Discuss
the rise of the novel in the larger context of the socio-cultural developments of
the time.
The most important
gifts of the eighteenth century to English literature are the periodical essay
and the novel, neither of which had any classical precedent. Both of them were
prose forms and eminently suited to the genius of eighteenth-century English
men and women. The periodical essayist and the novelist were both exponents of
the same sensibility and culture, and worked on the same intellectual,
sentimental, and realistic plane, with the oft-avowed aim of instructing the
readers and making them lead a more purposeful and virtuous life.
Of
these two new literary genres the periodical essay was a peculiar product of
the environment prevailing at that time. It was born with the eighteenth
century and died with it after enjoying a career of phenomenal popularity. The
novel, on the other hand, survived valiantly the turn of the century and has
since then been not only managing to live, but has been growing from strength
to strength and adding to its popularity. Even today, when the current of
poetry has unhappily run into the arid vistas of cold intellectualism and clever
phrase-mongering and the real drama has become as defunct as the dodo, the
novel, which originated in the eighteenth century, is holding up its head as a
dominant literary genre.
It was immediately
after 1740 that the English novel suddenly arose from the lower forms and came
to embody, as no other literary form did, the spirit of the age. The glorious
work of Richardson and Fielding was followed by that of the two other major
novelists of the eighteenth century, namely, Smollett and Sterne. Soon the
whole English literary air was thick with a staggeringly vast number of novels
produced by a host of writers. Let us consider the important reasons for the
rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, as also, by implication, for its
spectacular popularity.
The Social Environment: The Rise of the
Middle Classes:
According to David
Daiches, the novel "was in a large measure the product of the middle
class, appealing to middle-class ideals and sensibilities, a patterning of
imagined events set against a clearly realized social background and taking its
view of what was significant in human behaviour from agreed public
attitudes." 