‘The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel’
By Ian Watt
[Abridged & Summarised Version]
Introduction
Ian Watt (1917-1999) was Professor of English at Stanford University. This book titled The Rise of the Novel, began as a study of the relation between the growth of the reading public and the emergence of the novel in eighteenth-century England. And eventually, in the year 1947, it took shape as a Fellowship Dissertation for St. John’s College, Cambridge.
To Watt, ‘The whole question of the historical, institutional and social context of literature is very widely ignored, to the great detriment not only of much scholarly and critical writing, but of the general understanding of literature at every educational level.’
Rejecting the view that the work of art is an autonomous object, Watt insists that an artist cannot be perceived separately from the social and moral conventions of their time. Watt then proceeds to relate the growth of the novel’s form to changes in the intellectual and social milieu of the eighteenth century.
Defoe, Richardson and Fielding & the ‘New Climate’ of Social & Moral Conditions
Defoe, Richardson and Fielding were no doubt affected by the changes in the reading public of their time; but their works are surely more profoundly conditioned by the new climate of social and moral experience which they and their eighteenth-century readers shared.
DRF – Founders of a New Kind of Writing – A Break with the Old-fashioned Romances
It is true that both Richardson and Fielding saw themselves as ‘founders of a new kind of writing’, and that both viewed their work as involving a break with the old-fashioned romances.
Realism - The idiosyncratic features of the new form
With the help of their larger perspective the historians of the novel have been able to do much more to determine the idiosyncratic features of the new form.
Briefly, they have seen 'realism' as the defining characteristic which differentiates the work of the early eighteenth-century novelists from previous fiction.
The main critical associations of the term 'realism' are with the French school of Realists.
'Réalisme' was apparently first used as an aesthetic description in 1835 to denote the 'vérité humaine' (human truth) of Rembrandt; it was later consecrated as a specifically literary term by the foundation in 1856 of Réalisme, a journal edited by Duranty.
Was There a Remarkable Popular Interest in Reading?
Many eighteenth-century observers thought that their age was one of remarkable and increasing popular interest in reading.
On the other hand, it is probable that although the reading public was large by comparison with previous periods, it was still very far from the mass reading public of today. Burke estimated it at 80,000 in the nineties.
80,000 Out of a Population of 60,00,000 People
By one estimate, that of 43,800 copies sold weekly in 1704, implies less than one newspaper buyer per hundred persons per week.
Rapid Success of Circulating Libraries
The extent to which economic factors retarded the expansion of the reading public, and especially that for the novel, is suggested by the rapid success of the non-proprietary or circulating libraries, as they were called after 1742 when the term was invented.
A few such libraries are recorded earlier, especially after 1725, but the rapid spread of the movement came after 1740, when the first circulating library was established in London, to be followed by at least seven others within a decade.
Most circulating libraries stocked all types of literature, but novels were widely regarded as their main attraction: and there can be little doubt that they led to the most notable increase in the reading public for fiction which occurred during the century. They certainly provoked the greatest volume of contemporary comment about the spread of reading to the lower orders.
The High Price of Books
It is likely, therefore, that until 1740 a substantial marginal section of the reading public was held back from a full participation in the literary scene by the high price of books; and further, that this marginal section was largely composed of potential novel readers, many of them women.
The distribution of leisure in the period supports and amplifies the picture already given of the composition of the reading public; and it also supplies the best evidence available to explain the increasing part in it played by women readers.
Addison is an early spokesman of a new trend. He wrote in the Guardian (1713):
'There are some reasons why learning is more adapted to the female world than to the male. As in the first place, because they have more spare time on their hands, and lead a more sedentary life…. There is another reason why those especially who are women of quality, should apply themselves to letters, namely, because their husbands are generally strangers to them.
'Poetry is a pretty thing enough for our wives and daughters; but not for us'
For the most part quite unashamed strangers, if we can judge by Goldsmith's busy man of affairs, Mr. Lofty, in The Good Natur'd Man (1768), who proclaims that 'poetry is a pretty thing enough for our wives and daughters; but not for us'.
Women of the upper and middle classes
Women of the upper and middle classes could partake in few of the activities of their menfolk, whether of business or pleasure. It was not usual for them to engage in politics, business or the administration of their estates, while the main masculine leisure pursuits such as hunting and drinking were also barred. Such women, therefore, had a great deal of leisure, and this leisure was often occupied by omnivorous reading.
Well-to-do women & Feminine Leisure
Many of the less well-to-do women also had much more leisure than previously. B. L. de Muralt had already found in 1694 that 'even among the common people the husbands seldom make their wives work'; and another foreign visitor to England, César de Saussure, observed in 1727 that tradesmen's wives were 'rather lazy, and few do any needlework'.
Feminine Leisure & Economic Change
These reports reflect the great increase in feminine leisure which had been made possible by an important economic change.
The old household duties of spinning and weaving, making bread, beer, candles and soap, and many others, were no longer necessary, since most necessities were now manufactured and could be bought at shops and markets.
Other Difficulties to Reading – Little Privacy
For those few who might have liked to read there were other difficulties besides lack of leisure and the cost of books.
The Window tax – Not Enough Light
There was little privacy, as, in London especially, housing was appallingly overcrowded; and there was often not enough light to read by, even by day. The window tax imposed at the end of the seventeenth century had reduced windows to a minimum, and those that remained were usually deepset, and covered with horn, paper or green glass.
Candles – A Luxury
At night lighting was a serious problem, since candles, even farthing dips, were considered a luxury. Richardson was proud of the fact that as an apprentice he bought them for himself, but others could not, or were not allowed to. James Lackington, for example, was forbidden to have light in his room by his employer, a baker, and claims to have read by the light of the moon!
Greatest single category of books – Religious Books
By far the greatest single category of books published in the eighteenth century, as in previous centuries, was that composed of religious works.
An average of over two hundred such works was published annually throughout the century.
The Pilgrim's Progress - although little noted by polite authors, and then usually with derision - went through one hundred and sixty editions by 1792; while at least ten devotional manuals had sales of over thirty editions during the eighteenth century, and many other religious and didactic works were equally popular!
These enormous sales, however, do not refute the view that eighteenth-century readers had increasingly secular tastes. To begin with, the number of religious publications does not seem to have increased in proportion either to the growth of the population or to the sales of other types of reading matter.
Defoe & Richardson – Combined Religious & Secular Interests in their Novels
On the other hand, many readers, especially those from the less educated strata of society, began with religious reading and passed on to wider literary interests. Defoe and Richardson are representative figures in this trend. Their forebears, and those of many of their readers, would in the seventeenth century have indulged in little but devotional reading; but they themselves combined religious and secular interests.
Defoe, of course, wrote both novels and works of piety such as his Family Instructor; while Richardson was conspicuously successful in carrying his moral and religious aims into the fashionable and predominantly secular field of fiction.
The most famous literary innovations of the century – Tatler & Spectator - Periodicals
This compromise, between the wits and the less educated, between the belles-lettres and religious instruction, is perhaps the most important trend in eighteenth century literature, and finds earlier expression in the most famous literary innovations of the century, the establishment of the Tatler in 1709 and of the Spectator in 1711.
The Spectator and the Tatler were much admired in Dissenting Academies and among other groups where most other secular literature was frowned on: and they were often the first pieces of secular literature encountered by uneducated provincial aspirants to letters.
Forming a Taste – The Role of the Periodical
The periodical essay did much in forming a taste that the novel, too, could cater for. Macaulay thought that if Addison had written a novel it would have been 'superior to any that we possess'; while T. H. Green, alluding to this, describes the Spectator as 'the first and best representative of that special style of literature - the only really popular literature of our time -which consists in talking to the public about itself. Humanity is taken as reflected in the ordinary life of men... and... copied with the most minute fidelity.'
10,000 Copies & Twenty Imitators
Dr. Johnson estimated the total circulation of the Magazine at ten thousand and stated that it had twenty imitators; while Cave himself asserted in 1741 that it was 'read as far as the English language extends, and... reprinted from several presses in Great Britain, Ireland and the Plantations'.
‘Gentleman’s’ Influence on the Novel
Two of the characteristic features of the Gentleman's Magazine - practical information about domestic life and a combination of improvement with entertainment - were later to be embodied in the novel.
But, although journalism had brought many new recruits for secular literature into the reading public, that public's taste for informative, improving, entertaining and easy reading had not as yet found an appropriate fictional form.
The Gentleman's Magazine also symbolises an important change in the organisation of the reading public.
The Spectator had been produced by the best writers of the day; it catered to middleclass taste, but by a sort of literary philanthropy.
Steele and Addison – Middle Class Way of Life
Steele and Addison were for the middle-class way of life but they were not exactly of it.
Less than a generation later, however, the Gentleman's Magazine showed a very different social orientation: it was directed by an enterprising but ill-educated journalist and bookseller, and its contributions were mainly provided by hacks and amateurs.
The Reason: The decline of literary patronage by the court and the nobility
The main reason for this prominence is clear: the decline of literary patronage by the court and the nobility had tended to create a vacuum between the author and his readers; and this vacuum had been quickly filled by the middlemen of the literary market-place, the publishers, or, as they were then usually called, the booksellers, who occupied a strategic position between author and printer, and between both of these and the public.
The Rise of the Bookseller
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the booksellers, especially those in London, had achieved a financial standing, a social prominence, and a literary importance considerably greater than that of either their forebears or of their counterparts abroad.
The Power of the Booksellers to Influence Authors & Audience
The power of the booksellers to influence authors and audience was undoubtedly very great, and it is therefore necessary to inquire whether this power was in any way connected with the rise of the novel.
‘Master Manufacturers’
Contemporary opinion was certainly much concerned with the new influence of the booksellers, and there were frequent assertions that it had had the effect of turning literature itself into a mere market commodity.
Writing as a Branch of the English Commerce
This view was expressed most succinctly by Defoe, in 1725 -
'Writing... is become a very considerable Branch of the English Commerce. The Booksellers are the Master Manufacturers or Employers. The several Writers, Authors, Copyers, Sub-writers, and all other Operators with Pen and Ink are the workmen employed by the said Master Manufacturers.'
Defoe did not condemn this commercialisation, but most of the spokesmen of traditional literary standards did so in emphatic terms.
Goldsmith, for example, often deplored ‘that fatal revolution whereby writing is converted to a mechanic trade; and booksellers, instead of the great, become the patrons and paymasters of men of genius’.
Fielding on the ‘Fatal Revolution’
Fielding went further, and explicitly connected this 'fatal revolution' with a disastrous decline in literary standards: he asserted that the 'paper merchants, commonly called booksellers', habitually employed 'journeymen of the trade' without 'the qualifications of any genius or learning', and suggested that their products had driven out good writing by the operation of a kind of Gresham's Law, forcing the public to 'drink cider water... because they can produce no other liquor'.
The novel was widely regarded as a typical example of the debased kind of writing by which the booksellers pandered to the reading public.
The Bookseller – Feels the Pulse of the Times
The sagacious Bookseller feels the Pulse of the Times, and according to the stroke, prescribes not to cure, but flatter the Disease: As long as the Patient continues to swallow, he continues to administer; and on the first Symptom of a Nausea, he changes the Dose. Hence the Cessation of all Political Carminatives, and the Introduction of Cantharides, in the shape of Tales, Novels, Romances, etc.
The Bookseller’s Bias for Large Works of Information
Until then, however, there is very little evidence that the booksellers played a direct part in stimulating the writing of novels; on the contrary, if we examine the works which the booksellers are known to have actively promoted, we find that their bias was primarily for large works of information such as Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia ( 1728), Johnson Dictionary ( 1755) and his Lives of the Poets ( 1779-1781), and many other historical and scientific compilations, which they commissioned on a lavish scale.
From The Control of Patronage to The Laws of The Market-Place
But if the booksellers did little or nothing to promote the rise of the novel directly, there are some indications that, as an indirect result of their role in removing literature from the control of patronage and bringing it under the control of the laws of the market-place, they both assisted the development of one of the characteristic technical innovations of the new form - its copious particularity of description and explanation - and made possible the remarkable independence of Defoe and Richardson from the classical critical tradition which was an indispensable condition of their literary achievement.
The most obvious result of the application of primarily economic criteria to the production of literature was to favour prose as against verse. In Amelia (1751) Fielding's hackney author makes this connection very clear:
'A sheet is a sheet with the booksellers; and, whether it be in prose or verse, they make no difference'. Consequently, finding that rhymes 'are stubborn things', the denizen of Grub Street turns away from writing poetry for the magazines and engages in the production of novels.
Defoe's own career had long before followed this course; after using the current medium of verse satire in his early career he turned to an almost exclusive use of prose.
The Age of Authors
'The present age', Dr. Johnson wrote, 'may be styled, with great propriety, the Age of Authors; for, perhaps, there never was a time in which men of all degrees of ability, of every kind of education, of every profession and employment, were posting with ardour so general to the press'.
Then, emphasising the contrast with the past, he added: 'The province of writing was formerly left to those who, by study or appearance of study, were supposed to have gained knowledge unattainable by the busy part of mankind'.
By virtue of their multifarious contacts with printing, bookselling and journalism, Defoe and Richardson were in very direct contact with the new interests and capacities of the reading public; but it is even more important that they themselves were wholly representative of the new centre of gravity of that public.
As middle-class London tradesmen they had only to consult their own standards of form and content to be sure that what they wrote would appeal to a large audience.
The ‘Changed Composition’ of The Reading Public And its Effects
This is probably the supremely important effect of the changed composition of the reading public and the new dominance of the booksellers upon the rise of the novel; not so much that Defoe and Richardson responded to the new needs of their audience, but that they were able to express those needs from the inside much more freely than would previously have been possible.
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