26 Background to the Rise of the Novel

Dr.Manashi Bora

Storyboard:

Section 1:The Beginnings: The Story-telling Tradition

Section 2: The Four Giants

Section 3:Other Novelists of the Eighteenth Century

Section 4: Women’s Contribution to the Novel

Section 5: Conclusion

Introduction

The novel is a major literary genre which students of literature have to deal with. The intricacies of plot, character and diverse techniques employed to render them are interesting facets of the novel.However, it is no less interesting to probe the history of the genre itself, and its development in various contexts from the story-telling tradition which dates back to early times.

In this unit we shall deal with the background of the rise of the novel in England in five modules.We will trace the history of the genre from the early days of oral culture to the eighteenth century which witnessed the first great flowering of the novel in the hands of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne and paved the way for many later developments in the form.

Section OneThe Beginnings: The Story-Telling Tradition

The art of story-telling with which the novel is concerned, dates back to the days of oral culture when tales were told in verse by bards or professional story tellers. The tales  were carried across countries by the wandering singer who improvised to let in local and topical elements. The replacement of verse by prose, of early romance and allegory by attempting to faithfully mirror character and society, is a significant step in the development of the novel.

The medieval romances were the sources of the first tales listened to by people. Greece provided the first prose romances which formed the basis of the European novel. Greece also provided fictional biographies of great men, a form in which they first experimented within the medium of prose.

In England, before the Greek influence made itself felt, there was a native supply of tales in the stories of King Arthur and his Knights. With the coming of the Normans, another set of tales centered on Charlemagne was added. The chief cycles of medieval romance on which the English novelists drew were the legends of Troy, of Alexander, of Arthur, and of Charlemagne. Italy in the fifteenth century provided the novella– a love story with a rounded- off plot.

Boccaccio’s Decameron in the 16th century was another source of powerful tales. Many of these tales were allegorical, with the result that the individual character had no life of its own. This changed with the Renaissance which brought about a keen interest in human life and individual character, and concentration on factual detail.

The introduction of the printing press by Caxton was a great step in the circulation of tales. Malory’s Le Morted’Arthur, one of the first publications from Caxton’s press, shows a shrewd observation and an awareness of conflict in its myriad manifestations.

Another influence on the development of the novel was Don Quixoteby Cervantes with its critique of the age of chivalry, the elements of fantasy and extravagance in the early romances. It is an important example of the rogue book or picaresque novel in which a vagabond figure observes life as he travels in a detached, often irreverent manner.

Thomas Deloney and Thomas Dekker, in their realistic story-telling and portrayal of contemporary scenes and customs involving characters who were members of trade guilds, apprentices and craftsmen, contributed an important quality to the development of the novel. English prose, the vehicle of the novel, was also shapedby the Authorized Version of the Bible, and by writers like Bacon, Hooker, Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, and a host of others.

The age of chivalry was replaced by the paganism of the Renaissance. The dawn of science was on the horizon and the Royal Society was formed in 1662.The effect of all these on prose was to prune it of all embellishments and give it a sharper edge. Real life began to figure prominently as subject matter for the novelist, and many writers turned to the treasury of stories contained in the Authorized Version of the Bible with its tenor of setting out on an adventure or crusade.

Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress for instance is a book aimed not at amusing the readers, but at instructing them about the dangers of a life not lived according to the teachings of the Bible. AphraBehn was considered a pioneer female author in the history of the novel and towards the end of her life, wrote the famous tale Oroonoko in 1688. The many aspects of this tale would find an echo in the work of many later novelists. Life was realistically presented and included a love element, humanitarianism, a railing against slavery and the cult of the noble savage.

The growth of the novel had a lot to do with the rise of the mercantile/middle class which resulted in the shift away from the chivalric romance representing the oppressive forces of the church, the feudal and the landowning class. The new men coming to power in society were dependent on trade, commerce and industry, and their own wits to make their wealth.

Things began to come down from the level of abstraction to concrete facts. The Royal Society began to emphasise the way of trial, error and experiment and observation of facts which had its impact on the growth of the novel. The advent of the Age of Trade sounded the death-knell for the Age of Chivalry. The new age with its matter-of-factness found its spokesman in the fiction of Daniel Defoe.

Works before Daniel Defoe, which have the qualities of novels are Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, and tales like The Wife of Bath’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde where we find an interest in character and a realistic observation of life that we find in later novels. Every age has its own dominant literary form which has its relation to the social conditions prevailing at that time. The low literacy rate during the Elizabethan and Jacobean times led to the development of the oral and visual elements of culture and hence the predominance of drama during those times.

The audience did not ask for a mirror image of society, but heightened language and fabulous characters though they were not incapable of drawing real life ones.Shakespeare, a genius in the field of drama, was an important influence on the development of the novel as well. His influence can be seen in the early novelists’ presentation of dialogue and the mixing of tragedy and comedy which is so much a feature of the traditional English novel.

Among important precursors to the novel, mention may be made of Malory’s Le Morted’Arthur, a collection of Arthurian legends written in prose, and Lyly’s Euphues.

Lyly’s style in Euphues was an important influence on the development of English prose.It was an attempt to give to prose the formal order and complexity one finds in Elizabethan poetry. Written in the form of letters Euphuesis seen as the forerunner to the epistolary novels of Richardson.

Sidney also attempted in his prose romance Arcadia to give to prose something of the formal pattern of verse. The Elizabethan age produced many works of prose fiction; apart from the ones mentioned above one of the most widely read works was Thomas Nashe’sThe Unfortunate Traveller or The Life of Jack Wilton; notable for its imaginative, racy, graphic, energetic prose embellished with imagery from everyday life.It is a picaresque story with a string of incidents held together by the fact that they happen to one hero.

The growth of the habit of reading together with the development, in the later years of the 17th century of a prose equipped for analysing character and recording detail had a lot to do with the development of the novel.

Works of history like Clarendon’s and accounts of real-life adventures like Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World curbed the element of the fantastic in prose fiction.The exploits of rogues in the vein of Cervantes’ Don Quixote helped in the birth of the novel which is more or less an imitation of the real world.

It was with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress published in 1678 that reality first entered English fiction.A religious allegory with fidelity to observed reality; it provided an important model for story-telling, vivid characterisation and recording of dialogue which influenced a lot of later novelists. Bunyan’s love for the real is echoed by AphraBehn who in her famous prose fiction Oroonokoattempted to use verisimilitude in a conventional story of romance. It uses the idea of the noble savage and belongs to the genre of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist literature.

The emergence of the periodical essay in the eighteenth century was an important influence on novel writing. The characters in the Spectator papers like Sir Roger de Coverley and Sir Andrew Freeport were forerunners of characters in novels.

The man who played an important role in the development of the novel was Daniel Defoe.He was of lower middle-class origin, the son of a tradesman. He tried various odd jobs before deciding to live by his pen. He is credited with developing a form which had a marked influence on the English novel.

The new age of science emphasized facts, and facts and transcripts of actual experience were the raw material with which Defoe worked in his novel The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner which was published in 1719 and became famous throughout the world. By the time he wrote Robinson Crusoe Defoe had gained enough experience of the world and had read travel books like Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World (1697).

Robinson Crusoe is an imaginative rendering of the adventures of Alexander Selkirk who had joined Dampier’s expedition and was shipwrecked on the island of Juan Fernandez from  1704 to 1709.Defoe filled the novel with convincing details gathered from contemporary travel books while the theme of the novel which was one of survival on a lonely island battling against the forces of nature removed it from the realm of the abstract and the remote and placed it firmly in the real world. Defoe thus blazed the trail for Realism which was to dominate European fiction for quite some time.

Defoe’s endeavour was to show life as it is and his unique matter of fact prose forced readers to accept as facts details which had an element of imagination in them. Robinson Crusoe is not just an adventure story. It dramatizes every man’s struggle for existence in this world and his loneliness in relation to God. In Defoe’s other work Moll Flanders, there is a marked interest in character, which is considered the hallmark of the novelist.

Jonathan Swift borrowed many of the devices from Robinson Crusoe for his Gulliver’s Travels-a shipwreck, first hand evidence, and provision of details to build up an impression of reality. Swift perfected English prose and Gulliver’s Travels became an example of the new realistic mode and of the picaresque. Gulliver was a wandering rogue and his adventures in strange lands catered to the curiosity of a people living in an age of geographical and intellectual exploration.

Swift however was filled with contempt and loathing at the spectacle of human vice and folly and his work turned out to be a monstrous satire on humanity. Many later writers followed in the footsteps of Swift and produced satires. The directness and simplicity of his prose and the wide learning it carries made him a model for many novelists who came after him.

Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift prepared the way for the flowering of the English novel in the eighteenth century. An adequate prose medium to clothe a variety of ideas and an increasing middle class which provided an encouraging reading public provided great impetus to the growth of the novel. Four giants-Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne did for the English novel what Shakespeare did for English drama in the Elizabethan Age.

Section Two: The Four Giants 

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) was a product of the middle class, the son of a Derbyshire carpenter. After the family shifted to London, he became apprenticed to a printer, married his master’s daughter, and inherited the business.He combined a literary career with preoccupation with worldly affairs.

The way to Richardson’s literary career was prepared by Addison and Steele who in their periodicals The Tatler and The Spectator chatted about life and with a reformatory zeal, deliberated on virtues and vices in a prose well equipped to deal with the middle-class sensibility of the age. The new middle class life was brought out into the open especially by Richardson in the novel of sensibility.

Prudence had become an important word for the middle class and in his novel Pamela, he made use of a story which was narrated to him about a beautiful and virtuous servant girl who with great prudence resisted a young squire’s advances forcing him in the end to offer her his hand in marriage. This story in Pamela is narrated in seven volumes of letters written by the girl to her parents. She protects her one asset-her physical beauty as though it were a commodity in the market. Richardson was something of a moralist who rebelled against the arbitrary exercise of power by those in authority.

Richardson was a psychological realist who was more interested in people’s motives and reactions rather than in their external actions. The characters reveal a lot about their inner lives through the letters they write to each other. They are forever discussing things amongst themselves and the letters they write to each other have the effect of dramatic speeches. The letters the characters write enable us to see a character through the eyes of another character. Clarissa by Richardson is another tale based on a woman’s chastity and told through the medium of letters. It ends in tragedy however because here the pursuer is a villain who rapes the decent woman who, despite the pleadings of her friends,refuses to marry him, wastes away and dies.

Richardson had a didactic purpose in writing his novels.His aim was to improve morals by delineating virtuous models. One of the problems that beset them and their contemporaries was that of the arbitrary exercise of power before which the ordinary citizen felt helpless. In Pamela, he makes helplessness combined with virtue triumph against odds.

One of his most important contributions was that he did much to elevate the status of women by making the central characters in his first two novels women. Another important contribution to the history of the novel was his analysis of emotion and motive through the medium of letters. His rendering of the inner working of the minds of the characters influenced similar probing by later novelists like Joyce, Richardson and Virginia Woolf.

Henry Fielding(1707-54) came from a different background than that of Richardson. He was schooled at Eton and had a stint on the continent where he studied law. After coming back to England he was involved with administrative activities and came into contact with different sections of society and varied experiences of life which instilled in him a sense of tolerance not commonly found in many other novelists.

Fielding started his career by writing plays and went on to write novels after surveying the success of Richardson. His novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones are some of the greatest novels of the world presenting common humanity and the world as he sees it. Fielding brought to the novel an observing mind and as a result we see in the novel real human beings appearing for the first time. Fielding, who chronicled the English social scene of the eighteenth century, was a great influence on a host of later writers like Hazlitt, Lamb, Austen, Dickens and Thackeray.

Like Richardson, he was a moralist and satirist and was against the tyrannical exercise of power, the vanity and hypocrisy he discovered in his times. He wrote, as he said “a comic epic in prose” and used ridicule and irony rather than biting criticism to expose vices like affectation which he found in the society of his times.As his career progressed, Fielding’s satire became less severe and a new gentleness began to pervade his work. In Amelia for instance he shows the virtue of meekness in the character of the gentle wife Amelia.

Tobias Smollett was of humble birth like Fielding and was forced at a young age to earn his living. He was apprenticed to a doctor and went as a ship’s surgeon to the West Indies which gave him a lot of useful experience. After returning to England he set up his practice and wrote his first book Roderick Random in 1748.

It is a tale of life aboard a ship, the first such tale captured in the genre of the novel at a time when British ships had set sail to distant corners of the world. Smollett had a great interest in life around him and wrote about it with great zest. However he did not have the geniality of Fielding. His temper, aggravated by ill-health, was irritable and he found fault with everybody and everything. His characters are too preoccupied with their own affairs to bond together in common interest.

The book is in the picaresque vein and there are a lot of details about life aboard a ship-the mutinies, the hardships, the discipline, diseases and vice. Smollett continued with his sea- stories in his next novel Peregrine Pickle. However, his best work is Humphrey Clinker. It does not have the rancour of his previous novels. It is written in the epistolary mode; people, places and events are seen through the eyes of several personalities, the writers of letters. Smollett’s sense of comedy is seen in this novel. It has a host of eccentric characters which are a constant delight to the reader. Smollett drew character in terms of their externals reducing them to caricature. Dickens borrowed heavily from Smollett for his novels-the characterisation, as well as the management of theme and prose-style.

Lawrence Sterne (1713-68) , the great grandson of an Archbishop procured for himself a living in the North Riding after taking Orders. His experiments with time in literature were far in advance of their time. He discarded the chronological sequence of events and in his most famous novel TristramShandy introduced a method of progression by sensory suggestion and momentary reaction to immediate experience.He was influenced by Locke’s theory of the irrationality of the association of ideas in the mind.He can be said to be the father of Impressionism and the progenitor of that school of literary art in which the interest is in the medium and not on the material.

Sterne’s experiments with time and words are reminiscent of the experiments of Monet and Renoir in the realm of paint and light. Joyce drew on Lawrence Sterne for his magnum opus Ulysses.

Section Three:Other Novelists of the Eighteenth Century

The ground prepared by the four giants was exploited by a number of other writers. The establishment of lending libraries in the middle decades of the 18th century increased the reading public and played a great role in the development of the novel. The booksellers began to realize that they could make money by selling novels which reflected the mood of the times.Thus the commercial novel arrived on the scene. Not all the novels produced were of good artistic quality, but they reflected the shift from aristocratic to middle-class values. Domestic sanctity became an ideal until its abuse in Victorian times.

Literary historians put the novels produced in the last thirty years of the 18th century into distinct categories-the novel of sentiment, the Gothic novel or the novel of horror,the oriental tale, the novel of doctrine etc.Two forms of tales became popular – the Gothic and the Oriental. The Gothic found its early exponent in Horace Walpole who wrote The Castle of Otranto and brought ruined castles, graveyards and ghosts into prominence.

This was in consonance with the interest in the past, the Middle Ages in particular which became a feature of the 18th century. The plot centred round usurpations, marriages of convenience, sinners retiring to convents, etc.-elements which exercised alot of influence on European fiction. Ann Radcliffe was another practitioner of the Gothic mode and is known for her Mysteries of Udolpho. These writers, exploiters of the romantic mood,preserved the novel’s connection with its poetic origins which tended to get obscured in the hands of realists like Richardson and Fielding.

The Oriental Tale also had its vogue. Trade relations between Europe and the East grew rapidly during the eighteenth century. The East fuelled the imagination of the writers.The translation of the Arabian Nights into different languages led many to conjure Arabia and Persia. The East was fascinating as the society and values they revealed were different from those of Western Europe. In The Spectator, Addison and Steele wrote Oriental sketches and Johnson wrote a tale about Ethiopia in his periodical The Rambler, a prelude to his novel Rasselaswhich is his contribution to the oriental romance.

Vathek, a fantasy is another piece of orientalism written by the eccentric millionaire William Beckford. It was written in French and translated into English and tells the caliph Vathek’s attempt at acquiring power and knowledge which results in his selling himself to the powers of evil much like Dr. Faustus. By the end of the eighteenth century the sociological novel, also called the “doctrinaire novel” with a focus on the social and economic problems of the day came into prominence. Caleb Williams by William Godwin, Hugh Trevor by Thomas Holcroft, Hermsprong by Robert Bage are some such novels.

An important contribution to novel writing in the eighteenth century came from Oliver Goldsmith who wrote about the Irish scene in The Vicar of Wakefield.It is a charming story of the vicissitudes of domestic life pervaded by a spirit of good fellowship and religious faith. It celebrates the virtues of domesticityand the delight in little things, a quality Goldsmith imported into the English novel. He wrote with great ease, like a journalist and this was also a contribution to the development of the novel.

Section Four: Women’s Contribution to the Novel:

Women also distinguished themselves in the writing of novels in the eighteenth century. Fanny Burney, although no brilliant blue-stocking of the times, was keenly interested in middle and upper class life she saw around her and shot into public fame with her first book Evelina. Through her father, she got introduced to many people who were of intellectual and artistic consequence. She was principally interested in the aristocracy andit is their life she documents in her novels thus preparing the way for another great woman writer, Jane Austen.

Burney was influenced by Fielding and like him placed a high premium on chastity and wrote in the epistolary mode. She excelled in social comedy and it is said that she feminized the Fielding type of novel. In her other novels like Cecilia,Camilla, and The Wanderer Burney introduced photographic character study, making the novel feminine.

Charlotte Smith was another woman novelist who wrote The Old Manor House, a novel in the Gothic vein.It also embodies her criticism of society.

Mrs. Ann Radcliffe’s best-known work The Mysteries of Udolphobecame a stock example of the Gothic novel or the novel of horror where there is a close relationship between the character and the environment and an atmosphere of mystery and suspense with ruined castles and dungeons, superstitious beliefs, bandits and villains. Radcliffe points to the Romantics and to all 19th century novelists and story-tellers who use the supernatural and probe the morbid psychological states in man.

Another important woman writer who began writing in the eighteenth century was Maria Edgeworth(1767-1849).In her novels she deals with London social life and the relationship between the Irish landlords and the peasantry. The portrayal of Irish life was taken up by later writers. Maria Edgeworth can be said to one of the pioneers of the regional novel. She is also notable on account of her interest in the social problems of the day.

SectionFive:Conclusio

The impulse to write the novel was an expression of the primordial instinct of man to tell stories. When orality gave way to literacy, stories dealing with characters drawn from real life and incidents resembling situations from everyday affairs got to be encoded through the genre of the novel. It was the emphasis on the real world that distinguished the novel from the romances and allegories that were popular in the medieval times.

A number of writers prepared the ground for the flowering of the novel in the eighteenth century by writing about the everyday rather than the fantastic and by contributing to the development of a prose style well equipped for rendering character and incident. The novel thus began with a close association with the life and concerns of the times. From the picaresque to the epistolary mode, from social satire to the exploration of the inner workings and states of the mind, the genre encompassed a diversity of motives, techniques and themes from which later practitioners of the genre drew heavily on.

Points to ponder

•  The novel as a genre is of western origin. Have you ever wondered how this genre got carried to different parts of the world and gave birth to a rich storehouse of literature in various vernacular languages as well as in English embodying a variety of experiences from different contexts? Colonialism had a lot to do with the spread of western literary forms to different parts of the world. In India the upanyaas was an offshoot of the exposure to the English novel in the 19th century.
• Mrs. Radcliffe is supposed to have blazed the trail for the Gothic novel with her Mysteries of Udolpho. How does one explain a woman’s fascination with horror in the 18th century? How does the Gothic mode with its ruined castles and hidden dungeons stand in relation to the confined lives led by women in the earlier centuries?
• It is interesting that Richardson, who is credited with writing the first novels in English in the 18th century, chose women as protagonists of his novels and dealt with the problems faced by women in a patriarchal society. The novelistic representations of women’s issues can be said to have preceded the appearance of overtly feminist tracts like Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792,one of the earliest such tracts to have been written.

Was Richardson’s choice of women as protagonists due to his natural sympathy for women or was it due to the fact that a sizeable section of the reading public in the 18th century consisted of women and hence tales concerned with women’s experiences were more likely to strike a chord with them? It would be interesting to investigate women’s relationship to the novel as writers as well as readers.

Do you Know

• The first novels in English were written entirely in letters of enormous length between different characters in the novels. Critics have often ridiculed the technique. Sir Leslie Stephen noted that one of the female characters in Richardson’s Sir Charles
• Grandison,tohave written the letters she is supposed to have written in three days,must have to sit down and write letters for around eight hours a day. In these novels we are transported to a world whose inhabitants live for the pen and sit down to write letters as soon as something has happened to analyse events and their impact on their mental states.
• Tobias Smollett tried his hands at different kinds of writing apart from the novel-verse, drama, travel writing, political writing, a treatise on midwifery, translation etc. He translated Cervantes and Voltaire and wrote a history of England in many volumes.
• Fielding wrote some 16 or so plays before he turned to the novel. His political satires as a playwright turned too severe for Prime Minister Robert Walpole to bear and he passed a Bill through the Commons in 1737 which became the Licensing Act.