DANIEL DEFOE

Daniel Defoe (1657-1731) was a pioneer novelist of adventure and low

life. For the first time he let the readers hear the actual voice of the average
middle class. He notes the moral corruption of the nobility and the decline
of the brutal but ignorant country gentleman. He is the most wonderful
observer of facts and by means of his imagination he can form them anew.
Defoe was the first nonconformist and dissenter in English literature.
When he established his periodical The Review in 1704 the age of English
journalism was less than fifty years. Like Dickens he was highly endowed
with the experiencing nature and nothing seemed to him to be too small to
escape his notice. He knew how to turn the smallest detail into literary
account. He had made fiction appear like truth and truth appear like fiction.
In 1706 Defoe published A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs.
Veal, the day next Day after her Death, to one Mrs. Bargrave at
Canterbury, the 8th of September 1705. At one time this book was thought
to be a hoax but actually turned out to be a well researched work of
imagination. When the first part of ROBINSON CRUSOE was published in
1719 Defoe was sixty years old. During the next few years he was to
become the most extraordinarily prolific old man in the history of English
fiction.
In quick succession he wrote CAPTAIN SINGLETON (1720), MOLL
FLANDERS (1722), COLONEL JACQUE (1722), A Journal of the Plaque
Year (1722) and ROXANA (1724). Defoe regarded novel not as a work of
imagination but as a true relation and even when the element of fact
decreases he maintains the close realism of pseudo fact. ROBINSON
CRUSOE has the shipwreck of Selkirk as its source. CAPTAIN
SINGLETON and MOLL FLANDERS have accounts of travels and the
vague and suggestive geography of the time, the memoirs and biographies
of loose women and criminals. Defoe instinctively applies the
documentary method.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

The most important development in English novel seems to have come

almost by chance. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) came to London and
apprenticed himself as a printer. Once he was asked to prepare a series of
model letters for those who were unable to write by themselves. Thus he
told maid servants how to negotiate a marriage proposal, apprentices how
to apply for situations and even sons how to plead their fathers
forgiveness. This task made him realize that he possesses the art of
expressing himself in letters. This realization led to the publication of three
epistolary novels titled PAMELA (1740), CLARISSA (1747-8) and SIR
CHARLES GRANDISON (1753-5).
Pamela struck the readers as a virtuous servant who resisted the attempts
of seduction of her master and as a reward gained the marriage proposal
from him. Though Richardson intended Pamela to point out a moral but the
artist in him got the better of the moralist and his first novel belongs to an
order of artistic achievement and psychological truth. Richardsons next
novel CLARRISA grew out of PAMELA. The moralist Richardson must
have found some danger in the hero of PAMELA being a rake reformed by
marriage so CLARRISA was designed as a painful demonstration of the
perfidy of man. It is quite substantial to note here that as CLARISSA had
grown out of PAMELA, SIR CHARLES GRANDISON grew out of
CLARISSA. Richardson took up the moralists burden once again and Sir
Charles Grandison appeared as a model gentleman.
Richardson, like Defoe, was a representative of the average middle class.
In Richardson, his analysis of sentiment becomes the dominant motive and
is pursued with a minuteness and patience which fiction in England was
seldom to parallel. His realism in narration was combined with a skill in
dialogue. He produced the first novels of psychological analysis and made
everyday manners and ordinary persons acceptable in fiction. The French
found in him a herald of revolt. Goethe felt his influence and became
Richardsonian in The Sorrows of Wether. Even in Italy two plays were
adapted from PAMELA by Goldoni.

In the eighteenth century novel grew to its full stature. The Elizabethans
had toyed with romance and realism. Bunyan had made story out of his
religious convictions. Defoe had given to homely fact an imaginative
appeal. Richardson emerged as the typical figure of the changed order. The
English novel firmly established by Richardson was further strengthened
by Fielding and Smollett.
HENRY FIELDING
Henry Fielding (1707-54) began his literary career as a playwright by
writing a comedy in the Restoration manner. But he soon found a real
talent for burlesque. Richardson who was skilled in dramatic parody was
tempted to write a parody of Richardsons PAMELA and the result was
SHAMELA (1741). Soon he found something on a large scale and there
appeared his first published novel JOSEPH ANDREWS (1742). As Pamela
was tempted by her master so her brother Joseph Andrews is tempted by
his mistress, Lady Booby. With Pamela as his example of virtue he resisted
though the reward was only to be kicked out in disgrace. There follows a
series of adventures on the road where Joseph was accompanied by Parson
Adams, a clerical Don Quixote. The comedy is admirably contrived with
the Hogarthian figure of a pig keeping parson as one of its main delights.
Apart from the motive of satire Fielding presented a contrast between the
picture of humble, contemporary life and the classical epic.
Fielding was displeased with Richardsons PAMELA but both of them
were moralists and used the novel to demonstrate what they considered
right and wrong behaviour. For Fielding morals were essentially positive
and he laid emphasis on action. To him Richardson seemed to be saying
that virtue and prudence were identical. Pamela appeared to be a
calculating young woman whose concern for virtue masked a self
regarding intentness on material and social betterment. Fielding made
Shamela a hypocrite who resists her master in order to drive him into
marriage so that she may become a lady and carry on freely with a local
parson.
In his next novel JONATHAN WILD (1743) Fieldings irony was the
fiercest. In this novel Fielding took the life of a thief and receiver, who had

been hanged at Tyburn, as a theme for demonstrating the small division

between a great rogue and a great soldier or a great politician. The said
novel is a satire on human greatness. The condensed irony, the self
mastery, the mental liberty heightened by the implicit violence of the
thwarted passion has a power that recalls Swift.
TOM JONES, appeared in 1749, is the first long English novel conceived
and carried out on a plan that secured artistic unity for the whole. In its
attitude to prudence and to the codes of conduct TOM JONES like
JOSEPH ANDREWS is an anti Richardsonian novel. In TOM JONES
Fielding appears as the innovator of the main tradition of English novel
the novel of panorama. Scott, Dickens and H G Wells followed the suite
later. In this novel Fielding offers a mature presentation and criticism of
almost every topic of general human interest: religion, sex, love, war, the
nature of man and woman.
In his last novel AMELIA (1751) Fielding idealises the main woman
character by making the novel a celebration of womanly virtues. Amelia is
a successful character in English fiction, a credible and convincing
representation of a positively good person. This novel is the work of a
mellower Fielding and represents a fresh start conditioned by Fieldings
admiration for Richardsons CLARISSA.
With Fielding the English novel seems to have come of age. He
established it in one of its most notable formmiddle class realism. He
appeared as one of the most civic minded English writers, a living example
of the Augustan ideal of the public man.
SMOLLETT
At the age of eighteen Tobais George Smollett (1721-71) came to London
from Scotland to make his fortune not by practicing his apprenticed
profession of a surgeon but by producing his tragedy THE REGICIDE. The
managers refused to produce the play. Having obtained an appointment as
a surgeon in the navy, he sailed in 1740 to the West Indies. This
experience exposed him to the rough sea life and to the people who lived
it. Having left his job and settled in London to practice as a surgeon he

wrote a number of poems of no value and interest. Then he turned to his

most ambitious work and published his novel THE ADVENTURES OF
RODERICK RANDOM in 1748 in which he portrayed the life of a rogue
hero until his marriage with the loyal, beautiful and incredible Narcissa.
The depiction of the reckless and ferocious sea life makes this novel
memorable. He gave a new life to the picaresque form and enriched it with
freshly invented characters
Two years later Smollett published THE ADVENTURES OF PEREGRINE
PICKLE (1751) which became his most successful work in comic
characterization. Once again it is a novel of a rogue who follows a
depraved life until he marries the virtuous Emilia. With these two novels
Smollett exhausted his own experience and in FERDINAND COUNT
FATHOM (1753) he draws a fantastic villain who anticipates the figures of
the novel of terror which was soon to follow.
Both Fielding and Smollett tried their hands at the drama before finding
their true medium. Fielding was the essayist novelist of character; Smollett
is the exuberant novelist of incident.
During the twenty years after the death of Richardson, new elements were
added to the English novel. Chief of these was sentiment or sensibility
and the master of this was Lawrence Sterne. Apart from him the novelists
of the time fall into three groups: (a) the novelists of the sentiment and
reflection typified by Henry Mackenzie; (b) the novelists of home life
represented by Fanny Burney; and (c) the novelists of Gothic romances
typified by Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve.
STERNE
Though educated almost in a barrack room Sterne (1713-68) found his
way to Cambridge for a Masters degree. Though he read theology and
published sermons he also studied the works of Rabelais and Cervantes.
The publication of his novel LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM
SHANDY began in 1760 (Vols I, II) and continued at intervals until the
year before his death. The novel had no predecessor and was the product of
an original mind. Sterne showed that there were untried possibilities in the

genre and opened new fields of humour. In a style more subtle and a form
more flexible Sterne invented the fantasia novel. The narrative consists of
episodes, conversations, perpetual digressions, excursions in learning, with
unfinished sentences, dashes, blank pages, fantastic syntax, and caprices in
humour, bawdy and sentiment. Sterne asserted that the orderly narratives
of events, with their time and space realism, have little relation to the
disorder of the human mind, where sequence is not logical but incredibly
capricious.
HENRY MACKENZIE
Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831) was the novelist who carried the eighteenth
century well into the nineteenth. With the publication of THE MAN OF
FEELING (1771) he was recognized as the literary leader of Edinburgh
Society. The sentimentalism of Sterne not only remained popular but also
gained its most lachrymose exposition in this novel in which the hero is
forever weeping under the stress of some pathetic scene or emotional
excitement. The story is purely episodic, completely without humour,
owing nothing in form to Fielding or Smollett. In his next novel THE MAN
OF THE WORLD (1773) Mackenzie achieved both a plot and a villain. His
last and the best novel JULIA de ROUBIGNE (1777) strikes as a wholly
different note and places him in the straight line of descent from
Richardson. It is one of the few tragedies to be found in the early stages of
English novel.
FANNY BURNEY
With the novels of Frances (Fanny) Burney (1752-1840) we enter into
another plane of reality. Her first novel and her best EVELINA (1778) took
the reading public by storm. The novel describes the entry of a country girl
into the gaieties and adventures of London. This is the first English novel
of home life. The motherless Evelina goes out into the world and her
adventures are related in a series of letters with a vivacity and swift
succession of incidents entirely original. She had created new comic
characters who pre shadowed the far off Dickens. She was the first to give
flesh and blood to sheer vulgarity. She had been regarded as the direct
English successor to Richardson. However while Richardson could create

things Fanny Burney seemed to have only a tenuous store of invention to

support her own observation and experience. As a result her work declined.
CECILIA (1782) is less natural and less effective. In her last novel THE
WANDERER (1814) her style seems to have become diseased. However
she was the first writer to depict that how the ordinary embarrassments of a
girls life could be taken for the main theme of a novel.
HORACE WALPOLE
Amid these later eighteenth century developments in English novel one of
the most notable is the tale of terror or Gothic novel which continues
into the tales of horror or crime. The saga began with THE CASTLE OF
OTRANTO (1765) by Horace Walpole (1717-97). It was written in
conscious reaction against the domesticities of Richardson and sought to
extend the world of experience by the addition of the mysterious and the
supernatural. Walpoles antiquarianism had its emotional aspects for he
can be regarded as the clearest example in the eighteenth century of a wide
spread sensibility arising from a disillusionment with the increase in
commercialism and rationalism. Walpole carried out the medieval cult than
most of his contemporaries and at Strawberry Hills he constructed a Gothic
house where he could dream himself back into the days of chivalry and
monastic life. THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO resulted from those romantic
day dreams. Set in medieval Italy the story includes a gigantic helmet that
can strike its victim dead, tyrants, supernatural intrusions, mysterious and
secret terrors.
WILLIAM BECKFORD
William Beckford (1759-1844) was another gentleman of fashion and
wealth who made a Gothic edifice, Fonthill Abbey, and had written a
romance of mystery. As Fonthill appeared to be more extravagant than
Strawberry so was VATHEK (1782), a more bizarre composition than THE
CASTLE OF OTRANTO. Walpole had a sound sense of the material world
but Beckford seemed to live in a territory of fantasy. VATHEK is an
Oriental story of a caliph who pursues his complex cruelties and intricate
passions. The main impressions communicated by this novel are of a
fantastic world of lavish indulgences.

ANN RADCLIFFE
Among later practitioners of the Gothic novel the most able and popular
one was Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) whose best known novels are
THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO (1794) and THE ITALIAN (1797).
Though she accepted the mechanism of Gothic novel she combined it with
sentiment. In The Mysteries of Udolpho we find an innocent and sensitive
girl in the hands of a powerful and sadistic villain named Montoni who
owns a grim and isolated castle where mystery and horror stalk in the
lonely corridors and haunted chambers. The works of Mrs. Radcliffe not
only attracted the circulating library readers but it also infected a number
of powerful minds. Byron at Newstead Abbey appeared to be a Montoni
come to life. For Shelley the ghosts of the tale of terror become so real that
he actually saw them. Charlotte Brontes Rochester in JANE EYRE was a
Montoni modified into a middle class setting. Emile Brontes novel
WUTHERING HEIGHTS was also stimulated through this strange source.
MONK LEWIS
Matthew Gregory (Monk) Lewis (1775-1818), who had read Goethe and
the German romanticists, employed all the worst of his reading in THE
MONK (1796). He modified the Faust theme for such a portrayal of
sensuality that contemporary taste was offended though the novel was
immensely popular. He continued this notorious success with TALES OF
TERROR (1799) and TALES OF WONDER (1801).
We may also briefly observe that one of the most competent of the tales of
terror was FRANKENSTEIN (1817) by MERRY SHELLEY. It is the novel
of a mechanical monster with human power of a terrifying aspect.