THE NOVEL  IN  18th  CENTURY:
          S. RICHARDSON  AND  H. FIELDING

            Among writers of the novel, a newly popular form in this period, an advocate of sentiment and simple, innocent feelings had already appeared in the person of Samuel Richardson. Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded is one of the earliest novels in the English tradition, that has a well-developed sense of social reality, and perhaps the earliest in which the events can be seen as a projection of the personal concerns of its author.
            This work inspired the two writers who would consolidate the bases of the novel: Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Richardson irritated Fielding. Henry Fielding parodied Pamela in An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741) and in The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742); Henry Fielding evinced his connexion with the earlier satirical spirit in this novel. Joseph Andrews marked the beginning of a long and bloody literary career between Richardson and Fielding, which only finished with Fielding's dead, in 1754. Henry Fielding provided vitality, movement and the style, whereas Richardson shut himself in the soul and feeling movements, and in the meticulous and psychological brushstroke.
            In conclusion, the great flowering of the English novel in 18th century took place starting from Samuel Richardson, who had the idea of organizing a novel in epistolary form. Samuel Richardson had little permanent direct influence on English fiction. But his works played a part in the growth of the novel of sentiment, especially on the continent. Diderot eulogized him, Rousseau adapted him, and a whole series of German writers admired his emotional power. Yet this kind of influence misses his real strength. It was indirectly through Jane Austen (though after her epistolary juvenilia she discarded the lettter-form) that the legacy of Richardson's "point-of-view" writing was transmitted to later English novelists. The modern novel, after Henry James and James Joyce, if it has not turned to Richardson himself, has been largely concerned with extending and developing the type of dramatic novel he creatded.