- Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Writing
In terms of strictly English fiction, the earliest remaining works are those of the Anglo-Saxon period, most famously Beowulf, written in the 8th century. Again, though, this is a poem. In fact, only Apollonius of Tyre has survived as evidence of an Old English prose romance genre – and we only have this by the chance of its being copied into the back of a book of homilies and laws in the 11th century. Therefore prose fiction may have existed in greater quantities before the Norman Conquest, but it seems from the examples that we have that prose was usually employed for sermons and other religious writings, legal and documentary texts, and travel / medical books.
Fiction in the Middle Ages also tended to be written in the form of poems (The Canterbury Tales (circa 1387-1400) and Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1400)), or was transmitted in the form of morality plays. After 1470, though, Caxton began to print the works of Chaucer, Gower and Malory. The printing press made prose fiction a practical possibility and in the early years of the 16th century the Humanists (principally Thomas More and his friend, the Dutchman Desiderius Erasmus) began to write. However, their famous books Utopia (1516) and Encomium Moriae (1511, "The Praise of Folly") were written in Latin, which was still the language of official documents. Utopia, although it was veiled as a genuine account of a traveller’s experiences in a strange land, was nonetheless a work of prose fiction.
- The Birth of the Novel
Swift and Defoe It was in the early years of the 18th century that the novel as we know it began to be written. As Walter Allen writes in The English Novel, "Nothing that preceded it in the way of prose fiction can explain it. There were no classical models for it". Certainly Sidney and Cervantes’s Don Quixote (translated into English in 1612) were models of a sort, but what developed in the works of the great innovators of the novel form (Swift and Defoe) had more in common with histories, plays and moral tales. What prose fiction before 1670 lacked was what Hazlitt calls, "the close imitation of men and manners… the very texture of society as it really exists". The novel emerged when authors fused adventure and romance with verisimilitude and heroes that were not supermen but, frankly, insignificant nobodies. It is no surprise, then, that Swift and Defoe’s seminal works of fiction, now seen as the progenitors of the novel form, were pseudo-histories. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) was based on the actual desert island adventures of Alexander Selkirk. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), though a satire and spoof of the far-fetched travel literature of the Middle Ages, (where stories of twenty-foot tall dragon- headed women, disembodied heads on legs and so on abounded) was written as a narration by a traveller (like More’s Utopia). Coleridge claimed that Crusoe was "the universal representative, the person, for whom every reader could substitute himself". Therein lies the key to both the appeal of the novel and its imminent ubiquity: the real world. Of course, neither a happy desert island sojourn nor capture in a land full of one foot tall people can be termed ‘realistic’, but the narrators of these first novels spoke as if they were, and they themselves were ordinary representatives of humanity. In Moll Flanders (1719 and 1722) Defoe offered an ordinary setting and a familiar world but presented an extraordinary woman, strange in her actions and compelling in her adventures but ultimately not abnormal: more deserving of infamy than fame. It is significant that Defoe’s other major work was A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a fictionalized account of an historical event. Truth and a degree of verisimilitude were essential to the early novel.
- Epistolary Novels
Richardson and Fielding As the 18th century progressed, the novel began to take shape with the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740 and Clarissa (1748). These were written in the form of letters and again this lent a false ‘realness’ to the enterprise and started something of a vogue in epistolary novel writing. It is Henry Fielding, though, who is seen to have established the English novel form, oddly enough in direct reaction against Richardson. Joseph Andrews (1742) was initially conceived as a satire on Pamela but became much more than mere ribbing or criticism. Like Richardson he became a novelist almost by accident when the 1737 Licensing Act censored the stage to the extent that Fielding abandoned writing for it. He wrote with a great sense of irony and satirized the manners and values of his time (especially those extolled by Richardson). He would certainly not be the last to use the novel to poke fun at his contemporaries, something enjoyed later by Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen . With Tom Jones (1746) Fielding displayed an entirely new degree of skill in plot development and technical innovation. Further, Tom Jones himself was a new kind of hero: flawed, ordinary, weak and un-heroic in spite of his good looks and bravery. Smollett took this a stage further with his many novels centred around caricatured, despicable and dehumanized heroes (in the adventures of Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle and so on). Smollett was a curmudgeon and an appalling grouch (see his hilariously grumpy Travels Through France and Italy (1766) for proof) and his sociopathic attitudes infiltrated his fiction. Even in his best and most humane novel, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), the character Lismaho is described as resembling a rather unpleasant-looking insect. Smollett depicted his characters as he saw the world: as a vulgar and absurd parade. Everyone was exaggerated and caricatured. Nothing was sacred.
- Haunted Castles versus Small Town Romance
Radcliffe and Austen In 1765, Horace Walpole published the Castle of Otranto and, in doing so, instigated the vogue in so- called ‘Gothic’ writing. It was a bit brief and insubstantial to be called a novel, but it successors would be longer, subtler and more complex. The Gothic was a fundamentally populist, even artless, form. Beckford’s Vathek (translated from French into English in 1786) was something of a detour as it is the only English ‘oriental’ tale of note apart from Rasselas. Its combination of extremely black humour, settings in imaginatively otherworldly foreign places, and Gothic towers places it in the transitional phase of English fiction, between the realistic novel and the flights of imaginative fancy that were to come. The latter type, again largely Gothic, was to be found in the writings of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and, later, Mary Shelley. Novels had previously been, to a great extent, the playing out of possibilities and were now to become for an exciting period the playing out of improbabilities. Simultaneously with the great days of Gothic fiction, of castles, ragged landscapes and mystery in strange lands, and a public fascination with the incest, devilry and horror of Lewis’s The Monk (1796) came a backlash that would shape novel writing for the entire 19th century. That backlash came in human form and with the name Jane Austen. From the 1790s onwards Austen wrote tales of small town uneventfulness, tending to explore character rather than event. Hers was a non-judgemental but sensitive eye for detail. Northanger Abbey (published 1818 but written much earlier), probably her first completed extant novel directly ridiculed Ann Radcliffe’s popular Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Austen’s other famous novels such as Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813) left the ‘sublime’ foreign locations and landscapes of Radcliffe behind, and were complex and often extremely amusing and subtle investigations of English manners and society.
- Popular Novels With a Social Conscience
Dickens and Eliot Apart from the self-centred but compellingly exaggerated autobiographies of de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) and Borrow’s Lavengo (1851), the novel tended to retain its predominantly fictional basis. The horror within everyday life was also to be investigated by Dickens and George Eliot, the former in, almost without exception, urban settings and the latter in bleak, out of the way, nowhere towns. Dickens’s early work was both unrealistic and by-and-large humorous without being as satirical as his more complex later fiction. The Pickwick Papers (1835-7) is a joy of a novel, but its characters have no weight that is not derived from their downright lazy lifestyle. Even the sinister characters are more ridiculous than ominous. This was to change, however, when the freedom bought by popular success allowed him to begin to depict the real and miserable underside of the metropolis: the criminals, vagabonds and dispossessed, while never losing sight of the rotten core of the rich. Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House (1852-3) is, for instance, an example of the danger of snobbish idiocy, ignoring and neglecting her family while selfishly making a name for herself rushing around supporting philanthropic enterprises in far away lands. Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1860-1) is similarly disturbing with her bitter enmity for all men due to a single man’s cruelty to her. While Dickens was essentially a populist with a conscience, George Eliot seemed to care not a jot about entertaining her reader. Rather she presented a world of dire occurrences in rural backwaters and littered her novels with uniquely didactic authorial interjections. Thus, in her first novel, Adam Bede (1859), Hetty Sorrell falls pregnant to Arthur Donnithorne before betrothal to Adam, is convicted of infanticide, is imprisoned and is preached at by a Methodist. This is typical of the Eliot humour, as is The Mill on the Floss (1860) where the heroine’s family falls apart through death and bad luck - everybody of consequence dying horribly or turning out to be wretched and dislikeable. Critically acclaimed, often brilliant but equally often sanctimonious or wholly absurd (see the entire Jewish plot of Daniel Deronda (1876)), Eliot is at her best when bearing polite witness to misery.
- The Later Nineteenth Century
In America, the transition from James Fenimore Cooper’s straight-laced adventure The Last of the Mohicans (1826) to Mark Twain’s seminal The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with its satire and social conscience, showed the irreversible movement away from idealistic and naïve fictions that would culminate in the 20th century writings of the Beats such as Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. In mid-19th century Russia, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy concurrently investigated the possibility of presenting a life entirely without hope and leading inevitably to suicide and spells in prison. Here, though, the sheer scale of the novels and their vision of an entire society put them in a separate – if not necessarily superior – league to George Eliot. In the latter half of the 19th century the novel became ubiquitous. From around 1810, public lending libraries had opened up literature to the masses (very controversially at the time) and, with the serializations of Dickens and other authors in popular journals, novels became the popular entertainment of choice. This not only goes to explain the didacticism of George Eliot but also the outright populism of works such as Blackmore’s wonderfully romantic and – unusually for the 19th century – optimistic novel Lorna Doone (1869). Further, it explains the rise of the mystery novel as founded by Wilkie Collins in the 1860s. The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1860) were exciting tales of devious goings on, mysterious Indians prowling the grounds of mansions, and strange doppelgangers that enthralled and perplexed. Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Arthur Conan Doyle and the rest would carry this baton into the next century. Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Kidnapped (1886) were in the same vein as Collins’s novels and were similarly appealing to adults and children alike with their swashbuckling adventures. Around the same time, H. Rider Haggard’s many novels such as King Solomon’s Mines (1886) and She (1887) explored distant lands, again with great popular success.
- Modernism
Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence With the emergence of Modernism in the 1910s and 1920s came an entirely new way of writing novels. The so-called ‘stream of consciousness’ style innovated by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925) imagined characters as living beings whose entire thought-processes might be explored on the page via linguistic invention and unconventional style (Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in the last chapter of Ulysses is one long sentence and follows an internal logic representing the thought process in progress). Both Joyce and Woolf’s masterpieces follow their main characters through a single day. This would have been quite impossible in the traditional novel because character and event tended previously to pan out over months or even years. They established a literary version of 20th century individualism (later taken to extremes by Kerouac and other solipsists). The logical extension of the Sternean shaggy dog tale, these Modernist novels – like Tristram Shandy earlier – were playful, inventive and serious at the same time. They were also controversial, but Ulysses is high in many ‘favourite book’ lists to this day (perhaps not least because it is such a challenging work and therefore seems to bestow a certain academic prestige upon its readers). By this time the novel, and fiction in general, seemed to have inverted and was looking in on itself via random characters on the outside. Highly academic writers in fiction (as in poetry – see Ezra Pound and T S Eliot) took the novel back from the masses and "into the classroom" again as William Carlos Williams explained. Rarely passionate (Molly Bloom aside), not genuinely tragic or particularly funny in any traditional sense, and never deigning to focus on anything actually happening, these novels revel in the sheer ordinariness of their subject matter and the newness of the way they are explaining it. If we say that fiction was written initially to stimulate the mind, to entertain, to consider possibilities, and /or to educate then Modernist writing can be seen as a freak occurrence. It does none of these things directly and all of them extremely indirectly (or not at all as some would have it). Their appeal cannot be explained easily, but they were extremely influential. The importance of the tiny details in life was what they dragged up, and the novels of D H Lawrence, especially Sons and Lovers (1913), were very much of this school. They investigated the minutiae of life, the irrelevancies that become the most important parts of life: in many ways they can be claimed to be the origin of the fly-on-the-wall documentaries so popular on television. Like Joyce’s beautiful and influential short stories, Dubliners (1914), Lawrence’s work is poignant but exceptionally unhappy. They were, in Lawrence’s case, though, unusual for being set in the unfashionable North of England and with working class characters: for once the novel was actually displaying novelty.
- Dystopian Fiction
Orwell, Huxley and Golding As the twentieth century wore on, torn apart by war, new technologies advancing at an unprecedented rate, greed, selfishness and the emergence of sinister theories such as that of eugenics that were not limited to Germany by any means (‘kill all stupid and imperfect people’ was the effective plan), new writers emerged who spurned the concept of the novelist as artist. Backlash followed backlash and new media accelerated movements from decades to five or ten years. The novel was by the 1940s well accepted as a literary form as worthy as any other and as such artistry in the process of writing began to be taken for granted. Rhetoric was shunned (especially and brilliantly by Orwell) and the novel with a precise social message or purpose emerged (see Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-four (1949)). As well as the dystopian novelists, we find in this category many writers not reveling in the joys of life or the status quo but endeavouring to undermine cosy middle-class assumptions and general human arrogance. Foremost among these was William Golding, whose Lord of the Flies (1954) is considered to be one of the very finest novels of the century and also one of the most pessimistic with its implication that human evil is innate and not learnt. In The Inheritors (1955) and later novels, Golding continued to debunk various theories about man’s superiority and greatness: viewing his enterprises as pointless and his beliefs as almost always vain and worthless. Since the Second World War there has been an explosion in the number of people writing novels in England, America and elsewhere, seemingly undiminished by the popularity of the cinema and television. It is claimed that there are now almost as many people writing novels as there are people buying and reading them. For this reason it is near impossible to trace significant movements or even single novelists in the second half of the 20th century. That will be left to readers in centuries to come to sort out.
