English Novel, Vol II, The

Smollett to Austen

Richard. W. F. Kroll, Richard W.F. Kroll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780367237844
• eBook ISBN: 9781317894643
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The English Novel, Volume II: Smollett to Austen collects a series of previously-published essays on the early eighteenth-century novel in a single volume, reflecting the proliferation of theoretical approaches since the 1970s. The novel has been the object of some of the most exciting and important critical speculations, and the eighteenth-century novel has been at the centre of new approaches both to the novel and to the period between 1750 and 1800.

Richard Kroll's introduction seeks to frame the contributions by reference to the most significant critical discussions. These include: the general importance of 'sentimentalism' as a cultural movement after 1750; its relationship to the emergence of the Gothic novel as a specific genre or mode; the rapid rise in the number of women novelists in the later eighteenth century; the relationship between the novel as mediator of social relations and the idea of the 'public sphere'; the relationship between novelistic codes and the massive growth of a consumerist society; the class conflicts of writers like Smollett; the effect on the novel of the new 'British' nation; and the effects of the French Revolution and the subsequent political debates on writers like Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Austen.

This collection will be of interest to students of the later enlightenment, and also to all who are interested in late eighteenth-century radicalism, and the general relationship between literature, history, and politics.

1 Introduction

This is the second of two volumes anthologizing a series of previously published critical essays and book chapters about the eighteenth-century British novel. The first covers the period from 1700 to the end of Fielding’s career; the second covers the period between mid century and Jane Austen’s earliest novels, so that we conclude this volume with two essays on Northanger Abbey which debate Austen’s relationship to the revolutionary climate of the 1790s.¹

My intention is to present both volumes, with their introductions, as a pair. The first introduction is the more literary’ of the two, focussing on the rich historiography about the ‘rise of the novel,’ discussing some of the most successful attempts to describe the novel’s cultural role in the eighteenth-century, and concluding with three attempts to place early women novelists into either or both of those frameworks.

In this introduction, I approach the historiography of the later eighteenth-century novel by a different, but I hope complementary, route. My reading of both the novels and the criticism is governed by what I see as two salient facts. First, the kinds and varieties of authors, of interests, and of narrative techniques greatly expand after mid century. Second, unlike the criticism of the earlier period, the criticism of novels and novelists in the later eighteenth century is itself varied, and responds to no dominant critical canon. This is in marked contrast to the substantial literature on Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, as well as criticism on the early novel in general, all of which it seems must, at some point or another, engage with Ian Watt’s classic The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957).² My first introduction therefore orients the student by showing how criticism has used or departed from Watt. And it describes some models for thinking about the nature of the eighteenth-century novel as a whole, as well as its relation to questions of gender.

In the absence of the framework provided by Watt, my purpose here is to emphasize how the later eighteenth-century novel is engaged in a number of cultural and historical debates which are distinct to this period. I cast the issues in historical rather than literary terms, not least because the essays that follow provide the literary applications. And I describe three different, but closely related, arenas of discussion, all of which seem especially animated because they seem so closely to reflect our current uncertainties about how we are to revise or confirm conventional modes of political identity and organization.

First, historians have focussed on the question of how the individual can continue to act virtuously in the context of an increasingly commercial society. Neil McKendrick – along with John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, in a joint volume – has famously proposed that the last quarter of the eighteenth century experienced a consumer revolution.³ This literature has been greatly expanded by a series of almost epic collections, edited by John Brewer and others, elaborating on the extent and breadth of eighteenth-century consumerism, which resulted from and was associated with Britain’s rapidly increasing role in world trade.⁴ Indeed, we could treat Britain’s experience through the course of the century as marked by a series of stages in the expansion of her mercantile reach and power. For political theorists, the accompanying changes in people’s status and the way they could proclaim it seemed to herald potentially destructive changes in traditional modes of social deference and obligation. They became the explicit occasion for heated debates about how the subject was to imagine and execute his or her role in the polity, since these changes called into question the stability of individual personality, and consequently, conventional ways of picturing its obligations to others. Already quite early in the eighteenth century – especially after the establishment of the national debt and the new economic order it denoted – Britons were exercised by the problem of how the possession of money and goods might erode people’s sense of moral connectedness.

Second, historians and critics alike have developed an interest in the public sphere. This idea serves as a means to typify distinctively eighteenth-century modes of rationality and sociability, which, on this view, encouraged certain literate styles of speech and self-representation. As we will see, for Jürgen Habermas, its main modern exponent, this notion is also associated with new ideals of civic conduct, and with the kinds of bürgerlich clubbishness and conversational codes promulgated by the coffee houses, first established in London in the late 1650s, and rendered into a systematic social protocol by such journals as Addison’s The Spectator, first published in 1711.

Finally, I link these discussions to the interest in sentimentalism, about which there is currently some vigorous disagreement. I argue that the conventional habits of thinking about the later eighteenth century, which associate that period with the ideals of sentiment and the rhetoric of sensibility, are in fact well founded. But by contrast to a slightly circular tradition of defining the period by an appeal to sensibility and vice versa, I also want to propose that sentiment and the gothic, as literary styles, describe novelistic attempts to mediate a series of political and ethical pressures that characterize political – as well as literary – history after 1746.

The expansion of novelistic authorship

I have mentioned both a growth in the numbers of novelists writing in the later eighteenth century, and a corresponding proliferation of critical approaches to the material. These facts are registered in the wide range of approaches informing the following essays, and the large number of different, and in some cases fairly minor, novelists they discuss. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the period after 1750 witnesses an explosion in the number and kinds of authors that turn their hand to writing novels, and this is especially true after about 1780 or so, a point I also elaborate below.⁵ Significantly, the numbers have received the closest scholarly attention in the case of women authors. Where in the early period we are talking about a handful of novelists of any kind, including women such as Aphra Behn, Delarivière Manley, and Eliza Haywood, the later eighteenth century experiences a notorious rise in the sheer number of women authors, a rise that sometimes led to the (misleading) view that women now dominated novelistic production. Cheryl Turner’s Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (1992) shows that there was a brief rise then decline in women’s writing between 1725 and 1740, a gradual and continuous rise thereafter, and finally a spectacular rise in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.⁶ (We must however avoid the assumption that the novel was the most popular reading form by the end of the century. In fact, sermons remained the single most popular genre.) This rise certainly contributed to the prejudice against the novel as a form which, being so easily consumable, relaxed the reader’s vigilance and enervated his or her (usually her) morals.

This expansion in production produces its own interpretative problems. Many critics believe that the increasing success of women novelists produced a paradox. Mary Poovey for one has pointed out that, as writing achieved greater respectability, it also became a more concentrated source of social anxiety for women, since to publish was improperly, even imprudently, to enter the public forum, the domain of masculine prerogative.⁷ Moreover, in response to the dangers stemming from such public exposure, women novelists after mid century strove to distance themselves from what they saw as the indecorous interests and themes in earlier writers such as Behn and Haywood, whom we now value precisely because they explore female desire. William Warner partly ascribes this shift to the moralizing atmosphere surrounding Richardson and his circle, in which what was approved if not invented was an ideal of female virtue, so that the culture associated with novel-writing and novel-reading became, with the success of Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48), explicitly dedicated to the preservation of piety and morality.⁸

These features of the literary landscape create particular challenges for a certain tradition of Anglo-American feminism. I would stress that they exemplify the larger problems of how we are to approach later eighteenth-century novelists in general. The desire of later eighteenth-century writers to avoid the moral taint of a supposedly more licentious age makes it impossible to argue – as Elaine Showalter famously does for the Victorians – that eighteenth-century women created a seamless literature of their own.⁹ It is only by limiting the time-line – typically to the last decade of the century – that a coherent genealogy of this kind can emerge. Thus Mary Poovey’s The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984) discusses Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen; while Claudia Johnson’s Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (1995) discusses Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Austen.¹⁰ In the wake of the French Revolution, with its promise of a more egalitarian dawn, the 1790s undoubtedly intensified the debate about whether and how women could claim a share in the body politic. And it is therefore possible to see something of an unusual concentration of interests among certain types of writers animated by the political climate. Consequently, we are faced with the odd situation that – apart from Sterne criticism – the most canonical traditions of interpretation to have developed in recent years surround the writers of the 1790s, both because almost all the most powerful writers are women, and because the fate of contemporary critical politics is perceived to hinge on how we interpret their views of the French Revolution and new forms of eighteenth-century feminism. Our concluding pair of essays on Austen is animated by precisely such concerns.

Pocock and Habermas

Many books about later eighteenth-century literature – indeed about the period as a whole – engage with two very influential general models for reading eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural history. J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975) and Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (1985) represent the most schematic and influential accounts of traditional ideas of individual virtue, and the challenges to that ethic represented by Britain’s success as a commercial society.¹¹ Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962; trans. 1989) is by now the established starting point for discussions of eighteenth-century sociability and rational debate, and their productive relationship to a new urban phenomenology, especially the world of the coffee houses.¹² Although they have very different interests, both writers believe that the debates they describe make the eighteenth century distinctive. In some ways they both assume that these discussions become increasingly marked aspects of life as the century progresses. For the purposes of this introduction, I would argue that this is indeed the case. Pocock describes an attitude that has an ancient genealogy, and coffee houses as an institution predate even the Restoration. But the codes that each writer lays out become increasingly assumed frames of reference – both for contemporary Britons and for modern critics – especially when, as I argue below, national anxieties after about 1750 turn from constitutional and dynastic to more ethical and micropolitical issues. Sustaining one’s virtue in the face of larger and more impersonal social forces, or cultivating proper modes of social deportment and conversation (both central criteria of value for Austen), can be said to belong to the culture of sentiment in general, even if they anticipate it, and even if they do not define it.

Pocock’s view of virtue and commerce and Habermas’s notion of the public sphere also affect how we are presently to perceive the genealogy and health of the Anglo-American liberal tradition, and the extent to which it can contribute meaningfully or effectively to political arrangements at the end of the twentieth century. In this connection, the debate is partly about usable history, one already richly at play in the eighteenth century itself. In some ways, all parties assume that modern capitalism and modern varieties of liberalism derive from the period of the long eighteenth century, with much of the stress lying on interpretations of the Glorious Revolution in 1688. But the questions that remain include the extent to which constitutional liberalism depends on or is inevitably engrafted into a defence of homo economicus – the possessive individual described almost mythically by C. B. Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962).¹³ On textual and historical grounds, Macpherson’s reading of Hobbes and Locke has largely been disproved. But Macpherson’s model has nevertheless enjoyed a remarkable afterlife, both because the phrase ‘possessive individualism’ rolls so easily off the tongue, and because his Marxist critique of liberalism encapsulates an ongoing discomfort about liberalism in general. Put simply, his thesis argues that the liberal defence of political rights is enmeshed in a defence of acquisitive market practices: individual political rights depend on the individual owning property. The stakes are all the higher for the later eighteenth century, since classical economics is the child of the Scottish enlightenment. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published the year of the American Revolution, can seem to argue that the market produces its own self-regulating economy, and that it is a good in itself, not fully accountable to traditional debates in ethics and politics.¹⁴ Was Smith celebrating a kind of amorality of the marketplace that before the fact justified the worst excesses of laissez-faire economics? (This fear received contemporary encouragement from Mandeville’s sardonic celebration of acquisitive instincts in The Fable of the Bees [1714–29] under the rubric ‘Private Vices, Publick Benefits.’) Or can the force of the marketplace remain indebted to a broader definition of political economy, which might explain Hume’s receptiveness to the civilizing force of the forum – in all its senses – and Smith’s own career and status as a moral philosop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Editor’s Preface
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I General Essays: The Sentimental and the Gothic
• Part II Smollett
• Part III Sterne
• Part IV Walpole
• Part V Burney
• Part VI Wollstonecraft
• Part VII Godwin
• Part VIII Austen
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index