Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830 9780231881197

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
I. The New Reading Public and the New Novel
II. The Circulating Library
III. Women and Fiction
IV. The Novel as a Means of Instruction
V. Reading for Amusement
Notes
Bibliography

Citation preview

E A R L Y OPPOSITION TO THE ENGLISH N O V E L

EARLY OPPOSITION TO THE ENGLISH NOVEL The Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830 By JOHN TINNON TAYLOR

SUBMITTED IN

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REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY, IN THE FACULTY O F PHILOSOPHY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

New York: Morningside

Heights

KING'S CROWN PRESS J

943

COPYRIGHT 19-13 BY JOHN TINNON

TAYLOR

Printed in the United States of America

King's Crown Press is a division of Columbia University Press organized for the purpose of making certain scholarly material available at minimum cost. Toward that end, the publishers have adopted every reasonable economy except such as would interfere with a legible format. The work is presented substantially as submitted by the author, without the usual editorial attention of Columbia University Press.

PREFACE ' - P UT THE NOVEL was given a bad name in its youth that has overI ) shadowed its successful maturity," Henry Seidel Canby explains in his essay, " O n a Certain Condescension toward Fiction." The present volume deals with the popular opposition to the novel as it existed during the latter part of the eighteenth and first part of the nineteenth centuries. Literary historians frequently make at least passing reference to this well-known early antagonism. Related aspects of the subject have received more definite treatment. The tardy evolution of critical criteria in regard to the novel has been traced by Joseph Bunn Heidler and Byron Hall Gibson; the relation between the hostility to fiction and the critical theory of the eighteenth century has been analyzed by F. W . Gallaway. "Forgotten favorites" from the many volumes of "tenth-rate" fiction against which much of the censure was directed have been brought again to life in the work of J. M. S. Tompkins and Dorothy Blakey. Yet no detailed picture has hitherto been given of the elements which made up this widespread opposition to the reading and writing of novels. In attempting to re-create this pageant of protest and the replies it provoked, I have sought to portray the rise in reputation of the form in the popular mind. Since I have considered the vigorous resistance to the novel from the more largely social point of view, I have supported my generalizations principally with ideas found in numerous minor publications. Expressions of opinion about the dangers of novel reading pervade the ephemeral literature of the day—the little-known periodicals, books of conduct designed for young men and young women, treatises on education, and even the forgotten novels themselves—as well as the letters and the diaries. It has been impossible to refer to all the mass of material which has been sifted, so repetitious and persistent did these comments become. Such passages, however, have been quoted as seem to hold most accurately their spirit as well as their content. In considering this multitude of sweeping denunciations of all fiction, I have given special attention to those objections which were made upon moral grounds. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance which I have received in

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the preparation of this study. Professor Ernest Hunter Wright suggested the subject to me. For his generosity and encouragement I am especially grateful. My thanks are due to Professor George Sherburn, of Harvard University, who gave valuable advice regarding materials. For critical comments upon the manuscript, I am indebted to Professors Marjorie H. Nicolson, Oscar James Campbell, Emery Neff, and E. V. K. Dobbie, all of Columbia. I wish to acknowledge the aid and consideration which I have received from the staffs of: the Columbia University Library, the Harvard College Library, the New York Public Library, the New York Society Library, the Library of Union Theological Seminary, and the Yale University Library. J. T. T. February 15, 1943

CONTENTS I. II.

T H E N E W READING P U B L I C AND THE N E W N O V E L

1

T H E CIRCULATING LIBRARY

21

III.

W O M E N AND FICTION

52

IV.

T H E N O V E L AS A M E A N S OF INSTRUCTION

87

V.

READING FOR A M U S E M E N T

101

NOTES

115

BIBLIOGRAPHY

135

I. THE N E W READING PUBLIC AND THE NEW NOVEL A Collection of Novels has a better chance of giving pleasure than of commanding respect. — A N N A LETITIA BARBAULD, T h e B r i t i s h N o v e l i s t s ,

1810

1

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enough, the new novel and the new reading public grew up together; and during the very years when the form was establishing its right to exist, a group which had been illiterate and unthinking came into intellectual life. Reacting upon each other, these two forces began to wield a powerful social influence in a world which was not too willing to accept them. Although the increase of a great body of readers contributed toward making the novel popular, it also brought to that species of writing two definite types of opposition. On one side were the moral judgments imposed upon the novel by a middle-class conception of conduct and practical morality. On the other were the warnings of critics and moralists who considered any wide reading by the lower orders to be inconsistent with their life of manual labor, in particular any reading which seemed diabolically designed to unsettle the stolid peace of mind necessary to the acceptance of such a lowly status. IGNIFICANTLY

The growth of this public, like that of the novel, was distinctly a product of the eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson, who on several occasions noted with satisfaction the intellectual progress of his age, gives a picture of the conditions which prevailed in the earlier decades, during the lifetime of Addison. "That general knowledge which now circulates in common talk," he writes, "was in his time rarely to be found. Men not professing learning were not ashamed of their ignorance; and, in the female world, any acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured." 1 The authors of the Toiler and the Spectator, therefore, had seen clearly their task of instructing the public, Addison pointedly expressing his objective in the well-known statement: " . . . I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and

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libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at teatables, and in coffee-houses." 2 Other periodicals, likewise, contributed their influence toward fostering a new class of readers. Established by Edward Cave in 1731, the Gentleman's Magazine was followed by its rival, the London, and a whole series of others. Thomas Holcroft recalled, however, the difficulties which he encountered in obtaining reading material during the early fifties. "Books were not then, as they fortunately are now, great or small, on this subject or on that, to be found in almost every house: a book, except of prayers, or daily religious use, was scarcely to be seen but among the opulent, or in the possession of the studious . . ." He protested that over a period of six or seven years the old English ballads posted on the walls of homes and alehouses were the only literature which he knew: " . . . I neither had in my possession, nor met with any book of any kind which I had leisure and permission to read through." 3 But the growth in commerce brought better methods of transportation, better living conditions, and more adequate opportunities for learning. The rise of the middle classes and the education of the poor in the latter part of the century created a far greater audience than the one of which Addison had dreamed. The literature of the period abounds with comments upon this change. Noting the revolution which these improvements had wrought in the life of the individual, Dr. Johnson's unsympathetic biographer, the "unclubbable" Sir John Hawkins, summarily observed in 1787 that "a few years of public tranquility had transformed a whole nation into gentlemen." 4 Likewise, Thomas Monro's Oxford periodical, Olla Podrida, declared in the same year, "There never was a time when learning forced itself so much into notice as it does at present. Y o u can no more walk a hundred yards in any street, or go into any house, without seeing some display of it than you can turn a corner in London without seeing a beggar . . ," 5 This spread of general culture brought radical changes for the author as well. His wealthy and often capricious patron was replaced by subscribers, who in turn were themselves being rapidly superseded by a more powerful sponsor, the new reading public. Part of this increase in the number of readers among the middle classes was due to the efforts of a London bookseller, himself the son of a journeyman shoemaker, James Lackington: "I could almost be vain enough to assert, that I have thereby been highly instrumental in diffus-

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ing that general desire for READING, now so prevalent among the inferior orders of society . . . ," he boasted when reviewing his labors.8 Throughout his life he was possessed of a genuine fondness for books, an enthusiasm which, on at least one occasion, caused him some embarrassment. Sent by his wife to the shop to buy Christmas dinner with their last half crown, he had returned with a copy of Young's Night Thoughts instead and had been forced to explain that the best dinner he could think of was "in my pocket." Encouraged by the "great increase in a certain oldbook shop" in London, he had on Midsummer Day in 1774 dared, with very small resources, to launch a venture of his own. His keen business sense, added to a natural curiosity concerning the reading interests of his customers, brought him a success which was prodigious. Since he disapproved of the usual practice of destroying books in order to keep up their price, be began to sell these remainders at cut rates and, in spite of the united opposition of competitors, was in 1779 sufficiently prosperous to print a sales catalogue listing some twelve thousand volumes.7 Some of the credit for the growth of the public which he served, Lackington attributed to an important pioneer movement of the day. "The Sunday-Schools," he wrote, "are spreading very fast in most parts of England, which will accelerate the diffusion of knowledge among the lower classes of the community, and in a very few years exceedingly increase the sale of books.—Here permit me earnestly to call on every honest bookseller . . . to unite . . . in a hearty AMEN." 8 Established by Robert Raikes in 1780, these schools were not purely religious in nature but had as their principal aim the instruction of the poor in reading and general education. Said Lackington, It is worth remarking that the introducing histories, romances, stories, poems, etc. into schools, has been a very great means of diffusing a general taste for reading among all ranks of people . . . . the children . . . have been pleased and entertained as well as instructed; and this relish for books, in many will last as long as life." 9 So rapidly did the new public grow that according to a computation made by this bookseller in 1 7 9 1 the number of books being sold was four times as great as it had been twenty years earlier. The poorer sort of farmers, and even the poor country people in general, who before that period spent their winter evenings in relating

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stories of witches, ghosts, hobgoblins, etc. now shorten the winter nights by hearing their sons and daughters read tales, romances, etc. and on entering their houses, you may see Tom Jones, Roderick Random, and other entertaining books, stuck up on their bacon racks, etc. If John goes to town with a load of hay, he is charged to be sure not to forget to bring home Peregrine Pickle's Adventures; and when Dolly is sent to market to sell her eggs, she is commissioned to purchase The History of Pamela Andrews. In short, all ranks and degrees now READ. But the most rapid increase of the sale of books has been since the termination of the late war. 10 2 As Lackington had noted, the preference of this new public was for fiction. A popular custom which had assisted in spreading the love of books and in widening the range of a writer's influence among all classes was the habit of reading aloud. Thus the author of the Preface to the 1 7 5 0 reprint of Charles Leslie's Rehearsals recorded, "For the greatest part of the people do not read books, most of them cannot read at all, but they will gather about one that can read, and listen to an Observator or Review (as I have seen them in the streets) . . . " 1 1 But it was the story which, by one Made vocal for th' amusement of the rest, 12 attracted even more interest than the page of the poet or historian. In his picture of the rustic's winter evening, James Thomson had described the appeal of the tale to those who listened, While, well attested, and as well believed, Heard solemn, goes the goblin-story round, Till superstitious horror creeps o'er all. 13 This, then, was the group in whose homes Lackington later found copies of Roderick Random and Tom Jones propped up in the bacon racks, copies which had been used for reading aloud to listeners who had long delighted in narrative. Thus the appeal of this new form, the novel, found its root in one of the oldest of social customs. The secret of Scheherazade has never lost its charm. And it was hence to be expected that the freshly awakened populace should revel in this source of pleasure which

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was so rapidly being made obtainable for them. The moralist, Hannah More, was especially concerned over her discovery that in the workshops "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 . . ." 1 4 That this reading aloud of novels had a tendency to supplant all other activity was the subject of comment and satire. Although he is careful to offer his youth and a desire to please the ladies as excuses for his participation in what he claims to consider a frivolous pastime, a writer for the Reasoner recounts in vivid detail his experience while visiting at the home of a friend, Mr. Meanwell, whose wife and two daughters were "passionately fond" of such reading. He says that after breakfast was oyer and Mr. Meanwell had departed for his place of business, those who stayed at home gathered in a circle, read continuously by turns with only a few minutes out for meals, and in this way finished three volumes by midnight. It is evident, from his account of an earlier protracted session, that the greatest difficulty which he encountered in reading to this audience was that of leaving off, for they all declared it grew so extremely interesting, that they wished to hear the next chapter, at the close of which the heroine had been carried off no one could tell where. The following chapter was read through in great anxiety in search of her; but (shame upon the author, to trifle with people's feelings so at bedtime!) that related nothing about her, as it contained the particulars of a duel the hero had fought, and having wounded his antagonist, precipitately left the country, and fled to . . . Here was intolerable suspense! Both hero and heroine gone! and where? I could bear to read no more of the sad fate of this hapless couple; so I wished the ladies good night . . . Not so easily discouraged, however, the other members of the circle continued reading until four and were able to unravel all the mysteries for their guest over his cup of coffee the next morning. 15 Thus universal in its appeal, the novel gained unprecedented popularity. "To the writer of fiction alone, every ear is open," reflects Anna Letitia Aikin, later editor of The British Novelists,18 while another writer draws an appropriate comparison when he notes that the growth in public favor of this type of composition "has not been less rapid than the ex-

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tension of the use of tea, to which a novel is almost as general an attendant, as the bread and butter. . , " 1 7 In Saintsbury's opinion, Rasselas is almost as important to a discussion of the history of the novel as Tom Jones because it shows how imperative was the preference for narrative; when Johnson wished to reach the popular reader, he chose a popular form. 1 8 "Universally carped at, universally sought after," 1 9 from the time of the controversy over Pamela, novels increased in popularity in spite of all the maledictions heaped upon them. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, tea dealers found a profitable means of increasing their trade among the poorer classes when they established the custom of giving away a Dickens novel when a specified amount of their product had been purchased. 20 By 1886 the novel had surpassed in annual output its nearest rival, theology, thereby gaining a lead which it trebled within the course of the next twenty years. 21 In " A General Defence of Modern Novels," which he prefixed to his own work, Monckton; or, The Fate of Eleanor ( 1 8 0 2 ) , James Sands contended that it was this very popularity of the novelist over his competitors in the literary world which brought to the form much of the opposition it encountered: Y e t the profound philosopher, the sturdy moralist, the abstruse metaphysician, irritated, perhaps, at finding their learned tomes remain unsoiled in the library, while the light duodecimo is thumbed till it becomes illegible, endeavour to prohibit by ridicule, argument, and their power in the court of criticism, the circulation of . . . delightful, enchanting Novels! 2 2 Although such a spirit of rivalry could not in all seriousness be cited as a major contributing factor, it was indeed true that many of the objections raised against novels were prompted by the wide circulation which the books enjoyed, particularly among the new middle-class reading public.

3 The pose of those persons who wish to be known as readers of only the best books, regardless of the quality of the literature which they enjoy in private, is not new. In the eighteenth century, those who most often felt the need of bolstering up their reputations with this type of pretense were the novel readers, who, although they reaped hours of enjoy-

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ment from this new-found diversion, feared a censure second only in its severity to that bestowed upon the writers of these frivolous works themselves. Dr. John Moore, in " A View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance," which he prefixed in 1797 to an edition of the works of his fellow physician, Smollett, commented upon the prevalence of this pose when he observed that the disrepute in which the form was held "made many people at pains to declare, that for their part they never read novels; a declaration sometimes made by persons of both sexes who never read anything else." 23 In a tone of disgust, Jane Austen describes and makes reply to the hypocritical attitude assumed by members of this group in conversation: " I am no novel reader; I seldom look into novels; do not imagine that I often read novels; it is really very well for a novel." Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss—?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with aifected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;" or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed . . ,24 Indeed, so general was this form of affectation in Jane Austen's day that one Mrs. Martin felt compelled to support her request for the author's subscription to her circulating library with the promise that the collection would not be all novels, a pretense for which Miss Austen found natural explanation when she wrote to Cassandra, ". . . it was necessary I suppose to the self-consequence of half her Subscribers."25 Blame for this hollow scorn Francis Coventry, author of one of the genuinely pleasing minor novels of the period, places upon the "pride and pedantry of learned men, who are willing to monopolize reading themselves, and therefore fastidiously decry all books that are on a level with common understandings, as empty, trifling, and impertinent." More dishonest, however, does he find such a pose to be among "some of the greatest triflers of the times," the dilettantes. "These, surely, have no right to express any disdain of what is at least equal to their understandings." Scholars, he maintains, are partially justified in their attitude because serious studies have destroyed their relish for lighter works, but "beaux, rakes, petit-mattres, and fine ladies, whose lives are spent in doing the things which novels record" should not, in his estimation, be permitted

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their affected contempt. "Yet these are as forward as any to despise them "2« Thj s pose was imitated even on the intellectual level of Miss Burney's illiterate colleague, a Keeper of the Robes, Mrs. Schwellenberg, who, though she bought a copy of Camilla, possibly did not read it or deviate from her policy which she expressed so colorfully: " I won't have nothing what you call novels, what you call romances, what you call histories—I might not read such what you call stuff,—not I!" 2 7 The fact that here was a kind of reading which did not require the sanctity of the study but could be pursued by the average person anywhere became the subject of amusing satire. The very places which habitual novel readers chose for indulging in this pastime were cited as a type of criticism. Most frequently mentioned was the hairdresser's shop. "Pretty tittle tattle for the amusement of Miss Polly, while Monsieur is preparing her Parisian wig, and quite as proper furniture for the inside as that is for the outside of her head," railed the Monthly Review regarding a work of 1766. 28 "Hair-dressing has been very serviceable to reading," commented a contributor to the Lady's Magazine. "Look at the popular books of a circulating library, and you will find the binding cracked by quantities of powder and pomatum between the leaves.—The booksellers never complain of this—The book is certainly spoiled."29 Such reading was allowed to be especially valuable as a means of dispelling boredom if the attendant should "happen not to have the entertaining qualities of honest Partridge in Tom Jones or Strap in Roderick Random."30 Similarly, the author of The Rencontre even saw some chance that the laboriously written introductory remarks to her novel would be noted, when she addressed her reader as one "who, under the hands of thy hairdresser, having read to the end of the volume, for want of having another at hand to beguile the tedious time, he is fiddle-faddling about thee, turnest back to the preface, and does it the honour of a perusal." 31 The modern beauty parlor with its racks of cheap and popular magazines had thus in the eighteenth century an ancestral prototype where tedious and long hours of elaborate hairdressing were spent in reading the light novels which were beginning to make their influence felt in the life of the age. By far the most unusual place where one might devour fiction is chosen by a lady in Combe's Devil upon Two Sticks in England who pursues her novel reading in church:

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Indeed so infatuated is she to that kind of study that she has the cover of a book ornamented with religious emblems, in which she never fails to take a volume from the circulating-library . . . so that while the . . . clergyman is enforcing the duties of morality and religion, she is actually amusing herself with an high flown epistle from some Lady Elizabeth, to some confidential Harriet; considering the difficulties of romantic passion, lamenting the miseries of unsuccessful love, or enjoying the unexpected union of some persecuted and faithful pair. 32 Even the ever popular custom of reading novels in bed provoked criticism. Hannah More ridiculed this habit in her description of Lady Melbury, a character in Coelebs, who explained a tardiness to an appointment by saying that a fascinating German novel "positively chained me to my bed till past three. I assure you I never lose time by not rising. In the course of a few winters I have exhausted half Hookham's catalogue, before some of my acquaintance are awake, or I myself am out of bed." 33 The Lady's Magazine also condemned reading in bed at night, adding the practical observation that "The insurances offices against Fire are not much pleased with this Mode . . ." 3 4 But it was not only the unconventional places outside the study or home library which ingenious minds chose for their reading that so irritated the more conservative thinkers. The manner in which these readers ran through their novels stirred up additional censure. First of all, there was quite general agreement that little or no mental activity was necessary. "Novels, therefore, have circulated chiefly among the giddy and licentious of both sexes, who read, not for the sake of thinking, but for want of thought," wrote the Monthly in 1 7 6 1 . 3 5 A little over half a century later, the reader of fiction was characterized in a similar manner by the author of the first number of the celebrated Nodes Ambrosianae, when, in support of his contention that the novel was "better fitted for the present state of public taste" than the drama, he said, "The public are merely capable of strong sensations, but of nothing which requires knowledge, taste, or judgment." 36 A particular stigma was attached to those who read only for plot. Eliza Haywood pokes fun at this method of procedure by causing Miss Loyter in The Invisible Spy to insist that she hates digressions and to urge that all such passages be printed in a different kind of type so that she could skip them more easily.37 Those readers who looked

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only for story were commonly accused of consuming the last of the novel first, a "backward way" of procedure to which the Lady's Magazine filed two objections: It is not fair, because you deprive the author if he has ingenuity of fable from surprizing you into turns of joy and sadness; and it is not necessary, because in most modern novels you may discover the whole plot in the first two or three chapters, so communicative are those authors that they cannot even keep their own secret. This writer also facetiously expressed the fear that, should this mania spread, the theater might feel its influence and actors be obliged to begin a new comedy with the fifth act.38 Interest in plot, likewise, was the reason for Princess Elizabeth's answer when asked by the Queen how to read Miss Burney's latest novel, Camilla, "whether quick, at once, or comfortably at Weymouth . . ." The Princess replied, "Why, mamma, I think, as you will be so much interested in the book, Madame d'Arblay would be most pleased you should read it now at once, quick, that nobody may be mentioning the events before you come to them; and then again at Weymouth, slow and comfortably." 39 Rapid readers were looked upon with even more suspicion. Explaining that his bookseller friend, Page, has customers who draw five books a day and come for the sixth at night, Mr. Clare, in Courtney Melmoth's novel Family Secrets, remarks, " I say read a book to the end, indeed! they begin with end, return to the title, skip preface, jump to middle, dash again to end, and away for another vol!" 40 Thus, in 1766 the Critical labeled the Miss Minifies's work, The Picture, "peculiarly calculated to gratify a certain set of readers who pique themselves more upon the number of the pages they peruse, than the knowledge they obtain from them." 41 In this connection, it is particularly interesting to note the reading rate of the bored reviewers themselves, one of whom blames a two-volume novel published by Noble for "six hours very disagreeable employment." 42 Novel readers were supposed to have been especially inclined toward making marginal notations, sometimes in writing, sometimes with the mark of thumb or fingernail. For this reason, Lydia Languish in Sheridan's Rivals could always tell whether or not the books which she drew from the circulating library had been read by Lady Slattern Lounger. "She

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has a most observing thumb; and I believe cherishes her nails for the convenience of making marginal notes." 43 Pages over which an enthusiast had rejoiced or suffered were returned to the bookseller in a particularly bad state. Viewing in retrospect an old library of the Minerva Press, Charles Dickens says, in "Our English Watering Place," "The leaves of the romances, reduced to a condition very like curl-paper, are thickly studded with notes in pencil . . ." The nature of these impulsively phrased marginalia affords this novelist an amusing picture of the habits of a reading public nearly a century earlier than his own. "Some of these commentators," he adds, "like commentators in a more extensive way, quarrel with one another. A young gentleman who sarcastically writes 'O ! ! !' after every sentimental passage, is pursued through his literary career by another, who writes 'Insulting Beast!' " One young lady, a Miss Julia Mills, has read the entire collection, leaving such heart-throbs upon the pages as, " 'Is not this truly touching? J. M.' 'How thrilling! J. M.' 'Entranced here by the Magician's potent spell. J. M.' " Those readers who resent finding books underlined by other people at what they consider to be the wrong places would have writhed under this rhapsodist's habit of italicizing the traits which appealed to her in the portrait of the hero: " 'his hair, which was dark and wavy, clustered in rich profusion around a marble brow, whose lofty paleness bespoke the intellect within.' It reminds her of another hero. She adds, 'How like B. L.! Can this be mere coincidence? J. M.' " 4 4 So did the majority of eighteenth-century readers devour the forbidden novel, perhaps secretly delighting in its fruits even more because of the carping critic, the sober-minded moralist, and the lukewarm reviewer.

4 Another reason for the opposition to the novel in conservative circles was that the form itself was new. Its reputation had not yet been made in England as a literary genre. The epic had molded into shape the time-honored saga of Beowulf and more recently had furnished the frame for Milton's majestic portrait of the fall of man. The elegy had found a place among the sublime types of writing, sharing its halo of respectability with the lyric and the ode. Dramatic writers could recite to their persecutors the noble ancestral names of Shakespeare and Marlowe. But

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novelists were not able to exhibit such an imposing family tree. In the larger tradition of story-telling, relationship could be traced to one whose art as a teller of tales has been unsurpassed, Geoffrey Chaucer. At the time of the Renaissance, the romances of Lyly, Sidney, and Nashe had blossomed under the foreign influence of the novella, the pastoral, and the picaresque tale. It was only in the latter part of the seventeenth century, however, that any fictional work emerged in England which might be compared in form with its modern counterpart on the best-seller lists of the current season. The scandal novels of Mrs. Manley and the pioneering work of Mrs. Behn took their place beside the brightest light in the narrative literature of the period, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Making use of his journalistic ability for giving the details which engraft a story onto the consciousness of the public, Defoe in the third decade of the eighteenth century followed his masterpiece of 1 7 1 9 , Robinson Crusoe, with a number of other works each interesting in its own particular sphere. But it was not until 1740, the time of the publication of the first two volumes of Richardson's Pamela, that the novel, regarded in its strictest modern sense, was launched in its full course. Despite its popularity, therefore, the novel as a literary genre devoid of conventional tradition was fcJr a long time in disrepute. Recognizing this fact, Fielding had made a semi-serious effort to create a background for his productions, aiming at the most exalted of artistic connections when he called Joseph Andrews a "comic epic poem in prose." 45 On the other hand, Clara Reeve made a self-conscious attempt to characterize the novel as a new form, not romance, not epic, but a type unique in itself.46 With the magazine reviewers, in particular, the lack of a tradition in technique was cause for scorn. The power among these critics, Francis Jeffrey, although he himself was not unkindly disposed toward novels, nevertheless asserted that they were "generally regarded as among the lower productions of our literature,"47 thereby lending authority to an attitude which had long prevailed among members of his profession. The Monthly disdainfully showered its sarcasm upon "this valuable species of writing," 48 while as late as 1828 the critic for the Athenaeum wanted it distinctly understood that praise bestowed upon any novel was given only in comparison with productions of its own class.49 In 1 8 1 7 the British Critic explained its tolerance of the form by suggesting that one doesn't quarrel with a novel for lack of the "qualifications which we in general

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expect to find in a literary production," any more than he would quarrel with, a dozen of "superior old crusted wine, price only thirty-two shillings," for want of that flavour, smell, colour, or any of those other properties usually to be discovered in that liquor which comes from Oporto. A novel is fabricated not only for immediate consumption, but for the consumption of those who are just as well pleased with brandied blackstrap, as with unadulterated port. This reviewer's moral sense and public spirit prompted him to add, however, that "when into this innocuous compound of brandy and sloe-juice is infused a poison of more deleterious and subtle nature," the matter becomes a case for the police!50 The singular idea that the novel form was worn out through use has been expressed at various stages in its history. As early as 1752, a writer for the Monthly had concluded that "all the variety of which this species of literary entertainment is capable, seems almost exhausted, and even novels themselves no longer charm us with novelty."51 That a novel could have a genuine charm other than that of novelty or sheer variety was not in any measure recognized for many decades after this premature statement of its collapse. In spite of the fact that there had been suggestions from time to time of critical criteria in the reviews, by the close of the century the writers for the periodicals had barely begun to appreciate the possibilities of the form, much less to ascribe to it any dignity in the world of the arts.52 Thus prejudiced, they were inclined to give slight mention to works of fiction if not to ignore them entirely, and it was not until a late date that anything like representative analyses appeared in their publications. "Few of the numerous productions termed novels, claim any attention," the Analytical Review bluntly stated as its policy in i788. 5S The brief comments that did appear were usually many months late, the critic feeling justified in delaying consideration of literary efforts which he thought to be of a trivial nature. Noting that this slowness on the part of critics caused them to wield little influence over the popularity of any novel which they did choose to evaluate, Fanny Burney replied to Miss Cambridge's suggestion that she take some care about the reviews of Camilla by saying, There are two species of composition which may nearly brave them—

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Under this cloud of disapprobation, even novelists themselves often felt that they were indulging in one of the lower literary forms and sincerely, or out of deference for the prevailing conception, extended apologies. Thus, in 1754, the author of The Temple Beau; or, The Town Coquets wrote in dedication to the Earl of Rochford: "As I have nothing but a Novel to offer to your Lordship, I ought perhaps to apologize for asking you to patronize so small a Work . . ," 58 Likewise, the Dedication of a 1789 novel called Belinda; or, The Fair Fugitive, bears the promise, "Should my Pen ever aim at any Thing higher than a Novel, there is no Person I would sooner inscribe it to than his Grace your Husband . . ." 59 Viewing the situation from outside the trade, Sara Coleridge was impressed with "how distasteful a task" it must be to write a novel, "to dwell so long as writing requires on what is essentially base and worthless!"07 The philanthropist and traveler, Jonas Hanway, expressed his extreme amazement and chagrin over the fact that someone had suggested that he cast his book of ethics into novel form, and, in 1770, discussed the idea in a letter to Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu: "The Proposal at first view, struck me as Strange, and stranger still, that it should come from a Man, and it was yet more wonderful that such a Thought should enter the heart of an Old Sensible Man, and a solid Merchant, and yet is was founded in Reason and sad Experience."58 The name "novel" itself long carried a connotation of disrepute, and writers often avoided it, substituting another term. In 1779, Richard Graves, having labeled his Columella a "colloquial tale," asked in his Dedication to the Rev. Dr. Demure that it not be called a novel, out of deference to the doctor's known prejudices.59 Henry Card, the author of Beauford ( 1 8 1 1 ) , went so far as to advocate that a new term be coined to distinguish good works of this class from the "nauseous trash," at the same time causing one of his characters, Lady Meeresfield, to give way to some Baconian reflections upon the power of a word over the judgment:

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15

" A name, or a word," replied Lady Meeresfield, "certainly has a mighty influence over the understandings of the weak and ignorant; for whatever ideas, however ill-founded, they are originally taught to associate with that name, continue to sway them through life. In the days of my youth, for instance, a general notion prevailed, that novels were bad things for young persons. And even at this period, you will still find many who are tolerably enlightened upon other points, retaining their antipathy against novels, as tenaciously as their estates. Now such persons, if you asked them whether they ever read this or that novel, would make you the same reply as Dr. Glebmore did to me yesterday, when I asked his opinion of Doddridge's Rise and Progress of the Soul, 'that he durst say the book had a vast deal of merit; but he never read dissenting books.' Let therefore a novel be calculated to do ever so much good; to instruct and embellish life, and only bear that proscribed title, it is sure to be abused by those whose prejudice against the best novels proceeds, not from having read them imperfectly, but because they have not read them at all." 60 In surveying the literature of the age of Johnson, Sir John Hawkins found one type of writing to be "books of mere entertainment . . . distinguished by the corrupt appellation of novels and romances,"81 while John Moore blamed the rapid manufacture of fiction for the fact that in the latter part of the eighteenth century "the very words Romance or Novel conveyed the idea of a frivolous or pernicious book." 62 It was Fanny Bumey, however, who spoke most often about this adverse implication. " I own I do not like calling it a novel," she wrote of her third work, Camilla. Indicating that the book could more properly be classified as "sketches of characters and morals put in action," she recalled how the word "novel " had long stood in the way of Cecilia at the Queen's house, the princesses not having been allowed to read it until it was sanctioned by the Bishop of Exeter.63 Later, in dedicating The Wanderer to her father, she specifically urged that, when appraising her efforts, he free his mind of all such prejudice: "Divest, for a moment, the title of Novel from its stationary standard of insignificance . . ." 64

16

THE NEW NOVEL 5

Another argument used to prove novels despicable was the contention that everybody wrote them. This type of composition suffered more heavily than any other from the larger criticisms concerning the number of authors and the rage for writing which the wider dissemination of learning in the eighteenth century had produced. The best statement of this often-repeated comment upon the age is given by Alexander Pope in his "Epistle to Augustus" of 1738: Now times are chang'd, and one Poetic Itch Has seiz'd the Court and City, Poor and Rich: Sons, sires, and grandsires, all will wear the bays, When sick of Muse, our follies we deplore, And promise our best friends to rhyme no more; We wake next morning in a raging fit, And call for pen and ink to show our Wit. Who builds a Bridge that never drove a pile? (Should Ripley venture, all the world would smile;) But those who cannot write and those who can, All rhyme, and scrawl, and scribble, to a man.65 Particularly strong were the denunciations of the influence of this craze upon the lower classes. One writer longed for the days of Cicero or Vergil when erudition was "a fine Thing" rather than this age in which "everybody is so very learned, that there's scarce a Tradesman in the City of London, but what thinks himself qualified for an Author."6® Similarly, pedantic Vicessimus Knox, the headmaster of Tunbridge School, discovered the real danger of this "itch of scribbling" to lie in the fact that "traders, and even manufacturers of a very subordinate rank" became so well convinced of their natural genius that they devoted the time to writing which should have been used in providing ample sustenance for their families.67 Coleridge offered these same low standards as the reason for the slight esteem in which followers of his craft were held during the early years of the nineteenth century. Tracing the steps by which writers had fallen from being regarded "almost as intermediate beings, between angels and men," he placed the blame partly upon the rise of

THE NEW NOVEL

17

that reading public which he so roundly scored on another occasion for passing its unlettered judgment on every work that appeared, and partly upon the fact that "in these times, if a man fail as a tailor, or a shoemaker, and can read and write correctly (for spelling is still of some consequence) he becomes an author."68 At least one novelist, Robert Semple, is conscious of some incongruity in his position, for he says in the first sentence of his Preface: "When a young man who calls himself a Merchant, publishes a Novel, the World has as much right to expect an apology from him as from a Bishop who should dance a hornpipe." Therefore, addressing his reader, he hastens to justify himself in his new role by stating that possibly in moments of relaxation "you smoke your pipe, or you drink your wine; or you mount your horse or your gig; or go to Sadler's Wells, or perhaps the Opera. Very well, then, during the hours that you were there, I wrote the history of Charles Ellis."'"' One of the most amusing manifestations of the eighteenth-century genteel attitude toward writing appears is the ingenious apologies and reasons, similar to the one above, which were offered for the composition of a novel. Such a work was dashed off as a pastime, as a mental sedative, or as a tonic for bodily ailments. John Piper protests that his Life of Miss Fanny Brown was written solely "to divert the Pain that I underwent for almost a Month, from a violent Fit of the Gout," and finds that, for ail he knows, composition has been as conducive to his cure as "Flannel or Patience."70 Indicating that he has penned his work as a means of passing the time during an absence from his wife, the author of another novel allows himself the parenthetical boast that "many a wife would be happy if her husband's amusement while absent were no less innocent."71 The desire "to beguile the remembrance of real and recent misfortunes" entirely accounts for the publication of Interesting Memoirs in 1785, 72 while "bad eyes, and various other circumstances" which made the author "unfit for more important studies" brought about the composition of Eugenius in the same year.73 "It was a whim first incited me to take up my pen; and that whim continuing, I proceeded," nonchalantly confides the author of The False Friends?* A practical turn is given to his reason by Edward Du Bois when he urges, in the Preface to Old Nick ( 1 8 0 1 ) , that if other men enjoy hunting or dancing, he does not see why he should not enjoy writing novels, particularly since he is paid for his pleasure and they must pay dearly for theirs.75

i8

THE NEW

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That this device of apology became threadbare is evidenced by the fact that novelists themselves sometimes renounced the practice in their prefaces. For instance, the writer of Fatal Effects of Deception ( 1 7 8 3 ) lists some of the reasons usually given for composing a novel but contends, regarding his own work: "The author is determined not to account, whether vanity, want of employment, or want of a dinner, was the motive which induced him to assume the character."76 (The vast tribe of novelists who plied the trade for money will, however, be considered in connection with the manufacturing industry which was developed to supply the circulating libraries and the eager public of the latter part of the century.) It is not surprising, therefore, that the novel was regarded as a form easy to write. George Eliot found this attitude prevalent even in her day and deplored the lack of an "absolute technique" which would reveal at once to an amateur his shortcomings. One discovers immediately that he cannot play the piano, she pointed out, but with the novel there were no "external criteria" or "barriers for incapacity to stumble against." Consequently, she saw often repeated the situation described in La Fontaine's fable of the ass who put his nose to the flute and, discovering that he could draw forth some sound, exultantly exclaimed, "Moi aussi je joue de la flute."'1'' As proof of this contention there had been, for instance, the case of John Piper, who admitted that before he wrote his novel he had "never read twenty Books of any Kind, . . . having very little Time, and less Curiosity," or any works of fiction except the first two volumes of Pamela and Roderick Random.1* "Every love-stricken swain . . . and every melting nymph . . . is qualified to write a love-story which shall pass for a pretty novel; at least, with the help of a friend, to spell it and put it together," remarked the Monthly Review in 1775. 7 9 "From reading to writing novels, the transition is very easy," asserted another critic,80 thereby expressing an attitude which Hannah More cited as one reason for the "unparalleled fecundity" of authors, calculating that "by a sort of arithmetical proportion" a young woman from the reading of three such works could produce a fourth. 81 Edward Du Bois replied to Miss More on this last point, however, by saying that if this were true, the process must be, in Shakespeare's phrase, " 'as easy as lying,' " and he thereupon resolved in his own novel to do nothing else, refusing to pretend that this type of composition was hard work. 82

THE NEW NOVEL

19

Suffering the sting of this ill repute, the more serious-minded of the creators of fiction indignantly voiced the opinion that their work was undervalued by laymen and even by fellow writers themselves. " I n the republic of letters, there is no member of such inferior rank, or who is so much disdained by his brethren of the quill, as the humble Novelist," decides Fanny Burney in the Preface to Evelina. Nor does she find the judgment any less severe "in the world at large" since no type of literature is pursued by a "more numerous but less respectable" body of writers. 83 The best statement of the plight of the despised novelist, however, is made by Jane Austen. While listing the amusements enjoyed in common by Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe, she confesses that on rainy days they, shut themselves up to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding: joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? Taking up the theme in a more vigorous strain, she pleads, Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. 84

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Thus the novel, probably the most significant addition which the century had made to literature, was, in spite of its great vogue, looked upon with scorn and distrust. As the years advanced, the dignity and reputation of the form lagged far behind its popularity. In slightly over a quarter of a century after the publication of Pamela, the works of the "Big Four"—Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne—were before the public. Although all these novels were praised on artistic grounds by at least some of the critics, each of them, for one reason or another, fell under the axe of the moralists. Approximately coincident with the appearance of Richardson's great masterpiece was the establishment in London of an institution which was to do more than any other agency toward disseminating the objectionable novel—the circulating library. The year 1770 saw these libraries in the ascendancy. By 1790 they had found an enthusiastic promoter and were beginning to flourish throughout the kingdom. Expressions of distrust and fear concerning the possible influence of the new novel upon the new public gave place to outbursts of censure and indignation.

IL THE CIRCULATING L I B R A R Y Sir Anthony: of diabolical upon it, Mrs. will long for

Madam, a circulating library in a town, is an ever-green tree knowledge!—It blossoms through the year!—And depend Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, the fruit at last. — R I C H A R D B R I N S L E Y SHERIDAN, T h e R i v a l s ,

1775

1 HE circulating libraries had a great influence upon the novel and th opposition it encountered. They spread rapidly, reached a large num ber of readers, and did much to bring before the public the works o fiction to which the moralists and often the reviewers objected. In spit of elaborate claims which were made to the contrary, these librarie were chiefly filled with novels, and it was from the novel trade tha the booksellers expected their largest returns. The connection betweei the spread of these institutions and the growth of interest in that type o writing seems to have been established with the popularity of Pamela. Because of the low opinion of the novel as a form, the pretense on the par of the owners that these circulating collections were primarily made u] of other classes of books persisted until quite late. The pose can be seei even in this country in the Catalogue of the Ladies Circulating Librar of Boston for 1 8 2 9 . On the title-page, the contents of this library an listed only as "History, Biography, Voyages, Travels, Miscellany, an< Poetry," no mention being made of fiction. Page one, nevertheless, be gins with an inventory of "Novels and Romances," which runs for elevei pages. This unheralded section and the many items of fiction in the large "miscellaneous" division of 2,529 items cause the novel to outnumbe the much-advertised history and poetry about three to one. 2 The price of all books was too high for any extensive buying on the par of the middle classes and entirely out of proportion to the earnings of thi lower orders. Thus, in 1 7 8 6 , the head of a family, when writing to thi Gentleman's Magazine for suggestions concerning a suitable book of in struction for servants, rejects Hanway's Virtue in Humble Life on th< grounds that few employers would be willing to present their domestic

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THE CIRCULATING

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with two quarto volumes, "almost equal in expence to one half of their yearly wages." 3 The novels appeared in duodecimo. They were thus convenient to the hand, and, as in the case of Lydia Languish's maid, easy to hide in the pocket or to conceal under a coat. In the third quarter of the century, the average cost of one of these volumes was is. 6d. to three shillings. Few of the novels of the period could be purchased in their entirety for that sum, however, as most of them were at least two, and many six or seven, volumes in length. T h e cost of one complete work would, consequently, often run from five to twenty shillings. 4 The circulating libraries, therefore, brought the novels to many people who would otherwise never have seen them. A subscriber could rent and become familiar with a number of works of fiction for the price he would have paid to own a single production. One of well-known libraries was that of J . Bell, in the Strand. An advertisement for this establishment which appeared in the Star for February 10, 1789, is representative of many notices of its type and indicates the arrangement by which customers could avail themselves of the library privileges.

THE E N L A R G E D PLAN OF R E A D I N G N E W BOOKS A N D PAMPHLETS B Y SUBSCRIPTION J . B E L L , of the BRITISH LIBRARY, in the STRAND, has instantly com-

pleted his extensive CATALOGUE, by the addition of an APPENDIX, which includes all the NEW PUBLICATIONS to the present day. . . Subscribers at ONE GUINEA per year, are entitled to the Reading of any and every Book in this vast and extensive Collection, and also the perusal of every NEW BOOK and PAMPHLET, of whatever subject or value, which may hereafter be published. This accommodation will prove a general and national convenience, as every Subscriber will have the free use of a Library which has cost many Thousand Pounds, and which includes every valuable Literary Production of this Country, at the moderate expence of a single volume in quarto. Quarterly Subscribers are admitted at Five Shillings per Quarter; but they are not entitled to the Reading of NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE CIRCULATING L I B R A R Y

23

It will be noted that the subscription rate here given, in 1789, is a guinea a year, or five shillings a quarter. In the midcentury, the rate had been three shillings a quarter, but as business grew, the booksellers had banded together and raised the price. The flyleaf of a novel of 1767 called The History of Miss Emilia Beville contains their joint notice of one of these changes:5 We, Proprietors of Circulating Libraries. . . have been compelled to advance the Sum of One Shilling on our Quarterly, and Eighteen Pence on our Yearly Subscribers, in order to avoid the disagreeable Alternative of throwing up that Branch of Business which hath so many Years been a source of Amusement, and, we will venture to add, Instruction to the Public, or of suffering it to languish through a want of a proper Supply of New Books, so essentially necessary to its Credit and Support. . . Four Shillings per Quarter OR

Twelve Shillings per Year FRANCIS N O B L E

T . VERNOR and J . CHATER

JOHN NOBLE

THOMAS JONES

WILLIAM BATHOE

W I L L I A M COOK

THOMAS LOWNDES

In spite of the great role which the circulating libraries played in bringing the new novel within reach of the new public, their early history is vague and uncertain. Maintaining Sir Anthony's figure of speech, an observer more sympathetic than he comments upon the obscurity which has shadowed the details regarding the development of these popular institutions. "How this new plant appeared above the earth," he writes, "where it first budded, where it bore its early fruit—how it grew into a great tree, like that in the old title to Lilly's Grammar where the apples of knowledge are being gathered by little climbing boys—would be difficult to trace and record."6 Before the days of these libraries, persons who could not afford the price of a book partially satisfied their hunger for reading material by lingering in front of the booksellers' stalls along the street— the stall readers of Milton's sonnet.7 It was partly the growth in the num-

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ber of readers of this type which showed the booksellers the profits they might reap if the custom were placed upon a paying basis and gave them an interest in establishing the circulating libraries. The practice of stall reading did not die out with the coming of the libraries, however, but continued to remain popular with those who were either too frugal or too poor to afford the usual subscription prices. Charles Lamb views with affection the poverty-ridden lovers of books who "filch a little learning at the open stalls—the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have done." He tells of a certain Martin B. who in this manner had got through two of the volumes of Richardson's Clarissa before the stallkeeper dampened his ardor by asking him if he meant to buy the book. In this Martin's opinion, however, the very uneasiness with which he was forced to follow by snatches the correspondence of the characters in this novel gave him more real pleasure than any other reading he had ever done. Evidently interested in the unusual difficulties involved in this type of reading, Lamb quotes a poet of his day who has described a similar case in a "touching but homely" stanza. I saw a boy with eager eye Open a book upon a stall, And read, as he'd devour it all; Which when the stall-man did espy, Soon to the boy I heard him call, "You, Sir, you never buy a book, Therefore in one you shall not look." The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh He wish'd he never had been taught to read, Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need.8 In the seventeenth century, before the days of the circulating libraries, certain booksellers had already turned this practice to their advantage by charging a rental fee for the use of the books from their shops. In 1661 the bookseller Francis Kirkman stated at the end of The Thracian Wonder: "If any gentlemen please to repair to my House aforesaid, they may be furnished with all manner of English, or French Histories, Romances, or Poetry; which are to be sold, or read for reasonable Considerations."9 Although it is not evident here whether or not these books might be taken out of the shop for such reading, the device for raising money suggested to

THE CIRCULATING LIBRARY

25

Eugenes Junior in Nevile's play, The Poor Scholar, of the following year indicates clearly that the volumes were to be taken home. Page: Thus you must steer your course, step to a Book-sellers, and give him this angel, puts money out ofs pocket, which I'le lend you, for the use of (the many-languag'd Bibles lately publisht) for a week, their price is 1 2 pound, when you have once get 'um in your study, invite your father to your chamber, show him your Library, and tell him you are 12/. out of purse for those large volumes.10 Benjamin Franklin referred to an agreement for borrowing books which he made in the seventeen-twenties with a bookseller named Wilcox, who lived next door to him during his days of residence in Little Britain. According to Franklin, "Circulating libraries were not then in use; but we agreed that, on certain reasonable terms, which I have now forgotten, I might take, read, and return any of his books. This I esteem'd a great advantage, and I made as much use of it as I could." 11 A subscriber to the Gentleman's Magazine wrote that the practice was certainly not in vogue as early as 1724, since he possessed letters in which "one friend laments to another (from the distance of but few miles) that literature was not communicated in London as in foreign cities, where libraries were accessible to all the curious." 12 The first circulating libraries in London were established in the early seventeen-forties, priority having been claimed for three separate booksellers: Samuel Fancourt, a dissenting minister from Salisbury, Thomas Wright, and William Bathoe. 13 There had, however, been libraries in other cities.14 From the very beginning they had stirred up opposition. The first known allusion to Allan Ramsay's circulating library in Edinburgh is one of disapproval. Robert Wodrow, in his Analecta for 1728, vehemently denounced Ramsay's activity, complaining that "all the villanous profane and obscene books . . . are gote doun from London . . . and lent out, for an easy price, to young boyes, servant weemen of the better sort, and gentlemen. . ." Evidently Wodrow had kept a safe distance away from this establishment where vice was so "dreadfully propagated," since his acquaintance with conditions there consisted entirely of details furnished him by "my informer, my Lord Grange." This public-spirited citizen told Wodrow that he had gone so far as to complain to the magistrates concerning the library's pernicious influence but that they had "scrupled at med-

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THE CIRCULATING LIBRARY

ling" until he had moved that the borrowers' book be inspected. The examination of this volume had produced the effect desired, and the officials were stirred to action. Having been notified, however, an hour before their raid, Ramsay had gained the opportunity of hiding the objectionable books and the high-minded investigation had ended in a farce.16 The most detailed source of information regarding Samuel Fancourt is his own Narrative of 1747. Several types of opposition to his scheme for lending books appear in the course of this account. After telling at some length of his personal trials with a bankrupt brother, sick wife, failing school, and the low salary paid him by his congregation, he described his initial project by saying, "I THEREFORE, for the Ease of my People . . . contriv'd a Circulating Library for the Entertainment of distant, as well as home Subscribers. . ." Failing of support, he eventually moved his establishment to London, where, he complained, the publishers who had agreed to supply him with books took it into their heads that their sales would be decreased if any plan of lending on a large scale were projected.10 James Lackington noted that he had also heard this fear expressed by the booksellers at the time the early libraries were opened, but asserted that, in his own experience, this apprehension had proved unfounded. On the contrary, he had discovered that his sales grew in proportion to the growth of the reading public, since a person who read a book and liked it often bought it.17 Fancourt met with opposition also on the grounds that one in his profession should not be engaged in so shady an undertaking as operating a circulating library which disseminated books of a questionable nature. On this point he defended himself by contending, Some Tares will . . . unavoidably intermix with the most useful and entertaining Collection. . . . Nay, are not such Books to be met with among the purest Classics, that are read in Universities and Private Schools? . . . And are not Youth, in their unguarded Years, and when the Incentives to Lust are strongest, sometimes compelled to treasure up in their Memories the filthy Stories of the Pagan Deities, etc.?18 His first London project having failed, Fancourt established in Crane Court, Fleet Street, "The Gentlemen and Ladies' Growing and Circulating Library," and issued an alphabetical catalogue in parts. According to the plan outlined in this publication, the library was to be controlled by

THE CIRCULATING LIBRARY

27

a board of trustees elected by proprietors. Any person might become a proprietor by paying an initial fee of a guinea, plus a shilling a quarter, and be thus entitled to draw one book and one pamphlet: "He may keep them a reasonable time according to their bigness; but if they are not wanted by others, he may keep them as long as he has a mind." 19 Further opposition to Fancourt came from Dr. Cromwell Mortimer, secretary to the Royal Society, which organization had its quarters close to the Crane Court establishment and later took that house or the next one to it to enlarge its own library. A letter to the Gentleman's Magazine for April, 1784, bears indignant witness to this antagonism, its writer recalling that Dr. Mortimer maintained strong resistance to the circulating library to the end of his life. "There never was a scheme set on foot for the benefit of the public," this contributor protests, "on which that public did not think themselves authorized to criticise and interfere into a degree of impertinence."20 Though often condemned in the same manner that Ramsay's and Fancourt's enterprises had been, circulating libraries flourished more widely as the century progressed. In commenting upon the changes in manners which had come over the rural population, the Annual Register for 1761 recorded, "The reading female hires her novels from some country circulating library, which consists of about a hundred volumes. . ." 2 1 In 1808 Edward Mangin intensified his denunciation with the calculation: "There is scarcely a street of the metropolis, or a village in the country, in which a circulating library may not be found: nor is there a corner of the empire, where the English language is understood, that has not suffered from the effects of this institution."22 One historian estimates that there were not fewer than a thousand such libraries throughout Great Britain in the year 1800. 23 John Feltham's Picture of London, for I8OJ lists as the principal London circulating libraries for that year: Hookbam's and Ebers's, in Old Bond-street Hookham's (Jun.) in New Bond-street Earle's in Albemarle-street Lane's in Leadenhall-street Booth's, Duke-street, Portland place Parson's, on Ludgate hill Ogilvy's, in Holburn

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Dutton's, in Gracechurch-street Cawthorn's, in Catherine-street Danger field's, in Berkeley-square Carpenter's, in Old Bond-street Creighton's in Tavistock-street Cheeseuright's, King-street, Cheapside Tegg's, Cheapside 24 The most famous of these libraries was undoubtedly that of William Lane at 33 Leadenhall Street from which establishment poured the most popular and, to many observers, the most objectionable of the cheap novels of the day, those of the Minerva Press.25 A good businessman, Lane knew his public and capitalized upon its tastes, at the same time affording amusement to the thousands who enjoyed newly discovered delights in reading. That much of this amusement was derived from novels which were filled with sensational action and tawdry sentiment has been generally allowed; but whether reading them drew one on to better books by developing a valuable habit or hurled one into a maelstrom of moral degradation became a much-discussed issue of the age. The epithets bestowed upon Lane's books were consistently bitter and harsh. Monotonous cries of "rubbish," "hash," and "ratsbane" beat upon the ears of the public a relentless warning against the evils of these marble-covered volumes. In spite of this opposition, or because of it, Lane by his success became the veritable symbol of the cheap literature of his day. " N o man knew the world better, and none better how to manage and enjoy it," wrote Timperley, thereby expressing an estimate which Lane's career fully corroborated.26 In 1791 Lane claimed complete superiority in the novel field but, as a means of increasing the respectability of his enterprise, thought it fitting to insist that he had no desire to limit his collection to fiction and that he was taking steps toward purchasing more "literary productions." 27 Samuel Rogers bore witness to the financial success which keen diplomacy had brought. "Lane made a large fortune by the immense quantity of trashy novels which he sent forth from his Minerva-press," he said. "I perfectly well remember the splendid carriage in which he used to ride, and his footmen with their cockades and gold-headed canes." 28 So widely disseminated were Lane's works of fiction that comments

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29

concerning their influence can be found in the writings of many distinguished figures of the day. Cyrus Redding recalled that Minerva novels had been the rage in his youth, and although he considered them openly licentious, he thought them less dangerous than those works in which vice was more subtly concealed.29 Percy Bysshe Shelley had also felt the influence of this press in his boyhood. His biographer, Medwin, records that since there was no library at Dr. Greenlaw's Academy, he and the poet, then at the age of ten, "resorted, 'under the rose,' to a low circulating one" in the town of Brentford where they found the tales of terror which were Shelley's favorites. "After supping on the horrors of the Minerva press," writes Medwin, "he was subject to strange, and sometimes frightful dreams, and was haunted by apparitions that bore all the resemblance of reality." 30 Likewise Leigh Hunt recalls, " I had subscribed, while at school, to the famous circulating library in Leadenhall-street, and I have continued to be such a glutton of novels ever since, that, except where they repel me in the outset with excessive wordiness, I can read their three-volume enormities to this day without skipping a syllable. . ." 3 1 Much less favorably impressed, W. H. Ireland in his fantastic Scribbleomania sarcastically observed that in view of the amount of trash which had poured from Leadenhall Street, "instead of Minerva, a goose should have been the designation of its far-famed press." 32 Very often the librarian engaged in other trades besides that of bookseller. The combination of his dual or, in some cases, multiple roles frequently proved amusing, as did the miscellaneous assortment of wares displayed upon his shelves. The library for sale at Weymouth, advertised in the Sun for November 1, 1793, contains a variety of articles besides books. WEYMOUTH TO BF. DISPOSED OF T H E LARGE LIBRARY OF BOOKS, v a r i o u s MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS, CUTLERY, J E W E L L E R Y , HARDWARE, PERFUMERY, STATIONARY, a n d Other STOCK IN TRADE o f a w e l l

f r e q e n t e d CIRCULATING a n d

MUSICAL

LIBRARY. The whole to be taken at an appraised value, and immediate possession given of the Premises, the Proprietor being lately dead; whereby there is an excellent opening for any person desirous of entering into this line of business Apply to C. Bowles, Weymouth

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It was possibly such questionable company as this which helped pull the novel down in the estimation of the public. In her Fragment of a Novel, written January-March, 1 8 1 7 , and only recently published, Jane Austen describes a circulating library which sold jewelry and other articles besides books. She tells how Charlotte Heywood, not wishing to spend all her money the first evening, resolutely turns her back upon the "drawers of rings and Broches:" "The Library of course, afforded every thing; all the useless things in the World that d not be done without, & with so much good will for M r P. to encourage Expenditure, Charlotte began to feel that she must check Herself. . ." 3 3 The stock-in-trade combination was, of course, that with millinery. Fanny Burney went with Mrs. Thrale "to Widget's, the milliner and library-woman on the Steyn."34 It might be noted, also, that this library was one of two on the Steyn which John Williams mentions in his New Brighton Guide with the caustic note that the "flimsy" novels which they contained were called light reading because they made the borrowers lightheaded.86 It was at a circulating library and milliner's shop that William Hazlitt encountered the young lady who tried to direct him toward reading which she considered more interesting than the novels of Sir Walter Scott for which he had asked. Asserting that she had found these works "so dry she could hardly get through them," she suggested that in place of them her customer read Agnes; or, The Triumph of Principle. This incident led the essayist to remark that, while he had never considered the matter before, there must be many young women who, if truth were told, were in the same situation and found the Waverley novels dull reading.36 Fanny Bolton, in Thackeray's Pendennis, is represented as having borrowed the vast number of novels which she consumed from her former schoolteacher, Miss Minifer, who kept a circulating library, "in conjunction with her school and a small brandy-ball and millinery business."37 These libraries also sold patent medicines. Thus the mother of Sir George Jackson, the diplomat, wrote from Ilfracombe that it looked as though she would not be able to obtain much reading material during her stay in that metropolis since, although there was "certainly a thing called a library," it held "far more quack medicines and articles of an all-sort description than books."38 Similarly, the Star of February 4, 1793, advertised that Hazard's Library at Bath was then well supplied with "Dr. Waite's celebrated Worm Medicine in the form of Gingerbread Nuts."

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Some of the most popular of these circulating libraries were located at the fashionable resorts. " W e suppose that it is an indespensable necessary of life, at all the watering places, especially in a rainy season, to have a constant supply of new novels; whether they are worth reading or not is very little to the purpose," commented the Anti-JacobinVamp in Samuel Foote's play, The Author, also finds that "novels are a pretty light summer reading, and do very well at Tunbridge, Bristol, and the other watering places. . ," 40 Once safely located at the quiet seaside town of Sanditon, a number of the characters in Jane Austen's Fragment of a Novel, a satire of health resorts, plan an early visit to the library of Mrs. Whitby. Business is slack at this institution during July, however, and when they arrive they find the owner, "sitting in her inner room, reading one of her own Novels, for want of Employment." 41 At Bath, the reading rooms were famous, and the subscription to the library went along with that to the pump room at the rate of a crown, a half-guinea, or a guinea according to one's rank.42 The author of The Wonders of a Week at Bath celebrates in doggerel verse this rage for reading, paying rhythmic tribute to the one institution in particular which had gained his patronage during his stay in the noted metropolis. Some think, tho' the thing seems a little surprising, That Bath is a very good place to grow wise in; And surely if books were sufficient to show, What's fitting and good for us mortals below; If our heads were as easily fill'd as our bellies, And science at once were digested like jellies; There's a place to buy wisdom at least ev'ry street in, And the shops are more frequent for reading than eating: Indeed all the libraries always are full, But the man I've frequented is Upham, late Bull. Step down to his book-room, he's vastly polite, And stands in a box turning in on the right. Some description of the library is given: To the left of the door there's a fire-place, and there You may lounge, if you please, on a bench or a chair; A little way on the right you'll behold,

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The books that are bound up in calf and in gold; Not far, on a table neglectfully lie The volumes that nobody chooses to buy: In yonder recess you see novels, romances, Wise, witty, and horrid, made up to all fancies.43 It was at Bath that three of the most famous of the young ladies of eighteenth-century fiction and drama found the circulating libraries so much to their taste. Lydia Melford in Smollett's novel The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker writes enthusiastically that the booksellers' shops, are charming places of resort, where we read novels, plays, pamphlets, and newspapers, for so small a subscription as a crown a quarter; and in these offices of intelligence (as brother calls them) all the reports of the day, and all the private transactions of the bath, are first entered and discussed.44 As Catherine Morland's mind went back to Bath, after her somewhat ridiculous behavior at Northanger Abbey, "it seemed as if the whole might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading which she had there indulged." 45 Lydia Languish in The Rivals finds it necessary to maintain the utmost secrecy concerning her patronage of the Bath libraries, relying upon the discretion and perseverance of her maid, Lucy, to procure for her the books she enjoys. Although Lucy has started out with an attractive array of titles, she has been preceded, however, by other anxious readers and returns with quite a different, if not a slightly more impressive, collection than that for which she has been sent. Thus, cleverly, does Sheridan find occasion for mentioning two lists of contemporary novels instead of one. Since Lucy names highly ephemeral publications in the same breath with the works of Smollett and Sterne, the dramatist might also be interpreted as satirizing that lack of discrimination which observers found so objectionable among the library subscribers. The highly diverting instructions which Lydia gives to her maid for concealing the books upon the approach of Mrs. Malaprop and Sir Anthony are famous. Her weakness for fiction has been discovered, however. In spite of the fact that, in Mrs. Malaprop's opinion, Sir Anthony is proving himself to be a "misan-

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thropy" with his bitter remarks upon women's reading, he still insists that the sight of Lucy at the door of the library bodes no good. Sir Anthony. In my way hither, Mrs. Malaprop, I observed your niece's maid coming forth from a circulating library!—She had a book in each hand—they were half-bound volumes, with marbled covers!— From that moment I guess'd how full of duty I should see her mistress! On this point, at least, Mrs. Malaprop has no "misapplied" words to contribute and voices her approval by merely exclaiming, "These are vile places indeed!" 46 Raffles, cards, and the librarian's concert were regular features of these establishments. The Royal Brighton Guide for 1826 advertises: "Lucombe's and Tuppen's Libraries, in the evening, are filled with fashionables, who resort there to hear the singing, and to amuse themselves with the game of Loo." 47 In his novel Modern Literature, Robert Bisset gives a sketch of the activity in a Brighton library of this type. Beginning with the early morning when a man who thinks he possesses powers of declamation is reading the newspaper aloud, he details the order of events until the late evening hours when "the librarian is considering the chances of the dice, preparing for the principal business of the Brighton trader." 48 In another of his novels, Douglas, Bisset describes the routine of the Margate library where the ladies are occupied, not only with reading the latest novels and making sets to teach their children loo and hazard, but with planning parties at the Dandelion so that they, by their examples, might instruct their offspring "in the art of love, as the Library did the art of gaming; and, indeed, in love too, through . . . valuable novels, theoretically, as the Dandelion did practically."49 Later, in the midnineteenth century a writer observes that, although there have been many changes made in these institutions, still, in watering-places where raffles have their charm, and a musical performance is patronized in the "Fancy Repository," by "audience fit though few"—there the circulating library may be studied in its ancient brilliancy. There, are still preserved, with a paper number on their brown leather backs, and a well-worn bill of the terms of subscription on their sides, those volumes, now fading into oblivion. . , 50 In a sympathetic vein, Thackeray goes back in reminiscence to the library

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on the Tunbridge Pantiles with its fiddling and dancing, with its varied articles for sale, and the old novels he enjoyed. Who knows? They may have kept those very books at the library still— at the well-remembered library on the Pantiles, where they sell that delightful, useful Tunbridge ware. I will go and see. I wend my way to the Pantiles, the queer little old-world Pantiles, where, a hundred years since, so much good company came to take its pleasure. . . . Can I go in and ask the young ladies at the counter for Manfroni, . . . absurd. I turn away abashed from the casement—from the Pantiles—no longer Pantiles, but Parade." 1 2 Foibles and false pretensions of circulating library readers were often made the subject of satire, while the varied tastes of the rising new public provoked alternate outbursts of merriment and indignation. From the subscribers' standpoint, the disrepute in which the novel was held complicated the borrowing problem and forced many readers to resort to ingenious devices for obtaining the books with which they dared not be seen. These petty hypocrisies regarding fiction were frequently described in vivid detail, even by the novelists themselves. Thus Courtney Melmoth, in his Family Secrets, turns in Chapter forty-eight to "The Secrets of a Circulating Library . . ." and causes Mr. Page to give an account of the patrons as they come and go in his shop. The first borrower is completely frank about her taste for popular reading: "In the name of nonsense," says one customer, "why, Page, do you send me such trumpery as this? Buffon's history, Harris's Hermes, Hume's sketches, British Zoology! I wonder you don't load me at once with Chambers's Dictionary, the Statutes at Large, and the State Trials: here bring them in if you can, Thomas, they have almost broke down my coach."—"Beg pardon for my mistake," replied I, "was told you were one of our learned ladies, and wished for something to shew off a little: can change them in a twinkle—heavy old boys these, to be sure—only mention your taste—hit you off to a nicety!"—"The last plays and novels to be sure," said she.

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The second subscriber, however, wishes to draw her novels and romances under the safe disguise of profound treatises. "Really, Mr. Page," exclaimed another customer, sailing stately into the shop, two lazy liverymen behind, all be-book'd—"really, Mr. Page, it is insulting, your people will be troubling me with these contemptible things; Children of Nature, Filial Piety, Misfortunes of Love, Man of Feeling, and Man of the World!"—All this time her servants were unloading—"How often must I tell you there never were more than three or four of these things written since the beginning of the world, worth a rational woman's reading, and they are now as old as Poles; and if you will persist in vexing my nature with such trumpery, I positively must take my name out of your book; you know I study only metaphysics."—"Sorry, my lady—blunder of shopman—will make amends—there, ma'am, have you down for physics in future"—"Well, let me have Priestly on Necessity, Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, Hutchenson's Enquiry, and the Philosophical Arrangements, for the present; and you may throw in some nonsense for the servants"—(exit frowning,—servants smiling to each other, and winking). Next, an attractive girl expresses herself concerning the aroma arising from the much-used duodecimos and makes a few choice selections of her own from the shelves. "Pray, dear Mr. Page," cries a pretty lisper, who had been looking over the catalogue, "is not that lady Sarah Dingey? she who makes your books smell so horribly of spirits, and is so generous with her snuff?— I declare my sister Bab and a whole party of us were the other evening almost poisoned, in the first volume of Delicate Distresses; and sweet Jane Hectic was quite overcome before she had half got through Excessive Sensibility"—"Mum, Miss," whispered I, "a word to the wise . . . " — " I thought so," said the lisper, "well let me have that dear Man of Feeling I have so long waited for; and though I have it from the hands of that inveterate snuffler, and I know it ought to perform a month's quarantine, I will even hazard suffocation for any of that writer's books,—O, why don't he write again?—Well this will do for one —I'll take No. 1889, Cruel Disappointment, for another, Reuben, or Suicide, heigho! No. 4746,1 suppose he killed himself for love— . . .

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Unguarded Moment, ah! we all have our unguarded moments, Mr. Page.—True Delicacy, No. 2, that must be a silly thing by the title; School of Virtue, heaven knows, mamma gives me enough of that: Test of Filial Duty, at any rate she puts me to that test pretty often: Mental Pleasures, worse and worse! I'll look no longer—Oh! stay a moment: Mutual Attachment—Assignation, Frederick or the Libertine —just add these, Mr. Page, and I shall not have to come again until the day after to-morrow!—and then I hope to bring three new customers— all annuals, the Diggey, Rake, and Rifle families, great readers—just come into our neighborhood—Immense acquisitions!" The "bevy of young things" who then flutter out of their carriage are described as readers who merely "run over a letter or chapter at hairdressing time," and thus consume only a volume or two a week: ". . . my books come home," cried Page, "so powdered, so pomatumed, so perfumed, my old dons and ladies declare, they are worse than the strong waters, snuff-blots and brandy-stains of my metaphysicianess." Continuing his account, the librarian exclaims, "O! but, I must not forget to mention my whisperers, most of whom send credentials;—or, such as venture themselves, hem, cough, blush, stammer, and so forth—have I got this? Could I get that? for—for—for —'a friend in the country?' Others desire me to make up parcel to penny-post list—ready—money—own price—no questions asked— to be called for,—cash in hand—and all in the way of snug. Thus I dispose of my good things," quoth Page;—"sometimes tucked between muslins, cambrics, silks, satins, and the like, or rolled into a bundle, then thrown into a coach by some of my fair smugglers; the old ones meanwhile, Mams and Dads, never the wiser." Although it is necessary that every collection should have a "sprinkling" of "high-prizers," Page has discovered that "they don't go much out." He says, " I keep most of my wise ones to myself, such as Master Gibbon, Domine Robertson . . . and bold Sir Isaac." 52 Serious, good-hearted Rachel in Francis Lathom's Men and Manners was surprised at the company in which she found herself when told by the bookseller at whose house she was lodging to step into his circulating

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library and pick out anything she liked to read. Among the customers she saw "some loungers, some listeners, a great many talkers, and a very few readers." Their comments about the books reveal, as exaggerated by satire at least, the attitude of the age toward the library subscribers. One woman who had been rebuked by her male companion for censuring a work prematurely, found in his observation a stimulus to her vanity: " D o you think my condemning a book prejudices its sale, then?" said she, affectedly. " N o t at all," he replied. Dissatisfied with his answer, the lady turned to one of her own sex, and asked what she had been reading. " I never read anything but ghost stories," returned the other; "and I think spectres are grown rather scarce." The librarian was quick to indicate that no such shortage as this existed by suggesting that she read the Castle of Ollada. " W h a t ? " said the first lady. The librarian repeated the name. "Oh! the worst thing in print," she cried. "Is it?" asked the other lady;—"what is it about?" This pointed interrogation was sufficient to force the scornful subscriber's critical criteria out into the open and, remarking that she did not know since she was not acquainted with anyone who had read the book, she walked hastily to the other end of the room. "Shall I put it down in your name, ma'am?" said the librarian to the ghost-admiring lady. "Oh dear, no," she said, " I am sure I shan't read a thing that ain't the fashion." Finding a volume adapted to her taste, Rachel returned to her apartment, the atmospere of which place she considered much more conducive to her type of reading. 53 The numerous opponents of these circulating libraries were never at a loss for phrases to describe them. "Slop-shops in literature," wrote Mrs. Griffith in the Preface to Lady Barton, as she complained of the amount of improbable fiction which lined the shelves. 54 "Quack-shops," and

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"sinks," others cried in disdain. As early as 1754, the Gentleman's Magazine had added its voice to the satire of both the institution and its readers by reprinting from the Connoisseur a catalogue for a "Polite Circulating Library" which would cater only to the tastes of the most fastidious. 55 In the same periodical for May, 1788, an occasional writer who habitually signed himself "Belzebub" surveyed the evils in England which were contributing to his satanic cause and looked with particular pleasure upon the libraries. " I approve much of the great increase of circulating libraries over the kingdom," he wrote. "An indiscriminate reader at these seminaries of knowledge I could not wish to see in a more hopeful train." His reasons for approving of the librarians he explained by saying, A circulating library kept by a man of taste, principles, and attention, I would indeed very much dislike; for it might promote a relish for literature and useful knowledge at any easy rate; and he might be patronized by my enemies.—But, amidst the great numbers that now abound, this can but rarely happen; therefore I wish them all manner of success.59 The possibility that the libraries might prove useful under favorable conditions was, at least, acknowledged. In a different vein, but no less scornful, the Gentleman's Magazine in 1805 observed again, "The circulating-libraries and reading-rooms in every market-town degrade us by the impertinence and abuse of Curiosity. They poison our leisure-hours without improving them . . ," 5 7 Actual licensing of these establishments was demanded in a letter to the same publication, three years later. Commenting upon a national trait which allowed the English to submit to a Licensing Act for the theaters but caused them to insist upon the freedom of the press, he discovered in the novel an influence more widely pernicious than had ever been that of the stage. "How few persons are likely to be contaminated by the performance of an immoral play, compared with those who may be rendered vicious by the publication of an immoral book, which may be circulated throughout the kingdom, and may enter every house, from the mansion to the cottage," he argued. Noting that, "not a vile contemptible novel, or romance, makes its appearance, but what will find its way to the circulating library," he blamed this institution for encouraging the production of works which were a disgrace to the British press.

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A fund of variety is all that the master of the shop finds requisite; and it would be vain to suppose he thinks it at all incumbent on him to enquire into the nature or tendency of the books he provides for the perusal of his customers, who thus, too often, swallow "The total grist unsifted, husks and all." Therefore, he demanded that the influence of the libraries, like that of public houses, should be curtailed by law! 58 The author who disguised himself under the pseudonym of Joshua Collins thought, on the other hand, that such prohibitions should originate in the home and urged parents to establish "an immutable law" that their children should not "subscribe to, or borrow from the circulating libraries, upon the common plan." It is worth noting, however, that although he attributed to these establishments "an overflowing mass of pestilential error," he found that the best system for combating them was the formation of book societies from which works of entertainment were not to be excluded if they were "innocent" and founded upon "good principles." 59 More sweeping condemnations of the libraries came from members of the conservative groups at the close of the century who distrusted the influence of a great quantity of books upon the aggregate of average readers. The eminent writer, Mrs. Sarah Trimmer, voiced the opinion of many leaders when she lamented the opportunities afforded for wide reading by filing as her chief objection against the libraries the fact that they "gave free access to books of all descriptions."80 Similarly, Hannah More wrote to Sir William Pepys that she had thought there were "good books enough in the world for good people," but that she had discovered one class of readers outside the limits of that circle—the patrons of the circulating library. " A little to raise the tone of that mart of mischief, and to counteract its corruptions," she gave as one of her aims in composing her only novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife.81 The enervating effect of this "hot-bed," the library, upon the conversational ability of its subscribers had been her theme in an earlier attack.62 In 1804 the Evangelical Magazine printed in its monthly question box a query from a correspondent seeking to know whether or not, in view of the immoral nature of novels and other forms of light literature, a member of that sect could be justified in keeping a circulating library. Such inquiries were usually answered, in accordance with his own per-

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sonal point of view, by some other reader in the next or an ensuing issue. Unfortunately for the interest it would furnish, either because the reply to this question was too difficult, or, more probably, because it was too obvious, advice upon this point was not forthcoming. 63 Attacked from all sides, therefore, those handy and popular duodecimos which so rapidly made the rounds of an ever growing circle of subscribers became the symbol of all that was objectionable in reading. 3 One cause for this general condemnation was the "fiction-manufacturing" industry which developed to meet a growing need. "It was largely the means taken to keep the shelves of the circulating library stocked that brought the novel into disrepute," Miss Tompkins observes.84 Thus, to the status of the novel as a form devoid of artistic tradition, a form which could be written easily by anyone, was added the immediate position of the novel, after the middle of the century, as an article in demand in great numbers. One condition reacted upon the other; mass production was the result, and the prestige of the novel suffered. Critics possessed few criteria by which to discriminate the good works of fiction from the bad, nor, in most cases, were they desirous of making such a distinction. Certainly the moralists were not. The presence of this mass of supposedly noxious literature, which had found such an effective means of reaching thousands of readers, was to them a great social problem. Complaints about the number of these novels were vigorous. Smartly satirical, the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine who calls himself "The Projector" informs his readers that, although the fact might seem strange to patrons of circulating libraries, there was a time when novels were so scarce that the same work was sometimes given a second or even a third reading. Consequently, he explains, some ingenious persons who attributed this custom entirely to the "scarcity of the article, as a man must wear the same coat pretty often who knows not where to get another," not only found means of doing the public a service but also of setting up for themselves an extremely profitable trade.''5 The flood of fiction which poured forth from the presses of these booksellers was said by some opponents of the novel to go quickly to the trunkmakers, since these individuals were supposed to have used up the waste paper of the day.66

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Others expressed the opinion that such flimsy publications were put to the best use when employed in "lighting a pipe, embracing a tallowcandle, or forming the basis of a minc'd pie." 07 In fact, the paper-makers and printers owed a debt to Fielding and Richardson, these critics asserted, for the amount of paper and print they had caused to be used by their numerous imitators.88 In the same manner, the passing of the seasons was disdainfully recorded by the reviewers in terms of novel production, the largest crop being reaped in the fall of the year. "The season for novels is now set in," wrote the Monthly in November, 1 7 5 5 , "and the press is likely to produce a plenteous harvest; but, if those that shall hereafter be brought to market, prove no better than the first crop, we shall have no great appetite for more of 'em." 60 The May issue brought the triumphant announcement of the end of the fiction season, the reviewer rejoicing that "thanks to the approach of summer," the novel under consideration "is the last work of the sort, we are like to be troubled with, for some Months, at least." 70 Likewise, in October of the following year, the Critical explained scornfully, "Novels generally usher in the Winter as snow-drops do the Spring, and, like them, have little beauty to recommend them, besides early appearance." 71 Most indignantly did the reviewers object to their task of reading all these works. In 1797, the commentator for the British Critic stated that the number of novels demanding a hearing was so great that before he could finish reading more important material, half of them had "done their duty at the Circulating Libraries, and found a quiet repose in the records of the catalogue." Declaring that his plan for dealing with the situation at the moment was to give "a sort of gaol-delivery to these trembling expectants," he thereupon bestowed brief reviews upon some eight works of fiction.72 The fact that the critics very frequently neglected to discharge this duty which they considered so unpleasant did not, however, tend in any way to soften the tone of their grumbling. "Doomed to review," "jaded with perusing," and "vile drudgery," became stock phrases under cover of which they maintained an arbitrary attitude toward all works of fiction. Informing their readers that "as tasters to the public" they encountered "many a nauseous mess," 73 they thanked some novelists for making their compositions short,74 while others they praised hand-

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somely for having at least lulled their reviewer into a pleasant afternoon's nap.7B In spite of booksellers' indignant denials that they ever resorted to such methods for keeping their circulating libraries supplied, the reviewers loudly condemned the use of paid laborers whose business it was to turn out fiction by the quire. "This Lady seems to be one of the best hands employed in Mess. Noble's manufactory," the Monthly wrote sarcastically of an author in 1756, condescending at the same time to rate her novel as less absurd than any of the productions of her fellow laborers which had "come to market" during the course of the season.76 The bookseller's contact with the hacks who served him was shrouded in secrecy, and most of the Tom Starvelings who worked up these volumes were condemned in their obscurity, along with the novel form which they had converted into their stock in trade. Mercury in Archibald Campbell's Sale of Authors has established some sort of connection with a number of literary hacks of this type, for he says, And now Gentlemen, I speak to You my Worthies who are Booklenders, and keep circulating libraries. Against the next reading Season, I mean the Winter, I have provided a choice collection of Authors for you, who shall write you novels and romances without number . . . most exquisite reading for your worthy Subscribers. Apollo and I want a little ready cash at present . . .77 More specific in its attack upon the methods used for acquiring these works, the Critical charged, The booksellers . . . take care every winter to procure a sufficient quantity of tales, memoirs, and romances for the entertainment of their customers, many of whom, not capable of distinguishing between good and bad, are mighty well satisfied with whatever is provided for them . . . . The circulating libraries, therefore, whose very beings depend on amusements of this kind, set their authors to work regularly every season . . ,78 The author of the interesting but short-lived periodical, the Sylph, makes occasion for a clever analysis of the relation of a number of trades to this manufacture of fiction by assuming that word has gone out that he is to ban all novels from the kingdom. Petitions of complaint are

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then included from all persons likely to suffer from the effects of such an edict: the paper-makers, the ragmen, and, finally, the pastry cooks and shopkeepers, since they would thus be forced to lay their hands upon works of learning for waste paper. One of these petitions is dated from the Minerva Press in Leadenhall Street and emanates from the "Lady and Gentleman Novel-makers," the numerous and hungry beings who are compelled to obtain "food for their own appetites by feeding the appetites of others." It contains a satire of the fiction-writing process which is bitterly meticulous. These suppliants explain that their chief occupation consists in the sheer mechanical process of moving a pen across a given number of sheets of paper, thus forming words which, when taken together, constitute sentences, the sentences, according to the arrangement and collection of them, become narrations, speeches, sentiments, descriptions, etc. and when a very great quantity of them (the number and order of which it is our peculiar privilege and art to determine) are wedged together after a particular form and manner, they are denominated a N O V E L . The writer hastens to note, however, that this name does not indicate that such productions are either new or original, since they are all extracted from other works of the same type left to these manufacturers by the "founders" of their "science." This last point regarding the lack of originality in the novels was much discussed, for the library hacks were supposed to have been unusually skillful in the art of plagiarism. Accordingly, the scribbling petitioners are caused by the Sylph to go on to tell how they revamp old works of fiction by dividing them into a larger number of volumes, and, most important of all, by prefixing fresh titles. With these few simple alterations, the novels, they allege, become so new that "none but an artist can discover them to be old."19 Referring to this practice, the Monthly Review ironically suggested that when an art became general it was then time to invent "engines to facilitate the operations, as in the cotton manufacture." Noting that Swift's machine for composing books which is described in Gulliver's Travels had not proved practical, this periodical writer took it upon himself to publish a scheme whereby all such revisions might easily be made with a pen in the margin of the printed book.80 The method of cutting and pasting was also a common subject of censure.

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"Is it new? or is it old? We confess we know not. We suspect it to be a literary patchwork . . . ," the Critical reflected concerning Meltvyn Dale in 1786. 8 1 "Authors of novels are supposed to be the greatest plunderers in the world, stealing a bit here and a bit there, and thus vamping up a book by any means," writes Henry Siddons in his own work, Virtuous Poverty, at the same time confessing that he has probably pilfered as much as his neighbors and would acknowledge these thefts if he knew exactly to whom he was indebted.82 The minor novelists of the period often worked at a prodigious speed, in many cases doing little, if any, proof reading or revision. Thus Mrs. Charlotte Smith records that she has, under the pressure of financial necessity, completed thirty-two novels in eight years. While reviewing this amazing career she makes reference in the Preface of her 1796 novel, Marchmont, to the minor faults of style and orthography which appear in her work, designating them as imperfections which she believes "those who write to live, and consequently write in haste, can seldom escape committing." She has also been handicapped, she asserts, by the fact that the libraries at the bathing town where she has done most of her writing did not contain the books of reference she needed. For that reason, the mottoes and quotations she has used have all been reproduced from memory or from her commonplace book, while the very uncertain task of designating their authorship has been omitted entirely.83 No less astounding is the record of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, by whom the three volumes of the famous novel The Wild Irish Girl were composed in six weeks. Moreover, Lady Morgan oifers her publisher's word as guaranty for the fact that she has never corrected a proof sheet of any one of her novels nor in any instance has she been living in England at the time it was being published. " I have been necessitated to compose with great rapidity," she states, "and my little works have always been printed (from an illegible MS.) in one country while their author was the resident of another."84 One of the most prolific of the male novelists of the period was Dr. Shebbeare, who had some thirty-four novels to his credit. Evidently, any engaging qualities with which he tried to hold the circulating library subscribers through so many volumes did not appear in his personality, however, and Fanny Burney mentions the fact that on one occasion, at least, he ruined eveiyone's evening by being so "rude, gross, and ill-mannered."

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She writes, "What a strange fancy it was, for such a man as this to write novels!" 85 Reviewers frequently scored the lack of accuracy on the part both of the author and the publisher, using it as an additional stone to throw at a form of composition they distrusted. The critic for the Monthly concludes that, in a novel of the year 1 7 7 3 , "the press is pretty well even with the pen. Between the wretched writing, and the miserable printing, it is as difficult to discover the meaning as the sense . . ." 8 8 Likewise, a work of the following season reveals "a multitude of little slips, which seem to intimate that the Author wrote in haste. The bookseller, too, appears to have been as much in a hurry as the Writer." 87 At the end of the century, this sort of condemnation was still prevalent and still directed specifically against fiction. In evaluating a work of 1793, the Monthly Review again found both "numerous, and highly reprehensible" the small errors of that, "as of most other novels." 88 Manufactured in this manner, works of fiction were viewed merely as a cheap and harmful commodity in an overstocked market. It was thus at the very time when some of the prejudice against the novel's lack of prestige as a literary form was being dispelled that the means taken to bring this popular new type of writing to its public tended to supplement and intensify its disrepute. One of the chief objections made against these novels was that they were all the same. Reviewers often proved resourceful in the variety of expressions which they used to censure novelists on this account. The writer for the Critical was especially ingenious. In 1 7 6 3 he asked to be pardoned for a "small clench" in calling The History of Miss Harriot Watson "a novel rather than a novelty," since all its contents had persistently appeared in works of this type.89 Two years later, he said of the History of Miss Indiana Danby, "Let any reader go through a circulating library, and he will find a limb, a finger, or a toe, of this same Miss Indiana's history, which, when soldered up together, will constitute the figure Z'90 With a comparison to the culinary arts, he expressed surprise that there existed no recipe book for "romance cookery" since the process was so well known."1 He made his metaphor specific when criticizing novels on another occasion, "All the difference between them lies in the skill of the cook; for, after all, the dish is but cow-heel." 92 Likewise, he saw similarity between the writing of novels and the baking of gingerbread, urging that in both processes the ingredients of all the separate pieces

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were the same, the only difference resting in the disposal of the decorations: "Whether they are in the shape of a king, a queen, or a cuckold, they still consist of flour, water, brown sugar, or treacle." In the fact that formerly the ornaments used on this confection were the letters of the alphabet, he discovered an ominous hint "that a time would come when the alphabet was to be of little other use to the belles and beaus of Great Britain, than the composition of that intellectual gingerbread generally known under the name of novel writing."93 The critic for the Monthly also allowed himself a pun, affirming in 1766 of The Adopted Daughter, "There is the same resemblance between the characters of this and the foregoing novel, that we often observe between two persons, i.e. an ordinary likeness."®4 The fact that these works were "all echoes of echoes, and shadows of shades"95 was often given by the reviewers as an excuse for allowing them very slight consideration or for ignoring them entirely. In speaking of a novel published by Noble Brothers in 1767, the Monthly explained, This so nearly resembles the rest of our late novels, that what we have said of the Mrs. Draytons, the Miss Grevills, the Miss Howards, and the rest of the Misses, may serve for Miss Emilia Beville, and, probably, for most of the Misses which are to make their appearance, in the course of the ensuing winter.98 Finally, the Gentleman's Magazine summed up this criticism of similarity by prophesying that in the revision of old materials there would come a time when "the nakedness of the land must be discovered," and by declaring that the public was weary of the stock devices upon which novelists depended: Even elopements lost their effect, when repeated experience proved that lovers could escape only by the door or window (the chimney was unluckily never thought o f ) ; and houses, in general, happened to have no other outlets. Stormy nights and peals of thunder, too, became hacknied; and it was discovered, although not until after much ink-shed, that one storm is extremely like another, and that few men had the power of making their flashes of lightning, or their torrents of rain, appear more terrible than those of their neighbours.97 With the novel-writing art thus condemned as a process which could be executed by rule, it is not surprising that numerous observers went so

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far as to propose definite formulas for this type of composition. Edward Mangin, in his Essay on Light Reading, lays down one such set of directions which, if followed carefully, are guaranteed to give the proverbial satisfactory results. First take a great deal of paper, pens, and ink, and an English pocket dictionary. Next compose a vast assortment of names, reserving the most romantic for your hero and heroine; then, affixing persons to these appellations, allow them to converse together on any given subject, by letter, or word of mouth, as long as your publisher thinks proper. . . . See that your heroine is invariably of a fragile form, with blue eyes; accustom her to exist without either eating, drinking, or sleeping; which will enable her to endure as much fatigue as would weary a camel, without any inconvenience; and also account for her always flying, tripping, bounding, and gliding—heroines being never known to walk. Make your hero as much like the Belvidere Apollo, Hercules, and Antinous combined, as you can; and take care that he knows how to swim. For the story, no particular pains are requisite; at it arises naturally out of the incidents. 98 Thoroughly in line with the popularity of the circulating libraries among those who sought diversion at that famous resort, Christopher Anstey included in his New Bath Guide a recipe for a novel as given by three "Ladies of Piety, Learning, and Discretion." First Lady. Why if thou must write, thou had'st better compose Some novels, or elegant letters in prose. Take a subject that's grave, with a moral that's good, Throw in all the temptations that virtue withstood In epistles, like PAMELA'S, chaste and devout—A book that my family's never without.— Second Lady. O! pray let your hero be handsome and young Taste, wit, and fine sentiment flow from his tongue, His delicate feelings be sure to improve With passion, with tender soft rapture and love. Third Lady. Add some incidents too which I like above measure,

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Such as those which I've heard are esteem'd as a treasure In a book that's entitl'd—The woman of pleasure. Mix well, and you'll find 'twill a novel produce Fit for modest young ladies—so keep it for use.09 In the light of such satire it might be noted that this very sameness of plot and character is cited by Mrs. Inchbald as one of the greatest charms which fiction holds for a certain class of readers. Keenly observant, she points out that there are those who are "so devoted to novel-reading, that they admire one novel because it puts them in mind of another, which they admired a few days before. By them it is required, that a novel should be like a novel . . ." 1 0 °

4 The attacks which the reviewers made upon the circulating libraries and the high-handed attitude they maintained toward the reviewing of fiction provoked at least one heated reply. The brothers, Francis and John, Noble, keepers of one of the most famous of the libraries, sent an advertisement enclosed in a letter to Mr. Baldwin, publisher of the London Magazine, filing protest over the reviews they had received for two novels which had been written by the same hireling scribbler and issued by them in November, 1772. Scorning the first of these, The Way to Lose Him, the critic for the periodical had summed up his case with the words: "Written solely for the use of the Circulating Library, and very proper to debauch all young women who are still urtdebauched." In reference to the second, The Way to Please Him, he had merely added: "See the last article. The same character will do for both." Enraged by such insolence, the brothers Noble insisted that the reviewer had in all probability not read the novels and assured Mr. Baldwin that the author was "no hired writer (and, indeed, we have no connections with any such) but a gentleman and a scholar, as much above your defamatory critic in point of situation in life, as he is in goodness of heart." Washing his hands of the dispute, the publisher evidently referred the matter to his editor, who wrote a belligerent reply which, as their next card in this game of vindictive, the Nobles published, heavily footnoted with their own interpretation, at the end of one of their novels of 1 7 7 3 called 'Twas Wrong to Marry Him, a work that, incidentally, evoked from the Monthly the sub-

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stitute title, " 'Twas wrong to write it." 1 0 1 In his statement the correspondent for the London Magazine designated the brothers as "men, whose business it is to puzzle heads, and to corrupt hearts," labeled the circulating library "the palace of scandal," and issued warning that an act of Parliament was soon to be passed whereby institutions of its type would be closed and their owners "declared, like the players, 'rogues and vagabonds,' the debauchers of morals, and the pest of society." Terming this last bit of invective sheer raving, the Nobles in turn protested that the purpose of their library had always been "to diffuse knowledge, and improve the Mind, instead of corrupting the heart." As a parting thrust, they asserted that they were at a loss to know how they could in any way be considered vagabonds unless it could be that their assailant had completely misunderstood their profession and thought that because they kept a circulating library they must circulate from place to place as did the books. 102 But open defense of the circulating libraries was scarce. That enterprising pioneer, James Lackington, saw clearly the value of these institutions to the public. 103 Possibly entirely serious and in a measure correct, is also the author of Monckton when he urges that "the decrease of drunkenness in this country is, perhaps, owing to the introduction of Circulating Libraries, which may be considered as temples erected by Literature to attract the votaries of Bacchus." 104 The influence of these libraries upon the opposition to the novel was, therefore, twofold. First, as has been noted, the growth in respectability of the form was retarded, during the very years when the novel was emerging from its infancy, by the manufacturing methods which the booksellers employed to supply their subscribers. Thus the writer of a letter to the Lady's Monthly Museum maintained that the circulating library plan of reading and writing had rendered contemptible the composition of novels, "a kind of writing, meanwhile, which, but for this vile management, ought to be in the highest estimation . . ," 1 0 5 Certainly this expression of belief in even the possibilities of fiction was a far cry from the early sweeping denunciations. Nor was such an attitude unique. "Belzebub" had indicated that his satanic principles could not be furthered by a librarian of taste. Joshua Collins was willing to permit the use of "innocent" fiction by book societies instead of libraries, and even Han-

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nah More, although she condemned the "mart of mischief" into which the work was to go, had written a novel! In the second place, the libraries, nevertheless, did more than any other agency toward bringing to the novel the great body of readers who, because of their enjoyment of fiction, were to cast the decisive ballot which would cause this type of writing finally to triumph over all others in its influence upon the public. To this triumph, the cheapest duodecimo upon the library shelves lent its share. Preserved Smith has remarked in speaking of the novel of the period, that "even its faults contributed to its marvelous sway over the mind of the modern reader." 108 In an article, "On the Good Effects of Bad Novels," one eighteenth-century observer stresses this same point by likening the poor works of fiction to the moss which tenaciously adheres to the roadside stone: "So, in the mind, idle tales first cling to its barren surface: they make, however, a little soil in which better things may grow." 107 Indeed, it would seem that the force which the novel needed at this time was the very one it received, one to lift it from the trammels of mass production, not by damnation but by art. To the influence of Edgeworth and Austen was soon to be added that of Scott, concluding a period aptly characterized by the reviewer who, in the midst of his praise of The Abbot, took occasion to urge his readers to exercise more critical judgment and contrasted his own task of commenting upon the numerous novels of Scott with that which he had encountered in former days: A few years ago, indeed, these sober admonitions would have been more extensively requisite: for they would have applied to the mob of fictitious productions which over-ran our circulating libraries, and demanded the constant inspection of a literary master of the ceremonies to keep order and decorum among them. At present, however, it seems probable that our admonitory duties may be considerably curtailed; and that, instead of operating as heretofore on an undisciplined rabble, they will be chiefly confined to one family of fictions, descended from one progenitor . . . of which such is the ascendancy that they bid fair to drive all competitors from the arena. Nevertheless, even this situation challenged the skepticism of the reviewer concerning the value of works of fiction and he prodded himself to greater

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diligence in inspecting for their literary worth the novels of a writer a( once so popular and so prolific: Still, however, our duties are not the less imperious. They are in fad still more urgent. By whatever means he has obtained the patent of his monopoly, the restriction of the market renders it more necessary to inspect the commodity. It is our province to see whether, in this as in othei instances, the certainty of success has not relaxed the endeavour tc deserve it . . . 1 0 8

III. WOMEN AND FICTION lVith Pamela, by name, No better acquainted; For as novels I hate, My mind is not tainted. (Answer to an Enigma run in the Lady's Magazine for 177 U

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ORALISTS and critics were not content, however, to belittle the novel as a form devoid of tradition or as a cheap product manufactured by greedy booksellers. They had found for it a victim. As young as the novel itself in their enjoyment of any sort of rights and educational privileges, women seemed the persons most susceptible to the inordinate sensibility which was generally accredited with being the worst type of poison contained in this dangerous plant. That "the ladies" had a definite preference for fiction and enjoyed it with a genuine appreciation, no one had ever chosen to deny; women have always been "the great novel-readers of the world." 1 As early as 1692 the editor, Peter Motteux, had explained, in referring to the numerous short pieces of fiction with which the Gentleman's Journal abounded, "As for Novels, I need not Apologize for them otherwise than by saying that the Ladies desire them . . ."- In 1760, at the beginning of the period under consideration, George Colman set the theme for his play, Polly Honeycombe, by proclaiming in the Prologue: 'Tis not alone the small-talk and the smart, 'Tis NOVEL most beguiles the female heart.3 Conscious of an influence stronger than that of his own protests against the form, the reviewer for the Monthly asserted in 1 7 7 3 that the "fair sex" must have as "keen a relish for novels, as they have for green apples, green gooseberries," and unwholesome foods in general, since otherwise it would not be possible for booksellers to cultivate their objectionable crops even under the "scythe of criticism."4 Recognizing this feminine in-

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terest in fiction, therefore, novelists sometimes went so far as to address their public as though it consisted exclusively of women. The author of The False Friends, having proclaimed herself a female, calls upon her readers to rally to the support of their sex by making her novel a success.5 The introductory remarks to The Rencontre; or, Transition of a Moment are addressed, "Fair Lady!—For such I have a presentiment thou art," 6 while a Richard Graves novel of 1785 carries the inscription, "To the Fair Reader of Eugenius; or, Anecdotes of the Golden Vale."7 Likewise, another author insists that she is publishing her moral tale out of "a tender regard to the female part of this Metropolis, whose more immediate province, I apprehend Novel-reading to be." 8 The periodical writer who poses as the Sylph is disturbed by the extent of this predilection for fiction: Women, of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels . . . the depravity is universal. My sight is every-where offended by these foolish, yet dangerous, books. I find them on the toilette of fashion, and in the work-bag of the sempstress; in the hands of the lady, who lounges on the sofa, and of the lady, who sits at the counter. From the mistresses of nobles they descend to the mistresses of snuffshops—from the belles who read them in town, to the chits who spell them in the country. I have actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread: and the mistress of a family losing hours over a novel in the parlour, while her maids, in emulation of the example, were similarly employed in the kitchen. I have seen a scullion-wench with a dishclout in one hand, and a novel in the other, sobbing o'er the sorrows of a Julia, or a Jemima. In his anxiety he describes what might be termed the "seven ages" of the female novel reader. The first of these fiction-reading ages he places in the nursery, whence the books are carried to school and, from the seminary, home again to supply food for youthful emotions, until by some misconduct or foolish marriage the "reading Miss" is turned out upon the world. In this next age, the young lady's "sentimentals still go with her"; and, if misconduct has been her lot, tend to assist her in the course she has chosen. If, on the other hand, an unhappy marriage is her fate, the books are still "companions of her pillow," teaching her how to pose as a "martyr to

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love." The climax of "this strange eventful history" is reached in the novel-reading mother who "becomes the agent of corruption to her own offspring, while she lives; and at her death leaves them the heirs of the same destructive poison, to be administer'd to a future generation." 9 Thus, in the novel's infancy a most serious argument took root. The reviewer about whose work the brothers Noble so vigorously protested had, after all, hit upon one common and persistent objection in his analysis of The Way to Lose Him, namely, that the novel was calculated to do irreparable harm to young women. This, exactly, was what the opponents of the novel dreaded most, and it was the peculiar status of women in their relation to love and marriage in the eighteenth century which made the life of the reading girl a battleground. Polly Honeycomb's father was therefore expressing fears that were fundamental in regard to the reading habits of young women when he exclaimed that "a man might as well turn his daughter loose in Covent-Garden, as trust the cultivation of her mind to A CIRCULATING LIBRARY!" 10 Certainly, the audience appeal of his speech was increased by the fact that there were many moralists of the age who would quickly have divested the lines of all their wit to insist upon them as literal truth. Objections to the "reading Miss" were not new; they had their foundation in an older animosity toward any education for the female sex. It was, therefore, only after decades of struggle that enough shackles were removed for young women to gain either the opportunity or the ability to read, much less to find themselves in the dangerous habit of devouring novels, that species of composition so ingeniously characterized by the Miniature as "a descriptive manual of speculative debauchery, with infallible rules for reducing it into practice." 11 By the latter part of the seventeenth century, however, under the influence of notable pioneer work and pronouncements, gratifying changes were beginning to take place. Schools were planned by Mary Astell and Elizabeth Elstob. 12 Preaching in 1684 upon the subject of almsgiving, Dean Hickes of Worcester listed as one worthy use to make of money, "building Schools, or Colleges for the Education of young Women . . . who are so silly and deceivable for want of Ingenious, and Orthodox Education, and not for want of Parts." 13 In 1697 Daniel Defoe, asserting that he could not think God had given women such charms only to be "cooks and slaves," contended in his Essay on Projects that it was "the sordidest piece of folly and ingratitude

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in the world to withhold from the sex the due lustre which the advantages of education give to the natural beauty of their minds." Of the opinion that the greatest barrier between women and men arose from this lack of schooling, he proposed a curriculum which included music and dancing, "because they are their darlings;" French and Italian, since he was willing to give woman more than one tongue; and, interesting enough in the light of modern educational trends, conversation.14 It is worth noting, also, that this was the very type of instruction which, when carried to absurd extreme in the cultivation of accomplishments, brought down wholesale rebuke upon the boarding school some fifty years later. Defoe's point of view was subsequently echoed in the Taller, the Spectator, and the Guardian, Steele's interest in the ladies bringing him to the then quite radical opinion that "the great happiness or misfortune of mankind depends upon the manner of educating and treating that sex." 18 Although Swift ridiculed Mrs. Astell as Tobiah Greenhat, he went out of his way to show that both sexes were educated alike in the commonwealth of Lilliput. Evidence of the inadequacy of female education in the early years of the eighteenth century is, nevertheless, not hard to find. "Prithee, don't talk to me about books," Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, had exclaimed, protesting that she read only men and cards,16 while Mary Wortley Montagu wrote in 1756 to her daughter, Lady Bute, regarding the deplorable state of affairs which had existed when she was in England: " A woman married at five-and-twenty, from under the eye of a strict parent, is commonly as ignorant as she was at five; and no more capable of avoiding the snares, and struggling with the difficulties, she will infallibly meet with in the commerce of the world." 17 It was the rise of the middle class and the increasing wealth of the merchant which finally freed woman from many of her domestic duties, giving her time for leisure and study. In this atmosphere, boarding schools multiplied, women found their places in science and letters, and lady novelists sprang up on every side. In 1778 the "Great Cham of Literature," Dr. Johnson, acknowledged that "all our ladies read now, which is a great extension." 18 By the end of the century, Lady Elizabeth Montagu was presiding over an illustrious body of "Blues," while Mary Wollstonecraft, in a more militant fashion, had taken the question of women's rights from the salon to the soap box. In the same period, James Lackington comments

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enthusiastically regarding the "thousands of ladies, which come to my shop, that know as well what books to choose, and are as well acquainted with works of taste and genius, as many gentlemen in the kingdom, notwithstanding the sneer against novel readers, etc." 1 9 Indeed, there lay an inevitable truth in the couplet: —Learning, once the man's exclusive pride, Seems verging fast towards the female side. 20 Opposition to this development was strong and frequently expressed. 21 Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, whose literary parties were successful because "no idiots were ever invited," 2 2 considered it a great misfortune that learned women had the fools and "witlings of both sexes for their enemies." 2 3 Swift compiled a long list of objections most commonly advanced against the educated woman, 24 while at the end of the century, Maria Edgeworth found a device for covering the opposition of her day in a letter from a man to his friend upon the birth of a daughter. 25 Among these varied objections to female learning, a constantly recurring one was that reading unfitted woman for her household duties. The Lady's Magazine discovered that plays, fiction, love-verses, and cards invariably destroyed the domestic cast in the female mind. 2 6 Noting the prevalence of this charge, Hannah More expressed the opinion that " i f families are to be found who are neglected through too much study in the mistress, it will probably be proved to be Hoyle, and not Homer, who has robbed her children of her time and affections." 27 Defense for the educated woman, however, came from that brilliant iconoclast, the Rev. Sydney Smith, who asked what could be more absurd than to suppose that a mother's care for her children was dependent "upon her ignorance of Greek and Mathematics; and that she would desert an infant for a quadratic equation." 28 But the husband also felt neglected in such a household. In a lighter vein, his point of view is given in a letter to the Flapper, a rare periodical which drew its title from Swift's famous admonishers to the men of science on the Island of Laputa. Too late, Sylvester Hawthorn finds himself married to a learned lady, who stacks her shelves with five cartloads of books and refuses to come to the door even when the mantuamaker arrives, to try on a new gown. "In short," he bewails, "reading is her only occupation, except when she prattles about her books, which last is the worst of the two, as she reads by herself, but talks with me." One is

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reminded here of how bored Mr. Pepys was with his wife's detailed accounts of the romances she had read. "O, Mr. Flapper," Hawthorne appeals to his sympathizer, "can there be a greater curse in marriage than when all the learning is on the woman's side?" 29 And Byron put it: 'Tis pity that learned virgins ever wed With persons of no sort of education, But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?30 Another of the criticisms most frequently made was that women's capacities were too weak to support learning. The following poetical "Advice to a Young Lady" was often repeated in one form or another: Nor make to dang'rous Wit, a vain Pretence, But wisely rest content, with modest Sense; For Wit like Wine, intoxicates the Brain, Too strong for feeble Woman to sustain: Of those who claim it, more than half have none, And half of those who have it, are undone. 31 After telling her experience as a lady of learning, Calypso in Gray's Inn Journal issues the warning: "Wit is the most dangerous Thing a Woman can think of, because it generally ruins the Share of Understanding Heaven has been pleased to bestow upon her." 32 As Mary Wortley Montagu remarked, the very phrase, "learned woman," implied, "according to the received sense, a tattling, impertinent, vain, and conceited creature." 33 The erudite lady who gazed into the looking glass of Lao in The Citizen of the World beheld "a mind by no means so fair as she had expected to see. Ill-nature, ill-placed pride, and spleen were too legible to be mistaken." Undaunted, however, she "retired with a sullen satisfaction, resolved not to mend her faults, but to write a criticism on the mental reflector."34 Equally haughty is Goldsmith's character "sagacious Sophronia" who, having lost her facial beauty, "talks incessantly of the beauties of the mind." 35 Some critics, on the other hand, did not go quite so far as to denounce all intellectual pursuits for women but singled out one or two which they

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considered particularly dangerous. Disapproval of female interest in politics is the theme of an anecdote about the French Lord Tyrconnel who, upon his visit to England, became tired of hearing discussions of public affairs and invited some ladies of pleasure to supper. Scarcely had the meal begun, however, when his guests took sides on a topic under parliamentary debate. After several vain attempts to change the subject, his lordship angrily left them and returned to the Continent. 38 Studies by ladies in science were often condemned,37 "The Female Rambler," an occasional writer for the Lady's Magazine, hesitating to include them in an otherwise strong defense of women's education.38 Though not averse to being called "the Paladin of the reading ladies," Charles, in Hannah More's Coelebs, also draws the line at women of science such as the one he decribes "who talked of the fulcrum, and the lever, and the statera, which she took care to tell us was the Roman steel-yard, with all the sang-froid of philosophical conceit."39 Indeed, it seemed that many people wanted women to maintain the complacent attitude toward scientific phenomena which caused Mr. Shandy to be so much irritated with his wife. It must be noted in this lady's behalf, however, that while she consistently failed to ask questions or to remember whether the earth "turned round, or stood still," she conformed quite well to the conservative idea of a wife, quietly acquiescing—as in the dialogue about the breeches—while her husband expressed their joint views.40 Intellectual companionship between the sexes was obviously out of the question as long as any mental activity was thought to have the pernicious effect which Erasmus Darwin ascribed to participation in amateur theatricals, that of eradicating the "retiring modesty and blushing embarrassment to which young ladies owe one of their most powerful external charms." 41 In her Strictures, Miss More condemned the social custom among men of waiting until women left the room before beginning any sort of thoughtful conversation because, she argued, girls were thereby constantly compelled to "behold every thing through a false medium," being perpetually made conscious of their beauty when trying to improve their minds. 42 Citing an example of this deplorable convention, Mrs. Elizabeth Carter described a social gathering at which "the gentlemen ranged themselves on one side of the room, where they talked their own talk and left us poor ladies to twirl our shuttles, and amuse each other, by conversing as we could." Naturally, this student of the classics was not

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content with such a situation and writes that from what she could overhear "our opposites were discoursing on the old English poets, and this subject did not seem so much beyond a female capacity, but that we might have been indulged with a share of it." 43 So strong did this prejudice continue that as late as 1820 Harriet Martineau felt its influence in her girlhood days and was forced to pursue her studies in philosophy "with great care and reserve."44 Mrs. Catherine Cappe records that the horror with which her aunts viewed reading on the part of young ladies was so great that whenever she took up a magazine there would follow the inevitable warnings, delivered by one aunt and echoed by the other, arguments invariably supported by the threadbare example of one "Miss" whose books had qualified her for the madhouse.45 "Let your knowledge be feminine, as well as your person. And let it glow within you, rather than sparkle upon others about you."40 Such were the beacons of wisdom held up before young ladies as they made their entrance into the world and sought their way toward the marriage which was invariably expected of them. 2 The fear that books and education would bring about a ruinous discontent on the part of young women was the focal point of much of the opposition to the most common type of female instruction, that hotbed of novel reading, the girls' boarding school. Miss Pinkerton of Chiswick, at whom Rebecca Sharp hurled her copy of Dr. Johnson's dictionary, conducted, with her sister, a school which was probably quite above the average of the vast crop which flourished in the environs of London and throughout the countryside in the preceding century. Many of the critics of these seminaries went far beyond Becky's desire to see her governess floating down the Thames, "her nose like the beak of a wherry,"47 and loaded all such institutions with vitriolic abuse. Referring to the number and character of these schools, James P. Malcolm says that, even in the year 1759, two or three houses might be seen in almost every village, with the inscription "Young Ladies boarded and educated," where every description of tradesmen sent their children to be instructed, not in the useful attainments necessary for humble life, but the arts of coquetry and self-consequence—in short, those of a young lady."

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Distrust of any education for the lower orders was the real issue behind much of the complaint that these establishments did more to prepare young ladies for Magdalen House than for being thrifty wives.49 Thus a correspondent in the Lady's Monthly Museum reasoned: If the child of a mechanic receives the same education as the daughter of a gentleman, how is it to be supposed that, at the termination of her days of tutelage, she will be enabled to lower her ideas to the level of her own origin, or submit patiently to those degradations she must of necessity meet with in her father's house? . . . The swarm of petty schools, which crowd the environs of the metropolis, I consider as nurseries for vice . . . and am convinced, that amongst those unhappy beings who stigmatize their sex by the depravity of their conduct, few are to be found who have been educated in the bosoms of their family, and in the duties of the station to which they belong.50 In the same vein, Beelzebub, while outlining A Sure Guide to Hell, said of the education of a daughter, "You may send her to a boarding school; most of them are nurseries for me." 3 1 Actually, there were a number of concientious proprietors who did what they could to raise the standard of a type of institution which was never looked upon with very great respect.62 Susan Sibbald gives a somewhat flattering account of her treatment at the boarding school which the novelist Sophia Lee and her sisters conducted at Bath. 53 Considerably above the average also must have been the Abbey School at Reading attended by Jane Austen and her sister, Cassandra,54 by Mrs. Sherwood/'5 and Mary Russell Mitford. 56 It is easy to conjecture that this last institution may have been the original of Mrs.Goddard's "real, honest, old-fashioned boarding-school" in EmmaBut in the main, students were often neglected and allowed to do what they pleased for hours at a time. It was to these hours that critics assigned the seminary's evils, one of which was the vicious habit of novel reading. Even at the Reading school, Mrs. Sherwood found that the liberty which her class enjoyed was so great that "so long as we attended Mr. St. Quintin in his study for an hour or two every morning . . . no human being ever took the trouble to consider where we spent the rest of the day between our meals. . . . No one as much as said, "Where have you been?' " 8 8 In an enlightening account of the low intellectual and moral standard of

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boarding schools in the third quarter of the century, during the girlhood of his mother, Robert Southey recalls that the two sisters who used to keep the most fashionable establishment in Herefordshire consistently said, " 'Her went to school to we,' " when referring to a former pupil. This, he says, was much the same sort of English as that which he heard spoken by the schoolmistress in Bristol to whom Mrs. Siddons sent her daughter. The character of the woman who kept the seminary which his mother's half-sister, Miss Tyler, attended, he considers typical of the times, for in spite of the fact that her children were generally known to be "like the Harleian miscellany, by different authors," she was pre-eminently successful, retired "with a competent fortune, and was visited as long as she lived by her former pupils." 59 That the novel was thought to go hand in glove with these much-criticized institutions was certainly not to its credit. In his unqualified denunciation of the seminary as not being conducive to the development of female character, one of His Majesty's chaplains, J. L. Chirol, describes in detail the devices resorted to by students for getting hold of these books of fiction and the alarming avidity with which they read them: It is a fact that girls at schools procure what books they please, through the day scholars, or the parlour boarders, who have liberty to go whereever they please, or sometimes through the servants. They read them in bed in summer, as soon as it is day-light, they lend them to one another; and it is a fact, that there is no book, however immoral and repugnant to all the sentiments of modesty, but what finds its way into these seminaries.00 Fanny Burney, in speaking of the mass of inferior fiction, advanced the opinion that if novels could be wiped out, "our young ladies in general, and boarding-school damsels in particular, might profit by their annihilation,"®1 while several decades later William Hazlitt more scornfully affirmed, "Only young ladies from the boarding-school, and milliners' girls, read all the new novels that come out." 62 Booksellers' hacks were often characterized as supporting themselves by writing novels specifically designed to feed the appetites of boarding-school Misses.63 The author of the Country Spectator found reason for the excessive fondness for novels "and other trash" in the fact that in all the advertisements of these institutions, he had never seen one boasting a well-chosen library, infor-

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mation which he considered more valuable to parents than the news that the "Dancing-Master attended three times a week, or that the Teacher of French resided in the house."64 Whether or not the schools were actually to blame, they technically cleared themselves by assigning to novel reading a prominent place on the blacklists of forbidden amusements. In a farewell poem to her boarding-school days, Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe derived great satisfaction from the thought that her novel reading would never be criticized by her governess again.85 " I put such books only into the hands of my pupils as I think they will profit by . . . I allow of no novels . . . ," bragged a model schoolmistress as she told how she educated her brood.06 Nevertheless, as might be expected, such prohibitions seem merely to have added zest to the long hours of reading by candlelight behind barred doors. Thus, to the moralists, the young lady appeared to be in a perilous situation, for she was educated beyond her station and she was introduced to the novels which fed her discontent. Oil was added to the flames by the course of study placed before her. Based largely upon the acquirement of superficial accomplishments, it seemed diabolically designed to enable her to act out the roles of rich and indolent heroines about whom she read. In an amusing one-act farce, The Boarding School, Mrs. Grodesnap explains to the bewildered farmer Holly the principles upon which her establishment is run: Merely eighty guineas a year, sir, exclusive of French, Italian, and the globes—the pupil to bring her own sheets and napkins, two silver forks, an umbrella, and a drinking cup! Cognizant of the danger of overloading the mind, she has adopted the "homeopathic" system of "administering knowledge in the smallest possible doses:" . . . we commence at nine, when the arts and sciences are taught in the following proportions:—ten minutes for geography, eleven for French, ten for astronomy, six for mathematics, and half an hour for dancing. Play-ground at one, dine at two, and school again at three— then comes ten minutes for history, seven for Italian, eleven for chemistry, eight for algebra, nine for hydraulics, and fifteen for the harp and piano!87

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All this does "zeem a tidy heap" to Farmer Holly and would have seemed more so had the list included the entire parade of masters who in that age were the Pygmalions that changed "Miss," the tradesman's daughter, into a young lady. Miss Amelia Rattle in Coelebs regales the Stanleys with an amazing account of her studies: I have not been idle, if I must speak the truth. One has so many things to learn you know. . . . I learn varnishing, and gilding, and japanning. And next winter I shall learn modelling, and etching, and engraving in mezzotinto and aquatinta. . . . Then I have a dancing master, who teaches me the Scotch and Irish steps; and another who teaches me attitudes, and I have begun to learn the waltz, and I can stand longer on one leg already than Lady Di. Then I have a singing master, and another who teaches me the harp, and another for the pianoforte. And what little time I can spare from these principal things, I give my odd minutes to ancient and modern history, and geography, and astronomy, and grammar, and botany. Then I attend lectures on chemistry, and experimental philosophy, for as I am not yet come out, I have not much to do in the evenings. . . . And I run so delightfully fast from one thing to another that I am never tired. What makes it so pleasant is, as soon as I am fairly set in with one master, another arrives. I should hate to be long at the same thing. But I shan't have a great while to work so hard, for as soon as I come out, I shall give it all up, except music and dancing. After listening to such a catalogue of vanities, the men in the room take their shots at woman's attempt to educate herself, by observing that they themselves can, after long application, become proficient in only one field, the linguist rarely being a painter, or the mathematician a poet, "But woman, ambitious, aspiring, universal, triumphant, glorious woman, even at the age of a school boy, encounters the whole range of arts, attacks the whole circle of the sciences!"68 As the century progressed, this emphasis upon accomplishments reached a high pitch. One mother who regretted that the procession of masters left no time for serious study finally compromised by reading lessons aloud to her daughters while they were drawing.89 A doting father, anxious that his daughter's education might include everything that money could buy, specified particularly "painting on velvet, and playing

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on the tambourine!"70 The recognized queen of female excellence, Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, finding no pleasure in the company of her affected niece, denounced the training given at boarding schools where girls were taught "to speak and move by art," learning grimaces "which would deform a monkey, and a style of conversation that would disgrace a parrot." 71 This particular kind of unnaturalness Mrs. Jane West makes the cause of a humorous situation in her novel, The Infidel Father. In order to gain the attention of Lord Glanville, the accomplished young Melisandriania is spurred on to show what she has learned at school by striking the pose of Lucretia stabbing herself. Mistaking her art, and supposing "her to be pouring out the coffee, instead of acting an indignant heroine striking the mortal stroke, that was to clear her polluted honour and give liberty to Rome," the lord gallantly declared that "though it was a beverage he was not in the habit of drinking, he would not decline taking one cup from her." 72 An early fictional satire of the accomplished lady appears in the novel The Invisible Spy where Miss Loyter, upon being asked her opinion of Fontenelle's Plurality of Worlds, replies: "O hang it,—I was never so disappointed in my life;—I thought by the beginning, when I found a gentlemen and lady were taking their promenade together by the moonlight, that some pretty adventure would have ensued;—but good God, the Author has made them talk of nothing but the Planets and the things that happen in the Sky." Her questioner immediately analyzes her attitude by saying, "I fancy then, miss, that Romances and Novels are chiefly your taste."73 Jane Taylor cleverly summarizes in rhyme the pernicious inadequacy of this type of training: 'Tis thus Education (so call'd in our schools) With costly materials, and capital tools, Sits down to her work, if you duly reward her, And sends it home finish'd according to order. Thus Science distorted, and torn into bits, Art tortur'd, and frighten'd half out of her wits, In portions and patches, some light and some shady, Are stitch'd up together, and make a young lady.74

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Primarily troubled concerning the harm to the middle classes, Hannah More was alarmed to see this "phrenzy of accomplishments" raging downward from the "usual limits of rank and fortune," to the impressionable daughters of the curate, the tradesman, and the farmer.75 Miss Edgeworth also recognized the trend and considered it harmful, noting the way in which practically every girl among these classes was making use of her claim to accomplishments to transform herself into a lady: Stop at any good inn on the London roads and you will probably find that the landlady's daughter can shew you some of her own framed drawings, can play a tune upon her spinnet, or support a dialogue in French of a reasonable length, in the customary questions and answers.76 In a more violent strain, another critic wrote: . . . when I see a girl destined to weigh candles behind a counter, or make butter in a dairy, learning to jabber a language she cannot comprehend, and thrumming an instrument she has no ear to enjoy, I consider it so manifest an infringement upon the rights of gentility, that I neither think of it with patience, or behold it with composure.77 Nor could any of the other contemporary reformers view the situation with composure—or with silence. Moreover, to anyone who looked upon woman's main duty as that of a domestic servant, it seemed doubly dangerous that these novels which the boarding-school Miss thumbed so affectionately depicted the power of love as sufficient for transcending class barriers, marrying a lord, and leading a life for which the study of these accomplishments had trained her. Indeed, the fact that love is the universal theme of novels has always been a major objection, and condemnation of works of fiction as silent instructors in the art of intrigue are numerous. In answer to the question of whether or not it was lawful to read romances, the Athenian Mercury for 1692 had noted "the softning of the Mind by Love, which are the greatest Subject of these sort of Books. . ." 78 Catherine Macaulay's chief objection to works of fiction was that "they are all the history of lovers; and love tales are always improper for the ears of youth, whose mind should . . . be kept as long as possible in ignorance of the melting sensations of what is called in pre-eminence 'the tender passion'."79 Likewise,

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other observers were equally confident that young novel readers paid most attention to the fascinating accounts of love and wished to become actors in scenes80 which at best were calculated only to "cherish the flame, which nature is sufficiently able to kindle and keep alive without the help of art." 81 Nor could even descriptions of the most virtuous love be read with safety, except under conditions which the serious-minded Mrs. West considered very rare—where the writer had drawn from a "chaste hallowed imagination."82 That love was often shown to be the one predominant and uncontrollable emotion brought additional blame upon the novel. The Critical explains in 1765: From the usual strain of these compositions, one would be apt to conclude, that love is not only the principal, but almost the sole passion that actuates the human heart. This we consider as one of the most dangerous consequences resulting from the too general prevalence of these kind of writings. The youth of both sexes, having their minds early tinctured with this unhappy prejudice, are thereby rendered liable to the grossest illusions. They fondly imagine . . . that every thing must yield to the irresistible influence of all conquering love: but, upon mixing with the world, . . . they find, to their cost, that they have been miserably deceived; that they have viewed human nature through a false medium; and that though love has a strong influence on the actions of men, yet is it frequently overpowered by avarice, ambition, vanity, and a thousand other passions.83 One recalls in this connection that in appraising the works of Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson had asserted, "But love is only one of many passions; and, as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him."84 The most common brand of this overpowering emotion as found in circulating library books is represented by Richard Griffith, in his own novel, Something New, as one containing far more sensation than sentiment. "Were brutes but suddenly gifted with speech and reason," he expounds, "they would express their instinct, in the very stile of modern Novelists."85 By so stating, he places himself in the paradoxical position, quite common among writers of the period, of damning his own trade and those who followed it. Indeed,

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there is no stronger proof of the prevalence and pressure of many of these objections than the way in which they crept into books of fiction, novelists themselves being driven to voice condemnation of the form while writing it. Particularly interesting is a denunciation of the treatment of love as an ungovernable passion contained in the Introduction to a work issued by the Minerva Press in 1798. Although the statement is placed on the lips of an "old Cynic," its inclusion in a debate upon the novel is typical of the devices employed by ingenious writers. Viewing it in any other light, one might be amazed to find the presses which had reaped a fortune for William Lane by capitalizing upon romance, finally grinding out the announcement that a novel, the " 'last refuge of every blockhead of a scribbler'," is nothing more than " 'Love run mad, Honour stripped naked, and the Passions dancing the hays together'." 86 In his defense of fiction, James Sands gave answer, however, to all those who charged novel writers with "representing Love as uncontroulable, omnipotent, and everlasting, to the incalculable detriment of society," by making the terse observation, "Let facts speak for themselves." 87 The quite academic question aroused no little discussion. More criticism was provoked by the fact that marriage was often used as a convenient terminal point for these love stories, "and holy wedlock converted into a Spunge, to wipe out at a single stroke every stain of guilt. . ." s 8 Although he had acceded to the custom in his own work, Charles Jenner was still perplexed and could not help wondering whether this practice among the great masters of ending their novels as soon as they had brought their heroes and heroines to the altar prevailed because "the marriage-state is so uniformly happy and even, that an account of it would be surfeiting," or because "it is so calm and barren of events as to run the risque of being dull in the detail. . ." 89 Byron expressed this facetiously: Romances paint at full length people's vvooings, But only give a bust of marriages; For no one cares for matrimonial cooings.90 In recalling his boyhood ideas of love gleaned from the reading of fiction, one contributor to Chambers's Journal wrote that he then "looked upon men and women as puppets, whose business it was to pair off, surmount impediments, and finally marry," after which their only mission in life was "to rear fresh heroes and heroines, and then die opportunely." 91

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The Gentleman's Magazine went so far as to insist that novelists gave a picture of life too limited in its scope to be valuable, since their accounts of marriages were shamefully exaggerated only to form a fitting climax for an equally exaggerated love: Now, in common life, we know, that marriage is neither very difficult nor remarkably lucrative. The parties meet together without any of those extraordinary risks from rope-ladders and blunder-busses which accompany courtship in Novels; and if they happen to have acted improperly in any stage of this business, it is very rarely that they are rewarded or punished by a wife of extreme beauty, or vast wealth.92 Several decades later than the period under consideration, Anthony Trollope cleverly dismissed this whole complaint regarding the prevalence and treatment of the love theme in novels when he admitted: The love story is the thing. In what way did this special John make himself pleasant to that particular Jane;—how did Jane receive John's attentions, and what became of it at last? This is the nucleus of all this mass of ephemeral literature which is so voluminous . . . The influence of such stories he also acknowledged with an example: If I were to make my way into the house of any one of you as a chance visitor, and begin to teach your sons and daughters how to make love and how to receive love-making, you would think me to be a very dangerous and impertinent fellow. . . . But when I, or some greater professor, come on the same errand with Mr. Mudie's ticket on my back, you admit me, and accept my teaching.03 Whether or not this teaching was harmful depended, Trollope concluded, upon the choice of novels. 3 Placed in such circumstances, young women seemed indeed to be predestined victims; their situation was analyzed with concern and its dreadful consequences predicted. Not only were they possessed of an education which was incompatible with their domestic duties, and trained in accomplishments which lent some degree of reality to the dreams

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which fiction engendered; but they found in their novels of love a readymade pattern for a life of extravagance and immorality. This general analysis of their plight boiled down to the much-quoted fear that a copy would produce an original. 94 The first step along the road of imitation born of "this identifying propensity" 95 was a dissatisfaction on the part of the "reading Miss" with the life about her. Few young women have ever been beset by such extravagant fancies as were generously ascribed to the girls who patronized the eighteenth-century circulating libraries. The printed page of fiction was credited with engendering a tantalizing, an irresistible discontent. It could so "tickle the imagination"96 that it caused young women to expect the unusual and bizarre instead of the common run of events. In milder cases, this fever raised by fiction resulted in a "restless desire to be seen and admired," 97 while a consideration of its more advanced stages led Mrs. Chapone, in her Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, to conclude that the reading of sentimental novels "corrupts more female hearts than any other cause whatsoever." 98 With Mrs. Lennox's Female Quixote as a pioneer in the English field, the idea thrived as a convention in fiction itself.09 Such romantic notions were supposed to affect all ages and types of women characters. One impressionable lady in The Locket ( 1 7 7 4 ) recalls that as a result of having read novels when other girls were playing with their dolls, she "began to look out for lovers before she left her hanging sleeves . . ," 1 0 0 The exotic notions with which fiction can affect a doting mother form the theme of a better-known work, Mary Charlton's Rosella. Having lived long on the ideas of life which she found so agreeable when enclosed in a "tremendous breadth of margin," and encased in "marbled paper, extremely soiled by the devotion of the curious," Sophia looks forward to seeing her daughter become the heroine of adventures similar to those about which she has read. In order to facilitate the realization of these dreams, therefore, she finally packs a large box of books from the circulating library and takes Rosella on a quixotic journey to Scotland and Wales, where she hopes the child may more easily explore the realms of romance. 101 In view of the amount of satire which was pointed at that sect in its infancy, it is not surprising to find a fictional account of a lady novel reader whose emotionalized outlook on life has driven her to become a Methodist. It was at a fashionable boarding school that the wealthy widow

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in The Devil upon Two Sticks in England cultivated the taste for fiction which "governed the subsequent course of her life," and it was from this seminary that "thanks to the influence of a circulating library," she ran away to an unhappy marriage with a young officer. Here, however, her novels did not fail her. Drawing upon a vast store of highly wrought pictures of life, she found an outlet for her misery in conversation, "kept 'squires in order—and made vicars silent by her powerful elocution." At last, finding herself the object of ridicule and noticing that people with less wit than she shone merely by constantly differing with the views of others, the lady had resolved to turn unbeliever and was reading books on deism when a chance argument converted her into a "boasted disciple of the tabernacle."102 Jane Austen's Catherine Morland is almost too well known to need additional comment. Spurred on by an active imagination, this young lady nourishes ideas concerning possible secret rooms and concealed murders in spacious Northanger Abbey which later prove embarrassing. The seven novels in the list recommended by her friend Isabella Thorpe are of the Gothic variety and represent the specific type of reading against which the genial satire is directed.103 The eighteenth-century theater also had its crop of heroines made foolish by the reading of fiction. Marking the opposite extremes of a period of English comic representations which derived from Moliere's Les Précieuses ridicules, two of the most famous examples of this type are Steele's Biddy Tipkin and Sheridan's Lydia Languish. Biddy has read the romances of Mlle de Scudéry; Lydia Languish's list includes The Fatal Connection, de Vergy's The Mistakes of the Heart, and other circulating library stand-bys of the latter half of the century.104 Biddy's sweetheart, fortunately, is able to talk to her in terms of her reading; but the romantic Lydia speaks for every disillusioned "novel-reading Miss" when she complains: There had I projected one of the most sentimental elopements!—so becoming a disguise!—so amiable a ladder of Ropes!—-Conscious Moon—four horses—Scotch parson—with such surprise to Mrs. Malaprop—and such paragraphs in the Newspapers!—Oh, I shall die with disappointment ! 1 0 5 Both of these young ladies, however, have taken another step toward permitting a copy to become an original and not only expect romantic

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adventures themselves, but demand that any young man seeking their love shall act according to a prescribed code of behavior. A celebrated representation of the girl whose head is so turned by the reading of fiction that she expects every lover to conform to this unnatural pattern, to serve an apprenticeship of swoons, fasting, and hardships, is found in Mrs. Lennox's Female Quixote. Although this work is ostensibly a satire and stands amazingly close to Cervantes's classic at many points, there is significance in the fact that the author has allowed her wit to be eclipsed by an anxious desire for reform. Indeed, the fear that young women will not be content with anything short of the most romantic courtship practiced by the heroes they idolize was an objection universally raised against novel reading. Strikingly similar to Arabella's demands in The Female Quixote had been those of Marilla, described some eight years earlier in the novel The Lady's Drawing Room (1744). So saturated was this young woman with conceptions of love drawn from her romances that "it seem'd to her the utmost Indecency in a Woman to listen to any amorous Proposals, 'till the Lover had grieved himself to a Skeleton, and was on the Point of falling on his Sword . . ." On such occasions the greatest favor which the lady could grant her suitor was a "command to live," and it was only after an apprenticeship of seven years that she might profess that he merited her pity or permit him to kiss her hand. A second apprenticeship of faithful service was required if she was to be won. Quite unnecessary, then, seems the added statement that, to date, none of Manila's admirers have come close to meeting these demands and that, as is customary in such cases, the "reading Miss" continues to look upon all ordinary proposals of marriage as so many affronts.108 While the style of courtship in the novels was less violent than that of the romances, many people found it none the less pernicious in its influence. Just as Mrs. Lennox had been too much concerned about the seriousness of the situation to take any real delight in her satire, so observers outside the fiction field were too gravely vexed to find much occasion for wit at all. In a lighter vein than most, Edward Mangin asked what chance any suitor less than perfect had with a girl who was prejudiced by early impressions received from her novel reading: Should a man . . . with fewer accomplishments than the hero of a novel, and whose Christian name should unfortunately be Timothy, or Nicholas, or Daniel, present himself to the sublimated nymph, he

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is scornfully dismissed in behalf of some well-dressed and flippant idiot, who, being an adept in the literature of the circulating library, can converse with the lady on equal terms, and is master of all the requisites that can constitute him the destroyer of domestic peace, but of none whereby female honour or happiness can be secured. 107 Maria Edgeworth reflected that young girls addicted to the "common novel-reading" habit constantly mistook "plain William and Thomas for M y Beverly," 1 0 8 a conception of love which Byron evidently had in mind when he contrasted the natural bliss of Haidee and Don Juan with the ideas of the "novel-reading Miss." This is in others a factitious state, A n opium dream of too much youth and reading, But was in them their nature or their fate: N o novels e'er had set their young hearts bleeding . . , 1 0 9 " A young woman . . . expects to be addressed in the style of these books, with the language of flattery and adulation," objects Clara Reeve's Hortensius, in cataloguing the evils of the circulating library. " I f a plain man addresses her in rational terms and pays her the greatest of compliments,—that of desiring to spend his life with her,—that is not sufficient, her vanity is disappointed, she expects to meet a Hero in Romance." T o this Euphrasia replies, " N o Hortensius,—not a Hero in Romance, but a fine Gentleman in a Novel . . , " 1 1 0 The peak of cleverness in denunciation of this conception of a lover is undoubtedly reached in Jane Austen's remarkable early work, Love and Freindship, where, as a contrast to the good sense of Graham, who unfortunately does not have auburn hair and has never read The Sorrows of Werther, the "genuine" symptoms attributed to Captain M'Kenrie are said to conform more closely to what a girl should expect: " D i d he never gaze on you with admiration—tenderly press your hand —drop an involantary tear—and leave the room abruptly?" "Never (replied she) that I remember—he has always left the room indeed when his visit has been ended, but has never gone away particularly abruptly or without making a bow." "Indeed my Love (said I ) you must be mistaken—for it is absolutely impossible that he should ever have left you but with Confusion, Despair, and Precipitation. Consider

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but for a moment Janetta, and you must be convinced how absurd it is to suppose that he could ever make a Bow, or behave like any other Person." 1 1 1 Often, however, novels were condemned as having greater influence than merely inspiring extravagant notions or providing a romantic code of conduct for lovers. They became actual textbooks which furnished specific arguments to justify unusual behavior, and young ladies grew amusingly efficient in citing these works whenever the occasion arose. Possibly best fortified of all in this respect are Mrs. Lennox's Arabella and Lady Harriot Stuart, since, never at a loss for comparisons, these characters persistently punctuate their conversation with such phrases as, "In short, I was nothing less than a Clelia or Statira." 112 Jenny in the novel The Sisters also proves herself to be familiar with her textbooks as, in a letter to her mother, she justifies her rashness in running away with Mr. Fortebrand. Not only does she compare her mother's objections to those which the Harlowes raised against Lovelace, but she believes that, in her own role, she has even surpassed the technique used by her models: Now, Madam, as I am assur'd you have a much better opinion of me than to think I have so ill-distinguishing a head as to read without making proper reflections and improvement, and as I conceive this moral way of writing, in which we of this age so much excel, and which to be sure is the finest, best and most instructive way of writing that ever was invented, is to teach us life, and to direct us in the knowledge of things, so I have read with this view, and greatly improv'd my way of thinking, avoiding the errors there recorded, and following my better judgment, have without any of their troubles made myself happy. Jenny congratulates herself that she has thus gained a lover more desirable than "all the Lo velaces, or Jones's, or Booths, or Pickles, or Randoms."1™ The Harlowe family also "serves as an example" for the heroine of one of the most enjoyable of all the plays dealing with novel reading, Polly Honeycombe. Because her parents demand that she marry Ledger, a businessman who wishes his courtship to be done with the dispatch of an office, Polly contends that she is in the same position as Clarissa when threatened with Solmes, except that Ledger is more horrible. She considers her father, mother, and suitor good characters for a novel. Denouncing Ledger as a "vile book of arithmetick," and "more tiresome

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than the multiplication-table," she believes that she has acted fit for a chapter in a new novel by repulsing him with so much spirit. Reproved by her father for such conduct, Polly maintains that she is as dutiful a child as any in the world. "But there's always an uproar in the family about marrying the daughter, and now poor I must suffer my turn." She attempts to elope with her real lover, Scribble, but is thwarted by Ledger. When it is revealed that this Scribble is only an apprentice, nephew of her crafty nurse, Polly calls Fielding to her aid by exclaiming, "Lord, papa, what signifies whose nephew he is? He may be ne'er the worse for that. Who knows but he may be a foundling, and a gentleman's son, as well as Tom Jones?" Scribble threatens suit and proves objectionable, but Ledger, at last in the lead, throws away his chances by protesting, "She'd make a terrible wife for a sober citizen. . . . I would not underwrite her for ninety per cent." This romantic lady's reading has not forsaken her, however, for she has already finally dismissed Ledger with the assurance that he is "as deceitful as Blifil, as rude as the Harlowes, and as ugly as Dr. Slop." Mr. Honeycombe voices a parting curse upon those "damned storybooks," and protests to the audience that all his trouble has been caused by novels. 114 The novel was blamed also for serving as a fashion sheet to the young Miss. It is worth stepping ahead a few years to cite the best treatment of this idea, one by George Eliot. The chameleon-like quality in the appearance of Miss Rebecca Linnet, from Scenes of Clerical Life, was only to be accounted for by the fact that she had fed on the fiction from Mr. Proctor's circulating library, and nothing but an acquaintance with the course of her studies could afford a clue to the rapid transitions in her dress . . . . her cheeks, which, on Whitsunday, loomed through a Turnerian haze of network, were, on Trinity Sunday, seen reposing in distinct red outline on her shelving bust, like the sun on a fog-bank. 115 Jane Austen's sprightly mind toys with this idea as she notes in a letter to her sister, Cassandra, that Mr. Tom Lefroy has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove—it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which he did when he was wounded. 116

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In addition, a girl's manners were supposed to have been strangely influenced by her reading of fiction, as is the case with Julia Dawkins in Mary Brunton's novel, Self Control. "Having no character of her own, Julia was always, as nearly as she was able, the heroine whom the last read novel inclined her to personate." Reading Evelina caused her to sit "with her mouth extended in a perpetual smile," and to become so timid that she would not look at a stranger. After Camilla, she appeared "rattling, infantine, and thoughtless," but when, "in an evil hour," she opened La Nouvelle Heloise, "which had before disturbed many wiser heads," she began with a new fervor to cultivate the joys of sentiment.117 A point very often raised against this imitation of the standard of conduct found in novels was that it supposedly caused, among other undesirable attitudes, a disregard for the authority of parents. Citing this as one of the dangers of the circulating libraries, Clara Reeve expressed the belief that young people who were well versed in the fiction of the day thought themselves so much wiser than their guardians that they looked upon them with contempt and disdain.118 Similarly, the writer who called himself the "Sylph" pointed with apprehension to the "thousand delightful instances" of disobedience which these books contained;119 and although he, in common with many other censors, was reviling works with which he was not himself well acquainted, it is true that one can, with no very intensive search, find in the novels of the period quite an imposing array of disobedient offspring. " ' A U T H O R I T Y , ' what a full word is that in the mouth of a narrow-minded person, who happened to be born thirty years before one!" Miss Howe writes to Clarissa.1** Jenny in The Sisters, likewise, finds her mother's advice to be entirely wrong when compared with ideas gained from romance, maintaining an attitude which Polly Honeycombe flippantly describes in her Epilogue: We girls of reading, and superior notions, Who from the fountain-head drink love's sweet potions, Pity our parents, when such passion blinds 'em : One hears the good folks rave—one never minds 'em. Till these dear books infus'd their soft ingredients, Asham'd and fearful, I was all obedience. Then my good father did not storm in vain, I blush'd and cried, "I'll ne'er do so again." 121

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One reason for the particular emphasis upon this supposed evil of fiction was the fact that the balance of the relationship between parental authority and a daughter's inclinations in marriage was, during the eighteenth century, definitely in the parents' favor. Moreover, precluded from any possibility of a career, a girl found marriage her only hope and the one object toward which all her training had been aimed from the time of infancy. One remembers Charlotte Lucas's sober reasoning as she accepted the tiresome Mr. Collins. Though acknowledging that "his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary," she consoled herself with the thought that "still he would be her husband." Without thinking highly either of men or matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for welleducated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative against want.122 Bound strongly by class distinctions, a girl found it her duty to marry well and, if possible, to improve the family fortunes by the transaction. Newspaper announcements of weddings included the inevitable financial statement. Observing in the Tatler that most parents sought matches for their estates rather than for their children, Steele had early cautioned his readers against this mercenary procedure.123 In this respect, Clarissa Harlowe had erred. Though disappointed that she had thrown herself away upon a rake, the heroine's family had a deeper grievance in that she had not made an advantageous marriage. As a daughter of the newly wealthy merchant class, she was obliged to establish a connection which would either prove profitable financially or bring home a title. On the other hand, the one-sided moral code of the age was beset with dangers for even the most scrupulous young lady, class distinctions being again the major consideration. Belzebub, a writer for the Gentleman's Magazine, found particularly favorable to his evil design the attitude of the young man who protested that he would never be guilty of trying to mislead a woman of station, but in the case of "an ordinary girl, and below one's rank, Lord! where's the harm?" 124 If, however, a young lady tried to transcend these barriers of class, she was regarded with humiliating suspicion. In the novel The Excursion Charlotte Brooke quotes a dramatic writer as saying, "Virtuous women walk on foot," to which she adds

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her own interpretation that "if a woman is not born to a coach," she can never gain one by conventional conduct. 125 Nevertheless, the boarding school Miss with her accomplishments and her novels was generally credited with entertaining such ideas. J. L. Chirol states very succinctly the general opinion concerning the plight of the young woman so trained: The genteel education she has received has elevated her above the humble offices of housekeeping; she despises her parents, and their vulgar shop, or loom garret; she seeks in novels and dissipation, some means of escaping from her present condition; and at length, as too frequent experience demonstrates, she falls a victim to seduction. How indeed, could it be otherwise? 126 Apparently the time-honored distrust of any intellectual or social freedom for women was still active, and it is not surprising to find the young lady's newly acquired diversion of novel reading blamed for bringing about the results which had been so long predicted. By transcending mere extravagances in ideas of life and love, or mere fancies in dress and manner, to consummate this demoralizing effect, the evils supposedly engendered by fiction had run their full cycle. "Jamais file chaste n'a lu de romans," writes Rousseau. More adroit than most critics, however, he defends his own novel by saying that if a young girl should complain that the reading of La Nouvelle Heloise has contributed to her loss of character, she is being unjust since "elle n'a plus rien ]• Malcolm was moved to suggest in a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine that "some worthy persons" should review all the novels of the year, in a monthly publication, pointing out such as were of an improper tendency with candour, and recommending those of merit. From such a work parents and guardians might select profit and entertainment for their pupils, and prevent their taste from being vitiated by scenes of depravity and wickedness too often to be found pourtrayed by the hand of real Genius.50 In the supplement for the same year, another correspondent warmly praised the idea and, incidently, by appending a eulogy of the novels of Mrs. Jane West, indicated that his conception of such a critical work was a very rigorous one indeed. Malcolm's plan was commended again in the following January by a contributor, " K , " who asserted that such a work was already in progress but doubted that it would be successful enough even to defray expenses "because, on the one hand, Novels are not regarded as objects of so much importance as most seriously belongs to them; and, on the other, it is notorious that with right-earnest Novelreaders 'every rank fool goes down.' " 6 1 It was Sir Walter Scott who did most to establish the novel on a moral basis with the reviewers and with the public. The Waverley series was received into homes in which no other works of fiction had ever been accepted. "Gradually," said Trollope some years later, "under their influence was removed the embargo which had hitherto been laid upon novels in many English and Scotch domestic circles, and which Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen had not been strong enough to dislodge." Trollope took some pains to point out also that most of the situations from which the

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harm of novels was supposed to have emanated were present in Scott's works but were treated in such a manner that no moral injury was done: A n d yet Scott told tales which freeze the blood,—as of Lucy Ashton; of fallen womanhood,—as of Effie Deans; of broad farce,—as with Bailie Nicol Jarvie; of fairie-land,—as of the White Maid of Avenel; of villany,—as of Varney; and also of somewhat too forward feminine behaviour, as I have always thought was the case with Miss Julia Mannering. But no woman became forward, and no man a villain under his teaching. N o r has he helped to produce domestic tragedies. N o wife has left husband or child, stirred to mischief and vagabond propensities, —to what we, in the cant of the day, call Bohemianism,—through his influence. He has instructed no Lydia to be desirous of rope ladders. . . . But I assert that propriety of life and that domestic security which is so ineffably precious to us all, have been advanced and not impeded by the reading of Scott's novels. 82 A s is usually the case, it was the literary critic who had from time to time during the latter years of the century taken the lead in finding artistic justification for a type of composition which the moralists considered objectionable. When reviewers began to recognize a few points in novelwriting technique, their insistence upon moral aim became less frequent. It did not disappear among the more conservative members of the group, however, and even in 1 8 1 5 the British Critic felt the necessity of concluding the list of attributes which it considered essential to the making of a novelist with the qualifying statement that no excellence could be ascribed to such an author "unless to these qualities he add a truly virtuous mind: which, of course, implies a due veneration for morals and religion. This, in our eyes, is an indispensable requisite; and, if he have it not, we shall rejoice to see him deficient in all the rest . . ," 8 3 Advanced indeed, however, was the argument of the Monthly when in 1 8 2 0 it condemned a piece signed by one Timothy Touchstone and called A Letter to the Author of Waver ley, Ivanhoe, etc., on the Moral Tendency of Those Popular Works, the purport of which epistle was to show "that the writer of those celebrated fictions has not made the interests of religion and morality any part of his plan, in the numerous volumes which he has given to the world." In the first place, the reviewer did not consider the novelist's materials adaptable to such a narrow objective:

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The every-day business of life, its perpetually recurring events, its changeful scenes, its strange and fantastic personages, are the elements of the modern novel; and it is therefore obvious that, without the most violent distortion of the original which he copies, it must frequently be wholly impossible for the author to make his persons, his events, and in short all the machinery of his tale, systematically conduce to a moral purpose. . . . He must, consequently, be contented with an inferior end; taking care that his scenes do not conduce to one that is immoral.54 In the second place, this critic did not believe that if a work of fiction were directed toward some moral end, it would be certain to leave that impression with the reader. Accordingly, he concluded: The best way, therefore, is to let every one who takes up the book extract from it his own moral. Human life is so constructed, that its ordinary occurrences not unfrequently impart the most momentous lessons. . . . Every novel must contain a portion of this species of instruction, because the materials of every novel are drawn from the world at large, and in the world these things are constantly occurring: but whether this be the primary purpose or the incidental effect of fiction is of little consequence.5"' Even here, however, the fear of immoral influence persisted. As has been noted, the very persons who had condemned fiction for untruth and unreality to life held in horror all realistic detail. Scott in his use of the saga of the Scottish Highlands had restored some of the elements of the romances, deviating from the path of the everyday novel of manners. The Tom Jones type of hero was, for a number of years, banished from the world of fiction. By some critics, the influence of women readers has been blamed for this hero's exile, on the grounds that women admire gallantry but not self-indulgence, insisting upon fidelity as their ideal in fiction as in life. 56 More specifically, however, at the end of the period under consideration, it was the force of a rising conservative movement, itself of the people, which carried on into the nineteenth century the tendency, then on the wane among reviewers, of judging literature principally by moral standards. Thus the Eclectic Review in 1 8 1 2 discovered no living characters in Hannah More's Coelebs but hastened to state that an inadequacy so unimportant, was completely counteracted by the "force of the moral lesson." 57 Although the Methodist Magazine in 1833 found the

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"capital defect" of Scott's novels to be "that they appear to have been written without any moral aim," these works were tolerated on the grounds that they had "to a considerable extent, superseded publications of a directly injurious character." 58 On the same principle the hero, Waverley, gained admittance to all except the strictest Evangelical homes while Tom Jones did not. The squeamish attitude toward realism was in full sway. In the light of such protest one can understand Thackeray's regret when, having felt the necessity of altering certain passages in Pendennis, he wrote: "Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict in his utmost power a M A N . " 8 9

V. READING FOR AMUSEMENT For trifles are not trifles when they

please!

— I . D'ISRAELI, "A Poetical Essay on Romance and Romancers," 1799

M

UCH of the opposition to the novel at the close of the century was directed, not only against the works themselves, but against all reading for amusement, particularly on the part of the new middle-class public. Indeed, light reading on any social level had long been frowned upon. At the midcentury, John Brown had complained in his Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times: Reading is now sunk at best into a Morning's Amusement; till the important Hour of Dress comes on. Books are no longer regarded as the Repositories of Taste and Knowledge; but are rather laid hold of, as a gentle Relaxation from the tedious Round of Pleasure.1 As this ability in reading in the later decades began, under the influence of the charity schools and Sunday schools, to permeate the lower orders, such criticisms became more serious.2 " W e have long lamented that the diffusion of literature is a very different thing from the diffusion of virtue, and that the easy circulation of knowledge has been perverted into the service of licentiousness," stated the Eclectic Review when lauding the work of the Religious Tract Society.3 Protesting against the spread of Sunday schools, the author of Variety: a Collection of Essays Written in the Year, ij8j, argued that a knowledge of books could in no wise keep the people of the lower orders from indolence, vice, or misery, and insisted that it was possible for them to obtain all the learning they needed orally from their teachers. Most of all, this opponent of the movement feared the eradication of class distinctions, since he believed that it was only when they were kept in due subordination that the poor could be useful, and since he considered "some degree of ignorance" necessary toward holding them in that tractable state.4 Propagandist John Boles objected to the teaching of any more reading to the lower ranks of society than was essential for an understanding of the Bible and religious tracts, on the grounds that it

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might have a tendency to cause members of this group to become dissatisfied with the manual labor which was destined to occupy their lives.8 Dr. Johnson's answer to this type of argument regarding education contained both a grain of wisdom and a prophecy. Asked whether or not he thought that by establishing schools upon his estate one Mr. Langton would make his people less industrious, the great lexicographer had replied, "No, Sir, . . . when every body learns to read and write, it is no longer a distinction." 6 The rapidity with which the charity school movement spread was not an unmitigated source of satisfaction, even to those who had supported the project, since what they expected in the line of reading formed a far more restricted diet than any to which these laboring groups that had found a new way of dispelling their boredom were able or inclined to adhere. After a clergyman had conveyed to her the disquieting news that novels were eagerly read even in the wards of hospitals, Hannah More, writing in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, labeled the situation "an awful hint, that those who teach the poor to read, should not only take care to furnish them with principles which will lead them to abhor corrupt books, but that they should also furnish them with such books as shall strengthen and confirm their principles."7 James Sands in his comprehensive "Defence of Modern Novels" quoted and replied to Miss More upon this subject of hospital reading, contending that if such light compositions could ease "the languid hours of sickness," or could "act as a 'mild oblivious antidote' to mental anguish" they had sufficiently proved their utility. "Indeed," he continued, "with the exception of books of devotion, which are certainly more suitable to a suffering sinner, but which require a previous education to be properly relished, a good Novel seems as proper for an hospital as Voyages, and Travels, or History, or Biography, or the Drama." He had his taboo to enforce in the matter of general reading, however, and concluded with the protestation that he would rather discover a member of the lower orders reading one of the novels which Hannah More found so mischievous than to see him "with a newspaper in hand, plunging into the gulph of politics . . ." 8 "To an ardent open mind there is nothing more dangerous than a mixed and indiscriminate course of reading," maintains a contributor to the Methodist Magazine, at the same time issuing the warning: "Persons who keep a circulating library, generally do it for a living, and consequently endeavour, not so much to improve the minds, as to gratify the taste of

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their readers."9 In 1 8 1 7 a writer in the Christian Observer, a publication of the Clapham sect, notes the change which has come over the libraries of religious families in the lapse of a quarter of a century. He has seen "desert book-cases" which lined the parlor wall quickened into life, and has with "no very pleasurable feelings" watched a "naturalization of fashionable literature." As censor of books for his family, this father has hitherto excluded what were generally thought to be the most dangerous in the field of light reading, novels. He has done this partly on the grounds that his children have not yet read the books which he considers worth while: "My eldest daughter only finished Addison's critique on Milton five weeks since; and I tell her, that, according to the ancient code of lettered law, she must fairly purchase her right to run through the new publications by fairly studying the old ones." In the opinion of this cautious parent, the passion for novels has been intensified by the popularity of narrative verse. He not only deplores the fact that the admission of Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel into his home some twelve years ago has since opened the way for the poetry of Lord Byron, but he expresses the belief that, although "the waters had been gradually rising" for some time, it was, more than anything else, the introduction of the Lay which brought to a "flood-height" this undesirable "inundation of indiscriminate reading." 10 Always suspicious of the "rage for new publications," conservative Mrs. Trimmer would even oppose placing the advisability of novel reading before young persons as a subject upon which they could express their ideas. Accordingly, in the review of The Juvenile Library which she wrote for her Guardian of Education, she filed protest against the Prize Question which had been proposed in this work for original composition, one which she did not even want young people to be sufficiently well informed to discuss: "Whether such a love of Novels as excludes all other reading, or no reading at all is to be preferred?" 11 More moderate in his attitude than the Evangelical father who forbade all fiction, and indeed, than other members of his own sect, was John Wesley, who likewise opposed any wide reading of novels but was not averse to using the form as a vehicle for propagating his doctrines. In a letter to Miss Bishop, the mistress of a boarding school, he expressed his objection to the fiction-reading habit when he wrote, " I would recommend very few novels to young persons, for fear they should be desirous for more." 12 However, so enthusiastic was he about at least one such pro-

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duction, Henry Brooke's famous Fool of Quality, that he made an adaptation of it under the title of The History of Henry, Earl of Moreland. His interest is a triumph for fiction itself since, having been prejudiced against the work because of its "whimsical Title," he had on one occasion thrown the volume aside. Later, however, he by chance picked up the book and, reading one page, became intrigued. The primary complaint which Wesley made against this piece of writing was the length to which the story was spun out, and in his revision he therefore eliminated practically one third of (as he expressed it) "what was published in those five volumes, more to the satisfaction of the bookseller than of the judicious reader." 13 The success with which he thus expurgated the novel to fit his ideas is indicated by Charles Kingsley when, in the Biographical Preface to a later edition, he says that "country Wesleyans still believe their great prophet to have been himself the author of the book." 14 As might be expected, this act on the part of their leader brought criticism from many of the more conservative members of the sect. Especially loud in his protest was one of the itinerant preachers, John Easton, to whose criticism Wesley once replied with a series of questions about the work which indicate that he was fully aware of the power of the character delineations but that his opponent was not: Wesley—"Did you read Vindex, John?" Easton—"Yes, sir." W.—"Did you laugh, John?" E.—"No, sir." W.—"Did you read Damon and Pythias, John?" E.—"Yes, sir." W.—"Did you cry, John?" E.—"No, sir." Wesley, lifting up his eyes, and clasping his hands, exclaimed: " O earth—earth—earth!" 15 It must be acknowledged, however, that Wesley's interest lay primarily in the value of the tale as a means of conveying truth, "so that the thinking reader is taught, without any trouble, the most essential doctrines of religion." 10 But the Methodists as a body abhorred all fiction,17 and as Tyerman has remarked in his biography, "that an old evangelist, like Wesley, bordering on fourscore years of age, should revise, abridge,

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publish, and circulate a novel has always been a perplexity to a certain section of Wesley's admirers." 18 The antipathy with which members of this denomination as a whole viewed such reading is well reflected by a writer in the Methodist Magazine who, terming the habit "novelism," lists four major objections against it. 19 Two of these, the dissipating influence upon the mind and the waste of time, had long been among the most prevalent of the arguments which the fiction enthusiast was forced to combat, but it was by the conservative sects especially that they were kept alive well into the nineteenth century.

2 Thoroughly in line with the distrust of reading for amusement was the idea that novels would unfit the mind for more solid pursuits and intoxicate it with a morbid sensibility. "It has been well observed, that the reading of novels is to the mind what dram-drinking is to the body," announced the periodical, the Miniature,20 while James Beattie felt called upon to end his seventy-page discussion, "On Fable and Romance," with a warning to youth concerning all works of fiction: A habit of reading them breeds a dislike to history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge; withdraws the attention from nature, and truth; and fills the mind with extravagant thoughts, and too often with criminal propensities. I would therefore caution my young reader against them: or, if he must, for the sake of amusement, and that he may have something to say on the subject, indulge himself in this way now and then, let it be sparingly and seldom.21 Asserting that "a novel-reading public will never be a poetry-reading public," the Athenaeum maintained that when our faculties are at their peak we pick up a poem; when they are at low ebb, we "court embecility and inanition in the pages of a novel." 22 In a more descriptive vein, the perturbed correspondent in the Methodist Magazine had suggested: "Ask the man, who with smiling but vacant countenance, rises from reading Tom Jones, Don Quixote, etc., if his judgment is better informed; if his mind is more expanded; his stock of ideas increased; or if he is better prepared for performing the duties of his station?" On the contrary, according to this spokesman, the habitual novel reader will find his intellect "engaging

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in aerial pursuits, spinning out fictions of its own . . , " m The Christian Observer found such works so highly seasoned as to spoil one's appetite for more serious study,24 while the Eclectic Review sensed that a "sickly taste" was induced with which a "thirst for knowledge" was completely incompatible.25 Coleridge was also convinced of this harmful tendency and said, I will run the risk of asserting, that where the reading of novels prevails as a habit, it occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind: it is such an utter loss to the reader, that it is not so much to be called pass-time as kill-time. It . . . produces no improvement of the intellect, but fills the mind with a mawkish and morbid sensibility, which is directly hostile to the cultivation, invigoration, and enlargement of the nobler powers of the understanding.26 As analyzed by the reviewer for the Christian Observer, the novel was destined by its very nature to produce this pernicious effect. If the plot is to arouse interest, he argued, it must build upon one distressing situation after another: If the writer succeeds in his art, he excites in the breast of his readers, the very feelings and passions which he describes. A tempest is raised in the mind; and till the same magic power which called it forth has calmed the storm, we cannot easily turn with serious attention to any other subject.27 Likewise, a contributor to this periodical advanced the opinion that Dr. Johnson "would have written more accurately" if instead of saying that Richardson's novels "taught the passions to move at the command of virtue," he had "supposed them to have fluttered under the excitement of high feeling." 28 In 1 8 1 5 a subscriber who signed himself " A . A . " set forth a long and scorching denunciation of all novels and works of fancy. "It is this continual feeding of the imagination in which the great danger of novels consists," this writer proclaimed as he also adapted to his own use the words of the great lexicographer. "If Dr. Johnson could confess," he urged, "that were his waking reveries told, they would appear little short of the extravagances of Don Quixote, what must be the influence of imagination upon undisciplined minds . . . ?" 29 The reply to " A . A . " 's argument caused Zachary Macaulay, the editor

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of the Christian Observer, some little embarrassment. Contending that the imagination, "the faculty which your respectable correspondent seems determined to eradicate from human nature," needed only "judicious training" to make it useful, a contributor pointed out that of all works of fancy, it was the novel which had suffered the most abuse. Dividing works of fiction into five classes, he bestowed praise upon the writings of Fielding and Smollett and strongly insisted that since there were good novels as well as bad, all should not be blindly rejected.80 The article evoked violent protest from shocked correspondents, one of whom announced that he had burned the offensive number of the magazine and wished therewith to discontinue his subscription. Although the editor made suitable reply, he had by that time no heart for the controversy, because he was then aware that the remarks which had caused such a storm among his conservative readers had been written by his own son, Thomas Babington. Nor were this editor's views upon the subject as extreme as many of his subscribers might have wished. According to Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Mr. Macaulay disapproved of novel reading and forbade such activity in the daytime, but he was too indulgent with his children to insist upon such a point and therefore "lived to see himself the head of a family in which novels were more read and better remembered than in any household in the United Kingdom." 8 1 This same evil effect upon the intellect was one of the principal reasons assigned by the Quakers for placing a ban on works of fiction. "The Quakers conceive that there is among professed novel readers a peculiar cast of mind. They observe in them a romantic spirit, a sort of wonderloving imagination, and a disposition towards enthusiastic flights of the fancy, which to sober persons has the appearance of a temporary derangement." So writes Thomas Clarkson in his Portraiture of Quakerism, as he gives the history of prohibitions upon the subject by the cautious George Fox, William Penn, and other leaders.32 Nor can Clarkson himself refrain from adding his own engaging parenthetical observation upon the unwholesome excitement which such works arouse: I have been told by a physician of the first eminence that music and novels have done more to produce the sickly countenances and nervous habits of our highly educated females, than any other causes that can be assigned. The excess of stimulus on the mind from the interesting

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and melting tales, that are peculiar to novels, affects the organs of the body, and relaxes the tone of the nerves, in the same manner as the melting tones of music have been described to act upon the constitution, after the sedentary employment, necessary for skill in that science, has injured it.83 Lord Macaulay makes a pleasing reference to the attitude of this group toward fiction when, in a letter to his sisters, Hannah and Margaret, he asks, Do you read any novels at Liverpool? I should fear that the good Quakers would twitch them out of your hands, and appoint their portion in the fire. Yet probably you have some safe place, some box, some drawer with a key, wherein a marble-covered book may lie for Nancy's Sunday reading.34 On another occasion, he recommends a novel which he has enjoyed and advises, "Smuggle it in, next time that you go to Liverpool, from some circulating library; and deposit it in a lock-up place out of the reach of them that are clothed in drab; and read it together at the curling hour." 35 The self-conscious feeling about wasting time is another attitude of the age which was brought to bear upon the novel. The Lady's Monthly Museum runs "Three Letters, to a Young Lady, on the Proper Employment of Time," viewing that element as an article purchased and analyzing with the utmost care and seriousness the ways in which it can be most profitably used.36 The periodicals abound with such comments upon the proper disposal of one's leisure, especially as it affects the lower classes. It is not surprising, therefore, to find the voracious novel reader the chief object of much of this type of criticism. All books of amusement were called "time-traps," works of fiction invariably being cited as the conspicuous example. Thus the Lounger discovers the institution most needed in Edinburgh to be a hospital for the idle where women could write novels and men could read them.37 Quoting Lord Falkland's remark, "I pity an unlearned gentleman on a rainy day," another critic, however, finds reading some "innocent novel" to be at least more desirable than spending several hours in a "contemptible lounge," since in his opinion no form of diversion "can be more despicable than the sight of an empty head gazing out at a window for amusement in the street!" Nevertheless,

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he feels compelled to qualify this concession to fiction by remarking that, although he is willing to confess having received pleasure from the reading of Coventry's Pompey the Little and the novels of Fielding, he would think himself "excessively idle" if he devoted much time to that type of entertainment.38 Similarly, the Reasoner maintains that the two most objectionable ways of killing time are the reading of novels and an excess of sleep,39 while the protest of the Monthly Magazine came in the form of an "Epitaph of a Novelist:" Accept in rime Our last adieu; Once you kill'd time, Then time kill'd you.-10 It was with the conservative religious groups, however, that this anxiety about misspending time reached the point of frenzy and was ranked as a sin. A Methodist adviser urged young persons to place upon their dressing tables an hourglass and a death's-head, "one to remind them of the swiftness of time, and the other of the certainty of death."41 Music and novel reading were frequently spoken of together as the two worst means of misspending time. Hannah More appended to the later editions of her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education Bishop Cleaver's computation of the amount of time which the study of music had, in one instance, required. If the pupil practiced four hours a day from the ages of six to eighteen, Sundays excepted and thirteen days allowed annually for traveling, she would, according to this calculation, have spent a total of 14,400 hours in this manner. More serious, indeed, than Miss More's animadversions upon the evils of the situation seems the ironic additional bit of information that this ambitious young lady finally married a man who disliked music!42 Asserting that the injunction regarding the proper use of time is "of a commanding nature" and "ought to have almost, if not altogether, an equal influence upon our minds with 'Thou shalt do no murder," " a Methodist observer likewise turns his attention toward novel reading as a means of violating that law. In contrast to the computation concerning music, his estimate allows only two hours a day for the objectionable type of diversion, but by spreading his reckoning over a long period, he makes the severe implications of his mathematics even more imposing. If two hours are spent daily with these books, he

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computes, the sum is equal to "a loss of two months in each year; and this, in fifty years, makes an awful total of eight years and jour months of precious time!" 43 The supposed sheer waste involved in the enjoyment of novels, therefore, helped to earn that pleasant form of diversion a place alongside the most weighty in the list of the transgressions of the frivolous. Thus, although the novel had begun to receive more than casual recognition as a literary form and was no longer judged exclusively on moral grounds by the reviewers, it encountered the opposition of those rising conservatives who opposed light and extensive reading along with numerous other forms of amusement. Acknowledging that she had read Sir Walter Scott's poetry "with safety, though certainly not with profit," Hannah More, nevertheless, was content with having completed one volume and a half of that writer's novels. Although she was willing to recognize Scott's genius, she still thought three score years and ten too short a time in which to read all of the Waverley series if one had more serious duties to perform.44 The Methodists agreed perfectly with Miss More's attitude toward Scott. A member of this sect acknowledges freely the "breathless attention" which his novels have attracted among those who read for amusement, all of whom, from the grave Divine and Statesman, and the busy merchant, down to the Apothecary's 'prentice, and the sempstress in the milliner's shop, have read the "Waverley Novels," could talk about the different characters described in them, and tell the title of the next work of the series, as well as the day on which it was "to arrive in Town." Nevertheless, he deplores the fact that these works are obviously intended only to interest and play upon the feelings of the reader. "If amusement be the end of human experience," he concludes, this aim is sufficient; but if not, "for a man of talent and learning to expend his entire energies in writing books of this class is the veriest trifling." So it is that while this spokesman finds some consolation in the fact that these publications have displaced others which he considers pernicious, he is confident that as men become more serious "such works as the 'Waverley Novels' will cease to be applauded."45

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hi

3 Before the novel could make its larger contribution to the new reading public which had adopted it so eagerly, it was therefore necessary for it to be defended as light reading. Champions on this score were headed by that enthusiastic devotee of novels, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who late in life exclaimed, " I thank God my taste still continues for the gay part of reading. Wiser people may think it trifling, but it serves to sweeten life to me, and is at worst better than the generality of conversation."46 Rebuking her daughter for calling her books of fiction "trash, lumber, sad stuff," she argued that her time was "better employed in reading the adventures of imaginary people" than was that of the Duchess of Marlborough, "who passed the latter years of her life in paddling with her will . . ," 47 In 1770 Charles Jenner prefaced one of the books of his Placid Man with a frank defense of novel reading as a pastime. Although he was fully convinced of the instructional value of works of fiction, "natural vehicles," as he termed them, of the utile dulce, he preferred to look upon them purely as "pleasing and innocent amusements." He noted the variety of means man uses to elude anxiety—"one hunts, one shoots, one plays, one reads, one writes,"—and recommended the agreeable diversion of "castle-building," or "pleasing reverie," for which a novel better than anything else provides the materials.48 However questionable the psychological value of this type of mental amusement might be, the plan, nevertheless, represents a far departure from the pedantic attitude of many of Jenner's contemporaries in regard to fiction. Similarly, Richard Graves remarks in his novel, Eugenics, that if the reader who picks up the book is a lady who studies Robertson, Hume, or Gibbon, he desires her to "go on and prosper!" But if she is among those women "who nurse their own children, and teach them their catechism; or play at Pope Joan with the curate's wife and daughters; or sometimes read a novel, these long winter evenings, in the country," she is here offered light, harmless entertainment which the writer trusts will keep her awake until her usual time of going to bed. He adds, moreover, that if she should fall asleep, she ought not to begrudge her "sixpence at the circulating library," since she is then also oblivious to her cares.49 When Mrs. Barbauld came to publish her British Novelists in 1810, she stated definitely in her introductory essay,

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"For my own part, I scruple not to confess that, when I take up a novel, my end and object is entertainment . . . ," 8 0 while John Moore, arguing for the recreational value of the reading of fiction, amplified his plea by asserting that adverse critics "ought to recollect how many languid intervals there are in their journey through life; how often they fill them up in a more pernicious way; and if a novel or romance should now and then help them to jog along with more innocence and less yawning, they ought to be a little more grateful." 81 Keen-minded Thomas Babington Macaulay, however, in his strong defense of such reading, had begun to see the power of fiction as a leavening influence upon society far beyond the realm of simple amusement, an influence at once more forceful and more complex than that expressed in the old and much-dreaded formula, " A copy will produce an original." 62 Writing from Cambridge in 1820, he irately and brilliantly refutes the rumor which has reached his Evangelical father that he has the reputation of being a novel reader. Assured by his three closest friends that they have never known him to be so described, he allows wittily that their very intimacy may have prevented them from hearing such a comment, since it is not customary "for a gentleman who does not wish to be kicked downstairs to reply to a man who mentions another as his particular friend, 'Do you mean the blackguard or the novel-reader?' " This point disposed of, he proceeds to heap scorn upon those by whom the appellation is used as a form of rebuke. Some of his fellow students, he finds, belong in this category, men whose minds are "contracted" by concentrating upon a narrow field, whose memories are "stored only with technicalities." He writes, How often have I seen men go forth into society for people to stare at them, and ask each other how it comes that beings so stupid in conversation, so uninformed on every subject of history, of letters, and of taste, could gain such distinction at Cambridge! It is in such circles . . . that knowledge of modern literature is called novel-reading: a commodious name, invented by ignorance and applied by envy. . . . To me the attacks of such men are valuable as compliments. The man whose friend tells him that he is known to be extensively acquainted with elegant literature may suspect that he is flattering him; but he may feel real and secure satisfaction when some Johnian sneers at him for a novel-reader.53

R E A D I N G FOR A M U S E M E N T

113

But critics who considered the mass of new readers from the middle classes were still imbued with the idea that light reading gave members of this group a taste for the unattainable and filled their heads with ideas about which they knew nothing and were therefore able to form no judgment. In 1800 Dr. Currie, the biographer of Robert Burns, in commenting upon the poet's connection with one of the early book dubs, the Mauchline Club, expressed sincere doubt as to "whether the books which were purchased were of a kind best adapted to promote the interest and happiness of persons in this situation of life." Since originally a majority of the members of the organization were farmers, this writer felt that works which were primarily calculated "to refine the taste of those who read them" were potentially injurious. Having declared his original position, however, Dr. Currie then proceeded to qualify his statement in a manner truly progressive for his day. "It may be observed, on the other hand," he wrote, "that the first step to improvement is to awaken the desire of improvement, and that this will be most effectually done by such reading as interests the heart and excites the imagination." More significantly, he continued by allowing that, every human being is the proper judge of his own happiness, and, within the path of innocence, ought to be permitted to pursue it. Since it is the taste of the Scotch peasantry to give a preference to works of taste and fancy, it may be presumed they find a superior gratification in the perusal of such works. . . , 54 In an interesting book of the midnineteenth century called The Old Printer and the Modern Press, Charles Knight commends Dr. Currie's quite timid statement of an idea which he thinks should be "the foundation of every attempt to provide books for all readers." He is gratified to note that taste in reading is at last no more "the exclusive property of the rich" than it is of " 'the swink'd hedger at his supper,' " and views with satisfaction the passing of the old boast that certain books were " 'adapted to the meanest capacity.' " B 3 Because the common people work hard, and because the training for reading has been very recent, he believes that the great popularity of books of a lighter nature is not surprising. The importance of these works, therefore, should not be underestimated.50 Knight's volume is dedicated to his contemporary, Charles Dickens, "one of the most earnest labourers in that popular literature which elevates

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AMUSEMENT

a people." At Birmingham, on December 30, 1853, Dickens gave one of the earliest of his famous public readings before two thousand interested workingmen, having previously stipulated that the price of seats be kept within their means.57 By so doing he might be thought of as epitomizing the larger force which the novel was wielding in the interests of the same lower classes which had contributed to that type of writing its greatest public and popularity. In spite of the fact that the bad reputation of the novel as a literary form was still sufficiently strong to cause Dickens to be looked down upon by reviewers such as those for the Athenaeum,58 in his work and in the social novel of his age those who had long insisted upon didactic purpose began to feel that they had something of value which they could assign to this species of composition. That the formula was not so simple as they believed, or, indeed, that the novel had actually been a great social force since the publication of Pamela, did not concern critics of this type. Nor did it any longer matter. A more powerful critic, the new reading public, had passed its verdict. The miners who heard Dickens at Birmingham were a quite different group from the silken circle who had listened to Richardson read Clarissa; they represented a change which had made its influence felt upon the novel form itself, as well as upon the nation. Far stronger than the persistently recurring waves of opposition was the growing conviction that the reading of novels was a rational form of amusement. It was Charles Lamb who most effectively expressed this attitude as he contemplated the delight which fiction had brought to the generality of readers: How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old "Circulating Library" Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight!— of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantua-maker) after her long day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents!59

NOTES CHAPTER I

1. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, in Works (Literary Club ed.; Troy, N. Y., 1 9 0 3 ) , IX, 198- For comments on the growth of the reading public see: Maurice J. Quinlan, Victorian Prelude: a History of English Manners, 17001830 (New York, 1941), pp. 160, 179-80; William Connor Sydney, England and the English in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1 8 9 1 ) , II, 131-42; A. S. Collins, "The Growth of the Reading Public," Nineteenth Century, CI (May, 1 9 2 7 ) , 749-58; Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1 9 3 2 ) , pp. 106-50. 2. Spectator, No. X (March 12, 1 7 1 1 ) . 3. Thomas Holcroft, Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft . . . (London, 1816), I, 134-36. 4. Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1 7 8 7 ) , p. 261. 5. Olla Podrida, No. IV (April 7, 1 7 8 7 ) , p. 48. 6. James Lackington, Memoirs of the Forty-five First Years of the Life of James Lacking/on (London, 1 7 9 5 ) , p. 377. 7. Ibid., pp. 213-17, 355. 8. Ibid., p. 427. See also W. F. Lloyd, Sketch of the Life of Robert Raikes, Esq., and of the History of Sunday Schools (New York, 1849) ; John Carroll Power, The Rise and Progress of Sunday Schools (New York, 1863) ; and Robert Raikes, the Man and His Work, ed. J. Henry Harris (New York, 1 8 9 9 ) . 9. Lackington, op. cit., p. 429. 10. Ibid., pp. 420-21. 11. Charles Leslie, A View of the Times, Their Principles and Practises: in the First Volume of the Rehearsals (London, 1 7 5 0 ) , Preface. 12. William Cowper, "The Task," Book III, 11. 158-59. 13. James Thomson, "Winter," 11. 617-20. 14. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, in Works (London, 1818), VII, 218-19. 15. Reasoner, No. VI (January, 1 8 1 4 ) , pp. 352-55. 16. Anna Letitia Aikin, "On Romances: an Imitation," in J. and A. L. Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (London, 1773), p. 41. 17. Monthly Review, V, NS (July, 1 7 9 1 ) , 337. 18. George Saintsbury, The English Novel (London, 1 9 2 4 ) , p. 147. 19. Miniature, No. II (April 30, 1 8 0 4 ) , p. 13.

ii 6

NOTES

20. Anthony Trollope, "Novel-Reading," Nineteenth Century, V (January, 1879), 32-33. 21. Rowland Edmund Prothero Ernie, The Light Reading of Our Ancestors: Chapters in the Growth of the English Novel (London, 1927), pp. 9-10. 22. [James Sands], "A General Defence of Modern Novels," prefixed to Monckton; or, The Fate of Eleanor (London, 1802), p. xv. 23. John Moore, "A View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance," prefixed to The Works of Tobias Smollett, M. D., with Memoirs of His Life (London, 1797), I, xcii. 24. Jane Austen, Nonhanger Abbey (Everyman ed.; London, 1906), pp. 2122.

25. fane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, collected and ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1932), I, 38-39. 26. Francis Coventry, The History of Pompey the Little; or, The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog (London, 1751), Dedication. 27. Frances d'Arblay, Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay, ed. Charlotte Barrett (London, 1842-46), III, 301. 28. Monthly Review, X X X V (November, 1766), 407. 29. Lady's Magazine, X X (April, 1789), 177. 30. Ibid., X X (February, 1789), 81. 31. Albinia Gwynn, The Rencontre; or, Transition of a Moment (Dublin, 1785), Preface. 32. William Combe, The Devil upon Two Sticks in England . . . (London, 1791), II, 83. 33. Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, in Works (London, 1818),XI, 159. 34. Lady's Magazine, X X (April, 1789), 177. 35. Monthly Review, X X I V (June, 1761), 415. 36. Blackwood's Magazine, X I (March, 1822), 368. The majority of the papers in the Nodes Ambrosianae were written by John Wilson (Christopher North). The first number, however, has been generally attributed to Dr. William Maginn. See Carrie Thompson Lowell, Christopher North and the Noctes Ambrosianae (Boston, 1928), p. 89; Nodes Ambrosianae, ed. R. Shelton Mackenzie (New York, 1863), I, xv. 37. [Eliza Haywood], The Invisible Spy (London, 1755), III, 267. 38. Ladys Magazine, X X (February, 1789), 81. 39. D'Arblay, Diary . . . , VI, 68. 40. Courtney Melmoth, pseud. [Samuel Jackson Pratt], Family Secrets (London, 1797), I, 384. 41. Critical Review, X X I (April, 1766), 288-89. 42. Ibid., X X I I I (March, 1767), 217. 43. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals, ed. from the Larpent MS by R. L. Purdy (Oxford, 1935), Act I, Sc. ii.

NOTES

" 7

44. Charles Dickens, "Our English Watering Place," in Works (New York, 1924-26), X, 189-90. 45. Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, in Works (London, 1903), V, Preface. 46. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance . . . (New York, 1930), I, 7, 110-11, and passim. 47. Edinburgh Review, XXVIII (March, 1817), 193. 48. Monthly Review, L (April, 1774), 327. 49. Athenaeum, September 17, 1828, p. 735. 50. British Critic, VIII, NS (October, 1817), 430. 51. Monthly Review, VI (March, 1752), 231. 52. See Joseph Bunn Heidler, "The History, from 1700 to 1800, of English Criticism of Prose Fiction," University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. XIII (May, 1928), No. 2. Dr. Heidler deals exclusively with the development of critical criteria in regard to the novel, making it clear that throughout the length of the century the form had failed to find its Aristotle, Horace, or Longinus. 53. Analytical Review, I (July, 1788), 333. 54. D'Arblay, Diary . . . , VI, 80. 55. The Temple Beau; or, The Town Coquets (London, 1754), Dedication. 56. Belinda; or, The Fair Fugitive (London, 1789), Dedication. 57. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, ed. by her daughter (London, 1783), II, 80. 58. Elizabeth Montagu Mrs. Montagu cf. ill, 23. Mrs. Montagu, "Queen of the Blues," Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800, ed. Reginald Blunt (London, [ 1 9 2 3 ] ) , I, 237. 59. Richard Graves, Columella; or, The Distressed Anchoret: a Colloquial Tale (London, 1779), Dedication. 60. Henry Card, Beauford; or, A Picture of High Life (London, 1811), Dedication. 61. Hawkins, op. cit., p. 213. 62. Moore, op. cit., I, xcii. 63. D'Arblay, Diary . . . , VI, 47. 64. Fanny Burney, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (London, 1814), Dedication. 65. Alexander Pope, "The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace," 11. 169-72, 176-80, 185-89. 66. James Ridley, The History of fames Lovegrove, Esq. (London, 1761), II, 95. 67. Vicessimus Knox, Essays Moral and Literary (London, 1782), I, 243. 68. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton (London, 1856), p. 4. See also Biographia Literaria, in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York, 1884), III, 183-84 ; and "The Statesman's Manual," Compiete Works, I, 441-42 and note.

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69. Robert Semple, Charles Ellis; or, The Friends (London, 1806), Preface. 70. John Piper, The Life of Miss Fanny Brown . . . (Birmingham, 1 7 6 0 ) , Preface. 71. The Distrest Wife; or, The History of Eliza Wyndham, Related in a Journey from Salisbury (London, 1 7 6 8 ) , Advertisement. 72. Interesting Memoirs (5th ed.; Boston, 1 8 0 2 ) , Preface. 73. Richard Graves, Eugenius; or, Anecdotes of the Golden Vale (2d ed.; London, 1 7 8 6 ) , Dedication. 74. The False Friends (London, 1 7 8 5 ) , Preface. 75. Edward Du Bois, Old Nick: a Satirical Story (London, 1 8 0 1 ) , Dedication. 76. Fatal Effects of Deception (London, 1 7 7 3 ) , Advertisement. Review, 77. George Eliot, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," Westminster L X V I (October, 1 8 5 6 ) , 461. 78. Piper, op. cit., Preface. 79. Monthly Review, LII (April, 1 7 7 5 ) , 361. 80. Analytical Review, I (June, 1 7 8 8 ) , 208. 81. Hannah More, Strictures . . . , in Works, VII, 216-17. 82. Du Bois, op. cit., Preface. 83. Fanny Burney, Evelina; or, A Young Lady's Entrance into the World (London, 1 7 7 9 ) , Preface. 84. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, p. 21.

CHAPTER I I

1. See A. D. McKillop, "English Circulating Libraries, 1725-1750," Library. X I V ( 1 9 3 4 ) , 4 8 4 ; Paul Dottin, "L'Accueil fait à Pamela," Revue AngloAméricaine, VII (August, 1 9 3 0 ) , 517. 2. Miss Marjorie Watkins, curator of rare books at the New York Society Library, has made an interesting tabulation of the large percentage of fiction contained in the collection which up to about 1850 formed the greater part of the circulating library of James Hammond in Newport, Rhode Island. Of the 1,845 volumes printed between 1728 and 1850, 1,567 are novels; 108, plays; and 170, books of history, biography, travel, and popular "beauties" of standard authors. 3. Gentleman's Magazine, LVI (December, 1 7 8 6 ) , 1023. 4. Esther McGill, "The Evergreen Tree of Diabolical Knowledge," Bookman, L X X I I I (May, 1 9 3 1 ) , 2 6 8 ; Charles Knight, The Old Printer and the Modern Press (London, 1 8 5 4 ) , pp. 221-23; J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (London, 1 9 3 2 ) , p. 10. 5. The History of Miss Emilia Beville (London, 1 7 6 8 ) , Vol. I. 6. Knight, op. cit., p. 229. 7. John Milton, "Sonnet X I , " in Works (New York, 1931-38), I, 62.

NOTES

119

8. Charles Lamb, "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," in Works (New York, 1903-05), II, 176-77. 9. The Thracian Wonder: a Comical History (London, 1661). 10. Robert Nevile, The Poor Scholar: a Comedy (London, 1662), Act II, Sc. iv, See also All the Year Round, L X X I V (May 26, 1894), 4 8 9 ; McKillop, op. cit., p. 4 7 7 ; Reginald Arthur Rye, The Students' Guide to the Libraries of London (London, 1927), p. 243, n. 1. 11. Benjamin Franklin, Complete Works (New York, 1887-88), I, 89. 12. Gentleman's Magazine, LIII (October, 1783), 832. 13. McKillop, op. cit., p. 479. 14. In The Picture of London, for 1813 . . . , p. 332, John Feltham states, "The Edinburgh Circulating Library, established in 1725, by the celebrated Alan Ramsay, was the first institution of the kind in Great Britain." 15. Robert Wodrow, Analecta; or, Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences . . . (Edinburgh, 1842-43), III, 515. See also Burns Martin, Allan Ramsay: a Study of His Life and Works (Cambridge, 1931), pp. 33-34. 16. Samuel Fancourt, The Narrative (London, 1747), pp. 3-5. 17. James Lackington, Memoirs . . . (London, 1795), p. 422. 18. Fancourt, op. cit., p. 6. 19. In Ibid., p. 7, Fancourt explains: "But since my Library could not now be disposed of by Lot, I was advised to make it the Joint Property of the Subscribers, under certain Rules of Circulation : Which would perpetuate the Use of the Library to others, without any Disadvantage to the Librarian. The Substance of the Plan is this Whereas Gentlemen and Ladies have given a Guinea a year several Years together for the bare Use of the present Library, a better Library now becomes their common Property, and circulates among them for one Guinea only. This Property is about to be vested in the Hands of Trustees, of their own chusing, out of their own Body. There is indeed Twelve-Pence a Quarter to be paid besides to continue their Right; which, if the number be compleated, (and so in Proportion) will maintain a Librarian, pay the Rent of convenient Rooms, defray the Expence of Catalogues, and bring in, as an additional Property, sixty or eighty Pounds of new Books every Year; which will, with the rest, descend to them and their Assigns for ever." See also the Dictionary of National Biography under "Fancourt." 20. Gentleman's Magazine, LIV (April, 1784), 273; Dictionary of National Biography under "Fancourt"; Rye, op. cit., p. 31. 21. Annual Register ( 1 7 6 1 ) , p. 207. 22. Edward Mangin, An Essay on Light Reading (London, 1808), pp. 12-13In this essay and in the biographical sketch which he later prefixed to his

120

NOTES

edition of the works of Richardson, Rev. Mangin stresses the influence which the reading of fiction has upon the English people, chronicling in detail the evils engendered by the ordinary contents of a circulating library. From his censure of novelists, he excepts only Goldsmith and his favorite, the author of Pamela and Clarissa. 23. Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1 8 0 3 ) , II, 426. 24. [John Feltham], The Picture of London, for 1807 . . . (London, 1807), pp. 318-19. 25. The most complete account of Lane's career is the one given by Dorothy Blakey in The Minerva Press, 1790 1820 (London, 1939), pp. 5-25. See also McGill op. cit., pp. 269-70; Amy Cruse, The Englishman and His Books in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, 1 9 3 0 ) , p. 94. 26. C. H. Timperley, Encyclopaedia of Literary and Typographical Anecdote (London, 1842), p. 853. 27. Blakey, op. cit., p. 18. 28. Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers (London, 1856), p. 139. 29. Cyrus Redding, Fifty Years' Recollections . . . (London, 1858), I, 58. 30. Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1847), I, 30-34. 31. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt . . . (New York, 1 8 5 0 ) , I, 168. 32. W . H. Ireland, Scribbleomania; or, The Printer's Devil's Polichronicon (London, 1815), p. 157n. 33. Jane Austen, Fragment of a Novel (first printed from the MS, Oxford, 1 9 2 5 ) , pp. 71-72. 34. Frances d'Arblay, Diary . . . (London, 1842-46), I, 218. 35. Anthony Pasquin, pseud. (John Williams), The New Brighton Guide (London, 1796), p. 5. 36. William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, in Collected Works (London, 1902-04), IV, 243 n. 37. William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis, in Works (New York, 18989 9 ) , II, 469. 38. A Further Selection from the Diaries and Letters of Sir George Jackson . . . (London, 1873), I, 134. 39. Anti-Jacobin, LVIII (August, 1820), 517. 40. Samuel Foote, The Author, in Works (London, 1830), I, 194. 41. Austen, op. cit., pp. 69-72. 42. John Wood, A Description of Bath (London, 1769), p. 417. 43. The Wonders of a Week at Bath . . . (London, 1811), pp. 21-24. 44. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (New York, 1 9 0 5 ) , p. 40. 45. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Everyman ed.; London, 1906), p. 160.

NOTES

121

46. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals, ed. from the Larpent MS by R. L. Purdy (Oxford, 1935), Act I, Sc. ii. 47. James Taylor, The Royal Brighton Guide . . . (Brighton, 1826), p. 9. Similarly, a doggerel poem of 1830, called "Brighton!! A Comic Sketch," contains in Stanza XXXVII the lines: But to the course! speed, ladies, speed! Leave libraries and loo . . . 48. Robert Bisset, Modern Literature (London, 1804), II, 9-24. 49. Robert Bisset, Douglas; or, The Highlander (London, 1800), II, 290. 50. Knight, op. cit., pp. 232-33. 51. William Makepeace Thackeray, Roundabout Papers, in Works, XII, 227. 52. Courtney Melmoth, Family Secrets (London, 1797), I, 384-90. 53. Francis Lathom, Men and Manners (London, 1799), III, 48-55. 54. Elizabeth Griffith, The History of Lady Barton (London, 1771), Preface. 55. Gentleman's Magazine, XXIV (July, 1754), 324. The catalogue is reprinted from the Connoisseur, I, No. XXIV (July 11, 1754), 190-93. 56. Ibid., LVIII (May, 1788), 391. 57. Ibid., LXXV (December, 1805), 1136. 58. Ibid., LXXVIII (September, 1808), 782-83. 59- Joshua Collins, pseud., A Practical Guide to Parents and Guardians, in the Right Choice and Use of Books . . . (London, 1802), pp. 27-29. 60. Sarah Trimmer in the Guardian of Education, I (June, 1802), 63. 61. William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More (New York, 1836), II, 168. 62. Hannah More, Strictures . . . , in Works (London, 1818), VII, 202-03. 63. Evangelical Magazine, XII (September, 1804), 414. 64. Tompkins, op. cit., p. 3. 65. Gentleman's Magazine, LXXIV (May, 1804), 402. 66. Anthony Trollope, Four Lectures (London, 1938), p. 97. 67. Olla Podrida, No. IV (April 7, 1787), p. 52. 68. Monthly Review, XLVIII (February, 1773), 155. 69. Ibid., XIII (November, 1755), 399. 70. Ibid., XIV (May, 1756), 453. 71. Critical Review, II (October, 1756), 276. 72. British Critic, X (November, 1797), 552. 73. Monthly Review, XIII (November, 1755), 399. 74. Ibid., XXIII (December, 1760), 523. 75. Critical Review, XXVII (February, 1769), 151. 76. Monthly Review, XV (December, 1756), 656. 77. Archibald Campbell, The Sale of Authors . . . (London, 1767), pp. 221-22.

78. Critical Review, XVI (December, 1763), 449.

122

NOTES

79. Sylph, No. X I X (December 5, 1795), pp. 147-51. 80. Monthly Review, V, NS (July, 1791), 338. 81. Critical Review, LXI (March, 1786), 235. 82. Henry Siddons, Virtuous Poverty (London, 1804), III, 2. 83. Charlotte Smith, Marchmont (London, 1796), Preface. 84. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, Woman; or, Ida of Athens (London, 1809), Preface. 85. The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768-1778, ed. Annie Raine Ellis (London, 1907), I, 283-89. 86. Monthly Review, XLVIII (April, 1773), 320. 87. Ibid., L (March, 1774), 176. 88. Ibid., X, NS (March, 1793), 302. 89. Critical Review, X V (January, 1763), 62. 90. Ibid., X I X (June, 1765), 468. 91. Ibid., XVII (June, 1764), 478. 92. Ibid., X X (November, 1765), 384. 93. Ibid., X X I V (November, 1767), 350. 94. Monthly Review, X X X V (December, 1766), 485. 95. Ibid., X L I X (August, 1773), 150. 96. Ibid., X X X V I I (November, 1767), 393. 97. Gentleman's Magazine, L X X I V (May, 1804), 402-403. 98. Mangin, op. cit., pp. 82-84. 99. Christopher Anstey, The New Bath Guide . . . (London, 1767), pp. 159-60. 100. Article written for the Artist, June, 1807. Reprinted in William McKee, Elizabeth Inchbald, Novelist (Washington, D. C., 1935), Appendix I, pp. 156-57. 101. Monthly Review, XLVIII (April, 1773), 320. 102. 'Twas Wrong to Marry Him; or, The History of Lady Dursley (London, 1773). Miss Tompkins says that this quarrel seems to have begun a few years earlier when the brothers Noble first objected to the accusation that they kept hack writers in their pay. There was a final reverberation of hostilities in 1774 when the author of the novels in question, probably at the instigation of his publisher, prefixed to a new work the suggestion that all readers form their own opinion of the piece without consulting the reviews. Tompkins, op. cit., p. 14, n. 1. 103. Lackington, op. cit., p. 422. 104. [James Sands], "A General Defence of Modern Novels," prefixed to Monckton; or, The Fate of Eleanor (London, 1802), p. xv. 105. Ladys Monthly Museum, IV (February, 1800), 134. 106. Preserved Smith, A History of Modern Culture (New York, 1934), II, 303. 107. Lady's Monthly Museum, I (October, 1798), 259-61. 108. Monthly Review, XCIII, NS (September, 1820), 69.

NOTES

123

CHAPTER III 1. William Makepeace Thackeray, Roundabout Papers, in Works (New York, 1898-99), XII, 332. 2. Gentleman's Journal (February, 1 6 9 2 / 3 ) , p. 58. 3. George Co Iman, the Elder, Polly Honeycombe, Prologue, in Dramatick Works (London, 1777), Vol. IV. 4. Monthly Review, XLVIII (May, 1773), 417. 5. The False Friends (London, 1785), Preface. 6. Albinia Gwynn, The Rencontre; or, Transition of a Moment (Dublin, 1785), Preface. 7. Richard Graves, Eugenius; or, Anecdotes of the Golden Vale (2d ed.; London, 1786), Dedication. 8. Susannah Gunning, Family Pictures . . . (Dublin, 1764), Preface. 9. Sylph, No. V (October 6, 1795), pp. 35-38. 10. Colman, op. cit., p. 58. 11. Miniature, No. II (April 30, 1804), pp. 21-22. 12. See Florence M. Smith, Mary Astell (New York, 1916) ; Ada Wallas, Before the Bluestockings (London, 1929). 13. George Hickes, A Sermon Preached at the Church of St. Bridget, on . . . the First of April, 1684 (London, 1684), pp. 26-27. 14. Daniel Defoe, An Essay on Projects, in The Earlier Life and the Chief Earlier Works of Daniel Defoe, ed. Henry Morley (London, 1889), pp. 144-52. 15. Tatler, No. 141 (March 4, 1709/10). 16. Frances d'Arblay, Diary . . . (London, 1842-46), I, 326. 17. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Lord Wharncliffe (London, 1887), II, 307-308. 18. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD., ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1887), III, 333. 19. James Lackington, Memoirs . . . (London, 1795), p. 425. 20. Ibid., p. 423. 21. See Myra Reynolds, The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760 (New York, 1920), pp. 372-419. 22. A Later Pepys: the Correspondence of Sir William Weller Pepys . . . , ed. Alice C. C. Gaussen (London, 1904), I, 81. 23. Elizabeth Montagu, ¡Mrs. Montagu, "Queen of the Blues," Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800, ed. Reginald Blunt (London [ 1 9 2 3 ] ) , II, 220. 24. Jonathan Swift, "Of the Education of Ladies," in Prose Works, ed. Temple Scott (London, 1897-1908), XI, 62-63. 25. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies (London, 1795). 26. Lady's Magazine, X I (December, 1780), 657. 27. Hannah More, Strictures . . . , in Works (London, 1818), VIII, 165.

124

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28. Edinburgh Review, X V (January, 1810), 302. 29. Flapper, No. 44 (July 2, 1796), p. 174. 30. Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto I, Stanza XXII. 31. "Advice to a Young Lady," Universal Spectator, No. 231 (March 10, 1733). 32. Grayj Inn Journal (London, 1756), I, 50. 33. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, op. cit., II, 5. 34. Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, No. XLVI, in Works, ed. P. Cunningham (New York, 1881), III, 255. 35. Ibid., No. XXVIII, in Works, III, 189. 36. Pierre Jean Grosley, A Tour of London; or, New Observations on England and Its Inhabitants (London, 1772), I, 150-51. 37. For a discussion of this subject see Marjorie Nicolson, "The Microscope and English Imagination," Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, Vol. XVI, No. 4 (July, 1935), 39-49. 38. Lady's Magazine, I (May, 1771), 466-69. 39. Hannah More, Coelebs . . . , in Works, XII, 151. 40. Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (New York, 1925), p. 380. 41. Erasmus Darwin, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools (Derby, 1797), p. 32. 42. Hannah More, Strictures . . . , in Works, VIII, 50. 43. Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montagu . . . (London, 1817), III, 68. 44. Harriet Martineau's Autobiography (Boston, 1877), I, 77-78. 45. Memoirs of the Life of the Late Mrs. Catherine Cappe (Boston, 1824), p. 47. 46. John Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady . . . (Hartford, 1798), I, 91. 47. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, in Works, I, 6-7. 48. James P. Malcolm, Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century . . . (London, 1810), I, 328. 49. Sentimental Magazine, I (July, 1773), 210. 50. Lady's Monthly Museum, I (August, 1798), 137-38. 51. Beelzebub, pseud. (Benjamin Bourn), A Sure Guide to Hell (York, 1801), p. 26. 52. Dorothy Gardiner, English Girlhood at School: a Study of Women's Education through Twelve Centuries (Oxford, 1929), p. 333. 53. The Memoirs of Susan Sibbald (1783-1812), ed. Francis Paget Hett (London, 1926), pp. 32 ff. 54. William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters: a Family Record (London, 1913), p. 26. 55. Mary Martha (Butt) Sherwood, The Life and Times of Mrs. Sherwood (1775-1851) . . . , ed. F. J. Harvey Darton (London, [ 1 9 1 0 ] ) , p. 122.

NOTES

125

56. Miss Mitford attended after the school had been moved to Hans Place, London. See Constance Hill, Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings (London, 1920), pp. 66-74. 57. Jane Austen, Emma (London, 1910), p. 17; Austen-Leigh, op. cit. 58. Sherwood, op. cit., p. 127. 59- The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey (London, 1849-50), I, 20-21. 60. J. L. Chirol, An Inquiry into the Best System of Female Education; or, Boarding School and Home Education Attentively Considered (London, 1809), p. 110 n. Later, in his directions for the education of young women at home, Chirol has only one injunction to issue to parents regarding the choice of books: "I shall merely observe, that the system of reading (which I leave every judicious mother to form for her daughters) shall exclude all romances and novels whatever, as there is nothing good in the best of them, but what may be found in useful books, which, at the same time, contain no sentiments pernicious to the imagination, or to the heart." p. 225. 61. Fanny Burney, Evelina; or, A Young Lady's Entrance into the World (London, 1779), Preface. 62. William Hazlitt, "On Reading New Books," in Collected Works (London, 1902-04), XII, 163. 63. Country Spectator, No. I X (December 4, 1792), p. 74. 64. Ibid., No. X X I I (March 5, 1793), pp. 178-79. 65. [Elizabeth Rowe], Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1696), II, 8. 66. [Jonas Hanway], Midnight the Signal, in Sixteen Letters to a Lady of Quality (London, 1779), pp. 162-6367. W. Bayle Bernard, The Boarding School: an Original Farce, in One Act (London, n.d.), p. 10. 68. More, Coelebs . . . , in Works, XI, 333-36, 339-40. 69. More, Strictures . . . , in Works, VII, 83. 70. Jane Taylor, Correspondence between a Mother and Her Daughter at School (London, 1817), p. 55. 71. Elizabeth Montagu, op. cit., II, 356. 72. Jane West, The Infidel Father (London, 1802), I, 250-52. 73. [Eliza Haywood], The Invisible Spy (London, 1755), III, 266-67. 74. Jane Taylor, "Accomplishment," in Essays in Rhyme, on Morals and Manners (London, 1816), pp. 121-22. 75. More, Strictures . . . , in Works, VII, 72. 76. Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (London, 1801), III, 17. 77. Lady's Monthly Museum, I (August, 1798), 138. 78. Athenian Mercury, I X (December 17, 1692), Question 2. 79. Catherine Macaulay Graham, Letters on Education . . . (Dublin, 1790), p. 90.

126

NOTES

80. Vicessimus Knox, Essays Moral and Literary (London, 1782), I, 69. 81. Monthly Review, LII (April, 1775), 361. 82. Jane West, Letters Addressed to a Young Man on His First Entrance into Life . . . (London, 1803), III, 142. 83. Critical Review, X X (October, 1765), 288. This is the same objection which Carlyle later made to the novels of George Sand. See David Alec Wilson, Carlyle on Cromwell and Others (1837-48) (London, 1925), pp. 140-41; James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle: a History of His Life in London, 1834-1881 (London, 1884), I, 208, 247. 84. Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare," in Works (Literary Club ed.; Troy, N. Y., 1903), XI, 330-31. 85. Richard Griffith, Something New (London, 1772), I, 205. 86. [Charles Lucas], The Castle of St. Donats; or, The History of Jack Smith (London, 1798), Introduction. 87. [James Sands], "A General Defence of Modern Novels," prefixed to Monckton . . . (London, 1802), p. xviii. 88. James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women (London, 1766), I, 156. 89. Charles Jenner, The Placid Man; or, Memoirs of Sir Charles Beville (London, 1770), I, 4-5. 90. Byron, op. cit., Canto III, Stanza VIII. 91. Chambers's Journal, XLVII (October 29, 1870), 690. 92. Gentleman's Magazine, L X X V (October, 1805), 913. 93. Anthony Trollope, Four Lectures, (London, 1938), p. 109. 94. [William Darrell], The Gentleman Instructed in the Conduct of a Virtuous and Happy Life (London, 1723), p. 165. 95. Eclectic Review, VIII (June, 1812), 606. 96. Evangelical Magazine, X X (Supplement, 1812), 508. 97. Letters from the Mountains . . . (London, 1807), II, 142. 98. Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind . . . (London, 1774), II, 146. 99. See the analysis of this convention given by A. B. Shepperson, The Novel in Motley (Cambridge, 1936). 100. TheLocket; or, The History of Mr. Singleton (London, 1774), I, 216-17. 101. Mary Charlton, Rosella; or, Modern Occurrences (London, 1799), I, 9, 281, and passim. 102. William Combe, The Devil upon Two Sticks in England . . . (London, 1791), II, 170-74. 103. Michael Sadleir has identified these works in The Northanger Novels: a Footnote to Jane Austen (Oxford, 1927). 104. See the discussion of these novels in The Major Dramas of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. George Henry Nettleton (Boston, 1906), Introduction. 105. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals (Oxford, 1935), Act V, Sc. i. 106. The Ladys Drawing Room . . . (London, 1744), pp. 312-16.

NOTES 107. Edward Mangin, An Essay ort Light Reading

127 (London, 1808), pp. 107-

108.

108. Edgeworth, Practical Education, II, 51. 109. Byron, op. cit., Canto IV, Stanza X I X . 110. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance . . . (New York, 1930), II, 7879. 111. Jane Austen, Love and Freindship and Other Early Works (New York, 1922), pp. 24-26. 112. Charlotte Lennox, The Life of Harriot Stuart (London, 1751), I, 8. 113. [William Dodd}, The Sisters; or, The History of Lucy and Caroline Sanson, Entrusted to a False Friend (London, 1754), II, 84-85. 114. Colman, op. cit., pp. 23, 30, 33, 58. 115. George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, in Works (Edinburgh, 1907), V, 371. 116. fane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others (Oxford, 1932), I, 3. 117. Mary Brunton, Self Control (Edinburgh, 1811), I, 129-30. 118. Reeve, op. cit., II, 79. 119. Sylph, No. V (October 6, 1795), p. 38. 120. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (Shakespeare Head ed.; Oxford 1930-31), I, 94. See also Shepperson, op. cit., pp. 89-90, on the treatment of parental authority in certain novels of the period. 121. Colman, op. cit., Epilogue. 122. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Philadelphia, 1920), pp. 188-89. 123. Taller, No. 199 (July 18, 1710). 124. Gentleman's Magazine, LVIII (June, 1788), 491. 125. Charlotte Brooke, The Excursion (London, 1777), II, 13. 126. Chirol, op. cit., p. 234. 127. J. J. Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Préface, p. 182 ; Seconde Préface, p. 220, in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris, 1788-93), Tome Premier. 128. Lady's Magazine, X I (Supplement, 1780), 693. 129. Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London, 1797), pp. 215-16. 130. Bennett, op. cit., II, 38. 131. Colman, op. cit.. Prologue. 132. Elizabeth Montagu, op. cit., I, 15-16. 133. Weekly Magazine; or, Edinburgh Amusement, X I V (November 14, 1771), 200-201. 134. Half an Hour after Supper: an Interlude in One Act (London, 1789), pp. 8-9 and passim. The play is dedicated by "The Authoress" to George Colman, Esq. On the flyleaf the writer shows evidence of a serious desire for reform, urging that the literary pursuits of women "would, in her opinion, be still more to their honour, were they not too frequently engaged in the dangerous

128

NOTES

detail of armorous adventures, or, at best, tending to idle and frivolous amusement." 135. Robert Bisset, Douglas; or, The Highlander (London, 1800), II, 171-74. 136. Anna Letitia Barbauld, "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing," prefixed to The British Novelists (London, 1810), I, 58. 137. The False Friends, Preface. 138. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, op. cit., I, 54. 139. John Bennett, Strictures on Female Education; Chiefly as It Relates to the Culture of the Heart (Worcester, 1795), pp. 65-67, 145. 140. Miniature, No. II (April 30, 1804), pp. 15-16. 141. Monthly Review, X X X (June, 1764), 488-89. 142. [Mary Walker], Memoirs of the Marchioness de Louvois (London, 1 7 7 7 ) , Dedication. 143. The Example; or, The History of Lucy Cleveland (London, 1778), Preface. 144. The Dramatic Works of the Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre, with a New Account of Her Life (London, 1872), Memoir, pp. vii-viii. 145. Anecdotes of a Convent (London, 1771), Preface. 146. Richard Steele, The Christian Hero . . . (Philadelphia, 1 8 0 7 ) , p. 94. 147. Gwynn, The Rencontre; or, Transition of a Moment, Preface. 148. William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More (New York, 1836), II, 168. 149. D'Arblay, Diary . . . , Introduction, p. xxv, I, 41, 45, 101-102; The Wanderer . . . (London, 1814), Dedication. 150. Monthly Review, IV (February, 1 7 5 1 ) , 307. 151. Lady's Magazine, X X (June, 1789), 297. 152. Critical Review, X X V I I (June, 1769), 452. 153. Monthly Review, X L (May, 1769), 353. 154. British Critic, VIII, NS (September, 1 8 1 7 ) , 259. 155. Monthly Review, X L (June, 1769), 520. 156. Robert Bisset, Modern Literature (London, 1804), II, 199-216. 157. Monthly Review, X L V I I I (February, 1773), 154. 158. George Eliot, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," Westminster Review, L X V I (October, 1856), 460-61. 159. W . S. Gilbert, The Mikado, Act I, in Plays and Poems of IF. S. Gilbert (New York, 1 9 3 5 ) , p. 353. 160. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, ed. by her daughter (London, 1 8 7 3 ) , II, 390. 161. George Eliot, "Silly Novelists by Lady Novelists," p. 461. 162. The prospectus has been published by Dorothy Blakey, The Minerva Press, 1790-1820 (London, 1 9 3 9 ) , Appendix IV. For a detailed discussion of these novelists see pp. 53-62.

NOTES

129

163. Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, 2d. Series, ed. Henry Chorley (London, 1872), I, 68-69. 164. Dictionary of National Biography under "Frances Sheridan." 165. Reeve, op. cit., II, 45. W. H. Ireland in his Scribbleomania pays tribute to a number of the minor lady novelists mentioned above: "From the plains of romance, where, in battle array, My troops have but now had a partial field day, I, Scribblecumdash, must take peep at the ocean Where three-decker Novelist now is in motion; The crew quite elated have just mann'd the sides; And, supported by misses, wives, widows—she rides; Her port ev'ry station for books circulating, Whose trade is right famous for fools all inflating." He commends the members of the ship's crew: Captain Burney, Lieutenants Smith, Lennox, and Roche. Praise is also bestowed upon Mrs. Parsons, Mrs. Anna Maria Bennett, and Mrs. Meeke.

CHAPTER IV 1. Thomas Clerk, The Works of William Hogarth . . . (London, 1821), I, 13,43-44. 2. Austin Dobson, Hogarth (London, 1883), p. 62. 3. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, in Works (London, 1903), V, 313. 4. Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare," in Works, (Literary Club ed.; Troy, N. Y., 1903), XII, 1, 80-81. 5. See for instance, Helen Sard Hughes, "The Middle-Class Reader and the English Novel," journal of English and Germanic Philology, X X V ( 1 9 2 6 ) , 362-78. 6. [William Dodd], The Sisters . . . (London, 1754), I, 55-56; II, 897. Edward Kimber, The Life and Adventures of James Ramble, Esq. . . . (London, 1755), Preface. 8. Edward Kimber, Maria, the Genuine Memoirs of an Admired Lady of Rank and Fortune and of Some of Her Friends (Dublin, 1764), Preface. 9. Fatal Effects of Deception (London, 1773), Advertisement. 10. Clara Reeve, The Exiles; or, Memoirs of the Count de Cronstadt (London, 1788), Preface. 11. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (Shakespeare Head ed.; Oxford, 1930-31), Preface. 12. The False Friends (London, 1785), Preface. 13. J.M.S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (London, 1932), p. 77.

130

NOTES

14. Sylph, No. V (October 6, 1795), p. 34. 15. Monthly Review, X I V (May, 1756), 445. 16. Frances d'Arblay, Diary . . . (London, 1842-46), I, 397. 17. Man in the Moon, No. XII (December 21, 1803), pp. 89-96. 18. Honoria, pseud. The Female Mentor; or, Select Conversations (London, 1798), Conversation VIII, pp. 71-72. 19. John Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady . . . (Hartford, 1798), II, 54. 20. Hugh Murray, The Morality of Fiction; or, An Inquiry into the Tendency of Fictitious Narratives, with Observations on Some of the Most Eminent (Edinburgh, 1805), pp. 17-26; 97-98. 21. A Series of Letters between Airs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot . . . (London, 1809), I, 315. 22. Flapper, X X I V (April 23, 1796), 93-96. 23. Lounger, No. X X (June 18, 1785), p. 187. 24. Samuel Johnson in the Rambler, No. IV (March 31, 1750). 25. Mary Brunton, Self Control (Edinburgh, 1811), I, 134-35. 26. Sarah Trimmer in the Guardian of Education, II (July, 1803), 441. 27. Hannah More, Hints toward Forming the Character of a Young Princess, in Works, X, 172. 28. Jane West, Leiters Addressed to a Young Man . . . (London, 1803), Introduction, p. xv. 29. Johnson, op. cit. 30. John Potter, The Curate of Coventry (London, 1771), I, 3-4. 31. Edward Kimber, The Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson (London, 1783), Preface. 32. James Beattie, "On Fable and Romance," Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783), p. 569. 33. Ibid., p. 572. 34. Edward Mangin, An Essay on Light Reading (London, 1808), p. 111. 35. Prater, No. VIII (May 1, 1756), pp. 44-46. 36. Edward Kimber, The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger, Esq. (London, 1757), I, 207. 37. New Spectator, No. I X (March 30, 1784), p. 2. 38. Christian Observer, XVI (May, 1817), 300. 39. Eclectic Review, VIII (June, 1812), 616. 40. William Cowper, "The Progress of Error," 11. 319-20. 41. Edinburgh Review, XI (January, 1808), 461. 42. See for instance the Critical Review, X V I I I (October, 1764), 314. 43. Monthly Review, X X I I I (October, 1760), 327. 44. Ibid., XII (March, 1755), 237. 45. Ibid., X X I (November, 1759), 451. 46. Ibid., X X X I I (May, 1765), 394. 47. Critical Review, XVII (June, 1764), 478.

NOTES 48. Ibid., X X V I I (February, 1769), 151. 49. Monthly Review, X I (December, 1754), 466. 50. Gentleman's Magazine, L X I X (November, 1799), 920. 51. Ibid., L X X (January, 1800), 6. 52. Trollope, Four Lectures (London, 1938), pp. 114-15. 53. British Critic, III, NS (February, 1815), 209. 54. Monthly Review, XCIII, NS (October, 1820), 169-71. 55. Ibid., p. 171. 56. See Neith Boyce, "The Novel's Deadliest Friend," Bookman, X I V (September, 1901), 27. 57. Eclectic Review, VIII (June, 1812), 608-609. 58. Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, X I I , 3d Series (January, 1833), 17-18. 59. William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis, in Works (New York, 18989 9 ) , Preface. CHAPTER V 1. John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London, 1757), I, 42. 2. Maurice Quinlan, in his Victorian Prelude . . . (New York, 1941), has shown the apprehension with which leaders of this educational reform movement discovered that large numbers from the newly literate classes were reading the works of Thomas Paine. 3. Eclectic Review, III (November, 1806), 924. 4. [Humphry Repton], Variety: a Collection of Essays Written in the Year 1787 (London, 1788), pp. 50-51; 57-58. The Dictionary of National Biography lists this collection as being by Humphry Repton (1752-1818), "and a few friends." The Halkett and Laing Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature confirms Repton's authorship but adds the note that the work has also been ascribed to Ann Seward. 5. John Bowles, Education of the Lower Orders: a Second Letter to Samuel Whitbread, Esq. M.P. . . . (London, 1808), pp. 26-27. 6. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD., ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1887), II, 188. 7. Hannah More, Strictures . . . , in Works (London, 1818), VII, 219. 8. [James Sands], "A General Defence of Modern Novels," prefixed to Monckton; or, The Fate of Eleanor (London, 1802), pp. xviii-xix. 9. Methodist Magazine, X L I I (August, 1819), 610. 10. Christian Observer, X V I (May, 1817), 298-301; X V I (June, 1817), 374 and n. 11. Sarah Trimmer in the Guardian of Education, I (September, 1802), 316. 12. L. Tyerman, Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., Founder of the Methodists (New York, 1872), III, 450.

132

NOTES

13. The History of Henry, Earl of Moreland (Bristol, 1780), Preface. 14. Charles Kingsley's Biographical Preface to Henry Brooke's, The Fool of Quality (New York, I 8 6 0 ) . 15. Tyerman, op. cit., Ill, 342. 16. Ibid., Ill, 343. 17. A New History of Methodism, ed. W. J. Townsend, H. B. Workman, and George Eayrs (London, 1909), I, 350. 18. Tyerman, op. cit., Ill, 342. 19. Methodist Magazine, XLII (August, 1819), 607-609. 20. Miniature, No. II (April 30, 1804), p. 22. 21. James Beattie, "On Fable and Romance," in Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783), p. 574. 22. Athenaeum (September 17, 1828), pp. 734-36. 23. Methodist Magazine, XLII (August, 1819), 608. 24. Christian Observer, X I (November, 1812), 714. 25. Eclectic Review, VIII (June, 1812), 620. 26. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton (London, 1856), p. 3. 27. Christian Observer, X I (November, 1812), 714. 28. Ibid., XVI (May, 1817), 300. 29. Ibid., X I V (August, 1815), 512-17. 30. Ibid., X V (December, 1816), 784-87. 31. G. Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (New York, 1876), I, 67-68. 32. Thomas Clarkson, A Portraiture of Quakerism (New York, 1806), I, 129-36. 33. Ibid., I, 135 n. 34. Trevelyan, op. cit., I, 232. 35. Ibid., I, 234. 36. Lady's Monthly Museum, II (June, 1799), 454. 37. Lounger, No. VIII (March 26, 1785), p. 15. 38. Gentleman's Magazine, LXVII (November, 1797), 912. 39. Reasoner, No. IV (January, 1814), p. 352. 40. Monthly Magazine, X X X I (May 1, 1811), 352. 41. Methodist Magazine, X X X I V (August, 1811), 626. 42. More, op. cit., VII, 83 n. 43. Methodist Magazine, XLII (August, 1819), 608. 44. William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More (New York, 1836), II, 355-56. 45. Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, XII, 3d Series (January, 1833), 17-18. 46. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (London, 1887), II, 211-12. 47. Ibid., II, 319-20.

NOTES

133

48. Charles Jenner, The Placid Man . . . (London, 1770), II, 3-4. 49- Richard Graves, Eugenias . . . (2d ed.; London, 1786), Dedication. 50. Anna Letitia Barbauld, "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing," prefixed to The British Novelists (London, 1810), I, 46. 51. John Moore, "A View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance," prefixed to The Works of Tobias Smollett, M. D., with Memoirs of His Life (London, 1797), p. xciii. 52. See also William Godwin's statement in the Preface to Caleb Williams; or, Things as They Are (London, 1903). 53. Trevelyan, op. cit., pp. 98-99. 54. James Currie, The Life of Robert Burns, with a Criticism on His Writings. Originally Published in Connection with the Works of Burns in 1800 . . . (Edinburgh, 1838), pp. 26-27. 55. Charles Knight, The Old Printer and the Modern Press (London, 1854), pp. 235-36. 56. Ibid., pp. 298-99. 57. John Förster, The Life of Charles Dickens (London, 1904), II, 154. See also Knight, op. cit., p. 288. 58. See Leslie Alexis Marchand, The Athenaeum: a Mirror of Victorian Culture (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1941), pp. 299-300. 59- Charles Lamb, "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," in Works, (New York, 1903-05), II, 173.

BIBLIOGRAPHY This bibliography is by no means a complete list of the sources which have been used as a background for the present study. I have included only those novels which are cited in the Notes and those periodicals containing material most pertinent to the subject. Aikin, J., and A. L. Aikin. Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. London, 1773. All the Year Round Analytical Review; or, History of Literature, Domestic and Foreign Anecdotes of a Convent. London, 1771. Annual Register Anstey, Christopher. The New Bath Guide . . . London, 1767. Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine; or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor Appleton, Elizabeth. Private Education; or, A Practical Plan for the Studies of Young Ladies . . . London, 1816. Arblay, Frances d'. Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay. Ed. Charlotte Barrett. London, 1842-46. The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768-1778 . . . Ed. Annie Raine Ellis. London, 1907. Evelina; or, A Young Lady's Entrance into the World. London, 1779The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties. London, 1814. Athenaeum Athenian Mercury Austen, Jane. Emma. London, 1910. Fragment of a Novel. Written January-March, 1817. First printed from the MS, Oxford, 1925. Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others. Collected and ed. R. W . Chapman. Oxford, 1932. Love and Freindship, and Other Early Works, Now First Printed from the Original MS, with a Preface by G. K. Chesterton. London, 1922. Northanger Abbey. Everyman ed. London, 1906. Pride and Prejudice. Philadelphia, 1920. Austen-Leigh, William, and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh. Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters: a Family Record. London, 1913. Baker, Ernest A. The History of the Novel. Vol. IV, Intellectual Realism: from Richardson to Sterne. London, 1930. Vol. VI, The Novel of Sentiment and the Gothic Romance. London, 1934. Vol. VI, Edgeworth, Austen, Scott. London, 1935. Barbauld, Anna Letitia. "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing," prefixed to The British Novelists. London, 1810.

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VITA J O H N T I N N O N TAYLOR w a s b o r n i n S u l l i v a n , I l l i n o i s , o n

No-

vember 28, 1901. He received the Bachelor of Arts degree from James Millikin University in 1923 and the degree of Master of Arts from the University of Illinois in 1927. He later studied at Columbia University where he held a University Fellowship for the year 1941-42.