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How Did the Novel in English Come to Be?

The present English word, “Novel”, derives from the Italian novella for
"new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin
novella. A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has
historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern
romance. The roots of the novel extend as far back as the beginning of
communication and language because the novel is a compilation of various
elements that have evolved over the centuries.

The Romantic period saw the first flowering of the English novel. The
Romantic and the Gothic novel are closely related; both imagined almost-
supernatural forces operating in nature or directing human fate.

The English novel developed during the 18th century, partly in response to
an expansion of the middle-class reading public. One of the major early
works in this genre was the seminal castaway novel Robinson Crusoe, by
Daniel Defoe. The 18th century novel tended to be loosely structured and
semi-comic. There was a public demand for the novel. With the expansion
of the middle class, more people could read and they had money to spend
on literature. There was already a high interest in autobiography,
biography, journals, diaries, memoirs.
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A sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, must be something more
than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or neutral—that the novelist is
a cook, and must prepare and serve his materials with a sauce as much his
own as possible, of plot, arrangement, character-drawing, scenery,
conversation, reflection, and so on.

The four elements of the novel are sometimes, and not incorrectly, said to
be Plot, Character, Description, and Dialogue—Style, which some would
make a fifth, being rather a characteristic in another order of division.

Until quite late in the eighteenth century, the term "novel" was used very
loosely. Novel or fiction had been referring to Different uses as to any “tales
shorter than traditional romances”, or any “plot of love and deception. In the
late seventeenth century and early eighteenth, "novel" was often applied to
narratives much like romances

The rise of the novel in 1740 marks the end of prose fiction designed solely
for amusement and entertainment. The critical nature of the new type is
nearly always apparent from this date, and usually there is a well-defined
purpose clearly expressed in the author's preface.

The main purpose of the old romance was entertainment and amusement;
but this purpose changed when Richardson's first novel was given to the
public. After this event, all of the great eighteenth century novelists, under
the disguise of amusement, boldly and somewhat announce in their
preface that their object is "to promote the cause of religion and virtue."
they instruct the reader while showing vice and virtue in their true light.
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The theme of the eighteenth-century novel is the history of persons,
regarded as moral beings, and treated in relation to each other and to
society. The second and third quarters of the eighteenth century were
years particularly watchful and critical in all matters affecting the religious,
moral, social, and political conditions of the times.

Early eighteenth-century readers of travel narratives were apt to criticize

authors for making up tales rather than recording actual experiences.
Consequently, authors of the same period typically presented their writings
as manuscripts they had found and edited for public consumption. In this
way, Realism in the novel was synonymous with veracity: it denied
altogether its fictionality and, in prefaces and other narrative devices,
asserted its reality to the reader.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the reading public happily consumed
"novels"—those prose fictions understood to be an author's original
fabrication with wholly fictive characters and events. Since realism in these
works could not suggest anything about their veracity, it encompassed
instead the dominant meanings the term has today, "particularity of
description" and "the primacy of individual experience."

It is significant that the English novels underwent an entire change of

design during the process of composition. The tendency has been, as it
was in the Elizabethan drama, toward fullness of incident, plenty of
background, numerousness and variety of characters, rather than toward
concentration of interest and singleness of artistic purpose.

The result is frequently a lack of harmony in the design or an appearance

of negligence in the details of a plot, and a style marked rather by vigor and
natural grace than by subtlety or dexterity.
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The four writers who did really make contributions in improving the novel of
the 18th century are Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and
Jane Austen.

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)

Fiction is a mystery partly set a-working in the medieval romance, then

mostly lost, and later recovered by Daniel Defoe. Defoe is really the first of
the magicians. The writing of novels was a second thought which came to
Defoe late in life. Defoe commenced novelist at about the age of sixty.

In his novels, Defoe's first business is to impose the story on the reader for
truth. Clearness of sight and a fine sense of the harmony between big
things and small underlie what little art Defoe possesses in the telling of his
tales.

Defoe’s plots are of the "strong" order—the events succeed each other and
are fairly connected, but do not compose a history so much as a chronicle.
His descriptions are sufficient. But it is far from elaborate in any other way
and has hardly the least decoration or poetical quality. The illusion he
brings to bear upon our minds is perfect and complete, and his method is
the rapid addition of incident and episode. He never stops to explain his
narrative, and rarely makes comments upon it.

For most people Defoe means one book, and that, a book which has come
to be regarded as a boy's tale of adventure “Robinson Crusoe.” Robinson
Crusoe has no complications and no plot. When Crusoe finds himself on
the desert island, his first consideration is, "What was next to be done?”
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And the story tells simply and straightforwardly what was done -next.
Perhaps nobody, except Defoe, could tell a story in that way, and interest
generations of readers, from the boy who has just mastered the spelling of
his words to the learned pedant.

Certainly one great appeal which Robinson Crusoe makes is, that the
hero of the wonderful story is a very ordinary person, not a whit cleverer
than our poor selves. Anybody could play Crusoe's part without training.
He stands for each one of us. The simplicity of the tale carries us over into
the pages of the book. To read it is to adopt a special fashion of living for
the time being.

Richardson (1689-1761)

Samuel Richardson, founder of the modern novel, carried the development

of the English novel far on its way. Richardson introduces a wholly new
method of writing stories to be read. He does not try to interest the reader
in the story for its own sake, but in the moral he has to teach, and he
appeals, not to our interest in facts, but he attempts to evoke the feelings
and touch the emotions.

As a boy Richardson had served maids by writing their love letters; he

seemed to have a skill at this manner of love-making and when in the full
maturity of fifty years, certain London publishers requested him to write for
them a narrative which might stand as a model letter writer from which
country readers should know the right tone.
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Richardson's greatest contribution, however, was his introduction of
character insight to the novel. His use of the letter form eased the
discussion of Pamela's thought. He defined the form as "the most natural
and the least probable way of telling a story." Richardson claimed for the
method that it enabled the author to give a lively picture of the emotions
and feelings of the actors.

Richardson builds up his characters step by step touch by touch.

Richardson is not our first novelist of character but our first novelist of
feminine characters. He is the first to make novels effective and popular.

Richardson’s novels have moral purposes. They imply the contrast

between virtue and villainy, between innocence and guiltiness, between
love and lust. His novels are also sentimental, but this sort of sentimentality
was the fashion of the time. Richardson justified his fiction writing upon
moral grounds and upon those alone is shown in the descriptive title-page
of Pamela, "Published in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and
religion in the mind of youth of both sexes."

He wrote three novels Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. All the
three are epistolary novels (in a letter-form). Though he did not invent the
form, Richardson did invent the novel of common life. Richardson’s method
was progressive. For example, in Pamela, each letter is rather more
evoking than the one preceding. Pamela, the popular novel comprised of
32 letters, was the story of a maid who resisted several advances of her
lord until he proposed to her. Pamela writes letters too frequently, and
rather too well, she exactly represents the sentiments of the ignorant,
unsophisticated servant-girl. Richardson, with his Pamela extended the
scope of the novel to include a new meaning in character emotion.
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Fielding (1707-1754)

In the rise of the English novel in the eighteen-century, the name of Henry
Fielding shines as prominently as that of Samuel Richardson. Richardson
and Fielding, though recognized as classic masters in English novels, are
however widely different as novelists. Like Richardson, Fielding did not
write many novels. His notable novels include Joseph Andrews, The
History of Jonathan Wilds, The History of Tom Jones, and Amelia. His
novels are not in a letters form like Richardson’s. His method is direct, and
the story is developed through narration as well as conversation.

As playwright, as justice, as novelist, Fielding’s wit and humor were

repeatedly directed against the corruption and vice of the day. He earnestly
desired to expose sham and hypocrisy in politics, in society, and in religion;
consequently he marshaled all the wit and humor at his command to this
end, but he formulated no system or code of morality as did Richardson.

Fielding's literary life falls naturally into two divisions, the play-writing days,
and the period of the novels beginning with the year 1742.When he came
to the writing of novels, Fielding had not only conceived a strong sense of
literary responsibility, but he had formulated theories and ideals of work.

Fielding’s first notable novel Joseph Andrew, published in 1742, was

supposed to ridicule Richardson’s Pamela. Instead of the virtuous
maidservant, Fielding presents Joseph, an honest servant, who resists
seduction from his mistress. He is ultimately thrown out of employment for
resisting her. There follows a series of adventures on the road, where
Joseph is accompanied by Parson Adams, who becomes the source of
endless fun and comedy. He tells the story not for the sake of moralizing,
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like Richardson, but simply because it interests him and his only concern is
“to laugh men out of their follies”. Fielding was different, though, in that he
has been called "the first unashamed novelist in England" for his use of an
omniscient narrator over an autobiography form. In his writing, Fielding
knew he was creating something new - what he called the "comic prose
era." He parodied religion and added satire to his writing. Fielding's
Andrews furthered the scope of the novel. Joseph Andrews is a book which
is always new. It reflects the courage and virtue and humor and spirit of
adventure and mean vices which form the staple of human nature at all
times and in all places.

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Jane Austen’s novels present a record of the life of the upper middle
classes in Southern England at the end of the eighteenth century focusing
on practical social issues, especially marriage and money.

Austen’s first important achievement is to bring to the English novel

dramatic plots. She has the genius of a great dramatist. The unity of
purposes, the complete inter-dependence of the main plot and the sub-
plots, the perfect association of the action and the characters, and dramatic
irony make her plots highly dramatic. To this may be added the objectivity
of narration, the complete withdrawal of the creator from the creation, for
she hardly speak in her own person to give a direct comment.

Jane Austen has given us a multitude of characters. Remarkably, no two

villains are alike, nor two fools for even the greatest novelists are guilty of
repetition. However, her real achievement in characterization is the ironic
exposition of the ‘follies and nonsense’ of human manners. She excels in
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the depiction of the ridiculous and of the gap between a reality and an
appearance.

Her most important contribution to the English novels is her ironic world
view. This view lies in the recognition of the fact that man is confronted with
the choice of two things that are mutually exclusive. The two are equally
attractive, equally desirable, but ironically, incompatible. Ironically, the
theme of Pride and Prejudice is the contrast between complexity and
Simplicity. Both the qualities have their own attractions and dangers in
them. Perhaps one would like to be simple and complicated all at once, but
that is not possible; which is the irony. Jane Austen projects this ironic
world view practically in all her novels. Pride and Prejudice, like most of
Jane Austen's works, employs the narrative technique of free indirect
speech. This has been defined as "the free representation of a character's
speech, by which one means, not words actually spoken by a character,
but the words that typify the character's thoughts, or the way the character
would think or speak, if she thought or spoke."
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Documentation

 Williams, Harold. Two Centuries Of The English Novel. London.

Waterloo Place, 1911

 Herber, Charles. The Eighteenth-Century Novel In Theory And Practice.

Virginia. The Ruebush-Kieffer Company,

 Burton, Richard. Masters Of The English Novel. New York. Henry Holt
And Company, 1909

 Saintsbury, George. The English Novel. London.1913

 http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/novel.htm
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_novel
 http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/origins.htm
 http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=11675
 http://literarism.blogspot.com/2011/04/richardsons-contribution-to-
novel.html
 http://literary-articles.blogspot.com/2009/06/discuss-contribution-of-
samuel.html
 http://www.cssforum.com.pk/css-optional-subjects/group-i/english-
literature/240-jane-austens-contribution-english-novel.html