Main Point

The eighteenth century is the moment of the emergence of the English novel, and thus one of the most interesting testbeds for the development of a new form in all of literary history.  But these books--most of which did not call themselves "novels" and a good number of whose authors would have been offended at the idea of applying that term to their works--do not completely resemble the kinds of books we are familiar with from our reading of nineteenth-, twentieth- and now twenty-first century novels.  The main goal of our class will be to learn how to read these amazing and experimental works--what are the rules under these books they operate?  how do they represent the real world?  what can they tell us about their period and the development of fiction in English? Working out answers to these questions will be our collective task this semester.

Some Historical Background

In the course of the semester, we'll be spending some time talking about the eighteenth century in Britain.  While this is not a history class, some understanding of the period is essential to making sense of these books, not only because it's important to know the past when reading works from then, but in particular because, as we shall see, eighteenth-century fiction is very much concerned with the here-and-now--these books helped eighteenth-century Britain make sense to itself.

Today, I spoke about a couple of important developments that form a key backdrop to all the books we're reading:

1) Urbanization--the huge expansion of London 

Many of the books that we will read together this semester take place in whole or in part in London, which is a pretty good indication of how important that city had become to eighteenth-century Britons.  London grew enormously in the course of the eighteenth century, and throughout the century people were fascinated, amazed, and occasionally appalled at the development of this city, which was becoming perhaps the world's first modern metropolis.

Some facts:

• London had maybe 500,000-600,000 people in 1700 and about a million people

in 1800, a rapid expansion;

• this made it the largest city in Europe; many foreign visitors in the course of the century commented that they had never seen anything like it;

• it was by far the largest city in Britain; something like 12% of the population of Britain lived

in London, making it central to the culture in a way that few individual cities have ever been

Most important for our purposes, these developments meant that eighteenth-century people were fascinated and sometimes alarmed at the pace of urbanization, which was a tangible sign of how quickly the world was changing around them.

2) Literacy and Print Culture

It's not easy to be sure how many people could read and write in this period--and even harder to know how many people could read well.  But we know a few things:

• probably about 60-70% of the male population in Britain could read at at least a basic level; the percentage of women who could read was almost certainly lower, but we can't know by how much;

• these numbers were probably fairly static through most of the eighteenth century.  There had been a big push for people (ie, men) to learn to read in the seventeenth century, as Puritan reformers urged literacy in order to people to be able to read the Bible.  And there was another literacy push at the end of the eighteenth century.  But there doesn't seem to have been tremendous growth in literacy rates in the first half or three quarters of the eighteenth century.

Still, the numbers indicate that there was a fairly large potential readership for printed matter in the eighteenth century. What really made print--and thus printed fiction--take off in the eighteenth century were changes in the technology, business, and legal environment for printing.  This is a long and complicated story, but a couple of facts to note now:

• official government censorship of the press ended in 1695

• printing got cheaper--paper was still expensive, but cheaper than before

• the result of these things was an explosion of printed matter--books, of course, but also newspapers, journals, magazines.  Think of it this way:  in 1675, the average person in Britain would have had access to a very limited supply of printed materials--the Bible and some devotional material, probably, plus a small number of books like The Pilgrim's Progress, perhaps.  And in the countryside, access to printed matter was particularly limited.  By 1775, printed media were ubiquitous; you could buy newspapers and magazines at newstands and shops or have them delivered by subscription; bookstores were widespread; lending libraries were prospering.

3)  the "middling sort"

For a long time, scholars correlated what they called "the rise of the novel" in the eighteenth century to what they also referred to as "the rise of the middle class."  There's still a grain of truth to both of these generalizations, but they deserve more nuance.  Eighteenth-century people never talked about the "middle class"--they would have had no idea what we meant if we used that term.  Theirs was indeed a very divided, status-based system, with a small aristocracy at the top, a somewhat larger "gentry" class of small landowners, and a very large population of the working class and peasantry.  Where's the middle class in that?  Answer:  there isn't one, at least one that we would recognize.

But things were changing.  From the middle ages on, really, we can trace the growth and emergence of people doing new kinds of work and carving out new positions in society.  Tradespeople, lawyers, doctors, merchants, clergymen, writers, and so on were making a living by doing things that didn't have anything direct to do with the traditional means to wealth, such as farming.  Eighteenth-century people started to refer to those who did this kind of work as constituting a "middling sort," poised between the aristocracy on the one hand and the working class on the other.  The middle class?  Not quite, but getting there, and increasingly, these are the kinds of people that novels will be about.

Put these three things together, and you begin to see some of the outlines of the modern world, the world we know.  That's one of the things that makes this period fascinating, and its most significant development in literary form--the novel--absolutely essential.

Some rough and ready thoughts on reading eighteenth-century novels, to send you off to Love in Excess:

1) The eighteenth century didn't have a clear definition of "the novel"--this is an experimental form, and part of the pleasure is seeing authors experiment with what a novel can do and might be.

2) Novels were considered scandalous, even dangerous reading for much of the century.  It is worth thinking about what it is about these novels that people might have found so scandalous.

Today's useful web link:

This is a very handy timeline of events in Britain from the 1670s to the end of the eighteenth century.  Well worth bookmarking to help orient yourself in the period. 

http://mason.gmu.edu/~ayadav/historical%20outline/overview.htm#georgeII