Notes on Jane Austen - The Six Novels

 

 

 

W. A. Craik, Jane Austen: The Six Novels. 1965. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd. 1977. 210 p.

Notes taken by José Ángel García Landa (c. 1983).

Introduction

(2) "Her greatness lies less in the way in which she combines the artist and the moralist; hers is a perfect, because a natural, reconciliation of the two, and in none of her six completed novels does either the artist or the moralist have to give way." Jane Austen appeals to all reasonable and rational qualities of the reader.

1. Northanger Abbey

Literary burlesque and social & moral comment come eventually into opposition: an unsatisfactory work. Austen is unwilling to take on much personality as a narrator [!]. Action is seen through the mind of an immature and ignorant but raturally right-thinking heroine. Austen is exceptional in presenting congruous scenes with serious and comic characters and being equally happy with them. Use of cliché by characters, vs. minds governed by cliché in her best achievements. In Northanger Abbey there is little interplay between minor figures, (21) "a fault of the plot is that as Catherine's character becomes more psychologically interesting, it becomes less so as a liteary force". [Aristotelian] unity. She depicts the steady passage of time over a short time without momentuous incidents—all are momentuous through selection. Little detail of scenery, no inanimate (or indeed animate) objects are described, no symbolic values added — only as they act as characters. Little need to describe physical features or expression; conversation renders character. The style lacks in personal mannerisms: it is Augustan, precise and easy. The humorous characters confuse important and trivial matters and do not advance the conversation. (31) "Jane Austen can make the most apparently commonplace topic reveal the discussion of personal principles and conduct, both social and moral, which is at the heart of all ther novels." 

(2) Sense and Sensibility

(32) "Sense and Sensibility resembles Mansfield Park in being in places not only serious but solemn." Irony is confined to lesser figures. Elinor is a faultless character, too much weight is placed on her. The plot requires the main character to be passive, which is a serious drawback. Elinor is an ideal balance of sense and sensibility. The novel is based on a patterning of character, symmetries, etc. Jane Austen guides the reader, Elinor is her main mouthpiece; Brandon is used to comment on her. Willoughby becomes suspect when his character is not commented on. The best way of using minor characters: "she uses a few traits and applies them to a wide variety of subjects" and functions. Rank or wealth are not estimable in themselves for Jane Austen, but only because of the opportunities they allow. All the characters are gentry: there is no place for servants in Jane Austen's literary schemes. Character and plot are balanced in Jane Austen's novels—but the plot of Sense and Sensibility is more mechanical and there are some coincidences and improbabilites (less than in Dickens, Hardy, etc.). The settings and the weather are used as an organizing force—they are not symbolic, though. A strong sense of time and place. (57): "An abrupt opening to a scene is therefore clearly deliberate (...) Jane Austen's own abruptness emphasizes Lucy's awkwardness." Money concerns, with figures, etc. —equivalents only in Trollope. (61): "Jane Austen does not merely analyse a situation, she reproduces it so that the time it takes the reader to grasp its implications appears to delay the narrative no more than it would arrest the action in real life." 

3. Pride and Prejudice

More compressed, vicacious and active than Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen here is a lively commentator on the main characters, whe Elizabeth (with limited judgement) cannot present the material. An ironical novel (similar to Emma, versus Mansfiel Park and Persuasion). Minor and limited characters, as well as Elizabeth, often do the narrator's work of evaluation. (66): "Mr Darcy is the first hero Jane Austen tackles seriously or at much length. He develops like Elizabeth from complacency to self-knowledge and reformation." (69): "What the author tells us, what the heroine perceives, and the conclusions the heroine draws are so mingled that they are hardly separable". Elizabeth, (78) "Like Elinor before her she is a lens through which the action is seen, and like Emma after her she is a lens with a flaw." Scenes are presented through her eyes or ears. (79): "During and after her stay in Lambton, Elizabeth is presented—like Catherine Morland after her disillusion, an like Emma as a whole—by the kind of reported thought-process which is Jane Austen's most original method." (79): "In the second part of the novel, after she has realized the errors her prejudice has led her into, her judgment is directed inwards on herself rather than outwards on to other people, and more of the action takes place in her own mind, less in actual events." A new use for some minor characters—to reveal the situation (of the heroine) rather than their own personality. Sensitive to place. No tours de force as in Sense and Sensibility. Pride and Prejudice resembles Emma (a fault in judgement in the heroine) while Sense and Sensibility  looks forward to Mansfield Park, where the consciously virtuous heroine cannot control the circumstances, and the hero fails.

4. Mansfield Park

More solemn than the rest. Jane Austen plays a large part as narrator and . Fanny is not a lens, (92): "there are many important scenes in which Fanny does not appear at all". Analysis of motives and emotions. (92): "The subject is no longer the reform of a single heroine (Fanny has really no faults to lose), it is the breakdown and subsequent reform a whole highly organized society—the society formed by those who live at Mansfield Park, after the influence of the corrupting Crawfords. Fanny is much less of a heroine, with a sound but limited judgement (unlike Elinor she does not have an old head). The reader does not feel Fanny is an equal. All themes are clear since the opening chapter. Fanny is the pivot of action but not a heroine: she is solemn, has no humour, and is passive throughout. Jane Austen does not clarify enough the moral damage of the play. Confusion results, and it is a liability. Edmund tries to prevent the love between Henry Crawford and Maria, but he is not supposed to know about it [This is not correct - JAGL.]. Henry and Mary Crawford decide. Comments by Lady Bertram unconsicously reveal the truth of the situations. Pity for Mrs Norris: cf. George Eliot's grotesque suffering characters. Episodes of the play and Sotherton are tours de force: revelation of the situations, symbols of Maria's future elopement, etc. The Crawfords are attractive: there is real affection between them, but they are condemned nevertheless. Henry Crawford retains propriety; he is not an instrument of the plot like the earlier seducers. Jane Austen has made it impossible for either Mary or Henry to marry the right ones. A story of how heroes avoid wrong marriages, rather than a story of their own marriage. mary and Edmund's watch episode: a symbol of her unwillingness to come to terms with the inescapable truth; the same as with his ordination. Fanny is the standard of perfection in Edmund's unconscious. The theme of Mary and Edmund is not sufficiently developed: the novel is both too long and with too much material. The conjunction of Edmund and Fanny is necessary to guide the reader (both are fallible). Austen uses an introduction of characters by degrees, and in relationship to all other main characters (not only to the heroine). Portsmouth scenes: a very late introduction of new characters, which is new. Too much commentary: a danger of character being dissociated from immediate surroundings, one of Jane Austen's best skills, being suppressed. The novel covers a long space but most of it is devoted to a single year.  With a kind of "sub-plots." The novel is faulty but impressive, and sometimes excels Emma. 

 

(5) Emma

The most perfect of Jane Austen's novels. (125): "readers find difficulties and imperfections where none exist except what their own preconceptions create". An intrincate plot without any sensational events. (126): "Jane Austen appears much less in person as narrator because here we need to know scarcely anything that Emma cannot tell us, consciously or unwittingly; the unity of the plot and character is therefore much closer than ever before." (126): "The whole plot, as well as the character of Emma herself, would be spoilt if we saw any more." In a first reading, the reader does not draw the right inferences, and merely reconsiders past hints with Emma herself. Emma is deluded but not ridiculous; equal to us. Many characters comment validly and unconsciously (ironically) on the action. Most are presented and seen through other characters. Character is used as relief, or as a compression of useful information (e.g. Miss Bates), presented paradoxically as rambling discourse. Mr. Knightley is one of the few characters, apart from Emma, whose thoughts are reported. Emma, when at her worst, is similar to Mary Crawford. An ironic use of romantic cliché in all novels. The conclusion is smoother than in Mansfield Park. The presentation of late-comers is prepared early on by talk about them. Secondary cahracters are often presented (162) "in a third-person version of their own words, which has all its personal, rhythmical and idiomatic trait, without its immediacy [sic]". Emma's speeches often comment on themselves, so there is no need for Jane Austen's commentary.

6. Persuasion

Persuasion is unfinished, and lacks development of a secondary plot. Jane Austen's tone is at her most assured. More direct narrative than ever before, vs. conversations or characters used to transmit information. But she still understates her points and minor characters still reveal themselves ironically, even thought she uses more serious and moral characters.The heroine is nearest to the author: Jane Austen's comments slide into Anne's. It is her least dramatic work in terms of plot surprise and method of presentation. Mrs. Clay, a flatterer, similar to Mrs. Norris, etc. Mr. Eliot similar to Henry Crawford; subtler presentation than in the case of Wickham. Cliché is used to reveal insincerity in Jane Austen; but now wit does not equal sense. Social propriety no longer equals virtue, either. (As against Pride and Prejudice). (186): "Emma's exclamatory method of retailing thought is largely done away with because Anne's idiom and style are not clues to her meaning; there is generally little difference in style between what Anne say and what Jane Austen says, and it is sometimes both difficult and unnecessary to decide which one is speaking." (187): "Anne generally appears more by what she thinks than what she does"; she is passive. The passage of time begins with large sections and ends with particular days (vs. Austen's usual method). Settings are now relevant to character, symbolic. Johnsonian influence.  (196): "Jane Austen in Persuasion  is concerened with states of mind aroused by events, rather than with the events themselves. Her method here is to select what is of universal application from her material, rather than—as in Emma—to let the universal emerge ironically by contrast with her particular topic." An aphoristic style, with less conversation. Maybe (200) "Persuasion shows that Jane Austen was moving towards a more introspective kind of writing, towards a study of the individual and of his moral growth within himself, rather than within society."

 

 

—oOo—

'Solar': Irremediable historicidad

¿Llegará a tiempo la energía solar sostenible?  Solar, novela de Ian McEwan trata los ribetes picarescos de la ciencia occidental, con un tema casi cósmico de trasfondo, y con una vida complicada en primer plano. De lo cósmico a lo cómico—o picaresco. El protagonista, encarnación de la ciencia actual, es un pícaro moderno, que reúne en sí todos los extremos de la condición humana: a la vez genio y estafador en el plano científico, a partes iguales iluminado, genial, deshonesto e incompetente; e impresentable, contradictorio y humano (demasiado) como persona.

Texto completo:

Solar: Irremediable historicidad

 https://doi.org/10.17613/9xjb-0a51

 

Author(s):

José Angel GARCÍA LANDA (see profile)

Date:

2021

Group(s):

English Literature, Environmental Humanities

Subject(s):

English literature, 21st-century literature, Sustainability

Item Type:

Article

Tag(s):

Scientists, Ian Mcewan, Solar energy, Picaresque fiction

Permanent URL:

https://doi.org/10.17613/9xjb-0a51

 

English abstract: Will sustainable solar energy arrive in time? Ian McEwan's novel 'Solar' deals with the picaresque aspects of western science, with an almost cosmic subject as a backdrop, and with a complicated life on the foreground. The protagonist, an incarnation of present-day science, is a modern pícaro, who encompasses the extremes of the human condition: both a genius and a fraud as a scientist, simultaneously enlightened and incompetent; and unreliably immoral, contradictory and all too human as a human being.

Notes:

First published in 'Vanity Fea', 2011.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

También aquí:

 

_____. "Solar." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 14 August 2011.* (Ian McEwan).

         http://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2011/08/solar.html

         2011

_____. "Solar: Irremediable historicidad." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 11 Sept. 2021.*

         https://www.ibercampus.es/solar-41480.htm

         2021

_____. "Solar: Irremediable historicidad." Academia  10 Nov. 2021.*

         https://www.academia.edu/61489128/

         2021

_____. "Solar: Irremediable historicidad (Solar: Irremediable historicity)." SSRN 26 Jan. 2022.*

http://ssrn.com/abstract=3954729

         2021

_____. "'Solar': Irremediable historicidad." ResearchGate 24 March 2022.*

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359439464

         2022

_____. "'Solar': Irremediable historicidad." Humanities Commons 10 April 2022.*

         https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:45353/

https://doi.org/10.17613/9xjb-0a51

         2022

_____. "Solar: Irremediable historicidad." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 10 April 2022.*

         https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2022/04/solar-irremediable-historicidad.html

         2022

_____. "Solar: Irremediable historicidad." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 4 Jan. 2023.*

         https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/solar.pdf

         2023

 

 

—oOo—

Más Traumas y PTSDs

Me citan en esta tesis sobre representación de traumas y PTSDs en novelistas hembras inglesas ("female novelists").



Rogers, Natasha. The Representation of Trauma in Narrative: A Study of Six Late Twentieth Century Novels. Ph.D. diss. U of Warwick, 2004. Online at Academia.* (Silko, Morrison, Laurence, Munro, Roberts, Murdoch).

         https://www.academia.edu/24314180/

         2020

—oOo—

The Eighteenth-century Novel (Saintsbury)

From George Saintsbury's A History of English Literature.
Book IX: Middle and Later Eighteenth-century Literature.  

 Ch. II, "The Eighteenth-century Novel"

Richardson - Fielding - Smollett - Sterne - Minor novelists - Walpole - Beckford - Mrs. Radcliffe - Lewis


Some reference has been made earlier to the differences, or rather the hesitations, of opinion in reference to the exact history of the English novel (1). But for general purposes these may be neglected. The early prose romance, the Euphuist innovation, major and minor, the philosophical or Utopian fantasy, the brief Elizabethan tale, the long-winded translations or imitations of the Scudéry Heroic story, the picaresque miscellany, and the like, are stages obvious as the general history unfolds itself. As to the exact position which the great names of Bunyan and of Defoe hold, difference may be agreed to with resignation. What is certain is that about the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the period immediately succeeding the appearance of Defoe's work, there began a development of the prose novel, and that this, partly though by no means wholly owing to one group of great writers in the style, had made very great progress by the beginning of the third, about which time we find lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy receiving boxes full of new novels from her daughter in England.

(1) This history has been put briefly, but with much knowledge and grace, in Mr. W. A. Raleigh's The English Novel (London, 1894).

It is so difficult to mark out the precise stages by which the modern novel came into being, that the wisest critics have abstained from attempting it. We can only say that, for the nearly three generations which passed between the Restoration and the publication of Richardson's Pamela, there was an ever greater determination and concentration towards completed prose fiction; and that the use of the general form in two such different ways by two such different men as Swift and Defoe is sufficient proof how near, by the end of the second decade or so, that completed form was. But there was not much general practice of it (1). Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood, women of no very good reputation, followed in the footsteps of Afra Behn, and achieved a certain popularity, but the novels of the former are thinly-veiled political libels. The earlier books of Mrs. Haywood are in seventeenth-century styles, and though she lived to do better in Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753), these were not published till long after the three great re-creators of the novel had shown the way. To them, therefore, we may as well turn at once. 

(1) The minor novels of the eighteenth century are not generally accessible save in the original editions. There is, indeed, one useful and rather full collection, Harrison's Novelists, but, as a whole, it is very bulky, and duplicates much that every one has on his shelves in other forms. Richardson has been sometimes, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Miss Burney have been often, reprinted.

Richardson

Samuel Richardson, by a great deal the oldest, by a little the precursor in actual publication, and indirectly the inspirer of his greatest and nearest successor, was born in 1689 in Derbyshire, his father being a joiner, his mother of rather higher rank. He went to Charterhouse, and was apprenticed in 1706 to a printer, whose daugher he afterwards married. After setting up for himself he became very prosperous, had a house in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, and another, first at North End, then at Parson's Green, was Master of the Stationers' Company in 1754, and King's Printer in 1761. A year later he died of apoplexy. He was contented for many years to print books without writing them, and he was past fifty when a commission or suggestion from two well-known London publishers, Rivington and Osborne, for a sort of Model Letter-writer (he had in his youth practised as an amateur in this art) led to the composition of Pamela, which (at least the first part of it) was published in 1740, and became very popular. Richardson had already made some acquaintance with persons of a station superior to his own, and the fame of his book enlarged this, while it also tempted him to fly higher. In 1748 he produced Clarissa, which is usually considered his masterpiece, and in 1753 Sir Charles Grandison. Except one paper in The Adventurer, he published nothing else, but left an enormous mass of correspondence. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, gives the story of a girl of low degree who, resisting temptation, marries her master, and in the second and less good part reclaims him from irregular courses; Clarissa, that of a young lady of family and fortune, who, partly by imprudence, partly by misfortune, falls a prey to the arts of the libertine Lovelace and, resisting his offers of marriage, dies of a broken heart, to be revenged in a duel by her cousin; Sir Charles Grandison, that of a young man of still higher family and larger fortune, who is almost faultless, and constantly successful in all his endeavours, and who, after being the object of the adoration of two beautiful girls, the Italian Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron, condescends to make the latter happy. Richardson's expressed, and beyond the slightest doubt his sincere, purpose in all was, not to produce works of art, but to enforce lessons of morality. Yet posterity, while pronouncing his morals somewhat musty and even at times a little rancid, has recognised him as a great, though by no means an impeccable, artist. It is noteworthy that his popularity was as great abroad as at home—indeed, it far exceeded that which any English writer, except Scott and Byron, has obtained on the Continent during his lifetime. His adoption of the letter-form influenced novelists very powerfully, and though his style and spirit were less imitable, there is no doubt that they practically founded the novel of analysis and feeling, as distinguished from the romance of adventure.

His fault is an excessive long-windedness (Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison are by far the longest novels of great merit in English, if not in any language), an inability, which grew upon him, to construct a stroy with any diversified and constantly lively interest, an almost total lack of humour, and a teasing and meticulous  minuteness of sentimental analysis, and history of motive and mood. To those Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a formidable critic, added, justly enough, though not so importantly from our point of view as from hers, an ignorance of the society which, in his two later novels, he endeavours to depict. His merits, on the other hand, are a faculty of vivid, though too elaborate, presentation of the outward accessories of his scenes; a real, though somewhat limp, grasp of conversation; an intense, though not very varied or extensive, mastery of pathos; and, above all, a one-sided, partial, but intimate and true, knowledge of human motive, sentiment, and even conduct, his time being considered. The proviso is necessary; and the overlooking of it (with perhaps some personal reasons) was at the bottom of Johnson's now almost incomprehensible preference of Richardson over Fielding. Richardson knew the feminine character of his time with a quite extraordinary thoroughness and accuracy, though his men are much less good; whereas Fielding knew both men and women first, eighteenth-century men and women only afterwards, and however well, in a minor degree. Nor, though Johnson had plenty of humour himself, was he likely to resent the absence of it in Richardson, as he resented the presence of a kind different from his own in Fielding.

Great, however, as are Richardson's qualities, and immense as was the impetus which his popularity and his merits combined gave to the English novel, he cannot be said to have given that novel anything like a final or universal form. The scheme of letters, though presenting to the novelist some obvious advantages and conveniences, which have secured it not merely immediate imitation but continuance even to the present day, has disadvantages as obvious, and can never rise to the merits of prose narrative from the outside (1). But it is one of not the least curiosities of literature that the attainment of the true and highest form actually resulted from an exercise in parody, which certainly, cannot be regarded as in itself a very high, and has sometimes been regarded as almost the lowest, form of literature. It is less curious, and much less unexampled, that the author of this parody was a man who had already tried, with no very distinguished success, quite different kinds of writing.

(1) In combination it can do wondrously, as in Redgauntlet.

Fielding

Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, in the south of Somerset, on 22nd April 1707. His birth was higher than that of any mano of letters of all work who had preceded him. The house of Fielding claimed kindred with that of Hapsburh; it had ranked among English gentry since the twelfth century; and in the century before the novelist's birth it had been ennobled by two peerages, the earldom of Denbigh in England and that of Desmond in Ireland. Herny Fielding himself was great-grandson of the first Earl of Desmond of this creation, but was, of course, unconnected with the great Geraldines who came to an end when they rebelled against Elizabeth. His grandfather was a canon of Salisbury, his father a general in the army who had seen service under Marlborough; his mother's father was a Justice of the King's Bench, and it was at his house that the novelist was born. Nor is it to be omitted that he was a near cousin of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose mother was a Fielding.

But though his pedigree was thus undeniable, his immediate forebears had for two generations been younger sons, and his own patrimony was little or nothing. He was, indeed, well educated at Eton and at Leyden, but he seems to have found himself at twenty-one in London with a nominal allowance and no particular interest for any profession, though, like other young gentlemen, he was of the Inns of Court. He turned to the stage, and for not quite ten years produced a large number of plays, neither very bad nor very good, of which Tom Thumb, a burlesque "tragedy of tragedies," is perhaps the best, and certainly the only one which has kept any reputation. About 1735 he seems to have married a Miss Charlotte Craddock, who was very beautiful, very amiable, and an heiress in a small way; but whether, as legend asserts, Fielding really set up for a country gentleman on the strength of her fortune, and spent it on hounds and showy liveries, is quite uncertain. His theatrical enterprises being interfered with by some new legislation in 1737, he turned seriously to the law, was called to the Bar, and practised or at least went on circuit, while in 1739 he contributed largely to the Champion, a paper on the Spectator pattern (1). His first published, though probably not his first written novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, appeared in February 1742, when its author was almost exactly thirty-five. It was successful, and next year Fielding published three volumes of Miscellanies, the important parts of which are A Journey from this World to the Next, in the Lucianic manner which Tom Brown had made popular, and the mighty ironic story of Jonathan Wild. His wife died soon after this publication, and he married again but not for some years afterwards. He returned to periodical essay-writing (the True Patriot and the Jacobite's Journal) in '45 on the Whig side, and in 1759 he produced his third and greatest novel, Tom Jones. Meanwhile, Lyttelton had obtained for him the position of Bow Street Magistrate, as it was called, or Justice of the Peace for Westminster, an office which, though poorly paid, was of enormous importance, for its holder practically had the police of London, outside the City, in his hands. He dischrged its duties to admiration, and found time not merely to publish his last novel, Amelia, in 1751, but to conduct the Covent Garden Journal for the greater part of 1752. His health, however, was ruined, and, trying to restore it by travel, he undertook in June 1754 the voyage to Lisbon which forms the subject of his last book, issued after his death. He reached the Portuguese capital in August, but died on the 8th of October.

(1). Fielding's dramatic, periodical, and miscellanous works must be sought in their original editions, the best of which is in 4 vols. 4to (London, 1762), or in the great édition de luxe of Mr. Leslie Stephen. The present writer attempted a selection from them in the last volume of an issue of the novels, the Journey, and the Voyage, which he superintended (12 vols. London, 1893).

Fielding's first novel started as a deliberate burlesque of Pamela. Its hero is the brother of Richardson's heroine, and her trials are transferred to this Joseph. Nor did Fielding ostensibly give up his scheme throughout the book; but his genius was altogether too great to allow him to remain in the narrow and beggarly elements of parody, and after the first few Chapters, we forget all about Richardson's ideas and morals. The great character of Mr. Abraham Adams—a poor curate, extremely unworldly, but no fool, a scholar, a tall an of his hands, and a very Good Samaritan of ordinary life—is only the centre and chief of a crowd of wonderfully lifelike characters, all of whom perform their parts with a verisimilitude which had never been seen before off the stage, and very seldom there; while the new scheme of narrative gave an infinitely wider and more varied scope than the stage ever could give. Moreover, one of the instruments of this vivid presentation—an instrument the play of which not seldom sufficed in itself to make the literary result—was a very peculiar irony, almost as intense as Swift's, though less bitter, indeed hardly bitter at all, and dealing with life in a fashion which, but for being much more personal and much less poetic, is very nearly of the same kind as Shakespeare's.

In his next published book, Jonathan Wild, this irony predominates, and is more severe. The hero was a historical personage, an audacious and ingenious blend of thief and thief-taker, who had been hanged ten years earlier. Fielding's ostensible object in composing an imaginary party-history of him was to satirise the ideas of "greatness" entertained by the ordinary historian—a design showing not imitation of, but sympathy with, certain ways of thought diversely illustrated by Swift and Voltaire. But his genius, intensely creative, once more broke away from this ideal—though the ironic side of Jonathan Wild is stronger than anything else in English or any literature outside the Tale of a Tub, and so strong that the book has probably on the whole shocked, pained, or simply puzzled more readers than it has pleased. But it is really as full of live personages as Joseph Andrews itself; and if these, being drawn almost entirely from the basest originals, cannot be so agreeable as the not more true but far more sympathetic characters of the earlier-published novel, they are, as literature, equally great, and perhaps more astonishing.

It was, however, in his third and longest novel, Tom Jones, that Fielding attained a position unquestionable by anything save mere prejudice or mere crotchet. Joseph Andrews had been, at least in inception, only a parody, and Jonathan Wild mainly a satire; the former, though not destitute of plot, had had but an ordinary and sketchy one, and the latter chiefly adapted actual facts to a series of lifelike but not necessarily connected episodes. Tom Jones, on the contrary, is as artfully constructed as the most nicely proportioned drama, and, long as it is, there is hardly a character or an incident (with the exception of some avowed episodic passages, made tolerable and almost imperative by the taste of the day and the supposed example of the classical epic) which is not strictly adjusted to the attainment of the story's end. To us, perhaps, this is a less attraction than the vividness of the story itself, the extraordinarily lifelike presentation of character, and (though this is a charm less universally admitted) the piquancy of the introductory passages. In these (after a manner no doubt copied from the parabases or addresses to the audience in the chorus of the older Attic comedy, and itself serving, beyond all doubt likewise, as a model to the later asides of Thackeray — Fielding takes occasion sometimes to discuss his own characters, sometimes to deal with more general points. But the characters themselves, and the vivacity with which they are set to work, are the thing. The singular humanity of Tom Jones himself, a scapegrace even according to the ideas of his time, but a good fellow; the benevolence, not mawkish or silly, of Allworthy; the charms and generosity of Sophia; the harmless foibles of Miss Western, the aunt, and the coarse but not offensive clownishness of her brother, the Squire, with the humours of Partridge the schoolmaster, and others, have always satisfied good judges. Even among the black sheep, Lady Bellaston, shameless as she is, is a lady; and at the other end of the scale, Black George, rascal as he is, is a man. Only perhaps the villain Blifil is not exactly human, not so much by reason of his villainy, as because Fielding, for some reason, has chosen to leave him so.

There is somewhat less power and life in Amelia, though its sketches of London society in the lower and middle classes are singularly vivid, and though the character of the heroine as an amiable wife, not so much forgiving injuries as signoring their commission, has been almost idolised by some. But no other novelist of the time — and by this the novelists were numerous — could have written it.

On the whole, if we are to pronounce the novel as such present for the first time in the pages of any writer, it must be in those of Fielding rather than in those of Richardson. Johnson, in his prejudice, endeavored to set the latter above the former by comparing Fielding to a man who can only tell the time, and Richardson to one who can put together the watch. The point may be very stoutly argued; but if it be admitted, it can be turned against Johnson. For Fielding does tell the clock of nature with absolute and universal correctness, while Richardson's ingenious machinery sometimes strikes twenty-five o'clock, and constantly gives us seconds, thirds, and other troublesome details instead of putting us in possession of the useful time of day. And in fact the comparison itself will not really hold water. Fielding does not parade his mechanism as Richardson does, but his command of it is every whit as true, and in reality as delicated. He first in English (1), he thoroughly, and he in a manner unsurpassable, put humanity into fictitious working after such a fashion that the effect hitherto produced only by the dramatist and poet, the practical re-creation and presentation of life, was achieved in the larger and fuller manner possible only to the prose novelist.

(1) "In English," for, as he himself was eager to confess, Cervantes in Spanish had not merely preceded him, but had served as his model.

Smollett

The novels of Tobias George Smollett relapse in appearance and general plan upon a form — that of the "picaresque" or adventure-novel — older than that of Fielding or even of Richardson; but in reality they contributed largely to the development of the new fiction. Their author was born in 1721 at Dalquhurn, in the West of Scotland, and was a member of a good family, of which, had he lived a little longer, he would have become the head. He was born, however, the younger son of a younger son, and the harsh treatment of Roderick Random by his relations has been thought to reflect upon his own grandfather, Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, Judge of the Commissary Court of Scotland, M.P., and Commissioner for the Union. However this may be, Smollett, though well educated, had to make his own way in the world, and was apprenticed to a Glasgow surgeon. He practised at different times during his life, but his real profession was literature, by which he set out to make his fortune in London at the age of eighteen. He did not make it with a bad and boyish tragedy, The Regicide (1), but took the place of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war in the Carthagena expedition of 1640. He does not seem to have served long, but remained for some years in the West Indies, and probably they married his wife, Anne Lascelles, a small heiress. Returning to England he tried poems and plays with no success, and then in 1748 turned to novel-writing with a great deal, as the deserved reward of Roderick Random. 

From this time onward, Smollett was a novelist by taste and genius, and a man of letters of all work by necessity. In the former capacity he wrote and published Peregrine Pickle (1751), Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753), Sir Lancelot Greaves in 1760, and in 1771 Humprey Clinker. In the latter he edited the Critical Review, wrote a very popular and profitable History of England, gave an account, in an ill-tempered but not uninteresting book, of his Travels in France and Italy, and did a great deal of miscellaneous work, including a fierce and foul, but rather dull, political lampoon, The Adventures of an Atom. His health, between hard work and the hard living then usual, brok down early, and making a second visit to italy, he died at Leghorn in October 1771.

(1) Smollett's plays and poems are seldom reprinted with the numerous editions of his novels, but may be found in Chalmers; his History is on all the stalls; his criticism and miscellaneous works have never been, and are never likely to be collected in full. The Travels, which are worth reading, have been more than once reprinted.

Smollett's miscellaneous work, though almost always competent, and sometimes much more, need not detain us; his novels, excellent in themselves, are of the highest historical importance. It has been said that he fell back on the adventure-scheme. Plot he hardly attempted; and even, as regards incident, he probably, as Thackeray says, "did not invent much," his own varied experiences and his sharp eye for humorous character giving him abundant material. In Roderick Random he uses his naval experiences, and perhaps others, to furnish forth the picture of a young Scotchman, arrogant, unscrupulous, and not too amiable, but bold and ready enough; in Peregrine Pickle he gives that of a spendthrift scapegrace, heir to wealth; in Fathom he draws a professional chevalier d'industrie. The strange fancy which made him attempt a sort of "New Quixote" in Sir Launcelot Greaves has seldom been regarded as happy, either in inception or inresult; but in Humphrey Clinker we have the very best of all his works. It is written in the letter form, the scenes and humours of many places in England and Scotland are rendered with admirable picturesqueness, while the book has seldom been excelled for humorous character of the broad and farcical kind. Matthew Bramble, the testy hypochondriac squire who is at heart one of the best of men, and in head not one of the foolishes; his sour-visaged and greedy sister Tabitha; her maid Winifred Jenkins, who has learnt the art of grotesque misspelling from Swift's Mrs. Harris, and has improved upon the teaching; the Scotch soldier of fortune, Lismahago, — these are among the capital figures of English fiction, and in the earlier books are the Welsh surgeon's mate Morgan, Commodore Trunnion, and others.

Besides this conception of humorous if somewhat rough character, and a remarkable faculty of drawing interiors which acompanies it, and in which he perhaps even excels Fielding, Smollett made two very important contributions too the English novel. The first was the delineation of national types in which he, almost for the first time, reduced and improved the stock exaggerations of the stage to a human and artistic temper. The second, not less important, was the introduction, under proper limitations, of the professional interest. He had, though less of universality than Fielding, yet enough of it to be successful with types in which he had only observation, not experiment, to guide him, but he was naturally most fortunate with what he knew from experience, sailors and "medical gentlemen." Until his time the sailor had been drawn almost entirely from the outside in English literature. Smollett first gives him to us in his habit as he lived, and long continued to live. To these great merits must be added one or two drawbacks — a hardness and roughness of tone approaching ferocity, and not more distinguished from the somewhat epicene temper of Richardson than from the manly but kindly spirit of Fielding, and an exreme coarseness of imagery and language — a coarseness which can hardly be called immoral, but which is sometimes positively revolting.


Sterne 


One element, however, or one special conmixture of elements, remained to be added in fiction, and then (if we except such minor varieties as the terror-novel to be handled shortly) it remained with no important addition or progress until the day of Scott and Miss Austen within the present [19th] century. This was supplied, that the three kingdoms might be separately and proportionately represented, by Laurence Sterne (1), an Irishman by birth at least, and something of an Irishman in temperament.

(1) The standard edition of Sterne — novels, sermons and not quite complete letters — is in 10 vols. The work other than the novels has been often omitted in reprints; but, as in the case of Fielding, the present writer has arranged a selection from it in 2 vols (London, 1894).

 The Sternes were an East-Anglian family which, after a member became Archbishop of York in the seventeenth century, was chiefly connected with Yorkshire. Laurence was the son of Roger Sterne, a captain in the army, who was the younger son of Simons Sterne of Erlington, third son of the Archbishop, and he was born at Clonmell, where his father was quartered, in 1713, was educated at Halifax, and went thence to Jesus College, Cambridge, of which, many years before, the Archbishop had been Master. He took his degree in 1736, and orders soon afterwards, receiving the livings of Sutton and Stillington as well as minor preferment in York chapter. He married Elizabeth Lumley in 1741, and for some twenty years seems to have felt, or at any rate indulged, no literary ambition. But on New Year's Day 1760 there appeared in York and London the first volume of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. It was immediately popular, it made its author a lion in the capital and it turned his attention definitely to literary work, society, and foreign travel. During the remaning nine years of his life he continued Tristram Shandy at intervals, issued some volumes of Sermons, travelled and resided abroad, and embodied some of the results of this travel in A Sentimental Journey. This last appeared only just before his death, after some previous escapes from long disease, on 18th March 1768.

Sterne's work — his Sermons  even to some degree, his two novels to a much greater — is the most deliberately and ostentatiously eccentric in the higher ranges of English literature; and being so, contains an element of mere trick, which inevitably impairs its value. If a man will not, and does not, produce his effects withouth such mechanical devices as continual dashes, stars, points, and stopped sentences, even blank pages, blackened pages, marbled pages, and the like, he must lay his account with the charge that he cannot produce them without such apparatus. The charge, however, is in Sterne's case unjust; for though the "clothes-philosophy" of his style is fantastically adjusted, there is a real body both of style and of matter beneath.

Tristram Shandy, the pretended history of a personage who rarely appears, is, in fact, a "rigmarole" of partly original, partly borrowed, humour, arranged in the syle which the French call fatrasie, and of which Rabelais' great books are the most familiar, though not quite the normal, type. Although Tristram himself is the shadow of a shade, Sterne manages to present the most vivid character-pictures of his father, Walter Shandy, and his Uncle Toby (the latter the author's most famous, if not his greatest, creation), together with others, not much less achieved, of Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby's servant and comrade in the Marlborough wars, Mrs. Shandy, Widow Wadman, Dr. Slop, and others. And he thus gives a real novel-substance to a book which coould otherwise hardly pretend to the title of a novel at all. The Sentimental Journey, a pretended (and no doubt partly real) autobiographic account of a journey through France to the Italian frontier, is planned on no very different general principles, and has its own medallions of character, though they are less elaborately worked and less closely grouped.

Both books depend for their literay effect on a large number of means — out-of-the-way reading, of which Sterne availed himself with a freedom which has brought upon him the charge of plagiarism; very real though occasionally exaggerated pathos; a curiosly fertile though not extremely varied fancy; and a considerable indulgence, not in coarseness of the Smollettian kind, but in indecent hint and innuendo.  But their main appeal lies in two things — a kind of humour which, though sometimes artificial and seldom reaching the massive and yet mobile humanity of Fielding, has a singular trick of grace, and a really intimate knowledge of human nature, combined and contrasted with a less natural quality, to which Frnace at the time gave the name of "Sensibility" and England that of "Sentiment." It was this last which gave Sterne his immediate popularity, though perhaps for a generation or two past that popularity has been rather endangered by it; and it is still this which gives him his most distinct place, though not his greatest value, in literary history. For it, like the prominence of a less definite kind of the same quality in Richardson, shows the reaction from the rather excessive hardness and prosaic character of the earlier decades. This reaction was not yet directed in the right way. It was still powdered and patched, deliberate, artificial, fashionable. It bore to true passion very much the same relation which the mannerism of Ossian bore to true romance, and Strawberry Hill Gothic to real Pointed architecture. It was theatrical and mawkish; it sometimes toppled over into the ludicrous, or the disgusting, or both. But it shows at worst a blind groping after something that could touch the heart as well as amuse the head. 

Minor novelists

Perhaps it was the popularity of Richardson and Fielding, as early as the first years of the fifth decade of the century, but more probably the aura or prevalent tendency of general thought, which brought about a great expansion and multiplication of the novel about 1750 (1).

(1) Most of the books mentioned from this point to the end of the chapter will be found in the above-noted collection of Harrison, or in Scott's Ballantyne novels, sometimes in both. The latter, in ten capacious but unwieldy volumes, contains all the four great novelists (including Smollett's translations), the Adventures of a Guinea, Johnson's, Walpole's, and Goldsmith's novels, Mackenzie, Bage, Mrs. Radcliffe, Gulliver's Travels, Cumberland's Henry, and Clara Reeve's Old English Baron. 

Few of the minor results of this retain much reputation even with students of the subject, and most are not over-accessible.Some of them have obtained an additional prop from the mention and criticism of Lady Mary (vide supra et infra). We have mentioned Mrs. Haywood's books. Francis Coventry's Pompey the Little (1751) was the most amusing, as Charles Johnstone's Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea (1760) was the most powerful, of a kind of personal fiction whereof a memorable example survives in the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, inserted (one regrets to say for money) by Smollett in Peregrine Pickle, and doubtless rewritten by him from the materials of the beautiful and liberal Viscountess Vane. The too notorious Dr. Dodd attempted to combine Sterne and Smollett, and succeeded in combining the most objectionable parts of each without any of their genius, in The Sisters; Dr. Hawkesworth followed Dr. Johnson with steps of his usual inequality in Almoran and Hamet (1761). But the most interesting work in fiction of the middle of the century is to be found in two books, eccentric in more senses than one. John Buncle (1750-66) and The Fool of Quality (1766-70). The first was the work, though by no means the only work, of a curious Irishman named Thomas Amory, who was born in 1691 and died in 1788, who assures us that he was intimate with Swift, and on whom it would be extremely interesting to have Swift's opinion. Amory began in 1755, with a book, not improbably composed on French models and called Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain. But this, though interesting, pales before the Life of John Buncle, Esq. The hero is an enthusiastic Unitarian, the husband of seven wives of surpassing beauty, a man of letters in a way, a man of science and distinctly marked with the madness which no doubt existed in a temperate and intangible form in his creator. The book, which is entirely sui generis, fascinated Hazlitt, and has been reprinted, but never widely read.

A much more respectable and an almost equally interesting book, though a worse novel, seeing that it attempts innumerable things which the novel cannot manage, is The Fool of Quality. The author of this, Henry Brooke, was like Amory and Irishman, was born in County Cavan in 1703, and died at Dublin in 1783. He was, also like Amory, mad, and died so. He had money, education, and abundant ability, while in his earlier manhood he was familiar with the best literary society of London. In 1735 he published a poem called Universal Bounty, which is worth notice, though it has been too highly praised; four years later a play, Gustavus Vasa. The Fool of Quality, or The Adventures of Henry, Earl of Morland, is a wholly unpractical book and a chaotic history, but admirably written full of shrewdness and wit, and of a singularly chivalrous tone. Nor must we leave out the really exquisite Peter Wilkins, of an almost unknown author, Robert Paltock, which appeared in 1751. In conception it was a sort of following of Gulliver, but Paltock has little satire and no misanthropy, and the charm of his book, which once was a boys' book, and now delights some men, depends on his ingenious wonders, and on the character of the flying girl Youwarkee, the only heroine (except Fielding's) of the eighteenth-century novel who has very distinct charm.

Walpole 

The contributions of Johnson and Goldsmith to the novel will be best mentioned with their other work. But the history, as we can give it here, of eighteenth-century fiction proper is incomplete without a notice of the curious terror-novel which, anticipated by Horace Walpole, had its special time in the last decade of the century, the work of Fanny Burney, that of Mackenzie, and some others. Walpole himself will occupy us later. The incongruity of most of his work and character with the Castle of Otranto has always attracted and puzzled critics; nor is there perhaps any better explanation than that the Castle, momentous as its example proved, was mainly an accident of that half-understood devotion to "the Gothick" which was common at the time (1764) and of which Walpole as a dilettante, if not as a sincere disciple, was one of the chief English exponents. The story is a clumsy one, and its wonders are perpetually hovering on the verge of the burlesque. But its influence, though not immediate, was exceedingly great.

Its nearest successor, the Old English Baron of Clara Reeve in 1777, imitated rather Walpole's Gothicism than its ghostliness. Nor can the extremely remarkable and almost isolated novelette of Vathek (1783) be set down to Walpolian influence thoguh it undoubtedly did exemplify certain general tendencies of the day. Its author, William Beckford, was the son of a rather prominent politician in the city of London, and inherited very great wealth. He travelled a good deal, leaving much later literary memorials of his travels; he collected books; he built two gorgeous palaces, one in England, at Fonthill in Wiltshire, and another in Portugal, at Cintra; and he in many respects was, and perhaps deliberately aimed at being, the ideal English "milord" of continental fancy—rich, eccentric, morose, generous at times, and devoted to his own whimsical will. Such a character is generally contemptible in reality, but Beckford possessed very great intellectual ability, and Vathek stands alone. Its debts to the old Oriental tale are more apparent than real, those to the fantastic satirical romance of Voltaire, though larger, do not impair its main originaly; and a singular gust is imparted to its picture of unbridled power and unlimited desire by the remembrance that the author himself was, in not such a very small way, the insatiable voluptuary he draws. The picture of the Hall of Eblis at the end has no superior in a certain slightly theatrical, but still real, kind of sombre magnificence, and the heroine Nouronihar is great.

Mrs. Radcliffe

Mrs. Radcliffe (Anne Ward)—who was born in 1764, and did not die until 1822, but who published nothing after the beginning of the nineteenth century, though some work of hers appeared posthumously—produced in the course of a few years a series of elaborate and extremely popular work, which has not retained its vitality so well as has Vathek—The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), the celebrated Mysteries of Udolpho (1795), and The Italian (1797). Mrs. Radcliffe is prodigal of the mysteries which figure in the title of her most famous work, of castles and forests, of secret passages and black veils; but her great peculiarity is the constant suggestion of supernatural interferences, which conscientious scruple, or eighteenth-century rationalism, or a mere sense of art, as constantly leads her to explain by natural causes.

Lewis

Matthew Lewis, her successor, and (though he denied it) pretty certainly her imitator, had no such scruples, and in his notorious Monk and other stories and dramas simply lavished ghosts and demons. This department of the novel, unless Vathek be ranked in it, nothing of very high literary value, but its popularity was immense, and it probably did some real good by enlarging the sphere and quickening the fancy of the novelist. 

There are more than a few names of note who might be criticized if space permitted, and who must at any rate be mentioned. Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831), who followed Sterne in sentiment, though not in other ways, drew floods of tears with The Man of Feeling (1771), The Man of the World, and Julia de Roubigné; the political philosopher Godein, who will reappear, produced, besides his still famous Caleb Williams (1794), other novels, St. Leon (1799), Fleetwood, Mandeville, etc.; Holcroft the dramatist (1745-1809) gave Alwyn, Hugh Trevor,  and especially Anna St. Ives (1792); Robert Bage, a freethinking Quaker and a man of business, wrote no less than six fictions, some of them of great lenght; Mrs. Inchbald (1753-1821), a beauty, an actress, a dramatist, and a novelist, gave to her Simple Story a certain charm; Hannah More (1745-1833), who was petted by Johnson in her youth, and petted the child Macaulay in her age, wrote Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, a moral novel not untinged with social satire. The Zeluco of Dr. John Moore (1719-1802) is not insignificant. But the most important, though far from the most gifted, novelist of the latter years of the century was Frances Burney (1752-1840), the daughter of a historian of music, who was the intimate friend of Johnson and most of the men of letters of his time, a pet of the great lexicographer and of the society of the Thrales, for some time a member of the household of Queen Charlotte, and then the wife of a French refugee. From him she took the name Madame D'Arblay, by which she is more commonly known as a diarist, though almost the whole of that delightful part of her work deals with her maiden years. Miss Burney wrote in Evelina (1778) a not very well-arranged but extremely lively picture of the entrance of a young girl into society; in Cecilia (1781) a much more ambitious and regular but less fresh story of love and family pride. Her later novels, Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814) were, the former, a partial, the latter a complete, failure. Her importance, however, consists in the fact  that, at any rate in youth, she had a singular knack of catching the tone and manners of ordinary and usual society, and that by transferring these to her two first books she showed a way which all novelists have followed since. Her great predecessors of the middle of the century had not quite done this. Some of the stock ingredients of the older novel are indeed thrown in for Evelina's benefit—the discovery of parentage, the bold attempts of unscrupulous lovers, etc. — but they are of no real importance in the story, which draws its entire actual interest from the faithful presentation of the most possible, probable, and ordinary events and characters.

Daiches on Sterne

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What the Dickens

Origins of the English Novel Class 1 "The Introduction"

Melanie Holm - The Origins of the English Novel (Course syllabus and videos).

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Daiches on Sterne

(From David Daiches' Critical History of English Literature, ch. II.4: "The Novel: Richardson to Austen")

Fielding's notion of the comic epic in prose had infused new blood into the picaresque tradition in England, but Smollett did not follow Fielding in this and, except for his last novel, was content to follow the traditional picaresque mode and bring his hero's adventures to an end when he had carried through as many adventures as his own experience and invention enabled him to produce. But for both writers, as indeed for all writers of stories hitherto, the narrative line was important and events ordered in chronological order provided the external framework and the formal structure of the work.

Laurence Sterne (1713-68) was an altogether more original figure. His Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767, revealed a wholly new concept of form in fiction as well as a kind of sentimental comedy equally removed from Fielding's comic epic and the didactic humors of Humphrey Clinker. Told in the first person by a narrator whose personality and train of association determine the tone and organization of the narrative (and who is not born until near the end of the third volume), Tristram Shandy is on the surface a rambling and eccentric patchwork of anecdotes, digressions, reflections, jests, parodies, and dialogues centering on the character and opinions of the narrator's father, Walter Shandy, and those of his brother, the narrator's Uncle Toby, with other characters and caricatures introduced to provide humorous or sentimental incidents. The punctuation consists largely of dashes, and the book is interlarded with asterisks, blanks, and a variety of typographical and other eccentricities including pages that are solid black, entirely blank, or marbled. The chapters vary in length from several pages to a single short sentence. The author's own views are conveyed partly in his own person and partly in the person of Yorick, a sentimental and jesting person. There are passages of extreme sentimentality, in Sterne's own sense of that term: for Sterne, to be sentimenal was to be self-consciously responsive to the slightest emotional stimulus, to relish every sensation and feeling. This self-conscious responsiveness was both comic and moral. It made its possessor both sympathetic with the feelings of others and so helped to make him charitable and affectionate and at the same time led to awareness of the ludicrous and promoted genial laughter at the idiosyncrasies and private fantasies of individuals. Sterne's treatment of idiosyncrasy is more than humorous in the Jonsonian sense. He had learned from John Locke, his favourite philosopher, that the consciousness of every individual is conditioned by his private train of association; thus every an in a sense lives in a world of his own, with his own "hobby horse" (as Sterne called a private obsession) in the light of which he interprets (or misinterprets) the actions and conversations which other people's hobby horses have led them to engage in. Every man is the prisoner of his private inner world, which in turn is the product of his own "association of ideas which have no connection in nature." It is only by a conscious exertion of fellow-feeling that one man can make contact with another. Walter Shandy's main obsession (he has several) is his theory of names, and Uncle Toby's is the theory and practice of fortification and siege warfare; when Walter harangues Toby about his pet theory Toby misinterprets him and imagines he is talking about the theory of fortification, and in the same way Walter misunderstands Toby. Only the rush of affection can bridge the gulf that lies between individual consciousnesses. One might almost say that for Sterne one must be sentimental to escape from the prison of the private self.

The superficial evidence of chaos in the style and organization of Tristram Shandy is wholly misleading. Sterne knew what he was doin in his multiple digressions and inset anecdotes and tales. He deliberately eschews chronological order, partly because he knows that the past exists in present consciousness and colors and conditions it (we are our memories) and partly because he realizes that time as marked off by experiencing man is not the same as time as ticked off by the clock—a short clock-time can seem, and be, much longer in experience than a much longer clock-time. He has the chronology of his story firmly fixed in his mind; he is writing long after the events he is presenting took place, when some of the main characters are dead, so that he can occasionally leap forward to the present and see his story as history and at times stay with the moment whose events he is describing. A firm skeleton of dates lies underneathe the author's jumping about in time. Uncle Toby's death is described in volume six, but he is alive at the end of volume nine, as is Yorick, who has the last word in the novel, yet who at several earlier points in the book is looked back on as long dead. The author's whimsical, sentimental personality—at once moralist and clown, alternately tender and prurient—controls the whole story, and the digressions not only determine the comic and moral scope of the novel but also, because they are promised, produced, looked back on, in different parts of the book, help to keep the tone personal and even intimate. The suggestiveness, the appeals to the reader (often done very slyly, assuming that the reader is a woman at some moments and at others addressing him as a man), the asterisks and blanks for the reader to interpret and fill up as he wishes, also help to implicate the reader in the novel. The reader is made a conspirator with the writer in producing the work.

The society in provincial England created by Sterne in Tristram Shandy consists largely of the inhabitants of Shandy Hall and certain neighbors; it is, however, sufficiently lively, varied, and representative to stand as a microcosm of human society as a whole. Sterne vents some private dislikes and prejudices throughout the novel, notably in the ludicrous character of Dr. Slop, the man-midwife, but there is nothieng of Smollett's violent malice in these attacks. Everything is subdued to the comis-sentimental-moral picture of individuals in their oddities, obsessions, and fundamental loneliness teasing, misunderstanding, ignoring, amusing, or loving each other. There is also throughout the book a pervasive sense of human inadequacy. Walter Shandy begets the hero with a certain amount of difficulty: he is already a middle-aged man who is worried by thoughts of importance. His plans for his child (based on his own obsessive theories about names, about the importance of long noses, and other eccentric ideas) go ludicrously astray.  He is never understood and rarely understands any one else. His wife goes quietly about her business without ever responding to his frequent pedantic arguments, for she never knows what he is talking about. Yorick, the jesting sentimentalist, is misunderstood and ill used. Only Uncle Toby and his man Trim, simpletons both, enjoy (for the most part) living in their private world: their gentle emotional natures cannot understand evil and deceit, and they alone in the book never realize that they are prisoners of their private consciousnesses.

Tristram Shandy is packed with humorous pedantry and mock-pedantry. Nothing more readily illustrates the idiosyncrasies o the human mind than the obsessive love of scholars for their own theories. Walter Shandy is himself an eccentric pedant, and in his conversation Sterne can both parody the solemn disputations of scholars and create his favorite kind of comic moral dilemma. Sterne learned from Rabelais, Cervantes, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift, and numerous obscure minor works of learning he found in the extraordinary library of his friend John Hall-Stevenson, and he puts his remarkable fragments of erudition together with all sorts of extravagant, fantastic, and sometimes simply nonsensical elements to achieve a chorus of parodied pedantry which sometimes swells out into a full-scale mock-treatise and at other times recedes to a muttering reference or two. Throughout the book he treats sex as both ridiculous and a little sad. He has been often attacked for his prurience and for his mingling of sentimental idealism with low sexual innuendo. But the combination belongs to the essence of his art and his attitude. Man is absurd, and nothing about him is more absurd than his sexual behavior. The novel opens with Mrs Shandy inquirring of her husband, at the very moment when Tristram is about to be procreated, whether he had remembered to wind the clock the first Sunday night of the month "and being somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age, at the time I have been speaking of,—he had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get them all out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month." The two activities are thus associated in Mrs. Shandy's mind, even though as it happened this particular occasion, her husband having been away from home, was during the second week of the month. But the association had been set up, hence the question asked at such an unseasonable moment. Now this serves to make sex ludicrous, but not at all (as with Swift) disgusting. Dirty jokes are thus jokes at the expense of human absurdity. They are never obscene in the proper sense of the term, nor are they cruel. They are part of the comic sadness of the human situation.

The sentimentality sometimes rises to heights which offend the modern reade: anecdotes and inset stories of people of the most tender sensibilities weeping in each other's arms are not as popular now as they once were. But thie element in Tristram Shandy (generally associated with aUncle Toby and Trim) is bound up both with its comic and its moral elements. Uncle Toby gently releasing a fly out of the window because he does not want to hurt the creature illustrates the comic simplicity of his character and at the same time presents the moral that kindness both to his fellow men and to other creatures is man's only way of escaping from the prison of self to become a member of God's creation. That Uncle Toby is a retired soldier who spends all his time building models of fortifications and conducting mock sieges makes his tenderheartedness comic in a special way: Uncle Toby would never have though of applying his pacific principles to a consideration of war, because war as a theoretical art was his private obsession. The paradox helps to illustrate the nature of all human obsession; but it does not make Uncle Toby a hypocrite: his eloquent speech in defense of the military profession is wholly sincere—it omits, however, most of the really relevant considerations.

"Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is), is but a different name for conversation." This is one of many remarks which Sterne makes to the reader about his method of writing in the course of the novel. The tone of informal conversation or anecdote is sustained throughout the book. The author's personality pervades all, and the multifarious elements which make up this fantastic novel combine into a unity as a result. Sterne thus contrived to create a quite new kind of novelistic form, and gave the novel a kind of freedom it had never previously enjoyed and which novelists were not to take advantage of again until the twentieth century. He is in many ways—in his attitude to time, to the individual consciousness, his use of shifts in perspective—the most modern of eighteenth-century novelists. But the lesson he learned from Locke about human loneliness and the relativity of time was not what other men of his century learned from that philosopher. For other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists, reality remained public and socially recognizable. It was left for twentieth-century novelists, learning from their own philosophers and psychologists lessons similar to that which Sterne had learned from Locke, to develop  the novel further along the lines that Sterne had indicated.

In A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) Sterne tried to placate those who complained of his mixing bawdiness with moral feeling in Tristram Shandy. Here he is essentially the man of feeling in Tristram Shandy. Here he is essentially the man of feeling, writing a quite new kind of travel book in which he describes not famous buildings and picturesque scenes but intimate glimpses in the character and emotions of people he happens to meet. It has none of the exuberance, variety, and trickery of Tristram Shandy, being both much shorter and in the same key throughout. The humor is still here, but it is mixed mroe gently with the sentimentality, and even when the author is thrown into comic predicaments with relation to a young lady (as in the concluding scene, when he has to share the one available bedroom in an inn with a Piedmontese lady and finds himself in the end accidentally holding hands with the lady's fille de chambre), the sigh of feeling is always heard. The famous account of the poor man lamenting his dead ass is a studied exhibition of the kind of feeling for which the book implicitly pleads and which its whole tenor illustrates. Yet the narrative moves with speed and is full of surprises. The style, proliferating with dashes, is essentially that of Tristram Shandy, and the pauses, turns, interruptions, and sudden developments in the action, while not as elaborate or extravagant as in the earlier novel, still maintain continuous interest and help to establish that intimate relationship between writer and reader that was so important to Sterne. The exhibitionist exploitation of the author's own generosity and charity is more in evidence in A Sentimental Journey than in Tristram Shandy, for now he is determined to vindicate his character. Yet there is humorous self-deprecation as well, which counterbalances the exhibitionism. 

"Feeling" in A Sentimental Journey means something more than the expression of one's own emotions and sensibilities. It is essentially Einfühlung [empathy], the ability to feel oneself into someone else's situation and to be moved by the emotions of others—indeed, sometimes to feel others' emotions more strongly than they do themselves. It is morally good because it is bound up with generosity and Christian charity. Smollett, in his Travels through France and Italy (1766) had vividly expressed his own feelings, but they were feelings of exacerbation and anger, altogether different from Sterne's state of mind. Sterne refers to Smollett's travel book in his own:

The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris—from Paris to Rome—and so on—but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed was discoloured or distorted—He wrote an account of them, but 'twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings. . . . 
    I popp'd upon Smelfungus again at Turin, in his return, and a sad tale of sorrowful adventures he had to tell. . . .—he had been flea'd alive, and bedevilled, and used worse than St. Bartholomew, at every stage he had come at—
    —I'll tell it, cried Smelfungus, to the world. You had better tell it, said I, to your physician.

Tristram Shandy was followed by many imitations, none of which showed anything like the genius of the original. There were at the same time other manifestations of the cult of feeling in fiction. (...)

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The Chains of Semiosis

This paper puts forward a theory of literary writing as a practice of ideological transformation. The example analyzed is the representation of the sexes in George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss, a representation which is intertextually mediated, metafictional, and transformative, rather than merely "realistic" or spontaneous. This view of writing as a practice of material production in the intertextual field is theorized on the basis of V. N. Voloshinov's (or M. M. Bakhtin's) materialist linguistics, and of Peirce's semiotics. The methodological kinship between these researchers is asserted (as it was ignored in the 1980s, when this paper was written).

 The Chains of Semiosis: 

Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss

http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6PZ81

Author(s):

José Angel García Landa (see profile)

Date:

1991

Group(s):

Narrative theory and Narratology

Subject(s):

George Eliot, Victorian novel, Semiotics, Intertextuality, Women's studies

Item Type:

Article

Tag(s):

Representations of women, Stereotypes

Permanent URL:

Abstract:

Notes:

Written in 1989.

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Sterotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Papers on Language and Literature 27.1 (Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991): 32-50.* http://www.siue.edu/PLL/

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." iPaper at Academia.edu 19 July 2010.*

         https://www.academia.edu/267223/

         2014

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Online PDF at Social Science Research Network 21 July 2010.*

         http://ssrn.com/abstract=1645219

         2010-07-19

         English and Commonwealth Literature eJournal 21 Jul. 2010.*

         http://www.ssrn.com/link/English-Commonwealth-Lit.html

         2013

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Online PDF at Zaguán 8 Oct. 2011.*

         http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/6550

         2011

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." ResearchGate 3 May 2013.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228174273

         2013
_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Humanities Commons 29 April 2018.*
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6PZ81
    https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:18929/
    2018

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Selection. In The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. Ed. Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder. (New Casebooks). Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002. 73-82.* Amazon Online Reader:

         http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/033372805X/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link

         2008

         Introduction by Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder at Palgrave.com

         http://www.palgrave.com/pdfs/033372805X.pdf

         2014

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