How the Novel Became Middle Class

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How the Novel Became Middle Class: A History of Histories of the Novel Author(s): GEORGE BOULUKOS Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 42, No. 2, Theories of the Novel Now, Part I (SUMMER

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How the Novel Became Middle Class: A History of Histories of the Novel

GEORGE BOULUKOS

The sociological status of the novel has played an odd, important, and largely unrecognized role in the development of English studies. Indeed, I contend, argu ments about the novel (here I mean the eighteenth-century British novel, to be

precise) and its history have reflected the self-imagining of the position of English departments in the university, particularly at key moments in their history. Hence

arguments about the novel, in a social history defined in terms of class conflict, as the cultural self-expression of a rising class of puritan merchants in the early eighteenth century are also?indeed, in a sense, are more accurately?arguments about the possibility of displacing classical education as an aristocratic relic and instead having nonelite, professionalized university professors teach the humani ties through the novel (as the most vernacular of forms) to middle-class students

while also keeping a careful distance from the degrading coarseness of popular culture.

My argument arises, initially, from a striking discrepancy between the his

toriography of the novel and that of class in England. Historians have long cast doubt on the "rise of the middle class" in the eighteenth century. Even before Ian

Watt's Rise of the Novel J. H. Hexter's 1950 essay "The Myth of the Middle Class in

Tudor England" pointed out that historians examining any period in English his

tory from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries have found a rising bourgeoisie. Hexter therefore wonders how seriously we can take claims of the cultural impact of such "rising middle classes" on any given historical moment. In this essay I

hope to follow Dror Wahrman's Imagining the Middle Class by viewing the linkage of the novel with the middle class as itself always political and strategic. Unlike the few other scholars of the novel to attempt to take on the historical plausibility of an eighteenth-century English middle class, I do not try to offer a more accurate

social history of the eighteenth-century novel (Downie, Hudson); instead I offer an interpretation of the cultural meaning of the emergence of the link between the novel and the middle class, a linkage I argue first solidifies at the end of the nineteenth century.

In outline, then, my argument is that the powerful and persistent notion of the novel as somehow middle class is neither organic and self-evident nor the result of the special insight of Ian Watt, its most famous proponent. Instead it is the result of market-oriented self-positioning on the part of the emergent late nineteenth

century literature departments and of the arguments of the literary histories that

served as their primary textbooks. Before analyzing this moment when the asso

ciation of the novel and the middle class was forged, I will establish the rather

impressive failure to make such a connection over the first century or so of studies

of the novel.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42:2 DOI 10.1215/00295132-2009-011 ? 2009 by Novel, Inc.


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246 NOVEL I SUMMER 2009

Although the titles of the earliest studies of the novel suggestively invoke both

"history" and "progress," the debates they engage in do not concern sociology but rather what might be called the practical morality of the genre. I have in mind here, for instance, William Warner's account in Licensing Entertainment of novel and anti novel discourse among eighteenth-century novelists themselves. The moment that Homer Obed Brown identifies as the key institution of the novel?the first decades of the nineteenth century?saw the consolidation of the argument for the novel's

practical morality. The central debate at that moment, for instance, in consider ations of the history of prose fiction by Dr. John Moore, Anna Laetitia Barbauld,

Hugh Murray, and John Dunlop (all published between 1797 and 1810) is whether or not modern novels are capable of providing worthwhile "social instruction," with the answer being increasingly positive and increasingly bolstered by the care ful selection of a canon defined through this very criterion.

John Moore is typical of the laborers who produced this first institution of the novel: a novelist himself, he writes to introduce the collected works of a novelist for whose value he is arguing. In his 1797 "View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance"?introductory to the collected works of Smollett?Moore concedes that the superiority of "moral essays or sermons" to novels is unquestionable but also argues that

persons of dissipated minds, incapable of attention, who stand most in need of instruc

tion, are least willing to receive it; they throw such hooks down the moment they perceive their drift. But a romance in the highest degree entertaining, may he written with as moral an intention, and contain as many excellent rules for the conduct of life, as any hook with a more solemn and scientific title. This, however, not being suspected by the persons above alluded to, they continue to read in the confidence of meeting with amusement only. (63-64)

Moore's somewhat backhanded defense of the genre is not atypical of its moment, a moment in which responding to the argument that novels are morally destruc tive is more important than asserting their complexity or potential value as objects of analysis. This of course presents problems to those who, in a future unforeseen

by Moore, might wish to use the novel itself as the subject matter of university education. In Moore's terms, the novel offers a form of instruction that is by defi nition not conscious. Indeed, it depends for its success on a seeming promise of

providing "amusement only" and hence on the overt exclusion of the "solemn and scientific."

Mid-nineteenth-century writers, despite the early beginnings of English studies at the time, more or less accepted Moore's terms and thereby made the problem he posed to their successors more difficult. William Forsyth, previously a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, published The Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century in Illustration of the Manners and Morals of the Age in 1871, not to teach his readers about the novel itself or to encourage them to read it but to extract from it

the knowledge of what we might call social history. He imagined his labor as an

act of self-sacrifice justifiable only in terms of its scholarly value: "Without some

such object in view, it would have been difficult to go through the task of read



BOULUKOS I HISTORIES OF THE NOVEL 247

ing what I have been obliged to read. For as stories, the novels of the last century, with the exception of some well-known names, are deplorably dull. Their plots are

contemptible, and the style is detestable" (11). Indeed, the aesthetic failings of the novels in question are not their most important flaw; Forsyth must expose himself to greater risks than boredom in reading them on behalf of his public. He explains of his task: "[T]here is a difficulty in the way. We have to face an amount of coarse ness which is in the highest degree repulsive. It is like raking a dirt-heap to dis cover grains of gold" (13). Forsyth, although he sees progress from the eighteenth century to the Victorian period, is nonetheless no Whig progressivist and is keen to emphasize that his own moment is all too sinful. Still he remarks of the prior century: "I do not think it is fair to say that the middle classes had no good-humor and the lower no honesty; but it is certainly true, that grossness and brutality were

their characteristics" (17). The eighteenth-century novel for Forsyth is not so much an object of analysis as an embarrassment, and its association with the eighteenth century middle class does nothing to lessen his discomfort with it.

Thomas Hill Green?another midcentury British academic, a Hegelian philoso pher, and eventually an Oxford Don?in An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times takes a more generous view of the novels of the

prior century. He does insist that the novel is an inferior literary form, but, in a

view reminiscent of John Moore's, he also suggests that it can offer a kind of moral

education of particular value to the unenlightened. Although the novelist, Green

argues in his prize essay of 1862, "cannot raise us to a point of view from which

circumstances appear subordinate to spiritual laws, he yet saves us from being blinded, if not from being influenced, by the circumstances of our own position." Novels, then, whatever their effect on the individual, are socially valuable because

"the most wounding social wrongs more often arise from ignorance than from

malice, from acquiescence in the opinion of a class rather than from deliberate self

ishness" (65). Notably for later orthodoxies, Green sees the novel as in no way the

creation or expression of a single class but rather as a technology for imaginatively

transcending one's specific social position. However, this salutary aspect of the

novel, though it seems anticipatory of arguments for the inherent educative value

of the "humanities," derives its easy bridging of the gaps between social groups at a serious intellectual cost. Novelists and their creations paradoxically gain their

social value from their extremely limited, indeed facile, nature. The novelist, Green

contends, "helps to level intellects as well as situations. He supplies a kind of liter

ary food which the weakest natures can assimilate as well as the strongest, and by the consumption of which the former sort lose much of their weakness and the lat

ter much of their strength" (69-70). Green's vision, then, while much like Moore's

in its account of the experience of novel reading, is much more dire in its view of

the genre's value to education. The novel is not only unworthy as a serious object

of analysis but actually threatens the "intellects" that encounter it, especially those

that are above average in their "strength." In the chapter "The Novelists" in Hippolyte Taine's History of English Literature

(French publication 1863-69; first English translation 1872) comes a much stronger

case for the social power, and social value, of the English eighteenth-century novel.

Indeed, if one is searching for the origin of the link between the novel and the




middle class, Taine seems to step into the role of originator quite obligingly. He

says of the appearance of the new, modern form of the novel?he calls it the "anti romantic" novel?that "it was a strange apparition, and like the voice of a people buried underground, when, amidst the splendid corruption of high life, this severe

emanation of the middle class welled up, and when the obscenities of Mrs. Aphra Behn, still the diversion of ladies of fashion, were found on the same table with De Foe's 'Robinson Crusoe'

" (402). But after this promising beginning, the sense of the

novel's relation to class is nowhere developed or sustained in Taine's discussion. Taine's "sociological" focus is explicitly not on the question of class. He explains in

his introduction that he will give an account of literature through the category of "race" (along with "milieu" and "moment")?but this is race in a now unfamiliar sense: Taine charts the English "racial sensibility" to contrast it with the French,

despite a pronouncement of the underlying consistency of the "Aryan" race. Fur

thermore, Taine's distinction between this "racial" character and the social context

that produces it is so hazy as not to exist. Says Taine: "In fact, the French became

civilized by conversation. Not so the English" (282). Indeed, he elaborates: "Alto

gether different is the path which English civilization has taken. It is not the spirit of society which has made it, but moral sense; and the reason is that in England, man is not as he is in France" (285).

Having taken pains to establish the antisocial aspect of the English in the eigh teenth century, Taine finally reveals the key to his distinction between the English and the French: religion. The defining feature of the English character is the inten

sity of Protestant religious experience, despite the smokescreen put up by apparent differences of faction. These Taine dismisses as ultimately irrelevant: "Before this

deep emotion, metaphysics and theology, ceremonies and discipline, all is blotted

out or subordinate, and Christianity is simply the purification of the heart." In

this context, Taine explains, "religion is a moral revolution," one based on "a deep sentiment?veneration" (285).

Taine's understanding of the English character, and of the English novel as

defined by the "moral revolution" of eighteenth-century Protestantism, leads him

to offer a bizarre canon of the English novel. He includes Daniel Defoe (as a sort of

precursor) and the nineteenth century's familiar big three of Samuel Richardson,

Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett, along with Laurence Sterne and Oliver Gold

smith. But Taine also includes Samuel Johnson?emphasizing the moral essays over Rasselas?and even more bizarrely William Hogarth. How do an essayist and

a visual artist fit into Taine's canon of English novelists? Through a thoroughly circular logic: Taine defines the novel as the center of the cultural project of "civi

lizing" and moralizing the corrupt, rambunctious British eighteenth century, and

therefore any artist who successfully works on the project of inculcating morality can be profitably considered a novelist. Taine reformulates the moral and educative

meaning of the novel, rejecting Moore's and Green's ideas of the inadvertent edu

cational effect of the novel and even more so Forsyth's idea that these novels reflect

the degradation and crudity of their time. Instead the novel becomes for Taine, in its very generic definition, an agent of moral progress specifically designed

to

combat the "splendid corruption" of its time.



BOULUKOS HISTORIES OF THE NOVEL 249

Indeed, Taine finds Samuel Johnson particularly useful because Johnson enables the clearest distinction between literary taste (and national character) in England and France. Johnson's popularity in England is a mystery to the French: "We thank him for these sage counsels, but we mutter to ourselves that we could have done

very well without them. We should like to know who could have been the Lovers of ennui who have bought up thirteen thousand copies of his works" (Taine 449). Taine ultimately resorts to (what else?) a culinary metaphor to explain this dif ference in national taste: of Johnson's essays, he explains, "[T]his substantial food

only needs a very simple seasoning. It is not the novelty of the dishes, nor dainty cookery, but solidity which [the English] seek." Indeed, such a national difference

may even be part of the motivation of the English in their love for "the respectable, the tiresome Dr. Samuel Johnson" and his essays: "[I]t is because they are insipid and dull for Frenchmen that they suit the taste of an Englishman" (449).

Despite lacking appeal to the French (and despite being typified by Johnson, who few others would identify as a novelist), the quality of feeding the Protestant

appetite for the substantial food of morality, in Taine's account, is what makes the

English novel valuable. Taine concludes the section by examining the moral les sons imparted by the satirical vision of Hogarth's prints. His conclusion: "French

men will say that such lessons are good for barbarians, and that they only half like

these official or lay preachers, De Foe, Hogarth, Smollett, Richardson, Johnson, and the rest. I reply that moralists are useful, and that these have changed a state

of barbarism into one of civilization" (453). The implication may seem familiar: a

state of aristocratic decadence in the Restoration has been transmuted through that "severe emanation" of the middle class, the novel, into modern civilization? but we need to be careful not to read Taine directly into the received critical veri

ties of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, he is a key link in the chain of their

development. While Taine's sociology of the novel?in its generic definition and interest in

"race," if not in its focus on English Protestantism?may be unrecognizable from a perspective formed in the twentieth century, he notably fuses together the two

sets of terms dominating earlier nineteenth-century histories of the novel: morality and nationalism. Taine seems, then, to have been performing a reading of the pre

existing debate about the morality of the novel, summing it up in order to offer the

ultimate pro-novel argument and at the same time using this answer to solidify

previous arguments for the essential Englishness of the English novel.

Taine's history is explicitly framed in terms of nation and race rather than class, but it provides a vision that will recur often. What is lacking to transmute Taine's

understanding of the English novel as capturing the English Protestant "racial

character" into Watt's "triple rise" thesis is Max Weber's linkage of the protestant work ethic to the spirit of capitalism. While that development still lay in the future,

remarkably, in both British and American literary histories at the turn of the twen

tieth century, at the very moment of the institution of literary criticism?and of the

history of the novel?in the new field of English literature in the newly expanding

university, the English "puritan" middle class, with its commitment to social and

economic progress, nonetheless becomes strongly associated with the novel.




The literary histories produced for the new university market?aimed at aspir ing students and newly professional professors?perhaps unsurprisingly drop the social snobbery implicit in Moore's and Green's views and attempt to rescue the

eighteenth-century novel (exclusive of Sterne, anyway) from a Forsyth-like insis tence on its moral degradation. Instead, perhaps liberated from these constrain

ing views by Taine's influence, they begin to link the novel to a class that insisted on social, moral, and economic progress and imply that to study the eighteenth century novel is at once to imbibe and analyze such values, although they often

only do so in passing. Bayard Tuckerman, in A History of English Prose Fiction: From Sir Thomas Malory to George Eliot (first published in 1882), argues of the early eigh teenth century that "[i]t was a time of social and material progress, and it was also the period of the growth and perfection of English fiction. To thoroughly under stand the one, we must be acquainted with the other" (137). Further, Tuckerman

paints the social arrangement of the time as one in which only one class was capable of progress: "The lower classes of society were as ignorant and brutal as the higher classes were coarse and corrupt" (158). However, "[a]mong the middle classes fast

rising to political and social prominence, lived an earnest morality, which at a later time took the form of the great Methodist revival, and the rise of philanthropy. The persevering industry of the same classes added enormously to the wealth of the nation" (169). This image of an industrious, persevering class fending off both the "brutal" lower classes and the "corrupt" upper classes can, I contend, be read as an allegory of the position of the new professional exponents of literary study as they try to bring literary culture and humane morality to the "rising" class of

aspiring students while also fending off the corrupt, exclusive, classics-based edu cational schemes of the old upper classes, yet refusing to descend to the coarseness

and brutality of mere popular culture (Graff 19-118; Renker 17-22). Accounts of the novel's relation to society?as the genre most representative of middle-class

progress?were often repeated in literary guides of the time. The tenth volume of the Cambridge History of English Literature on the eighteenth century, for instance, first published in 1917 and in some editions titled The Rise of the Novel: The Age of Johnson, remarks on its opening page that "[f]rom the beginning of the Georgian era, the rise of the trading class had been slowly infusing into public opinion in a

new spirit of probity and fervour" (Ward and Waller 1). Carl Holliday (noted as the

acting head of Vanderbilt University's English department on the title page) writes in 1912 in his English Fiction from the Fifth to the Twentieth Centuries that

it was upon this middle class, in or near the larger cities, that regeneration had to

depend; the aristocracy were too basely immoral, the common folk too basely igno rant. These middle-class folks of the city, however, had to be respected. They were

industrious; they were the wealth producers; their demand brought better highways, canals, safety from robbery; they were heavy tax payers. From a financial standpoint, they compelled regard. Though solemn and stiff and often ridiculous in their efforts to appear aristocratic, they were at heart religious, and had indeed a profound regard

for propriety.



BOULUKOS HISTORIES OF THE NOVEL 251

Beyond its use as an allegory for the situation of the professor teaching the novel, the emphasis on this social and economic background of the novel serves another

purpose as well: it offers a "scientific," historical, and interpretive approach to

literature, an approach often called for in turn-of-the-century debates about the

emergence of new departments of English literature.

Works Cited

Barbauld, Anna Laetitia. "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing/' 1810. The British Novelists. Vol. 1. London: Rivington, 1820.1-59.

Brown, Homer Obed. Institutions of the Novel from Defoe to Scott. Philadelphia: U of Penn

sylvania P, 1997.

Downie, J. A. "The Making of the English Novel." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1997): 249-66.

Dunlop, John. The History of Fiction. 1805. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1814.

Forsyth, William. The Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century in Illustration of the Man ners and Morals of the Age. New York: Apple ton, 1871.

Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Green, Thomas Hill. An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times. 1862. Ed. Fred Norton Scott. Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor P, 1911.

Hexter, J. H. "The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England." 1950. Reappraisals in History: New Views on History and Society in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. 71-117.

Holliday, Carl. English Fiction from the Fifth to the Twentieth Centuries. New York: Century, 1912.

Hudson, Nicholas. "Social Rank, The Rise of the Novel/ and Whig Histories of Eighteenth Century Fiction." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17 (2005): 563-98.

Moore, John. "View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance." 1797. Works of John Moore M.D. Vol. 5. Edinburgh: Stirling and Slade, 1820.1-64.

Murray, Hugh. The Morality of Fiction. Edinburgh: Mundell and Son, 1805.

Renker, Elizabeth. The Origins of American Literary Studies: An Institutional History. Cam

bridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

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Colonial, 1900.

Tuckerman, Bayard. A History of English Prose Fiction: From Sir Thomas Malory to George Eliot. 1882. New York: Putnam, 1899.




Wahrman, Dror. Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain c. 1780-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Ward, A. W., and A. R. Waller, eds. Cambridge History of English Literature. Vol. 10: The Age of Johnson. New York: MacMillan, 1917.

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Article Contentsp. [245]p. 246p. 247p. 248p. 249p. 250p. 251p. 252

Issue Table of ContentsNOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 42, No. 2 (SUMMER 2009) pp. 167-359Front MatterEditor's Introduction: The Way We Read Now [pp. 167-174]Oscar Wilde's Fictions of Belief [pp. 175-182]The Problem of Realism and African Fiction [pp. 183-189]What Kind of History Does a Theory of the Novel Require? [pp. 190-195]States of Emergency, States of Freedom: Woolf, History, and the Novel [pp. 196-206]Fictions of the Global [pp. 207-215]Prolepsis and Parabasis: Jazz and the Novel [pp. 216-222]Du Bois, Kinlessness, and the Catachrestic Novel [pp. 223-230]The Known Worldin World Literature: Bakhtin, Glissant, and Edward P. Jones[pp. 231-238]Quixotic Realism and the Romance of the Novel [pp. 239-244]How the Novel Became Middle Class: A History of Histories of the Novel [pp. 245-252]The Potter's Thumb/The Writer's Hand: Manual Production and Victorian Colonial Narratives [pp. 253-260]Expansion, Interruption, Autoethnography: TowardDisorienting Fiction, Part 2[pp. 261-267]If the Shoe Fits... Trollope and the Girl [pp. 268-277]D(NA) Coding the Ethnic: Jeffrey Eugenides'sMiddlesex[pp. 278-283]The Consular Service and US Literature: Nathaniel Hawthorne Abroad [pp. 284-289]The Right to Mobility in Adventure Fiction [pp. 290-296]Envy and Victorian Fiction [pp. 297-303]Sleep Deprived and Ultramodern: How Novels Turned Dream Girls into Insomniacs [pp. 304-310]"Very Abstract and Terribly Concrete": Capitalism andThe Theory of the Novel[pp. 311-317]The Novel and the Moving Now [pp. 318-325]On the Protocols of Victorian Citation [pp. 326-331]History, the Twentieth Century, and a Contemporary Novel [pp. 332-336]The Novel and the Machine in the Eighteenth Century [pp. 337-342]Fanaticism and Civil Society: Hogg'sJustified Sinner[pp. 343-348]The Return of the Referent in Recent North American Fiction: Neoliberalism and Narratives of Extreme Oppression [pp. 349-354]"Vaulted Over by the Present": Melancholy and Sovereignty in Mary Shelley'sThe Last Man[pp. 355-359]Back Matter

How the Novel Became Middle Class

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