English Novel, Vol I, The

1700 to Fielding

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

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317895992
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The English Novel, Volume I:1700 to Fielding 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 1700 and 1750.

Richard Kroll's introduction seeks to frame the contributions by reference to the most significant critical discussions. These include: the question of whether and how we can talk about the 'rise' of the novel; the vexed question of what might constitute a novel; the relationship between the novel and possibly competing genres such as history or the romance; the relationship between early male writers like Defoe and popular novels by women in the early eighteenth century; the general ideological role played by novels relative to eighteenth-century culture (are they means of ideological conscription or liberation?); poststructuralist analyses of identity and gender; and the emergence of sentimental and domestic codes after Richardson.

Since the modern European novel is often thought to have been formed in this period, these debates have clear implications for students of the novel in general as well as for those interested in the early enlightenment. Headnotes place each essay within the map of these wider concerns, and the volume offers a useful further reading list. Taken as a whole, this collection encapsulates the state of criticism at the present moment.

1 Introduction

This is the first of two volumes that anthologize a series of previously published essays and book chapters about the eighteenth-century British novel. The present collection covers the novel’s career from 1700 to Fielding; its companion, the novel’s career from Smollett to the end of the century.¹

My intention is to treat the anthologies as a matching pair, so that my separate introductions will attempt to perform for the student two distinct, but I hope complementary, tasks. The first introduction, more purely ‘literary’ in manner and method, provides a digest of the major recent critical approaches to the novel of the first half of the eighteenth century. It will also introduce in passing some of the main literary-theoretical approaches that have appealed to critics.

The second introduction will be more historical in scope, responding to what I see as a change in the nature and range of literary expression in the later eighteenth century, and thus in the descriptive challenge confronting the scholar or critic. It seeks broadly to frame the concerns of later eighteenth-century novelists with the pressures and anxieties that distinguish British history between 1745, when the Jacobite cause was decisively defeated, and 1800, when Britain was at war with France in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789. And it connects that analysis to modern debates in intellectual history and political theory about how the eighteenth century as a whole dealt with the effects of a commercial and consumer revolution, and how it developed and articulated cultural ideals of conversation, politeness, and rational debate.

The problem of ‘the novel’: Ian Watt and his successors

Any responsible commentator on the early eighteenth-century novel must recognize the success and authority of a single book, namely Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, published in 1957, the same year in which Northrop Frye published his Anatomy of Criticism, and only four years after the appearance in translation of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, to which Watt owes a great deal.² Almost none of the essays printed below can proceed without accounting in some way or another for the impact Watt’s book has had on all later critics of the eighteenth-century novel. The book has served, for most of us, as a classroom primer. Qualifying and attacking The Rise of the Novel has become the grounds of a number of books almost as important in their own right, but Watt’s argument is deservedly famous. It takes more or less as an assumption the view that what we ordinarily recognize as a novel – a literary artifact aiming, according to Watt, at ‘formal realism’ (a term his critics tend to simplify) – first became fully visible with the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719.

The success of Watt’s book reflected not only its exemplary clarity and intelligence of presentation, but also the structure of its crucial opening chapters. Here, Watt argued several things. Above all, he held that the novel represents a distinct departure in literary aims and techniques from the former course of European literary history. Despite an ancient tradition of long prose narratives, of which he is patently aware, Watt argued that the novel combines a series of effects reflecting or exploiting the peculiar conditions in European, specifically English, life that emerged generally after the middle of the seventeenth century. It is important to see how Watt stresses that what is new is a question of methods of representation, that the ‘realism’ he heralds does not generally in his argument have the kind of objective, almost ontological status accorded it by many of his critics. For Watt, ‘realism’ is itself an artifice: the novel ‘attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective’; its ‘realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it’ (11). Its protagonists are represented not as types but as ‘particular individuals in the contemporary social environment’ (19), and its plot mechanisms are driven by a concern to regard strictly probable and causal relations among character, motivation, and effects in the world. Moreover, character is not an allegorical type or bundle of humors, but is the product of the individual mind’s encounter with numerous particular experiences over time: in fact, it is this pressure of time on the individual consciousness that distinguishes Defoe from predecessors such as Sidney or Bunyan (24).³

The power of Watt’s explanatory mechanism arose primarily not, I think, from this internalist approach to literary history, where the emergence of a new literary form becomes visible by contrast to what literary forms and genres had preceded it. It derived at least as much from the way Watt elegantly attached it to two different external forms of explanation. The first, summoning intellectual history, held that Descartes’ formulations concerning human identity were indeed as revolutionary as historians of philosophy have thought. Descartes’ Discourse of Method and Meditations were, precisely, intensive investigations of the career of an individual, privatized conscience; and what Descartes revolutionized at the level of high abstract philosophy became profoundly popularized in England with the spectacular success of John Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). In this document, Locke argues that personal identity is the accumulation of individual mental experiences through space and time. Though Watt does not explicitly treat it in this way, this aspect of his thesis appealed and still appeals to critics who see the novel as an instrument for forming a new bourgeois conscience or identity in the wake, especially, of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

The second aspect of Watt’s approach is in some ways his most enduring legacy to studies of the novel. For here Watt connected the rise of the novel to the growth of literacy in England, the emergence of different and new kinds of readers – or writers’ assumptions that such new kinds of readers existed – the growth of publication, and the creation of such institutions as lending libraries. In short, Watt attended carefully to what is now often called literature’s material conditions. In his second chapter, Watt anticipates the outlines of similar lines of inquiry to the present day, especially J. Paul Hunter’s excellent amplification of Watt’s thesis, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (1990).⁴ He considers the growth of literacy in the early eighteenth century; the relative cost of books, with novels costing less than the expensive folio editions of French romances; the emergence of circulating libraries; a recognition that, increasingly, readers were women, apprentices, and household servants; these classes’ aspirations in a society in which upward mobility seemed possible; the overwhelming production of religious literature in an age where tastes nevertheless seem to become increasingly secular; the growth of periodical literature such as the Gentleman’s Magazine (issued in the 1730s) and the social changes detectable in that journal in the wake of Addison’s more gentrified Spectator (issued in 1711–12); the rising power of the booksellers in stimulating literary consumption; and the economic conditions of authorship in the literary marketplace which tended to encourage prolixity – one reason that the novel, in the minds of satirists such as Pope, was associated with Grub Street.

There are further reasons why Watt’s book has been so successful, ones largely external to his actual thesis and methods. These are inevitably and paradoxically some of the motives for issuing the present volume and its companion. That is, there is a widespread assumption that there is such a thing as the novel, accompanied by several other assumptions that Watt’s main title (shorn of the important qualifying subtitle) and language tend to foster. We could list them as follows: the novel is about everyday life and the concerns of everyday people; it aims at representational transparency of a kind that can reproduce the texture of quotidian, especially urban, life; its commentary bears quite immediately on social concerns and pressures; and it is both the most popular and most widespread literary form.

The problem is that many of these assumptions either about novelistic form or its social relevance have a nineteenth-century, not eighteenth-century, provenance.⁵ Though eighteenth-century writers are conscious that the novel escapes classic generic taxonomies – what are its debts to romance or to epic, to courtesy books or the novella? – it was primarily the nineteenth, not the eighteenth century that embarked on programmatic attempts to legitimate the novel as high art (Flaubert, James), following an era in which its social relevance was such that Dickens was cited in parliamentary debates on the poor. Moreover, since the singular power of the novel as a genre goes today unchallenged by and large, and since these assumptions – ideologically pervasive as they are – deeply affect students’ views about what they want to read, studies of the eighteenth-century novel often proceed as if the novel as such was as visible and established a category to eighteenth-century readers as it has become to us. Consequently, the tendency has been to assume that the crucial stage in the formation of the novel was the agreement that arose out of the debate between Richardson and Fielding. It is as though all sides were agreed that these writers, between them, had forged a new literary type. And histories of the rise of the novel or the rise of the English novel have often relaxed at this milestone in the 1740s, as if from that point forth, the novel’s victory was assured. In some retrospective sense, of course, it was.

I have sketched the significance of Watt’s book at some length because it has, positively as well as negatively, determined the course of the major studies to have appeared in recent years, the latest two being Margaret Doody’s The True Story of the Novel (1996) and Homer Brown’s Institutions of the English Novel from Defoe to Scott (1997).⁶ These studies can, I think, be grouped into three types: studies that effectively accept Watt’s thesis about the rise of the novel in England in the first half of the eighteenth century, but seek in significant ways to qualify or extend its terms; studies that argue that the focus on the eighteenth-century English novel as ‘new’ are essentially mistaken, since the novel has an ancient pedigree of which it has always remained aware; and studies that argue that the shape of the history assumed and encouraged by Watt is itself an outgrowth of highly charged ideological battles fought during the eighteenth century, and decided by the beginning of the nineteenth, about how the novel in English should be recognized, and what values it should be deemed to promote.

Davis, Keener, Hunter, McKeon

Lennard Davis’s Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (1983) was one of the first sustained attempts, in the 1980s, to redefine the terms of Ian Watt’s book.⁷ Davis’s book is nothing if not methodologically self-conscious, and interestingly raises the central point of contention of all the major studies since. That is, if the novel has an origin, does it emerge gradually from earlier genres and historical moments, or does it appear rather suddenly as a new form, as Watt implicitly argues? Davis contends that there are essentially three ways of constructing explanations for the emergence of a genre to prominence: the ‘evolutionary’ model, in which the novel organically develops out of previous narrative forms; the ‘osmotic’ model, in which the novel rather vaguely responds to, or absorbs, changes in the culture – a position Davis ascribes to Watt; and the ‘convergence’ model, in which the novel does emerge at a distinct time, but uses everything currently available to it: it is part of a new discursive formation. By citing Foucault, Davis favors the ‘convergence’ model, but in practice selectively propounds a thesis not unlike that of Watt: the ‘osmotic’ and ‘convergence’ models are in practice alike, it seems. This is hardly surprising, since almost all analyses of the emergence of an historical phenomenon tend to fudge the question of whether it was produced by, or helped produce, other, seemingly related, phenomena. For example, did bourgeois expectations help stimulate the novel, which catered to them, or was the novel an essential device for propagating what we might see as distinctively bourgeois values?

Further, and usefully, Davis raises an issue that continues to tease studies of the early novel, and that is its relation to the romance, and by implication specifically the French romances that flowered in the seventeenth century. Since he is thinking in terms of Foucauldian ruptures, whereby the genealogy of historical forces can be dismissed as causal explanations, Davis rejects the connection between the romance and the novel. Rather, the novel emerges from a series of pressures or impulses that are local to Britain, and are marked centrally by an unresolved ambivalence about the difference between fact and fiction. Novels are ‘a new and self-conscious genre’ (12), Davis argues, precisely because they are fictions that claim to be factual. This doubleness they owe to sixteenth-century ballads and seventeenth-century newsbooks, whereby the Wattian values of immediacy, transparency, and readerly engagement are given a distinct, vernacular genealogy. And what was immediate, though atomized, in the ballad, became more methodical, continuous, though no less engaged, in the newsbooks, especially at that critical juncture in the 1640s when news assumed vital polemical significance for the nation at large, as it lurched toward Civil War. In sum, formal realism has its own history.

In categorically rejecting any affiliation between the romance and the novel, Davis may be overstating his case, but his summary of the opposition is useful, since it so vividly etches the terms that other critics such as McKeon and Doody are themselves trying to negotiate, though in markedly different ways. Thus:

1 The romance is set in the distant, idealized past; the novel is set in a more recent, less heroic, setting.

2 The romance is based on the epic; the novel is modelled on history and journalism.

3 The romance is usually not set in the country of the author but in a remote and exotic location; the novel tends to be set in the locale of the author, that is, the novel tends to be a national form of literature.

4 The romance depicts the life of the aristocracy and is designed for an upper-class reader; the novel tends to be more middle-class in scope and is geared to a slightly less aristocratic readership, although the statement is less true in France of the seventeenth century than in England.

5 Romances tend to be long and episodic; novels are shorter and more compact of plot.

6 Romances value the preservation of virtue and chastity; novels tend to focus on illegal doings and forbidden passions.

7 Novels of the eighteenth century tend to be written in the first person or in letter form; romances are never written in these forms.

8 Romances make clear that they are mixing fact and fiction to create an essentially fictional plot; novels tend to deny that they are fictional.

9 Romances follow the rules of bienséance and vraisemblance; novelists openly reject these rules since they claim to be writing history or recording life as it is.⁸

Two other important books avowedly develop their cues from Watt, namely Frederick Keener’s The Chain of Becoming: The Philosophical Tale, the Novel, and a Neglected Realism of the Enlightenment: Swift, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Johnson, and Austen (1983); and J. Paul Hunter’s Before Novels (cited above).⁹ In his subtle and highly original argument, Keener begins with an obiter dictum in Watt, namely t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Models and Beginnings
• Part II Defoe
• Part III Richardson
• Part IV Fielding
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index