What were the major genres and
traditions that contributed to the shaping of the novel in the eighteenth century?
Illustrate your answer with reference to some major novels of the period.
Answer: The
expiration of the Licensing Act in 1695, which had required the pre-publication
censorship of all printed matter, led to an explosion of published works during
the 18th century; books, periodicals, and pamphlets poured forth from the press
in great abundance. One of the most enduring genres which emerged during this period,
however, was the novel.
The first English
novel is generally assumed to be Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).
It had its roots in the romance genre which began on the continent with titles
such as Don Quixote (1605, 1615), which usually took as their heroes
members of the nobility acting within fantastical settings. Yet novels, in
contrast, took for their subject real life, and usually purported to be the
‘life’ or ‘history’ of a real person, hence the full title of Defoe’s work, The
Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Their
purpose was to provide entertainment and moral instruction to aspirant members
of polite society, as Henry Fielding wrote in the preface to his novel, Joseph
Andrews (1742):
“Delight is mixed with Instruction…the Reader is almost as much
improved as entertained.”
Additionally, the novel also had roots in late 17th-
and18th-century criminal biography. Criminal biographies such as Alexander
Smith’s A History of the Most Noted Highwaymen (1719), Charles
Johnson’s Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (1735), and many other
individual titles detailing the life of a condemned felon, sought to mix
entertainment with moral instruction by presenting readers with highly
fictionalised lives of criminals, detailing their birth, life, and death, and
making a moral example of them.
It was the readers of this type of fiction that the first
novelist, Defoe, marketed his early works towards, by providing them with more
sophisticated criminal narratives, as in his novel, Moll Flanders
(1722). The full title of the novel is quite revealing:
“The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll
Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu’d
Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore,
five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight
Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died
a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.”
Defoe himself also authored three ‘proper’ criminal
biographies:
- The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard (1724)
- A Narrative of all the Robberies, Escapes, &c. of John Sheppard (1724)
- The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild (1725).
Defoe would continue to use the conventions of criminal
biography in later novels, such as (and I quote the title in full to emphasise
its “criminal” connections):
“The History and Remarkable Life of the truly Honourable
Col. Jacque, commonly call’d Col. Jack, who was Born a Gentleman, put ‘Prentice
to a Pick−Pocket, was Six and Twenty Years a Thief, and then Kidnapp’d to
Virginia, Came back a Merchant; was Five times married to Four Whores; went
into the Wars, behav’d bravely, got Preferment, was made Colonel of a Regiment,
came over, and fled with the Chevalier, is still abroad compleating a Life of
Wonders, and resolves to dye a General (1722).”
Later authors such as Henry Fielding would also utilise the
conventions of criminal biography in their works, as in Fielding’s novel, The
Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743).
