Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

by J. Paul Hunter

“By taking a close look at materials no previous twentieth-century critic has seriously investigated in literary terms―ephemeral journalism, moralistic tracts, questions-and-answer columns, ‘wonder’ narratives―Paul Hunter discovers a tangled set of roots for the early novel. His provocative argument for a new historicized understanding of the genre and its early readers brilliantly reveals unexpected affinities.” ―Patricia Meyer Spacks, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, University of Virginia What did people read before there were novels? Not necessarily just other “literary” works, according to this fascinating study of the beginnings of the English novel. To understand the origins of the novel as a species and to read individual novels well, we must know several pasts and traditions―even non-fictional and non-narrative traditions, even non-“artistic” and non-written pasts―that at first might seem far removed from the pleasures readers find in modern novels.

Genres: Literary Criticism

Paperback

First published August 1, 1990

About the author

J. Paul Hunter is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe; Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance; and Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. He is author of the first nine editions of The Norton Introduction to Poetry and the long-time co-editor of The Norton Introduction to Literature and New Worlds of Literature.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hunter adopts a historicist approach, and doesn’t argue something so much as introduce us to an array of cultural contexts from which the novel emerged, asserting that novels “have to be read against a far broader context of cultural texts and materials in order [for us] to have any notion of how they seemed to early readers” (xvi). Hunter admires Watt’s thesis, as propounded in The Rise of the Novel; he applauds his “‘sociological’ basis of the English Novel,” and claims, actually, to be writing under his “inspiration.” Hunter’s intention in writing this book is to complicate Watt’s thesis (which suffers from oversimplification) by identifying a cluster of frequently overlooked traditions—some non-fictional, non-narrative, non-“artistic,” even non-written—that existed before novels and “prepared” early 18th-century readers for the new form when it arrived. The phenomenon that’s come to be known as “the rise of the novel” isn’t something that can be explained in simple terms, according to Hunter. He generally avoids causation claims, and is extremely careful when he does make them. Instead of delineating neat literary paternities, he recreates the world of 18th-century England in all its sprawling diversity—with its ephemeral print journalism, didacticism, wonder narratives, guide books, private histories, etc.—and leaves us to make our own connections, suggesting possible relationships along the way. He acknowledges that there’s more work to be done, and invites others to build on his findings.

I: Texts

1st- and 2nd-Wave Novelty

There is a universal perception in England by midcentury, Hunter writes, that a literary revolution is taking place. This observation is similar regardless of the evaluation or the stakes. Conservatives were worried about change, while rebels celebrated it. Such “rebels” believed that traditional forms and conventions were too constricted and rigid to represent modern reality. The traditionalists, on the other hand—cultural guardians like Alexander Pope—believed in the continuing vitality of the Christian humanist heritage, and saw the new, modern way of writing as indicating slipped standards and debased values, the destruction of all that was fine in the tradition.

Hunter identifies two distinct waves of literary novelty in England, the 1st occurring between the 1690s and the deaths of Pope (’44) and Swift (’45), the second occurring after in the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and their successors. 1st-wave novelty represents tastes that at first seem simply aberrant, transitory, and trivial. (The fact that the first wave of novelty left so little mark had something to do with the powerful Augustan counterattack (think Battle of the Books, Dunciad, etc.), but equally important was the fact that the innovators had little sense of what a vital new literature might look like.) In 2nd-wave novelty, pioneer novelists like Richardson and Fielding codified and extended the bold novelty of their predecessors, creating a broad cultural consciousness among readers and potential writers that a significant and lasting form had been created—even if there were still major issues of definition—and that whole careers could be built on their foundations.

The “Novel”

Until quite late in the 18th century, the term “novel” was used very loosely and imprecisely, often implying little more than opprobrium and contempt. Sometimes it designated tales shorter than traditional romances, sometimes it claimed the plot of love and intrigue, and sometimes it implied a native heritage rather than continental loyalties. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, “novel” as often applied to narratives not substantially different from romances; sometimes the terms “romance” and “novel” were used interchangably, and the generic term in other linguistic traditions often does not make distinctions that have come to seem crucial to the English tradition of lengthy fiction, roman in French or romanzo in Italian encompassing, in each case, both novels and romances: hence le roman moderne and il romanzo moderno. (Note: Hunter incorrectly translates the word “novel” into the Italian nouvelle.) When a distinction was made, it usually involved length, novels being relatively short compared to romances (much as we now distinguish novellas from novels), a usage that seems to have developed from the French nouvelle or the Italian novelle—“a diminutive story whose material is fresh, untraditional, and whose resolution is extraordinarily surprising.” But short English “novels” did not necessarily follow their French and Italian models in rejecting traditional plots or other established, and the works labeled “novels” in the late 17th century or early 18th century most often looked backward—in spite of their name—than forward.

Some early writers did use the term “novel” in a way that, in quite a general sense, points to our modern idea. Congreve for instance, in 1692, distinguishes between novels and romances:
Romances are generally composed of the Constant Loves and invincible Courages of Hero’s, Heroins, Kings and Queens, Mortals of the first Rank, and so forth; where lofty Language, miraculous Contingencies and impossible Performances, elevate and surprize the Reader into a giddy Delight, which leaves him flat upon the Ground whenever he gives of, and vexes him to think how he has suffer’d himself to be pleased and transported, concern’d and afflicted at the several Passages which he has Read, viz. these Knights Success to their Damosels Misfortunes, and such like, when he is forced to be very well convinced that ’tis all a lye. Novels are of a more familiar nature; Come near us, and represent to us Intrigues in practice, delight us with Accidents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly unusual or unpresidented, such which not being so distant from our Belief bring also the pleasure nearer us. Romances give more of Wonder, Novels more Delight.
But even so hesitating and imprecise a description is rare, and one cannot find common agreement about the meaning of the term until the kind of retrospective view that Clara Reeve began to codify in 1785. And so, despite some of her own ambivalences, it was Reeve who has set the tone for most subsequent discussion of what the novel is because it was she who separated the novel definitively from romance in The Progress of Romance through Times, Centuries and Manners (1785)—a theoretical work of criticism written in dialogue form, whose importance lies partly in its “spirited attempt to distinguish between the ancient romance and the modern novel.” Here’s the crucial exchange (only partially cited by Hunter):

Euphrasia. . . . The word Novel in all languages signifies something
new. It was first used to distinguish these works from Romance,
though they have lately been confounded together and are
frequently mistaken for each other.
Sophronia. But how will you draw the line of distinction, so as to
separate them effectually, and prevent further mistakes?
Euphrasia. I will attempt this distinction, and I presume if it is
properly done it will be followed, — If not, you are but where
you were before. The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats
of fabulous persons and things. — The Novel is a picture of real
life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. The
Romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what never
happened nor is likely to happen. — The Novel gives a familiar
relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as
may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of
it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and
to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a per-
suasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are
affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as
if they were our own.

In closing section I, Hunter notes an unfortunate, if unintended, outcome of Reeve’s distinction. Because the novel traces its terminological existence from romance, literary theory and theoretical criticism have generally assumed some kind of parent-child relationship between the two, a misleading historical state of affairs. If the novel needs to be distinguished from romance, it does not follow that the novel descended from romance.

II: Contexts

“New” Readers

In chapter 4-6, Hunter puts the literary experience of the early novel into a large historical and cultural perspective by suggesting prevailing social and psychological patterns that influenced readers as the novel emerged. Using newly acquired population statistics, he confirms the notion of increasing Anglophone literacy, and asserts that literacy in the English-speaking world grew rapidly between 1600 and 1800, so that by the latter date the vast majority of adult males could read and write, whereas only two centuries earlier only a select minority could do so. (Female literacy was lower, though data is too scant to say by what degree.) This increase comes almost completely from the classes of “artisans, shopkeepers, yeoman, husbandmen, laborers, and servants (i.e., the occupationally “middling”). Most of this increase, as it turns out, also took place in the early 17th century, three generations before the novel began emerging, as a result of the Protestant Reformation. Therefore, the ancestors of mid-18th-century novel-readers were the ones to “cross the linguistic divide in the brawling but heady years between James I and Charles II.”

Hunter identifies four characteristics shared by so-called “new” readers—readers, that is, who, in the late 17th century, were potential consumers of novels: 1st, new readers were more likely to be urban than rural; 2nd, more likely to be ambitious and keen on rising up in the world; 3rd, more likely to have mobilized from rural to urban areas (with their quick pace, crowds, loneliness, impersonality, and sense of displacement, etc.); and 4th, more likely to be young.

The Decline of Fairy Tales

Hunter underscores the curious dearth of fairy tales produced and transmitted in 17th century England, arguing that they disappeared from the public consciousness as a result of the Reformation, their household familiarity in Shakespeare’s day having dwindled to nothing by the time of Henry and Sarah Fielding. Their disappearance, he writes, is part of a larger distrust and suppression of oral culture in the seventeenth century. Puritanism rejected any traces of the pagan tradition and anything even vaguely associated with Merry Old England. The broader distrust of orality meant that traditional channels for cultural meaning and individual adjustment were not easily available and not sanctioned when they were. Novels, Hunter writes, pick up where such oral narratives leave off, both the former and latter telling young people of a world beyond their personal experiences.

III: Pre-texts


Journalism

Long before Samuel Richardson showed readers and writers of fiction how to savor a single human instant a thousand ways, the world of print had begun its long liaison with the up to date, the latest news, and the present moment, trying to provide a sense that the printing press offered a technology for nearly instant replay of human experience. Such a sense was crucial to many kinds of art and cultural experience in England in the late 17th century because the culture had developed a fixation on contemporaneity, part of its larger interest in discovery, enlightenment, and novelty. The desire for acute awareness of the latest events and for innovation and originality—both features of the contemporary consciousness—contribute to the emergence of the peculiarly present-centered form of narrative we now call (appropriately enough) the “novel.” (Jour-nalism, the “news,” the “news”-paper, the “novel”—all are expressions of this new appetite for contemporaneity.) Timeliness was a crucial element of conversation; talking “to the moment” was as crucial to the coffeehouse consciousness (and daily life in London) as it was in the novel. This widespread desire for news developed during the English Civil Wars, when Englishmen and women felt they had much personally at stake in every public event. By the 1690, with its subject matter expanding, an audience of eavesdroppers was essentially creating itself. The sense of filling in the details, helping to write the full history of the time and ultimately of reality itself, is prominent in the eclectic subjects covered by journals. Hunter does not claim that journalism “gave rise” to the novel; he simply argues that the consciousness that made the present moment the center of human attention and led to the directions of modern journalism helped prepare the cultural context for novelists’ preoccupations, too, and that crucial dimensions of the novel seem unimaginable without the peculiar combination of “News, and New Things” that obsessed English culture at the turn of the 18thcentury.

“Strange, but True”: Fact, Certainty, and the Desire for Wonder

One tradition of printed materials became especially important and held sway over the popular imagination in England from the last quarter of the 17th century until the novel emerged as a cultural force. It in effect links the empirical thinking that finds its way into the novel with its opposite, the desire to retain a sense of awe and mystery and find, even in everyday life, something strange and surprising. These books seem to have been designed to find phenomenon and events that eluded ready rational explanation. One example is so-called Providence literature, which was intended to influence God’s continuing influence in human history (a symptom of the secularization and scientific-mindedness gradually spreading over Europe).

Didacticism

Most published writings and an astonishing amount of private discourse in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in England were religious in subject matter and didactic in intent—so fully so as almost to constitute a definition of taste, desire, and habit. Hunter notes that the reason such materials have been largely neglected by literary historians is that they strike modern readers as inherently wrongheaded, narrow, ineffectively focused, and boring. This is a mistake. Hunter argues that it is impossible to fully understand early British fiction without understanding the didactic traditions that inform it. Hunter identifies six features of didacticism that clarify its cultural importance: the 1st is a powerful sense of good and evil, a confidence in absolutes (intended to instill principles in an increasingly scientific world that seemed fuller every day of shades of grey); the 2nd is a faith in language to affect the behavior of reader in rational and predictable ways; the 3rd is a heightened tone and urgent sense of interiority (with the kind of imperative mood, second-person constructions, exclamation points, and interjections that seem to originate from righteous indignation and moral concern); the 4th is a tendency to address readers directly and personally; the 5th is a tilt to Horation instruction (as opposed to Horation delight); the 6th is a tone of authority and air of certainty (from moralists keen to halt what they saw as a society undergoing rapid deterioration. People—especially young people in new circumstances, loosened from the security of family, the familiarity of their community, the traditional sources of stories and lore��needed desperately to feel grounded, to gain basic information about how their new world worked and what was expected of them—what the codes and rules were, what behavior was appropriate, which people who one could trust, what the implications for ignorance and deviation were, etc. Hunter makes a tentative typology of didactic texts, regretting the paucity of existing research on the subject. Most early novelists learned their craft as didactacists by writing in one or more subkinds. Defoe wrote guides for families, tradesmen, and gentlemen, providence books, etc.; Richardson wrote letter-writing manuals and moral treatises; Fielding wrote moral and religious essays, etc.; Haywood wrote essays and cultural criticism; Sterne wrote homilies, etc. Novels were, to most novelists, just one more species in which to work their skills and promote their ethical and social ideas—a bit looser and less defined than most of the standard didactic subkinds but otherwise not, at first, much better, or worse, or different.

Guides

By far the most popular of the identifiable kinds of didactic para-literature of the time—and the closest in spirit to the novel—is the guide. Guides address all sorts of situations and circumstances, practical, spiritual, and personal. The verbal guidance of books began to replace the sense that exemplary personal guidance—of parents, pastors, and patriarchs—was necessary to proper conduct. The context that led to the extensive production of guides involves lost personal contact and radically changed institutions and situations; it was that very change that not only made the novel possible but in some basic sense necessary.

Against Idleness

On the hazards of idleness, there is a powerful agreement from the time of the Puritan Commonwealth until late into the eighteenth century. Whether one regards the cultural anxiety about idleness as an aspect of Puritan consciousness, the Protestant ethic, urban economics, rising worries about education and personal fulfillment, or revulsion against aristocratic customs and rural place, the net result is that writers of all stripes agree that idleness is a “damnable sin.” In insisting that they were redeeming leisure, transforming idleness into practical guidance, both recommending and illustrating self-examination, and (especially) materializing examples within a rhetoric of attraction, novels set themselves to answer directly against the charges made most often against “idle fictions” and “wanton tales.”

Diaries

Private writings came to exist in the 17th century because English (and, slightly later, American) men and women, not just a few religious extremists, believed that their eternal salvation was closely linked to the events of their private lives—that “reading” one’s life analytically could provide awareness of one’s spiritual status. The recording and analysis of these events, in minute and painstaking detail, became a sacred duty and a common Protestant practice, and diary keeping became a national habit practiced by a large percentage of those who were literate. (Early diary keeps shared with Augustine a profound sense of individual responsibility.) It is the novel that creates a formal space for such a proliferation of private details. The novel needs, depends upon, and devours such details. Later, the 18th century saw the gradual rise of biography (and autobiography), a genre that became increasingly willing to cover the lives of moderately distinguished, as well as historically emblematic, individuals—something novels do as well. Finally, Hunter closes by briefly establishing the contextual importance of history, biography, and travel narratives for the novel.