S. Richardson (1689-1761)

Mid-century novel. Sentimentalism.

Sentimentalism emerged in England in the mid- to late eighteenth century. It reflected a similar trend in continental literature at the time. Literary sentimentalism or "sensibility" prioritized feeling. It developed primarily as a middle-class phenomenon. It reflected the emphasis on compassion or feeling as a desirable character trait in the appearing middle class. In England by the 1770s the rise of sensibility was also linked to a growing concern for the suffering of others. This was reflected in the antislavery movement, concerns about child labor, and the campaigns for better hospitals, prison reform, and charity schools.

The word "sentimental" is first known to have appeared in print in English in the 1740s. Becoming almost immediately popular, the term was used to describe the emotional state of a sensitive and "genteel" person, and sentiment began to play an important role in literature. Among the earliest British novelists that proclaimed the rise of sentimentalism was. Samuel Richardson. S. Richardson’s contribution to the development of the novel lies in his attention to his character’s psychological profiles.

S. Richardson (1689-1761)

Born in 1689 in Mackworth, Derbyshire, Samuel Richardson was the son of a carpenter and had little formal education. Although his parents hoped he would enter the priesthood, financial troubles forced him to find paid work in the printing business. Richardson joined the trade as an apprentice in 1706, and set up his own printing shop thirteen years later. He printed several periodicals, most of which were political in nature.

Richardson’s first novel was written almost by accident. As a printer, Richardson was asked to construct a set of “familiar letters,” models to help country people write to their families.

Richardson provided ideal letters of consolation, excuses for not lending money, formal recommendations for chambermaids, but among them he included some letters from a servant girl to her parents, asking what she should do when faced with her master’s sexual advances. Richardson’s friends enjoyed this plot and asked for more of it. Richardson based the novel on an account of real-life events in which a serving maid resists the amorous advances of her employer. He published Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded in 1740. The novel was an instant sensation.

It was written in epistolary form. This form was already popular in France but Richardson took it to new heights. Pamela’s letters are private and immediate and a reader of them becomes an intruder into her confessions. The epistolary form presented Pamela’s first-person jottings directly to the reader. Richardson explored the psychological dimension of characters and showed a deep insight into the working of the heart. Richardson’s objects in writing Pamela were moral instruction and commercial success. Richardson felt that the best vehicle for a moral lesson was an exemplary character; he also felt that the most effective presentation of an exemplary character was a realistic presentation. It evoked the reader’s sympathy and identification.

In 1742 Richardson published a second part to Pamela. The heroine is displayed as a perfect wife and mother, who writes long letters of advice on moral, domestic and general subjects.

By the summer of 1742 Richardson had begun work on what was to become his masterpiece. Richardson’s second novel Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady was published in 1747-1748. Although he had finished the first version of the novel by 1744, he continued to revise it for several years. It tells the storey of a well-bred young lady who, against the advice of her family, elopes with an unscrupulous dishonest man. He holds her prisoner and rapes her. When she realizes she has made a mistake she distances herself from her persecutor and dies alone in shame and grief. The massive work, which stands as one of the longest novels in the English language, contains 547 letters, most written by the heroine, Clarissa Harlowe, her friend, Anna Howe, the dashing villain, Lovelace, and his confidant, John Belford. While almost all of the letters in Pamela are written by Pamela, four principal writers in Clarissa provide a more complex plot. Richardson also set out to raise the social level of his story. Instead of the voice of a servant girl, he adopts the language of the upper classes. He takes his goal of moralizing through entertainment further than he had in Pamela. Clarissa is less of a conduct book. It is a Christian parable (притча). Clarissa dies a Christian death, having rediscovered the meaning of her sufferings. She is the first great bourgeois heroine.

For his third and final novel Richardson chose a male protagonist. Sir Charles Grandison was published in 1753–1754. It has proved much less influential over time than either Pamela or Clarissa. The novel tells the storey of Sir Charles, who is torn by his love for a beautiful English woman, Harriet Byron, and an Italian noble lady, Clementina Porretta. Charles is saved from his dilemma when at the last minute Catholic Clementina refuses to marry a Protestant. Richardson's History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-1754), marks a significant departure from his earlier works.

Richardson died in 1761 in London, leaving a bold mark on the British novel and on European culture as well.

Henry Fielding (1707 – 1754)

Henry Fielding was born in 1707 into an aristocratic family. Fielding lost his mother in 1718, and his father remarried just a year later and began immediately to raise a new family. That same year Fielding began his education at Eton.

Fielding started his career in drama. His first play, Love in Several Masques, was produced in February of 1728 at the Drury Lane Theater, with encouraging results. Fielding would go on to write over twenty plays and farces, the most successful of which was The Tragedy of Tragedies, or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great. In the meantime, however, Fielding spent some time between 1728 and 1729 in Holland at the University of Leyden as a law student.

In 1734 Fielding married Charlotte Craddock of Salisbury. He later modeled the heroine of Tom Jones, Sophia Western, on his wife. In 1740 he was called to the bar. He began to earn a living as a barrister, supplementing this work with extensive writings for political journals such as The Champion and later, the Jacobite's Journal.

His true talent emerged however when he turned to novel writing. His first novel is a parody of S. Richardson’r Pamela. Fielding attacked the sentimentality, hypocrisy and middle class moralizing of Richardson’s work. In his novel The Apology for the life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741) he depicts Richardson’s central heroine not as a virtuous girl but as a scheming social climber. His second novel was The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams. It was published in 1742. It tells the story of Pamela’s good and modest brother who has to defend his virtue from the attacks of his mistress. The novel was also making fun of Pamela. But its characters and plot developed independently of that text.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling was published in 1749. Almost every aspect of Fielding's own life is apparent in the novel, from the love and reverence he had for his first wife to his extensive knowledge of the Southwestern part of England. Even Tom Jones himself clearly shows the markings of Fielding, exhibiting the same careless good nature as well as a deeply entrenched awareness of poverty and the reversals of fortune.

Tom Jones is theaccount of the fall and rise of a vital but imprudent (неблагоразумный) young man. Tom is 'a foundling,' with a generous heart but a weak will. Several features of his novel mark it out as a clear development of the works of Defoe and Richardson:

1. The plot is no longer a serious of episodes or a single storey; it involves a large cast of characters of various social ranks. The episodes are interwoven in a structured and orgnised way.

2. Each of the novels 18^th books is prefaced by an introductory chapter. In which the reader is remained that what he is reading is fiction. Instructions are given on how to approach what was a new literary form.

3. An omniscient 3^rd person narrator is used to comment on the action. The reader is not asked to identified with protagonists and the detachment allows to appreciate the comic effects.

4. The storey is not used as a vehicle for Puritan moralizing.

Fielding’s classical education and aristocratic family background distinguished him from other novelists like Defoe and Richardson. He considered the novel to be a comic epic in prose. It dealt not with heroic actions but with events of everyday life.

Fielding published his last novel, Amelia, in 1751. Although it is considered inferior to Fielding's two earlier novels, Amelia was an immediate commercial success.

In an attempt to regain his health, he set out for Lisbon in 1754 with his wife and daughter. Unfortunately, either the change of climate came too late or did him no good, and he died there Oct. 8, 1754. The journey is recorded with good humor and charm in his final work, Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, which was published in 1755.

5. Second half of the 18^th century: a period of transition in poetry

The second half of the eighteenth century was a time of changing standards in church, state and literature. The philosophy of the time was changing. In France Jean Jacques Rousseau questioned the importance of reason. For him emotions and imagination were of primary importance. There began to be a revolt against the narrow classical standards in literature. Rationalism and elevated sentiments of the early part of the century gave way to a simple more genuine form of expression. A longing gradually manifested itself for more freedom of imagination. There was a departure from hackneyed forms and subjects of the preceding age. There was a renewed interest in nature and the simple rural life.

In English literature the earliest evidence of this cultural shift can be seen in the poetry of Thomas Gray and the Graveyard poets.

Thomas Gray’s (1716-1771)

Thomas Gray was born in London to a prosperous middle-class family. Educated first in Eton he went on to Cambridge where he became friend with Horace Walpole, the son of Prime Minister. He travelled around Europe in 1739-1741. Soon after his return to England< Gray’s father and then his close friend Richard West died. Gray returned to live with his mother for a short time in a small village Stoke Poges. While there he wrote The Sonnet on the Death of Richard West, Ode on Adversity and the unfinished Hymn to Ignorance. After this period of reclusion he returned to Cambridge. He graduated in Law in 1743. He was then appointed Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. He died in 1771.

Gray was by inclination and cultivation withdrawn and melancholic. His fines verse reflects a taste for mediation rather than action. Thomas Gray’s reputation rests upon a handful of poems written in the middle years of the century. Elegy Written in a country Graveyard is generally considered to be his masterpiece.

Elegy a poem in which the speaker laments оплакивать death of a particular person or the loss of something he valued.

It was published in 1751. In it the poet walks around the graveyard reflecting on the mortality of the villagers who are buried there. In the final lines the poet considers his own death and composes his epitaph. The poem is sentimental, melancholic in nature. It’s introspective. It marked a clear shift from classical style and foreshadowed the Romantic period.

Little material was to follow his great poetic masterpiece. In 1753 he published a small collection of 6 poems and later his two Pindaric odes (пиндарические стихи, оды (в стиле древнегреческого поэта Пиндара), The Bard (1757) and Progress of Poesy (1754). They offer both a tribute to Greek poetic form and an experimental interest in new kind of subject. Gray’s Odes reveal a lyric poet experimenting both with an elevated mood and a weighty historical moral. The Progress of Poesy traces patriotic genealogy for English verse. The author depicts the history of verse tradition that moves from Greece and Rome to England.

He then started doing research for a history of English poetry which he intended to write. He also travelled around Scotland and England. This travelling revealed his great interest in ancient Celtic and Norse poetry and his love of nature. In 1768 he published Poems which included his imitations of Celtic and Norse verse, such as The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin (1761). Gray boldly attempts to interfuse a Celtic tradition and an English inheritance within a classical framework.

Gray’s work inspired a group of poets known as Graveyard poets. Like Gray they found inspiration in graveyard and wrote on the theme of mortality. They emphasized the subjects of death, and bereavement тяжёлая утрата in their writings. While reveling in the images of death and the grave, the poets in the Graveyard school sought to describe death in a way such that the reader would gain an appreciation of death as a transitional phase. They also introduce detailed imagery evoking the grave and the tomb, and lay stress on subjective experience, often incorporating personal material from the poet's own life. In their emphasis on the personal and individual, the Graveyard poets are often viewed as precursors of Romanticism. In addition, the Graveyard school, with its depictions of graves, churchyards, night, death, and ghosts, has been seen as laying the groundwork for Gothic literature. The so‐called ‘graveyard school’ of poets in England and Scotland was not in fact an organized group. The best‐known examples of this melancholic kind of verse are ‘A Night‐Piece on Death’ (1721) by the Irish poet Thomas Parnell, Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742–6), the Scottish clergyman Robert Blair's The Grave (1743), and the culmination of this tradition in English, Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy

Drama

At the end of the 17^th century middle and low classes lived by a strict puritan moral code, and considered theater going to be immoral, so drama became a form of entertainment for the upper classes. As the Court had been in France during the greater part of the Protectorate all of them were familiar with Paris and its fashions. Thus it was natural, upon the return of the court, that French influence should be felt, particularly in the theater. The French influence can be seen in a new type of drama called heroic tragedy. Heroic tragedies:

ü Tried to emulate epic poetry

ü Were mainly about love and valour; the main character was generally a hero whose passionate love conflicted with the demands of honour and his patriotic duty

ü Were written in rhyming couplets and in an elevated style, both of which made the language extremely artificial.

Dryden’s All for Love is a good example of this type of drama.

A new type of play, called the Comedy of Manners appeared at the end of 17^th century.

The main features of the Comedy of Manner can be summed up as following:

ü It reflected the life of the Court, which was portrayed as being immoral, corrupt and licentious but also elegant, witty and intelligent

ü The main targets of criticism were middle class values and ideals, conventions, hypocrisy and the institution of marriage. True love was rarely a theme of a play

ü The dialogues were prose; the comic effect was achieved mostly through the wit and sparkle of the dialogue, which was often in the form of ‘repartee’ – verbal fencing match of witty comments and replies

ü While in Elizabethan drama comic characters were usually low and humble in origin, in the Comedy of Manners they were aristocratic ladies and gentlemen

ü Two new male character types were created: the gallant ad the fop. The gallant was usually the hero of the play. The flop was a figure of fun ridiculed for his stupidity and pompous pretentiousness

ü The leading female characters usually had no feelings or morals. Their only interests were fashion and breaking their marital vows

ü The characters usually had names that captured some aspects of their personality (Scandal, Lady Fidget)

ü The plays had no moral didactic purpose, they were written merely to entertain the audience.

The 18th century was not a particularly interesting period for drama. Theatrical performances were censored. That made many talented writers turn their attention from drama to novel. While 17th century theatre goes were largely aristocratic, the 18th century audience was predominantly middle class and dictated new trends:

ü The 17th century comedy of manners was rejected for its amorality

ü Shakespeare continued to be performed but his plays were often cut and transformed to suit the public’s taste.

ü Melodramas (unimaginative sentimental pieces with strong didactic element) became very popular but were of little literary value

ü Pantomime - a mixture of singing, dancing, and knockabout comedy was very fashionable.

Towards the end of the century a more refined version of Comedy of Manners again became popular.

Seminar Questions:

1. Mid-century novel:

S.Richardson. Life and works. “Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady”

H.Fielding. Life and works. “ The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling”

2. Poetry of the second half of the 18^th century.

3. Development of drama in the 17^th-18^th centuries.

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