The Reading Public

It is also important to bear in mind changes in the structure of society itself. The reading public was changing quite rapidly and the taste for reading was spreading. Female readers became increasingly numerous as the age wore on. In addition to the fine ladies who had much leisure time on their hands, another market was made up of the huge number of household servants who had access to their masters' books.

It should be noted that novels were far too expensive for the average lower-class worker: the price of a book would be more than the weekly wage of a labourer. Although the establishment of circulating libraries helped to relieve this situation towards the middle of the century, the novel could not at that time be said to constitute a popular literary form as such.

A rising middle class hungry for knowledge and for literary representations of a changing social reality, which was very much of their own making, sought new forms of entertainment and intellectual stimulation^ Apart from the new novels - or 'histories' as they were often known - these were provided by the coffee houses which quickly became centres of active debate, business transactions and social life, and also by the proliferation of newspapers and magazines dealing with all aspects of society, from duelling to the latest fashions.

A growing middle-class public was slowly becoming the arbiter of taste and 'public opinion'. Many writers had to learn to cater to the new requirements, and did so by employing a prose which was far removed from the complicated niceties of its seventeenth-century forerunner. A sophisticated, speech-based prose prevailed - a social prose for what had become a social age, in­creasingly dominated by the tastes and opinions of both the upper and emerging middle classes.

Poetry and Drama

In contrast to prose, both poetry and drama take a secondary role in eighteenth-century literature. The Augustan poet was a social being whose private feelings were considered inappropriate material for public confession. The classicizing influence of ancient Rome held sway in the first half of the eighteenth century. Locked into pre-conceived forms, well balanced lines and a predictable diction, poets played out their role obediently, producing much worthy satire and mock heroic verse.

However, the guardians of reason and public life were not to have it all their own way. By the mid 1700s, it was evident that the 'conflict' between the intellect and the emotions was drawing to a climax and that the neoclassical tenets were being challenged by a more personal and melancholic kind of poetry. In the absence of a language which could deal adequately with this growing emphasis on the inner self (as opposed to man as a social being), it was to be a long time before the challenge matured fully in the poems of the so-called Romantics.

As for drama, this is a particularly barren period: not a single tragedy of any worth was written during the eighteenth century. Restoration drama and its comedy of manners fell into disrepute as the new middle class audiences rejected the frequently immoral attitudes they contained. In catering to the new tastes dramatists invariably turned out unimaginative, sentimental comedies. The tone of these comedies was frequently moralizing and there was often a strong didactic element to the plays: the theatre was evidently a place where the moral standards of a well-ordered early eighteenth-century society should be seen to be upheld. With few notable exceptions, characterization and dialogues were lacking in the wit and sparkle - and, indeed, vulgarity - often associated with Restoration drama, and the prevailing sentimentality of theatrical works was later to become an easy target for parody.

Prose

Essays, journalism and, above all, the novel were the most important aspects of literary production in an age which was dominated by prose.

The abolition of the Licensing Act in 1694 marked the end of censorship and I heralded a new period of freedom for what amounted to the beginnings of the modern press. Many ac­complished writers of the age (Defoe, Swift and Johnson, to name but a few) were encour­aged to write articles or essays for the growing number of newspapers and periodicals. Journalism became a new trade plied to the satisfaction of a growing middle class only too keen to prove its intellectual worth in the urbane coffee houses of expanding cities like London. Depending on the periodical concerned, the subjects dealt with were current affairs, politics, literature, fashion, gossip, entertainment and contemporary manners, fads and morals. It was a prose frequently characterized by a refined simplicity; this, together with its almost conversational tone, was a symptom of a growing concern to reach the largest number of readers possible. This adaptable and logic-aspiring prose was most suited to those objectives held dear by the lovers of classical taste and social order -instruction, description and persuasion.

Only in the field of what we now call the novel, however, was prose to manifest its truly variegated properties and infinite flexibility. Other works of prose fiction such as Mallory's Morte D'Arthur, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, not to mention the lengthy French romances of the seventeenth century, had existed prior to the 1700s. The eighteenth century novel - whilst varying considerably from author to author - represented, however, a new departure from previous canons. It might broadly be defined as a prose narrative of considerable length dealing more or less imaginatively and in varying degrees of complexity, with a world of actual human experience. This frequently results in a narrative consisting of a sequence of events connected one to the other, and involving a number of people in a specific setting. We should remember the following when dealing with the most popular literary form of the time:

• Philosophers like Descartes and Locke had done much to question traditional ways of interpreting reality during the seventeenth century. In drawing increasing attention to the validity of the individual's evaluation of experience they effectively undermined the classical emphasis on the search for universal truths which had alone supposedly constituted reality. The novel took individual experience as its most important criterion, and the plots that had formed the backbone of English literature for many centuries - plots taken from history, legend, mythology and previous literature – were largely abandoned by the new novelists. The familiar was being replaced by the new in what was not always a conscious reaction against a formerly unquestioned and readily recognizable literary reality.

• The rejection of classical literary conventions meant that instead of the general human types and universals familiar to the smaller and more easily identifiable reading public of former times, readers were presented with original plots acted out by often highly individual characters in singular circumstances. In looking at an eighteenth-century novel we are aware that characters - whether one is considering novels singly or making comparisons between one novel and another – usually differ greatly one from the other. The fact that characters were often given contemporary names and surnames was something new and served to reinforce the impression of realism still further.

• This sense of realism extends to the background of the novels, too: any attempt to render a character individual is helped if there is a notion on the reader's part of when things are happening. In contrast to earlier fictional works where notions of specific time were usually considered irrelevant in demonstrating the unchanging nature of timeless truths, the eighteenth-century novel reveals a much greater concern with the exactness of time. We often have the sensation that characters are very much rooted in a temporal dimension: there is a sense of temporal sequencing which encourages us to believe there is some kind of causal relation between events -experiences in the past lead to results in the present. References are made to particular times of the year or even to days, and characters are seen to act and, indeed, develop against a temporal backdrop which had not been systematically present in fiction prior to the eighteenth century.

• Similarly, greater attention was paid to the physical background or setting. Where the action occurred became a question of great importance, and was the logical complement to the question of time. In previous fiction (for example, in Sidney or in Bunyan) the idea of place had usually been vague and, at best, fragmentary. In the new novels specific references to names of streets or towns, together with more detailed descriptions of the objects situated in the variously defined interiors and exteriors of the physical world, helped form a solid idea of setting which rendered the narrative all the more 'realistic'.

• Finally, a mention of the actual features of the prose itself. The genre of the realistic novel was a new form of prose and the idea of an 'appropriate' style or a form of linguistic decorum corresponding to a given subject was obviously inapplicable. In keeping with much -though not all - writing of the time, there was a general movement away from rhetorical and figurative language towards a more descriptive and denotative form of language. In its hankering after verisimilitude -the desire to present things with an air of complete authenticity - prose gained in realism, even if it lacked much of the polish and elegance that had characterised it in former times.