The Novel

by Steven Moore

  156 The English Novel, 1700–1740, xix. But he includes in his bibliography A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727) by Captain Samuel Brunt, which he annotates “Satire imitative of Swift” (368), along with a number of other titles even I wouldn’t call novels, like Russen’s Iter Lunare (see note 111 above.)

  157 Maurice Z. Shroder, “The Novel as a Genre” (1963), rpt. in Stevick, 14. Shroder goes on to say Gulliver’s Travels belongs to the subspecies of bildungsroman, featuring “protagonists who are incredibly naïve and largely unheroic, which deal in the disillusionments one suffers in trying to apply systems to the unsystematic realities of life” (16).

  158 “A Letter from Capt. Gulliver to His Cousin Sympson,” xxxiv; hereafter the novel will be cited by part/chapter.

  159 It still inspires imitations: see John Paul Brady’s clever satire of modern Ireland, A Voyage to Inishneefa: A First-hand Account of the Fifth Voyage of Lemuel Gulliver (1987).

  160 Chapter 16 in Kerby-Miller’s stupendous critical edition; the novel is cited by chapter, his apparatus by page number. (Since this edition is hard to come by, interested readers should seek out the serviceable edition published by Hesperus in 2002 as Scriblerus.)

  161 Page 69 in Rumbold’s edition of the definitive, even more elaborate edition of The Dunciad Pope published in 1743.

  162 Kerby-Miller notes that the Scriblerians were probably familiar with the Chef d’oeuvre d’un inconnu (1714) by Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, “a clever burlesque of learned editing in which a childish little poem of five stanzas is treated with great reverence and surrounded with a vast amount of scholarly pomp in the form of notes, commentaries, congratulatory epistles to the editor, etc., all done under the character of ‘Dr. Chrysostomus Mathanasius’ ” (70).

  163 The Dunciad Variorum inspired far fewer imitations than Gulliver’s Travels, but in 1978 Richard Nason published A Modern Dunciad that cleverly satirized the 1970s New York poetry scene. I remember showing it to Dr. Richetti in our Pope and Swift seminar; he spent about 30 seconds disdainfully looking through it before returning it, affronted that anyone would try to emulate Pope’s masterpiece. But it is well worth seeking out if you like this sort of thing.

  164 Pages 142–43 in Partridge’s edition, minus his interleaved commentary, which is more interesting than the deliberately dimwitted conversation.

  165 William Plomer noted the resemblance in a 1946 essay: “Sometimes the talk in his books reminds one of Swift’s Polite Conversation, but that is recorded rather than invented, and Firbank invents rather than records” (quoted in my Ronald Firbank, 81).

  166 Thus Letellier 2002 (363), cut and pasted from Watson’s 1971 Bibliography (993), which seems to derive from MacCarthy’s dismissive remark in her 1944 book that The Happy Unfortunate is written “in a species of melodramatic blank verse” (232).

  167 Emily Dickinson disagrees: “Parting is all we know of heaven,/And all we need of hell.”

  168 E.g., “When Duke Bellfond instant took the fair charge, and so protected, as our tale informs many, and doubtful were the lover’s thoughts; thus distanced, strange to either’s change of fortune, few letters got conveyance, and those dark ones affairs of moment; can they stay for utterance, much better being worded when we meet; but either constant, found once met a heaven, for does life know an ecstasy its love” (93).

  169 For more on Hogarth’s influence on novelists, see Paulson’s essay, Moore’s older Hogarth’s Literary Relationships, and de Voogd’s Henry Fielding and William Hogarth.

  170 Letellier states it was reprinted in 1763 as The Reign of George VI, 1900–1925 (492), but that’s a completely different book, one that sets George VI’s reign at the beginning of the 20th century, not at the end, as Madden did. Despite a reference to Swift in the introduction, George VI has has little in common with Madden’s novel. See chap. 3 of Alkon’s Origins of Futuristic Fiction for interesting discussions of both.

  171 See Beasley’s “Portraits of a Monster” for further examples; he suggests Walpole inadvertently contributed “to the development of English prose fiction during that critical period of the novel’s birth as a new and distinctive literary form of great popular appeal” (408). See also Aravamudan’s informative essay “In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as National Allegory,” the second half of which is devoted to Eovaai.

  172 See pp. 158 and 228n49 above, respectively, and see Harvey and Racault’s essay on Gaudentio di Lucca for details on Berington’s borrowings.

  173 Richardson probably took the name Colbrand from the giant in Guy of Warwick, a popular chapbook of the time (see pp. 246–48 of my previous volume).

  174 Most of the revisions were made in response to criticism by friends and correspondents, who urged Richardson to clean Pamela up, grammatically and morally, abetted by his own changing conception of his protagonist as he grew older. (See the essay by Eaves and Kimpel on all this for an object lesson on how to ruin a novel.) Consequently, you want to read the first edition (currently available from Oxford University Press, which I’ll be citing by page number) for Pamela in the raw, so to speak, not the final revised edition (available from Penguin), Pamela all gussied up for church ladies of both sexes.

  175 When Richardson began writing it, “Little did I think, at first, of making one, much less two volumes of it” (Selected Letters, 41).

  176 In his introduction to the second edition (published on Valentine’s Day 1741), Richardson reprinted 13 pages of commendatory letters he received from fans.

  177 Straub suggests Pamela “embodies Richardson’s solution to ‘the servant problem’: morally conscientious servants whose autonomy allows them choices that confirm, rather than challenge, a class- and gender-based domestic order” (48–49), but Pamela is portrayed as too freakishly unique to serve as a realistic model for most servants. Straub goes on to say, “The shared literacy between master and servant, man and woman, serves as the grounds for negotiating their romantic connection” (58), which is true, but again, the case of Pamela and Brandon is exceptional.

  178 See the second half of Parker’s useful essay on the time scheme of Pamela for a defense of Brandon’s character; on the other hand, Brophy feels “He is so insufferably self-satisfied and so intellectually mediocre that marriage to him seems more punishment than reward” (65).

  179 Page 36 of Ingrassia’s edition, where the novel occupies pp. 51–227.

  180 As paraphrased by Sabor in his introduction to volume 3 of The Pamela Controversy (xiv), a 6-volume collection of all the novels written in response to Pamela during the first decade after its publication (aside from Joseph Andrews), the rest of which are basically hackwork. Thankfully, Kreissman’s compact monograph Pamela-Shamela relieves the interested reader from actually having to read them.

  181 As we’ve seen, a few Cervantine novels were published in England in the 17th century (Moriomachia, Don Zara del Fuego), but they were largely forgotten by Fielding’s time.

  182 Only fragments of it survive: for a tantalyzing description, see Kelly’s Book of Lost Books, 11–14. Aristotle attributed it to Homer, but today critics speculate it was written by a Greek poet named Pigres (5th cent. bce). Martinus Scriblerus claims Margites set the pattern for Pope’s Dunciad (69–70).

  183 Fielding luxuriates in her plumpness—“she seemed bursting through her tight stays, especially in the part which confined her swelling breasts. Nor did her hips want the assistance of a hoop to extend them” (2.12)—obviously preferring that body type to “squinny-gut bitches,” “those slender young women who seem rather intended to hang up in the hall of an anatomist than for any other purpose” (2.2, 12). On several occasions Richardson notes how skinny Pamela is.

  184 Adams has a similar discussion earlier with an innkeeper, who feels religious matters “were things not to be mentioned nor thought of but in church” (2.3).

  185 Indeed Scarron was probably a greater influence because The Comic Novel is more realistic than Don Quixote; it avoids “the abs
urdity of imagining windmills and wine-bags to be human creatures, or flocks of sheep to be armies,” as Fielding wrote in praise of Charlotte Lennox’s 1752 novel The Female Quixote (as quoted by Goldberg [75], who discusses a number of instances where Scarron influenced Fielding).

  186 The phrase was picked up by the anonymous author of the pamphlet An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding (1751), an early recognition of Fielding’s innovations. Attributed to Francis Coventry, it can be found in the appendix to the Broadview edition of his novel Pompey the Little (231–51), which we’ll take for a run later. But as William Park suggests, it could be argued that this “new species of writing” was created a decade earlier in France by Prévost, Crébillon, and especially by Marivaux in Marianne—which Richardson claimed never to have read, though Fielding certainly did—and is based on the “myth of wandering and return which may be found in almost any literature” (120).

  187 Book 1, chap. 7 in the first edition; for the second edition published a few months later, Henry not only added a self-serving preface but “corrected” Sarah’s grammar, diction, and especially her punctuation (she uses dashes expressively) to move it away from Richardson’s style and closer to his own, wreaking all sorts of damage in the process as Janine Barchas shows in the chapter on David Simple in her fascinating book Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (153–72).

  188 The quotation is an example of what Barchas calls Fielding’s “experimental punctuation,” her attempt to signal “the transitions, interruptions, and momentary hesitations of direct speech” (160, 170). Here Spatter sputters as he searches for the words for Simple’s Pollyanna worldview.

  189 Between the two came Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple (1747), which Fielding’s modern editor calls a “heterogeneous collection” of letters, essays, and verses. It is not reprinted in any of the modern editions of David Simple.

  190 Bree, 90, who makes the strongest case for this off-putting novel in her Twayne volume on la Fielding.

  191 The Penguin edition I’ll be citing (by letter number) is 1,465 pages long, but it’s a huge book with tiny type; the 4-volume Everyman edition I once owned adds up to 2,127 pages. (I made it through only volume 1 before hitting the wall.) In the 20th century, some serial novels began appearing that are longer, such as Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–38) and Henry Williamson’s Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951–69). The Penguin edition reprints the first edition of Clarissa; as with Pamela, Richardson made many ill-advised changes and additions for later editions.

  192 Specifically, he is referring to his hope that he has impregnated Clarissa, a possibility raised a few times but never confirmed. Clarissa is so sexless and sterile that pregnancy seems an aesthetic, if not a medical, impossibility.

  193 The quoted words are Anna’s, while dutiful Clarissa respects anyone in authority. She is sometimes called a “rebel” in the novel—against both her parents and Lovelace—but she doesn’t question authority per se, only its misuse, such as her father’s delegation of power to his son James, and Loveless’s departure from the code of a gentleman. She’s fine with the patriarchal power structure of her day as long as men wield their power responsibly. Anna, not so much.

  194 Eagleton is especially penetrating on “the sex/text metaphor in Richardson” (54), on letter-writing/reading as sexual activities. He could have added that in Richardson’s day, “correspondence” was also a polite term for sexual intercourse. (There’s a flaming gay sea captain in Smollett’s Roderick Random who is accused “of maintaining a correspondence with his surgeon not fit to be named” [chap. 35]—and that doesn’t mean a pen-pal relationship.)

  195 “The machinery, madam, is a term invented by the critics to signify that part which the deities, angels, or demons are made to act in a poem” (Pope, prefatory letter to “The Rape of the Lock”).

  196 The thous and thees belong to the casual “Roman” style that Lovelace uses with his fellow rakes.

  197 Head cheerleader for Team Lovelace is William Beatty Warner, whose controversial book Reading Clarissa is not only an insightful analysis of the textual games Lovelace and Clarissa play, but an interesting argument that, for all his faults, he’s human, while for all her virtues, she’s inhuman. (And by “faults” I don’t mean his rape of Clarissa; for that, Lovelace, like all rapists and stalkers, deserves to be castrated.) Richardson was alarmed to learn that some early readers felt likewise, and thus devoted many of his revisions to blackening Lovelace’s character.

  198 These are the only two mentions of novels in the entire work; most of Richardson’s literary references are to plays, and what he calls his “dramatic narrative” (postscript) is an attempt to adapt the immediacy of a stage performance to the printed page. I believe Clarissa is the first novel to include a dramatis personae up front, like a play.

  199 Even though Richardson had an outline for the novel, he sort of made it up as he went along, confessing in a 1753 letter to his Dutch translator that “when he ended one letter, hardly knew what his next would be” (quoted in Eaves and Kimpel, 416).

  200 Like Richardson, Clarissa regards literature as propaganda, not art: she prefers tragedies “for the sake of the instruction, the warning, and the example generally given in them” (194)—not for their language or aesthetic qualities.

  201 Nevertheless, in later editions Richardson added two more letters at this point!

  202 Terry Castle, in her headnote to selections from Richardson’s novels in The Literature of Lesbianism, 267. Surprisingly, she includes passages from Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison but not from Clarissa, despite the obviousness of Anna and Clarissa’s homosexual feelings (probably because the lesbian hints are scattered). Castle is the author of a smart book and several papers on Clarissa, in disregard of the title character’s petulant remark “I don’t care to have papers so freely written about me” (16).

  203 Page xxxv in the well-annotated Oxford edition; the novel itself will be cited by chapter.

  204 I’ve already noted Eliza Haywood’s habit of jumping on literary fads, so it’s probably not coincidental that, four months after Roderick Random appeared, she published a short novel entitled Life’s Progress through the Passions; or, The Adventures of Natura (1748) about a “good-natured but lusty young adventurer” whose “travels take him about England and Europe, where he entangles himself with predatory whores, lusty nuns, rapacious French soldiers, . . .” and so on, until “in the declining years of a miserable life he meets, falls in love with, and marries a virtuous matron whose example steadies him and leads him to peace and the rewards of quiet happiness” (Beasley, 179–80).

  205 Memoirs of Fanny Hill is the title of an expurgated edition Cleland published in 1750, and since then Fanny Hill has become the popular title for the unexpurgated edition too (and for movie versions), so I’ll use that more distinctive title, and will cite Sabor’s 1985 edition (the first accurate one since 1749) by page number.

  206 Page 49 in her essay “ ‘This Tail-Piece of Morality,’ ” in a collection of original essays she and Alan Jackson published as Launching Fanny Hill (2003).

  207 Among the academics who have grappled with this question, Lena Olsson has shown that Fanny’s life is indeed consistent with that of a certain lucky class of prostitutes in mid-18th century England: see her essay in the Fowler/Jackson collection (81–101).

  208 In the charming and fairly faithful 2007 film version starring Rebecca Night, the older Fanny becomes so worked up while writing a sex scene that she love-bites her quill.

  209 In the introduction to her translation of La Mettrie’s short treatise, Thomson explains: “The title, ‘machine man’, refers specifically to the Cartesian hypothesis that animals are merely machines without a soul, and La Mettrie claims that what he is doing is simply applying the Cartesian hypothesis to humans; he shows repeatedly that whatever applies to animals applies equally to humans” (xvii). Descartes’s ph
rase was bête machine, which appears on p. 164 of Fanny Hill as “brute machine.”

  210 Page 10 in Garland’s facsimile of the 1749 edition. The 1968 Award paperback, reprinted from an 1844 edition, omits the introduction and changes Camillo’s name to Charles Manly. After Fanny Hill was legalized in 1963, many publishers rushed to reissue “classic” erotica like this, often with silly covers: this one has a photograph of a woman who looks like a dentist’s wife from Palo Alto slipping out of a little black dress.

  211 See Johnson’s “A Comic Homunculus before Tristram Shandy,” which discusses the similarities between the two novels without suggesting Sterne necessarily knew of The History of the Human Heart.

  212 These too may be plagiarized; one of them ludicrously cites Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, and Design (1725) to explain why Camillo doesn’t want to have coitus with an ugly woman (197n).

  213 “Art and Artifice in Tom Jones” (1968), reprinted in Baker’s Norton Critical Edition of Tom Jones, 789. Hilles explains that his “plan is based on what John Wood originally designed for Prior Park, the stately home of Fielding’s patron Ralph Allen [the model for Allworthy]. According to Wood, the extent of the whole, from the extreme left (the stables) to the extreme right (a picture gallery and bedrooms), ‘was proposed to answer that of three sides of a duodecagon [a 12-sided object], inscribed within a circle of a quarter of a mile diameter’ ” (788).

  214 This of course echoes Jesus’ observation that the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27) and that, unlike the Pharisees, one should follow the spirit, not the letter, of the law.

  215 Sophia is an anti-Clarissa, for she has no pretense “to that kind of wisdom which is the result only of great learning and experience, the affectation of which, in a young woman, is as absurd as any of the affectations of an ape. No dictatorial sentiments, no judicial opinions, no profound criticisms” (17.3)—the very qualities Richardson endows Clarissa with.