John Richetti - The Columbia History of the British Novel

John Richetti

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NOVELShave been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century. Long before it became an issue for debate in literary studies, a quantum leap in the number, variety, and popularity of novels provoked cultural alarm in England during the decades following 1700. The flood of novels on the market, and the pleasures they incited, led many to see novels as a catastrophe for book-centered culture. While the novel was not clearly defined or conceptualized, the targets of the antinovel campaign were quite precise: seventeenth-century romances, novellas of Continental origin, and those «novels» and "secret histories" written by Behn, Manley, and Haywood in the decades following 1680. The central themes of this debate may be culled from several texts: Samuel Johnson's 1750 Rambler No. 4 essay on the new fiction of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; Francis Coventry's enthusiastic pamphlet in support of Fielding, " An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding: With a Word or Two upon the Modern State of Criticism " (1751); and in The Progress of Romance, a literary history in dialogue form by Clara Reeve published in 1785.

These texts mobilize criticism and alarm, praise and prescription in an attempt to modulate the comparatively new vogue for novel reading. Francis Coventry mocks the unreflected «emulation» produced in readers by the French romances of an earlier day: "This [vogue] obtain'd a -1- long Time. Every Beau was an Orondates, and all the Belles were Stariras." Though Samuel Johnson could not account for the fashion for romance, his Rambler No. 4 essay describes the more powerful identification that recent "familiar histories" like Clarissa and Tom Jones induce in their readers: "If the power of example is so great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken that… the best examples only should be exhibited." If novels produce effects "almost without the intervention of the [reader's] will," then readers are at risk of becoming automatons, and the author must assume responsibility for the novel's moral effects.

The power and danger of novels, especially to young women not exposed to classical education, arose from the pleasures they induced. In The Progress of Romance, Clara Reeve's leading character, Euphrasia, remembers "my mother and aunts being shut up in the parlour reading Pamela, and I took it very hard that I was excluded." Closeted with a novel, some are included, and others excluded, from the circle of pleasure. Coventry remarks upon the tenacity with which readers clung to their pleasures: "For tho' it was a folly, it was a pleasing one: and if sense could not yield the pretty creatures greater pleasure, dear nonsense must be ador'd." Opposing this pleasure "lecture would lose it's force; and ridicule would strive in vain to remove it."

But what is so pernicious about reading novels? The Progress of Romance ends with a staged debate between the woman scholar Euphrasia and a high-culture snob named Hortensius. Hortensius develops a wide-ranging indictment of novel reading. First, novels turn the reader's taste against serious reading: "A person used to this kind of reading will be disgusted with every thing serious or solid, as a weakened and depraved stomach rejects plain and wholesome food." Second, novels incite the heart with false emotions: "The seeds of vice and folly are sown in the heart, — the passions are awakened, — false expectations are raised.-A young woman is taught to expect adventures and intrigues… If a plain man addresses her in rational terms and pays her the greatest of compliments, — that of desiring to spend his life with her, — that is not sufficient, her vanity is disappointed, she expects to meet a Hero in Romance." Finally, novels induce a dangerous autonomy from parents and guardians: "From this kind of reading, young people fancy themselves capable of judging of men and manners, and… believe themselves wiser than their parents and guardians, whom they -2- treat with contempt and ridicule." Hortensius indicts novels for transforming the cultural function of reading from providing solid moral nourishment to catering to exotic tastes; from preparing a woman for the ordinary rational address of a plain good man to leading her to expect a proposal from a hero out of romance; and from reinforcing reliance upon parents and guardians to promoting a belief in the subject's autonomy. Taken together, novels have disfigured the reader's body: the taste, passions, and judgment of stomach, heart, and mind. Here, as so often in the polemics that surround novels, the reader is characterized as a susceptible female whose moral life is at risk. By strong implication, she is most responsible for transmitting the virus of novel reading.

From the vantage point of the late twentieth century, and after nearly nine decades of film and five of television, the alarm provoked by novel reading may seem hyperbolic or even quaint. But a condescendingly modernist «pro-pleasure» position renders the alarm with novel reading, and its effects on early modern culture, unintelligible. Though it is difficult to credit the specific object of the alarm of the eighteenthcentury critics of novels-after all, we recommend to students some of the very novels these early modern critics inveighed against-given our current anxieties about the cultural effects of slasher films, rap music, MTV, and soap operas, it seems contradictory to dismiss those who worried about the effects of novels when they were new. But there are fundamental obstacles to deciphering the eighteenth century's anxious discourse on the pleasures of novels. After psychoanalysis, most concede the difficulty of knowing why one experiences pleasure; it is even more difficult to define the content or cause of the pleasure of eighteenth-century novel readers. However, we can trace certain clear effects of the campaign against these unlicensed pleasures. First, cultural critics sketched the profile of the culture-destroying pleasure seeker who haunts the modern era: the obsessive, unrestrained, closeted consumer of fantasy. Then, novelists like Richardson and Fielding, accepting the cogency of this critique, developed replacement fictions as a cure for the novel-addicted reader. In doing so, they aimed to deflect and reform, improve and justify the pleasures of a new species of elevated novel.

Since Plato's attack on the poets, philosophers and cultural critics had worried the effects of an audience's absorption in fictional entertainment. During the early eighteenth century the market gave this old cul -3- tural issue new urgency. Although there had been a trade in books for centuries, several developments gave the circulation of novels unprecedented cultural force. At a time when state censorship in England was subsiding and technological advances were making all printed matter more affordable, the market in printed books offered a site for the production and consumption of a very broad spectrum of entertainment. Published anonymously, or by parvenu authors supported by no patron of rank, novels appeared as anonymous and irresponsible creations, conceived with only one guiding intention: to pander to any desire that would produce a sale. Novels not only violated the spirit of seriousness expected of readers of books like The Pilgrim's Progress or Paradise Lost; they made no pretense to making any lasting contribution to culture. Novels were the first «disposable» books, written in anticipation of their own obsolescence and in acceptance of their own transient function as part of a culture of serial entertainments. Although only a small part of print culture in the early decades of the eighteenth century, novels appear to have been the most high-profile, fashionable, and fast-moving segment of the market. The vogue for novels helped to constitute a market culture-in the modern sense of commodities for purchase by the individual. In short, novels desanctified the book. Little wonder that novels were figured as an uncontrollable menace to culture.