The Insistent I

Abstract

Critical attention to the eighteenth-century English novel almost always centers on one of five writers, and the result has been historically crippling. It may well be that Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne wrote, among them, all of the best English novels in the eighteenth century, but in looking only at the best we serve the narrowest interests of literary criticism at the expense of the broadest and most useful interests of literary history. Students of eighteenth-century fiction today seldom can provide a cogent account of how work developed from work or author from author, and a proper criticism demands a greater contextual sense than that readily available to us for individual texts, not to mention the richer interpretations that would be possible if we had a fuller sense of the novel's origins and its relationship to competing genres and modes. And because recent criticism has concentrated so totally on landmarks, broader attention to the nature of the eighteenth-century novel has become virtually nonexistent, so that questions about the distinguishing characteristics of the novel are very indifferently addressed when addressed at all. In this essay I want to suggest some of the facets of that character by discussing a writer who is neither a novelist nor a very talented writer of any kind, but whose work may tell us something about the books that follow in his wide wake. My subject is John Dunton, the bookseller and publisher of the 1680s and 90s, and journalist, anthologist, and occasional writer through the 1720s, and my thesis is that he deserves, for some rather complex reasons, an extensive chapter in any history of narrative. I want to suggest that traditional literary history makes a serious mistake in considering only the geniuses and accomplished craftsmen who create masterpieces in new genres while ignoring the cultural conditions, events, and minor or failed personages who set the stage. I am not going to claim that John Dunton is a neglected genius or a great writer, or that his works should now all be issued in Norton Critical Editions, but I do want to suggest what his pervasive presence on the landscape of print means for the way narrative began to go in the early eighteenth century. My hope is to illuminate the nature of the new form of fiction that became prominent in England and on the Continent during the eighteenth century, suggesting a few of the many features that define what was then new about the novel, for one of our most insistent needs is to transcend the old simplistic distinctions that divide novel from romance and that find the identity of novels in one single, allimportant feature such as realism, organic unity, or individualism.