The Novel

by Steven Moore

  271 See the section on the sentimental novel below (pp. 862–67) for further discussion of this subject, one so important to the 18th century that it’s been called the Age of Sentiment.

  272 Page 11 in New and Day’s edition, which, like the Penguin Tristram Shandy, is based on the definitive but expensive University of Florida Press edition of Sterne’s complete works. The annotations are overwhelming, but they unearth the intellectual depths of this deceptively airy novel.

  273 I believe this is the first novel to end midsentence without closing punctuation. Later examples include Cummings’s Eimi, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Beckett’s Malone Dies and How It Is, Calvino’s Cloven Viscount, Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers, Delany’s Dhalgren, Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic, Fuentes’ Christopher Unborn,Wallace’s Broom of the System, Olsen’s Anxious Pleasures

  274 Though published more than 80 years ago, Joyce Tompkins’s Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 remains the best overview of this period.

  275 Chap. 2 in Folkenflik’s fine edition, hereafter cited by chapter. A “greave” is the part of a suit of armor that covers the shins, just as the quijote covers the thighs.

  276 Volumes 1 and 2 were published together in 1765–66, and the final three yearly from 1768 to 1770; Brooke gives no explanation for dropping the author–reader dialogues in the later volumes.

  277 Frans De Bruyn has an interesting essay on Burke’s Quixoticism that I’ll cite later in my discussion of William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams. Godwin, as it happens, is castigated in The Infernal Quixote, Charles Lucas’s reactionary 1801 novel; Lucas quotes The Spiritual Quixote at one point, and intended his title to denominate a demonic, rather than spiritual, character. For Lucas, as for some others, Quixoticism meant fanaticism.

  278 Later editors tried to smooth things out by inserting the added incidents into the earlier narrative per Johnstone’s cross-references, but they had to do some creative editing to make it work. (Johnstone meant to do the work himself, but never got around to it.) Samuel Johnson recommend Chrysal for publication, another example of his poor taste in novels.

  279 Review of Scott’s Adventures of a Rupee, as quoted in Johnston’s “Little Lives,” 143. This minor genre has received a surprising amount of scholarly attention in recent years; for useful overviews, see Flint’s “Speaking Objects,” Lupton’s “The Knowing Book,” and especially Blackwell’s Secret Life of Things. In 2012, Pickering & Chatto published British It-Narratives, 1750–1830, a 4-volume set edited by Blackwell, Lupton, et al. that gathers over 60 examples of the genre.

  280 I should say overt sexual tension; see Nancy Paul’s “Is Sex Necessary?” for an insightful reading of sublimated sexuality in Ophelia.

  281 The Broadview edition I’ve quoted—which has a fabulous cover photo—includes in an appendix two scenes from Evelina that seem indebted to Ophelia, and in his introduction, Sabor discusses its probable influence on Austen’s earliest writings.

  282 Pages 117 and 285 in the recent Broadview edition, hereafter cited by page. Like Richardson’s heroines, Sidney has an unbelievable ability to recreate extensive conversations; Sheridan seems to realize how unrealistic this is and lamely tries to explain it away when Sidney writes, “I have set down the whole conversation, with every other particular, exactly as my mother related it. [¶] She, who has a most circumstantial memory, repeated it word for word; and I, from a custom of throwing upon paper every thing that occurs to me, have habituated myself to retain the minutest things” (133).

  283 Page 30 in Hutner and Garret’s introduction to Sidney Bidulph.

  284 Both novels have been edited with useful introductions and notes by Jonathan Gross. His description of Emma is from page xii of his introduction to The Sylph, hereafter cited by page number. Lady Georgiana is an ancestor of the late Lady Diana, Princess of Wales.

  285 Volume 1, letter 18, and volume 2, letter 28; hereafter cited by volume/letter.

  286 Burney uses the capitalized phrase “PRIDE and PREJUDICE” three times near the end as a character sums up the moral of the story (book 10, chapter 10), which is where some critics say Jane Austen, who admired Cecilia, got the title for her first published novel. But the phrase is also used a few times in Bage’s Hermsprong (1796), which Austen owned, so who knows?

  287 The novel shares a number of plot elements with The Sylph, including Jewish money-lenders, a character named Biddulph, and a gambling husband who cancels his debts with a bullet to his head. Due to a misleading ad, some people thought Burney was the author of the anonymous Sylph.

  288 In vol. 2, chap. 8, she tells her guardian she’s thinking of dressing up as a nun to make a “conquest” of him at a masquerade, for she’s read bawdy stories “about nuns and their confessors.” Instead, she appears as the goddess Diana in a tight outfit that shows lots of skin.

  289 Inchbald was Catholic, but according to her biographer, she “had serious doubts about her religion and her relationship to the authority of the church” when writing this novel (Jenkins, 277). Unfortunately, she returned to the fold and, near the end of her life, let her confessor talk her into burning her memoirs.

  290 Page xxxiv of Gary Kelly’s modern edition. Like Cornelia, it is very old fashioned, completely out of step with the more experimental fiction of the ’50s.

  291 On the penultimate page, she describes a female as having a countenance expressing “sense and sensibility.”

  292 The editors of the 2011 edition were the first to attribute it to Sheridan; previously it had been tentatively attributed to Maria Ruxton. The novel will be cited by letter number.

  293 Chap. 1 in Kelly’s edition, hereafter cited by chapter. As examples, Mary names two sappy, forgotten novels: The Platonic Marriage by Mrs. H. Cartwright (1787) and the anonymous History of Eliza Warwick (1778).

  294 Conclusion of chap. 16, in the same edition by Kelly (who supplies very full annotations).

  295 Later, Maria says of another woman’s husband that he “was her master; no slave in the West Indies had one more despotic” (12). In Scott’s Sir George Ellison, a white Jamaican plantation owner says “women and negroes were made to be slaves” (1.4). Englishwomen made the connection two centuries before John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.”

  296 “The Persistence of Reading,” 22, 2. She also argues that Emma Courtney’s problems stem from her uncritical reading of Rousseau’s Julie, which also misleads both Bridgetina and Julia. When dealing with 18th-century novels, it’s easy to forget that many of them are, in effect, YA novels: coming-of-age stories read mostly by teens. In a 1763 novel I’ll discuss later, the author addresses his reader “whatsoever thou art, whether a judge, a colonel, a merchant, or perchance, more probably, a giggling miss in her teens, or one who pretends to be in her teens . . .” (The Peregrinations of Jeremiah Grant, chap. 3).

  297 Pages xviii and xxiv of his introduction to Oriental Tales, an anthology of four examples of the genre from 1761 to 1804.

  298 Chap. 12 in Mack’s Oriental Tales, where the novel occupies pp. 1–113.

  299 Page 194 in Mack’s Oriental Tales, where the novella occupies pp. 115–94.

  300 Pages 98 and 22 in Lonsdale’s edition; this reprints the 1816 edition of Vathek, for which Beckford revised Henley’s earlier translation—published without Beckford’s permission—and pruned the annotations. For a more fluent translation of the French original, read Herbert B. Grimsditch’s version (first published in 1929 and reprinted a few times thereafter).

  301 The best edition for these episodes is Graham’s, listed in the bibliography. If he had retained the Henley/Beckford annotations to Vathek, his edition would be ideal.

  302 All quotations are from Price’s critical edition of Colman’s first two plays, where Polly Honeycombe occupies pp. 191–235. “Precursors to public libraries, circulating libraries charged a membership fee for readers to gain borrowing privileges and offered access to works that (most) readers could not afford to
buy. Women of leisure classes were thought to comprise the majority of their members, and their main stock was considered to be the novel, though they carried other genres, including sermons and histories, as well”—editorial note to Robinson’s Walsingham, 217n2.

  303 Price heroically identifies most of them (242–46). According to this catalog, Fanny Hill and other erotica were available to teens like Polly.

  304 Chap. 2 in Duquette’s recent edition, hereafter cited by chapter.

  305 Robinson’s 1797 novel Walsingham may have been influenced by Julia, for it contains even more poems (and a table of contents for them), but they are less organic to the novel than those in Julia.

  306 At one point, Seymour makes off with one of Julia’s gloves and, alone in his room, “pressed it to his heart and lips ten thousand times, and was guilty of the most passionate extravagancies” (15). I think I know what that means, especially if the glove was fur-lined. Julia wouldn’t want it back.

  307 From Kirkpatrick’s introduction to Castle Rackrent, vii (hereafter cited by page). Born in England, Edgeworth moved with her family to Ireland as a child, and later helped manage her father’s estate, which was run on English principles, not on the Irish ones she skewers in this novella.“Rackrent” is an excessive, extortionate rent.

  308 An Irish genre set in the country mansions owned by Protestant, Anglo-Irish families who leased land to Catholic tenants.

  309 Critical Review, January 1763, 13. (The review is unsigned but is now assumed to be his.) There is a paragraph in the dedication of Count Fathom that is usually pointed to as Smollett’s major statement on the theory of the novel, but the first few pages of this review contain a much fuller statement.

  310 It should be remembered that in 1762, when this novel was written, Tristram Shandy was still a work-in-progress. Elsewhere in Jeremiah Grant, there’s a character who is translating Sterne’s novel into French to make money.

  311 Letter of 14 October, hereafter cited by date. The letters run from 2 April to 20 November of an unspecified year, which seems to be 1766. They are preceded by two letters between the editor and publisher of the collection.

  312 He thumbs his nose at the genre in a metafictional scene in which Jeremy visits a successful writer named Mr. S― (obviously Smollett) who entertains a motley crew of Grub Street hacks, one of whom used to write novels, but no more, for “that branch of business is now engrossed by female authors, who publish merely for the propagation of virtue, with so much ease and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart, and all in the serene tranquillity of high life, that the reader is not only enchanted by their genius, but reformed by their morality” (10 June).

  313 Rowan Gibbs discusses the attribution in “Who Wrote the First New Zealand Novel?”, KITE: Newsletter of the New Zealand Literature Association 7 (1994): 8–9.

  314 It can be found on pp. 449–65 of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. For more on it, see Eugene Kirk, “Blake’s Menippean Island,” Philological Quarterly 59.2 (Spring 1980): 194–215.

  315 See Braudy’s essay in the bibliography for this and other formal features of the genre, and part 1 of Brissenden’s Virtue in Distress for a superb overview.

  316 In Boswell’s Johnson, he humorlessly tells the following anecdote as an example of Goldsmith’s resentment when others eclipsed him as the center of attention: “once at the exhibition of the Fantoccini in London, when those who sat next him observed with what dexterity a puppet was made to toss a pike, he could not bear that it should have such praise, and exclaimed with some warmth, ‘Pshaw! I can do it better myself’ ” (260–61). Hello, is this mic on?

  317 Introduction to Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, xxi–ii.

  318 Though gaggingly sentimental, this one is interesting and will be discussed in the final section of this chapter.

  319 Actually, this is a satire of sentimental novels, written by Charles Dodd (1787).

  320 Pages 7 and 12 in the Everyman edition, hereafter cited by page.

  321 Or it may just be a “high-camp comedy,” as Richard Davenport-Hines insists; see his Gothic (135–41), which includes illustrations of Walpole’s Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill, the the model for the castle at Otranto.

  322 E.g., Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury: An Historical Romance (1762), which is available in a modern edition (NYU Press, 1957), and William Hutchinson’s Hermitage: A British Story (1772), which has a few supernatural touches.

  323 Garber’s introduction to The Italian, vii.

  324 This is an example of why I have been modernizing punctuation from old texts; modern editors who retain premodern punctuation aren’t doing their authors a favor by making them sound like they have a speech impediment.

  325 Not surprisingly, Sade considered The Monk “superior in every respect to the strange outpourings of the brilliant imagination of Mrs Radcliffe,” though as an atheist he deplored Lewis’s reliance on the supernatural, which “forfeited the reader’s credulity” (“An Essay on Novels,” in The Crimes of Love, 13–14).

  326 This is the same conclusion Arabella reaches in The Female Quixote about the heroines of 17-century French romances.

  327 If you like this sort of thing, visit the Website of Valancourt Books; they have reprinted many of the most popular Gothic thrillers of the 1790s, including translations from the German.

  328 The standard book on this genre is Kelly’s English Jacobin Novel (1976). The Jacobins were the violent extremists in the French Revolution, so British conservatives applied that term, inaccurately and contemptuously, to sympathizers in England, even though all the novelists I discuss in this section “were really Girondins, favouring reform by peaceful means” (Fletcher, introduction to Celestina, 31).

  329 As Roger Manville calls it in his 1987 book on Inchbald, quoted in Maurer’s introduction (20).

  330 The clergy is represented by the vain, pompous Dr. Blick, who was based on the same bishop (Samuel Horsley) that modeled for William in Nature and Art and for a similar character in Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor.

  331 For an overview of the subgenre, see chap. 6 of Shepperson’s Novel in Motley and especially Grenby’s Anti-Jacobin Novel.

  332 Verhoeven’s introduction to The Vagabond, 12–13: an excellent account of the historical background of anti-Jacobin novels.

  333 From the anonymous Evils of Prostitution, quoted by Binhammer, 1.

  334 See pp. 580–81 of my previous volume for a medieval Japanese critifiction and a humongous footnote listing later examples. And for a more recent, demonstration-class example, see Ali Smith’s Artful (2012).

  335 It appears to be a group effort in fact as well as fiction, for according to the title page it was “Conceived by a Celebrated HEN and Laid before the Public by a Famous COCK-FEEDER,” meaning a man who tends fighting cocks. (Warning: do not Google “cock-feeder”; use the OED instead.) The Egg will be cited by page because the chapter numbering is irregular (and starts over for the last third).

  336 It’s Tristram Shandy that The Egg most resembles, even down to misnumbered chapters and a missing chapter (13).

  337 Evening 7, hereafter cited by evening from Kelly’s annotated edition in volume 6 of Bluestocking Feminism, where the novel occupies pp. 161–275.

  338 The tale is included in Mack’s Oriental Tales (197–211), and in his introduction he offers some very perceptive remarks on its relationship to the main part of The Progress of Romance.

  339 This is the major weakness of Reeve’s theory of fiction: like many male critics at the time, she regards novels not as works of art but as object lessons in morality, and disapproves of all authors (like Voltaire and Sterne) who challenge or mock traditional beliefs and values.

  340 Letter 2 in Cook’s 2009 edition, the first reprint since 1786. The English translation of Werther appeared in 1779.

  341 Gibbon is the historian, Reynolds and Copley the famous painters, and William Hayley (1745–1820) is a poet whom Theresa quotes throughout the
novel, which is also dedicated to him.

  342 Vol. 1, pp. vi–vii; hereafter cited by volume/page, for though the letters are numbered, many are very long.

  343 I have not been able to obtain a copy, so what follows is based on Shepperson’s description in The Novel in Motley and on Natalie Neill’s plot summary in issue 2 (2004) of the online journal CW3. It sounds as fun as The Female Quixote and deserves to be rescued from obscurity.

  344 Page 184 in Gemmett’s edition, hereafter cited by volume/chapter.

  345 Vol. 2, chaps. 5 and 7 in Gemmett’s edition. Both of Gemmett’s editions have long introductions and copious notes.

  346 Though dead a dozen years by this time, Samuel Johnson appears as the “loud, sonorous, and sententious” Mr. Gallstone, who says of Azemia: “this young thing’s head is filled with agglomerated carnosities, generated by novels and romances. Let her get a good cookery book if she will read . . .” (2.2).

  347 It was revised shortly before it was sold in the spring of 1803 to Crosby & Company, who sat on it for the next six years. On 5 April 1809 Austen wrote (under a pseudonym) to inquire about the inexplicable delay, wondered if they had lost the manuscript, and said if she didn’t hear back she would offer it elsewhere. Richard Crosby snottily responded to say that because “there was not any time stipulated for its publication, neither are we bound to publish it,” and threatened to sue if she sent it elsewhere. Another seven years passed, during which time Austen anonymously published her four major novels, until her brother Henry bought the rights back from Crosby & Co. in 1816 for the same amount they paid in 1803 (£10, about $1000 today). Henry didn’t mention it was written by the well-regarded author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma (1811–16)—serves the bastards right. Specialists disagree whether Austen made any substantial changes to the manuscript after 1803, aside from changing the heroine’s name from Susan to Catherine and writing a brief preface in 1816 to explain the novel’s delayed publication. It finally appeared in December 1817, five months after she died. The epistolary exchange between Austen and Crosby is reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of Northanger Abbey (214–15), which will be cited hereafter by volume/chapter.