The Novel

by Steven Moore

  —which is to say, he’d like to see Cleland hanged. As here, the narrator often encourages readers to use their imagination to supply further details, or to skip over uninteresting matter, or even reread early chapters as needed. Like Goodall and especially the author of Charlotte Summers, the narrator toys with the author–reader relationship, nowhere as ludicrously as at the conclusion of the chapter that takes Connor across the Irish Sea to England: “I hope it will not be expected I should furnish my readers with the adventures of this voyage of ten days, as there happened but the common occurrences on such occasions; but I am strongly inclined to present them, according to the practice of other wise authors, with a most extraordinary and surprising dream Jack had the first night. He dreamed―But I beg pardon, for I find myself at this instant so drowsy that I must request my kind reader will follow my example, and by taking a nap, dream the remainder of this chapter” (1.14). Among other innovations is Chaigneau’s practice of beginning every chapter with an extract of poetry, some taken from the Scriblerians (Pope, Swift, Gay), some tagged “anonymous” that are probably Chaigneau’s own inventions. Another innovation, which reflects the novel’s more serious concerns, occurs just before Connor leaves Ireland for England: an advisor tells him to lose his Irish brogue and name, suggesting that he call himself Jack Conyers thereafter, and from that point on the recto running heads read “Jack Connor, now Conyers.”

  Born an upper-class Irishman, Connor betrays both his class and his nationality when leaves Ireland and leads a picaresque life under a phony English name. (As a servant, he later adopts the English/French name “Jack Constant,” as though to recall his French Huguenot heritage.) He encounters and counters anti-Irish prejudice and eventually realizes “that in order to attain the stability he is seeking,” as Ian Campbell Ross puts it, Connor “must define his identity not only spiritually or materially but in terms of nationality also” (276). (His spiritual concerns are complicated by the fact that, like Ireland itself, he is part Catholic and part Protestant.) After “Jack Conyers” marries Lady Harriot, he returns to Ireland and reclaims his original surname; “the taking of his Irish name is imbued with a symbolic significance,” to quote Ross again, “for it re-establishes for himself, as well as for others, the identity he has lost, and has sought throughout the novel” (277).

  The running heads don’t revert to “Jack Connor” at the end, but that’s about the only trick Chaigneau misses in this clever novel. He is wittily bawdy, often conflating reading/fucking: Connor loses his virginity to a girl who has him read/enact a racy French novel to/with her (an occasion for Chaigneau to parody the genre), and when he is caught in bed with her later by the schoolmaster, who thought Connor was alone turning the leaves of a textbook, he drolly remarks, “it seems you have lately passed over other leaves besides Greek and Latin” (1.13). The narrator includes an interpolated story à la Fielding, and gives us a preview of a 7-volume work he plans to publish entitled Memoirs of the Parliament of Footmen. Like Tom Jones, Chaigneau’s novel is pleasantly didactic and demonstrates that a novel can have a serious moral purpose and still indulge in sexual/textual fun and games. (Richardson would have hated it, which is a strong recommendation.) The History of Jack Connor has the further distinction of being “an early and very successful attempt by an Irish writer to create within a European tradition an authentically Irish novel” (Ross, 270).

  Pointedly rejecting Fielding’s example, Tobias Smollett went in the opposite direction in his third novel, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753). Complaining in his dedicatory preface that the protagonists of most recent novels “are characters of transcendent worth, conducted through the vicissitudes of fortune to that goal of happiness which ever ought to be the repose of extraordinary desert,” he decided to choose his “principal character from the purlieus of treachery and fraud” (5), believing “such monsters ought to be exhibited to public view that mankind may be upon their guard against imposture” (chap. 49). A bastard born to a camp follower in Europe, Ferdinand Fathom scams his way from Hungary through France and eventually to England, where—now calling himself “Count” Fathom—he cons the upper classes and, after a spell in jail, practices as a quack doctor. Both he and Smollett portray “civilized” life as a jungle:

  He had formerly imagined, but was now fully persuaded, that the sons of men preyed upon one another, and such was the end and condition of their being. Among the principal figures of life, he observed few or no characters that did not bear a strong analogy to the savage tyrants of the wood. One resembled a tiger in fury and rapaciousness; a second prowled about like a hungry wolf, seeking whom he might devour; a third acted the part of a jackal in beating the bush for game to his voracious employer; and a fourth imitated the wily fox in practicing a thousand crafty ambuscades for the destruction of the ignorant and unwary. (chap. 11)239

  Fathom’s debts and crimes eventually catch up with him, and his ruin inspires, unrealistically and melodramatically, an epiphany that he’s a bad person, and soon after he is rescued from grinding poverty by the same benefactor he had defrauded back in Hungary years earlier.

  A throwback to 17th-century rogue biographies and novels of romantic intrigue, Count Fathom isn’t particularly compelling, and the sappy ending depends on the dovetailing of too many wild coincidences. Smollett’s style is rather stiff and formal, privileging expository prose over dialogue, and reading at times like a detailed plot summary of a novel rather than a dramatized narrative. (Lennox and even Goodall can write circles around him.) On the plus side, Smollett orchestrates a contrapuntal narrative line that contrasts Fathom’s immoral acts with his benefactor’s moral actions—and those of the latter’s exemplary fiancée—but even this feels like a concession to the popular preference for “characters of transcendent worth.” Two scenes stand out because they anticipate later genres: chapters 20–21 are set at night in a French forest, a crime scene of murder and mayhem characteristic of later German horror novels, and chapters 62–63 near the end are set in a burial vault at midnight with all the trappings of the Gothic novel (though the latter is not so much an innovation as an adaptation of a similar scene in Congreve’s 1697 play, The Mourning Bride). Like Smollett’s other novels, Count Fathom was written quickly and as a result contains some plot discrepancies and many anachronisms: in his introduction to the superb Georgia edition, Jerry Beasley argues that the latter represent an “adventurous experiment with the novelistic uses of history” (xxxvi), and while I’m usually quick to applaud experimentalism, in this instance it isn’t very convincing. Smollett’s best work still lay ahead of him.

  On the other hand, Samuel Richardson’s best work lay behind him by the time he brought out The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), another gigantic epistolary novel. Reportedly the novel was reluctantly written by Richardson at the request of his female fans, who wanted an example of a virtuous man to set aside his portraits of virtuous women. He also wanted to portray a man who deserved his happy ending, unlike the protagonists “of many modern fictitious pieces” (cough!Tom Jones) who are “vicious, if not profligate characters.”240 For a 1,600-page novel, there’s not much of a story: Harriet Byron—a rich, high-minded 20-year-old beauty cut from the same pattern as Clarissa Harlowe, though a little more human—ditches three unwanted suitors in Northamptonshire by traveling to London to stay with her cousins. There she attracts further suitors, including an alpha male named Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, a sort of Lovelace Lite. Frustrated at her repeated rejections of his marriage proposals, he kidnaps her one night from a masquerade with the idea of forcing a marriage on her by dawn. (Really, Richardson? Yet another abduction of your heroine? Is that your only move?) Harriet is rescued by the handsome, 26-year-old Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson’s ideal of “a good man.” He rescues her on page 130; the remainder of the long novel slowly labors toward their eventual marriage, long delayed because Sir Charles is already committed to another young woman he had rescued from an unwanted suitor
, an Italian woman named Clementina della Porretta, whose family opposed their marriage because the English Protestant refused to convert to Catholicism. The family eventually changes its mind, but not bigoted Clementina, who refuses to marry a “heretic,” which clears the way for Sir Charles to marry coreligionist Harriet near the end. All the minor characters are rewarded/punished per the dictates of didactic fiction.

  Like Pamela and Clarissa, Harriet is a self-described “scribbler” via whom Richardson can justify his technique: “What a length I have run! How does this narrative letter-writing, if one is to enter into minute and characteristic descriptions and conversations, draw one on!” (1.13) She becomes a kind of novelist, dramatizing Sir Charles’s backstory in third-person narrative form based on materials she’s received, complete with dialogue. It’s one of many instances where Richardson struggles against the confines of the epistolary form like a buxom woman in a corset, and has to resort to cheating: he would have us imagine his correspondents have phonographic memories that allow them to recall lengthy conversations to the letter, and in one instance, a character takes what he admits is the “extraordinary” step of calling in a stenographer to record a conversation, only (I suspect) because Richardson couldn’t figure out how otherwise to include that material. (He dislikes the kind of summary and indirect dialogue people actually employ in letters.) And as in Clarissa, there are some ludicrous instances where Harriet writes about events as they happen: “But a coach stops— [¶] I ran to the dining-room window. O my dear! It is a coach; but only the two ladies! Good God!—Sir Charles at this moment, at this moment, my boding heart tells me—” (1.39). One novelty Richardson introduced was an index: at Samuel Johnson’s request, he had added one to the third edition of Clarissa, but this is the first English novel to include an index as part of the original text.241

  Sir Charles Grandison is yet another dramatized conduct book, less an exploration of human nature (as Fielding claimed for Tom Jones) than a platform for Richardson’s paleoconservative social views. Fielding “exhibited human nature as it is,” Richardson complains in his “Concluding Note,” while he exhibits human nature as it should be, offering Sir Charles as a Ken doll representing the ideal 18th-century gentleman. (He is the first upper-class character in English literature to sport a tan.) But the novel isn’t as deadly as it sounds: the tone is lighter than his previous efforts and the dialogue more sprightly—I can see why Jane Austen loved it. Sir Charles’ younger sister Charlotte is a special treat: variously described as “a very whimsical creature,” a “mad girl,” and “a little Satan,” this fun, flippant character lights up the pages on which she appears or writes. Richardson even allows the saucebox to parody his technique, as when she writes Harriet of the time when her older sister interrupted her:

  Lady L. sends up her name. Formality in her, surely. I will chide her. But here she comes.—I love, Harriet, to write to the moment; that’s a knack I had from you and my brother: And be sure continue it on every occasion: No pathetic without it!

  Your servant, Lady L.

  Your servant, Lady G.—Writing? To whom?

  To our Harriet—

  I will read your letter—Shall I?

  Take it; but read it out, that I may know what I have written.

  Now give it me again. I’ll write down what you say to it, Lady L.

  Lady L. I say you are a whimsical creature. But I don’t like what you have last written.

  Charlotte. Last written—’ Tis down.—But why so, Lady L.?

  Lady L. How can you thus tease our beloved Byron with your conjectural evils?

  Charlotte. Have I supposed an impossibility.—But ’tis down—conjectural evils.

  Lady L. If you are so whimsical, write—‘My dear Miss Byron’—

  Ch. My dear Miss Byron— ’Tis down.

  Lady L. (looking over me) ‘Do not let what this strange Charlotte has written grieve you:’—

  Ch. Very well, Caroline!—grieve you. (6.9)

  This comic sister act goes on for an entire page, evidence that Richardson could be playful. But apparently Charlotte was too much fun for some early readers. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu—who is caricatured as a butch lesbian in the novel—wrote that Charlotte should “have have had her [petti]coats flung over her head and her bum well whipped in the presence of her friendly confidante Harriet.”242 ’Tis a pity Richardson didn’t include that scene – Englishwomen didn’t begin to wear panties until the end of the century – for the novel has too much of the conduct-book about it, too many lectures on manners, parental obedience, marital duties, Christian principles, the evils of dueling, etc. Like Fielding’s Amelia, Sir Charles Grandison holds its own with other novels of the 1750s, but not with the author’s earlier work.

  While Richardson was content to stick with the old epistolary form, his friend Sarah Fielding—along with her friend Jane Collier (1715–55)—decided to try something different. Their novel The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754) is one of the most unusual novels of the 18th century, and deliberately so: They state in their introduction that “stories and novels have flowed in such abundance for these last ten years that we would wish, if possible, to strike a little out of a road already so much beaten,” and “to assume a certain freedom in writing not strictly perhaps within the limits prescribed by rules.”243 This freedom mostly has to do with form, not content. The story itself concerns a virtuous young woman named Portia (named after Shakespeare’s heroine, whom she quotes at one point), who is introduced by her childhood friend Melantha to a distressed family: the widowed father, Nicanor, has financially ruined himself by running after a young woman named Cylinda (a well-read, self-proclaimed epicurean), which allows the family’s despicable oldest son, Oliver, to lord it over the rest. Portia becomes friends with Oliver’s younger siblings, the twins Cordelia (Shakespeare again) and Ferdinand, and gradually falls in love with the latter. Too poor to marry—which doesn’t bother Portia—Ferdinand sails off to the Barbados and quickly earns a fortune, but before he returns to propose, he tests Portia first by sending false reports that he has turned into a rake. Shocked at this behavior, she renounces him and plans to hide herself in France, but a sudden, debilitating fever—common in 18th-century fiction, if not in life—delays her long enough for Ferdinand to confess his idiotic test, which she forgives as “a little too much refinement on true and delicate love” (5.4). After they marry, they are joined by Cordelia and Cylinda, who resign themselves to spinsterhood, and Oliver marries Portia’s vain friend Melantha in spite.

  The unoriginal story is presented in a highly original form: resembling a play in its layout, The Cry is a hybrid of novel, play, essay, and allegory. In the prologue, the authors invite readers to take flight “on the wings of fancy . . . into the midair, where by imagination you may form a large, stupendous castle. Within is a magnificent and spacious hall, in which behold a large assembly composed of all such tempers and dispositions as bear an inveterate hatred to truth and simplicity, and which are possessed also with a strong desire of supporting affectation and fallacy.” This is the Cry: a combination of Greek chorus, courtroom jury, and theater audience. (In the 18th century, “the cry” was a term for gossip, common report, conventional wisdom.) Portia has been called to this assembly—“whether by magic, by enchantment, or what other means, let particular fancy dictate”—to explain and justify her life before an allegorical figure representing truth, Una (from Spenser’s Faerie Queen). As Portia tells her story, the Cry frequently interrupts to mock and discredit her nuanced, psychological account of her actions and feelings, twisting her words in an attempt to prove that she’s no different or better than they are. Given their mob mentality, their remarks are usually summarized, rarely individuated—a brilliant formal stroke. When they get out of hand, Una defends Portia against the Cry as our poised heroine fulfills the intentions stated by the authors in their introduction: “Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind,” for despite the efforts of “the best authors,”
“there seem yet to remain some intricate and unopened recesses in the heart of man. In order to dive into those recesses, and lay them open to the reader in a striking and intelligible manner” (14), the authors adopted this allegorical trial setting, with striking results.244

  A recess is called at the end of part 1, which is followed by a traditional, third-person narrative of Nicanor’s family history. The dramatic form returns in part 3 as Portia resumes her testimony, and not until part 4 does Cylinda come before the assembly to tell her side of the story, a fascinating account of a self-directed intellectual dilettante who flits from one philosophical system to another as a teenager, convinced that she’s too smart to have to follow the same rules of honor as other girls. A sexual as well as philosophical adventuress, she meets the older Nicanor at this point, who ruins himself over the next few years in a vain attempt to convince her to marry him, which she refuses, valuing her independence. By the time Cylinda’s ready to settle down with a man who once proposed to her, he has married someone else, devastating her. In the prologue to part 5, before Portia returns to the stage to finish her story, the authors offer a Fieldingesque essay in literary criticism, specifically on the use of characters and the danger of misinterpreting an author’s intentions, as they felt readers did with Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews and in general with Clarissa. (In her 1749 pamphlet Remarks on Clarissa, Sarah Fielding dramatizes the complaints some readers made against Richardson’s novel.) At this point, it’s clear that the Cry also represents the book-reading public, who predictably had trouble with The Cry, “concluding with a general clamour against innovation and novelty” (1.11).

  Given the iconoclastic social criticism that runs throughout the novel, the reactionary conclusion of The Cry is somewhat surprising: Portia is happy to “submit” to her husband, Cylinda is punished for being too intellectually adventurous (and for not submitting pagan authors to Christian morality, as Portia does), and filial Cordelia fades into spinsterhood. But before that, The Cry is a devastating attack on the status quo represented by the Cry. The cerebral novel seethes with anger at the way conventional people decry unconventionally well-educated women, as both Fielding and Collier assuredly were, and I’m guessing that Portia’s sharp retorts to the Cry represent things the authors wished they could have said in response to similar criticism and condescension in their own lives. (Both were unmarried and had to rely on others for room and board.) Cylinda is offered as an example of how women, like men, can misuse education, but Portia rejects the idea that women shouldn’t be well read. She criticizes the way young girls are raised, and regards typical romantic courtship as being “treated like an idiot” (1.2). She translates what a typical man really means when making a flowery wedding proposal: “Madam, I like you (no matter whether from fortune, person, or any other motive) and it will conduce much to my pleasure and convenience if you will become my wife: that is, if you will bind yourself before God and man to obey my commands so long as I shall live. And should you after marriage be forgetful of your duty, you will then have given me a legal power of exacting as rigid a performance of it as I please” (1.3). Portia rejects the vague meanings attached to words like “friendship” and “love”—she defines the latter as: “A sympathetic liking, excited by fancy, directed by judgment, and to which is joined also a most sincere desire of the good and happiness of its object” (1.5)—and she invents her own words as needed for certain concepts. Portia often quotes Montaigne, and varies her narrative with essayistic digressions, exemplary stories, and wisps of whimsy, along with quotations from an impressive range of authors (including Henry Fielding; the unidentified quotation from “an ingenious author” that begins the prologue to part 3 is from Tom Jones [9.1].) Portia is seen reading Clarissa near the end, and like Sarah’s earlier David Simple, The Cry is an innovative hybrid of the two new species of writing: more formally inventive than her brother’s novels, and more psychologically astute than Richardson’s. To his credit, the latter wrote to Sarah in 1757 to lament, “I cannot bear that a piece which has so much merit and novelty of design in it should slide into oblivion.”245 But slide it did, attended by the catcalls of the cry.