[While writing the conclusion for the Mansfield Park essay (which I am about to post) I realised that it relies on an assumption that may not be widely shared--that the rise of the realistic novel in the 18th century was a significant factor in the development of modern thought--so I will discuss it here first.]
The novel’s serious concern with the daily lives of ordinary people seems to depend upon two important general conditions; the society must value every individual highly enough to consider him the proper subject of serious literature; and there must be enough variety of belief and action among ordinary people for a detailed account of them to be of interest to other ordinary people, the readers of novels. It is also probable that neither of these conditions for the existence of the novel obtained very widely until fairly recently, because they both depend on the rise of a society characterised by that vast complex of interdependent factors denounced by the term ‘individualism’.
Even the word is recent, dating only from the middle of the nineteenth century. In all ages, no doubt, and in all societies, some people have been ‘individualists’ in the sense that they were egocentric, unique or conspicuously independent of current opinions and habits; but the concept of individualism involves much more than this. It posits a whole society mainly governed by the idea of an individual’s intrinsic independence both from other individuals and from the multifarious allegiance to past modes of thought and action denoted by the word ‘tradition’–a force that is always social, not individual. The existence of such a society, in turn, obviously depends on a special type of economic and political organisation and on an appropriate ideology; more specifically, on an economic and political organisation which allows its members a very wide range of choices in their actions, and on an ideology primarily based not on the tradition of the past, but on the autonomy of the individual, irrespective of his particular social status or personal capacity. It is generally agreed that modern society is uniquely individualist in these respects, and that of the many historical causes for its emergence two are of supreme importance–the rise of modern industrial capitalism and the spread of Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist and Puritan forms.
We think of ourselves as living in an Enlightened age, tending to see pre-scientific people as underdeveloped and superstitious. Perhaps before Levi Strauss drew attention to the practice, ’savage’ was routinely used to refer to non-industrial foreign cultures. Even our own pre-scientific forbears tend to be thought of in this way (Brad De Long, for example, uses ‘medieval’ in this way: see here and here). Of course there is a certain ambivalence as as the romantic idea of the ‘noble savage’, promoted by Rousseau, also has strong currency.
(Voltaire’s 1755 reply to Rousseau on being forwarded Rousseau’s prize-winning essay was as follows:
I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves.
As Russell notes in his History, ‘it is not surprising that Rousseau and Voltaire ultimately quarrelled; the marvel is that they did not quarrel sooner.’)
Indeed the father of modern Romanticism is a central figure in the Enlightenment, tangling with Hume and redirecting Kant’s ethical theories through his novelistic Emile. Much of our exalted, modern self-image comes from the idea that we are the product of 18th century intellects like Hume, Rousseau and Kant, but tempered by the feeling that this is but a thin veneer of civilization on top of Darwin’s animal and Freud’s neuroses (being largely a self-fulfilling prophesy).
But there is another way of looking at the way ethics evolved in the 18th century that places less emphasis on the prognostications of philosophers, looking instead at developments in popular literature and society.
The impact of the development of printing on the modern consciousness is difficult to overestimate, the transformative effects not stopping at mass un-mediated access to the Bible, pamphleteering and the Reformation, but when urbanisation brought together the technological, economical and social conditions needed to industrialise news and entertainment, it created a print-based rival source of ethics that appealed to the new individualism.
Who reads novels? Ian Watt’s famous “triple rise” thesis about the novel’s origins — that the rise of the middle class, the rise of literacy, and the rise of the novel were related and nearly simultaneous — has often been interpreted to imply that the novel’s early readers were middle class and that the novel was in fact middle-class enterprise. Such a formulation represents a caricature of Watt’s argument, a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding of social change and of class history, and a simplification of the readership spectrum. It is accurate to say that early novels attracted new readers that traditional “literature” — that is belletristic texts such as poems — did not. But it is inaccurate (and anachronistic) to think of those readers as being exclusively from the merchant class or part of a new bourgeoisie that develops with the Industrial Revolution later in the century. Readership of novels extended down the social scale to include not only clerks, tradespeople, and those who had taught themselves to read for pragmatic purposes, but considerable numbers of domestic servants, both men and women, and people who — with so much reading material available — had learned to read for pleasure. But the characteristic feature of novel readership was its social range, not ist confinement to a particular class or group. “Traditional” readers — even experienced readers and critics like Alexander pope, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Samuel Johnson, who had a stake in maintaining a literary hierarchy — consumed novels too; what was unusual about the appeal ov novels was the way it spanned the social classes and traditional divisions of readers, although different kinds of readers probably read novels with different needs in mind and with different results.
One of the great innovators in this area was Daniel Defoe, starting out as a pamphleteer and pioneering journalist, he is considered to have made a decisive contribution in the evolution of the modern realistic novel.
The simple and positive qualities of Defoe’s prose, then, embodies the new values of the scientific and rational outlook of the late seventeenth century [...] The direct connection between Defoe’s early years as a journalist and pamphleteer and the verisimilitude of his novels is suggested by the case of his first famous piece of narrative, The True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs Veal (1706). Leslie Stephen used it [in Defoe's Novels] to illustrate Defoe’s fictional methods as a novelist; actually Defoe was reporting what he heard when he went down to Canterbury to interview a Mrs Bargrave who had seen the apparition in question. It cannot be denied, however, that what Stephens says about “the manufacturing of corroborative evidence” and the “deflection of interest” from the weak links in the argument applies perfectly to the novels, if not to Mrs. Veal; and some part of Defoe’s notable success in the art of enlisting our belief in his fictions may, therefore, be attributed without undue cynicism, to his training in the hard school of journalism.
By the time that Jane Austen was ready to publish Sense and Sensibility in 1811, the market was so developed that the reviewers had difficulty recognising the arrival of a new style of novel.
We think so favourably of this performance that it is with some reluctance we decline inserting it among our principal articles, but the productions of the press are so continually multiplied, that it requires all our exertions to keep tolerable pace with them.
Unsigned Notice on Sense and Sensibility, British Critic, May 1812, xxxix, 527
The rise of the modern realistic novel–unlike the speculations of philosophers–is central to the story of the development of modern ethics.
The Rise of the Novel
We think of ourselves as living in an Enlightened age, tending to see pre-scientific people as underdeveloped and superstitious. Perhaps before Levi Strauss drew attention to the practice, ’savage’ was routinely used to refer to non-industrial foreign cultures. Even our own pre-scientific forbears tend to be thought of in this way (Brad De Long, for example, uses ‘medieval’ in this way: see here and here). Of course there is a certain ambivalence as as the romantic idea of the ‘noble savage’, promoted by Rousseau, also has strong currency.
(Voltaire’s 1755 reply to Rousseau on being forwarded Rousseau’s prize-winning essay was as follows:
As Russell notes in his History, ‘it is not surprising that Rousseau and Voltaire ultimately quarrelled; the marvel is that they did not quarrel sooner.’)
Indeed the father of modern Romanticism is a central figure in the Enlightenment, tangling with Hume and redirecting Kant’s ethical theories through his novelistic Emile. Much of our exalted, modern self-image comes from the idea that we are the product of 18th century intellects like Hume, Rousseau and Kant, but tempered by the feeling that this is but a thin veneer of civilization on top of Darwin’s animal and Freud’s neuroses (being largely a self-fulfilling prophesy).
But there is another way of looking at the way ethics evolved in the 18th century that places less emphasis on the prognostications of philosophers, looking instead at developments in popular literature and society.
The impact of the development of printing on the modern consciousness is difficult to overestimate, the transformative effects not stopping at mass un-mediated access to the Bible, pamphleteering and the Reformation, but when urbanisation brought together the technological, economical and social conditions needed to industrialise news and entertainment, it created a print-based rival source of ethics that appealed to the new individualism.
One of the great innovators in this area was Daniel Defoe, starting out as a pamphleteer and pioneering journalist, he is considered to have made a decisive contribution in the evolution of the modern realistic novel.
By the time that Jane Austen was ready to publish Sense and Sensibility in 1811, the market was so developed that the reviewers had difficulty recognising the arrival of a new style of novel.
The rise of the modern realistic novel–unlike the speculations of philosophers–is central to the story of the development of modern ethics.