CONTEXT
THE BEGINNING OF THE NOVEL
To say that the modern novel came into existence in the eighteenth century is not to say that there was no prose fiction before 1700. There were the ancient Greek romances and their modern European imitators: the counrtly Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney and the humbler fiction of Thomas Deloney and Thomas Nashe and other Elizabethans; the interminable French romances of the seventeenth century and their English translations and imitations, loosely constructed, blending aristocratic refinement, chivalric adventure, and courtly love ; the tales of the careers of famous criminals and rogues; scandalous stories loosely based on current events; and in a world apart, Bunyan's vivid allegories of the spiritual adventures of wayfaring and militant Christians and their adversaries. Nor were clear distintions drawn between history and fiction; Behn's Oroonoko is both. But it remains true that, if we except Defoe, the creator of the modern novel was Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). Both Defoe and Richardson belonged to the middle class and expressed in their works middle-class interests and attitudes. They also wrote about and for women. To a large extent, the development of the novel is identical with the attempt to interest the growing number of female readers by shaping their lives into literature. Defoe simply ignored the sentimental and aristocratic refinements of the earlier romances and was content to show his readers not a world as it might be, a heroic world, but their world as it was, pipulated with believable people who were motivated by the practical conerns that dominate our daily lives. He did not seek - and except through Robinson Crusoe (1719) did not often find - readers among the upper classes. He was content to interest shopkeepers, apprentices, and servants, who were already avid readers of tales of crime and adventure, usually heavily laced with pious moral observations.\par \par \tab Richardson, however, caught the attention of all literate Europe, and once and for all established the novel as we know it, a solid and enduring object in the literary landscape, His three novels were strikingly new in their minute and subtle analysis of emotions and states of mind. It was while he was compiling a little book of model letters that he conceived the idea of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), a story told in a series of letters, in which a virtuous servant girl who resists hermaster's base desingns on her virtue eventually wins him as her husband. Richardson's masterpiece, Clarissa (1747-48), carries the same epistolary method, moral instruction, and sexual titillation to new heights. In the conflict between the libertine Lovelace, and attractive and diabolical aristocrat, and the angelic Clarissa, the perfection fo middle-class values, Richardson created a fiction that embodied the ideals and the tensions of his society. No earlier author had involved readers so fully in the thoughts and emotions of the caracters, nor had any author paid such close attention to the pressures on women. Such later novelists as Fanny Burney (1752-1840) and Jane Austen (1775-1817) would profit from his example. Richardson's final novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54), turns to a model of male perfection with less success.\par \par \tab Henry Fielding (1707-1754), who loved virtue as much as Richardson did, but to whom goodness was a matter of spontaneity andfellow feeling, no of conformity to a code, considered Pamela a misleading image of virtue; therefore, in 1742, he published Joseph Andrews, which beging as an hilarious burlesque of Pamela by describing the staunch resistance offered to the lewd advances of Lady Booby by her sevants, the virtuous Joseph, brether of Pamela. Expelled for his chastity from Lady Booby's household, he takes to the road, joining the guileless Parson Adams, who is walking to London to try to sell a bundle of his sermons to a publisher. Their adventures make up what Fielding called "a comic epic in prose." His great novel is The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749). The protagonist became the pattern of the good-natured hero of the age: a young man of manly virtues, generous, high spirited, loyal, and courageous, but impulsive, wanting prudence, and full of animal spirits and sensuality. The novel is crowded with incident and with varied types of men and women, and critcs have agreed with Coleridge's praise of its brilliantly constructed plot. Fielding's other importand novel, Amelia (1751), having as its heroine a long-suffering woman, almost wholly passive, is an example of pathos rather than of Fielding's comic vigor and gusto.\par \par \tab The picaresque tradition was continued by Tobias Smollett (1721-1771), in Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), and Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753). Smollett delighted to depict the grotesque side of ieghteenth-century life, its brutality, coarse practical jokes, and strong adors. His masterpiece is Humphry Clinker (1771), which recounts, through letters written by several members of a travling party, the comic incidents of a journey through England and Scotland. But the most original novelist of the perod was Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), and unclerical clergyman, a humorist, a sentimentalist, and an author who reminds us that one of the roots of the novel is the word novelty. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, produced between 1760 and 1767, deliberatery frustrated all the stock expectations of its readers. The plot has not the logical order of a beginning, a middle, and an end; instead it abandons clock time for psychological time, interrupts scenes to digress or to recount past or future events, follows whimsically any apparently chance association, digresses for several chapters--in fact,it is designed as an elaborated joke at the reader's expense. And yet the method gets us inside the consciousness of the narrator and the other characters and into a world peopled by the most engaging of comic characters.\par \par \tab Fielding, Smollett, an Sterne gave to English literature not only vivid scenes fom the life of thei times buy a gallery of eccentic an original characters that illustrate the inters of the age not only in the ideal and the general but also in the individual and the unique. The novels of Charles Dickens and of William Makepeace Thacheray in the nineteenth century owe much to their forerunners in the eighteenth.