HISTORY OF ENGLISH NOVEL
(series 03)

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL

DANIEL DEFOE

Though Ifor Evans traces the origin of English novel from Richardson’s PAMELA many regards Daniel Defoe (1657-1731) as a pioneer novelist of adventure and low life. For the first time he let the readers hear the actual voice of the average middle class. He notes the moral corruption of the nobility and the decline of the brutal but ignorant country gentleman. He is the most wonderful observer of facts and by means of his imagination he can form them anew.

Defoe was the first nonconformist and dissenter in English literature. When he established his periodical The Review in 1704 the age of English journalism was less than fifty years. Like Dickens he was highly endowed with the experiencing nature and nothing seemed to him to be too small to escape his notice. He knew how to turn the smallest detail into literary account. He had made fiction appear like truth and truth appear like fiction.

In 1706 Defoe published A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal, the day next Day after her Death, to one Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury, the 8^th of September 1705. At one time this book was thought to be a hoax but actually turned out to be a well researched work of imagination. When the first part of ROBINSON CRUSOE was published in 1719 Defoe was sixty years old. During the next few years he was to become the most extraordinarily prolific old man in the history of English fiction.

In quick succession he wrote CAPTAIN SINGLETON (1720), MOLL FLANDERS (1722), COLONEL JACQUE (1722), A Journal of the Plaque Year (1722) and ROXANA (1724). Defoe regarded novel not as a work of imagination but as a true relation and even when the element of fact decreases he maintains the close realism of pseudo fact. ROBINSON CRUSOE has the shipwreck of Selkirk as its source. CAPTAIN SINGLETON and MOLL FLANDERS have accounts of travels and the vague and suggestive geography of the time, the memoirs and biographies of loose women and criminals. Defoe instinctively applies the documentary method.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

The most important development in English novel seems to have come almost by chance. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) came to London and apprenticed himself as a printer. Once he was asked to prepare a series of model letters for those who were unable to write by themselves. Thus he told maid servants how to negotiate a marriage proposal, apprentices how to apply for situations and even sons how to plead their father’s forgiveness. This task made him realize that he possesses the art of expressing himself in letters. This realization led to the publication of three epistolary novels titled PAMELA (1740), CLARISSA (1747-8) and SIR CHARLES GRANDISON (1753-5).

Pamela struck the readers as a virtuous servant who resisted the attempts of seduction of her master and as a reward gained the marriage proposal from him. Though Richardson intended Pamela to point out a moral but the artist in him got the better of the moralist and his first novel belongs to an order of artistic achievement and psychological truth. Richardson’s next novel CLARRISA grew out of PAMELA. The moralist Richardson must have found some danger in the hero of PAMELA being a rake reformed by marriage so CLARRISA was designed as a painful demonstration of the perfidy of man. It is quite substantial to note here that as CLARISSA had grown out of PAMELA, SIR CHARLES GRANDISON grew out of CLARISSA. Richardson took up the moralist’s burden once again and Sir Charles Grandison appeared as a model gentleman.

Richardson, like Defoe, was a representative of the average middle class. In Richardson, his analysis of sentiment becomes the dominant motive and is pursued with a minuteness and patience which fiction in England was seldom to parallel. His realism in narration was combined with a skill in dialogue. He produced the first novels of psychological analysis and made everyday manners and ordinary persons acceptable in fiction. The French found in him a herald of revolt. Goethe felt his influence and became Richardsonian in The Sorrows of Wether. Even in Italy two plays were adapted from PAMELA by Goldoni.

In the eighteenth century novel grew to its full stature. The Elizabethans had toyed with romance and realism. Bunyan had made story out of his religious convictions. Defoe had given to homely fact an imaginative appeal. Richardson emerged as the typical figure of the changed order. The English novel firmly established by Richardson was further strengthened by Fielding and Smollett.

HENRY FIELDING

Henry Fielding (1707-54) began his literary career as a playwright by writing a comedy in the Restoration manner. But he soon found a real talent for burlesque. Richardson who was skilled in dramatic parody was tempted to write a parody of Richardson’s PAMELA and the result was SHAMELA (1741). Soon he found something on a large scale and there appeared his first published novel JOSEPH ANDREWS (1742). As Pamela was tempted by her master so her brother Joseph Andrews is tempted by his mistress, Lady Booby. With Pamela as his example of virtue he resisted though the reward was only to be kicked out in disgrace. There follows a series of adventures on the road where Joseph was accompanied by Parson Adams, a clerical Don Quixote. The comedy is admirably contrived with the Hogarthian figure of a pig keeping parson as one of its main delights. Apart from the motive of satire Fielding presented a contrast between the picture of humble, contemporary life and the classical epic.

Fielding was displeased with Richardson’s PAMELA but both of them were moralists and used the novel to demonstrate what they considered right and wrong behaviour. For Fielding morals were essentially positive and he laid emphasis on action. To him Richardson seemed to be saying that virtue and prudence were identical. Pamela appeared to be a calculating young woman whose concern for virtue masked a self regarding intentness on material and social betterment. Fielding made Shamela a hypocrite who resists her master in order to drive him into marriage so that she may become a lady and carry on freely with a local parson.

In his next novel JONATHAN WILD (1743) Fielding’s irony was the fiercest. In this novel Fielding took the life of a thief and receiver, who had been hanged at Tyburn, as a theme for demonstrating the small division between a great rogue and a great soldier or a great politician. The said novel is a satire on human greatness. The condensed irony, the self mastery, the mental liberty heightened by the implicit violence of the thwarted passion has a power that recalls Swift.

TOM JONES, appeared in 1749, is the first long English novel conceived and carried out on a plan that secured artistic unity for the whole. In its attitude to prudence and to the codes of conduct TOM JONES like JOSEPH ANDREWS is an anti Richardsonian novel. In TOM JONES Fielding appears as the innovator of the main tradition of English novel—the novel of panorama. Scott, Dickens and H G Wells followed the suite later. In this novel Fielding offers a mature presentation and criticism of almost every topic of general human interest: religion, sex, love, war, the nature of man and woman.

In his last novel AMELIA (1751) Fielding idealises the main woman character by making the novel a celebration of womanly virtues. Amelia is a successful character in English fiction, a credible and convincing representation of a positively good person. This novel is the work of a mellower Fielding and represents a fresh start conditioned by Fielding’s admiration for Richardson’s CLARISSA.

With Fielding the English novel seems to have come of age. He established it in one of its most notable form—middle class realism. He appeared as one of the most civic minded English writers, a living example of the Augustan ideal of the public man.

SMOLLETT

At the age of eighteen Tobais George Smollett (1721-71) came to London from Scotland to make his fortune not by practicing his apprenticed profession of a surgeon but by producing his tragedy THE REGICIDE. The managers refused to produce the play. Having obtained an appointment as a surgeon in the navy, he sailed in 1740 to the West Indies. This experience exposed him to the rough sea life and to the people who lived it. Having left his job and settled in London to practice as a surgeon he wrote a number of poems of no value and interest. Then he turned to his most ambitious work and published his novel THE ADVENTURES OF RODERICK RANDOM in 1748 in which he portrayed the life of a rogue hero until his marriage with the loyal, beautiful and incredible Narcissa. The depiction of the reckless and ferocious sea life makes this novel memorable. He gave a new life to the picaresque form and enriched it with freshly invented characters

Two years later Smollett published THE ADVENTURES OF PEREGRINE PICKLE (1751) which became his most successful work in comic characterization. Once again it is a novel of a rogue who follows a depraved life until he marries the virtuous Emilia. With these two novels Smollett exhausted his own experience and in FERDINAND COUNT FATHOM (1753) he draws a fantastic villain who anticipates the figures of the “novel of terror” which was soon to follow.

Both Fielding and Smollett tried their hands at the drama before finding their true medium. Fielding was the essayist novelist of character; Smollett is the exuberant novelist of incident.

During the twenty years after the death of Richardson, new elements were added to the English novel. Chief of these was “sentiment” or “sensibility” and the master of this was Lawrence Sterne. Apart from him the novelists of the time fall into three groups: (a) the novelists of the sentiment and reflection typified by Henry Mackenzie; (b) the novelists of home life represented by Fanny Burney; and (c) the novelists of ‘Gothic’ romances typified by Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve.

STERNE

Though educated almost in a barrack room Sterne (1713-68) found his way to Cambridge for a Master’s degree. Though he read theology and published sermons he also studied the works of Rabelais and Cervantes. The publication of his novel LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY began in 1760 (Vols I, II) and continued at intervals until the year before his death. The novel had no predecessor and was the product of an original mind. Sterne showed that there were untried possibilities in the genre and opened new fields of humour. In a style more subtle and a form more flexible Sterne invented the fantasia novel. The narrative consists of episodes, conversations, perpetual digressions, excursions in learning, with unfinished sentences, dashes, blank pages, fantastic syntax, and caprices in humour, bawdy and sentiment. Sterne asserted that the orderly narratives of events, with their time and space realism, have little relation to the disorder of the human mind, where sequence is not logical but incredibly capricious.

HENRY MACKENZIE

Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831) was the novelist who carried the eighteenth century well into the nineteenth. With the publication of THE MAN OF FEELING (1771) he was recognized as the literary leader of Edinburgh Society. The sentimentalism of Sterne not only remained popular but also gained its most lachrymose exposition in this novel in which the hero is forever weeping under the stress of some pathetic scene or emotional excitement. The story is purely episodic, completely without humour, owing nothing in form to Fielding or Smollett. In his next novel THE MAN OF THE WORLD (1773) Mackenzie achieved both a plot and a villain. His last and the best novel JULIA de ROUBIGNE (1777) strikes as a wholly different note and places him in the straight line of descent from Richardson. It is one of the few tragedies to be found in the early stages of English novel.

FANNY BURNEY

With the novels of Frances (Fanny) Burney (1752-1840) we enter into another plane of reality. Her first novel and her best EVELINA (1778) took the reading public by storm. The novel describes the entry of a country girl into the gaieties and adventures of London. This is the first English novel of home life. The motherless Evelina goes out into the world and her adventures are related in a series of letters with a vivacity and swift succession of incidents entirely original. She had created new comic characters who pre shadowed the far off Dickens. She was the first to give flesh and blood to sheer vulgarity. She had been regarded as the direct English successor to Richardson. However while Richardson could create things Fanny Burney seemed to have only a tenuous store of invention to support her own observation and experience. As a result her work declined. CECILIA (1782) is less natural and less effective. In her last novel THE WANDERER (1814) her style seems to have become diseased. However she was the first writer to depict that how the ordinary embarrassments of a girl’s life could be taken for the main theme of a novel.

HORACE WALPOLE

Amid these later eighteenth century developments in English novel one of the most notable is the tale of terror or “Gothic” novel which continues into the tales of horror or crime. The saga began with THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO (1765) by Horace Walpole (1717-97). It was written in conscious reaction against the domesticities of Richardson and sought to extend the world of experience by the addition of the mysterious and the supernatural. Walpole’s antiquarianism had its emotional aspects for he can be regarded as the clearest example in the eighteenth century of a wide spread sensibility arising from a disillusionment with the increase in commercialism and rationalism. Walpole carried out the medieval cult than most of his contemporaries and at Strawberry Hills he constructed a Gothic house where he could dream himself back into the days of chivalry and monastic life. THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO resulted from those romantic day dreams. Set in medieval Italy the story includes a gigantic helmet that can strike its victim dead, tyrants, supernatural intrusions, mysterious and secret terrors.

WILLIAM BECKFORD

William Beckford (1759-1844) was another gentleman of fashion and wealth who made a Gothic edifice, Fonthill Abbey, and had written a romance of mystery. As Fonthill appeared to be more extravagant than Strawberry so was VATHEK (1782), a more bizarre composition than THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO. Walpole had a sound sense of the material world but Beckford seemed to live in a territory of fantasy. VATHEK is an Oriental story of a caliph who pursues his complex cruelties and intricate passions. The main impressions communicated by this novel are of a fantastic world of lavish indulgences.

ANN RADCLIFFE

Among later practitioners of the Gothic novel the most able and popular one was Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) whose best known novels are THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO (1794) and THE ITALIAN (1797). Though she accepted the mechanism of Gothic novel she combined it with sentiment. In The Mysteries of Udolpho we find an innocent and sensitive girl in the hands of a powerful and sadistic villain named Montoni who owns a grim and isolated castle where mystery and horror stalk in the lonely corridors and haunted chambers. The works of Mrs. Radcliffe not only attracted the circulating library readers but it also infected a number of powerful minds. Byron at Newstead Abbey appeared to be a Montoni come to life. For Shelley the ghosts of the tale of terror become so real that he actually saw them. Charlotte Bronte’s Rochester in JANE EYRE was a Montoni modified into a middle class setting. Emile Bronte’s novel WUTHERING HEIGHTS was also stimulated through this strange source.

MONK LEWIS

Matthew Gregory (Monk) Lewis (1775-1818), who had read Goethe and the German romanticists, employed all the worst of his reading in THE MONK (1796). He modified the Faust theme for such a portrayal of sensuality that contemporary taste was offended though the novel was immensely popular. He continued this notorious success with TALES OF TERROR (1799) and TALES OF WONDER (1801).

We may also briefly observe that one of the most competent of the tales of terror was FRANKENSTEIN (1817) by MERRY SHELLEY. It is the novel of a mechanical monster with human power of a terrifying aspect.