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Martin Paul Eve

Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London

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This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subject. They implicitly or explicitly describe a canon not of my own making or choosing and replicate this from various sources. The original encyclopaedia articles are far more comprehensive, nuanced and worth consulting. I am especially conscious, in this article, of the danger of causing offense by grossly simplifying a national history.

In the early 18th Century, the novel in its current form did not exist and the stylistic and thematic premises that we associate with the genre had yet to be born.

That said, an early form of fiction around this period was the “amatory novel”, the best example of which are the works of Aphra Behn. Following the romance traditions, including Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590), the typical plot of an amatory novel follows the seduction and subsequent betrayal of women at the hands of duplicitous upper-class aristocrats. These are showcased in Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-87), which was based upon a contemporary sex scandal. Amatory fiction experienced perhaps its greatest successes in the 1720s in the novels of Eliza Haywood, such as Love in Excess (1719).

A common trope of novels of this period was to claim some element of realism or proto-facticity. For instance, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719-22) makes a claim to being a true story. Likewise, Swift’s satirical Gulliver’s Travels (1726) also claims a reality. Robinson Crusoe is often deemed to be an emblematic starting point for the realist novel that gives, as Richetti puts it, “a representative modern individual struggling to make his way in the world and against nature […]. In that precise evocation of his hero, Defoe inaugurates the main subject and scope of what will be the modern novel in England” (p. 108).

The epistolary novel with a female protagonist is also key to this period. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) used the format to give an air of excitement and pace as the chapters purport to be written immediately after thrilling encounters. The innovation here is to erase the author-as-narrator in favour of the epistolary format. Henry Fielding was not persuaded, though, and he wrote a response parody, Shamela (1740). Fielding is best known for his novel, Tom Jones (1749), which gives a broad sweep of English life. At least one way of characterising Richardson against Fielding is that the former writes “characters of nature” while the latter “characters of manners”, according to the 18th-century critic, Samuel Johnson (Richetti, p. 109). Despite their rivalry, Fielding admired Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-48) and wrote to him congratulating him on its publication. While Clarissa has ties to the amatory novel, the book develops complex psychological and moral dilemmas in ways unknown to its forerunners.

Satirical novels and novels of ideas also grew during this period. Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) is a good example of this genre, which features long sections exploring ideas and contemporary political controversies. When paired with Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), it becomes clear that the “subordination of ideas to character development is a defining feature of the novel as it emerges in the eighteenth century” (Richetti, p. 111).

An important point about the 18th-Century novel in the British Isles is that from about the 1740s to 1780s, the market is dominated by novels written by women. Ted Underwood has explored this trend in a longer arc in his book, Distant Horizons, but it is notable that the early phase of novelistic development had a strongly feminine bent to it. These novels also often featured strong female leads, such as Arabella in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752). Sometimes this involves great suffering on the part of women, as seen in Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph (1761) and, more satirically, France’s Burney’s Evelina (1778).

Another milestone novel from this period is Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-67), which famously takes several digressive volumes even to reach the moment of the protagonist’s birth. Finally, sentimental novels such as Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782) or Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744) present upright moral characters who are let down by the world around them. They bring to light “negative revelations about the modern society and sociability that the novel comes to represent” (Richetti, p. 114).

Further reading:

  • McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, 15th anniversary ed (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
  • Richetti, John, ‘British Isles (18th Century)’, in The Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. by Peter Melville Logan, Olakunle George, Susan Hegeman, and Efraín Kristal (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 105–15