by Steven Moore
To readers in the 1790s, Caleb Williams was also a thinly veiled dramatization of the crackdown on political dissent in England in the 1790s in response to the revolutionary upheavals in France. Caleb represents the liberal writers who were being silenced and imprisoned while Godwin was writing his novel. “Terror was the order of the day,” Godwin wrote in his preface to the second edition, “and it was feared that even the humble novelists might be shown to be constructively a traitor”—and indeed, after Holcroft published another radical novel in 1794 called Hugh Trevor, he was indicted for “high treason” and thrown in prison for two months. Falkland represents not only conservative critics like Edmund Burke—in one sense, Caleb Williams is a response to Burke’s polarizing Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)—but also the aristocratic class that supposedly honors the chivalric code and respects tradition, qualities that Burke regarded as the foundation of society. Caleb discovers the “secret” that all such notions—rank, privilege, “gentlemanly” codes of honor, the divine right of kings—are a sham, a cover for a power elite that despises “the people” and will shamelessly evoke God and country to maintain their position of authority. (The Christian god is included in that despotic oligarchy: near the end, Caleb compares Falkland’s persecution of him to “what has been described of the eye of Omniscience pursuing the guilty sinner” [3.14].) Given “things as they are,” Caleb’s decision to go public about Falkland’s secret doubles as call for revolt against the class he represents:
Who that saw the situation in its true light would wait till their oppressors thought fit to decree their destruction, and not take arms in their defense while it was yet in their power? Which was most meritorious, the unresisting and dastardly submission of a slave, or the enterprise and gallantry of the man who dared to assert his claims? Since, by the partial administration of our laws, innocence, when power was armed against it, had nothing better to hope for than guilt, what man of true courage would fail to set these laws at defiance, and, if he must suffer by their injustice, at least take care that he had first shown his contempt of their yoke? (3.2)
Caleb comes to regard Falkland as a Don Quixote figure (which is how Godwin and others regarded Burke): an admirable man in some ways, but whose commitment to outdated notions of honor and chivalry wreak havoc at both the personal level—aristocrats killing each other in duels over trifling points of honor—and at the public level by allowing the upper classes to deprive others of their rights and to literally get away with murder. Caleb goes all the way to the top, calling Falkland “a copy of what monarchs are, who reckon among the instruments of their power prisons of state” (2.10). (How apt that the British monarch at this time, George III, was insane.) As Frans De Bruyn writes in an informative essay on Burke’s Quixotism and Godwin’s use of him as a model for Falkland, “Chivalric virtues turn out to be virtues in name only. Chivalry is no rational system of ethics and moral conduct but the product of a social order founded upon oppression and inequality” (732). Falkland admits as much in his mid-novel confession to Caleb, and that’s the secret that both Caleb and Godwin vow to reveal: “I will tell a tale—! The justice of the country shall hear me!” (3.15). A mesmerizing page-turner as well as a powerful indictment of the status quo, Caleb Williams is easily the most significant English novel of the 1790s and remains (unfortunately) an accurate assessment of the power structures still in place.
Elizabeth Inchbald, whose not-so Simple Story is sometimes called a Jacobin novel, read Caleb Williams in manuscript, and in return showed Godwin the first draft of a short novel published two years later as Nature and Art (1796), which “commands a central place,” her modern editor feels, “in the history of the English Jacobin novel” (12). But it’s an amateurish production, a programmatic “sociopolitical fable”329 pitting the noble poor against the idle rich by way of the story of two cousins, one born and reared in Africa ignorant of English customs, and one raised in England in the lap of luxury—Henry representing “nature” and William “art” (as in artificial beliefs and behavior). Like Voltaire’s Ingenu, Inchbald’s nature boy asks many embarrassing questions of his civilized hosts after he arrives in England, and makes one Jacobin threat upon learning that an aristocrat distributes £100 among his peasants every Christmas: “I thought it was prudent in you to give a little, lest the poor, driven to despair, should take all” (chap. 19). But Inchbald damages the dichotomy when Henry falls for a modest, plain-looking woman not in the natural way a “savage” would, but per the highly artificial, unnatural strictures of sentiment; the Ingenu suddenly becomes Sir Charles Grandison. Thereafter, the novel contrasts his artificial courtship of Rebecca with his cousin’s more natural seduction and abandonment of a lower-class girl named Hannah, culminating in a trial in which William, now an influential judge, unknowingly condemns Hannah to death, accompanied by further potshots at “the evils that riches draw upon their owner” (47).
Nature and Art is lazily plotted, relies on stock characters and convenient coincidences, kills off characters as needed, concludes lamely, and indulges in what its original reviewers called “improbabilities” and “impossibilities.” The novel’s fairytale aura may excuse some of these, yet Inchbald evidently agreed, trying and failing to correct them in later editions. Her criticisms of the vapid upper classes are on target, but they are same easy targets that novelists had been hitting all century long. The only new tactic she adds to literary class warfare is the distinction she makes between readers about a quarter of the way through:
Readers of superior rank, if the passions which rage in the bosom of the inferior class of humankind are beneath your sympathy, throw aside this little history, for Rebecca Rymer and Hannah Primrose are its heroines.
But you, unprejudiced reader, whose liberal observations are not confined to stations, but who consider all mankind alike deserving your investigation; who believe that there exist in some knowledge without the advantage of instruction; refinement of sentiment independent of elegant society; honourable pride of heart without dignity of blood; and genius destitute of art to render it conspicuous—You will, perhaps, venture to read on, . . . (21)
“Genius destitute of art to render it conspicuous” is a straight line I won’t touch.
In 1792, Birmingham businessman Robert Bage (1728–1801) published a novel entitled Man as He Is, a Smolletian tale of a young English baronet who parties his way through Europe before settling down, and followed it four years later with Hermsprong; or, Man as He Is Not, which not only appeared the same month as Nature and Art (January 1796) but develops from a similar premise: a European-born lad raised among the “aborigines” of America arrives in Cornwall circa 1795 to encounter the absurdities and inequalities of English civilization. It too has a fairytale quality as this young American triumphs over despicable representatives of the old aristocracy, the clergy, and the law by braving their threats with the arch assurance of a Shavian superman.330 Strong, handsome Hermsprong is a fairytale ideal—as the subtitle suggests, he represents “man as he should be”—but his cheerful contempt for hidebound customs and oppressive policies is effectively conveyed by the novel’s cheeky narrator, a local resident named Gregory Glen whose flippant attitude makes Hermsprong’s radical social criticism seem like genial good sense. The comic novel has more in common with the those published earlier in the century than with the gloomy novels on the same themes by Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Hays that appeared in the 1790s. Sterne especially comes to mind as the narrator occasionally intrudes to argue with his copyeditor, to wish that he could insert an engraving at one point (and promises to do so if his novel reaches a fourth edition), and in one instance, to freeze Hermsprong in the act of kissing a lady’s hand as the narrator “scribble[s] two or three pages” to a hypothetical critic (1.16). While not exactly revolutionary, these departures from literary convention mirror the departures from sociopolitical conventions proposed by Hermstrong and other liberal characters.
Hermsprong contains a s
trong feminist argument, voiced by a smart, impertinent young lady named Maria Fluart who isn’t afraid to sass patriarchal oppressors or, in one delightful scene, to pull a gun on them. Her best friend, the timidly obedient heroine of the novel, represents the “church-and-king” conservatives of the time who didn’t dare challenge the tyranny of their overlords, exhibiting a slave mentality toward tradition and “duty.” (Inexplicably, Hermsprong falls for her rather than for the freethinking Fluart, which compromises the novel’s liberal thesis in the same way that Henry’s romantic choice in Nature and Art does.) Again like Inchbald’s inferior work, Hermsprong is a little too programmtic and concludes with a traditional happy ending that papers over the serious social problems exposed throughout the novel. But if you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, then Bage’s enjoyable political comedy may have converted more readers to the cause than the more serious political novels of the decade.
During the 1790s, there was also a backwash of reactionary, antirevolutionary novels by conservative authors who were alarmed rather than inspired by the anarchic ideas expressed in books like Paine’s Rights of Man (for which he was convicted of treason in England in absentia), Wollstonecraft’s Vindication (which is cited a few times in Hermsprong), and especially Godwin’s Political Justice. We’ve already seen one example in Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, which followed the same template established earlier in the decade: reductio ad absurdum dramatizations of the most radical notions in those books, especially those dealing with women’s liberation.331 They usually feature a philosopher-villain (often modeled on Godwin) who spouts anarchistic nonsense between seductions of political groupies, and who inevitably leads his followers into some sort of disaster. Most were written by hacks who expressed a “deep-seated contempt for novels” (Grenby, 12), and the critical consensus is these novels have little or no aesthetic value. Even the best of the lot, The Vagabond (1799) by George Walker (1772–1847), lacks “anything approaching conventional characterization, or anything resembling a regular plot,” his modern editor admits. “In lieu of characters, we find a rich intertextual tissue of political innuendo, malicious gossip and quotations from a wide range of (mainly) reformist writers; in lieu of a plot, we find a mass of historical events, woven into an idiosyncratic and deliberately anachronistic tapestry of revisionist historiography.”332 Such writers used the novel merely as a convenient vehicle to broadcast their views, not because they had any interest, or even respect, for the genre. Since they didn’t care about novels, we don’t care about them; let’s turn instead to a group that cared very much about the genre.
CRITIFICTIONS; OR, NOVELS ABOUT NOVELS
During what I have called the British novel’s wilderness years, many cultural critics continued to preach against worshiping the golden calves found in fiction—dangerously handsome men, attractively disobedient women—and prophesied all sorts of evils from novel-reading. As late as 1792, one hater insisted that “The increase of novels help to account for the increase of prostitution and for the numerous adulteries and elopements that we hear of in the different parts of the kingdom,”333 and part 3 of Cheryl Nixon’s Novel Definitions offers a noxious sampling of similar screeds. But some inventive writers chose to address the novel’s nature in the form of a novel, some defending it, some satirizing it. As we’ve seen, many 18th-century novels include occasional metafictional remarks on their medium, but critifictions differ in making the medium the message of the work.334
The state of the English novel in 1772 is the subject of an anonymous comic novel published that year whose full title is The Egg; or, The Memoirs of Gregory Giddy, Esq., with the Lucubrations of Messrs. Francis Flimsy, Frederic Florid, and Ben Bombast. To Which Are Added the Private Opinions of Patty Pout, Lucy Luscious, and Priscilla Positive; also the Memoirs of a Right Honorable Puppy; or, the Bon Ton Displayed; Together with Anecdotes of a Right Honorable Scoundrel.335 I could have treated it earlier under “Mixed Media” because it is an omelet of different forms and genres: after an “Advertisement” that draws attention to the novel’s novelty, and a prayer addressed to critics and readers to look kindly on it “because we have deviated from the common track, so much beaten and pursued by our brother novelists, and have struck into a new path” (2), the author switches from third- to first-person “in defiance to all the rules of criticism” to allow Gregory Giddy to tell the playfully allegorical tale of how he became a novelist. Thereafter the heterogeneous text switches between prose and poetry; takes play form occasionally; includes two verse tales, an it-narrative, and an essay on fame; and ends in the form of an epistolary novel.
But The Egg belongs here because it is primarily concerned with novel-writing: cash-strapped Gregory Giddy contemplates turning highwayman in emulation of Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera, but is persuaded by his friend Frank Flimsy to “turn novel spinner” instead, like him: “why I have written within these last two years seventeen different novels of two volumes each” (26). Advised by him and other friends named Florid and Bombast not to worry about writing a novel with “intrinsic merit” or even with any meaning, Giddy goes home and concocts a clichéd romance, which he then reads aloud to his friends, who frequently interrupt and critique it, giving the author the opportunity to satirize current trends in fiction. They approve of his ridiculous decision to use foreign names like Lorenzo and Horatio in an English setting, citing novelists who use ancient Roman names like Cornelia and Octavia in contemporary novels—a dig at Sarah Scott and Sarah Fielding. These barroom critics pass judgment on the major novelists of the previous generation—“Richardson is sentimental without plot; Fielding has a redundancy of plot, with very little sentiment; Smollett shifts his scene too often, and touches the heart too seldom; Sterne is as warm and bright as the sun, but as inconstant in his excellencies as the moon” (37).336 Florid feels “Most of the modern novels intended as pieces of humour are unnatural, and those designed as sentimental are insipid” (37–38), to which Bombast adds: “My opinion of what novels should be, and what novels are, is in short this. A novel should be an exact representation of simple nature as she appears while the sun is in its meridian glory, but a modern novel is an ill-drawn picture of distorted nature delineated while the sun is in eclipse” (37). Giddy’s romance novelette isn’t long enough for a book, so his friends contribute pieces they’ve written, as do their female companions (named in the title), furnishing Reader’s Digest versions of pop fiction. (The author clearly has more Augustan tastes, reflected in his numerous citations from Pope and 17th-century poets.)
Enlightened and emboldened by their examples, Giddy writes two more novelettes on the theme of female vanity: the first is a bitter satire of a stupid woman who elopes with an actor, cheats on him, and is confined to a madhouse; after satisfying the asylum-keeper’s lust, she is turned over to a rich businessman who has a fetish for madwomen, a role she’s forced to play to save her skin. The second mocks a society airhead who is “under the influence of a poetical frenzy” and gives herself the “poetical” name of Celinda (like the girl in Lennox’s Henrietta). The latter is a much more sophisticated version of the plot in Giddy’s first novelette, and represents his birth as a real novelist (which is perhaps what the novel’s title means), one who rejects “the common track, so much beaten and pursued by our brother novelists” in favor of fictions with more bite and daring. The Egg thus critiques current fiction and offers an alternative approach, albeit one too delightfully idiosyncratic to attract many followers. It takes talent to write a novel like this, the author implies; anyone can write conventional novels.
The best-informed critifiction of this time is The Progress of Romance (1785) by Clara Reeve, who you’ll recall had already written one novel (and translated Barclay’s Argenis) and went on to write several others. Narrated in dialogic form, the novel concerns a bibliophile named Euphrasia who meets with her friends Hortensius and Sophronia every Thursday evening for three months, not to gossip, flirt, or play cards (as in most
novels) but to discuss a history of the novel that Euphrasia plans to write. Each evening, she walks them through her chronological account, responding to questions from Sophronia and challenges from Hortensius; like many men of the time, he has a low opinion of fiction and little idea how the novel evolved over the centuries, so Euphrasia faces the twofold task of defending fiction as a legitimate, moral form of discourse and demonstrating the continuum that leads from ancient romances to modern novels. Though she makes a distinction between the two modes—“The Romance is an heroic fable which treats of fabulous persons and things. The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written”337—Euphrasia argues that the latter is an organic outgrowth from the former, not a separate genre, and that the best novels retain the virtuous ideals of older romances. Spritely Sophronia acts as moderator between the antagonists—she teases Hortensius about meeting “weekly two women, to talk of romances” (2)—and gradually Hortensius comes around to Euphrasia’s way of thinking, with certain reservations.