Daniel DefoeMinor novelists
Such ambitious debates on society and human nature ran parallel with the explorations of a literary form finding new popularity with a large audience, the novel. Defoe, for example, fascinated by any intellectual wrangling, was always willing (amid a career of unwearying activity) to publish his own views on the matter currently in question, be it economic, metaphysical, educational, or legal. His lasting distinction, though earned in other fields of writing than the disputative, is constantly underpinned by the generous range of his curiosity. Only someone of his catholic interests could have sustained, for instance, the superb Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-27), a vivid, county-by-county review and celebration of the state of the nation. He brought the same diversity of enthusiasms into play in writing his novels. The first of these, Robinson Crusoe (1719), an immediate success at home and on the Continent, is a unique fictional blending of the traditions of Puritan spiritual autobiography with an insistent scrutiny of the nature of man as social creature and an extraordinary ability to invent a sustaining modern myth. A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) displays enticing powers of self-projection into a situation of which Defoe can only have had experience through the narrations of others, and both Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724) lure the reader into puzzling relationships with narrators the degree of whose own self-awareness is repeatedly and provocatively placed in doubt.
The enthusiasm prompted by Defoe's best novels demonstrated the growing readership for innovative prose narrative. Samuel Richardson, a prosperous London printer, was the next major author to respond to the challenge. His Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740, with a less happy sequel in 1741), using (like all Richardson's novels) the epistolary form, tells a story of an employer's attempted seduction of a young servant woman, her subsequent victimization, and her eventual reward in virtuous marriage with the penitent exploiter. Its moral tone is self-consciously rigorous and proved highly controversial. Its main strength lies in the resourceful, sometimes comically vivid imagining of the moment-by-moment fluctuations of the heroine's consciousness as she faces her ordeal. Pamela herself is the sole letter writer, and the technical limitations are strongly felt, though Richardson's ingenuity works hard to mitigate them. But Pamela's frank speaking about the abuses of masculine and gentry power sounds the skeptical note more radically developed in Richardson's masterpiece, Clarissa: or, the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), which has a just claim to being considered the most reverberant and moving tragic fiction in the English novel tradition. Clarissa uses multiple narrators and develops a profoundly suggestive interplay of opposed voices. At its centre is the taxing soul debate and eventually mortal combat between the aggressive, brilliantly improvisatorial libertine Lovelace and the beleaguered Clarissa, maltreated and abandoned by her family but abiding sternly loyal to her own inner sense of probity. The tragic consummation that grows from this involves an astonishingly ruthless testing of the psychological natures of the two leading characters. After such intensities, Richardson's final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54), is perhaps inevitably a less ambitious, cooler work, but its blending of serious moral discussion and a comic ending ensured it an influence on his successors, especially Jane Austen.
Henry Fielding turned to novel writing after a successful period as a dramatist, during which his most popular work had been in burlesque forms. His entry into prose fiction was also in that mode. An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), a travesty of Richardson's Pamela, transforms the latter's heroine into a predatory fortune hunter who cold-bloodedly lures her booby master into matrimony. Fielding continued his quarrel with Richardson in The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), which also uses Pamela as a starting point but which, developing a momentum of its own, soon outgrows any narrow parodic intent. His hostility to Richardson's sexual ethic notwithstanding, Fielding was happy to build, with a calm and smiling sophistication, on the growing respect for the novel to which his antagonist had so substantially contributed. In Joseph Andrews and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) Fielding openly brought to bear upon his chosen form a battery of devices from more traditionally reputable modes (including epic poetry, painting, and the drama). This is accompanied by a flamboyant development of authorial presence. Fielding the narrator buttonholes the reader repeatedly, airs critical and ethical questions for the reader's delectation, and urbanely discusses the artifice upon which his fiction depends. In the deeply original Tom Jones especially, this assists in developing a distinctive atmosphere of self-confident magnanimity and candid optimism. His fiction, however, can also cope with a darker range of experience. The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), for instance, uses a mock-heroic idiom to explore a derisive parallel between the criminal underworld and England's political elite, and Amelia (1751) probes with sombre precision images of captivity and situations of taxing moral paradox.
Tobias Smollett had no desire to rival Fielding as a formal innovator, and his novels consequently tend to be rather ragged assemblings of disparate incidents. But, although uneven in performance, all of them include extended passages of real force and idiosyncracy. His freest writing is expended on grotesque portraiture in which the human is reduced to fiercely energetic automatism. Smollett can also be a stunning reporter of the contemporary scene, whether the subject be a naval battle or the gathering of the decrepit at a spa. His touch is least happy when, complying too facilely with the gathering cult of sensibility, he indulges in rote-learned displays of emotionalism and good-heartedness. His most sustainedly invigorating work can perhaps be found in The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), and (an altogether more interesting encounter with the dialects of sensibility) The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771).
An experiment of a radical and seminal kind is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67), which, drawing on a tradition of learned wit from Erasmus and Rabelais to Burton and Swift, provides a brilliant comic critique of the progress of the English novel to date. The focus of attention is shifted from the fortunes of the hero himself to the nature of his family, environment, and heredity, and dealings within that family offer repeated images of human unrelatedness and disconnection. Tristram, the narrator, is isolated in his own privacy and doubts how much, if anything, he can know certainly even about himself. Sterne is explicit about the influence of Lockean psychology on his writing, and the book, fascinated with the fictive energies of the imagination, is filled with characters reinventing or mythologizing the conditions of their own lives. It also draws zestful stimulus from a concern with the limitations of language, both verbal and visual, and teases an intricate drama out of Tristram's imagining of, and playing to, the reader's likely responses. Sterne's Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) similarly defies conventional expectations of what a travel book might be. An apparently random collection of scattered experiences, it mingles affecting vignettes with episodes in a heartier, comic mode, but coherence of imagination is secured by the delicate insistence with which Sterne ponders how the impulses of sentimental and erotic feeling are psychologically interdependent.
The work of these five giants was accompanied by interesting experiments from a number of lesser novelists. Sarah Fielding, for instance, Henry's sister, wrote penetratingly and gravely about friendship in The Adventures of David Simple (1744, with a sequel in 1753). Charlotte Lennox in The Female Quixote (1752) and Richard Graves in The Spiritual Quixote (1773) responded inventively to the influence of Cervantes, also discernible in the writing of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (known as Fanny Hill; 1748-49) chose a more contentious path; in his charting of a young girl's sexual initiation, he experiments with minutely detailed ways of describing the physiology of intercourse. In emphatic contrast, Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) offers an extremist, and rarefied, version of the sentimental hero, while Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1765) somewhat laboriously initiated the vogue for Gothic fiction. William Beckford's Vathek (1786), Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis' Monk (1796) are among the more distinctive of its successors. But the most engaging and thoughtful minor novelist of the period is Fanny Burney, who was also an evocative and self-revelatory diarist and letter writer. Her Evelina (1778) and Camilla (1796) in particular handle with independence of invention and emotional insight the theme of a young woman negotiating her first encounters with a dangerous social world.
(M.Co.)
© Copyright 1999 Britannica.com Inc.
http://www.britannica.com
