The metaphor of London as a stage also came spontaneously to Defoe, so that Moll Flanders may declare that “generally I took up new Figures, and contriv’d to appear in new Shapes every time I went abroad”; in particular, “I dress’d myself like a Beggar Woman, in the coarsest and most despicable Rags I could get.” Defoe himself dressed in strange shapes, and was for a long period a paid political spy in the service of Robert Harley; like Moll herself, he was consigned to Newgate Prison, which was “an Emblem of Hell itself, and a kind of an Entrance into it.” So he was always drawn to the condition of the confined and the desperate, and the birth of individual character in English fiction can confidently be ascribed to the condition of London itself. As Moll Flanders observes while living in the Mint, a poor area of Southwark, “I saw nothing but Misery and Starving was before me.” These are the afflictions which haunt Robinson Crusoe and Roxana, albeit in different guises. The general plot of Defoe’s fictions, which include the “true” histories of the criminals Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild, is of a provincial’s journey to London; it is also a pilgrimage towards sexuality and crime, with the imminent threat of the gaol and the gallows.
Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, is itself a tabulation of fears. London “might well be said to be all in tears,” and Defoe’s frequent image of the city as a human body takes on a piteous aspect. It exudes “steams and fumes” so that its streets reproduce “the Breath . . . the Sweat . . . the Stench of the Sores of the sick persons.” In this world of steam and suffering the inhabitants of the city run mad, “raving and distracted,” with others “frighted into idiotism, and foolish distractions, some into despair and Lunacy, others into melancholy madness.” The Journal is in fact itself a narrative of melancholy madness, that condition to which the English were most prone. If London resembled an asylum, however, it was also compared to a prison with every house its own gaol since “here were just so many prisons in the town as there were Houses shut up.” Many people, naked and delirious, ran through the streets screaming or plunged into the Thames while others grew “stupid with the insupportable sorrow.”
In Defoe’s account we see as much evidence of the English imagination as of the London plague. It purports to be the work of “a Citizen who continued all the while in London” but in fact Defoe was a small child at the time of the distemper, and this highly wrought account is essentially a fiction with details taken from contemporary annals and memoirs. It is literally a work of sensation in the most strident urban style, relying upon anecdote and adventure, filled with short character studies of the afflicted and suffused with practical detail. Defoe is always seeking for extremes, so that the sensationalism is effectively a literary device. Here we may make the connection with Hogarth or with Gillray, whose vivid and animated visions dwell in the region of sublime distortion. The artists employed a “strongly engraved, expressive line,”5 just as Defoe coined a powerful and fluent style heavily influenced by short Anglo-Saxon derivations; all of them came out of a popular tradition of print or journalism, and all appealed to a varied and urban market. But if it was a London vision, it also rested upon a native spirit and tradition.
The theatricality and excess of Henry Fielding’s novels are not in doubt; he was a highly successful dramatist before he became a novelist. During his early career in London he wrote comedies and farces for the popular stage, composing some thirteen plays in less than three years, with titles such as The Author’s Farce, Rape Upon Rape and Tom Thumb . In the tradition of Defoe, he also found employment as a journalist before he turned to fiction; he became assistant editor of The Champion: or, The British Mercury and wrote most of its leading articles. He created a character upon the model of Addison’s “Mr. Spectator,” Hercules Vinegar, who with the members of his immediate family commented upon the affairs of the day. In fact he continued writing journalism for the rest of his life. He edited two political news-sheets, The True Patriot and The Jacobite’s Journal; even after the success of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, he took on the editorship of a twice-weekly periodical called The Covent-Garden Journal. In that sense he shares a curious affinity with Charles Dickens, who edited Household Words and All the Year Round while engaged upon his great works of fiction.
There is in fact a skein of associations and resemblances between these three London novelists. Dickens wrote for the stage, also, and enjoyed great success as an amateur actor for much of his life. And all three men were touched by the shadow of the prison-house. Defoe was incarcerated at various times in Newgate, the Marshalsea and the King’s Bench, while Dickens’s youthful experience of London included the imprisonment of his father for debt in the Marshalsea. In turn Fielding was arrested and imprisoned for debt; he may have escaped Newgate, but he could not have avoided the “spunging house” or half-way house to gaol. Defoe’s fiction is filled with images and scenes of imprisonment; the novels of Dickens are preoccupied with prison and prisoners; the opening chapters of Fielding’s Amelia are set in a London gaol, and Tom Jones may be said to have been incarcerated with Moll Flanders in Newgate. It might also be mentioned here that for five years William Hogarth’s father was imprisoned for debt in the Fleet.
Fielding, like Defoe and Dickens, also wrote essays on social and political matters—among them “An Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Hanover Rat” and “A Dialogue Between the Devil, the Pope and the Pretender.” Like Defoe, he composed poetical satires and dubious “factual” accounts of famous criminals. His Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great is a classic of its kind, supplanting even Defoe’s True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild. These London authors were prodigal of genres as well as words so that urban writing becomes the stuff or material out of which are shaped novels, newspapers and pamphlets. Fielding himself called the novel “a newspaper, which consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not”; but he also described Tom Jones as “this heroic, historical, prosaic poem.” Just as the eighteenth-century term “cartoon” could be applied equally to a caricature and to an historical painting, so the word “history” applied to Joseph Andrews as well as to more sober narratives. Out of many forms came that formless jumble, the English novel.
The truest metaphor for Fielding, however, remains that of the theatre. The master of burlesque and farce, once called “the English Molière,” he translated his talent for stage comedy into another sphere. In defending his heterogeneous entertainments, filled with the spirit of “contrast,” he invokes “the inventor of that most exquisite entertainment, called the English pantomime” who mixes “the serious and the comic.” In Hogarth’s frontispiece to Fielding’s collected works, the image of the novelist is placed above the masks of comedy and tragedy in true interpretation of his genius. In Jonathan Wild he compares the political life of the nation to a street theatre—“these Puppet-shows,” as he puts it, “which are so frequently acted on the GREAT stage.” That is why his own work was often considered to be “low.” His reputation as a writer of farce and burlesque was held against him, and he was accused of importing these qualities into his fiction. His characterisation was implausible, his plots impossible, and his characters disgusting. “Common charity, a f——t,” exclaims Mrs. Tow-Wouse. In Tom Jones Squire Western declares that he regards his sister’s politics “as much as I do a f——t.” Which word “he accompanied and graced with the very Action, which, of all others, was the most proper to it.” Whereupon the periodical Old England described Tom Jones as “a Book so truly profligate, of such evil Tendency, and offensive to every chaste Reader, so discouraging to Virtue and detrimental to Religion.”
Dickens avoided any taint of obscenity and impropriety—there could be no Hogarth or Fielding in the nineteenth century—but his own fiction was also derided for inconsistency and implausibility. The plots of his later novels were considered to be unrealistic “twaddle.” It is the response of earnest intelligence to an urban sensibility which embraces
the pantomimic and the scenic, which revels in energy and adventure, and which betrays little interest in psychological or moral complexity. It is no accident that both Fielding and Dickens, for example, defended their use of coincidence in plot-making as a natural device; their experience of the city convinced them that coincidence is a strong force in human life and that it reflects a greater underlying network of relations. Theirs is a London vision.
If we reflect upon the different virtues of Tobias Smollett and Samuel Richardson, however, we may understand the actual capaciousness of that vision. Smollett was born and educated in Scotland, but moved to London in order to pursue his career as a surgeon. Very quickly he assumed the role of a London writer, however, by becoming in quick succession a journalist, dramatist and pamphleteer as well as a novelist. He helped to edit the Critical Review, he compiled a selection of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages and wrote a history of England; he even tried his hand at farce and tragedy. A recognisable pattern of prodigal achievement once more emerges.
Charles Dickens had Smollett’s novels by heart, having first encountered them in childhood when living in lodgings beside the Marshalsea Prison. Smollett was himself imprisoned in the King’s Bench, just south of the Marshalsea, affirming in his own life the connection between urban fiction and the London gaols. As a result, perhaps, his art is one of extremity and intensity. When Roderick Random, the eponymous hero of The Adventures of Roderick Random, meets his benevolent uncle who releases him from debt and confinement, “I was utterly confounded at this sudden transition . . . and a crowd of incoherent ideas rushed so impetuously upon my imagination, that my reason could neither separate nor connect them.” This is a fair measure of the sudden and rapidly changing sentiments which invade Smollett’s characters, and which prompted Sir Walter Scott to suggest that he “loved to paint characters under the strong agitation of fierce and stormy passions.” His metaphor of the “crowd” here suggests, in fact, how his sensationalism and excitation are related to the feverish life of the city. It is the life which he portrays in Humphry Clinker, where Matt Bramble remarks of Londoners that “All is tumult and hurry; one would imagine that they were impelled by some disorder of the brain, that will not suffer them to be at rest . . . how can I help supposing they are actually possessed by a spirit, more absurd and pernicious than any thing we meet within the precincts of Bedlam?”
Smollett was aware of the violence and despair which are the condition of the city, London “being an immense wilderness.” Roderick Random is beaten, robbed, press-ganged, swindled until he eventually languishes in the Marshalsea Prison with an “imagination haunted with such dismal apparitions, that I was ready to despair.” One critic has written of this novel that there “can be no movement but from one extreme to another, from shock to shock, from terror to hysterical laughter.”6 The life of the novel then replicates the life of the streets, filled with rapidly changing scenes and imbued with a certain spontaneity or incoherence of tone. All is action and confusion. When it is farther concluded that, in the novels of Smollett, “each statement is in competition with all the other statements; there is no remission from the struggle for attention”7 we are truly in the little world of London. Here are strident “types” who may clamour for notice—“There were also my Lord Straddle, Sir John Shrug, and Master Billy Chatter, who is actually a very facetious young gentleman”—but they must also struggle to be seen and heard among “the modish diversions of the town, such as plays, operas, masquerades, drums, assemblies, and puppet-shows . . . surprisals and terrifications.”
Prison and pantomime, death and excremental farce, are all in consort together. The city then becomes a kind of dream or hallucination in which irreconcilable states are jumbled together. “I could not believe the evidence of my senses,” declares Roderick Random, “and looked upon all that had happened as the fictions of a dream!” Life, for Henry Fielding, is no more than “an idle, trifling feverish dream.” “It was all a troubled dream?” asks Richard Carstone at the end of his unhappy life in Bleak House. It is the great dream of London.
If there is one aspect of Smollett’s art which is of particular significance, however, it lies in his creation and embellishment of eccentric character. A general delight in eccentricity, in all its forms, in fact animates the English genius. It is related to the habits of individualism and defensive privacy which the English have adopted; eccentricity then becomes the natural, if unacknowledged, issue of a native virtue. So Smollett introduces certain stock characters, such as the formidable Mrs. Trunnion who “by the force of pride, religion and Coniac, had erected a most terrible tyranny in the house.” But her unfortunate spouse, Commodore Trunnion, is of quite another order of creation. He is perhaps the first eccentric in English prose fiction. With his companions, Pipe and Hatchway, he lives in a nautical dream. “I have been a hard-working man, and served all offices on board from cook’s shifter to the command of a vessel. Here, you Tunley, there’s the hand of a seaman, you dog.” He is the immediate ancestor of innumerable Dickensian characters, from Captain Cuttle to Major Bagstock, and the preposterous if amiable ex-seaman has entered the list of English immortals. He calls his house a “garrison,” has a drawbridge over a ditch, and sleeps in a hammock; he “swears woundily” but “means no more harm than a suckling babe.” He is located in an English county “bounded on one side by the sea,” and he can be seen as a burlesque upon the private and enclosed English character. That is why he has achieved such exemplary status. His constant memories of the sea, and of nautical battles, render him an Anglo-Saxon revenant; his fear of women and his whimsical sentimentality can also be seen as marked characteristics of the English temper. He is a reluctant and hen-pecked husband who finds comfort with his male companions, generally in the tavern, but he makes a very good death. On his death-bed he declares, of his gravestone, that “it may not be in-graved in the Greek or Latin lingos, and much less in the French, which I abominate, but in plain English, that when the angel comes to pipe all hands at the great day, he may know that I am a British man, and speak to me in my mother tongue. And now I have no more to say, but God in heaven have mercy upon my soul, and send you all fair weather, wheresoever you are bound.” It has been said that Smollett based the death scene upon that of Shakespeare’s Falstaff; in the calm dignity and cool despatch there are resemblances, but it might also be fair to claim that in its reticence and disinclination to lament it is a very English death. The sensibility endures to the very moment of its surcease.
The emphasis upon eccentricity of behaviour or demeanour is also part of a larger English preoccupation, best exemplified by what became known as “the novel of character.” Its first and best practitioner was another urban writer, a tradesman and pamphleteer who like his contemporaries in eighteenth-century London seemed to adopt the novel form almost by accident. Samuel Richardson once confessed that “I almost slid into the writing of Pamela.” Thus was born the novel whose intense interest centered on the development of character under the pressure of circumstance and extremity, with a highly coloured presentation of the individual formed upon the anvil of adversity. Richardson’s novels betray their London origins.
Richardson himself, in characteristic London fashion, was a businessman and pamphleteer before turning to the business of writing novels. He was a printer by trade, with a shop at the top end of Fleet Street, who had already fashioned a successful career out of publishing political literature and periodicals such as the Duke of Wharton’s True Briton; he had a license to print parliamentary debates and launched himself into the public domain with a scholarly account of seventeenth-century English diplomacy. His fictional skills emerged out of that practical or pragmatic interest which has served the English imagination so well; he had been asked to compose a manual on the art of letter-writing “in a common Style” for the use of “Country Readers,” and on the basis of these models he hit upon the plot of Pamela which is itself an epistolary novel. The story of the kidnapping and imprisonment
of the unfortunate heroine took him two months to complete; in fact it can be said, of all the eighteenth-century London novelists, that they wrote fast and furiously, as if in consort with the life all around them. In a period when a pamphlet could be written in the morning and printed (by Richardson among others) in the afternoon, when a play and its prologue could be ready in published form the day after their first performance, there was a premium upon speed of execution.
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination Page 39