Did You Say Middle Class?: The Question of Taste and the Rise of the Novel

Abstract

Did You Say Middle Class? The Question of Taste and the Rise of the Novel Robert Mayer The different ways of relating to realities and fictions, of believing in fictions and the realities they simulate, with more or less distance and detachment , are very closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and, consequently, bound up with the systems of dispositions ... characteristic of the different classes and class fractions. Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.1 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction One of the principal ways that Ian Watt set the terms for exploring the appearance and growing importance of the novel in England in the long eighteenth century was to argue that the novel was made possible by a great shift in the socio-cultural field of early modern Britain, a shift Watt described as an alteration in "the centre of gravity of the reading public sufficient ... to place the middle class as a whole in a dominating position for the first time."2 Watt's argument was not new, and it has, in one 1 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (France, 1979; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 5-6. References are to this edition. The title of this essay was suggested by the appendix to Bourdieu, "Price Formation and the Anticipation of Profits," Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 90-102. 2 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), p. 48. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 278 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION sense or another, been repeated in much of the scholarship on the novel in the years since he published his study. As early as 1860, a writer in Fraser's Magazine argued that Samuel Richardson's Pamela was aimed at "the class to which its heroine belonged," and Ernest A. Baker, in his History of the English Novel, pointed out that Thomas Deloney (like Daniel Defoe after him) "knew the people whom he portrayed [weavers and clothiers] ... had shared their lot, and was, in fact, writing for them to read." Recently, J. Paul Hunter, examining Watt's '"triple rise' thesis," accepted the latter's "fundamental assumptions about literary origins" and set out to demonstrate "that the newly literate took their needs and desires to other reading materials before there were novels to address them."3 Yet although the idea that the novel is a form engendered by the rise ofthe middle class to prominence and power in England and one that responded to middle-class taste has long been one of the grounding assumptions of discussions of eighteenth-century English fiction, all scholars of the novel have recognized that such assertions raise more questions than they answer. What does it mean to invoke the concept of the middle class in the context of early modern Britain? How does one discern and describe the elusive phenomenon that is "taste"? Are there such things as "class tastes" and how does one specify a class taste?4Watt dealt with the last two sets ofquestions through content analysis and thereby set a pattern that most scholars have followed. He found in the works of Defoe and Richardson in particular the crucial values and beliefs of the newly risen middle class: individualism, capitalism, Puritanism, and a new view of love, sexuality, and gender roles. Hunter continues this tradition with his analyses of "what was new about the novel" and of "what was on the minds of potential readers" in the eighteenth century.5 These discussions and others like them are of 3 W.F.P., "British Novelists—Richardson, Miss Austen, Scott," Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country 61 (Jan.-June 1860), 26; Ernest A. Baker, The History of the English Novel, 10 vols (1936; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960), 2:171; for a similar assertion about Defoe, see 3:227. J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts ofEighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 66, 68; the "triple rise thesis" is that...