Rise of the Novel

 Ian Watt

(a) 

The greatness of Descartes was primarily one of method, of the thoroughness of his determination to accept nothing on trust; and his Discourse on Method (1637) and his Meditations did much to bring about the modern assumption whereby the pursuit of truth is conceived of as a wholly individual matter, logically independent of the tradition of past thought, and indeed as more likely to be arrived at by a departure from it. 

The novel is the form of literature which most fully reflects this individualist and innovating reorientation. Previous literary forms had reflected the general tendency of their cultures to make conformity to traditional practice the major test of truth: the plots of classical and renaissance epic, for example, were based on past history or fable, and the merits of the author’s treatment were judged largely according to a view of literary decorum derived from the accepted models in the genre. This literary traditionalism was first and most fully challenged by the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience-individual experience which is always unique and therefore new. The novel is thus the logical literary vehicle of a culture which, in the last few centuries, has set an unprecedented value on originality, on the novel; and it is therefore well named. 

This emphasis on the new accounts for some of the critical difficulties which the novel is widely agreed to present. When we judge a work in another genre, a recognition of its literary models is often important and sometimes essential; our evaluation depends to a large extent on our analysis of the author’s skill in handling the appropriate formal conventions. On the other hand, it is surely very damaging for a novel to be in any sense an imitation of another literary work: and the reason for this seems to be that since the novelist’s primary task is to convey the impression of fidelity to human experience, attention to any pre-established formal conventions can only endanger his success. What is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode, probably follows from this: the poverty of the novel’s formal conventions would seem to be the price it must pay for its realism. 

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.... nevertheless a broad and necessarily summary comparison between the novel and previous literary forms reveals an important difference: Defoe and Richardson are the first great writers in our literature who did not take their plots from mythology, history, legend or previous literature. In this they differ from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, for instance, who, like the writers of Greece and Rome, habitually used traditional plots; and who did so, in the last analysis, because they accepted the general premise of their times that, since Nature is essentially complete and unchanging, its records, whether scriptural, legendary or historical, constitute a definitive repertoire of human experience, 

This point of view continued to be expressed until the nineteenth century; the opponents of Balzac, for example, used it to deride his preoccupation with contemporary and, in their view, ephemeral reality. But at the same time, from the Renaissance onwards, there was a growing tendency for individual experience to replace collective tradition as the ultimate arbiter of reality; and this transition would seem to constitute an important part of the general cultural background of the rise of the novel. 

It is significant that the trend in favour of originality found its first powerful expression in England, and in the eighteenth century; the very word ‘original’ took on its modern meaning at this time, by a semantic reversal which is a parallel to the change in the meaning of ‘realism’. We have seen that, from the mediaeval belief in the reality of universals, ‘realism’ had come to denote a belief in the individual apprehension of reality through the senses: similarly the term ‘original’ which in the Middle Ages had meant ‘having existed from the first’ came to mean ‘underived, independent, first-hand’; 

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Locke had defined personal identity as an identity of consciousness through duration in time; the individual was in touch with his own continuing identity through memory of his past thoughts and actions.! This location of the source of personal identity in the repertoire of its memorics was continued by Hume: ‘Had we no memory, we never should have any notion of'causation, nor consequently of that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person’.? Such a point of view is characteristic of the novel; many novelists, from Sterne to Proust, have made their subject the exploration of the personality as it is defined in the interpenetration of its past and present self-awareness. 

Time is an essential category in another related but more external approach to the problem of defining the individuality of any object. The ‘principle of individuation’ accepted by Locke was that of existence at a particular locus in space and time: since, as he wrote, ‘ideas become general by separating from them the circumstances of time and place’,3 so they become particular only when both these circumstances are specified. In the same way the characters of the novel can only be individualised if they are set in a background of particularised time and place. 

Both the philosophy and the literature of Greece and Rome were deeply influenced by Plato’s view that the Forms or Ideas were the ultimate realities behind the concrete objects of the temporal world. These forms were conceived as timeless and unchanging,* and thus reflected the basic premise of their civilisation in general that nothing happened or could happen whose fundamental meaning was not independent of the flux of time. This premise is diametrically opposed to the outlook which has established itself since the Renaissance, and which views time, not only as a crucial dimension of the physical world, but as the shaping force of man’s individual and collective history. 

The novel is in nothing so characteristic of our culture as in the way that it reflects this characteristic orientation of modern thought. E. M. Forster sees the portrayal of ‘life by time’ as the distinctive role which the novel has added to literature’s more ancient preoccupation with portraying ‘life by values’;: Spengler’s perspective for the rise of the novel is the need of ‘ultrahistorical' modern man for a literary form capable of dealing with ‘the whole of life’; while more recently Northrop Frye has seen the ‘alliance of time and Western man’ as the defining characteristic of the novel compared with other genres.

We have already considered one aspect of the importance which the novel allots the time dimension: its break with the earlier literary tradition of using timeless stories to mirror the unchanging moral verities. The novel’s plot is also distinguished from most previous fiction by its use of past experience as the cause of present action: a causal connection operating through time replaces the reliance of earlier narratives on disguises and coincidences, and this tends to give the novel a much more cohesive structure. Even more important, perhaps, is the effect upon characterisation of the novel’s insistence on the time process. The most obvious and extreme example of this is the stream of consciousness novel which purports to present a direct quotation of what occurs in the individual mind under the impact of the temporal flux; but the novel in general has interested itself much more than any other literary form in the development of its characters in the course of time. Finally, the novel’s detailed depiction of the concerns of everyday life also depends upon its power over the time dimension: T. H. Green pointed out that much of man’s life had tended to be almost unavailable to literary representation merely as a result of its slowness;* the novel’s closeness to the texture of daily experience directly depends upon its employment of a much more minutely discriminated time-scale than had previously been employed in narrative. 

The role of time in ancient, mediaeval and renaissance literature is certainly very different from that in the novel. The restriction of the action of tragedy to twenty-four hours, for example, the celebrated unity of time, is really a denial of the importance of the temporal dimension in human life; for, in accord with the classical world’s view of reality as subsisting in timeless universals, it implies that the truth about cxistence can be as fully unfolded in the space of a day as in the space ofa lifetime. The equally celebrated personifications of time as the winged chariot or the grim reaper reveal an essentially similar outlook. They focus attention, not on the temporal flux, but on the supremely timeless fact of death; their role is to overwhelm our awareness of daily life so that we shall be prepared to face eternity. Both these personifications, in fact, resemble the doctrine of the unity of time in that they are fundamentally ahistorical, and are therefore equally typical of the very minor importance accorded to the temporal dimension in most literature previous to the novel. 

Shakespeare’s sense of the historical past, for example, is very different from the modern one. Troy and Rome, the Plantagenets and the Tudors, none of them are far enough back to be very different from the present or from each other. In this Shakespeare reflects the view of his age: he had been dead for thirty years before the word ‘anachronism’ first appeared in English,! and he was still very close to the mediaeval conception of history by which, whatever the period, the wheel of time churns out the same eternally applicable exempla. 

This a-historical outlook is associated with a striking lack of interest in the minute-by-minute and day-to-day temporal setting, a lack of interest which has caused the time scheme of so many plays both by Shakespeare and by most of his predecessors from Aeschylus onwards, to baffle later editors and critics. The attitude to time in early fiction is very similar; the sequence of events is set in a very abstract continuum of time and space, and allows very little importance to time as a factor in human relationships. Coleridge noted the ‘marvellous independence and true imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the ‘‘Faerie Queene” ’;2 and the temporal dimension of Bun. yan’s allegories or the heroic romances is equally vague and unparticularised. 

Soon, however, the modern sense of time began to permeate many areas of thought. The late seventeenth century witnessed the rise of a more objective study of history and therefore of a deeper sense of the difference between the past and the present, At the same time Newton and Locke presented a new analysis of the temporal process;? it became a slower and more mechan. ical sense of duration which was minutely enough discriminated to measure the falling of objects or the succession of thoughts in the mind. 

These new emphases are reflected in the novels of Defoe. His fiction is the first which presents us with a picture both of the individual life in its larger perspective as a historical process, and in its closer view which shows the process being acted out against the background of the most ephemeral thoughts and actions. It is true that the time scales of his novels are sometimes both contradictory in themselves, and inconsistent with their pretended historical setting, but the mere fact that such objections arise is surely a tribute to the way the characters are felt by the reader to be rooted in the temporal dimension. We obviously could not think of making such objections seriously to Sidney’s Arcadia or The Pilgrim’s Progress; there is not enough evidence of the reality of time for any sense of discrepancies to be possible. Defoe does give us such evidence. At his best, he convinces us completely that his narrative is occurring at a particular place and at a particular time, and our memory of his novels consists largely of these vividly realised moments in the lives of his characters, moments which are loosely strung together to form a convincing biographical perspective. We have a sense of personal identity subsisting through duration and yet being changed by the flow of experience. 

This impression is much more strongly and completely realised in Richardson. He was very careful to locate all his events of his narrative in an unprecedentedly detailed timescheme.

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In the towns, however, it is likely that semi-literacy was much commoner than total illiteracy. In London especially: the general spread of shop names instead of signs, which struck a Swiss visitor, Carl Philipp Moritz, as unusual, in 1782,! surely implies that it was being increasingly assumed that written communications would be understood by a large enough proportion even of the denizens of Gin Lane to be worth addressing to them. 

Opportunities for learning to read seem to have been fairly widely available, although the evidence strongly suggests that popular schooling was at best casual and intermittent. An educational system as such hardly existed; but a miscellaneous network of old endowed grammar schools and English schools, charity schools and non-endowed schools of various kinds, notably dame schools, covered the country, with the exception of some outlying rural areas and some of the new industrial towns of the north. In 1788, the first year for which adequate 

Women of the upper and middle classes could partake in few of the activities of their menfolk, whether of business or pleasure. It was not usual for them to engage in politics, business or the administration of their estates, while the main masculine leisure pursuits such as hunting and drinking were also barred. Such women, therefore, had a great deal of leisure, and this leisure was often occupied by omnivorous reading. 

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, was an avid novel reader, asking her daughter to send a list of novels copied down from newspaper advertisements, and adding: ‘I doubt not that at least the greater part of these are trash, lumber, etc. However, they will serve to pass away the idle time. . . .’3 Later, and at a definitely lower social level, Mrs. Thrale recounted that by her husband’s orders she ‘was not to think of the kitchen’ and explained that it was as a result of this enforced leisure that she was ‘driven . . . on literature as [her] sole resource’.4 

Many of the less well-to-do women also had much more leisure than previously. B. L. de Muralt had already found in 1694 that ‘even among the common people the husbands seldom make their wives work’;5 and another foreign visitor to England, César de Saussure, observed in 1727 that tradesmen’s wives were ‘rather lazy, and few do any needlework’. These reports reflect the great increase in feminine leisure which had been made possible by an important economic change. The old household duties of spinning and weaving, making bread, beer, candles and soap, and many others, were no longer necessary, since most necessities were now manufactured and could be bought at shops and markets. This connection between increased 

feminine leisure and the development of economic specialisation 

¥ No. rae. 2 Act II. 

2 2b ase ewer 

was noted in 1748 by the Swedish traveller, Pehr Kalm, who was surprised to find that in England ‘one hardly ever sees a woman here trouble herself in the least about outdoor duties’; even indoors, he discovered, ‘weaving and spinning is also in most houses a rare thing, because their : many man save them from the necessity of such’.! Y ufactures 

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The traditional view was that class distinctions were the basis of social order, and that consequently leisure pursuits were only proper for the leisure classes; and this outlook was strongly reinforced by the economic theory of the day which opposed anything which might keep the labouring classes away from their tasks. There was therefore considerable agreement among the spokesmen both of mercantilism and of traditional religious and social thought that even reading constituted a dangerous distraction from the proper pursuits of those who worked with their hands. Robert Bolton, Dean of Carlisle, for instance, in his Essays on the Employment of Time (1750), mentions the possibility of reading as a pastime for the peasant and mechanic, only to reject it summarily: ‘No, the advice to him is, Observe what passes’.! 

The opportunities of the poor for any extensive impropriety in this direction were in any case very small. Hours of work for labourers in the country included all the hours of daylight, and even in London they were from six in the morning to eight or nine at night. The usual holidays were only four-Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and Michaelmas, with the addition, in London, of the eight hanging days at Tyburn. It is true that labourers in favoured occupations, especially in London, could and did absent themselves from work fairly freely. But in the main conditions of work were not such as to give appreciable leisure except on Sundays; and then six days of labor ipse voluptas usually led to the seventh’s being devoted to activities more extrovert than reading. Francis Place thought that drink was almost the only working-class recreation during the eighteenth century;? and it must be remembered that cheap gin made drunkenness available for less than the cost of a newspaper. 

For those few who might have liked to read there were other difficulties besides lack of leisure and the cost of books. There was little privacy, as, in London especially, housing was appallingly overcrowded; and there was often not enough light to read by, even by day. The window tax imposed at the end of the seventeenth century had reduced windows to a minimum, and those that remained were usually deepset, and covered with horn, paper or green glass. At night lighting was a serious problem, since candles, even farthing dips, were considered a luxury. Richardson was proud of the fact that as an apprentice he bought them for himself,! but others could not, or were not allowed to. James Lackington, for example, was forbidden to have light in his room by his employer, a baker, and claims to have read by the light of the moon! 

There were, however, two large and important groups of relatively poor people who probably did have time and opportunity to read-apprentices and household servants, especially the latter. They would normally have leisure and light to read by; there would often be books in the house; if there were not, since they did not have to pay for their food and lodging, their wages and vails could be devoted to buying them if they chose; and they were, as ever, peculiarly liable to be contaminated by the example of their betters. 

It is certainly remarkable how many contemporary declamations against the increased leisure, luxury and literary pretensions of the lower orders specifically refer to apprentices and domestic servants, especially footmen and waiting-maids. In assessing the literary importance of this latter group it must be remembered that they constituted a very large and conspicuous class, which in the eighteenth century probably constituted the largest single occupational group in the country, as was the case, indeed, until within living memory. 

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 If the book sellers did little or nothing to promote the rise of the novel directly there are some indications that as an indirect result of their role in removing literature from the control of patronage and bringing it under the control of the laws of the markct-place, they both assisted the development of one of the characteristic technical innovations of the new form—its copious particularity of description and explanation and made possible the remarkable independence of Defoe and Richardson from the classical critical tradition which was an indispensable condition of their literary achievement. 

Once the writer’s primary aim was no longer to satisfy the standards of patrons and the literary élite, other considerations took on a new importance. Two of them, at least, were likely to encourage the author to prolixity: first, to write very explicitly and even tautologically might help his less educated readers to understand him easily; and secondly, since it was the bookseller, not the patron who rewarded him, speed and copiousness tended to become the supreme economic virtues. 

This second tendency was pointed out by Goldsmith when he considered the relationship between the bookseller and the author in his Enquiry into the Present State of Learning (1759): ‘ There cannot perhaps be imagined a combination more prejudicial to taste than this. It is the interest of the one to allow as little for writing, and of the other to write as much, as possible.’» Goldsmith’s view here finds some confirmation in the fact that the specific accusation that an author wrote diffusely for economic reasons became fairly common in the early eighteenth century; John Wesley, for example, suggested somewhat uncharitably that Isaac Watts’s long-windedness was ‘to get money’.? The possibility that this tendency may also have influenced the rise of the novel finds some support in the fact that somewhat similar charges were also levelled at both Defoe and Richardson. 

The most obvious result of the application of primarily economic criteria to the production of literature was to favour prose as against verse. In Amelia (1751) Fielding’s hackney author makes this connection very clear: ‘A sheet is a sheet with the booksellers; and, whether it be in prose or verse, they make no difference’, Consequently, finding that rhymes ‘are stubborn things’, the denizen of Grub Street turns away from writing poetry for the magazines and engages in the production of novels, For two reasons: because ‘romance writing is the only Branch of our business that is worth following and because it is certainly the easiest work in the world you may write it almost as fast as you can set pen to paper.