Exuberance marked British literary production in the 1740s. In prose and in poetry, the decade saw a vivid explosion of energy. Poetry ranged from Samuel Johnson’s passionate Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), composed in heroic couplets and imitating a classical model, to William Collins’s Odes (1747), innovative in form and content; from Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1743), a satiric anti-epic in couplets, to the final version of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1744), a long blank verse poem with a rhapsodic view of the natural world. Prose fiction included moralized fable, social satire, imitation biography and autobiography, sentimental investigation, action narrative, erotic exploration, and various combinations. The many important published novels did not necessarily have much in common. Clarissa (1747–1748) bears little obvious resemblance to Roderick Random (1748). Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (1741) and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) share almost nothing beyond their common satirical target of Pamela (1740). The efflorescence of fiction implied only a few widely held assumptions about what the novel is, does, or should do. Most of its manifestations, however, suggested a conviction that fiction, providing vicarious experience for its readers, should dramatize for them human experience in its common forms.
That rather obvious project carried significant weight in the 1740s. The notion that experience provides the only secure basis for knowledge was at the heart of philosophic empiricism, strongly articulated by the philosopher David Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) insisted that we must content ourselves with experience as the stuff of knowledge and that experience provides sufficient basis for the conduct of life. Hume elaborated the point in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) in terms suggesting the central principle of many novelistic plots:
The investigation of how a young man – or, often, a young woman – acquired and used experience provided a vibrant topos for the decade’s novels.
History, Hume believed, because factual, exerted great power over the human mind; but fiction, imitation history, could concern itself with ordinary individuals, whose version of experience might bear a closer relation to a reader’s than could happenings befalling princes or generals. Although novels throughout the decade explored many possibilities – as they would continue to do for the rest of the century – the pattern of following an imaginary young person’s acquisition of life experience persisted. Such narratives could provide vicarious experience, safer and less costly in emotional terms (particularly for women and young people) than direct experience of the world.
At the decade’s opening, terminology about fiction remained unstable, with novel and romance interchangeable labels for extended pieces of prose fiction. What we now call “romances,” fictions of a certain length that represent fanciful events, with no concern for probability, had long existed and were thought to have wide readership. Not many new ones, however, were being published. The Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue indicates that between 1700 and 1740, on average, ten or fewer new works of prose fiction in English emerged annually. “A brief but limited upsurge” developed between 1719, the year of Robinson Crusoe and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, both hugely popular, and 1726. After Pamela appeared in 1740, however, to wide acclaim, the average enlarged to about 20 novels a year, doubling again by the century’s end (Downie 2000). As the 1740s concluded, multiple possibilities remained in play. The novel had begun to solidify its authority as a form, but no one had won the struggle over its ongoing direction.
When Richardson and Fielding began writing, in the early 1740s, the novel could hardly claim a form at all. Fiction, of course, had flourished since ancient times, but the notion of an extended prose work focused on nonaristocrats was recent. The moral and aesthetic status of such a composition remained uncertain; novelists of the 1740s had to justify their enterprise. They did so most often by invoking a classical rationale: literature instructs and pleases. The first of these purposes carried more weight than the second. The familiar claim to offer moral instruction persisted in the eighteenth century – especially in the works of such writers as Haywood, where it might seem dubious. Fielding, though, a great innovator of the 1740s, offered a new kind of teaching. In Tom Jones (1749), he purported to instruct his readers about that large, vague concept, human nature: to teach them, along with his hero, how human beings operate in the world and on what principles. The claim aligned him with Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature, his first major work, had similar aspirations if different methods.
Although not every novelist articulated the same justification, the emphasis of prose fiction in the 1740s, despite the novel’s diversity in other respects, steadily moved in this direction. Instead of knights and ladies of high birth, novels now concerned themselves with men and women who might work for a living, whose origins might be indeterminate, whose fate depended not on heroic combat but on Providence as well as their own effort – effort that could prove, as often as not, misguided. Like the popular romances on our newsstands today, these fictions customarily had happy endings, but their protagonists typically faced arduous struggles, against internal as often as external obstacles. They thus educated their readers in the nature of moral endeavor, as well as in its proper goals, and they suggested the kinds of problem one might face in the world.
As for the other traditional justification, the pleasure literature provided, that too remained important to novelistic offerings, but now in new forms. The exuberance of Fielding’s play with language and with plot, the abandon with which Smollett sends his protagonists on wild travels, the inventiveness of detail, of happening, and of characterization in many of the decade’s novels: all promised and provided forms of lively delight.
While the British novel developed in new directions, attracting enthusiastic readers and listeners (reading aloud remained a common practice, and illiteracy, though decreasing, was still widespread), difficulties beset the country in which it pursued its course. During most of the 1740s, Great Britain was at war. The War of Jenkins’ Ear, against Spain, began in 1739, provoked by a merchant captain, Robert Jenkins, who displayed to the House of Commons his ear, allegedly cut off by a Spanish official. It merged into the War of the Austrian Succession, which ended only in 1748. In 1743 and 1744, the nation experienced constant threats of invasion from France, in support of claims to the British throne by James III, son of the deposed King James II. In 1745, a small force led by James’s son, Charles Edward (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”) invaded Scotland and, joined by considerable numbers of Scotsmen, managed to get within 150 miles of London. War and rumors of war, in short, formed a constant background to English life.
And not a background only. The threat of French invasion and the actuality of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s arrival stimulated divisions among the British. In 1689, after the so-called Glorious Revolution, Parliament had summoned the Protestant William of Orange and his wife Mary, daughter of James II, to the throne, replacing Mary’s father, unacceptable mainly because of his Catholicism. By 1740, George II ruled, as he had since 1727, the second of the Hanoverian kings. His father, George I, had succeeded Mary’s sister, Queen Anne, as her closest Protestant relative. German by birth and by residence, George I did not even speak English. His successor, without sharing this linguistic disability, likewise remained oriented toward Germany. Less unpopular among the English than his father had been, he was yet widely thought too bellicose, cause for anxiety in an era of widespread European wars.
Although relatively few British citizens had Catholic sympathies, many felt troubled at the breaking of the Stuart line when George I succeeded Anne, and many deplored the incursion of German rulers. Jacobites, as sympathizers with James’s cause were called, wanted an invasion and a new king who would restore the old lineage. Most of their countrymen did not. Such political divisions within the nation, less widespread than they had been 50 years before, yet contributed to national unease both before the 1745 invasion and after, when those who had provided military or financial support to Prince Charles were ferociously punished.
The custom of “impressing” soldiers and sailors – taking men by force from their usual pursuits – generated uncertainty and fear in the working classes. The wars might come all too close to home – as, indeed, they literally did in 1745 after Prince Charles landed from France and won a series of military victories that carried him from Scotland to within striking distance of London before his army was defeated by the English.
More than war troubled the nation. Corruption was thought to abound in the government. Money, as opposed to landed property, took an increasingly important place in individual lives. Both public and private corruption derived from desire for wealth and from easy possibilities for achieving it. The vast gap between the rich and the poor began to attract attention, as members of the growing mercantile class flaunted their money and its appurtenances. Possibilities for dealing with money had amplified: paper credit now existed, and stock trading was increasing – developments fraught with uncertainty. Anyone who looked around could find much to criticize – a situation familiar in every era. In the 1740s, however, the novel provided not only an imaginative escape from troubling actualities but also a fresh medium for conveying criticism. Tied to some version of ordinary life, the novel could attend both to the ways that human beings proceed through their careers and to matters that trouble them along their paths. Among these matters, in the 1740s as always, were national and international political issues.
To suggest that novels engaged the period’s large concerns is not to say that they focused as much attention on public as on private matters. But this fiction manifested not only intensifying interest in individuals, not only heightened concern for realism,1 but also fresh possibilities for pondering authority, succession, legitimacy, negotiation – issues alive in national and international politics. Moreover, many novelists used fiction to criticize corruption, public and private, and to convey anxiety about, or condemnation of, the place of money in national life. Such actualities figure mostly as objects of overt or implicit criticism, and their incorporation suggests the novel’s ambition.
In Clarissa, a work conspicuously concerned with its characters’ intimate lives, social and political allusions occur mainly by analogy. Early in the novel, while Clarissa still believes that she can negotiate successfully for her own freedom, she comments that the “world is but one great family” (Richardson 1985, 62). Her comment acquires increasing ironic force as her own immediate family ever more clearly epitomizes the viciousness of the larger world. Helpless against her siblings’ machinations, her mother’s weakness, her father’s obsessions, and her uncles’ venality, she grasps with increasing clarity the degree to which, both before and after her defection from her father’s home, those around her, like most in society at large, operate on the basis of narrowly conceived self-interest.
A series of apparently casual analogies strengthens the connection between intimate groupings and larger ones. The early part of the narrative, before Clarissa’s elopement, offers frequent comparisons between happenings in the Harlowe family and what Clarissa at one point calls...
