Lecture Ten. The Rise of the Novel in the Eighteenth century

1. The Rise of the novel in the eighteenth century:

1. the novel and the romance

2. the social background of the new genre, its acclaimed aims

3. the emergence of the novel from extra-literary genres. English journalism. The periodical essay as a precursor of the novel

2. Daniel Defoe, the pioneer of the novel genre:

1. Defoe’s life and career.

2. Robinson Crusoe

• the method of circumstantial precision, preoccupation with the actualities of life and interest in the adventure;

• the literary form: the first-person narration, memoir, diary;

• the philosophy of the novel.

3. The development of the genre. S. Richardson. The epistolary novel. The gains in the verisimilitude and drama. Psychological analyses.

4. The “histories” of H. Fielding. A comic epic

1. On the whole, the literature of the beginning of the eighteenth century retained its aristocratic bias, and much of it was addressed to a highly sophisticated and cultivated audience. Nevertheless, a body of writing that reached a wider audience was coming into being. It is clear now that the social and intellectual currents of the eighteenth century produced an entirely new and distinct literary form – the novel.

The novel proper was born, when people began to demand to hear stories about characters not too unlike themselves, in a society recognizably akin to their own. It was not called ‘novel’ at that time though. The word novel derives from ‘novella’. Used in the modern sense (a book-length story about fictitious characters), the word ‘novel’ appears in England in the mid-seventeenth century, when it was chiefly associated with romances of illicit love. For this reason the word ‘history’ was more favoured to describe the long prose fictions of the 18^th century, which were the precursors of the modern novel

Intellectual background. Interest in the practical, scientific aspect. It was a time when reason and common sense were the final court of appeal; in all matters, those of art and literature included. So the literature of the 18^th century England is primarily concerned with everyday life and interests of well-ordered, civilized human life, as it transacts itself in London and English countryside.

The devotion to the real and actual, the preoccupation with everyday life discouraged the flight of poetic imagination. But by way of compensation it gave us shrewd wisdom, sound sense and flashing wit.

Social background. The reading public extended steadily throughout the 18^th century. The new recruits were upper-class women and the increasingly numerous rich and leisured people of both sexes in the trading middle class. The rise of the novel is usually associated with the rise of the middle class.

More and more middle-class people in the 18^th c. were acquiring an education, and their education was less exclusively classical in contents than that of the upper classes).

Women in the upper and middle ranks had more leisure time; it was no longer considered lady-like to involve herself directly in domestic duties of the household. She became only the supervisor. (Compare in Tom Jones: Squire Western’s wife was a mere grudge; his daughter was an educated aristocratic girl with a moral judgement of her own.)

The greater leisure time had to be filled. Men also were receptive to literary forms that would open up to them new worlds, but real worlds outside their immediate ken.

The age was far more remarkable for its prose. French influence helped to develop a flexible, concise, energetic prose style.

Novelists of the age saw it as their duty not only to divert or inform, but to inculcate morality. Usefulness was an important concept for the middle class, and that included moral usefulness. The average novel reader took as an essential ingredient in the pudding passages of explicit moralizing that we today find intrusive or embarrassing. The triple aim – to reveal, to educate, to stimulate moral judgement – runs through the 18^th (and 19^th) century novels.

The Beginnings of the Novel. English periodicals.

The proliferation of newspapers and the popularity of periodicals is clear evidence of the public’s thirst for reading.

The popular press flourished producing a succession of periodicals. The new journalism satisfied a hunger for all sorts of information: politics, science, philosophy, as well as for scandal and gossip. But, probably, the most significant was the thirst to learn about manners, behaviour and circumstances of other classes and localities. To learn how others (particularly one’s betters) behave is a universal urge and the magazines provided this knowledge. Periodicals were important in expressing ideas and point of view, setting standards of taste and judgement and influencing the values of the society.

Writing became a profession.

The Gentleman’s Journal (1692-4) was the first among such enterprises. The most famous and important were The Tatler and The Spectator, run by the two pioneers of English journalism: Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. The Tatler was run by Steele in 1709-1711; Addison contributed part of the materials. It appeared three times a week and continued the idea of a magazine which represented the tastes of a gentleman. The other periodical – The Spectator – was started by Steele and Addison (March 1711 – December 1712). Addison continued to run it by himself from March 1714.

They were quite distinct from newspapers in the modern sense. It was rather a blending of literature and journalism. Addison and Steele developed a new literary form, the periodical essay. The periodical essay (a piece of writing on some topic of general interest) can be seen as the forerunner of the modern novel form.

The Tatler was started under the mythical pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff (the name was borrowed from Swift). Steele also developed a personality behind the name – an old philosopher, astrologist, humorist and censor. The essays were ascribed either to him or his sister – the young Jenny Distaff. The literary framework of the project comprised everyday life occurrences, points of view, customs and ways of this imaginary family.

The Spectator had an even more varied and complex literary framework. It was presented as a magazine of a fictitious gentlemen’s club. The members of the club featured both as the authors and the characters of the essays. The club was a miniature image of the English society of the time.

The true hero of The Spectator was Sir Roger de Coverley, an old eccentric country squire. He embodied the spirit of ‘good old England’, and appeared sometimes as a relic of the past. In a true sense, Sir Roger is a new type of literary character. He is minutely described as a living person with all his virtues and weaknesses.

Addison and Steele’s avowed purpose was popularize morality and culture, to bring “philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses”. They portrayed with good humor the manners and customs of the 18^th century life, criticized the follies and vanities of their countrymen. The tone was witty, conversational, and neither too colloquial nor intellectual. The term ‘middle-brow’ later came to describe this kind of journalism. It was a safe and comfortable reading, a model of good taste and politeness.

The essays of Addison and Steele constitute a landmark. No preceding English prose shows so much grace of style, delicate humor, and power of awakening and retaining interest.

Defoe. The great (if unconscious) pioneer of the English novel was Daniel Defoe (1660-1731). He lived a life of varied activity; he was a trader, a manufacturer, a politician, aournalist, apy and government agent, a ck-writer. His life was a succession of changing fortunes, but he died in poverty. He is regarded as one of the first great English journalists. From 1704 to 1713 he issued The Review, which appeared triweekly and gave the news current in England and Europe. It was an unusual achievement for the age and shows Defoe to have been a journalist of great ability. It has been computed that he wrote 5000 pages of essays for his Review in addition to nearly the same amount of other matter. He also issued many pamphlets. It is probable, that Defoe was the most prolific of all English authors. He wrote more than 250 separate works on subjects as different as social conditions, business, travels, ghosts, human conduct, etc.

At the end of his life (he was nearly sixty, when he wrote Robinson Crusoe) – the author of 5 or 6 narratives that laid foundations for the novel proper.

His books dragged prose-narrative out of generalised idealities into the actual world of the eighteenth century living.

Due to 1) the peculiar, prosaic nature of his imagination and 2) his journalistic training, which enabled him to seize on the essential elements of interest, he managed to invest his narratives with the atmosphere of perfect reality. With great skill he presented minute, matter-of-fact details and told his stories in a style as simple and direct as the speech of everyday life.

Defoe’s narratives are written as memoirs or autobiographies. He presented them as either written by the character himself (Robinson Crusoe), or based on authentic materials (Moll Flanders, the notes of a thief), or told by the character to the author.

In the very true light of the Enlightenment, they tell of the character’s life, the formation of personality, of their environment, living conditions, etc. His characters are in perceptual conflict with the hostile world; as a rule, they are bereft of social connections and have to fight on their own with their unsympathetic surroundings.

The best known of Defoe’s writings is Robinson Crusoe, though usually via adaptations and simplified versions for children. Defoe presented his story as authentic memoirs of a sailor. And in this light it was perceived by his contemporaries. The secret of its immediate and enormous success lies in the verisimilitude, the artless simplicity of the narration the spirit of authenticity.

Defoe pictures the minute details of his hero’s life, and each acquires a special, philosophical significance. The reader finds himself involved in the process of the character’s actual living, he participates in all his achievements and failures.

For the first time the subject of creative labour was introduced into the world of letters.

The hero. Robinson Crusoe personifies the eighteenth century idea of a natural man, a man in general. Significantly (and symbolically) the scene is laid on a desert island, which is pristine, primeval Nature, and to survive in such surroundings Robinson has to adapt to nature. But on the other hand, he wouldn’t have survived without the reminders of civilization (tools, knowledge, skills). In this sense, Crusoe is not a universal man, but a middle-class Englishman of the early eighteenth century, typical product of the new social order. His character is comprised of the universally acclaimed middle-class virtues of the time: common sense, piety, enterprise, and a good deal of practicality, economic shrewdness. The book is a perfect picture of a man as an economic being.

As an emotional being Crusoe hardly exists at all. Sentiment was to come into the world of letters later, with Richardson. So far, the emphasis is on the story itself and the moral lesson to be extracted from it. Supposedly, the author is a sailor, and we can’t expect much poetic grace from him. Robinson Crusoe is not much of a poet, or a thinker. He is too practically-minded for that. In fact, that obsessive practicality of his, his devotion to economic self-help, distrust of the romantic often repelled readers later. Children, however, love the book for its optimism.

The philosophy of the novel. In the preface to Part II and Part III of Robinson Crusoe Defoe defined his work as a historical parable or an allegorical history and compared it with the parables of the Scripture and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, thus recognizing the allegorical nature of his book.

Defoe’s narration, one might notice, is representative of human life and the history of human civilization. Crusoe’s adventures on the island can be seen as a generalization of the history of human society: Crusoe begins with hunting, goes on to breed cattle and cultivate land and finally procures a slave and turns his island into a colony.

The perception of the book changed greatly after Roussau and his interpretation. Roussau was sure, that Man was only capable of harmonious development in a natural environment. Roussau admired Defoe’s book. After Roussau Robinson Crusoe was often seen as a call ‘back to nature’. The pathos of a Robinsonaid has been felt as escape from the vices and fallacies of civilization to the primitive simplicity of nature. But if we read the book carefully, we’ll have to admit that Roussau misinterpreted it, or rather reversed its pathos. The enthusiasm of a Robinsonaid is based on an artificial and voluntary extraction of a man from society. Robinson suffers from his loneliness and longs to return to civilization

Robinson Crusoe is not a natural man, one unaware of the corruption of civilization (or weary of it). He is a civilized man. Society is present on the island, and it helps him in his single combat with nature. The labour of many generations is embodied in the tools, and their knowledge and experience – in Crusoe’s consciousness. His aim is to remain civilized. When he rescues Man Friday, he does not admire his innate noble spirit, but tries to educate him, to wean of his simplicity, to familiarize with civilization.

Moll Flanders. Once again Defoe goes to great lengths to convince the reader that what he is telling is not fiction, but a true story: the confessions of a notorious thief. Because of the prosaic nature of Defoe’s imagination, we learn an enormous amount about the 18^th century life. We almost feel we experience it, especially the aspects that historians overlook. Defoe’s contemporaries also learnt a lot from the book, got a lot of practical information (how to protect themselves against pick-pockets; how to contract a marriage; the conditions in American colonies, etc.)

Moll begins her life in jail; after a run of disastrous marriages, nearly ends it there too. The dominant interest in the book is Moll’s own well-being. She is a complete woman, the first in English fiction.

Moll tells her own story; the manner is that of a conventional autobiography (still very popular in English Sunday newspapers).

The importance of Defoe’s achievement was not immediately appreciated. Defoe was despised by the arbiters of taste as a hack, a sensationalist and something less than a gentleman. The novel as a literary form never gained respectability until the 20^th century. It was for a long time thought that Defoe was ignorant, that he accidentally happened to write a masterpiece. It is now known that he was well-educated, versed in several languages and the most versatile writer of his time.

Samuel Richardson.

The drama and romance had helped to prepare the way for the novel of everyday domestic life. Defoe invested fictitious adventure with reality. Richardson advanced on his beginnings and transferred the real human life around him to the pages of fiction.

Richardson (1689-1761) was born in a middle-class family. He learnt the craft of a printer, and married the daughter of the owner of the printing shop where he was working. Richardson lived a very respectable life, and was quite prosperous. As an author he started very late, and his career seems almost accidental. When he was about 50, some publishers asked him to prepare a letter writer which would be useful to country people and to others who could not express themselves with a pen. The idea occurred to him of making these letters tell a connected story.

The result was the first modern novel – Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740). The book concerns the efforts of a virtuous servant girl (Pamela) to avoid seduction or rape at the hands of her young master. It is an epistolary novel; the bulk of it is constituted by Pamela’s letters to her parents. So, for the first time in the world of letters it was a record of events just past, of feelings rendered in the heat of experiencing them. The gains in verisimilitude, immediacy, drama were enormous. The reader was totally involved in the situation.

Clarissa Harlow, or the History of a Young Lady is a much greater book. It is mainly its length that prevents it from being a living classic.

Contents: Clarissa is mistreated by her worldly family who want her to marry an uninspiring suitor. She seeks help from the rake Lovelace. Lovelace abducts her, lodges her in a brothel and eventually rapes her when she is under the influence of drugs. Clarissa refuses to marry him and wastes away. Lovelace is killed by her brother in a duel.

Richardson wearies the reader with his didactic aims. But that was the feature Richardson himself trumpeted most – he poses as a great moralist; he teaches morality of direct utility. The length and slow development also repel modern readers. But Richardson’s many faults are largely those of his age.

Sentiment plays such an important role in Richardson’s prose that the author is often referred to as the father of European sentimentalism. But he does not share in the sentimentalist criticism of reason, always calls to discipline passion by reason, and common sense.

Rationalism and humanism in Richardson’s outlook are modified by religious convictions. His rigid morals, his mistrust of human sensuality are explained by the strong influence of Puritan ideas.

Henry Fielding (1707-54).

Fielding was unlike Richardson in authorship and personal ways. But the moral codes of his novels are as deeply felt as Richardson’s, though they are different.

Fielding began as a playwright (see the previous lecture). After finishing his career as a dramatist, he took up law. He was a solicitor and magistrate. However, he never stops his attempts at belles-letters. He writes didactic poems like Pope’s (Of True Greatness –1741; Liberty – 1743), moral essays like Addison and Steele’s; fantastic satires like Swift (A Journey from this World to the Next – 1743). Around this time he also writes The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great, a short novel, based on the life of a notorious thief-taker, who was hanged in 1725. His life is traced from birth to his death on the gallows. Fielding’s hatred of hypocrisy here finds a most mordant expression. Jonathan Wild is the Great Man among thieves, cheats and bullies. This position of his is constantly compared, directly or by implication, with that of the Great Men among public figures of power (with Sir Robert Walpole as a particular target).

Fielding’s first novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, begins as a satire of Pamela. Fielding invents a brother for Pamela, Joseph, who in turn has his virtue tested by his insatiable mistress, Lady Booby. (Joseph, also in service, is now exposed to attacks on his virtue). Mild fun is made of Pamela herself.

But presently the satire is in the main dropped. Fielding sends Joseph out on the road. Joseph sinks rather into the background, and the real hero of the remainder of the novel is Parson Adams, the simple, good-hearted, slightly ridiculous but lovable curate in Sir Thomas Booby’s family. Parson Adams is an archetype of Don Quixote, whose humanist ideals are contrasted to the crude and vile reality.

In the Preface Fielding relates his book to classical forms and describes it as a ‘comic romance’, or a ‘comic Epic-poem in Prose differing from Comedy as the serious Epic from Tragedy’. His declared object is satirical – to ‘defend what is good by displaying the Ridiculous’.

The novel is one the first picaresque novels in English. The term ‘picaresque’ (from Spanish picaro, a wily trickster) is now commonly and loosely applied to episodic novels, which describe the adventures of a lively and resourceful hero on a journey. The spirit of the road appeals much more to Fielding than the hot-house atmosphere of Richardson’s novels with their ‘underclothing excitement’ (the phrase of D.H. Lawrence). There is possibility for action: chase, fighting, contretemps in the hunting field. Many of these are described in mock-heroic terms, for Fielding was very concerned to establish his kind of novel in a respectable classical tradition.

Adams and Joseph meet on their travels a comic gallery of characters of remarkable vividness and humanity. What Fielding was aiming at, as Joseph Andrews was developed, was a panoramic picture of eighteenth-century England, set in the context of a conservative, but tolerant and compassionate social morality.

He definitely managed to achieve that in his next and greatest novel, The History of Tom Jones (1749). The narrative consists of 18 ‘books’, each preceded by an introductory essay on some theme, more or less connected with the story, in the manner subsequently adopted by Thackeray and George Eliot. These essay contain some of Fielding’s best prose.

The title of the novel hints at the author’s possible intention: one of the commonest British surnames, allied with a sturdy British Christian name in its familiar form. Not that Tom is quite a British Everyman. He is too handsome, too gallant, too generous for that. But he allies what Fielding sees as many of the qualities of his countryman.

Contents: Tom is illegitimate, brought up by the virtuous Squire Allworthy. Due to his own imprudence, as well as to the hostility of his tutors Thwackum and Square and his cousin, the repulsively virtuous Blifil, he is cast out of the Allworthy household. The long central section of the book deals with his adventures on the road, where his path crosses now and then both with soldiers off to fight Jacobites (This is in 1745) and with the beautiful Sophia Western, whom he loves. The last section is in London, where Tom indulges in a fashionable intrigue, nearly gets hanged, yet finally (chastened and mature) gains the hand of Sophia.

Tom Jones, Sir Walter Scott observed, is ‘truth and human nature itself’. Critics call it the very form and pressure of the time. It is, one might say, Fielding’s ‘fair field full of folk”, presented with a moral strength comparable to Langland’s own.

The novel is experimental, interplaying different planes of characterization, different levels of moral engagement and different relationships of author, material and reader. The book is shaped with classical finesse. Scott praises it as a story ‘regularly built, and consistent in all its parts. Coleridge thought it had one of the three finest plots ever devised (along with Oedipus Tyrannus and The Alchemist). There is indeed much to admire in Fielding’s skill and care; he had for ten years written stage-comedy, and he believed the characteristic assumption of his time that causes and effects are clear and definable. The ‘comic epic in prose’, first presented in Joseph Andrews, here grows more searchingly comic, more deeply humane, and closer to the broad symbolic epic manner.

The book’s declared purpose is ‘to make good men wise rather than bad men good’ and it makes good and bad clearly visible, intermingled though they are in most of the characters, as in life itself. It works, among other aims, to contrast the reality of virtues with shams and hypocrisies, to warn against ‘the false appearances that are imposed upon us by words’ (F. Bacon).

Fielding’s moral confrontations are strikingly sharp. It is most evident in the antithetical nature of Blifil and Allworthy. Blifil is an offspring of the devil, born of one of the devil’s ‘disciples’ who acted by ‘diabolical principle’ (i; xiii). He never does anything not loathsome, and, realistically considered, Blifil is impossible. But then, though its substance is realistic, Tom Jones is not wholly a realistic novel; its realism interplays with something like symbolism or allegory. Blifil symbolizes what Fielding believes to be the devil’s interventions in the world. He is not so much a realistic figure as a morality or allegory character fitting awkwardly into a realistic society, but for Fielding he represents an entirely real element in life, that of deceit.

Allworthy is a diametrical antithesis, man as the agent of God. He is somewhere between a realistic and a morality figure, the generalization of Fielding’s friend and benefactor Ralph Allen into the Christian ideal.

The generous bent of Fielding’s own nature towards comedy and a basic faith in mankind make certain the triumph of good, but only after much potency of danger.

One of the book’s greatest creation is Squire Western. He is a magnificently comic, but dangerous brute. Some aspects of his violent natural force are attractive, others hideous, and on a full recognition of the contrast, as on other confrontations of good and bad, depends his full impact. Alive in every word and motion, he is a tremendous achievement, but not one to be sentimentalized.

But, of course, the book centres on Sophia and Tom. Sophia, rendered appreciatively and with great charm, presents no problem. Tom, on the other hand, is somewhat of a problem. Tom is a good and generous young man, as well as a splendidly vigorous and handsome one. That Tom is like Fielding himself in physique, nature and general conduct is evident enough. But he is also wild and not given to repressing his desires. D.H. Lawrence called Tom ‘a good animal, true to his animal instincts’.

Many critics, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Hazlitt and Thackeray among them, find some of his exploits distasteful and degrading. But the book is not a glorification of this behaviour, preferable though it is to Blifil’s hypocrisy, it rather shows the ‘natural man’ maturing his impulses into wisdom through trials of experience. Tom earns, and learns, the happiness he shares with Sophia at the end.

Fielding’s style has been universally praised. Over a wide range of effects it is unfailingly clear, spirited and cogent. The characters, however passingly drawn, declare themselves as they speak. He can record the brisk assurance of Aunt Western, the mordant sophistication of Lady Bellaston, the earnest dignity of Allworthy and the well-bred passion with which Tom and Sophia converse. He has clearly been alert to the kinds of vernacular exercised by his common folk.

Fielding’s younger contemporary, Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) both drew on his achievements and went further than Fielding in depicting how inconsistent the ideals of the Enlightenment are when contrasted to everyday reality. There is far less optimism, trust in natural goodness in his books. Even his favourite characters possess many more negative features than those of Fielding’s.

Smollett was born into a noble, but poor Scottish family. He was a doctor, but early in his life gave up medicine for the sake of literature. Having neither experience, nor influential patrons, he made desperate efforts to emerge from obscurity, tried himself in different genres, wrote dramas, poetry, scholarly works (the History of England), edited periodicals, described his travels in France and Italy.

The first of his famous narratives was the Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) It is modelled on Lesage’s Gil Blas (a famous picaresque novel), and is a series of episodes, strung together on the life the combative, often violent hero, who is also capable of generosity and affection. His hero is destined to fight with the unfriendly environment from his very birth. In his desire to achieve success, independence, recognition he resorts to deceit, violence, marriage of convenience. He gets into many scrapes, finds himself in jail several times, but his meetings with his loving uncle Bowling, his father who suddenly comes into money save him from perish and bring the long-awaited happiness.

The aim of the book (declared in the preface) is to “arouse generous indignation … against the vicious disposition of the world”.

Unlike Fielding, Smollett does not comment on the story, avoids moralizing, lets the plot and the dialogue speak for themselves.

Smollett’s democratic characters personify selfless, altruistic feelings and are opposed to the brilliant gentlemen of the upper classes. His Roderick Random is contradictory and capable of development. Unlike Tom Jones, who is maturing throughout the novel, Smollett’s character feels the depraving influence of the environment.

Smollett’s second novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle is much like the first one. The hero is a scoundrel with little to his credit, apart from courage and wit. The novel contains some savage caricatures. Smollett makes a wide use of grotesque as a satirical device. In the grotesques that populate his novels there is little humanity; they are part of the hideous and pointless brutality of the world as Smollett sees it.

It is only in his last novel The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771) that we sense a slight mellowing. Here Smollett reinvents the epistolary novel, for ends very different from Richardson’s. It relates the adventures of a family party travelling through England and Scotland. The journey is seen through the eyes of this company of travellers. Their epistolary styles, their different attitudes to the same events create a feeling of balance and humanity.

Richardson’s minute analyses of individual psychology in its correlation with the social psychology; Fielding’s shrewd understanding of life and running commentary and friendly talk with the reader;Smollett’s grotesques on the dark background of contemporary England constitute a new stage in the development of European novel. Richardson made a major influence on Roussau, young Goethe, Sterne, Jane Austen; Fielding – on Sheridan, Goldsmith, Scott, Thackeray; Smollett – on Dickens.