AN OVERVIEW OF LATE 18th - EARLY 19th CENTURY FICTION

The last three decades of the 18th century saw a great amount of new fiction written and published in England. The novel had risen at the beginning of the  century to respond to the needs of culture and education of the new ascending social class: the bourgeoisie. A new sensibility was now spreading and , though the audience was still made up of upper and middle-class readers, the novelists offered a great variety of new genres rooted in and indebted to the previous production of Richardson, Fielding or Sterne but different and original in many ways

If you have a look at the chart below, you’ll immediately realize that the major representatives of the three main kinds of novel wrote or published more or less in the same years.

	THE GOTHIC NOVEL	THE NOVEL OF MANNERS	THE HISTORICAL NOVEL
1764	Horace Walpole, THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO
1794	Ann Radcliffe, THE MISTERIES OF UDOLPHO
1795		Jane Austen writes ELINOR AND MARIANNE, first epistolary edition of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
1796	Matthew Lewis, THE MONK
1797	Ann Radcliffe, THE ITALIAN	Jane Austen finishes PRIDE AND PREJUDICE but it is refused by publishers
1798		Jane Austen writes NORTHANGER ABBEY, a parody of Gothic novels
1811		Jane Austen publishes SENSE AND SENSIBLILITY
1813		Jane Austen publishes PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
1814		J.A. publishes MANSFIELD PARK	Walter Scott publishes WAVERLEY
1816	Mary Shelley starts writing FRANKENSTEIN	Jane Austen publishes EMMA
1818	Mary Shelley publishes FRANKENSTEIN	Jane Austen’s brother publishes her sister’s PERSUASION and NORTHANGER ABBEY in one volume posthumously (J.A. died 1817)
1819			Walter Scott publishes IVANHOE

 Historical background

-          The last three decades of the 18th century or the Age of the Revolutions:

1.       The Industrial and  the Agrarian Revolutions

2.       The American War for Independence (1775 – 1783)

3.       The French Revolution (1789)

  

-          The Regency Era

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817)

The period between 1811 and 1820 is called Regency. In 1811 King George III of Hanover was deemed unfit to rule and his son the Prince of wales was instated to be his proxy as Prince Regent. In 1820 he became King with the name of George IV on the death of his father.

Both Jane Austen and Walter Scott were read and admired by the Prince Regent who wanted to meet them (in separate moments!). Austen’s EMMA was dedicated to him.

      B.   THE ORIGINS OF THE GOTHIC TASTE - A NEW CONCEPTION OF BEAUTY

A new taste for the desolate, the love of ruins, graveyards, ancient castles and abbeys, was part of a revival of interest in a past perceived as contrasting with the present reality. The rediscovery of the art, architecture, legends and popular traditions of the Middle Ages manifested itself in the “Gothic”, which was no longer synonymous with barbarity, but became a facet of exoticism.

The Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume(1711-1776) denied the objectivity of experience as stated by Locke and wrote: “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty”.

Joseph Addison, in his journal The Spectator, made the distinction between beauty and sublime, which became a main theme in the 19th century aesthetics. The most interesting development of this idea can be found in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of Sublime and Beautiful (1756-59).

Henry Fuseli, The  Nightmare (1781)

The sublime arises neither from the pleasure produced by beautiful forms, nor from the detached contemplation of the object, but it has its roots in the feeling of fear and horror created by what is infinite and terrible. For example, void, obscurity, loneliness and silence are sublime; the tall oaks are sublime, while flower-beds are beautiful, the night is sublime, whereas the day is beautiful.

This “horrible beauty” identified by Burke gave aesthetic dignity to anything ugly existing in nature, and affected late 18th century literature. The taste for obscurity, terror and introspection became the distinguishing feature of the Gothic novel.