The Printing Press and the Rise of the Novel in England in the 18th Century/ 1.

(Andrea Timár)

England becomes more and more print-oriented culture in the 18th century

1. printed items produced: 1740: 2000 -> 1800: 6500

2. literacy: doubles in the 18th c. -> 1750: 60 % of adult men, 40 % of adult women. (more in London, Scotland, Southeast)

3. bad educational system -> self-taught readers (practical purposes/pleasure) - > no classical learning

4. new readership: largely from middle classes and lower

Readings: practical needs of different trades, stories of notorious thieves and pirates, travel books, accounts of crime, anecdotes, how-to guides on ethics, political pamphlets, newspapers -> popular culture.

-> boundary between fact and fiction is uncertain

I. Rise of newspapers

First newspaper-like paper: London Gazette (1665), royalist government’s official newspaper, monopoly situation -> manipulates readers

<- “Licensing Act” (1662): to “prevent the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses".

1678: “Popish Plot”: government + Act collapses > news market opens, newspapers multiply.

Newspapers: internally heterogeneous (reports on parliamentary proceedings, speeches, political manifestos, accounts of military encounters, advertisements, reports on manners, fashion, crimes, punishments, miracle cures, etc) -> new way of reading: extensive skim-reading

The Public Advertiser (1657) The Ladies Mercury (1693) The Daily Courant (1702) <-Fr: “courir” (run) + “au courant” (up-to-date)

Richard Steele: The Tatler (1709) R. Steele and Joseph Addison: The Spectator (1711)

Later: The Female Tatler and The Female Spectator

Introduce a new genre: periodical essay: to improve the mind and manners of readers in a witty, enjoyable, accessible style -> to attract a large readership (business) Social ideal: urbanity, good taste, moderation, reasonableness, self-control.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744), in The Spectator, criticises all journalistic ventures because of their descent into triviality (cf. later: The Rape of the Lock), their taste for conversation and gossiping <- only financial interests

<- indeed: huge periodical market (mercantile and middle classes) is in place

- > spread of public coffee-houses: conversation, gossiping, reading news, discussing events

-- > emergence of the “public sphere” (cf:: Jürgen Habermas: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1962.): ‘the sphere of private people who join together to form a "public."’ Spread of literacy, newspapers (available information+opinions), coffee-houses -> free discussion, rational-critical debate on politics and literature independently from authorities -> “public opinion” -> separation from and a certain control over authorities and received oppinions -> rise of liberal democracy

II. Rise of the novel.

Economic criteria of the production of literature: price of an author estimated by the number of sheets he wrote -> favours prose over verse and drama

Novel <- Italian novella (tale, a piece of news) - > both: early and mid-18th c: fluid boundary between fact and fiction -> 18th c. novels: “history”, “adventures”, “lives”, “memoirs”, “fortunes and misfortunes.” Present fiction as fact and dramatise fact as fiction

Definition (1996) “a long prose narrative about largely fictional if usually realistic characters and plausible events” (Richetti, “Introduction”, 1)

Realism: novels are both constructed by the real, everyday world and shape this everyday world -> rather than mirroring ordinary life, they intervene in the ordinary, real world: they endow it with a shape (or shapelessness) and a meaning (or meaninglessness); novels conjure up a fictitious world that gives the illusion of being applicable to reality.

The novel is surely not “romance”, not “allegory” (like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, 1678) and yet, not newspaper either (N: long, coherent, narrative, structural hierarchy bw. trivial and important events).

First to call his own work a novel: William Congreve, in his preface to Incognita: or, Love and Duty Reconciled (1692) Yet, the term “novel” only came into general use in the late 18th century

<- Clara Reeve: The Progress of Romance (1785):

“The Romance is a 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. The Romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen. -- The Novel gives a familiar relations of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own.” (Reeve, I, 111, qted by Probyn, 3)

  1. Recognisable, local, and particular social and cultural context.
  2. Simple, natural style
  3. Focus on the present
  4. Encompasses either the whole life, or a longer section of the life of a character -> presents the passing of time through life and does it in a realistic way

--> possibility of identification with characters

Character: ordinary, individual name, has “identity”

John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

personal identity: continuity of one’s consciousness through time (!): remembrance of past states of consciousnesses, projections in the future -> causal connections through life, one event determines the next ones (-> Paul Ricoeur’s (1913–2005) concept of “narrative identity”: the structural model of our own life stories can be found in novels)

emerging (!) concept of individualityint he 18th c.: personal autonomy, freedom of choice, self-consciousness: reflected in and reflected upon in novels - characters’ acts and thoughts + world presented from (an) individual point(s) of view(s) (that of a character, or that of narrator)

<- shift in consciousness about life and its possibilities <-

Bank of England (1694) -> financial revolution -> one can acquire good social status through hard work, individual achievements (no need for inherited property)

18th novels “reflect upon the middle-class myth” (Watt) of personal possibility and development (leaving home/past authorities, strive for better position, finding ‘true self’) -> Bildungsroman(later term)

Readership: middle class + bellow (novels are relatively cheap+ circulating libraries), more female than male (more leisure time), more young people than old. Novels are mostly about young people (important life decisions, love, career) -> identification (cf: Reeve) -> novels: guides to life.

What’s wrong with novels (according to the moralists)? fiction <-> reality

  1. Reading time stolen from work time
  2. novels as “guides to life” = escapes from life: imaginary solutions, overheat passions, offer more than real life -> socially subversive

-> novels: important contributions to the shaping of reality by readers

Suggested Reading:

The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel, ed. John Richetti, Cambridge UP, 1996

Probyn, Clive P. English Fiction of the Eighteenth Century, Longman, 1987.

A Companion to Literature from Blake to Byron, ed. David Womersley, Blackwell, 2000.

Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel, Penguin Books, 1968 (1957)