Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730

By Leah Orr

The eighteenth century British book trade marks the beginning of the literary marketplace as we know it. The lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 brought an end to pre-publication censorship of printed texts and restrictions on the number of printers and presses in Britain. Resisting the standard "rise of the novel" paradigm, Novel Ventures incorporates new research about the fiction marketplace to illuminate early fiction as an eighteenth-century reader or writer might have seen it. Through a consideration of all 475 works of fiction printed over the four decades from 1690 to 1730, including new texts, translations of foreign works, and reprints of older fiction, Leah Orr shows that the genre was much more diverse and innovative in this period than is usually thought.

Contextual chapters examine topics such as the portrayal of early fiction in literary history, the canonization of fiction, concepts of fiction genres, printers and booksellers, the prices and physical manufacture of books, and advertising strategies to give a more complex picture of the genre in the print culture world of the early eighteenth century. Ultimately, Novel Ventures concludes that publishers had far more influence over what was written, printed, and read than authors did, and that they shaped the development of English fiction at a crucial moment in its literary history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9780813940144

Leah Orr

Leah Orr resides in Jensen Beach, Florida with her husband and three daughters. Leah is an Amazon #1 best-selling children's author and thriller novelist. She has written 13 books. Leah donates the profits from her books to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Upon learning that her daughter Ashley was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis (while still in the womb), Orr knew she wanted to do something special. With some input from her mother and three daughters, it was decided that she'd write books to benefit the (CF) Foundation. The Orr Family has risen over $1,300,000 over the past 20 years to help find a cure. Leah's mission to help cure Cystic Fibrosis has been featured on ABC's Health Watch, NBC Today South Florida, ABC Today South Florida, CBS South Florida, CBS This Morning Virginia, NBC the 10! Show Philadelphia, Fox 4 News Morning Blend, The Daily Buzz, and Lifetime TV's The Balancing Act. She has also been featured in publications such as Forbes Magazine, Medical News Today, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, and The Sun-Sentinel. Her daughter Ashley was also a recipient of Oprah's generosity in The Big Give. Popular books by Leah Orr include children's books: Messy Tessy, It Wasn't Me, Kyle's First Crush, and Kyle's First Playdate. Her thrillers include: The Executive Suite, The Bartender, The She Shed and The Fruitcake. Orr and her husband were recently nominated as one of Florida's Finest Couples by the CF Foundation, and included in "In The Spotlight" on CFF.org. Leah was also nominated as one of Broward County's top 100 Outstanding Women. Orr grew up in Boston, MA and is a graduate of the University of Miami. More information is available at www.leahorr.com

Book preview

NOVEL VENTURES

FICTION AND PRINT CULTURE IN ENGLAND, 1690–1730

Leah Orr

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2017 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2017

ISBN 978-0-8139-4013-7 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4014-4 (ebook)

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

Cover art: Detail of Bookseller & Author, hand-colored aquatint/etching, lettered with title and production detail: H. Wigstead delint. / S. Alken fecti / Publish’d Septr. 25. 1784 by I. R. Smith No. 83 Oxford Street. (Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

PART ONE · Fiction in the Print Culture World

1 · Defining the Novel · Eighteenth-Century Concepts of Fiction

2 · Fiction and the Book Trade

3 · Authors and Anonymous Publication

PART TWO · Fiction in England, 1690–1730

4 · Reprints of Earlier English Fiction

5 · Foreign Fiction in English Translation

6 · Fiction with Purpose

7 · Fiction for Entertainment

Conclusion · Did the Novel Rise

Appendix · Fiction Not in McBurney’s Check List

Notes

Bibliography of Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have helped me see this project to completion. I am most grateful to Robert D. Hume, who read countless early drafts of each chapter. He showed me how to ask questions and find their answers, how to judge sources, and how to accept the limitations of historical evidence. Several people read the complete manuscript: Laura Knoppers, John Harwood, and Philip Jenkins devoted much time and effort to helping me plan, refine, and revise the project, and I appreciate their rigor as well as their encouragement. In the late stages, Paula McDowell and an anonymous reviewer read the manuscript and provided detailed and insightful suggestions for improvement, and Angie Hogan and the staff at the University of Virginia Press have made this process a pleasure. The final version is much the better for the work and advice of these scholars, and I am grateful to them for their thoughtful consideration and generous assistance.

My initial research for this book was supported by a fellowship from the Committee for Early Modern Studies along with the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State University, which gave me a semester of time off from teaching and a quiet space to write. The Penn State Department of English provided me with a travel grant for research at the British Library. In the final stages of this project, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette granted me a Summer Research Award to provide me with time to complete revisions.

During the course of researching and writing this project, I also benefited from feedback from scholars at conferences. Parts of an early draft of chapter 3 were presented at the Daniel Defoe Society Conference in 2011, and part of chapter 4 was presented at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting in 2012. The discussions that followed those presentations were extremely helpful to me in thinking about the project as a whole. I have enjoyed the camaraderie and research of scholars at both these organizations as well as the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Aphra Behn Society. Too many people have offered encouragement and inspiration to name here, but I am particularly grateful to Eve Bannet, Gabriel Cervantes, Laura Engel, Stephen Gregg, Kathryn King, Jim May, Andreas Mueller, Max Novak, Ben Pauley, Jason Pearl, Ric Reverand, John Richetti, Pat Rogers, Manuel Schonhorn, Nicholas Seager, Jacob Sider Jost, Rivka Swenson, and James Winn.

Along the way I received advice and encouragement of mentors and friends at several institutions. As a sophomore at the University of Washington I met Thomas Lockwood, who first encouraged me to pursue eighteenth-century studies and let me take his seminar on Richardson and Fielding. He introduced me to Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, and I am sure he did not expect where that would lead. At Penn State, I appreciated the wisdom of Kit Hume, Nicholas Joukovsky, Marcy North, and Garrett Sullivan. I learned much from the eighteenth-century group—Ashley Marshall, David Spielman, Patricia Gael, and Julian Fung—and fellow early modern scholars Ryan Hackenbracht and Paul Zajac. The English departments at Dickinson College and, more recently, at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette have both been immensely supportive as I worked on this book.

Finally, my largest debt of gratitude is to my parents, Leonard and Sarah, who have always encouraged me in every way. It is to them that this book is dedicated.

Part One

FICTION IN THE PRINT CULTURE WORLD

1

Defining the Novel

Eighteenth-Century Concepts of Fiction

What do we know about early fiction? Several general premises come to mind: (1) it derived from a long tradition of romance and spiritual writing; (2) verisimilitude became increasingly important; (3) fiction was the underdog of the literary world, long read mainly by women and servants; (4) people knew by the mid-eighteenth century that there was a new type of fiction, the novel, that was more complex and more worth reading; (5) the fiction that was significant was new works written in English; and (6) increasing interest in fiction can be linked to growing literacy rates among the middle class.¹ These ideas are frequently repeated by critics of early fiction, and they are derived from a very few texts. Literary historians have traditionally seen fiction as developmental, proceeding from the past to the present along a single continuum, becoming more advanced and more closely resembling the works we call novels today. But fiction in the early eighteenth century is complex and messy, often without clear definition or aim. In the face of such chaos, many historians have sought order by concentrating on those texts that can be assembled into a linear progression. Something does change in the eighteenth century, and to many scholars, the works of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding appear to explain how we get from Arcadia to Middlemarch.

I am proposing here that we reconsider this model for literary history by starting from the texts without predetermined conclusions. The traditional narrative of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century does not work if we look at more texts, which is easier to do now than it was in the past. In order to gain an accurate idea of what fiction was printed in this time period, I read the nearly five hundred separate works of fiction printed in England between 1690 and 1730. I developed this list of primary texts by beginning with bibliographies of fiction by Charles Mish and William McBurney, then supplementing these with information from the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, the Term Catalogues, and the English Short Title Catalogue. I used Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online to find copies of many of these texts, and searched the Burney Papers from the British Library for newspaper advertisements showing prices of fiction. My extensive use of online databases and digitalized texts has made strikingly clear why this type of study has not yet been done: it is really only feasible by means of these new resources. The works on my list that are available in print editions are almost all by canonical authors—Behn, Bunyan, Manley, Haywood, Defoe—and so of course my predecessors, for whom this was the primary means of reading early fiction, depended on these few authors. My main argument in what follows is about the fiction itself, but in the scope of my study I am also proposing a new way of approaching literary history. By using newly available technology to study all printed texts from a certain time period (not just those in modern editions), we can achieve an understanding of the literature of the past that is more historically sensitive and comprehensive.

An explanation is in order about my date range. Many scholars of early fiction have chosen starting dates such as 1660, 1688, or 1719 for political or literary reasons, and many of them have ended in 1719 or 1740. Focusing on the publication of a single work, however, is misleading: while both Robinson Crusoe and Pamela were popular and in some ways influential, neither brought about the sort of widespread change that such a starting or ending date would imply. Similarly, political events such as the accession of kings have very little to do with the publication of fiction. For this reason, I have chosen the somewhat arbitrary dates of 1690 and 1730 for my starting and ending points. While not significant in themselves, they encompass the whole of this time period of dramatic change in fiction. In addition, the first copyright act in England was the Statute of Anne in 1710, so my date range enables me to give equal attention to the twenty years before and after this law. Of course, I am actually covering all the earlier texts that were still being reprinted—including fictional adaptations of medieval works like Reynard the Fox and Robin Hood, and Elizabethan fiction by Nashe, Deloney, Sidney, and others. By acknowledging the arbitrariness of the date range, I hope to approach the works without fixed ideas about the influence of particular texts or political events.

Using so many primary texts means that the treatment of each is necessarily brief. I give preference to texts important to their readers, not to modern critics: The Unfortunate Traveller is shortchanged here compared to Telemachus. Many of the works discussed are uninteresting to the modern reader, and I am not suggesting that we should start teaching Nine Pious Pilgrims as part of the undergraduate survey. But these texts are important to the history of print and the history of literature, and they are part of a dynamic period of political, economic, and literary change. For reasons of brevity I have not represented all the interpretations of various critics on a few particular texts. I have tried to represent major interpretations fairly and to give due credit to my predecessors, but the aim of this study is chiefly historical rather than critical. Fiction in the eighteenth century, as today, was a business as well as an art, and this study is concerned with how much the one influences the other. Ultimately, the argument of this book is that booksellers published what they believed would sell, and in this period they exerted far greater influence on the development of fiction than did individual authors or acts of creative genius.

In the chapters that follow, I shall describe the circumstances of reading, writing, and publishing, and the various kinds of fiction produced in the early eighteenth century. First, however, there is a problem of definition. What counts as a novel? Or even as fiction? These questions cannot wholly be answered by turning to the terminology used in the period, but the genre terms found on title pages and advertisements and the discussions of genre in prefaces give us some clues as to what eighteenth-century writers thought they were doing.

Defining the Novel: Problems of Scope

Fiction, unlike poetry or drama, is difficult to define and isolate from other literary genres like biography, travelogue, or spiritual narrative. What do we mean by early fiction? Do we mean only works that look like modern novels? All imaginative prose, including fables, sermon anecdotes, and jests? What about works based on factual or plausible events, but embellished with fictional details? What time period constitutes early? Scholars studying fiction before 1740 have long known of the wide range of fiction—Arundell Esdaile published his bibliography in 1912—but much of it has remained unread and unacknowledged.² This omission has three main causes: (1) methodological reasons for keeping the scope of literary history narrow, (2) definitional restrictions in determining what counts as early fiction, and (3) limited access to primary texts. In the early part of the twentieth century, scholars mostly focused on a few individual authors as exemplars of larger trends. Since the 1970s, literary historians have included minor fiction writers alongside the traditional major authors. The surviving texts are scattered among libraries around the world, which has made a comprehensive examination impractical until very recently. Now, however, a much more inclusive study is possible with electronic access to most of the extant works of fiction from the period 1690–1730. Since the practical difficulty of accessing texts is no longer a problem, we need to reconsider the methodological and definitional arguments in favor of limiting the fiction included in historical studies.

Until the late twentieth century, only a small number of early fiction writers appeared in literary histories. The Cambridge History of English Literature (1907) exemplifies the great man approach to selecting authors and texts for discussion, with volume titles such as The Age of Dryden and From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift. The only lengthy treatment of a fiction writer prior to 1740 is W. P. Trent’s essay on Defoe, which treats him as though he were writing in complete isolation.³ George Sherburn’s volume of A Literary History of England (1948) includes Defoe, Swift, Johnson, and Goldsmith, but only within a narrative of the rise and fall of classicism.⁴ Bonamy Dobrée mentions just Defoe and Swift in his discussion of fiction in English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century (1959).⁵ Histories of fiction are only slightly broader. Ernest A. Baker’s massive History of the English Novel (1926) includes more authors, but relegates them to subordinate chapters with titles like The Followers of Mrs. Behn.⁶ Alan Dugald McKillop’s The Early Masters of English Fiction (1956) discusses Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne; Ian Watt (1957) pares this list down to just Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, with a bit on Sterne.⁷ While such a narrow scope allows for more concentration on particular texts, it presents a misleading version of history in which a very few authors appear to connect directly to each other without any other influences.

More recent histories of fiction have been somewhat wider in their scope. The traditional model of focusing chapters on famous authors or works is still very much in use, though more authors appear regularly. John Richetti’s Popular Fiction before Richardson (1969) was one of the first to break away from the traditional canon, including chapters on Manley, Haywood, Aubin, Barker, and Rowe as well as Defoe, with extended discussions of some lesser-known writers. William Ray (1990) adds the works of French authors Madame de La Fayette, Marivaux, Rousseau, Diderot, and Laclos to the usual group of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne; William B. Warner (1998) has chapters on the works of Behn, Manley, Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.⁸ These later studies focus on fewer than ten authors, with only brief reference to the other fiction from the period.

Taxonomic histories avoid the emphasis on authors, but canonical authors continue to dominate. Michael McKeon (1987) uses both approaches, with six ideologically focused chapters and the remaining five on Cervantes, Bunyan, Defoe, Swift, and Richardson and Fielding. He has fifty-one references to Defoe outside of the chapter specifically on his work, but only two references each to James Harrington, Madeleine de Scudéry, and François Rabelais, and just one mention apiece of Richard Head, Thomas Nashe, and Margaret Cavendish. J. Paul Hunter’s Before Novels (1990) includes chapters on readers, journalism, and didactic writing, but has 105 references to Defoe or his fictions, and just two citations to Benjamin Keach and one to Nashe. Neither McKeon nor Hunter claims to be doing a comprehensive survey, but the conclusions they draw about fiction in general are based on analyses of very few texts—the same works that have featured in histories of fiction since the beginning of the twentieth century. More recently, Patricia Meyer Spacks (2006) divides texts into thematic categories such as Novels of Adventure or The Novel of Manners, which highlight common themes but omit outliers.⁹

These examples demonstrate the connection between methodology and scope. Efforts to expand the breadth of early fiction studied have succeeded in bringing Behn and perhaps Haywood into the ranks of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, but the method of writing history based on a few case studies has remained the same. A study that has too wide a scope, however, can lose argumentative focus. Paul Salzman’s English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700 (1985) is the most comprehensive account of early fiction, and he has very short chapters on texts from authors including Greene, Nashe, Sidney, Deloney, Bunyan, Dunton, Cavendish, and others, as well as translated fiction and jest books. With so many disparate texts treated equally, however, his book functions mainly as a reference work.

Bibliographies have a wider range of texts by both famous and unknown authors. Their compilers still have to address some of the same questions as authors of literary histories, including how to distinguish fiction from other prose forms and how to list anonymous literature. Esdaile writes in the introduction to his English Tales and Romances that even the distinction between prose and verse becomes occasionally, as in some mixed Elizabethan pamphlets, not very easy to follow, and his ending date "was really fixed for me at 1740 by the critics, more numerous perhaps than eminent, who have called Richardson’s Pamela, which appeared in that year, the first English novel" (xi). Charles C. Mish’s bibliography derives from Esdaile.¹⁰ William Harlin McBurney’s Check List of English Prose Fiction, 1700–1739 includes only prose works that are fictitious, but omits short character sketches, jest books, topical pamphlets, dialogues, chap-books, and fictional pieces in periodicals, with a few exceptions (ix). Clearly, the compilers of these bibliographies limit their definition of fiction to works that resemble modern novels: long prose narratives chiefly composed of nonfactual material.

By the nature of their organization, bibliographies tend to favor works that have known authors. Esdaile, Mish, and McBurney sort works by author. Of the 337 entries in McBurney’s list, 64 (19 percent) are said to be written or translated by either Defoe or Haywood.¹¹ While overly eager attributions made by other bibliographers can account for some of the works in this high number, it also indicates McBurney’s tendency to include works with identifiable authors. He mentions Defoe’s The Apparition of One Mrs. Veal as an example of a work he has included even though, at only eight pages, it does not fit his criteria (ix). The fiction section of The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature is divided into two parts, listing just eight Principal Novelists—Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, Burney, and, oddly, Beckford. Everything else falls under the category of Minor Fiction.¹² Robert Adams Day compiled the list of Minor Fiction, and he explains that he was selective, choosing works based on early or unusual developments in fictional technique or in quality; popularity and influence, irrespective of literary merit; modern edns, reprints, studies; and interest as illustrating popular movements in fiction (975). Of the 210 minor works listed as first published in the period 1690–1730, just 48 (23 percent) are anonymous. Day apparently considers fiction by known authors to have been most significant for literary technique, popularity, and influence in modern criticism, or as representative of trends. Intentionally or not, bibliographies have favored attributed works and thereby imply that the bulk of anonymous fiction is less worthwhile.

While many scholars were long dependent on the few works of fiction in modern editions or available on microfilm, we now have electronic access to a tremendous range of eighteenth-century texts. As of 2016, Early English Books Online (EEBO) has 128,000 records, and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) has 180,000 records. The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) reflects the holdings of more than two thousand libraries. This means that most extant items are immediately locatable, and 90 percent are available instantly to any scholar with access to these databases. With so many texts at issue, however, there are inevitably problems: The ESTC differs without explanation from printed bibliographies on the dating of many works, and attribution problems abound in all three databases. Translations and reprints are sometimes recorded as such, and sometimes listed as original new works.¹³ Still, the accessibility of texts and bibliographic records online means that a greater degree of comprehensiveness is now possible than was ever thinkable before. Thus, I do not mean to fault my predecessors for the fact that they only examined a limited number of texts, but rather to comment on the nature of their selectivity and the conclusions drawn from such evidence.

Even with virtually all relevant texts available, a scholar must determine what exactly counts as fiction. In the absence of clear terminology from the eighteenth century, many critics have relied on twentieth-century definitions of fiction. This is a reasonable solution, but frequently leads to a warped view of early fiction as incomplete versions of twentieth-century forms. McKeon makes the very good point that critics often try to discriminate the ‘factual’ from the ‘fictional’ in a way that is recognizably ‘modern,’ and as he later explains, there is often very little distance between imaginary voyages that undertake, with some self-consciousness, the parody of naive empiricism and those that claim historicity with earnest and undisciplined exuberance.¹⁴ Eighteenth-century writers were not as concerned with distinguishing fact from fiction as we are, so they seldom provide reliable information about the factuality of their texts. This is one of the main premises of Lennard Davis’s Factual Fictions—in his view, the use of fiction to embellish fact led to works that were entirely fictional. Even works that claim to be truthful may be partly or entirely imaginative. Scandal tales, fake histories, and tales of travels or voyages were almost never entirely true or false, and often were a mixture of truth, rumor, embellishment, and fiction. To understand these texts as their original readers might have, we need to take them as they are without trying to sort out which bits might be true and which not.

Many critics studying early fiction have created definitions of novel to indicate the type of long narrative fiction that they are trying to distinguish from other types of fiction in the early eighteenth century. Richetti identifies psychological participation of the reader with the characters as the defining quality of the specifically modern novel, and Ioan Williams points to concrete detail as a distinguishing characteristic.¹⁵ These definitions, relying on just a single determinant, are very narrow—and both are highly subjective. Davis and Hunter employ quite different criteria that distinguish the novel from romance and other fiction types. Davis points to setting, morality, and realism as key to separating novels from romances, while Hunter argues that the novel has a sense of contemporaneity, credibility, individualism, coherence, and innovation, among other qualities.¹⁶ By having so many characteristics for defining a novel, they eliminate many texts that might have different narrative features. Hunter, for example, wants to see the novel as a type of fiction that is original and new, so he includes this as part of his definition. Rather than describing novel as a general category, he is really defining the type of fiction that he sees as a precursor to Pamela and Tom Jones. The advantage of such definitions is that they establish the terms in which a particular critic understands fiction. We can tell from Hunter’s definition that he is not counting works like Alexander Smith’s The History of the Lives of the Most Noted Highway-men, Foot-pads, House-breakers, Shop-lifts, and Cheats (1714) as a novel, however fictional it might be. Many critics mean in practice a much narrower type of fiction than they acknowledge: Terry Eagleton, for example, defines novel as a piece of prose fiction of a reasonable length, but in fact his focus on Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, and other canonical authors demonstrates that he is really only looking at one very specific type of prose fiction.¹⁷

Modern ideas about the form of the novel have dominated discussions of early fiction. Richetti complains that the search for the exact biological history of the novel implies the existence of a Platonic ideal novel in which all prose fictions participate and towards which, with varying degrees of success, they all aspire.¹⁸ Such a Platonic form, Richetti argues, does not exist, and a critical method that relies on it does not account for the formal, stylistic, and thematic complexities of novels as actually written. Yet this is how many studies of fiction seem to view novels. The search for the origins or beginnings of the novel indicates an a priori assumption that a novel is an identifiable entity that has a specific starting point. This type of thinking leads us, in its most extreme manifestations, to comments such as Hunter’s that the most fundamental issue has to do with what three generations (and more) of readers did while they were waiting for the novel to rise.¹⁹ Readers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not waiting for someone to discover, invent, or otherwise create the novel, nor did they seem to feel that there was a lack of reading material for entertainment or instruction. We may have trouble imagining a literary world that did not feature novels, but no one at the time seemed to have felt any deficiency.

As certain novelists have become fundamental to the canon of English literature, they have influenced how we perceive early fiction as leading toward the longer narrative popular in the nineteenth century. Canonization is complex and highly disputed, but the main factors influencing the canonization of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding are formal, national, and ideological. Formal issues have to do with the type of fiction written by these authors being more similar to later dominant fiction forms than the works of other authors (Haywood, Rowe, Scudéry, etc.). National issues pertain to the creation of a particularly English narrative form, distinct from simultaneous literary trends on the continent. David Damrosch comments that "it seemed perfectly reasonable for Ian Watt to call his study of several British novelists The Rise of the Novel rather than The Rise of the British Novel, because when Watt’s book came out in 1957 it was generally accepted that the British novel had a distinctive national history that could well be studied—or could even best be studied—on its own, independent of developments in France or Spain."²⁰ While more recent historians, including McKeon and Ray, have added continental authors to their search for the origins of narrative fiction, the end point of their studies is still the British novel. Political and social issues, similarly, long kept women writers out of histories of fiction, but now mandate their inclusion. Reevaluations of current literature and social structures are reflected in revisions of literary history.

For the first time, a comprehensive study of early fiction is both desirable and possible. Modern scholarship is increasingly open to rediscovering popular works by minor authors, and literary historians have become more interested in studies of the reading public and book history rather than just a few examples of literature of a high artistic caliber.²¹ With electronic databases, a task that would have meant traveling between libraries even a decade ago is now possible from a single location. Even in a comprehensive study, however, some of the same questions of scope and method need to be answered—and for fiction, unfortunately, there are few clear solutions for determining what should count and how it should be approached.

Methodologies for the Literary History of Fiction

The lack of exact definitions for early fiction complicates the methodological problems in writing literary history more generally. McKeon begins his Origins of the English Novel by observing, Modern studies of seventeenth-century prose fiction used to suffer from a particularly virulent form of taxonomic disease (25). He is referring to the fact that many studies of the novel take a divide and conquer approach, sorting the mass of prose fiction into genres, subgenres, types, and modes, irrespective of terms and categories used in the period. By carving fiction into manageable groups, the literary historian can then analyze how these groups changed over time. Salzman does this in order to discuss the wide variety of fictional forms in the seventeenth century, and for the purposes of his survey it works very well. Virtually all histories of early novels have followed a developmental model, assuming that fiction was progressing from some primitive state toward a more advanced, complex form that more closely resembles modern novels, specifically in its use of individualized characters and verisimilitude. This shift is generally supposed to have occurred between 1650 and 1750. Certainly, the fiction of 1650 is different from the fiction of 1750; but whether the change is a progression is far less clear. The historical contexts of fiction can help determine the nature of the change, and perhaps some of its causes. A full critical and historical survey is impossible here, but the following discussion will explain how we have arrived at some of the conclusions mentioned near the beginning of this chapter.

Critics began to abandon the great man version of the history of early fiction in the 1980s with the work of Salzman, McKeon, Hunter, Ros Ballaster, and others. While earlier historians had always been aware that there was a great deal of fiction in the early eighteenth century besides that of Defoe, the minor works remained relatively unexplored. Using new ideological and critical perspectives, these literary historians applied feminist, Marxist, Foucaultian, New Historicist, and cultural materialist approaches to the history of fiction. The most lasting and influential of these has been feminist literary history, which began by using a great woman approach. Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Woman Novelist covers more writers than Watt, but starts from a similar premise that eighteenth-century England witnessed two remarkable and interconnected literary events: the emergence of the novel and the establishment of the professional woman writer.²² Ballaster focuses chiefly on Behn, Manley, and Haywood as a counter to Watt’s triumvirate.²³ Spencer, Janet Todd, and Dale Spender treat women writers separately from male writers, without adding them into established views of literary history.²⁴ Gradually, even historians and critics focusing on gender issues integrated male and female writers to provide a more nuanced picture of early fiction that shows the person of the author in relation to the text. Mona Scheuermann and Bradford K. Mudge both combine discussions of women writers with the representation of women in texts by male authors.²⁵ Neither Scheuermann nor Mudge is trying to write a literary history, but both are creating chronological, historical arguments about how the relationship of women to fiction changed during the eighteenth century.

Other interpretive angles similarly took advantage of fiction formerly omitted by literary historians. McKeon uses Marx’s idea of simple abstraction, to argue that the origins of the English novel occur at the end point of a long history of ‘novelistic usage.’²⁶ McKeon examines seventeenth-century spiritual narratives and didactic works to determine what might have led to the novel in the eighteenth century. Foucaultian analyses, such as those by Davis and John Bender, highlight the relationship between literature and hierarchies of power more broadly: as Davis argues, The novel is seen as a discourse for reinforcing particular ideologies, and its coming into being must be seen as tied to particular power relations.²⁷ Ray takes a more strictly New Historicist approach by arguing that the novel’s promotion as a representational vehicle is linked to the increasing conviction that both individual and social truths are rooted in continually evolving codes of behavior, contexts of belief, religious biases, and ethical assumptions.²⁸ Hunter also looks at contexts of fiction, claiming to demonstrate the importance of the ‘minor’ and the ‘ordinary,’ not only in assessing the directions of everyday life but in deciding the total shape of culture and its characteristic institutions.²⁹ To this end, he examines previously neglected texts such as John Dunton’s periodical the Athenian Mercury (1691–1696) alongside the more famous works of Defoe and Fielding. This method is extended in cultural materialist studies such as Steve Mentz’s Romance for Sale, which argues that scholars focused on the novel have ignored Elizabethan prose romances, and Warner’s argument that before the rise of the novel (as a literary form), novel reading emerged as a mode of entertainment.³⁰ Popular or noncanonical fiction has been incorporated into literary histories of the novel, but only so far as it helps explain the rise of prose fiction.

The application of modern ideologies (feminism, Marxist, materialism, etc.) to eighteenth-century literature is symptomatic of a broader practice of selective chronology. This leads to histories that are rigidly accurate about chronology in certain contexts, and dangerously lax about exact dates in others. For example, McKeon discusses the influence of the first English translation of Lazarillo de Tormes (1586) on Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), which was published just eight years later. His chronology has to be very exact for this argument to make sense, and it does. In the next paragraph, however, he refers to the direct influence of Lazarillo on criminal biographies that flourished after the Restoration and the contemporaneous ‘apparition narratives’ of Glanvill, Defoe, and the rest.³¹ Glanvill and Defoe are hardly contemporaneous, either with each other or with Lazarillo or Nashe: Glanvill died eight years before Defoe’s first published work appeared, and more than twenty years before Defoe published anything on apparitions.³² Warner leaps from Behn in the 1680s to Manley in 1709 without anything in between, and Margaret Anne Doody skips more than eight hundred years in her survey of fiction from the ancient world to the present.³³ Such blank spots are fine, and perhaps even desirable, for particular interpretive projects, but they drastically alter our sense of chronology when they are part of a survey attempting to explain the fiction of a specific period.

The final issue with negotiating the distance between us and the early eighteenth century is the fact that most critics look back at early fiction from a literary world in which the novel is the dominant form of literature. Williams comments that the enormous success of the novel in the nineteenth century has been the primary factor which has distorted our view of its history during the whole period from 1600, making it difficult not to accept the application of crude evolutionary terms.³⁴ Richetti similarly pointed out that the history of the novel has thus been handed down to us as . . . the development or evolution of a superior literary instrument.³⁵ This evaluative methodology for studying fiction assumes that the works currently being written are aesthetically and intellectually superior to previous fiction. This is inherent in developmental histories of fiction, from McKillop and Watt to McKeon and Hunter.

My primary objective is to reconstruct certain contexts of the original publication milieu of early fiction—in this case, the economic and social contexts of the fiction market—in order to understand better what the original readers might have thought of these texts, and what their expectations for fiction were. I am using facts about print culture and book history to help understand fiction as an early eighteenth-century reader might have, from the title to the back-page advertisements. Of the nearly five hundred works of fiction printed in English in Britain from 1690 to 1730, fully half were either reprints or translations of foreign fiction. These have mostly been excluded from literary histories, which have almost unanimously focused on new fiction originally written in English.³⁶ More than a third of all the works of fiction were anonymous and have largely been left out of literary histories. My object is to investigate literature viewed through a strictly defined and factually based historical context.

Naturally, as with any method, historical contextualization in the way I am using it here has its restrictions. It focuses on texts rather than authors, so certain works that are prominent in other literary histories and criticism receive relatively little attention here. My aim is not to provide lengthy interpretations of Oroonoko and Moll Flanders. I am devoting more space to works that I deem more successful based on reprints and reissues, and some of these are works few people have read in the last three centuries. I focus in detail on the print culture and the publishing market, rather than other possible contexts. The broader literary context of other genres of writing, for example, is not treated here. Finally, sticking only to history supported by demonstrable facts means that certain contexts cannot be studied. Most of the anonymous works will probably remain unattributed. We have virtually no information about the responses of original readers to texts from this period, and much of what can be said about the daily life of a fiction writer is purely conjectural.

Despite these limitations, I believe that this method will yield results that will help us to understand the texts in a historical context (from the perspectives of their original readers) as well as avoid some of the methodological slants of other histories of fiction. Modern writers read older books in addition to those written by their immediate predecessors, and eighteenth-century writers did the same. We get a warped picture of the potential literary influences on certain writers if we only read new fiction. Modern criticism distinguishes between new fiction and translations, abridgments, and reprints, but an eighteenth-century reader would not necessarily have categorized texts in the same way. In fact, the terms and labels used for fiction in the period show us that writers thought of fiction subgenres very differently from what we might expect.

Novels, Romances, and Histories: Eighteenth-Century Concepts of Fiction

One might suppose that a possible solution to the problem of defining novel or even fiction is to turn to the terms actually used in the early eighteenth century. What do writers and printers of fiction in this period think they are doing when they publish what we call a novel? How do they describe fiction? With the exception of a few famous prefaces cited repeatedly, modern critics have paid little attention to what contemporary writers had to say about fiction genres. Joseph F. Bartolomeo has done a thorough job of analyzing the significant discussions of genre in the eighteenth century, but no one has systematically studied individual references and short comments.³⁷ I have elsewhere argued that the nomenclature on title pages of new fiction throughout the period 1660–1800 tends to reflect trends over time rather than the content of particular works.³⁸ An analysis of the uses of genre terms in titles, prefaces, and advertisements will show what writers of this period seemed to think they were doing—and, perhaps, what readers might expect from texts based on their genre labels.

TITLE-PAGE NOMENCLATURE

In the eighteenth century, terms relate to identifiable trends: secret history is popular in the 1720s, and romance becomes popular in the 1790s with the increasing use of the term on Gothic texts. But why might some labels be more popular than others? Specifically, how can we account for certain tendencies in the period 1690–1730, and what can we tell from the types of fiction on which particular terms are used? Contrary to expectation, novel does not become the most frequent label on new works of long fiction until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. An analysis of title-page labels and the types of fiction they indicate shows that the terms, while nebulous and frequently used in combination, do seem to have some definite meanings even as early as 1690. A reader might not be able to define memoirs, but nevertheless could know from the label that this was not epistolary fiction or a series of short tales.

A statistical breakdown of the terms on title pages shows that novel and history each appear on more than a quarter of works of fiction printed in this period. Table 1 depicts some of the most common genre labels and the frequency of their appearance. Certain labels that we think of as having been very common were not used much on title pages. Romance appears only seven times in forty years. Story and true history occur on just twelve title pages apiece. The term history is surprisingly popular, considering that (to a modern reader, at least) it does not necessarily denote fiction. Similarly, the frequency of novel is startling, since the period at issue here begins fifty years before the novel is generally assumed to have become the dominant form. Clearly, the labels for fiction are inconsistent and do not necessarily indicate that the work inside is fictional at all. However, some patterns are discernible in the ways these terms were applied, and they show that genre labels in this period indicate form rather than content.

Table 1. Genre labels on fiction title pages, 1690–1730

Note: These figures include new fiction in English, first instances of a new translation