Abstract
As noted above, the ideology of individualism became increasingly influential in eighteenth-century England; the driving force behind it was the prosperous bourgeoisie which emerged as a powerful class throughout the century. One of the major cultural products associated with this class is the novel; it is not suggested here that the novel suddenly appeared as a finished form in the period, but rather that the gradual formation of the bourgeoisie as a distinct economic group in the preceding centuries, and their creation, articulation and transmission of — especially — individualist ideology, provided the necessary intellectual scenario, and indeed the actual reading public, which made possible the process which Ian Watt has termed ‘the rise of the novel’.
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Notes
I. Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 14–15.
J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800 (London, 1932), pp. 70, 71.
W. Benjamin, Illuminations (London, 1977), p. 86.
R. Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1965), pp. 257–61. See chapter 5 for the basis of Williams’s sample.
T. C. D. Eaves and B. D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford, 1971), pp. 2, 3–4.
See also, W. Scott, Lives of the Novelists (Oxford, 1906), p. 209.
P. Rogers, Henry Fielding: A Biography (London, 1979), p. 14.
C. J. Hill, The Literary Career of Richard Graves’s, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, XVI, October 1934 – July 1935, pp. 1–148, (p. 2).
See A. Lytton Sells, Oliver Goldsmith: His Life and Works (London, 1974), p. 24
R. M. Wardle, Oliver Goldsmith ( Lawrence, Kansas, 1957), pp. 39–40.
A. Dobson, Fanny Burney (London, 1903), pp. 5, 7.
W. Scott, Lives of the Novelists (Oxford, 1906), pp. 259, 253.
H. Fielding in his preface to S. Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple, edited with an introduction by M. Kelsall, Oxford English Novels (London, 1969), p. 5.
R. Alter, ‘Fielding’s Problem Novel’, in C. Rawson, (ed.) Henry Fielding, Penguin Critical Anthologies (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 555–86, (p. 558).
G. B. Needham and R. P. Utter, Pamela’s Daughters (London, 1937), p. 19.
R. Graves, The Spiritual Quixote, edited with an introduction by C. Tracy, Oxford English Novels (London, 1967), p. 3.
O. Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, Everyman’s Library ( London, 1908), All references to this edition unless otherwise stated.
G. D. Carnall in J. Butt, English Literature in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, edited and completed by G. D. Carnall, Oxford History of English Literature, 13 volumes (London, 1979), vol. 8, p. 475.
W. Allen, The English Novel (Harmondsworth, 1958), p. 95.
F. Burney, Evelina, edited with an introduction by E. A. Bloom, Oxford English Novels (London, 1968), p. 7.
P. M. Spacks, Imagining a Self ( Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1976), p. 176.
R. Bage, Hermsprong, or Man as He is Not, with an introduction by V. Wilkins (London, 1951), pp. 15, 53, 246.
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© 1993 K. G. Hall
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Hall, K.G. (1993). The Novel and Society 1740–1800. In: The Exalted Heroine and the Triumph of Order. Edinburgh Studies in Culture and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12295-0_2
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