The Rise of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century

Introduction:
In the eighteenth century the years after the forties witnessed a wonderful
efflorescence of a new literary genre which was soon to establish itself for all
times to come as the dominant literary form. Of course, we are referring here to
the English novel which was born with Richardson's Pamela and has been thriving
since then.
When Matthew Arnold used the epithets "excellent" and "indispensable" for the
eighteenth century which had little of good poetry or drama to boast of, he was
probably paying it due homage for its gift of the novel. The eighteenth century was
the age in which the novel was established as the most outstanding and enduring
form of literature. The periodical essay, which was another gift of this century to
English literature, was born and died in the century, but the novel was to enjoy an
enduring career. It is to the credit of the major eighteenth-century novelists that
they freed the novel from the influence and elements of high flown romance and
fantasy, and used it to interpret the everyday social and psychological problems of
the common man. Thus they introduced realism, democratic spirit, and
psychological interest into the novel the qualities which have since then been
recognized as the essential prerequisites of-every good novel and which distinguish
it from the romance and other impossible stories.
Reasons for the Rise and Popularity:
Various reasons can be adduced for the rise and popularity of the novel in
the eighteenth century. The most important of them is that this new literary form
suited the genius and temper of the times. The eighteenth century is known in
English social history for the rise of the middle classes consequent upon an
unprecedented increase in the volume of trade and commerce. Many people
emerged from the limbo of society to occupy a respectable status as wealthy
burgesses. The novel, with its realism, its democratic spirit, and its concern with
the everyday psychological problems of the common people especially appealed to
these nouveaia riches and provided them with respectable reading material. The
novel thus appears to have been specially designed both to voice the aspirations of
the middle and low classes and to meet their taste. Moreover, it gave the writer
much scope for what Cazamian calls "morality and sentiment"-the two elements
which make literature "popular." The decline of drama in the eighteenth century
was also partly responsible for the rise and -ascendency of the novel. After the

Licensing Act of 1737, the drama lay moribund. The poetry of the age too-except
for the brilliant example of Pope's workwas in a stage of decadence. It was then
natural that from the ashes of the drama (and, to some extent, of poetry, too)
should rise the phoenix-like shape of a new literary genre. This new genre was, of
course, the novel.
Before the Masters:
Before Richardson and Fielding gave shape to the new form some work had
already been done by numerous other writers, which helped the pioneers to some
extent. Mention must here be made of Swift, Defoe, Addison, and Steele. Swift in
Gulliver's Travels gave an interesting narrative, and, in spite of the obvious
impossibility of the "action" and incidents, created an effect of verisimilitude
which was to be an important characteristic of the novel. The Coverley papers of
Addison and Steele were in themselves a kind of rudimentary novel, and some of
them actually read like so many pages from a social and domestic novel. Their goodhumoured social satire, their eye for the oddities of individuals, their basic human
sympathy, their lucid style, and their sense of episode-all were to be aspired after
by the future novelists. Defoe with his numerous stories like Robinson Crusoe, Moll
Flanders, and Roxana showed his uncanny gift of the circumstantial detail and racy,
gripping narrative combined with an unflinching realism generally concerned with
the seamy and sordid aspects of life (commonly, low life). His lead was to be
followed by ' numerous novelists. Defoe's limitation lies in the fact that his
protagonists are psychologically too simple and that he makes nobody laugh and
nobody weep. But his didacticism was to find favour with all the novelists of the
eighteenth, and even many of the nineteenth, century. Some call Defoe the first
English novelist. But as David Daiches puts it in A Critical History of English
Literature, Vol. II, whether Defoe was "properly" a novelist "is a matter of
definition of terms."
The Masters:
Between 1740 and 1800 hundreds of novels of all kinds were written.
However, the real "masters" of the novel in the eighteenth century were fourRichardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. The rest of them are extremely
inferior to them. Oliver Elton maintains: "The work of the four masters stands
high, but the foothills are low." The case was different in, say, the mid-nineteenth
century when so many equally great novelists were at work. Fielding was the
greatest of the foursome. Sir Edmund Gosse calls Richardson "the first great
English novelist" and Fielding, "the greatest of English novelists." Fielding may not

be the greatest of all, but he was certainly one of the greatest English novelists
and the greatest novelist of the eighteenth century.
Samuel Richardson (1689-1761):
He was the father of the English novel. He set the vogue of the novel with
his Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741). It was in the epistolary manner. It took
England by storm. In it Richardson narrated the career of a rustic lady's maid who
guards her honour against the advances of her dissolute master who in the end
marries her and is reformed. Pamela was followed by Clarissa ffarlowe (1747-48),
in eight volumes. It was, again, of the epistolary kind, Richardson's third and last
novel was Sir Charles Grandison (1754). The hero is a model Christian gentleman
very scrupulous in his love-affair.
Among Richardson's good qualities must be mentioned his knowledge of
human, particularly female psychology and his awareness of the emotional problems
of common people. He completely, and for good, liberated the novel from the
extravagance and lack of realism of romance to concentrate on social reality. The
note of morality and sentimentality made him a popular idol not only in England but
also abroad. Thus Didoret in France could compare him to Homer and Moses!
However, his morality with its twang of smugness and prudery did not go
unattacked even in his own age. Fielding was the most important of those who
reacted against Richardsonian sentimentalism and prudish moralism. One great
defect of Richardson's novels, which is especially noticeable today, is their
enormous length. The epistolary technique which he adopted in all his three novels
is essentially dilatory and repetitive, and therefore makes for bulkiness. He is at
any rate a very good psychologist and as one he is particularly admirable for, what
a critic calls, "the delineation of the delicate shades of sentiment as they shift and
change and the cross-purposes which the troubled mind envisages when in the grip
of passion.''
Henry Fielding (1707-54):
Fielding in the words of Hudson, "was a man of very different type. His was
a virile, vigorous, and somewhat coarse nature, and his knowledge of life as wide as
Richardson's was narrow, including in particular many aspects of it from which the
prim little printer would have recoiled shocked. There was thus a strength and
breadth in his work for which we look in vain in that of his elder contemporary.
Richardson's judgment of Fielding-that his writings were 'wretchedly low and
dirty'-clearly suggests the fundamental contrast between the two men." His very
first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), was intended to be a parody of Pamela,

particularly of its priggish morality and lachrymosic sentimentalism. According to

Wilbur L. Cross, Richardson "was a sentimentalist, creating pathetic scenes for
their own sake and degrading tears and hysterics into a manner." In Joseph
Andrews Fielding light-heartedly titled against morbid sentimentalism and sham
morality. After the ninth chapter of the book, however, he seems to have outgrown
his initial intention of parody. Parson Adams, one of the immortal creations of
English fiction, appears and runs away with the rest of the novel. Joseph Andrews
was followed by Tom Jones (1749) and Amelia (1751). We may add to the list of his
fictional works Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), a cynically ironical novel which, as
Legouis says, must have been written "after a fit of gloom.
Fielding's novels are characterised by a fresh and realistic moral approach
which admits occasionally of animalism and ribaldry, a searching realism, goodhumoured social satire, and healthy sentiment In his abundant and coarse vigour,
his common sense and unflinching realism, and his delight in physical beauty
(especially female) he is essentially a masculine writer. He does not have the
delicacy of Richardson. It may be said that it is not Richardson who is the "father
of the English novel; it is in fact, Fielding. As for Richardson, he is only the
"mother" of the English novel!
It is to the credit of 'Fielding that unlike Richardson and most of his own
successors, at least in Tom Jones (if not the other novels, too), he provided a
glowing model of a well-constructed plot. According to Coleridge, Jones (with
Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist) is one of the three
works in world literature which have perfectly constructed plots.
Tobias Smollett (1721-71):
Along with Richardson and Fielding, Smollett is generally included among the
masters of eighteenth-century novel; but, as Hudson points out, "it must be
distinctly understood that his work is on a much lower level than theirs." His novels
are of the picaresque kind, and include Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle
(1751), and Humphrey Clinker (1771). Smollett was a realist and had his own art of
racy narrative and eye-catching description. He was a keen observer of the coarser
facts of life, particularly naval life. He exulted in coarseness and brutality. He
never bothered about the construction of a plot. Nor did he bother about morality,
Richardsonian or "Fieldingian." His humour, in keeping with his nature, is coarse
rather than subtle or ironical and arises mostly out of caricature. Hazlitt observes:
"It is not a very difficult undertaking to class Fielding or Smollett-the one as an
observer of the character of human life, the other as a describer of its various
eccentricities." Smollett's characterisation is necessarily poor. His heroes are

mechanical puppets rather than living personalities. They are meant only for the
bringing in of new.situations. As a critic puts it, "Roderick Random's career is such
as would be enough to kill three heroes and yet the fellow lives just to introduce us
to new characters and situations."
Laurence Sterne (1713-68):
His only novel is Tristram Shandy which appeared from 1759 to 1767 in nine
volumes and which is described by Hudson as "the strange work of a very strange
man." If this work can be called a novel, it is one of its own kind, without
predecessors and without successors. Hudson observes: "It is rather a medley of
unconnected incidents, scraps of out-of-the-way learning, whimsical fancies,
humour, pathos, reflection, impertinence, and indecency." The plot is of the barest
minimum: we have to wait till the third book for the birth of the hero! And he is
put into breeches only in the sixth! What a pace of development! It was, says
Cross, "a sad day for English fiction when a writer of genius came to look upon the
novel as the repository for the crotchets of a lifetime."
Sterne's sentimentalism was to leave a lasting trace on the English novels
which followed. What is quite remarkable in Tris&am Shandy is the wonderfully
living characters of Uncle Toby, the elder Shandy, his wife, and Corporal Trim.
The Novel after Sterne:
After Tristram Shandy we find in the eighteenth century a remarkable
proliferation of novels. But none of the later novelists comes anywhere near
Richardson and Fielding. We find the novel developing in many directions. Four
major kinds of the novel may be recognized:
(i)
(ii)
(iii)

The novel of sentiment.

The so-called Gothic novel.

The novel of doctrine and didacticism.

(iv)

The novel of manners,

Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) is prominent among the novels
of sentiment. According to Cross, "written in a style alternating between the whims
of Sterne and a winning plaintiveness, [it] enjoys the distinction of being the most
sentimental of all English novels." The Gothic novel, which appeared towards the
end of the eighteenth century, indulged in morbid sensationalism with impossible
stories of supernatural monsters and blood-curdling incidents. Horace Walpole,
Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, and William Beckford were the most important
writers of this kind of novel. The novel of doctrine and didacticism includes such

works as Mrs. Inchbad's Nature and Art (1796) and William Godwin's Caleb
Williams (1794). These works used the form of the novel just for propagating a
specific point of view. The novel of manners was mostly patronised by fairly
intelligent female writers such as Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth who aimed at
a light transcription of contemporary manners.
Sarah Fielding's David Simple (1744), Dr. Johnson's Rasselas, Prince of
Abyssinia (1759), and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefleld (1766) also
deserve a special mention in an account of eighteenth-century novel. Sarah
Fielding's work was inspired by the success of Pamela. It abounds in faithfully
rendered scenes of London life. Dr. Johnson's work is hjighly didactic. It
emphasized "the vanity of human wishes" in the form of an allegorical tale which he
wrote in a very despondent mood induced by the death of his mother. Goldsmith's
work is, in the words of Cross, "of all eighteenth-century novels, the one that many
readers would the least willingly lose." This novel is admirable, among other things,
for the sensitive characterisation of Dr. Primrose and the general sanity of the
"philosophy of life" which peeps through, it.