Fiction in the Eighteenth Century
Probably three-fourths of the books that are read today for pleasure are fiction - that is, stories. Most of them are long stories in prose, called novels. The popularity of novels comes from the fact that theytell stories about imagined men and women; and that the reader can put himself in the place of an imaginary character, live the character’s life, go through peril anc suffering and joy and love. In short, while the reader is lost in the pages of a novel he is living another life, living at a faster pace than his real existence has, and feeling more keenly, yet with a delightful sense of unreality. Most novels have much to do with the emotion of love.
The novel, as we know it, is not two centuries old. Of course, story-telling is as old as civilization, by voice in narration, by acting on the stage and in books. But the novel as a distinct form of literary art is nearly new.
It is true that the prose tale was very well known through Lyly, Lodge, Greene and Sidney in the sixteenth century, through Mrs. Behn in the seventeenth century and Defoe in the early eighteenth century. But these early forms of novel were stories of adventure rather than studies of character under the influence of love. The novel as it exists today dates from 1740, when Richardson published his story PAMELA.
Samuel Richardson (168g-176x) was the son of very humble parents, his father being an ordinary carpenter in Derbyshire, where Samuel was born. The boy had very little education and at the age of seventeen he was
apprenticed to a London printer, who made Samuel work so hard that he had no leisure for reading or study. But he made up for the time of which his master robbed him by sitting up at night to read any books he could secure. The candles used for these midnight studies he bought himself, so that his master might not have to pay.
An unambitious, steady, plodding, honest and industrious, and perhaps a very commonplace young man was this Samuel; but after fifteen years he had some reward from the printer, for he married his master’s daughter, having now become a printer on his own account in a court off Fleet Street, close by the old Church of St. Bride. Here he continued for many years to carry on his business like any other printer of his time, living above his workshop and thus spending most of his time amid the smell of printer’s ink. We can well believe that he was a kind and considerate master, and it is said he used to hide a silver coin among the types at night so that the first man to arrive at the workshop in the morning might have it as a reward.
Richardson was not far short of fifty years old when he determined to make himself famous by writing a novel. He was perhaps somewhat vain of his literary powers—which at the early age of thirteen he had first exercised by writing love letters for some village girls. In fact, he continued to oblige with such letters for many years. At any rate, PAMELA was the result of the little printer’s resolution. He certainly succeeded in making himself famous. The rest of his days were spent with much satisfaction in writirig for the sentimental ladies of his time, to whom the pale and tearful heroines of his novels seem to have been strangely attractive.
Though so few of us read his writings today, the little printer certainly gave a great impetus to the art of fiction in England; and the careful and elaborate way in which he traced the natures of imaginary people was also imitated by writers on the Continent, chiefly in France. He died on July 4, 1761, and by his own request was buried in the Church of St. Bride, near to which much of his life had been passed.
Richardson’s three important works were PAMELA, CLARISSA and SIR CHARLES GRANDISON: and PAMELA deserves to he called great. An American critic, William Rose Benét, places it among the fourteen outstanding prose works of the eighteenth century. though OU might not find it very thrilling to read today. It is the story of a simple. unsophisticated country girl, servant to a squire of doubtful morals. Pamela marries and reforms him.
PAMELA, like most of Richardson’s other stories, was written in the form of long-winded letters. The book was issued in “parts,” as they were called, somewhat as the continued stories in our magazines appear, spread over some months. Nowadays our lives are much too varied and active to leave time for reading such very long and unexciting stories as he wrote, but our great- great-grandfathers had more leisure and fewer interesting books, so that they could find time to follow the slow and steady unfolding of his appallingly lengthy tales. In country villages people used to wait anxiously for the arrival of the next “part” of his novels to find out what was to happen to the characters; and when the heroine of PAMELA married the rather unmanly hero, church bells were rung in some villages as though Pamela had been a real person.
When an author invents some unusual way of telling a story, it frequently happens that another author will turn it into ridicule by writing what is called a parody of it. So it happened with Richardson’s 1AMELA, which an abler and far more gifted man than Richardson, two years after its appearance, took as the idea of a very different sort of story called JOSEPH ANDREWS.
Henry Fielding, Whose Novels are Full of Life and Humour
The writer of this was a born story-writer, a man of great force of character, the son of distinguished parents, and well educated, His name was Henry Fielding, and he was born in Somersetshire, England, on April 1707.
Being fond of the pleasures of life and disinclined to work or to study too closely, Fielding left the University of Leyden, in Holland, and returned to London, when he was twenty. But he soon found that his father was not able to allow him so much money as he had expected, and he had to exercise his abilities by writing for the stage.
After a while he married a beautiful girl who had a small fortune; but this he soon contrived to spend, and at thirty-three he became a barrister (lawyer), though it was chiefly by writing hooks that he made his living. His wife died in 1743, and not long afterward he married a servant, who was a very good wife to him for the rest of his days. Poor man, he was not long to enjoy the success of the great books he had written or the advantage of the comfortable salary he received from a legal appointment given to him in 1749.
In that year Fielding wrote a very brilliant satire called MR. JONATHAN WILD THE GREAT, and in the same year appeared his most celebrated novel, THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES, which is one of the great masterpieces of English fiction. (This is also on William Benét’s list of foremost eighteenth- century prose writings.) Fielding’s third and last novel was AMELIA, which appeared in 1751. All his stories are written with a fine, vigorous feeling of life and overflow with humor, a quality in which Richardson was utterly deficient.
In 1754, while on a visit to Lisbon, where he had gone broken in health, Fielding died, and was buried in Os Cyprestres cemetery.
Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett Wrote Lively Fiction
Laurence Sterne was born in Ireland, though his ancestors were English. He was born on November 24, 1713, and educated at Halifax Grammar School and Cambridge University, becoming a clergyman in the year 1738.
For a good many years his life was, no doubt, that of an ordinary English country vicar, except that, being satirical and bitingly sarcastic in his speech, thin in appearance and poor in health, he was probably by no means so pleasant a companion as a country parson ought to be.
When he was forty-six years of age he published the first two volumes of his clever and amusing book, THE LIFE AND OPINIONS o TRISTRAM SHANDY. Very soon the wit and humor with which the characters in this great work were drawn had made the name of Sterne famous; and for years new volumes of the work continued to appear, until it was completed in 1767, just about two months before its author breathed his last.
On the whole, Sterne was not a pleasant kind of man to contemplate, and although his books are full of high spirits and laughter, it is not always the healthiest laughter, nor are his sentiments such as do credit to a preacher of the Gospel who during his later years may be said to have written under the shadow of death. His other famous book is called A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH FRANCE AND ITALY. It is very Witty.
Tobias Smollett was a Scotsman, born near the “bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond” in March 1721. He went to school at Dumbarton and to Glasgow University, and when he was about fifteen was apprenticed to a surgeon in Glasgow. He wished, however, to be a writer, and at the age of eighteen went to London with a play which he had written. But no one would buy the play and, as he had no money, he went to sea as assistant to a naval surgeon.
After his return to London he practiced as a surgeon. He married a lady who had some wealth, and he wrote for a time more for pleasure than for profit. Later he adopted writing as a profession. He became a journalist, wrote histories and books of travel, translated foreign stories and edited papers.
But, above all, he produced three novels very similar in style to those of Henry Fielding, and nearly always mentioned in company with them as the best examples of English novels written before the time of Sir Walter Scott. They are full of interesting and lifelike characters, and his sailors, especially, are the breeziest, saltiest sons of the sea to be found in English story-books. The names of his three famous books are RODERICK RANDOM, PEREGRINE PICKLE and HuMPHREY CLINKER, the first being written in 1748, and the last in in September of which year Smollett died at Leghorn, in Italy, and was buried in the English cemetery in that city on the Mediterranean.
Goldsmith’s Gentle Humour Still Charms His Readers
Oliver Goldsmith, whose VICAR OF WAKEFIELD is one of the most beautiful stories in the English language. Although he was a dramatist (his comedy SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER is a perfect stage play) and a poet (Johnson called him “the greatest poet since Pope”), we must never forget the importance of Goldsmith’s work as a story-teller. No one reading this book today would realize that the writing of novels was so new when it was written. The narrative is easy, the plot is natural.
In 1766 Oliver Goldsmith published his VICAR OF WAKEFIELD, and in 1778 Fanny Burney published her EVELINA. These novels were free from the vein of coarseness that spoils Smollett and mars Fielding. Goldsmith did not again attempt fiction. Miss Burney, who had begun with great promise and won well-deserved popularity, spoiled her style in her later novels, CECILIA and CAMILLA, by imitating Doctor Johnson’s most formal compositions. Before the close of the eighteenth century the novel had been fairly started and had been purified from its first failures in good taste.
In less than fifty years there were many writers of novels, and a larger proportion of the honors began to go to women than had been gained by them in any other field of literature. As with the drama in Shakespeare’s day, fiction reached its greatest height of glory almost suddenly. Less than forty years lay between the coming of the better novel in the EvELINA of Fanny Bürney, and the capture of the whole reading world by the novels of Sir Walter Scott. This sudden collection of stories, so varied in time, character and subject, can only be compared with the abundance of Shakespeare’s plays two hundred years before.
Fiction broadened out, after the domestic stories of Richardson, into wild and romantic fancies. A fashion was set by Horace Walpole in his CASTLE OF OTRANTO, a fearsome, supernatural story. Walpole put his talents into all kinds of things, and of course he had to try story-telling.
He was followed by other writers bent on making the reader’s flesh creep with mysteries. For a time, too, the novel made a fashion of using fine language that was quite unnatural. The most popular writer of that day was Mrs. Ann Radcliffe. Her ROMANCE OF THE FOREST is still worth reading as an illustration of a kind of fashion that, under various forms, creeps again and again into fiction and is thought by the uncritical to be thrillingly fine. Being unnatural, it fades away and is only smiled at by a later generation of readers.
Maria Edgeworth, Who Wrote About Life in Ireland
Two other women novelists who wrote in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) began the localizing of the novel - that is, the special study of the character, manners and speech of a district. Her ground was rural Ireland, and her success probably had some effect in prompting Sir Walter Scott to present to the world in fiction the Scotsman, past and present.
The Edgeworths were an English family made Irish by living in Ireland for two centuries. They kept up a constant connection with England, where Maria was born, and while they were quite Irish in their ways they were able to see Ireland from the outside as well as the inside.
Maria Edgeworth’s father was a wayward man of genius, fanciful, masterful and full of fads, and one of his fads was to regulate the writings of Maria according to his own ideas. As his ideas of writing a novel were clumsy, his admiring daughter was handicapped by his interference; but her pictures of the Ireland she knew, in CASTLE RACK- RENT, THE ABSENTEE and ORMOND, are the best pictures we have of it in her day.
Miss Edgeworth brought fiction back to real life; and because she makes us feel she is writing about men and women as they are, her stories will live as pictures of life in the past that have a historical as well as a human value.
Jane Austen Makes Quiet, Dull Lives Seem Exciting
And so it is in an even greater degree with Jane Austen’s novels. These are of a far choicer workmanship. Jane Austen was a Hampshire girl, daughter of the rector of Steventon, where she was born on December i6, 1775. Her first complete novel, but one that was not published till after her death, NORTHANGER ABBEY, was a mixed description of Bath, then the chief health resort and social center of England, and a clever exposure of the style of Mrs. Radcliffe’s tales, in the height of their popularity. SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (1811), PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1813), MANSFIELD PARK (1814) and EMMA (1816), make up a complete study of life in rural England.
Readers who want sensation, high-flown sentiment, an exciting or involved plot, stirring adventure, problems of passion or boisterous laughter need not trouble themselves with Jane Austen. But Jane, writing only about a quiet life which she knew very well, gives us a picture of the thoughts and ways of English gentlefolks a the end of the eighteentn century. It is faithful in drawing and delightful in its quiet humor.
Of the life of the poor and humble, we scarcely have a glimpse in her books, and the governing class that circled round the court is equally left alone. She seems even to be unaware of earth-thaking events of her day - the Napoleonic Wars, for instance. It is the comfortable landed gentry to whom Jane Austen introduces us. Her writing gives us the most finished picture of a section of English society that any novelist has drawn.
It has been said, and there is some truth in the criticism, that the men and women in any one of her stories are much like those of any other story, but with their circumstances and aims somewhat changed. That is natural since a rather narrow round of country life is shown with no sensational characters or incidents introduced. But this only makes the quality of her skill the finer when she holds our interest.
She fully understood her own limitations and never tried to do what was beyond her power. She wrote herself of “the little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect - after much labor.” But that fails to do justice to her method, though it suggests it. Scott was nearer the truth when he spoke of “the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment.”
Miss Austen lived a very quiet country life, with gradually failing health before she reached middle age. She died at Winchester in her forty-first year on July 18, 1817, and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.
A List of the Greatest Prose Works of the Eighteenth Century
A few words more about William Rose Benéts list of the fourteen greatest prose works in English published in the eighteenth century. All but one are by British writers— the one exception is Benjamin Franklin’s PooR RICHARD’S ALMANAC. Nine are novels: ROBINSON CRUSOE, by Daniel Defoe; PAMELA, by Samuel Richardson; THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES, by Henry Fielding; THE ADVENTURES OF PEREGRINE PICKLE, by Tobias Smollett; THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, by Horace Walpole; THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD, by Oliver Goldsmith; TRISTRAM SHANDY, by Laurence Sterne; EvELINA, by Fanny Burney, and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, by Jane Austen. GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, by Jonathan Swift, is not really a novel, though it is imaginative writing.