The First Modern Novel

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Introduction
“Let me make the ballads of a nation,” said Fletcher of Saltoun, “and I care not who makes the laws.” The place which the ancient ballads held in forming the characters of the people is in our day more than filled by the novels. Everybody reads them, especially in the younger generation and every character is more or less molded by the sentiments and teachings they contain.

The novel has been almost entirely a modern English development. Two centuries ago our ancestors did not read fiction: they had practically none to read. So that the production of the first English novel in 1740, leading as it has to the present state of affairs, may fairly be counted a most important event in the history of our race. Nowadays ten thousand novels are published every year, and for some of these is claimed the enormous circulation of half a million copies.

This selection is by Edmund Gosse.

Time: 1740
Place: England

There is nothing offensive to the dignity of literary history in acknowledging that the most prominent piece of work effected by literature in England during the eighteenth century is the creation — for it can be styled nothing less — of the modern novel. In the seventeenth century there had been a very considerable movement in the direction of prose fiction. The pastoral romances of the Elizabethans had continued to circulate; France had set an example in the heroic stories of D’Urfé and La Calprenède, which English imitators and translators had been quick to follow, even as early as 1647. The Francion of Sorel and the Roman Bourgeois of Furetière — the latter, published in 1666, of especial interest to students of the English novel — had prepared the way for the exact opposite to the heroic romance; namely, the realistic story of every-day life. Bunyan and Richard Head, Mrs. Behn and Defoe — each had marked a stage in the development of English fiction. Two noble forerunners of the modern novel, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, had inflamed the curiosity and awakened the appetite of British readers; but, although there were already great satires and great romances in the language, the first quarter of the eighteenth century passed away without revealing any domestic genius in prose fiction, any master of the workings of the human heart. Meanwhile the drama had decayed. The audiences which had attended the poetic plays of the beginning and the comedies of the close of the seventeenth century now found nothing on the boards of the theatre to satisfy their craving after intellectual excitement. The descendants of the men and women who had gone out to welcome the poetry of Shakespeare and the wit of Congreve were now rather readers than play-goers and were most ready to enjoy an appeal to their feelings when that appeal reached them in book form. In the playhouse they came to expect bustle and pantomime rather than literature. This decline in theatrical habits prepared a domestic audience for the novelists and accounts for that feverish and apparently excessive anxiety with which the earliest great novels were awaited and received.

Meanwhile the part taken by Addison and Steele in preparing for this change of taste must not be overlooked and the direct link between Addison, as a picturesque narrative essayist and Richardson, as the first great English novelist, is to be found in Pierre de Marivaux (1688-1763), who imitated the Spectator and who is often assumed, though somewhat too rashly, to have suggested the tone of Pamela. Into this latter question we shall presently have need to inquire again. It is enough to point out here that when the English novel did suddenly and irresistibly make its appearance, it had little in common with the rococo and coquettish work which had immediately preceded it in France and which at first, even to judges so penetrating as the poet Gray, was apt to seem more excellent because more subtle and refined. The rapidity with which the novel became domiciled among us and the short space of time within which the principal masterpieces of the novelists were produced, are not more remarkable than the lassitude which fell upon English fiction as soon as the first great generation had passed away. The flourishing period of the eighteenth-century novel lasted exactly twenty-five years, during which time we have to record the publication of no less than fifteen eminent works of fiction.

These fifteen are naturally divided into three groups. The first contains Pamela, Joseph Andrews, David Simple and Jonathan Wild. In these books the art is still somewhat crude and the science of fiction incompletely understood. After a silence of five years we reach the second and greatest section of this central period, during which there appeared in quick succession Clarissa, Roderick Random, Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle, Amelia and Sir Charles Grandison. As though invention had been exhausted by the publication of this incomparable series of masterpieces, there followed another silence of five years and then were issued, each on the heels of the other, Tristram Shandy, Rasselas, Chrysal, The Castle of Otranto and The Vicar of Wakefield. Five years later still, a book born out of due time appeared, Humphrey Clinker and then, with one or two such exceptions as Evelina and Caleb Williams, no great novel appeared again in England for forty years, until, in 1811, the new school of fiction was inaugurated by Sense and Sensibility. The English novel, therefore, in its first great development, should be considered as comprised within the dates 1740 and 1766; and it may not be uninstructive, before entering into any critical examination of the separate authors, to glance at this chronological list of the first fifteen great works of English fiction.

The novels contained in the catalogue just given, however widely they differed from one another in detail, had this in common: that they dealt with mental and moral phenomena. Before 1740 we possessed romances, tales, prose fiction of various sorts but in none of these was essayed any careful analysis of character or any profound delineation of emotion. In Defoe, where the record of imaginary fact was carried on with so much ingenuity and knowledge, the qualities we have just mentioned are notably absent; nor can it be said that we find them in any prose-writer of fiction earlier than Richardson, except in some very slight and imperfect degree in Aphra Behn, especially in her Rousseauish novel of Oroonoko.

Continued.

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