and remarks that while such a reader can believe anything about Highlanders, he is ‘not half so much disposed to believe that his own ancestors led a very different life from himself ’ (16). Ivanhoe sets out to dispel such assumptions, and it begins by historicizing the very language of English. Its celebrated opening scene between the Saxon serfs Gurth and Wamba constitutes a lesson in both historical linguistics and the power dynamics of language, showing that at the end of the twelfth century Norman, Saxon, and Latin languages collided in a markedly differentiated territory now known as England. From this linguistic-​racial mix there gradually emerged an English language and national identity. The bearer of this theme is the novel’s eponymous hero, who heralds future reconciliation and synthesis but (as is the wont of Waverley heroes) himself exists uneasily in the present. A Normanized Saxon who sees himself as neither, Ivanhoe is characterized by melancholy throughout the narrative, a ‘Disinherited Knight’ (to cite the role he assumes at the Ashby tournament) in more than one sense. In many ways Ivanhoe’s fable of the emergence of a compound English identity worked towards the very contemporary purpose of constructing an imperial British identity in the nineteenth century, but it also importantly disrupted the taken-​for-​grantedness of national identity in general, a point not lost on the French historian Augustin Thierry when (sparked by Ivanhoe) he came to write his landmark History of the Conquest of England by the Normans (1825).34 If Ivanhoe’s narrative dynamic follows the pattern established by the earlier Waverley Novels, however, its thick visual descriptions and elaboration of chivalric set pieces align it more firmly with pictorial genres, underlining historical fiction’s participation in a burgeoning popular culture of history as spectacle. The early nineteenth century saw the development of a whole range of new visual entertainments (e.g., historical 34 

See Thierry’s introduction to his History of the Conquest of England by the Normans, trans. C. C. Hamilton, 3 vols. (London, 1825).

Walter Scott’s Historical Fiction    565 panoramas, dioramas, waxworks), along with the rendition of historical subjects in paintings, plays, and novels. The past became something to be looked at, and contemporary reviews of Ivanhoe typically printed lengthy passages of period description, in particular long excerpts from Scott’s depiction of the tournament at Ashby. Repeatedly, they drew on the vocabulary of pageantry and visual appeal in their commentary, as does Francis Jeffrey when he describes the novel as a ‘succession of brilliant pictures, addressed as often to the eye as to the imagination’.35 For Jeffrey such intense visuality is a dubious value, undermining fiction’s affective power by blocking the sympathetic and imaginative engagement he considered proper to reading. Addressed to the eye, historical fiction in this mode turned readers into spectators. But this positioning of the reader answered to a widespread desire in the public for a concrete sense of the past as an object to which they could have a quasi-​physical connection. ‘We have read of bondsmen, serfs, and men ascripti glebae,’ noted one reviewer of Ivanhoe, ‘but we never saw them before.’36 To see the past rather than simply read about it was to bring it close to hand even if, paradoxically, it was also to alienate it. But the key point was that the translation of history into visual genres both widened access and multiplied forms of participation in the national past. The sense of such participation was central to the explosive success of the Waverley Novels. By the early nineteenth century the ongoing reconfiguration of the historical field to include the informal, everyday past had combined with a significant expansion of reading to produce a public that wanted a stake in the historical past, which was becoming increasingly understood in post-​Enlightenment and post-​ Revolutionary Europe as very much a public matter. Answering to the emergence of a new national-​historical sensibility, Scott’s mediatory mode of historical fiction represented a breakthrough for readers, confirming their share in the story/​stories of history, and they seized avidly on the participation these novels offered. Once such participation became more normalized, the intensity of interest decreased, and over the course of the nineteenth century the Waverley Novels, while continually reprinted, gradually lost cultural purchase. But Scott’s fictions had altered both the literary status of the novel in general and the possibilities of historical fiction in particular, and their intervention in the novelistic field represents one of the most consequential moments in the history of novel-​writing.

Select Bibliography Duncan, Ian, Scott’s Shadow:  The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton:  Princeton UP, 2007). Ferris, Ina, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP, 1991). 35 

[Francis Jeffrey], Edinburgh Review 33 (January 1820), 8. Edinburgh Monthly Review 3 (February 1820), 166. On Scott’s importance in transforming history into spectacle, see Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-​ Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004), ch. 4. 36 

566

566   INA FERRIS Garside, Peter, ‘Popular Fiction and National Tale:  Hidden Origins of Scott’s Waverley’, Nineteenth-​Century Literature 46/​1 (1991), 30–​53. Goode, Mike, Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History 1790–​1890 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009). Gottlieb, Evan, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–​1832 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2007). Lincoln, Andrew, Walter Scott and Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007). McCracken-​Flesher, Caroline, Possible Scotlands:  Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford: OUP, 2005). Maxwell, Richard, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–​1950 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009). Millgate, Jane, Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984). Rigney, Ann, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP, 2001). Robertson, Fiona, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Shaw, Harry E., The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP, 1983). Stevens, Anne H., British Historical Fiction before Scott (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997). Welsh, Alexander, The Hero of the Waverley Novels:  With New Essays on Scott (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992).

Chapter 34

Parody and S at i re i n the Novel, 1 7 7 0–​1 832 Gary Dyer

Satirical fiction changed relatively little between the era of Jonathan Swift and Delarivier Manley and the era of William Combe and Thomas Love Peacock, but the rest of fiction had been transformed. Between 1770 and 1829, 3,677 new novels were published in the British Isles, only a small percentage of which were predominantly satirical or parodic.1 A smaller percentage of fictional narratives were satirical than earlier in the eighteenth century, largely because other traditions in fiction had evolved, and the field was dominated by the sentimental novel and the Gothic novel. A larger audience awaited new fiction, and there were more efficient mechanisms for marketing it, notably the circulating libraries. The most successful and prolific publishers of fiction concentrated on Gothic, sentimental, and (later in the period) historical fiction, and, at most, they dabbled in other subgenres, as William Lane and A. K. Newman did by publishing a few satirical narratives. Peacock’s publisher, Thomas Hookham, was a marginal figure, publishing only three other novels in the years 1814–​24. Publishers may have been wary of controversy or scandal, and some satirical novels were surely too controversial for many circulating libraries. Numerous fictional narratives from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries employ wit or humour when criticizing actions or ideas, but these satirical narratives seem to have been written with little consciousness of genre. Commentators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seldom examined how novels were or might be satirical, and ‘satirical’ was never a common generic label for fiction, as it was for poetry. (Johnson’s dictionary defined the noun ‘satire’ as ‘A poem in which wickedness or folly is censured’, so Gulliver’s Travels was not a satire, even though it was satirical.) The terms ‘satirical novel’ or ‘satirical romance’ are rarer than the things themselves: only twenty-​five book-​length fictional prose narratives have title pages declaring them to be ‘satirical’ or ‘satiric’, and they 1  Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​ 1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 1: 26; 2: 36.

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568   GARY DYER do not include some of the novels that are most obviously satirical. Many novels that claim to be such (novels that, for example, profess to expose vice) lack the wit of satire. Romantic-​era fictional narratives are inspired by such satirical classics as Lucian’s dialogues, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Johnson’s Rasselas, Voltaire’s Candide, and Manley’s The New Atalantis. William Combe’s The Devil Upon Two Sticks in England (1790–​1) is, as the subtitle explains, ‘a Continuation of Le Diable Boiteaux of Le Sage’; the demon Asmodeus escorts a Spanish nobleman around London, relating the hidden stories of the people they see, many of whom are real-​ life notables, information he gains through his supernatural insight. Cervantes was a major influence on eighteenth-​century British fiction, and novels from the period 1770–​1832 focus far more often on the person who gives in to eccentricity (or mild delusion) than on the person who indulges in vice. Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote; or, the Adventures of Arabella was published in 1752, and the titles of several later works announce that they follow in the same mode: Richard Graves, The Spiritual Quixote: or, The Summer’s Ramble of Mr. Geoffry Wildgoose. A Comic Romance (1773); The Philosophical Quixote; or, Memoir of Mr. David Wilkins. In a Series of Letters (1782); The History of Sir George Warrington: or, The Political Quixote (1797, possibly the work of Elizabeth and Jane Purbeck); and Charles Lucas, The Infernal Quixote:  A  Tale of the Day (1800). Scotch Novel Reading; or, Modern Quackery. A Novel Really Founded on Facts (1824), written by ‘A Cockney’ (actually Sarah Green, fl. 1790–​1825), is a late example of anti-​quixotic satire. The heroine, Alice, dresses and speaks as if she emerged from one of Scott’s Waverley Novels. She also falls for the Scottish poet known as the Ettrick Shepherd, unaware that his surname is the unromantic ‘Hogg’. Alice eventually marries, and the narrator concludes thus: ‘We have, we hope, done our duty in awakening our romantic girl from her airy dream of Scotch perfection; we have every reason to hope that she will cease her admiration of all modern quackery, and be a happy wife.’2 Patriarchy had no better friend than Green, and no greater enemy than Scottish romance. Crucial facts about the satirical fiction of this era are lost in obscurity. Of the 3,677 novels that appeared 1770–​1829, about 57 per cent bore no author’s name, not even a pseudonym, and identifying the authors of anonymous satirical writing is notoriously difficult (this essay will reiterate some traditional attributions that may be disproven by later investigations).3 Information is also scarce about who read or who could have read a specific satirical novel. Many novels in this period had few readers, and we seldom know the size of the print run of a novel, or how it was distributed. Because novels were marketed to circulating libraries, where they were worn out by their readers, even popular novels sometimes survive in only one or two copies. Sarah Green was one of the more prolific authors of satirical fiction, but literary history has largely ignored her writings, and integrating them into this history is problematic 2  [Sarah Green], Scotch Novel Reading; or, Modern Quackery. A Novel Really Founded on Facts, 3 vols. (London, 1824), 1: 1–​11; 3: 244. 3  See Garside et al. (eds.), English Novel 177–​1829, 1: 47; 2: 66.

Parody and Satire in the Novel, 1770–1832    569 because the surviving evidence is too thin for these works to be reconstructed as cultural events. Copies of Romance Readers and Romance Writers: A Satirical Novel (1810), The Reformist!!! A  Serio Comic Political Novel (1810), Good Men of Modern Date: A Satirical Tale (1811), Scotch Novel-​Reading, and her other works have survived when many novels of this era have disappeared. But how many people read Green’s novels? How did they react? Some of her works may have appeared dated: in Good Men of Modern Date, a woman raises her children guided by Rousseau’s doctrines. Did readers see Green’s novels as timely? Periodical reviews and a few entries in circulating and subscription library catalogues cannot answer these questions. Nineteen-​ year-​old Harriet Grove recorded in her diary that on 10 November 1810 she ‘read the Reformist in the Evening’, but she did not say what she thought of it.4 Such isolated data only remind us how little we know.

Satire and ‘the Novel’ In 1835 Thomas Love Peacock observed that fictional narratives which deal with ideas fall into ‘two very distinct classes’. In the works of Petronius, Rabelais, Swift, and Voltaire, ‘the characters are abstractions or embodied classifications, and the implied or embodied opinions the main matter of the work’. In the second class, represented by Fielding’s fiction, ‘the characters are individuals, and the events and the action those of actual life—​ the opinions, however prominent they may be made, being merely incidental’ (Fielding’s Jonathan Wild is ‘a felicitous compound of both classes’: ‘Jonathan and his gang are at once abstractions and individuals’).5 The first of these two categories is the focus of the present essay, and Peacock’s own Nightmare Abbey can exemplify the first category as effectively as Candide can, while Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey can exemplify the second as well as Tom Jones. Northanger Abbey and Nightmare Abbey (both dated 1818) represent opposite methods of critiquing contemporary Gothicism: unlike Peacock’s protagonist Scythrop Glowry, Austen’s Catherine Morland is never simply a quixotic enthusiast. Likewise, although Northanger Abbey and Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine, or Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader (1813) both reflect upon recent trends in fiction, the reader never believes in the existence of Barrett’s ‘Cherubina’ (the ‘heroine’) as he or she does in Catherine’s. The term for prose fiction in which ‘the characters are individuals, and the events and the action those of actual life’, is a novel, as distinguished from a romance. In 1824 Walter Scott wrote that a novel is ‘a fictitious narrative’ in which ‘the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society’, whereas 4  Desmond Hawkins (ed.), The Grove Diaries: The Rise and Fall of an English Family, 1809–​1925 (Stanbridge: Dovecote Press, 1995), 89. 5  The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H. F. B. Brett Smith and C. E. Jones, 10 vols. (1924–​34; New York: AMS Press, 1967), 9: 258. All references to Peacock’s works are to this edition.

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570   GARY DYER a ‘romance’ is a narrative ‘the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents’.6 Eight years earlier, he wrote that Austen’s works ‘belong to a class of fictions which has arisen almost in our own times’: fictions that aim at ‘copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader … a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him’.7 Readers increasingly expected the ordinary and familiar from book-​length fiction. When the European Magazine reviewed Nightmare Abbey in 1818, its reviewer assumed that anyone picking up a work of fiction was entitled to ‘a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him’ and to ‘characters in a dress which we have either seen or heard of before’; indeed, entitled to ‘a probable reality’. Peacock’s characters, in contrast, tend to be ‘absurd in the extreme’.8 This reviewer refused to extend to Nightmare Abbey the licence that readers had routinely granted to Gothic fiction. Satirical narrative will typically be more romance than novel, in part because the marvellous or uncommon is a traditional and effective device for critiquing society, even society in its modern state. Satire often examines actuality by envisioning alternative worlds that are exaggerations and caricatures of real life: for example, in Benjamin Disraeli’s The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1828), the Britain of the late 1820s becomes ‘Vraibleusia’, where the title character, visiting from a remote Pacific island, has misadventures.9 Peacock’s fiction obviously belongs alongside that of Petronius and Swift. Although his reader is presented with a plausible version of Regency-​era Wales, the Lake District, or Lincolnshire, the characters appear to be abstractions. They articulate specific beliefs or doctrines; they bear unlikely names, often names that point to their professions or their proclivities (Mr. Milestone, Mr. Listless, Mr. Fax); and frequently they behave in uncommon ways. The Literary Gazette observed in 1818 that ‘It would be difficult to say what [Peacock’s] books are, for they are neither romances, novels, tales, nor treatises, but a mixture of all these combined’; describing Peacock’s works is difficult when the critic is unfamiliar with the Menippean tradition.10 Yet they are not 6 

Walter Scott, ‘Essay on Romance’ (1824), repr. in Essays on Chivalry, Romance, and the Drama (London: Frederick Warne, 1887), 65–​108; 65. Scott’s terms are familiar enough to twentieth-​and twenty-​ first-​century literary historians. In Ian Watt’s famous definition of ‘formal realism’, a novel puts itself ‘under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms’ (Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding [Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1957], 32). 7  Walter Scott, review of Emma in the Quarterly Review (1816), quoted in Cheryl Nixon (ed.), Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688–​1815 (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2009), 307, 309. 8  European Magazine and London Review 75 (March 1819), 255. 9  For further information on The Voyage of Captain Popanilla, see Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–​1832 (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 127–​37. 10  Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres 99 (12 December 1818), 787. In the twentieth century Northrop Frye and Mikhail Bakhtin (independently) drew attention to the coherence of the tradition of Menippean satire, which ‘deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes’; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957), 309. For Bakhtin on the Menippean tradition, see Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, introd. Wayne Booth

Parody and Satire in the Novel, 1770–1832    571 unique in the period:  John Thelwall’s The Peripatetic (1793), for example, is a novel-​ travelogue-​dialogue-​meditation-​Menippean satire, in which Sylvanus Theophrastus and various friends go on long walks in south-​eastern England and discuss what they see—​meditating on poetry, the poor, wars past and present, gypsies, slavery, Charlotte Smith’s sonnets, and the competing merits of Dryden and Pope. Novels in the realistic tradition seldom have footnotes; satirical narratives frequently use them to attribute characters’ opinions to specific texts, almost as though the reader otherwise would be sceptical that anyone might profess these views!

The Use of Parody Although parody is often treated as a distinct genre, it is really a technique, one that can be used in almost any genre. Parody is imitation that is unsympathetic to its source.11 In the Romantic period, parodies and burlesques of dominant fictional conventions presented readers with the anti-​Gothic, the anti-​‘philosophical’, the anti-​sentimental. Sentimental fiction is parodied in Barrett’s The Heroine and in two burlesques that have been attributed to William Beckford, each of which has a long and vivid title: Modern Novel Writing, or the Elegant Enthusiast; and Interesting Emotions of Arabella Bloomville. A Rhapsodical Romance; Interspersed with Poetry (1796), signed ‘The Right Hon. Lady Harriet Marlow’, and Azemia: A Descriptive and Sentimental Novel. Interspersed with Pieces of Poetry. By Jacquetta Agneta Mariana Jenks, of Bellegrove Priory in Wales. Dedicated to the Right Honorable Lady Harriet Marlow. To Which are Added, Criticisms Anticipated (1797). Continually exaggerating sentimental conventions, The Heroine exposes the failings of sentimental authors and sentimental readers, and so it is really satiric. Yet the work is classified as a parody, perhaps because the failings Barrett identifies seem merely literary; a satire on bad novels may not seem to be a satire at all. Beckford’s parodies, in contrast, contain some sharp social and political satire, such as satire upon Pitt’s government. Satirical narratives employ parody to expose errors that the satirist believes are as destructive as any. St. Godwin: A Tale of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Century (1800), attributed to the lawyer and miscellaneous writer Edward Dubois (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), 112–​22. See also Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005). 11  As Gary Saul Morson has observed, a parody ‘must evoke or indicate another utterance’; ‘it must be, in some respect, antithetical to its target’; and ‘the fact that it is intended by its author to have higher semantic authority than the original must be clear’. The traditional distinction between a parody of form and a parody of content is of limited use; indeed, one can only parody an utterance or statement. The parodist ‘redirect[s]‌attention from its text to a compromising context’, Morson writes, and ‘thereby aims to reveal the otherwise covert sphere of that occasion, including the unstated motives and assumptions of both the speaker and the assumed and presumably sympathetic audience’ (Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia [Austin: U of Texas P, 1981], 110, 113).

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572   GARY DYER (1774–​1850), attacks William Godwin’s ideas by means of a burlesque of his novel St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799). Godwin’s Reginald de St. Leon gives shelter to a mysterious stranger, and then men arrive in pursuit: They accepted my offer of submitting to their search, and made a strict examination of every place about my habitation, in which the stranger could be concealed. Disappointed here, they endeavoured by threats to discover whether I was able to give them any information. To these I calmly answered, that they had mistaken my character, that, though I was a poor man, I had not forgotten that I was noble, that they were already in possession of my spontaneous answer to their enquiries, and that, in no case, and upon no supposition, should tyranny and ill-​treatment extort from me, what I was not in the first instance freely disposed to give.12

Dubois’s parody stays close to Godwin’s original. ‘Count Guillaume De St. Godwin’ writes: The first thing they did on their arrival was to search every corner in the house; this they performed without effect. Indeed the reader might have guessed that, but every little in this way helps to fill the pages, and that is all I have got to do. They then questioned me roundly about the stranger, and I flatly denied ever having seen him. I was resolved, let what would happen, not to betray my Plutus into the hands of a bishop. (I like to have a fly hit at the church.)13

Godwin’s search party makes ‘a strict examination of every place about my habitation, in which the stranger could be concealed’, but they were ‘[d]‌isappointed’; in Dubois, they ‘search every corner in the house’, but ‘without effect’. Godwin’s St. Leon announces that ‘in no case, and upon no supposition, should tyranny and ill-​treatment extort from me, what I was not in the first instance freely disposed to give’; Dubois’s St. Godwin proclaims that ‘I was resolved, let what would happen, not to betray my Plutus into the hands of a bishop’. St. Godwin’s asides to himself represent the reflections William Godwin supposedly makes while writing: ‘every little in this way helps to fill the pages, and that is all I have got to do’; ‘I like to have a fly hit at the church’. Dubois’s footnotes, attributing words and phrases to St. Leon, invite his reader to compare the parody with the original and see how little Dubois has exaggerated.

Satire and Defamiliarization Many novels of the 1790s, whether ‘Jacobin’ (supporting the goals of the French Revolution), ‘anti-​Jacobin’ (opposing such Revolutionary ideals), or more neutral, use the device of an 12 

William Godwin, St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, 4 vols. (London, 1799), 2: 62–​3. [Edward Dubois], St. Godwin: A Tale of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Century (London, 1800), 27. 13 

Parody and Satire in the Novel, 1770–1832    573 ingénu, a character who neither was raised in nor accepts dominant mores. In Robert Bage’s Hermsprong; or, Man As He Is Not (1796), the title character was raised by American Indians, and he provides alternatives to the rural English society he encounters. Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1796) contrasts a father and son, both named William, with the father’s brother and his son, both named Henry. The Williams submit to the pursuit of status (‘art’) and the hypocrisy of society, while the Henrys display the sincerity, integrity, and virtue of ‘nature’ (the objects of Inchbald’s satire are more general than in most of the novels discussed here: her characters’ vices were as common in the 1740s or the 1820s as in the 1790s). Inchbald exploits the device of the ingenuous observer of sophisticated modern society. Young Henry, newly arrived in England from Africa, has a habit the narrator terms the ‘incorrigible misconception and misapplication of many words’: Henry ‘would call compliments, lies—​Reserve, he would call pride—​stateliness, affectation—​and for the monosyllable war, he constantly substituted the word massacre’.14 The reader is encouraged to see that Henry is not misapplying words, but uncovering the actual state of things. As these novels remind us, one established technique of satire is to defamiliarize the readers’ society by viewing it from an outsider’s perspective. The outsider may be non-​ human (in the tradition of Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal: or, The Adventures of a Guinea [1760]), but he is most often a visitor from a faraway nation, who interprets and judges what he sees by the norms of his own culture. Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) utilizes the device of an Asian observer, familiar from Giovanni Marana’s Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, or Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World. (Beckford’s heroine Azemia, mentioned earlier, is a native of Turkey who ends up in England.) Neither the reader’s nor the narrator’s society is held up as an ideal in this mode of satire, but the Western reader who takes for granted the limitations of Turkish, Persian, Chinese, or Indian society is meant to be startled by the limitations of his or her own society, which repeatedly fails to live up to its own professions. The plot of Letters of a Hindoo Rajah is complex, insofar as two Indian men visit Britain separately. Zāārmilla, the rajah, learns about British society and culture from Captain Percy, an English officer serving in India. The Brahmin Sheermaal, who has been to Britain, disputes Percy’s assertions (or Zāārmilla’s version of them). Whereas Percy describes the principles underlying British society, Sheermaal describes the practice. Zāārmilla then visits Britain himself. Contemporary readers thus gets three views of British society. British practices are interpreted and evaluated by foreign observers’ standards, even though those standards do not appear to be accepted by the satirist (a Hindu is not the most obvious person to criticize those who have fallen away from Christianity). The Indian visitors make surprising analogies to their own culture. Sheermaal discovers that the British have their own version of ‘the ceremony of the Purekah’ (trial by ordeal), namely duelling.15 The British also indulge in an unusual kind 14 

[Elizabeth] Inchbald, Nature and Art (2nd edn., Dublin, 1796), 58. Eliza[beth] Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah: Written Previous to, and During the Period of His Residence in England. To Which is Prefixed a Preliminary Dissertation on the History, Religion, and Manners, of the Hindoos, 2 vols. (London, 1796), 1: 153. 15 

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574   GARY DYER of ‘Poojah’ (worship): ‘to this Poojah of idols, termed cards, do the major part of the people devote their time; sacrificing every enjoyment of life, as well as every domestic duty to the performance of this singular devotion’ (1: 96–​7). When Zāārmilla reads a London newspaper, he believes that a government minister has composed it, and that the advertisements are disinterested recommendations to the women of the metropolis: it is highly praise-​worthy of this good superintendent of the kingdom, to point out to the fair creatures, where they may lay out their money to the most advantage. They are in one part, strongly assured of the superior excellence of the goods at the Pigeons; in another, they are conjured to buy their stockings at the Fleece; their shoes, their gloves, nay the very powder, with which they disfigure their beautiful hair, are all objects of this good nobleman’s tender anxiety … (2: 74)

Zāārmilla’s mistake compels the reader to see afresh the conventions of advertising, including their pose of objectivity. Hamilton’s targets are predictable: duelling, card-​playing, slavery, upper-​class snobbery, the game laws, neglect of religion, the prison system. Regarding women, Hamilton seems to echo Mary Wollstonecraft, criticizing British society for educating women in superficialities so they remain childlike. In the second of the two volumes, Zāārmilla meets a number of ‘philosophers’ who are sceptics of various kinds, and here Letters of a Hindoo Rajah resembles a typical anti-​Jacobin satire. When two philosophers who have been robbed testify before a magistrate, neither can give a straightforward account of what occurred, the one philosopher because of his Humean critique of identity, the other because of his Godwinian critique of property.

Satirical Fiction in the 1790s ‘The question now afloat in the world respecting things as they are, is the most interesting that can be presented to the human mind,’ Godwin wrote in his preface to Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794).16 After the French Revolution broke out in 1789, the question of whether ‘things as they are’ could be defended took on a new urgency in Britain, and the stakes in satire rose higher. Controversies stirred by events in Europe inspired numerous fictional critiques of society. In the preface to Man As He Is (1792), Robert Bage quotes Rousseau to the effect that ‘To a refined and sensible people … instruction can only be offered in form of a novel’.17 Godwin suggested that he composed Caleb Williams because some insights are ‘highly worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach’ (1). In the dedication to his satirical novel The Vagabond (1799), George Walker observed 16  17 

William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (New York: Norton, 1977), 1. [Robert Bage], Man As He Is. A Novel, 4 vols. (London, 1792), p. [i]‌.

Parody and Satire in the Novel, 1770–1832    575 that ‘a Novel may gain attention, when arguments of the soundest sense and most perfect eloquence, shall fail to arrest the feet of the Trifler, from the specious paths of the new Philosophy’—​as we will see, Walker’s key example of this specious philosophy was Godwin.18 Satirical elements predominate in some of the ‘anti-​Jacobin’ novels of the 1790s. Besides The Vagabond, these novels include Isaac D’Israeli’s Vaurien, or Sketches of the Times (1797), Jane West’s A Tale of the Times (1799), and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). In Vaurien, D’Israeli announces that he has ‘chosen the form rather than the matter of a novel’, implying that criticizing contemporary doctrines is not the novel’s normal function.19 Conservative satirists often depict a character who adopts the ‘new Philosophy’ and applies it to the world with absurd results. D’Israeli’s Vaurien is a French agent provocateur who only pretends to believe radical ideas; not so the ‘philosophers’ in Walker’s The Vagabond. Walker’s central characters are a coterie who adopt ideas from Rousseau, Hume, Wollstonecraft, Thomas Holcroft, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, and, above all, Godwin. (Walker is one of the few satirical novelists named as author on his title page, though his name would be present in any case because he served as his own publisher.) Most of the first volume is Frederick Fenton’s account of his conversion to the principles of his tutor Stupeo (the Dr. Pangloss of The Vagabond) and his efforts to live by those principles. In the second and final volume, Fenton and the other philosophers travel to Kentucky in order to live amid virtuous nature, after hearing that this land is ‘a second Arcadia, a continued scene of romantic delight and picturesque prospects’ (2: 133). Having been disappointed by Kentucky (dirt, poverty, hostile Indians), the philosophers cross mountains and discover a society that has been ruined by its Godwinian principles. One of the philosophers, Alogos, says he will return to Britain to warn people about the new philosophy; they must ‘open their eyes to the private views and interests of those miscreants who are shaking the torch of sedition in their face, while they seek only an opportunity of picking their pockets’ (2: 233–​4). In his preface, Walker says that truth is stranger than fiction: ‘No doubt those who feel themselves sore will endeavour to cast upon the work the charge of exaggeration; but, on this subject it is impossible to exaggerate; so inimical are the doctrines of Godwin, Hume, Rousseau, &c. to all civil society, that, when the reader candidly reflects, he will perceive that the inferences I have drawn from their texts, naturally result’ (1: p. xii). Walker often uses footnotes to attribute his characters’ sentiments to these authors, and occasionally the characters themselves acknowledge they are quoting from published texts (see 1: 174; 2: 28); that is, they reveal that they know they are relying upon a specific real-​life writer. Walker conflates disparate thinkers, and he often seems confused by the ideas at which he sneers (had he read Hume, or only read about him?). Obviously, naming a character 18 

George Walker, The Vagabond, A Novel, 2 vols. (London, 1799), 1: p. vi. [Isaac D’Israeli], Vaurien, or Sketches of the Times, 2 vols. (London, 1797). D’Israeli’s other work of satirical fiction, Flim Flams! or, the Life and Errors of My Uncle, and the Amours of My Aunt! with Illustrations and Obscurities, By Messieurs Tag, Rag, and Bobtail. With an Illuminating Index! (London, 1805) is a Menippean satire on intellectual trends, much of which is obscure even to a reader who knows the period well. 19 

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576   GARY DYER ‘Stupeo’ suggests that the reader is not being asked to give the character an impartial hearing. Like much satire, The Vagabond is unapologetically ad hominem. The new philosophy is just a licence to let human desires run amuck, and reformers have only selfish motives. Fenton is typical when he reflects on how wonderful it would be ‘to see the rage of lust despoiling those disdainful beauties, whose love heretofore was only to be won by cringing’ (1: 150). The Vagabond is essentially pessimistic: events repeatedly demonstrate that ‘reformist’ thinking fails because it idealizes nature and human nature. Walker’s satiric attack relies upon extrapolating actions from principles and consequences from actions. Throughout The Vagabond, characters take up crime, inspired by radical critiques of property. Walker takes aim at each of the most famous (or notorious) contentions in Godwin’s Political Justice (1793). Godwin argued that if a fire breaks out and a person must choose between rescuing a chambermaid and rescuing a great author, the author must be saved because ‘that life ought to be preferred which will be most conducive to the general good’.20 In The Vagabond, there is a fire, and, while Fenton ponders whether to save his lover Amelia or her father, both die (1: 69–​70). Godwin argued that the demands of justice negate the obligation to fulfil a promise or the impulse to do favours. In The Vagabond, a young married man has gambled away money he stole from his employer, and Fenton promises to compensate his loss. Fenton then learns from his friend Williams that he needs money so as not to be arrested for debt, and Williams argues that his needs outweigh the gambler’s. After Fenton breaks his promise by giving all his money to Williams, Williams absconds, the young gambler is arrested for theft, and the gambler’s wife kills herself (1: 187–​94). Godwin argued that a man must ‘practise no concealment’, and therefore, ‘[w]‌hoever questions me, it is necessary that I should have no secrets or reserves, but be always ready to return a frank and explicit answer’ (1:  279). When Fenton confronts two burglars in Alogos’s house, he tells them that Alogos keeps money in his bedroom. However, after the burglars leave for the bedroom, Fenton decides humanity will benefit if he saves Alogos. When Alogos thanks him for this favour, Fenton replies that he was motivated by justice alone (2: 47–​53). Throughout The Vagabond, Walker supplies footnotes directing the reader to passages in Political Justice.

Satire and Scandal Since the advent of print, prose narratives have depicted real people under transparent disguises, and the recurrent question is how much this exposure serves a higher purpose, fostering disgust for vice and folly, and how much it serves purposes that cannot justify the violation of privacy involved. The commercial demand for scandal can outweigh other imperatives, and often ‘satirical’ texts from this period display a disabling 20 

William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (London, 1793), 82.

Parody and Satire in the Novel, 1770–1832    577 fetish for personal allusion and its fantasy value, a fetish that serves to blunt its social import. In Satire Made Easy, or Instructions in the Art of Polite Censure (1815), John Corry claimed that satire, defined as ‘the public exposure of vice and folly in a high station’, originated in ‘the gossiping disposition to defamation’.21 The adjective ‘satirical’ often connoted the roman à clef, to judge by the novels that explicitly declare themselves to be satirical, such as Bath: A Satirical Novel, with Portraits. The publishers of scandal fiction apparently wished to claim satire’s higher purposes on behalf of their productions. It is often difficult to gauge how satirical is a ‘novel with portraits’ (the contemporary term), in part because it is so often unclear to what degree exposure implies critique. One of the authors of Six Weeks at Long’s (1817), William Jerdan, described this novel as ‘a personal satire of an order never tolerated by me as a critic, in which Byron, Beau Brummell, Lord Yarmouth (afterwards Hertford), and other living notorieties, were pilloried’. Most authors of such ‘satirical’ exposés probably shared Jerdan’s motive: ‘I had little excuse at the time, except such as the starved apothecary offered to Romeo when he sold him the poison—​“My poverty but not my will consents.” ’22 The pleasure a novel like Six Weeks at Long’s offers undermines the author’s overt satirical purposes because it lets the reader enjoy the behaviour it claims to satirize. Paying the reader the compliment of assuming that he or she can identify these people, the novelist lets the reader indulge in the fantasy of sharing in the leisurely life of Bath, Brighton, or the West End. The reader can enjoy both recognizing and identifying with members of the elite. (It is fitting that Byron, the romanticized image of a poet, appears in several of these novels.) Similar observations apply to some ostensibly political satires. A series of fictitious narratives attributed to Eaton Stannard Barrett (author of The Heroine) chronicle recent history using transparent disguises; for example, The Rising Sun, a Serio Comic Satiric Romance, signed ‘Cervantes Hogg, F. S. M.’, transfigures events in Britain since 1760 into the story of the manor of Freeland, its owner George Gildrig, and his son and heir, also named George. The American colonies are ‘Thirteen Acres’, and Gildrig’s enemy is ‘Farmer Lewis’ of ‘Gull’. The Rising Sun displays little satire beyond whatever wit the reader may find in the disguises.23 One central satirical subgenre is that in which characters resemble real public figures though they inhabit a radically different environment. In Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, thieves represent statesmen, and the notorious thief-​taker Jonathan Wild represents Sir Robert Walpole. In 1840 Edward Bulwer commented that his novel Paul Clifford (1830) was meant ‘to show that there is nothing essentially different between vulgar vice and 21 

[John Corry], Satire Made Easy, or Instructions in the Art of Polite Censure (London, 1815), 8. William Jerdan, The Autobiography of William Jerdan, 4 vols. (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, and Co., 1852–​3), 2: 177. ‘Satirical’ novels like Six Weeks at Long’s prepared the way for the popular novels of fashionable life that appeared from 1825 onwards (the authors of which were said to constitute the ‘Silver Fork School’, borrowing a term from William Hazlitt). The most notorious roman à clef of the Romantic period was probably Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon (1816). 23  The Miss Led General; A Serio Comic, Satiric, Mock Romance ‘by the Author of the Rising Sun’ (London, 1808) and The Setting Sun; or, Devil Amongst the Placemen by ‘Hogg’ (London, 1809) in varying degrees eschew narrative for meditations on the present state of England. 22 

578

578   GARY DYER fashionable vice’, and, unlike most ‘Newgate Novels’ of the 1830s, Paul Clifford uses vulgar criminals as allegory.24 Bulwer’s novel was advertised as ‘a general satire upon the hypocrisy of society and the various methods of rising in the world’, and the satire ‘is embodied in a covert shape, sometimes openly, sometimes in masks, sometimes in portraits’.25 Various characters from low life would make the reader think of prominent men: ‘Fighting Attie’ is a ‘portrait’ of the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, while ‘Old Bags’ represents the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon. ‘Gentlemen George’ represents George IV: when Gentleman George was young, he was ‘a very handsome fellow, but a little too fond of his lass and his bottle to please his father, a very staid old gentleman, who walked about on Sundays in a bob-​wig and a gold-​headed cane, and was a much better farmer on week-​days than he was head of a public-​house’ (97). Publishers Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley capitalized on Bulwer’s method by announcing in one publication notice that ‘The leading members of the cabinet and the lords paramount of the drawing rooms, headed by no less a person than the —​—​himself will be astonished to see the garb in which, with but little disguise, the author has arranged them’.26 At Gentleman George’s public house, the robbers ‘talked with infinite gôut of the sums they had levied on the public, and the peculations they had committed for what one called the “good of the community,” and another the “established order,”—​meaning themselves’. Indeed, ‘So nice was their language, and so honest their enthusiasm for their own interests, you might have imagined you were listening to a coterie of cabinet ministers conferring on taxes, or debating on perquisites’ (101). Bulwer’s ‘general satire’, nonetheless, is ultimately that of a man reluctant to offend: instead of attacking these self-​serving paeans to the ‘established order’, Paul Clifford appears to revel in cleverness for its own sake.

Peacock’s Novels The most significant satirical fictional prose narratives from the Romantic period are the works of Thomas Love Peacock (1785–​1866). Headlong Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817), Nightmare Abbey (1818), and Crotchet Castle (1831) are symposium novels, focused on gatherings of thinkers, while Peacock’s two historical romances deal with contemporary political debates by way of twelfth-​century England, in Maid Marian (1822), and sixth-​century Wales, in The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829). In Headlong Hall, ideologues and enthusiasts of various kinds have been invited to a country house in Wales. Mr. Cranium, the phrenologist, delivers a lecture in which he displays skulls and propounds 24 

Edward Bulwer, Paul Clifford, Tomlinsoniana, and Eugene Aram (New York: F. M. Lupton, n.d.), p. v. 25  Quoted in Michael Sadleir, Edward and Rosina, 1803–​1836 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1931), 206–​7. 26  Quoted in Sadleir, Edward and Rosina, 207.

Parody and Satire in the Novel, 1770–1832    579 upon their characteristics. Melincourt, Peacock’s most ambitious novel, deals with a wide range of topics, including the perils of ‘paper money’; the value of ‘chivalry’ for modern society; the complicity of British consumers in slavery; the inequities of the current system of parliamentary representation; the boundary between human beings and other animals; and, most centrally, the question of whether and how the human condition is likely to improve. Like most of Peacock’s fiction, Melincourt emphasizes dialogue, yet the action is not static: Sylvan Forester, Mr. Fax, and Sir Oran Haut-​ton wander around Cumberland, coming across scenes that supply fresh illustrations of the novel’s themes. Sir Oran, an orang-​utan Forester has adopted, is elected to Parliament to represent the rotten borough of ‘Onevote’. Nightmare Abbey, Peacock’s most accessible novel, satirizes ‘a few of the morbidities of modern literature’, as he informed Percy Bysshe Shelley, morbidities he sees in such recent texts as Canto IV of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.27 Peacock’s texts often identify his contexts: the characters and the narrator continually draw upon poems, treatises in political economy, etc., and the footnotes repeatedly attribute ideas and phrases to sources, often providing lengthy quotations. When Peacock referred in his 1856 preface to Melincourt to the ‘disputants whose opinions and public characters … shadowed in some of the persons of the story’, he reminded readers that his characters represent not real men but those men’s public behaviour and public utterances. Indeed, Peacock ‘never trespassed on private life’, never relied upon privileged information, but only used information available to the public, and he concerned himself only with matters that affected the public good (2: 2–​3). He is also among the most quotable satirists. The characteristic parallelism of the Peacockian narrator’s sentences is on display when he describes the protagonist’s education in Nightmare Abbey: ‘When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like well-​threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head’ (3: 1.3–​4). A new scholarly edition of Peacock’s fiction is in preparation, to be published by Cambridge University Press, and it will make Peacock more accessible than he has been since his own day. One impediment for Peacock’s reader is a trait endemic to satire: if it is often easy to discern the things a satirist opposes, it is a different matter to identify the things he favours. Where does the implied author stand amid the debates among the characters and the real-​life disputes that those debates ‘shadow’? The Peacockian narrator’s opinions are often clear, but he does not resolve every issue. He is particularly conspicuous in the historical romances. In Maid Marian, the narrator views medieval society from the perspective of the Enlightenment, except that he also points out how the world of the 1820s replicates the unenlightened past. In the twelfth century, priests imposed penance in order to reinforce

27 

152.

The Letters of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. Nicholas A. Joukovsky (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001),

580

580   GARY DYER what was in those days called social order, namely, the preservation of the privileges of the few who happened to have any, at the expense of the swinish multitude who happened to have none, except that of working and being shot at for the benefit of their betters, which is obviously not the meaning of social order in our more enlightened times: let us therefore be grateful to Providence, and sing Te Deum laudamus in chorus with the Holy Alliance. (3: 2.84)

Although the narrator feigns to describe twelfth-​century beliefs using twelfth-​century terminology, he adopts Edmund Burke’s notorious phrase ‘the swinish multitude’, undercutting Burke’s neo-​medievalist fantasy and equating the specious arguments of the powerful then and now. The narrator sarcastically contrasts the past with a present in which the reactionary Holy Alliance had been formed by Prussia, Russia, and Austria to combat progress of any kind. Later in Maid Marian the narrator describes Richard the Lion-​Hearted as ‘that most legitimate and most Christian king … the arch-​crusader and anti-​jacobin by excellence,—​the very type, flower, cream, pink, symbol, and mirror of all the Holy Alliances that have ever existed on earth’ (3: 2.85–​6). Throughout this passage appear buzzwords of the post-​Napoleonic peace: not only ‘Holy Alliance’ and ‘anti-​ Jacobin’, but also ‘legitimate’ employed to vindicate hereditary monarchies. When the narrator compares the past with the present, he emphasizes the latter’s failings: Richard ‘seasoned his superstition and love of conquest with a certain condiment of romantic generosity and chivalrous self-​devotion, with which his imitators in all other points have found it convenient to dispense’ (3: 2.86). One of Peacock’s most prominent traits is reliance upon dialogue, which often is printed with speech tags as in a play, but, though the narrator steps back to let the characters debate, authority is not delegated entirely to the various speakers. On the contrary, the narrator never seems far from sight. Peacock uses a distinctive kind of stylization: instead of the narrator adopting the cadences of the characters (as often occurs within free indirect discourse), the characters sound like the narrator, except for those rare figures who speak in regional dialects. In Nightmare Abbey, the Coleridgean Mr. Flosky endorses ‘mystery’: Mystery is the very key-​stone of all that is beautiful in poetry, all that is sacred in faith, and all that is recondite in transcendental psychology. I am writing a ballad which is all mystery; it is ‘such stuff as dreams are made of,’ and is, indeed, stuff made of a dream; for, last night I fell asleep as usual over my book, and had a vision of pure reason. (3: 1.75–​6)

Flosky’s speech is nothing like the tortuous prose of the Lay Sermons (1816–​17); Coleridge’s voice has been eclipsed by Peacock’s. If a character sounds like the third-​ person narrator, and the third-​person narrator appears authoritative, then the reader feels justified believing the character speaks for the author much as the narrator does. On the other hand, because characters sound like the narrator even when they are clearly wrong, the reader can infer that resembling the narrator does not ensure reliability.

Parody and Satire in the Novel, 1770–1832    581 After 1830 or so, the place of satirical fiction changed. The collapse of publishing in the late 1820s limited the number of new novels. The more central role played by illustration in magazine and books meant that fiction had to adjust to whatever the illustrator could render best, and vice versa. Satirical fiction bifurcated: the fiction of ideas increasingly disregarded humour and wit, so that Disraeli’s mature novels differ from his early Popanilla, while the fiction of wit moved away from topical satire.28

Select Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, introd. Wayne Booth (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984). ‘British Fiction 1800–​1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & Reception’ [http://​www. british-​fiction.cf.ac.uk/​]. Butler, Marilyn, Peacock Displayed:  A  Satirist in His Context (London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). Dyer, Gary, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–​1832 (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). Garside, Peter, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000). Grenby, M. O., The Anti-​Jacobin Novel:  British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). Kelly, Gary, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–​1830 (London: Longman, 1989). Raven, James, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–​1850 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). Weinbrot, Howard D., Menippean Satire Reconsidered:  From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005).

28  The satirical fiction of the Romantic period has been badly served by literary history. The ‘Standard Novels’, a series of 126 single-​volume editions of fiction that Richard Bentley published from 1831 until 1854, was one of the primary conduits by which Romantic-​era fiction survived for later generations. Because Bentley kept select novels in print, they remained in the public eye, and then other publishers chose to reprint them once they fell out of copyright. However, of the novels discussed in this essay, the only ones included in the ‘Standard Novels’ were Bulwer’s Paul Clifford and four of Peacock’s works.

582

E pil o gu e: Th e E ng l i sh Novel at t h e E nd of the 182 0s J. A. Downie

‘The year 1829’, according to Peter Garside, ‘marks a watershed in the production of fiction in Britain, with the first clear realization of an extended middle-​class market.’1 If one indication of this new-​found confidence that readers were prepared to pay for editions of previously published novels was the promotion in that year of ‘the Author’s Edition of the Waverley Novels’, the launch in 1831 of Bentley’s series of ‘cheap editions of … Novels and Romances written subsequently to the time of Fielding and Smollett’ was another. Prices of novels had risen steeply in the early nineteenth century, from 10s. 6d. (½ guinea) for a three-​volume novel in 1800 to 31s. 6d. (1½ guineas) in the later 1820s,2 by which time the ‘triple-​decker’ was finally becoming established as the publishers’ preferred format for prose fiction. ‘I am told there is a general prejudice against a single volume,’ Catherine Gore wrote in 1827 in the Preface to her novel, The Lettre de Cachet. ‘If so, it must exist in the bookselling, not in the book-​reading world.’3 Interestingly, the single-​volume arrangement became the principal format for cheap reprints after the introduction of series such as Bentley’s Standard Novels. Sir Walter Scott’s contribution to the growing market for novels can scarcely be overstated. Although the novel form had been growing in popularity throughout the previous century, he provided it with an authority and a respectability it had hitherto lacked,4 and 1  Peter Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era: Consolidation and Dispersal’, in Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel, 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 2: 15–​103 (at 102). This Epilogue is generally indebted to Professor Garside’s seminal essay. 2  Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era’, 2: 93. 3  The Lettre de Cachet; a Tale (London: J. Andrews, 1827), p. [iii]. 4  On this point, see Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991).

Epilogue: The English Novel at the End of the 1820s    583 ‘Scott’s apparently unstoppable appeal in the market’5 appears to have led to a growth in demand for prose fiction tout court. A number of significant developments in the advertising, marketing, and selling of novels can be attributed to Scott’s business acumen. He refused to sell the copyright of any of the Waverley Novels. Instead, he bargained with booksellers for the right to ‘sell editions’ or impressions.6 Publishers, in their turn, were acutely aware of the strength of the market for fiction and they, too, sought to exploit it for maximum profit. Thus Constable decided to increase the price of The Antiquary from 21s. to 24s. in the final run-​up to publication on the grounds that ‘the additional profit would be considerable, and we do not think one dozen less of the Book would be sold’.7 It was not only the publishers who were mindful of the commercial aspects of the novel-​publishing business. Authors themselves were of course eager to secure the best possible return for their labours. Once again, it seems, Scott was leading the way. ‘There is a selling time for every popular work which may last perhaps from four to six months or a year at most,’ he observed in 1817. ‘A pushing bookseller keeps the market full during that period and contents himself with smaller profits on each copy that he may be reimbursed by the quantity disposed of.’8 While Scott’s commercial acumen was proverbial, he was by no means the first novelist either to take an interest in the financial side of the publishing business or to remark upon the seeming reluctance of booksellers to promote their works. Frances Burney felt that her bookseller was failing to market her third novel, Camilla, energetically enough, even though 3,500 of the huge first edition of 4,000 copies sold quickly.9 Whether it was a consequence of her shrewd business sense, or merely because of her unfortunate experience in selling the copyright of what would eventually appear in print as Northanger Abbey for £10, Jane Austen elected to take the risk of publishing all of her novels except Pride and Prejudice ‘on commission’—​that is, she underwrote the costs of producing the volumes, including paper, printing, advertising, and distribution, paying the bookseller, Thomas Egerton, a 10 per cent commission for his services, and pocketing the net profit from the sales of the novel. ‘You will be glad to hear that every Copy of [Sense and Sensibility] is sold & that it has brought me £140—​ beside the Copyright, if that shd ever be of any value,’ Austen wrote to her brother Francis, making no attempt to disguise her pleasure. ‘I have now therefore written myself into £250.—​which only makes me long for more.’10 That she was perfectly aware of what she was doing seems to be confirmed by a subsequent letter when she was negotiating with 5 

Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era’, 2: 93. See Peter Garside, ‘Rob’s Last Raid: Scott and the Publication of the Waverley Novels’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Author/​Publisher Relations during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1983), 90. 7  Quoted in Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era’, 2: 93. 8  Quoted in Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era’, 2: 87n. 9  See Emma E. Pink, ‘Frances Burney’s Camilla: “To print my Grand Work … by subscription”’, Eighteenth-​Century Studies 40/​1 (2006), 51–​68. 10  Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (3rd edn., Oxford and New York: OUP, 1995), 217. Austen was paid £110 for the copyright of Pride and Prejudice, thus making £250 in total for her first two published novels. ‘I would rather have had £150,’ she explained, ‘but we could not both be pleased, & I am not at all surprised that he should not chuse to hazard so much’ (197). 6 

584

584   J. A. Downie John Murray about Emma: ‘Mr Murray’s Letter is come; he is a Rogue of course, but a civil one. He offers £450—​but wants to have the Copyright of MP. [Mansfield Park] & S&S [Sense and Sensibility] included. It will end in my publishing for myself I dare say.’11 It would be seriously misleading, however, to imply that, even at the very end of the 1820s, the vast majority of novelists were able to make money on this scale, let alone aspire to the huge sums commanded by Scott or Burney or Edgeworth. If Austen was able and willing to take the risk of publishing ‘for herself ’, for many would-​be novelists this was simply not an option, and there was less incidence both of subscription publishing and ‘printing for the author’ in the 1820s than in earlier decades.12 As the cost of underwriting a novel’s publication had to be borne by either the author or the publisher, then writers who wanted to be paid for their efforts needed to find a bookseller prepared to buy the copyright. Even though copyrights of novels were generally cheap, this was no easy task. Peter Garside cites Thomas Rees’s Reminiscences of Literary London 1778–​1853: ‘From ten to twenty pounds were the sums usually paid to authors for those novels of three volumes.’13 This does not seem out of line with the ‘five pounds a volume’ Minerva Press authors seem to have been paid in the 1790s,14 or even the ‘five pounds a volume’ Jery Melford’s fictional friend was paid for writing novels according to Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771).15 In this sense, novelists were increasingly in thrall to the booksellers, even as the market was being transformed in the 1820s from one dominated by women to one dominated by men. Until his death in 1832, Scott played a key role even in this development, his enormous success as ‘The Author of the Waverley Novels’ seemingly sufficient to persuade male authors that the writing of novels could be regarded as a manly occupation. Thirteen of the eighty-​one titles published in 1829 listed in The English Novel, 1770–​1829 were anonymous or pseudonymous. Of the remaining sixty-​eight, forty-​six (or 67.6 per cent) were written by men, a significant number of whom had already written novels. Interestingly, although it had been a commonplace of novel-​publishing since at least the middle of the eighteenth century, increasing use was made on title pages of the formula, ‘By the Author of …’. Indeed, of the forty-​six examples listed under the year 1829, no fewer than thirty-​four were written by men. Scott, who published more novels than any other single writer between 1810 and 1829, was also responsible for the large number of historical novels published in the 1820s and 1830s. But perhaps the most interesting feature of the novel at the end of the 1820s (as Peter Garside first pointed out)16 is that the words ‘tale’ or ‘tales’ were included in many 11 

Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Le Faye, 291. Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era’, 2: 81. 13  Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era’, 2: 82. 14  Jan Fergus, Jane Austen: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 13. 15  Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 2 vols. (London: W. Johnston and B. Collins, 1771), 2: 22. 16  See also Garside’s comments in his essay in the present volume: ‘The subsequent decline in the use of the term, with just 15 per cent of new works in the 1820s calling themselves novels, is a complex matter, intimately connected with the alternative labels of “Romance” and “Tale(s)” ’ (392). 12 

Epilogue: The English Novel at the End of the 1820s    585 more titles (just under 30 per cent) than the word ‘novel’ (slightly over 10 per cent). There are of course a number of ways of considering this phenomenon. It may be simply that, by 1830, it was no longer necessary to use the formula ‘A Novel’ on title pages because readers knew very well what they were buying, and that this, in turn, freed up authors so that they could make use of more descriptive titles. In this context, it is worth recalling the Preface to Hawthorne’s Gothic novel, The House of Seven Gables: A Romance (1851): ‘When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.’ Hawthorne may have been writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, but his remarks are nonetheless relevant as an indication of the sort of considerations taken into account by contemporary novelists when deciding how they ought to describe works of fiction. If, at the end of the 1820s, the market for prose fiction was driven more by materialistic than aesthetic or artistic concerns, what conclusions should be drawn? Quite clearly, the emergence and development of the phenomenon which we call ‘the English novel’ was not in any meaningful sense a consequence of ‘natural selection’. Evidently there was a market for novels, and this market, despite some fluctuations, expanded between the 1760s and the 1820s. If around forty new novels were being published annually at the end of the 1760s, then (as John Feather notes in the present volume) by the 1820s more than twice as many, on average, were appearing annually.17 Prices were becoming stabilized at 1½ guineas for the preferred ‘triple-​decker’ format, and ‘in these transitional years commercial considerations appear to have been a major factor’.18 It was also in the 1820s that there was the earliest significant incidence of fiction being published in serial form, ‘with the publication of novels by Hannah Maria Jones, Captain Marryat, and Catherine George Ward (among others), as well as the appearance of new-​style journals in the mould of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and of miscellanies and annuals such as The Keepsake and The Forget-​Me-​Not’.19 These factors, taken in conjunction with the launch of Bentley’s Standard Novels, strongly suggest that, regardless of the so-​called ‘publishing crash of 1826’, the decade of the 1820s was indeed a turning point in the process which I have called the making of the English novel.20

17 

John Feather, ‘The Book Trade 1770–​1832’, 292. Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era’, 2: 93. 19  Anthony Mandal, Jane Austen and the Popular Novel: The Determined Author (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 215. 20  J. A. Downie, ‘The Making of the English Novel’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 9/​3 (1997), 249–​66. 18 

586

Index

abridgements of novels  32–​4, 217 Addison, Joseph  xvii, 44, 52, 66, 67, 184, 231, 563 Adorno, Theodor  55, 157 Alcoforado, Mariana  166, 413 Lettres portugaises (attrib.)  18, 78, 166–​7, 413 Alemán, Mateo  506 Guzman de Alfarache  74, 506, 520 amatory fiction  160, 166, 168–​70, 175–​6, 179, 182–​6, 438 Anstey, Christopher  260, 278 ‘anti-​Jacobin’ fiction  94, 443, 445, 457–​471, 508–​9, 572–​3, 574, 575 Arabian Nights  34, 95, 100, 159, 191, 243, 492, 514, 515 Astell, Mary  229–​30, 234 Aubin, Penelope  58, 95, 175, 181–​3, 185, 186, 256 Austen, Revd George  341, 401 Austen, Jane  xviii, xxiv, 45, 53, 59, 85–​6, 95, 100, 128–​9, 176, 186, 228, 235, 285, 305, 340, 355–​6, 361–​6, 369, 373, 388, 394, 401, 412n11, 429, 433, 436, 454, 466, 470, 484, 501–​3, 509, 518, 520, 525, 531, 536–​50, 554, 569, 570, 583–​4 Emma  95, 366, 394, 538, 540, 541, 542–​4, 545, 546, 548–​50, 554 Mansfield Park  369, 501–​3, 546–​8, 584 Northanger Abbey  53, 95, 228, 355–​6, 361, 365, 373, 484, 509, 542, 544, 546, 569, 583 Persuasion  45, 363, 542, 546 Pride and Prejudice  128–​9, 362, 365, 536, 541, 542, 546, 583 Sense and Sensibility  86, 363, 364, 394, 429, 539, 541, 542, 546, 583–​4

Bage, Robert  xx, 203, 386, 394, 401, 442, 443, 446–​7, 458, 517, 573 Hermsprong; or, Man as He is Not  xx, 442, 446–​7, 573, 575 Bakhtin, Mikhail  77, 570n10 Ballantyne’s Novelists Library  xx, 101, 187, 404, 517, 554 Ballaster, Ros  18, 99, 175 Balzac, Honoré de  103, 438 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia  xix–​xx, 59, 101, 160, 212, 218, 228, 250, 264, 366, 367–​8, 370, 404, 478, 482, 507–​8, 516–​8, 520, 537–​8, 545 British Novelists  xix–​xx, 59, 160, 250, 264, 367–​8, 370, 404, 516–​8, 520, 537–​8, 545 Barclay, John  163, 165 Barker, Jane  172, 173, 176, 180, 317 Barker-​Benfield, G. J.  428, 431, 477 Barrett, Eaton Stannard  484, 569, 571, 577 Barrin, Jean  79, 167 Beattie, James  xix, 159 Becket, Andrew  374, 380 Becket, Thomas  28, 31 see also under Donaldson versus Becket Beckford, William  205–​6, 217, 377, 493, 508, 571, 573 Behn, Aphra  xix, 18, 19, 46, 50, 51, 58, 59, 67, 68, 77, 78, 79, 99, 100, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 166, 168–​9, 172, 175, 176, 253, 362–​3, 473, 501 Love-​Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister  18, 78, 157, 163, 166, 168, 169, 172, 473 Oroonoko  68, 100, 168–​9, 362, 501 Bennett, Anna Maria  391, 397–​8 Bewick, Thomas  315, 335 Bisset, Robert  402, 469

588

588   Index Blackwood’s Magazine  394, 509–​10 Blake, William  73–​4, 328, 329, 335 Boccaccio, Giovanni  xvii, 249, 505 booksellers  9, 12–​15, 25, 27, 29, 31, 33, 34–​6, 51–​ 2, 59, 64, 75, 89, 108, 143, 168, 172, 179, 207, 282, 293–​7, 301, 303, 317, 376, 383, 384, 442, 511, 512, 516, 539, 583–​4 book trade  5–​21, 24, 25, 27, 37, 51–​2, 53, 63, 166, 262, 291–​307, 314 Booth, Wayne C.  265, 270, 274, 280 Boswell, James  122–​3, 125, 129–​30, 133, 261, 352 ‘bourgeois public sphere’ see under Habermas, Jürgen Brewer, George  381, 396, 506 Bridges, Thomas  280, 477 British Critic  369n33, 375–​380, 382, 482 British Magazine  34, 321–​2, 323 Brooke, Frances  27, 28, 34, 99, 278–​9, 280, 359, 378, 517 Brooke, Henry  216, 280, 359–​60, 375, 376, 477 Browne, Dr. Joseph  xvii, 160 Brunton, Mary  484, 522, 526, 527, 531, 533, 534, 541 Bunyan, John  xviii, 50, 110–​16, 117, 118, 119, 126–​7, 156, 158, 159, 163–​4, 184, 188, 225, 464, 514 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners  110–​13, 163 Pilgrim’s Progress, The  xviii, 50, 110, 113–​16, 126–​7, 164, 225 Burke, Edmund  94, 266, 347, 459, 460, 465, 580 Burney, Frances  xxiv, 28, 42, 47, 52, 86, 93, 125–​6, 200–​1, 262, 360, 364, 370, 375, 377, 378, 385, 397, 400, 401, 402, 409–​10, 415–​7, 433–​8, 506, 516–​7, 520, 541–​2, 543, 544, 583, 584 Camilla  364, 377, 401, 436–​8, 541, 544, 583 Cecilia  375, 397, 401, 434–​5, 437, 505, 542, 544 Evelina  47, 93, 125–​6, 200–​1, 360, 364, 401, 409–​10, 415–​7, 433–​4 Burns, Robert  426, 432 Byron, George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron  86, 340, 352, 485, 577, 579 Cadell, Thomas  28, 304, 400, 401 Calvino, Italo  192, 266

Carter, Elizabeth  50, 230, 378 Carwitham, John  211, 214, 218 censorship  8, 82, 168 Cervantes, Miguel de  27, 34, 73, 74–​5, 77, 97, 98, 249, 259, 266–​7, 269, 274, 318, 325, 510, 515, 517, 568 Don Quixote  73, 74–​5, 77, 97, 266, 267, 269, 568 Chandler, Richard  210, 213, 218 chapbooks  33, 74, 300, 335, 500, 512, 514 Charles I  10, 11, 17, 105, 140, 169 Charles II  5, 11, 17, 138, 140, 150, 156n3, 164 Charlton, Mary  99, 484 Charrière, Isabelle de  101, 102 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of  90, 130–​1, 160 Chetwood, William  177, 179, 181 children’s literature  24, 300–​1, 464–​5, 514, 526–​7 circulating libraries  6, 35–​6, 53, 252, 297, 298, 300, 303, 359, 362, 367, 369, 378, 390, 396, 400, 401, 445, 485, 509–​11, 516, 567, 568 Clark, John  309, 312 Clarke, James Stanier  365, 538 Cleland, John  28, 78, 168, 214–​5, 216, 255, 261, 271–​2, 272, 331, 363 coffee houses  6, 21, 53, 60, 65, 122, 172, 349, 367 Colburn, Henry  298, 510–​11, 518, 578 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  83, 84–​5, 115, 466, 482, 580 Collyer, Mary  93, 515 Colman, George  262, 357 Combe, William  567, 568 conduct books  20, 109, 118, 343, 349, 360–​1, 368, 397, 436, 523, 525 Congreve, William  68, 170, 173 Constable, Archibald  298, 300, 553, 583 contes philosophiques  100–​1, 440–​1, 446 Cook, James  133–​6 Cooke, Charles  219, 516, 517, 518 copyright  7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 24, 29, 33, 51, 63, 160, 294–​5, 297, 304, 306, 308, 322, 323–​4, 325, 400, 404n21, 510, 512, 539, 581n28, 583–​4 Copyright Act of 1709–​10  11, 32, 294–​5, 303, 313 Coventry, Francis  30, 159, 215, 252, 274–​6, 282, 324, 376, 515, 516 Cowley, Abraham  14–​15, 215

Index   589 Crébillon, Claude Prosper Jolyot de  79, 91, 100, 101, 255 Critical Review  102, 218, 259, 267, 271, 319, 373–​6, 379–​80, 382, 383, 385, 395, 401–​2, 434, 482 Croxall, Samuel  325, 391 Cruikshank, George  322, 331–​2, 335 Cumberland, Richard  xx, 378 Curll, Edmund  79, 96, 168, 317 Dampier, William  187, 193, 201 D’Aulnoy, Marie-​Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy  78, 79, 100 Davidoff, Leonore  xxii, 341–​2, 346 Davis, Lennard  65, 489–​90 Davys, Mary  xviii, xxi, 46, 172, 173, 174, 175, 183, 185, 391 Defoe, Daniel  xviii, xix, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, 27, 31, 39, 41, 46, 47, 51, 58, 59, 65–​7, 68, 69, 74, 76, 77, 78, 116–​9, 123–​5, 127, 131, 135, 143–​6, 148, 151, 155–​6, 157–​8, 159, 162, 172–​5, 177, 179, 181, 182–​6, 187–​8, 189–​90, 203, 259, 309–​13, 317, 362–​3, 427, 473, 474, 490, 495, 506, 513, 514 Captain Singleton 47, 177 Colonel Jack  47, 74, 76, 124, 173, 178, 180, 427 Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 32, 177, 178 Journal of the Plague Year  155–​6, 474 Moll Flanders 31, 32, 39, 47, 51, 66, 67, 74, 76, 78, 124–​5, 135, 145–​6, 157, 173, 174, 177–8, 180, 362–​3 New Voyage round the World 178, 185 Robinson Crusoe  31, 32, 47, 50–​1, 67, 68, 78, 116–​8, 157, 159, 162, 172–​5, 177–​8, 181, 182, 183, 184–​5, 187–​8, 309–​13, 489–​90, 506 Roxana  31, 51, 76, 124, 144–​6, 174, 177–​8, 180, 183, 190, 362 Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe  32, 177, 309 Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain  123–​4, 125, 127, 178 De Hondt, Peter Abraham  28, 31 Deloney, Thomas 158n11, 474 Devonshire, Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of  216, 350, 359

Dickens, Charles  301, 304, 305, 306, 388 Diderot, Denis  81, 100 Disraeli, Benjamin  570, 581 Dodd, Daniel  325, 326–​7 Dodd, William  255, 515 Dodsley, James  28, 29 Dodsley, Robert  28, 29, 47, 282 Donaldson versus Becket  24, 295 Doody, Margaret Anne  110, 158, 474, 537 Downie, J. A(lan)  69, 162, 173, 187, 188, 340 Dryden, John  15, 46, 59, 90, 168, 249, 571 Dubois, Edwin  469, 571–​2 Dunton, John  31, 66, 140, 150–​1, 156, 170, 274 Edgeworth, Maria  xviii, xxiv, 201–​2, 360–​1, 364, 369, 394, 403, 421–​3, 485, 498–​500, 503, 517, 536, 538, 540, 541, 544–​5, 547, 548–​50, 558, 559, 584 Edinburgh Review 404, 552 Eliot, George  388, 523 Enfield, William  101–​2, 374, 381, 383 English Review  102, 374, 375, 377–​8, 379, 383, 385 epistolary fiction  17, 19, 66, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 91, 125, 201, 208, 209, 221–​36, 357–​60, 368, 393, 397, 409–​25, 441, 445, 454, 497, 500, 511 evangelicalism  106, 342, 521–​35 Ewing, George  209, 212 Faulkner, George  24, 25, 26, 28, 184, 209, 212 Fénelon, François  97, 98, 100, 101, 515 Fenwick, Elizabeth  418, 440, 442, 454 Ferrier, Susan E.  359, 364 Fielding, Henry  xv, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, 25–​6, 27, 30, 39, 42–​3, 46, 58, 68, 69, 73, 75, 77, 78, 83, 93, 96, 98, 102, 105–​7, 119, 157–​61, 167, 170, 179, 184, 186, 190–​4, 206–​10, 212–​4, 217–​8, 237–​51, 252–​3, 255–​6, 259, 262, 264, 266–​73, 275, 277, 283, 308, 317, 324, 325, 328, 330, 356, 365, 366, 369, 370, 375, 383, 402, 403, 415, 427, 428–​9, 434, 474, 484, 506, 510, 515, 552–​3, 569, 577, 582 Amelia  26, 30, 39, 43, 96, 206, 249–​50, 252, 255, 259, 375, 376 Jonathan Wild  100, 240, 250, 569, 577

590

590   Index Fielding, Henry (cont.) Joseph Andrews  25, 43, 73, 93, 105–​7, 184, 190, 208–​9, 240–​2, 267, 268, 270, 271, 330 Journey from This World to the Next  190–​4 Shamela  167, 207–​8, 210, 212–​3, 214–​5 Tom Jones  25–​6, 30, 39, 43, 44, 68, 157, 184, 190, 217, 242–​9, 254, 255, 258–​9, 260, 262, 267, 272, 299, 326, 330, 355–​6, 427, 429, 506 Fielding, Sarah  28, 31, 49, 90, 209, 253–​4, 263, 324, 427 Flaubert, Gustave  86, 103 ‘formal realism’  64, 158, 187, 190, 191, 226, 257, 283, 434, 492, 570n6 Fox, George  13, 16–​17 Franklin, Benjamin  24, 119, 209 free indirect discourse (FID)  86, 225–​8, 229, 544–​50 French Revolution  57, 339, 347, 356, 360, 417–8, 441, 453, 457, 459–​60, 498, 555, 572, 574 Fuseli, Henry  333, 334–​5, 347 Galland, Antoine  95, 100, 492 Gainsborough, Thomas  313, 315 Garrick, David  122, 255, 260, 276 Garside, Peter  410–​11, 539, 582, 584–​5 Gentleman’s Magazine  205, 374, 375, 376 Genlis, Stéphanie Félicité du Crest de Saint-​ Aubin, Comtesse de  90, 94–​5, 98, 101, 102, 375, 384, 464 Gibbes, Phoebe  377, 420 Gildon, Charles  125, 172, 184 Gillray, James  328, 335 Glorious Revolution  68, 139, 140, 168, 183 Godwin, William  85, 89, 100–​1, 203, 304, 347, 392, 396, 401–​2, 418, 440–​3, 445, 447–​8, 451–​5, 457, 458, 461, 464, 466, 467–​9, 490, 506, 520, 572, 574, 575–​6 Caleb Williams  396, 441–​3, 445, 447, 448, 452–​4, 458, 468, 506, 520, 574 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice 443, 447, 453, 467, 468, 576 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  82, 83–​4, 86, 397, 402, 413, 422, 514, 515 Goldsmith, Oliver  xvi, 27, 35, 37, 51, 52, 83, 283, 324, 376, 393, 428, 432, 435, 493, 506, 515, 517, 573

Vicar of Wakefield  51, 283, 324, 376, 393, 428, 432, 435, 506 Goodall, William  264n3, 271n43, 273, 275 Adventures of Capt. Greenland  253, 264n3, 273, 275, 277 Gothic novels  30, 85, 95–​6, 162, 185, 205, 283, 285, 297–​8, 333, 335, 355–​6, 359, 360–​1, 364, 368, 393, 398–​9, 402–​3, 411, 418–​9, 438, 444, 463, 472–​88, 493, 500–​1, 503, 506–​7, 511, 513, 514, 520, 539, 567, 569, 570, 585 Graffigny, Françoise d’Issembourg d’Happencourt, Mme de  95, 101, 515 Gravelot, Hubert  24, 218, 313–​6, 324, 328, 335 Graves, Richard  75, 517, 520, 568 Green, Sarah  517, 568–​9 Griffith, Elizabeth  92, 414 Griffiths, Ralph  101, 372, 374, 379 Grignion, Charles  308, 313, 314, 329 Guilleragues, Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, comte de  78, 166 Habermas, Jürgen  xxii, 55–​70, 207, 349 Hamilton, Ann Mary  397, 411, 507, 540 Hamilton, Elizabeth  377, 403, 420–​1, 464, 469, 470, 493–​4, 508–​9, 573–​4, 575 Letters of a Hindoo Rajah  377, 420–​1, 493–​4, 573–​4 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers  464, 469, 508–​9, 575 Hanmer, Sir Thomas  316, 317, 319 Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of  32, 254 Harley, Robert, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer  140, 145, 151, 175 Harrison, James  59, 324, 515 Novelist’s Magazine  59, 324–​5, 515, 517 Hawkesworth, John  324, 492, 515, 516 Hayman, Francis  24, 216n35, 218, 313–​5, 316, 317, 319, 322, 328, 335 Haywood, Eliza  xix, 19, 27, 28, 30, 31, 46, 48, 51, 52, 58, 68, 77, 78, 79, 91, 99, 100, 135, 151, 157, 162, 172, 174, 175–​8, 180–​6, 190, 212–​3, 215–​6, 253, 255, 324, 363, 474, 515 Hazlitt, William  327, 436n33, 482 Heliodorus 165, 473 Helme, Elizabeth  380, 399 Herringman, Henry  10, 14–​15 Highmore, Joseph  24, 218, 236 Hill, Aaron  176–​7, 209, 218, 316–​7

Index   591 Hill, ‘Inspector’ John  254–​5, 515 historical novels  85–​6, 95, 103, 470, 476, 507, 554 History of Charlotte Summers, the Fortunate Parish Girl  253, 260, 274 Hoadly, Benjamin  106–​7, 255 Hofland, Barbara  394, 521, 522, 526–​7, 532, 534 Hogarth, William  43, 308, 309, 313, 315–​6, 317, 319–​21, 328, 330, 335, 352, 477 Hogg, Alexander  28, 217–​8, 328, 516 Holcroft, Thomas  98, 203, 386, 440, 441, 442, 445, 447, 451, 458, 469, 506, 575 Hookham, Thomas  298, 304, 401, 567 Huet, Pierre Daniel  79, 92, 161, 239–​40, 248, 250 Hughes, J. F.  398, 402, 411, 510 Hume, David  51, 428, 433, 437, 452, 461, 508, 575 Hunter, J. Paul  xxi, 16, 19, 65, 156, 269–​70, 436n33 Hutcheson, Francis  428–​9, 433 Imlay, Gilbert  347, 490 Inchbald, Elizabeth  363–​4, 370, 377, 401, 440, 442, 443–​4, 458, 517, 573 Industrial Revolution  40, 41, 47, 292, 343, 345 ‘Jacobin’ novels  94, 440–​56 James II  5, 17, 67–​8, 140, 142, 150, 169 James, Henry  316–​8, 437, 526 Jeffrey, Francis  102, 404, 552, 553, 565 Johnson, Samuel  xiii, xvi, 24, 52, 59, 74, 93, 110, 116, 121, 122, 125, 129–​30, 132, 159, 160, 228, 291, 317, 370, 379, 380, 383, 393, 429, 437, 440, 451, 461, 492, 505, 515, 516, 567, 568 Rasselas  393, 440, 451, 461, 492, 568 Johnstone, Charles  31, 396, 573 Jones, David  139, 140, 142 Jones, Hannah Maria  517, 585 journalism  65–​7, 156, 492, 512 Joyce, James  266, 537 Kelly, John  210, 211, 218, 515 Kenrick, William  81, 94, 268, 273, 377, 413 Keymer, Thomas  24, 176, 219, 233n27, 234, 253, 265, 267, 270n37, 274 Kimber, Edward  27, 91, 255–​6, 259, 260, 261, 277, 279, 309, 324, 515

King, Gregory  44, 46 Kingman, Mary  209, 211 La Calprenède, Gaultier de Coste, seigneur de  78, 92, 98, 162, 163, 165 Lackington, James  217, 296 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de  79, 91, 94, 359, 417, 418 La Fayette, Madame de (Marie-​Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne)  86, 91–​3, 95, 99, 101, 166 Lane, William  28, 102, 297–​8, 304, 376, 401, 402, 567 Langhorne, John  27, 492, 515 La Place, Pierre Antoine de  90, 100 Law, William  229, 233, 234 Lazarillo de Tormes  74, 77, 506 Lee, Sophia  96, 377, 393, 399, 401, 472, 474, 475 Leland, Thomas  399, 472 Lennox, Charlotte  27, 28, 33, 46, 48, 74, 163, 252, 253, 324, 356, 357, 375, 376, 383, 418, 420, 429–​30, 432, 474, 515, 516, 520, 568 Female Quixote  33, 74, 163, 254, 255, 258, 356, 375, 429, 432, 474, 568 Le Sage, Alain-​René  xx, 31, 97, 100, 101, 269, 515, 517, 568 L’Estrange, Sir Roger  5, 11, 18, 66–​7, 78, 164, 166, 413 Lewis, Matthew  84–​5, 356, 393, 398, 402, 403, 472, 474, 476, 506 Monk, The  85, 355, 356, 393, 398, 472, 476, 506 libraries see under circulating libraries Licensing Act  5, 9, 11, 13, 24, 168, 349 Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates see under Tristram Bates literacy  xxii–​xxiii, 12–​13, 19, 22–​3, 52, 238, 243, 300, 367, 527 Locke, John  183, 212, 276, 317, 528 London Magazine  255, 266, 358, 375, 552, 553 London Review  375–​6, 380 Longman, Thomas  295–​6, 298, 401 Longman, Thomas Norton  295–​6, 298, 401 Longueville, Peter  179, 515 Lowe, Solomon  206, 209 Lowndes, Thomas  28, 36, 298, 391 Lucian  187, 249, 568

592

592   Index Lyttelton, George, 1st Baron Lyttelton  48, 245, 493 Macaulay, Thomas Babington  126, 344–​5 Mackenzie, Henry  358, 359, 393, 400, 401, 402, 403, 415, 426, 428, 432–​3, 435, 437, 449 McKeon, Michael  16, 59, 156, 187, 192, 444 Macky, John  123, 125 magazines  32, 34, 207, 208, 210, 301–​2, 374–​6, 384, 394, 483, 484, 485, 506, 509, 513 Maitland, William  123, 230 Mandeville, Bernard  246, 248, 249 Manley, Delarivier  xiii, xiv, xv, 19, 58, 59, 68, 77, 78, 148–​51, 175, 178, 189, 253, 317, 363, 473, 567, 568 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet Chamberlain de  79, 80, 92, 93, 95, 98, 100, 159, 161, 256, 274, 515 Marmontel, Jean-​François  27, 101, 393, 515 Maturin, Charles Robert  394–​5, 402, 403, 472, 474, 476, 485, 554 Medland, Thomas  313, 332 Meeke, Mary  376, 394 Mellon, Harriot, Duchess of St Albans  348–​50 Methodism  106, 119, 523–​4 middle-​class reading public  55–​6, 58, 79–​80, 299–​302, 367, 507, 511, 514, 515, 516, 518, 520, 582 Millar, Andrew  25–​6, 28, 31, 34, 281, 400n11, 429 Miller, D. A.  527, 550 Milton, John  84, 160, 181, 249 Minerva Press  xix, 99, 297–​8, 307, 362, 367, 370, 394, 401, 402, 484, 509–​11, 539–​40, 584 Montagu, Elizabeth  269, 378 Montesquieu, Charles-​Louis de Secondat, Baron de  95, 100, 440, 493, 573 Monthly Magazine  508, 518–​9 Monthly Mirror  374, 380, 483 Monthly Review  101, 266, 271, 272, 277, 366, 372–​85, 392, 482, 553 Montolieu, Isabelle de  98, 100, 101 Moore, John 360n7, 375, 377 More, Hannah  342–​3, 346, 364, 378, 402, 441, 462 Morgan, Lady see under Owenson, Sydney, Lady Morgan Murray, John  297–​8, 377, 541, 558, 585

narrative technique  86, 98, 166, 224, 490, 536, 537, 545 see also under free indirect discourse (FID) Naubert, Christiane Benedicte Eugenie 85, 506 Newman, A. K.  396, 402, 509, 567 newspapers  6, 10, 11, 32, 33, 65–​6, 69, 207, 210, 237, 262, 301–​2, 342, 349, 384, 506, 509 Noble, Francis  28, 30, 35, 36, 59, 185, 257, 297–​8, 383, 400, 435 Noble, John  28, 30, 34, 36, 257, 297–​8, 400 Norris of Bemerton, John  222, 229, 230, 231, 233, 234 Opie, Amelia  394, 395, 468 Owenson, Sydney, Lady Morgan  100, 403, 421, 431, 423, 558, 559 Oxford, Robert Harley, 1st Earl of see under Harley, Robert Ozell, John  266, 269 Paine, Thomas  457, 461, 462 Paltock, Robert  203, 252, 324, 325, 515 pamphlets  5–​6, 10, 22, 33, 37, 51, 69, 141, 143, 168, 175, 177, 350, 384, 468, 512, 514 Peacock, Thomas Love  84, 567, 569–​70, 578–​81 Pepys, Elizabeth  88–​9, 103 Pepys, Samuel  13–​17, 19, 21, 88–​9, 155n2, 167 periodical essays  65, 67, 260, 493 Petronius  165, 569, 570 Pilkington, Mary  11, 376, 465 Pine, John  309, 312, 335 Pope, Alexander  51, 132, 151n29, 174, 184, 185, 249, 271, 273, 274, 305, 359, 413, 563, 571 Porter, Anna Maria  393, 401 Porter, Jane  393, 399, 521, 534, 556–​7 Pratt, Samuel Jackson  377, 384 Prévost, Antoine François  80, 86, 95–​6, 99, 101 Printing Act of 1662 see under Licensing Act of 1662 public sphere  xxii–​xxiii, 55–​63, 67–​9, 207, 349, 359, 367, 527 publishers see under booksellers Purbeck, Elizabeth  379–​80, 568 Purbeck, Jane  379–​80, 568

Index   593 Quarterly Review  402, 404, 541, 551 Rabelais, François  188, 249, 265, 266, 269, 569 Radcliffe, Ann  xx, xxiv, 28, 81, 85, 95, 304, 356, 364, 370, 375–​6, 377, 381, 393, 394, 398, 400–​3, 472, 474, 475–​6, 478, 479, 481, 482, 484, 501, 506, 507, 520, 554 Mysteries of Udolpho, The  356, 364, 370, 376, 393, 398, 401, 403, 472, 476, 479, 481, 482, 485, 486, 487 Romance of the Forest, The  81, 370, 506 Sicilian, The 95, 393 Italian, The  304, 370, 375, 377, 381, 401, 472 ‘ramble’ novels  259, 262, 277–​8 Raven, James  82, 108, 252, 314 Ravenet, Simon François  319–​20 reading public  xviii–​xix, xxi–​xxiii, 15, 23–​4, 29, 50–​3, 55, 58, 59, 63, 64, 67–​9, 89–​90, 92, 175, 214, 283, 355–​71, 372, 380, 448, 484, 522, 552–​3 realism  64, 73, 92, 156, 158, 178, 187, 188–​9, 190, 191, 192, 223, 238, 239, 246, 253, 255, 262, 269, 365, 427, 432, 434, 435, 438, 442, 470, 486, 505, 522, 528–​9, 535, 536–​50 Reeve, Clara  xx, 85, 159, 187, 335, 362, 367, 369, 389, 472, 474, 475, 506, 517, 520 Riccoboni, Marie-​Jeanne  27, 28, 35, 96–​7, 99, 100, 359 Richardson, Samuel  xix, xx, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, 17–​20, 24, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32–​3, 35, 45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 56, 58, 66, 68, 69, 73, 77, 78, 79, 80–​1, 83, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102, 109–​10, 120, 157–​8, 159, 160, 161, 169, 173, 176, 181, 186, 189, 206–​20, 221–​36, 241, 253, 256, 262, 264, 270–​1, 278, 282, 284, 308, 313, 315–​6, 317, 319, 324, 325, 357, 359, 365, 367, 370, 375, 383, 400, 402, 410, 413, 417, 427, 432, 437, 441, 444, 445, 446, 450, 453, 467, 473, 474, 495, 507, 515, 516, 541, 552, 553 and free indirect discourse  225–​8 Clarissa  xx, 25, 32–​3, 66, 79, 81, 93, 95, 99, 100, 102, 109–​10, 157, 206, 222, 223, 225, 226–​8, 229–​34, 235–​6, 249, 252, 324, 325, 357, 359, 410, 413, 417, 427, 432, 445, 446, 450, 541–​2 Pamela  xx, 17–​20, 24, 25, 26, 31, 32, 51, 56, 66, 73, 79, 80–​1, 93, 96, 109–​10, 157, 159,

169, 189, 206–​20, 222, 223, 224, 226, 234–​5, 241, 308, 313–​6, 317, 357, 359, 367, 427, 467, 473 Sir Charles Grandison  xx, 26, 31, 32–​3, 45, 79, 206, 234–​6, 252, 271, 308, 375, 413, 427, 495 Richetti, John J.  76, 173, 175, 254 Rivington, House of  296, 316, 377 Robinson, George  296, 304, 401 Robinson, Mary  28, 217, 376, 377, 401, 442, 506 Roche, Regina Maria  376, 476, 517 romance  xviii, xix, 20, 33, 53, 74, 77–​8, 80, 83, 85, 92, 98, 115, 156, 158–​66, 178, 184, 188, 192, 199, 207, 213, 216, 237–​51, 255–​6, 257, 258, 262, 266–​7, 269, 270–​2, 279, 283, 324, 356, 361, 362, 363, 379, 381, 385–​6, 390–​5, 398–​9, 403–​4, 411, 418, 421, 427, 429, 432, 435, 438, 447, 450, 453–​6, 472–​88, 492, 500, 506–​7, 512, 514–​5, 519–​20, 528, 537, 538–​9, 541, 545, 551–​2, 553, 555–​60, 564, 567, 569–​70, 578, 579, 582, 585 romans á clef 148, 163 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques  325, 347, 397, 402, 412, 413, 416, 417, 418, 422, 449–​50, 461, 467 Rowlandson, Thomas  328–​31, 335 Royal Society  14, 156, 165, 188 Sabor, Peter  24, 176, 427 Said, Edward  489, 493, 501–​2 St Clair, William  255, 322–​3, 362 St Pierre, Bernardin de  99, 101 Sayer, Edward  458–​60 Lindor and Adelaïde  458–​60, 462, 463 Scarron, Paul  77, 100, 101, 269 Scott, Sarah  253, 257, 280, 308–​9, 376, 432, 495–​7, 498 Scott, Walter  xvii, xx, xxiii, xxiv, 82, 85–​6, 95, 101, 103, 186, 272, 285, 293, 298, 299–​300, 305, 306, 365, 368–​70, 388, 393–​4, 398, 402, 403–​4, 410, 421, 424, 454, 470, 472, 479, 485–​7, 506, 514, 517–​8, 520, 530, 536, 538–​9, 540–​1, 543–​4, 545, 551–​66, 568, 569–​70, 582–​4 Guy Mannering 538, 539 Ivanhoe  394, 404, 558, 564–​5 Kenilworth  300, 404, 506 Redgauntlet  410, 421, 424, 486

594

594   Index Scott, Walter (cont.) review of Emma  272, 538, 541, 543–​4, 545, 554, 570 Rob Roy  403, 486, 506, 536, 562–​3 Waverley  95, 298, 369–​70, 398, 403, 404, 485, 486, 530, 538, 539, 545, 551, 552, 553, 555, 557, 559, 560–​2 Scudéry, Madeleine de  78, 88–​9, 90, 92, 99, 162–​3, 392, 473 secret history  137–​52 Selkirk, Alexander  177, 310 sentimental novels  80–​1, 262–​3, 359, 398, 411, 426–​39, 450, 477, 495, 498 serial publication  6, 24, 32–​4, 51, 65, 184, 209, 210, 217, 301–​2, 304, 305, 306, 321–​2, 430, 500, 511, 515 Shakespeare, William  83, 90, 175, 249, 281, 295, 315, 316, 317, 363, 404, 473, 506, 519 Shebbeare, John  254, 515 Shelley, Mary  84, 125, 135, 335, 438, 472, 485 Frankenstein  84, 125, 135, 335, 472, 485 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  94, 469, 540, 579 Sheridan, Frances  278, 280, 324, 375, 492, 515 Sidney, Sir Philip  212, 473 slave trade  44, 351, 457, 494–​502 Sleath, Eleanor  370, 476 Smith, Adam  428–​9, 433, 437, 477–​8, 495, 497 Smith, Charlotte  84, 99, 362, 370, 377, 394, 398, 400, 401, 402, 417, 438, 442, 446, 451, 458, 463, 468, 509, 517, 520, 542, 552, 571 Smollett, Tobias  xix, xx, xxiv, 25, 27, 34, 45, 47, 74–​5, 76, 79–​80, 93, 97, 101, 125, 132, 198–​9, 205, 217, 252, 254, 255, 256, 262, 266–​7, 268, 269, 273, 277, 308, 314, 321–​2, 324, 325, 328, 330, 334, 356, 357, 358, 365, 370, 375, 376, 388, 414–​5, 428, 515, 517, 552–​3, 582, 584 Ferdinand Count Fathom  27, 75, 252, 376 History and Adventures of an Atom  198–​9, 375 Humphry Clinker  47, 76, 125, 198, 329, 358, 370, 414–​5, 428, 584 Peregrine Pickle  27, 75, 79–​80, 217, 252, 262, 328, 330, 334, 376 Roderick Random  25, 27, 75, 217, 252, 268, 314, 328, 330, 356–​7 Sir Lancelot Greaves  34, 45, 74, 254, 256, 308, 321–​2, 328 Smythies, Susan  215, 254, 256

Somers, John, 1st Baron Somers  52, 139, 142, 174 Southey, Robert  344, 466, 514 Spectator  xvii, 44, 66–​7, 122, 544 spiritual autobiography  16–​17, 110–​3, 116–​8, 145 Staël-​Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine de 82, 421 Stationers’ Company  9, 11, 13, 294 Steele, Sir Richard  66–​7, 184, 212 Stendhal 103, 438 Sterne, Laurence  xix, xx, xxiv, 27, 28, 31, 35, 46, 48, 74–​5, 77, 83, 100, 195–​7, 198, 205, 253, 258, 261, 264–​81, 282, 283, 308, 315, 319–​21, 324, 328, 330, 357–​8, 366, 370, 426, 428, 432, 435, 437, 466, 477, 484, 515 Sentimental Journey  100, 198, 264, 265–​6, 269, 270, 279–​80, 283, 321, 328, 426, 428, 432–​3 Tristram Shandy  27, 31, 35, 48, 74–​5, 100, 195–​6, 258, 261, 264–​8, 260–​77, 279–​80, 281, 282, 283, 308, 319–​21, 357 Stothard, Thomas  313, 321, 322, 324–​5, 327–​8, 331–​2, 335 Stuart, Gilbert  380, 382 subscription libraries see under circulating libraries subscription publishing  28, 35, 52, 174, 401, 584 Surr, Thomas Skinner  403, 506 Swift, Jonathan  xvii, xx, xxiv, 31, 45, 68, 135, 146–​8, 151, 172, 174–​5, 182, 183–​5, 187–​204, 246, 249, 265, 273, 274, 308, 430, 515, 567, 568, 569, 570 Gulliver’s Travels  xx, 31, 68, 135, 146–​8, 175, 182, 183–​5, 187–​90, 192–​3, 195, 197, 198–​9, 201, 203, 308, 568 Tale of a Tub, A  xviii, 174, 190, 195, 265, 274 Tatler  66–​7 Tegg, Thomas  516 Term Catalogues  xxiii, 15–​16, 19, 108 Thompson, E. P.  xxiii, 41, 339, 343 Thomson, James  51, 309, 311, 426, 495 Thousand and One Nights see under Arabian Nights Tillotson, John  106, 109 Toldervy, William  276–​7

Index   595 Tompkins, Jane  254, 284, 388, 473, 477 Tonson, Jacob  10, 15 Tristram Bates  253, 276, 277 Vander Gucht, Gerard  318, 325 Venus in the Cloister, or, The Nun in her Smock  79, 168–​9 Virgil  15, 90, 179, 249 Voltaire  27, 90, 97, 99, 100, 101, 132, 377, 440, 510, 515, 568, 569 Walker, George  458, 465, 466–​7, 574–​6 Walpole, Horace  xvi, 30, 80, 85, 125, 266, 282, 333, 334–​5, 392, 398, 472, 474, 475, 506, 517, 520 Walpole, Sir Robert, 1st Earl of Orford  42, 240, 577 Warburton, William  161, 190, 266, 276 Warner, William Beatty  18, 78, 83, 159, 160, 175, 207 Watt, Ian  xxi–​xxii, 55–​6, 57–​9, 63, 64–​5, 67–​8, 69, 73, 91, 157–​9, 160, 162, 187, 214, 226, 262, 283, 434, 484, 528, 570n6

and ‘formal realism’  65, 158, 187, 190, 191, 226, 257, 283, 434, 492, 570n6 Rise of the Novel, The  xxi–​xxii, 55–​6, 63, 73, 91, 157, 187, 214, 262, 528 Wenman, Joseph  325–​7, 516 Wesley, Charles  229, 523 Wesley, John  105, 229, 234, 523 West, Jane  364, 376, 399, 401, 442, 464, 555–​7, 575 Whitefield, George  105, 229, 523 Wilberforce, William  351, 498, 502, 521, 523–​4, 534 William III  139, 141, 150 Williams, Helen Maria  99, 375, 378, 514 Wollstonecraft, Mary  82, 125, 328, 347, 360, 364, 365, 377, 418, 438, 440, 442, 443, 445, 448–​9, 450, 451, 452, 455, 457, 458, 461, 464, 467, 469, 520, 574, 575 Wordsworth, William  83, 84, 453, 479, 485, 525 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary  51, 125, 132, 262 Wright, T.  460–​2 Solyman and Fatima  460–​2, 465

596

598

600