Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain

Abstract

In opposing ways these similarly titled books offer many insights into the eighteenth-century novel; in combination, they exemplify the best current methods of studying the history of literary genres. Leah Orr’s survey of the fiction published in England between 1690 and 1730—468 titles, including reprints of earlier works and translations of foreign works—challenges conclusions about “the novel” that draw on a highly selective set of examples. Joseph Drury’s claim that eighteenth-century novelists conceived of their works as narrative machines is thus open to question, depending as it does on four primary examples: Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho. Yet Orr’s otherwise persuasive argument—“booksellers published what they believed would sell, and . . . exerted far greater influence on the development of fiction than did individual authors or acts of creative genius” (5)—treats literary texts as if they existed in a vacuum; she ignores the historical events that shaped the book trade and that might have led authors to write about certain topics in a certain way and at a certain time. And Drury’s dazzling readings of how Haywood’s seduction scenes contributed to debates on free will and how Radcliffe’s use of acoustics imagined the novel as an “ethereal instrument” that might heal readers from the nerve-jangling effects of modern life aptly support his assertion that “the history of any technical device is incomplete without an account of the social and cultural conditions that help constitute and sustain it” (3). The differences between these thoroughly researched and elegantly written books suggest that the study of the eighteenth-century novel is flourishing, as Orr and Drury each challenge a literary paradigm that was established decades ago and is perhaps overdue for updating.Orr takes on the supposed opening of the eighteenth-century canon in John Richetti’s Popular Fiction before Richardson (1969), J. Paul Hunter’s Before Novels (1990), and other prominent studies. Circumscribed by the technological limitations of their time—before the creation of Eighteenth Century Collections Online and the digitization of the English Short Title Catalogue—these studies excluded the majority of fiction published during the eighteenth century and thus still undervalued its variety. By examining publication records and advertisements, the first part of Novel Ventures seeks to “reconstruct . . . the economic and social contexts of the fiction market—in order to understand better what the original readers might have thought of these texts, and what their expectations for fiction were” (15). Orr demonstrates that fewer than 20 percent of the households in England could have purchased the fiction that previous critics have designated as “popular”—for instance, the scandal tales and seduction fiction of Delarivier Manley and Haywood (28)—and that about 70 percent of the fiction published between 1690 and 1730 “did not name the real author on the title page,” a statistic that is “startling . . . considering that this is the age that supposedly saw the emergence of the professional writer and the rise of the novel” (75, 76). When the first printing of a novel sold well, the author’s name might be added to subsequent editions and subsequent works by the same individual, creating a brand of sorts.Orr’s focus on the material characteristics of novels and the conditions of their publication sheds light on who might have bought them and why, but the conclusions drawn from her meticulous research are sometimes overstated. Orr may have found “no distinction in price between books of the same length but different literary merit,” but this does not mean, as Orr claims, that books were valued solely as material commodities, “irrespective of their intellectual contents” (35, 33). After all, the intellectual value of books has never determined their market price, but it does not follow that we value them solely as material objects.The second part of Novel Ventures examines the fiction market by looking in detail at reprints, foreign translations, and, among new novels written in English, those written for a purpose beyond entertainment and those written for entertainment. Orr acknowledges that this is a slippery distinction but defines the former as including allegories, satires, and “scandalogues”—all modes of writing in which fiction is “a means to an end rather than an end in itself” (183). This section requires a fair amount of plot summary, as most of the works that Orr discusses will be unfamiliar to all but a handful of scholars. But this descriptive work is valuable for precisely that reason. Orr does a great service in documenting the exclusivity of most accounts of early eighteenth-century fiction, and I hope that her deft, often humorous summaries of little-known works will encourage scholars to explore this territory further. In the end, though, her explanation of why some fiction was successful, meriting several reprintings, while other stories were tossed into the dustbin of literary history simply confirms the theory underlying “great books” courses. Successful novels “were those that were versatile enough to appeal to different types of readers and that could be entertaining even after the original circumstances for their publication had disappeared” (225). In other words, they had transcendent, possibly even universal, significance.John Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary and, albeit indirectly, Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction (both 1987) presumed that the technical mediation of human subjectivity must always be disciplinary or even exploitative. Novel Machines replies by showing that eighteenth-century novelists drew on the “plural, contingent, and ambiguous meanings of machines” during Britain’s Industrial Enlightenment to address “the problem of how the novel mediates human subjectivity, how it helps constitute experience and shapes behavior” (10). Where Bender and Armstrong invoked Michel Foucault to explain the novel’s disciplinary strategies, Drury turns to Bruno Latour, demonstrating the common tendency in literary studies to legitimate our ideas by recourse to an extraliterary and seemingly more scientific framework. That Latour pretty much disappears from Novel Machines after the introduction indicates that Drury’s ideas can stand on their own merits.The constructivist approach that Drury shares with Latour suggests that novel machines could mediate human subjectivity in a variety of ways, just as the same tool can be used to perform several tasks or solve a range of problems. In the first part of the century, mimetic theories of literature assumed that readers would emulate characters in novels; subsequently, the development of an expressivist theory of literature raised anxieties about the overstimulating effects of novel reading. Thus Drury argues that efforts “to transform the novel into an Enlightenment machine in the first half of this period . . . helped establish some of the most distinctive formal features of realist fiction,” while “several of the innovative narrative forms that emerged in the second were shaped by the effort to re-engineer the novel’s machinery in such a way as to mitigate what were seen as the negative consequences of that transformation” (4).This distinction between the endeavors of early and late eighteenth-century novelists, although undoubtedly schematic, allows Drury to bring together novelists who do not often find themselves in the same book. His conclusions illuminate not only the eighteenth century’s “culture of unprecedented technological innovation and ingenuity” (2) but also unexpected literary genealogies. For instance, Haywood’s contrast between the male “libertine machine,” whose materialism relieves him of responsibility for his actions, and the female “thinking machine,” who exercises deliberative free will, “lays the foundations for the domestic fiction that would flourish later in the century” (54). And the “boundary-work” that Fielding performs in Tom Jones as he differentiates science from spectacle and the “rational machinery” of the modern novel from the supernatural machinery of its predecessors unexpectedly clears the way for Radcliffe’s female gothic.The chapters on Sterne and Radcliffe address the anxieties raised by the rapidity and efficiency of life in the Industrial Enlightenment. “For Sterne,” Drury claims, “the fast-moving linear plotting of modern novels was the pre-eminent aesthetic expression of this new culture of mobility” (109). The “subversion of conventional linear narrative” in Tristram Shandy was not an “unambiguous rejection of mechanization” but a modification that encouraged readers to enjoy the pleasures of the moment rather than hasten toward the end (110). Radcliffe’s novels were similarly therapeutic in intent, turning from the visual spectacles mocked by Fielding to acoustic effects. Drury reveals similarities between Radcliffe’s novels and the “ethereal instruments” featured in them (146): both were intended to restore the nerves to health and bring the mind back in tune with nature.Although neither Orr nor Drury provides—or aims to provide—a definitive account of the genre, Novel Ventures and Novel Machines demonstrate that the teleological “rise of the novel” narrative that shaped studies of eighteenth-century fiction for so long has outlived its usefulness. Orr offers instead a detailed examination of a discrete period of time that privileges comprehensiveness over a developmental narrative. While Drury shows novelists in the latter half of the eighteenth century responding to technological and narrative innovations in the former half, these responses are contingent rather than progressive. As Sterne might have hoped, Novel Ventures and Novel Machines show that it is possible to enjoy the pleasures of the moment when studying the novel.