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

Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-​Century Novel
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Prologue
PART I 1660–​1770: FROM ‘NOVELS’ TO WHAT IS NOT YET ‘THE NOVEL’
The Economics of Culture, 1660–1770
1 The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century
2 Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695–​1774
3 Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1660–​1770
4 Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-​Habermasian Perspectives
Influences on the Early English Novel
5 The Continental Influence on the Eighteenth-​Century Novel:  ‘The English Improve What Others Invent’
6 Criss-​Crossing the Channel: The French Novel and English Translation
7 Religious Writings and the Early Novel
8 Travel Literature and the Early Novel
9 Secret History, Politics, and the Early Novel
Early ‘Novels’ and Novelists
10 Restoration Fiction
11 Testing the Market: Robinson Crusoe and After
12 Gulliver Effects
13 ‘Labours of the Press’: The Response to Pamela
14 Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel
15 Henry Fielding and the Progress of Romance
16 Novels of the 1750s
17 Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-​Century Novel: The ‘Vast Empire of Biographical Freebooters’ and the ‘Crying Volume’
Epilogue: The English Novel at the End of the 1760s
PART II 1770–​1832: THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL
Literary Production, 1770–1832
18 The Book Trade, 1770–​1832
19 The Rise of the Illustrated English Novel to 1832
Authors, Readers, Reviewers, and Critics, 1770–​1832
20 Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1770–​1832
21 ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ Novels? Gendered Fictions and the Reading Public, 1770–​1832
22 Reviewing the Novel
23 ‘Ordering’ Novels: Describing Prose Fiction, 1770–​1832
Novels and Novelists, 1770–​1832
24 The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–​1832
25 Developments in Sentimental Fiction
26 Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s
27 The Anti-​Jacobin Novel
28 The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance
29 Novel and Empire
30 The Popular Novel, 1790–1820
31 The Evangelical Novel
32 ‘Pictures of Domestic Life in Country Villages’: Jane Austen and the ‘Realist’ Novel
33 Authorizing the Novel: Walter Scott’s Historical Fiction
34 Parody and Satire in the Novel, 1770–​1832
Epilogue: The English Novel at the End of the 1820s
Index

Citation preview

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

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

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The Oxford Handbook of

THE EIGHTEENTH-​ CENTURY NOVEL Edited by

J. A. DOWNIE

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

Contents

List of Illustrations  List of Contributors  Prologue 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

105

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8. Travel Literature and the Early Novel  Cynthia Wall

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

137

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

155

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

172

12. Gulliver Effects  Clement Hawes

187

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

205

14. Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel  John Dussinger

221

15. Henry Fielding and the Progress of Romance  Scott Black

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16. Novels of the 1750s  Simon Dickie

252

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

264 282

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

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Contents   vii

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

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

339

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22. Reviewing the Novel  Antonia Forster

372

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

388

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

409

25. Developments in Sentimental Fiction  Geoffrey Sill

426

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

440

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

457

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

472

29. Novel and Empire  Markman Ellis

489

30. The Popular Novel, 1790–1820 Gary Kelly

505

31. The Evangelical Novel  Lisa Wood

521

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

536

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

551

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

567

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

582

Index 

587

List of Illustrations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

List of Contributors

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prologue

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

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

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

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

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

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

xx

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

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

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

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

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

xxii

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

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

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

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

Pennsylvania P, 1997), p. xi.

xxiv

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

Pa rt  I

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

2

The Economics of Culture, 1660–​1770

4

Chapter 1

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

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

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

6

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

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

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

8

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

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

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

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

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

10

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

Number of titles11

1621–​40

1641–​60

1661–​80

12,029

32,238

22,289

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

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

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

12

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

Literate men Literate women

1580s

1640s

1710s

1740s

20% 5%

30% 10%

45% 25%

58% 32%

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

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

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

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

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

14

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

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

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

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

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

16

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

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

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

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

26 Hunter, Before Novels, 303.

18

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

27 

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

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

20

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

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

34 

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

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

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

37 Chartier, The Order of Books, 8.

22

Chapter 2

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

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

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

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

24

24   MICHAEL F. SUAREZ, S.J.

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

4 

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

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

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

26

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

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

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

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

28

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

24 

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

Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695–1774    29

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

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

30

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

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

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

32

32   MICHAEL F. SUAREZ, S.J.

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

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

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

34

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

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

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

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

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

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

36

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

36 

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

Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695–1774    37

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

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

37 

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

38

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

Chapter 3

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

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

40

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

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

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

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

42

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

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

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

44

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

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

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

6 

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

46

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

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

48

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

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

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

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

10 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Influences on the Early English Novel

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Chapter 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 Warner, Licensing Entertainment, passim.

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

11 

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

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

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

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

17 

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

82

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

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

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

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

84

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

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

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

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

86

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

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

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

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

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Chapter 6

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

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

1 

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

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

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90   GILLIAN DOW

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

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

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

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

of California P, 1960), 30.

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

6 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 7

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

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

1 

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

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

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

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

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

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108   W. R. OWENS

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

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

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

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

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

8 Raven, The Business of Books, 92.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

21 

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

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

22 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 8

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

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

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

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

122

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

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

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

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

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

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

124

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

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

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

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

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

9 

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

126

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

128

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

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

15 

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

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

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

130

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

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

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

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

22 

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

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

23 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28 

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

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

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

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

Chapter 9

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

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

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

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

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

Secret History, Politics, and the Early Novel    139

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secret History, Politics, and the Early Novel    143

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

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

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

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

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

16 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25 

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

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

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

28 

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

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

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

Early ‘Novels’ and Novelists

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Chapter 10

Restoration Fi c t i on Thomas Keymer

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

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

1 

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

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

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

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

158

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

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

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

160

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

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

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

162

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

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

164

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

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

166

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

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

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

168

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

39 

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

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

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

170

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

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

47 

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

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

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

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

172

Chapter 11

Testing th e  Ma rket Robinson Crusoe and After David Oakleaf

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

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

174

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

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

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

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

176

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

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

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

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

178

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

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

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

27 

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

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

28 

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

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

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

182

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

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

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

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

184

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

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

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

186

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

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

Chapter 12

Gulliver Effe c ts Clement Hawes

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

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

188

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

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

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

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

190

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

18 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

200

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

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

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

202

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

24 

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

Gulliver Effects   203

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

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

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

204

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

Chapter 13

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

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

1 

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

206

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

2 

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

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

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

208

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

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

15 

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

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

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

210

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

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

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

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

212

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

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

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

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

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

214

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

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

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

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

216

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

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

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

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

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

218

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

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

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

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

45 

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

220

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

Chapter 14

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

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

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

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

222

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

224

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8 

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

226

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

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

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

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

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

228

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

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

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

12 

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

Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel    229

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 15

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

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

1 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chapter 16

Novels of t h e  1 7 50s Simon Dickie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16 

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

258

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

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

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

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

260

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

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

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

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

262

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

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

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

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

264

Chapter 17

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

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

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

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

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

266

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 

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

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

36 

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

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

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

41 

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

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

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

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

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

274

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

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

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

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

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

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

363.

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

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

276

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

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

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

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

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

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

62 

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

278

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

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

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

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

65 

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

280

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

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

Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-Century Novel    281

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

282

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

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

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

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

284

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

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

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

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

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Literary Production, 1770–​1832

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Chapter 18

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

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

• • • •

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

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

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292   JOHN FEATHER

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

1 

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

The Book Trade, 1770–1832    293

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

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

294

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

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

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

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

296

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

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

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

298

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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302   JOHN FEATHER scale after 1800. Some newspapers carried serial fiction from time to time, some of it original, some of it reprints of novels which had already been published as books. The same was true of some general interest magazines. By the late 1820s, however, the wider availability of the steam presses meant that there was some capacity for producing long print runs of cheap serially published new fiction. Sketches by Boz was just such a work, planned by a publisher and a printer and drawing on the talents of an aspirant young writer. It was only when the young hack revealed his true genius in the commercial follow-​up to Sketches, in the publisher’s speculative investment which we now know as Pickwick Papers, that the serial novel finally became respectable. But the foundations were laid long before Mr. Pickwick set off on his travels, or indeed before his creator was born. Seria