Samuel Richardson. In 1740, Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), a London printer, short, plump, ruddy, and prosperous, began this new era by the publication of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, the story of a "virtuous serving-maid." Richardson seems a strange leader for a new movement. Up to this time he had done nothing in literature. A shy, demure, highly estimable printer, at the age of fifty, suddenly blossoms into the novelist of sentiment and a master in the analysis of human passion. The fact is partly explained by Richardson's early and unconscious preparation for his task. In all his novels the story is told in a series of letters. Richardson stumbled into fiction through his marked facility in letter-writing, as Defoe passed into it from journalism by almost imperceptible steps. When only a boy of thirteen, the future author of Pamela was entrusted by three young girls of his native town in Derbyshire with the delicate task of composing their love-letters, each confiding in him "unknown to the others;" "all," he tells, "having a high opinion of my taciturnity." During his apprenticeship to a London bookseller, he kept up a voluminous correspondence with a gentleman of cultivation who was greatly interested in him. The episode of the love-letters is one of especial significance in its bearing on his later work. We see in it proof of that intimate understanding of women which is one of the distinctive marks of Richardson's work. The character of Clarissa Harlowe, the heroine of the novel of that name, is admittedly a triumph of portraiture. There was something in Richardson that invited feminine confidences, and the creator of Clarissa Harlowe gathered around him from boyhood to old age an admiring circle of women. "As a bashful and not a forward boy," he writes, "I was an early favourite with all the

young women of taste and reading in the neighbourhood;" and long after, he was described by Dr. Johnson as one who "took care to be always surrounded by women, who listened to him implicitly and did not venture to contradict his opinions."

Richardson's Novels. Richardson's three novels, Pamela (1740), Clarissa Harlowe (1748), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753), deal respectively with life in the humbler, higher, and aristocratic circles. Yet Richardson's purpose was not so much to picture that life in its various phases as to draw moral lessons from it. On the title-page of Pamela he announces that the work is "Published in order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion." This avowedly moral purpose detracts somewhat from the human interest of Richardson's novels. His characters are not altogether real or true. Sir Charles Grandison, for example, is a fine gentleman, composed of all the virtues, but devoid of any redeeming grace of human weakness. Richardson had a profound knowledge of the human heart, but he had not learned to picture weakness as well as strength, and thereby to gain greater naturalness without sacrificing necessarily the moral interest.

Henry Fielding. It was the publication of Pamela that turned the genius of Henry Fielding (1707-1754) to the writing of novels, but the spirit which moved the second great novelist of this epoch was very different from that of the moralist. With the mild and diminutive Richardson, sentimentalist, water-drinker, and vegetarian, the boisterous, easy-going, masculine Harry Fielding, with his big frame and high spirits, his keen sense of the ludicrous and his hearty hatred of affectation, could have but little in common. Richardson subsisted on weak tea and feminine adulation. Fielding,

according to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "forgot everything when he was before a venison pasty, or over a flask of champagne." Yet, in spite of his debts, his extravagance, and the dash of the Bohemian in his youth, Fielding was a sound, sterling bit of manhood, of that sturdy, genuine type which we think of as emphatically English. Such a man was quick to detect a strain of false sentiment in Pamela, which its author was too serious or too conventional to perceive. So The Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), a "virtuous serving-man," supposed to be a brother of Pamela, was begun as a parody. But as the book grew, Fielding's interest carried him far beyond his primary intention, and the result was a great and original contribution to fiction.

Fielding differed from his predecessor in that he was contented to entertain or please the reader, and did not insist upon teaching him. His purpose was to show the life of the time, especially on its ridiculous side, and his work was eminently natural. Tom Jones, the hero of Tom Jones (1749), which is Fielding's masterpiece, is one of the most real characters in all fiction. In fact, Fielding's men and women live for us as men and women actually lived in that age no better, no worse; and though we miss in this realistic novelist many of the subtler and finer touches, we admire his grasp of fact, his manliness, and solidity. He hated cant and hypocrisy, and his large heart was very tender toward womanhood and goodness.

Other Writers. Fielding and Richardson were the most important of these writers of the novel of domestic life in the eighteenth century. Other distinguished novelists of the same period were: LAURENCE STERNE (1713-1768), who wrote Tristram Shandy (1759–1767);

and GEORGE SMOLLETT (1721-1771), author of Roderick Random (1748) and Humphrey Clinker (1771). Toward the end of the century another school of novelists arose whose interest centered chiefly in the romance of adventure and in stories of magic and enchantment.

Battle of Blenheim, won by the Duke of Marlborough

1704

The Battle of the Books and The Tale of a Tub
Gulliver's Travels

1704

1728

RICHARD STEELE founds the Tatler

1709

JOSEPH ADDISON contributes to the Tatler, the Spectator, the

Guardian

Contributes to the Tatler, the Spectator, the Guardian 1709–1714

GEORGE I, the first of the Hanover kings

Ministry of Robert Walpole

The development of the novel by RICHARDSON, FIELDING,

SMOLLETT, and STERNE.

1709-1714

1714-1727

1721-1742

IV. THE MODERN ENGLISH PERIOD

CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNING OF MODERN LITERATURE

(ABOUT 1725-1832)

THE work of the novelists, especially of Richardson and Fielding, is but one of many indications that in the middle of the eighteenth century a great change was coming over the spirit of English life and thought. That one writer devoted an entire book to the story of a serving-maid, and another wrote two novels in which the respective heroes were a serving-man and a foundling, is evidence that a new democratic feeling and a broader human sympathy were spreading over England, and in a definite way were influencing English literature. These and numerous other works, in both prose and verse, mark a wide departure from the literary ideals of Dryden and Pope. They prove that the English mind was freeing itself of conventions and rules; that men were finding new subjects to write about, new interests and enthusiasms to stir them to higher achievements; and that English literature was no longer restricted to the narrow life of Pope's London, but could portray with sympathy and renewed spiritual insight the life of the country and of the middle and lower classes as well as of the upper classes in the city. The