Novel Ventures
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Novel Ventures

Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730

Leah Orr

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Novel Ventures

Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730

Leah Orr

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About This Book

The eighteenth century British book trade marks the beginning of the literary marketplace as we know it. The lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 brought an end to pre-publication censorship of printed texts and restrictions on the number of printers and presses in Britain. Resisting the standard "rise of the novel" paradigm, Novel Ventures incorporates new research about the fiction marketplace to illuminate early fiction as an eighteenth-century reader or writer might have seen it. Through a consideration of all 475 works of fiction printed over the four decades from 1690 to 1730, including new texts, translations of foreign works, and reprints of older fiction, Leah Orr shows that the genre was much more diverse and innovative in this period than is usually thought.

Contextual chapters examine topics such as the portrayal of early fiction in literary history, the canonization of fiction, concepts of fiction genres, printers and booksellers, the prices and physical manufacture of books, and advertising strategies to give a more complex picture of the genre in the print culture world of the early eighteenth century. Ultimately, Novel Ventures concludes that publishers had far more influence over what was written, printed, and read than authors did, and that they shaped the development of English fiction at a crucial moment in its literary history.

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Year
2017
ISBN
9780813940144
Part One
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FICTION IN THE PRINT CULTURE WORLD
1
Defining the “Novel”
Eighteenth-Century Concepts of Fiction
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What do we know about early fiction? Several general premises come to mind: (1) it derived from a long tradition of romance and spiritual writing; (2) verisimilitude became increasingly important; (3) fiction was the underdog of the literary world, long read mainly by women and servants; (4) people knew by the mid-eighteenth century that there was a new type of fiction, the “novel,” that was more complex and more worth reading; (5) the fiction that was significant was new works written in English; and (6) increasing interest in fiction can be linked to growing literacy rates among the middle class.1 These ideas are frequently repeated by critics of early fiction, and they are derived from a very few texts. Literary historians have traditionally seen fiction as developmental, proceeding from the past to the present along a single continuum, becoming more advanced and more closely resembling the works we call “novels” today. But fiction in the early eighteenth century is complex and messy, often without clear definition or aim. In the face of such chaos, many historians have sought order by concentrating on those texts that can be assembled into a linear progression. Something does change in the eighteenth century, and to many scholars, the works of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding appear to explain how we get from Arcadia to Middlemarch.
I am proposing here that we reconsider this model for literary history by starting from the texts without predetermined conclusions. The traditional narrative of the “rise” of the novel in the eighteenth century does not work if we look at more texts, which is easier to do now than it was in the past. In order to gain an accurate idea of what fiction was printed in this time period, I read the nearly five hundred separate works of fiction printed in England between 1690 and 1730. I developed this list of primary texts by beginning with bibliographies of fiction by Charles Mish and William McBurney, then supplementing these with information from the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, the Term Catalogues, and the English Short Title Catalogue. I used Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online to find copies of many of these texts, and searched the Burney Papers from the British Library for newspaper advertisements showing prices of fiction. My extensive use of online databases and digitalized texts has made strikingly clear why this type of study has not yet been done: it is really only feasible by means of these new resources. The works on my list that are available in print editions are almost all by canonical authors—Behn, Bunyan, Manley, Haywood, Defoe—and so of course my predecessors, for whom this was the primary means of reading early fiction, depended on these few authors. My main argument in what follows is about the fiction itself, but in the scope of my study I am also proposing a new way of approaching literary history. By using newly available technology to study all printed texts from a certain time period (not just those in modern editions), we can achieve an understanding of the literature of the past that is more historically sensitive and comprehensive.
An explanation is in order about my date range. Many scholars of early fiction have chosen starting dates such as 1660, 1688, or 1719 for political or literary reasons, and many of them have ended in 1719 or 1740. Focusing on the publication of a single work, however, is misleading: while both Robinson Crusoe and Pamela were popular and in some ways influential, neither brought about the sort of widespread change that such a starting or ending date would imply. Similarly, political events such as the accession of kings have very little to do with the publication of fiction. For this reason, I have chosen the somewhat arbitrary dates of 1690 and 1730 for my starting and ending points. While not significant in themselves, they encompass the whole of this time period of dramatic change in fiction. In addition, the first copyright act in England was the Statute of Anne in 1710, so my date range enables me to give equal attention to the twenty years before and after this law. Of course, I am actually covering all the earlier texts that were still being reprinted—including fictional adaptations of medieval works like Reynard the Fox and Robin Hood, and Elizabethan fiction by Nashe, Deloney, Sidney, and others. By acknowledging the arbitrariness of the date range, I hope to approach the works without fixed ideas about the influence of particular texts or political events.
Using so many primary texts means that the treatment of each is necessarily brief. I give preference to texts important to their readers, not to modern critics: The Unfortunate Traveller is shortchanged here compared to Telemachus. Many of the works discussed are uninteresting to the modern reader, and I am not suggesting that we should start teaching Nine Pious Pilgrims as part of the undergraduate survey. But these texts are important to the history of print and the history of literature, and they are part of a dynamic period of political, economic, and literary change. For reasons of brevity I have not represented all the interpretations of various critics on a few particular texts. I have tried to represent major interpretations fairly and to give due credit to my predecessors, but the aim of this study is chiefly historical rather than critical. Fiction in the eighteenth century, as today, was a business as well as an art, and this study is concerned with how much the one influences the other. Ultimately, the argument of this book is that booksellers published what they believed would sell, and in this period they exerted far greater influence on the development of fiction than did individual authors or acts of creative genius.
In the chapters that follow, I shall describe the circumstances of reading, writing, and publishing, and the various kinds of fiction produced in the early eighteenth century. First, however, there is a problem of definition. What counts as a “novel”? Or even as “fiction”? These questions cannot wholly be answered by turning to the terminology used in the period, but the genre terms found on title pages and advertisements and the discussions of genre in prefaces give us some clues as to what eighteenth-century writers thought they were doing.
Defining the “Novel”: Problems of Scope
Fiction, unlike poetry or drama, is difficult to define and isolate from other literary genres like biography, travelogue, or spiritual narrative. What do we mean by “early fiction”? Do we mean only works that look like modern novels? All imaginative prose, including fables, sermon anecdotes, and jests? What about works based on factual or plausible events, but embellished with fictional details? What time period constitutes “early”? Scholars studying fiction before 1740 have long known of the wide range of fiction—Arundell Esdaile published his bibliography in 1912—but much of it has remained unread and unacknowledged.2 This omission has three main causes: (1) methodological reasons for keeping the scope of literary history narrow, (2) definitional restrictions in determining what counts as “early fiction,” and (3) limited access to primary texts. In the early part of the twentieth century, scholars mostly focused on a few individual authors as exemplars of larger trends. Since the 1970s, literary historians have included “minor” fiction writers alongside the traditional major authors. The surviving texts are scattered among libraries around the world, which has made a comprehensive examination impractical until very recently. Now, however, a much more inclusive study is possible with electronic access to most of the extant works of fiction from the period 1690–1730. Since the practical difficulty of accessing texts is no longer a problem, we need to reconsider the methodological and definitional arguments in favor of limiting the fiction included in historical studies.
Until the late twentieth century, only a small number of early fiction writers appeared in literary histories. The Cambridge History of English Literature (1907) exemplifies the “great man” approach to selecting authors and texts for discussion, with volume titles such as The Age of Dryden and From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift. The only lengthy treatment of a fiction writer prior to 1740 is W. P. Trent’s essay on Defoe, which treats him as though he were writing in complete isolation.3 George Sherburn’s volume of A Literary History of England (1948) includes Defoe, Swift, Johnson, and Goldsmith, but only within a narrative of the rise and fall of classicism.4 Bonamy Dobrée mentions just Defoe and Swift in his discussion of fiction in English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century (1959).5 Histories of fiction are only slightly broader. Ernest A. Baker’s massive History of the English Novel (1926) includes more authors, but relegates them to subordinate chapters with titles like “The Followers of Mrs. Behn.”6 Alan Dugald McKillop’s The Early Masters of English Fiction (1956) discusses Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne; Ian Watt (1957) pares this list down to just Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, with a bit on Sterne.7 While such a narrow scope allows for more concentration on particular texts, it presents a misleading version of history in which a very few authors appear to connect directly to each other without any other influences.
More recent histories of fiction have been somewhat wider in their scope. The traditional model of focusing chapters on famous authors or works is still very much in use, though more authors appear regularly. John Richetti’s Popular Fiction before Richardson (1969) was one of the first to break away from the traditional canon, including chapters on Manley, Haywood, Aubin, Barker, and Rowe as well as Defoe, with extended discussions of some lesser-known writers. William Ray (1990) adds the works of French authors Madame de La Fayette, Marivaux, Rousseau, Diderot, and Laclos to the usual group of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne; William B. Warner (1998) has chapters on the works of Behn, Manley, Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.8 These later studies focus on fewer than ten authors, with only brief reference to the other fiction from the period.
Taxonomic histories avoid the emphasis on authors, but canonical authors continue to dominate. Michael McKeon (1987) uses both approaches, with six ideologically focused chapters and the remaining five on Cervantes, Bunyan, Defoe, Swift, and Richardson and Fielding. He has fifty-one references to Defoe outside of the chapter specifically on his work, but only two references each to James Harrington, Madeleine de Scudéry, and François Rabelais, and just one mention apiece of Richard Head, Thomas Nashe, and Margaret Cavendish. J. Paul Hunter’s Before Novels (1990) includes chapters on readers, journalism, and didactic writing, but has 105 references to Defoe or his fictions, and just two citations to Benjamin Keach and one to Nashe. Neither McKeon nor Hunter claims to be doing a comprehensive survey, but the conclusions they draw about fiction in general are based on analyses of very few texts—the same works that have featured in histories of fiction since the beginning of the twentieth century. More recently, Patricia Meyer Spacks (2006) divides texts into thematic categories such as “Novels of Adventure” or “The Novel of Manners,” which highlight common themes but omit outliers.9
These examples demonstrate the connection between methodology and scope. Efforts to expand the breadth of early fiction studied have succeeded in bringing Behn and perhaps Haywood into the ranks of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, but the method of writing history based on a few case studies has remained the same. A study that has too wide a scope, however, can lose argumentative focus. Paul Salzman’s English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700 (1985) is the most comprehensive account of early fiction, and he has very short chapters on texts from authors including Greene, Nashe, Sidney, Deloney, Bunyan, Dunton, Cavendish, and others, as well as translated fiction and jest books. With so many disparate texts treated equally, however, his book functions mainly as a reference work.
Bibliographies have a wider range of texts by both famous and unknown authors. Their compilers still have to address some of the same questions as authors of literary histories, including how to distinguish fiction from other prose forms and how to list anonymous literature. Esdaile writes in the introduction to his English Tales and Romances that “even the distinction between prose and verse becomes occasionally, as in some mixed Elizabethan pamphlets, not very easy to follow,” and his ending date “was really fixed for me at 1740 by the critics, more numerous perhaps than eminent, who have called Richardson’s Pamela, which appeared in that year, the first English novel” (xi). Charles C. Mish’s bibliography derives from Esdaile.10 William Harlin McBurney’s Check List of English Prose Fiction, 1700–1739 includes only prose works that are “fictitious,” but omits “short character sketches, jest books, topical pamphlets, dialogues, chap-books, and fictional pieces in periodicals,” with a few exceptions (ix). Clearly, the compilers of these bibliographies limit their definition of fiction to works that resemble modern novels: long prose narratives chiefly composed of nonfactual material.
By the nature of their organization, bibliographies tend to favor works that have known authors. Esdaile, Mish, and McBurney sort works by author. Of the 337 entries in McBurney’s list, 64 (19 percent) are said to be written or translated by either Defoe or Haywood.11 While overly eager attributions made by other bibliographers can account for some of the works in this high number, it also indicates McBurney’s tendency to include works with identifiable authors. He mentions “Defoe’s” The Apparition of One Mrs. Veal as an example of a work he has included even though, at only eight pages, it does not fit his criteria (ix). The fiction section of The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature is divided into two parts, listing just eight “Principal Novelists”—Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, Burney, and, oddly, Beckford. Everything else falls under the category of “Minor Fiction.”12 Robert Adams Day compiled the list of “Minor Fiction,” and he explains that he was “selective,” choosing works based on “early or unusual developments in fictional technique or in quality; popularity and influence, irrespective of literary merit; modern edns, reprints, studies; and interest as illustrating popular movements in fiction” (975). Of the 210 “minor” works listed as first published in the period 1690–1730, just 48 (23 percent) are anonymou...

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