Secondary - Unit45.2016 17

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO
UNIT 45
GREAT BRITAIN IN THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY. SOCIOECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION. CULTURAL
AND TECHNICAL ACTIVITIES. GREAT
NOVELISTS OF THIS PERIOD.
By David Navarro Sarabia
David Navaro Sarabia

EPO English
David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 1

OUTLINE
1. INTRODUCTION.
1.1 Aims of the Unit
1.2 Notes on Bibliography
2. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND.
3. GREAT NOVELISTS OF THIS PERIOD.
3.1. The Novel in the Eighteenth Century.
3.1.1. Daniel Defoe: life, themes and style.
3.1.2. Samuel Richardson: life, themes and style.
3.1.3. Henry Fielding: life, themes and style.
3.1.4. Tobias Smollett.
3.1.5. Laurence Sterne.
3.2. Minor Novelists.
4. SATIRE.

4.1. Jonathan Swift: life, themes and style.
5. EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS
6. CONCLUSION. EPO English
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY.

1. INTRODUCTION.
In this unit, we will deal with Britain’s socioeconomic development and

political, cultural and technological background in the 18th century. This age
was mainly an age of stability in politics, religion, literature, and social
observances.
The conditions enabling Britain to pioneer the Industrial Revolution during
the 18th century can be divided into two categories, natural and political.
On the natural side the country has in abundance three important
commodities - water, iron and coal. Water in Britain's numerous hilly districts
provides the power to drive mills in the early stages of industrialization; the
rivers, amplified from 1761 by a developing network of canals, facilitate inland
transport in an age where roads are only rough tracks; and the sea, never far
from any part of Britain, makes transport of heavy goods easy between coastal
cities.
The ability to make effective use of Britain's iron ore is greatly enhanced

by technical advances in the early 18th century, associated particularly with the
Darby family. And the abundant supplies of coal become of crucial importance
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in the second half of the century when steam power is successively applied to
every branch of industry thanks to the efforts of Watt and Boulton.
On the political front, the contribution of entrepreneurs such as Abraham
Darby and Matthew Boulton is made possible by the changes resulting from the
revolution of 1688.
With royal power greatly reduced after 1688, and the nobility enjoying
none of the privileges associated with France's ancien régime, a new middle
class emerges more forcefully in Britain than elsewhere. There is money to be
made, and members of this class are willing to back new inventions and
mechanical improvements.
In this atmosphere, exceptional men such as Richard Arkwright can rise
through their own endeavours from low beginnings to exceptional wealth and
prestige (though the duke of Bridgewater may justifiably insist that such flair is
not limited to the middle classes).
As a final ingredient in this promising blend of circumstances, Britain can
offer its budding entrepreneurs an unusually large market. The union in 1707 of

Scotland and England removes internal tariff barriers. The developing British
Empire provides trading opportunities for much of the century in the American
colonies - and when these are lost, begins to replace them with others in India.
And British control of the seas, increasingly established during the
century, contributes to a general prosperity which supports the Industrial
Revolution. Much of the profitable carrying trade in the world's commerce can
be secured for British merchant vessels.
Literary life in England flourishes so impressively in the early years of the
18th century that contemporaries draw parallels with the heyday of Virgil,
Horace and Ovid at the time of the emperor Augustus. The new Augustan Age
becomes identified with the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14), though the spirit of
the age extends well beyond her death.
1.1 Aims of the Unit
The present unit, Unit 45, aims to provide a useful introduction to the

various relationships between the imaginative literature of eighteenth-century
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Great Britain and changing social, economic, political, cultural and
technological conditions within this period, namely by reviewing the main
socioeconomic developments, political body, and the main cultural and
technological events. In addition, we shall analyse the rise of the novel in the
second half of the century by approaching the greatest eighteenth-century
writers and their works, which reflected the already mentioned conditions
namely in the Augustan Age (c.1700 to 1790).
In fact, this body of writing (eighteenth century literature in England)

was both shaped by and reflected the prevailing ideologies of the day (and
also previous days) which, following Speck (1998), means that this is an
account of literary activity in which social, economic, cultural, technogical and
political allegiances are placed very much to the fore.
In Section 2 we will deal with the Historical Background, Socioeconomic
development, Political Events, Cultural Activities and Technological Innovations.
After that, we will study the Main Novelists of the Period: Daniel Defoe, Samuel
Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollet and Laurence Stern as well as Minor

Novelists. Finally, we will study the Satire, Jonathan Swift. We will continue with
the Educational Framework for the content of the unit. We will finish with a
Conclusion and the Bibliography consulted for the elaboration of this unit.
1.2 Notes on Bibliography
An influential introduction to the historical and literary background of the

Augustan Age is based on Thoorens, Panorama de las literaturas Daimon:
Inglaterra y América del Norte. Gran Bretaña y Estados Unidos de América
(1969); White, The Horizon Concise History of England. American Heritage
(1971); Brissenden, Henry Fielding. Joseph Andrews (1977); Wells, The
Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (1986); Rogers, The Oxford
Illustrated History of English Literature (1987); Albert, A History of English
Literature (1990); Sanders, The Short Oxford.

History of English Literature (1996); Speck, Literature and Society in
Eighteenth-Century England: Ideology Politics and Culture (1998); Alexander,
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A History of English Literature (2000); Ward & Trent, The Cambridge History
of English and American Literature (2000); Ward & Trent, The Cambridge
History of English and American Literature (2000); Allan Neilson, Lectures
on the Harvard Classics (2001); and Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies
in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (2001).
Other sources on literary background are the following three network

links, such as www.bartleby.com, www.geocities.com and www.bbc.com; also,
the Encyclopedia Encarta (1997) and The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia
(2003). The background for educational implications is based on the theory of
communicative competence and communicative approaches to language
teaching are provided by the most complete record of current publications
within the educational framework is provided by the guidelines in B.O.E. (2004)
for both E.S.O. and Bachillerato; and the Council of Europe, Modern
Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. A Common European
Framework of reference (1998)

2. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND.
• Socioeconomic development.
England in 1714 was a land of hamlets and villages: its towns were on
the coast. The majority of population was in the south and still rural.
From 1714 to 1742 there were some changes due to the growth of towns
and industrial villages. In these towns, there was no sanitary system, the streets
were narrow and unpaved. The tradesmen and craftsmen used the street as
their dustbin. Disease was rampart and unchecked: smallpox, typhus, typhoid
and dysentery made death a common-place. There was a very high infant
mortality. The people sought palliatives in drinking, gambling and violence.
At the head of urban society were the merchant princes, with whom a few
lawyers and high civil servants could associate on terms of equally both in
wealth and social standing. They tended to support Walpole and called
themselves Whigs. But the great majority of merchants were middling people;
among them the traditions of seventeenth century life were stronger. They were

deeply attached to the puritan attitudes. They were also Whigs, but it was an
old-fashioned type of Whiggery which did not always see eye to eye with
Walpole. EPO English
The craftsmen and artisans were the bridge between the rich and the
poor. Until 1725 they enjoyed a measure of political power, but this was
diminished by Walpole, who disliked the spread of opposition views, both Tory
and radical, among them.
Below the artisans and journeymen were the mass of the city’s
population, whose livelihood depended almost entirely on casual employment
and who were liable to be dismissed at will. They had no political rights.
With property, it came standing in society and a part of the century it was
relatively easy to pass from one social class to another.
In the rural England, the pattern of life was more stable, controlled firmly
by tradition and custom. The wasteful open-field strip system, only slowly giving
way before enclosure still dominated English agriculture. Breeding was
unselective and the majority of commons and pastures were overstocked.
Although inefficient, the profits were very great. The big farming profits
encouraged the movement towards enclosure.

It also made the possession of great states a highly desirable form of

investment and this encouraged experiments in agrarian technique.
Enclosure required a considerable capital expenditure, so the
consequence was a growth in rural poverty of the lesser gentry.
With the Industrial Revolution, there was a profound change in the whole
structure. It bred a new attitude of mind to the old problems of society. Satire or
self-satisfaction were replaced by analysis and constructive criticism.
As soon as the Industrial towns became towns in a modern sense, the
complete lack of local government and local administration became unbearable.
Thus, local administration was organised and was in charge of lighting, paving
and sanitation. By the end of the century most of the diseases of filth had been
checked and dismissed, this contributed to create a rapidly expanding
population.
• Political events.

The 18th century was a period of stability. The political background is
characterised by the opposition between two parties: Whigs and Tories.
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One of the main features of the Whig oligarchy was political corruption.
The most notoriously corrupt of the Whip statesmen was Robert Walpole, he
controlled both the executive and Parliament from 1721 and 1742.
Circumstances assisted him: Firstly, the German Kings from Hanover,
George I and II understood little of English politics or even the English
language; they needed English affairs to be managed for them. Secondly, a
major financial crisis, the South Sea Bubble burst upon the country in 1720, and
Walpole had the financial ability to settle it. He continued in Parliament by royal
support and by using corrupt methods. He kept support of his minister by
choosing them among his friends. He brought disrepute upon politics.
The accession of George III in 1760 changed the picture. He left himself
to be an Englishman, so it was natural he should pay an active role in politics.
George III succeeded in forming a party of sympathisers (The New Tories or
King’s Friends) in Parliament. With the help of these, he fought the Whigs and
secured in power for twelve years a Prime Minister congenial to him, Lord North
(1770-1782).

George’s efforts were finally defeated by two circumstances: the first, his
government was discredited by the loss of the American Was of Independence
(1775-1783); the second circumstance was that, while he had been obliged to
fight the Whigs with their own weapons of corruption, when he won power from
them he did nothing to reform the political system which invited such conduct.
This crisis was solved by the appearance of the twenty-three-year-old
William Pitt who was independent of party. Pitt had financial ability and integrity.
He purified the atmosphere in which parliamentary politics were conducted and
transmitted to the 19th century much clearer ideas about how to conduct them
strongly influenced by the ideas of Adam Smith; he initiated the practice of Free
Trade.
• Cultural activities.
The 18th century was the age of classicism: of harmony, proportion,

assured taste and balanced statement. It is known as the Augustan age. The

whole life in its ordinary aspects became a source of interest and generally of
comedy. It was also an age of reason.
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In drama, in the age of Walpole, a certain life was to be found in the
theatre because it was a battle ground for politics. Fielding’s Tom Thumb was a
powerful attack on the government. After Walpole’s fall the temperature of
politics dropped rapidly and the drama reached a pitch of dreariness
unparalleled since Gordubuc. Dramatists concentrated on high moral tone, pure
sentiments, and elegant diction. Sheridan with his plays The Rivals, The Critics,
The School for Scandal, and A Trip to Scarborough, brought life and wit back to
the stage.
The great painters of the 18th century ranged from conservative classical
taste, to satire, and to the poetic feeling for natural surroundings. Sir Joshua
Reynolds (1723-92) between 1750 and 1780 painted the wealth and beauty of
England. His colour, line and form are incomparable and about his portraits of
girls there is a strange liquid loveliness. He influenced Thomas Gainsborough
(1727-88), George Romney (1734-1802), and Allan Ramsay (1713-84). Hogarth
(1697-1764) was an exceptionally great painter; the main force of his genius
was spent in bitter satire of the gross, social evils of his day. England had its
greatest landscape painters in Constable (1776-1837) and Turner (1775-1851)

As for craftsmanship, taste was dominated by an extremely refined sense

of proportion. The great masters were James Gibb, William Kent, and first
Thomas Chippendale and then Sheraton.
There was a wide spread demand for books, pamphlets and newspapers
due to a very considerable growth of literacy. The growth of literature and
development of journalism deeply affected the writing of prose, it was
characterised by a plainer writing and a simpler vocabulary within the range of
the simply educated.
• Technological innovations.
The Industrial Revolution was mainly due to the developments in

technology and transport.
In textile, Arkwright’s waterframe (1769), Hargreaves’ jenny (1770), and
Crompton’s mule (1779) revolutionised the production of yarn and brought to
the weaver an age of golden prosperity which was to last for a quarter of a

century.
In mining, metallurgy and engineering, the technical innovations were
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greater and they affected the development of English industry more profoundly.
The problem of smelting iron with coal was successfully tackled by the Darbys
of Coalbrookdale and was perfected with the inventions in the reverberating,
puddling, and rolling processes, inventions which made the productions of cast
iron rapid and cheap. Not only was iron produced in greater quantities, but new
iron machinery brought greater control over material, which led to finer and
more accurate work.
The steam engine was invented by Watt in 1769. With its perfection and
adoption of a power engine, made of iron and steel and using coal, England had
completed the first stage of a profound revolutionary process.
Adequate transport also preoccupied the new industrialists. By 1760 the
improvement of river navigation had reached its limit. Canals were cut and
these cheapened goods. There was also an improvement of road engineering.

3. GREAT NOVELISTS OF THIS PERIOD.
3.1. The Novel in the Eighteenth Century.
The English Novel, destined to become the most popular and prolific of
all English literary forms, first fully emerged in the 18th century.
It was in large measure the product of the middle class, appealing to
middle-class ideals and sensibilities, a patterning of imagined events set against
a clearly realised social background and taking its view of what was significant
in human behaviour from agreed public attitudes.
The plot patterns of English fiction were based on the view that what was
significant was what altered a social relationship: love followed by marriage,
quarrelling and reconciliation, gain or loss of money or of social status.
The class consciousness shown by the novel from the beginning, the
importance of social and financial status and the use of the rise or fall from one
class to another as reflecting critical developments in character and fortune,
indicate the middle-class origin of this literature form.

The novel tended to realism and contemporaneity in the sense that it
dealt with people living in the social world known to the writer.
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3.1.1. Daniel Defoe.
Defoe is generally considered the first great realistic novelist in English

fiction. He based histories on current events and materials.
Almost all Defoe’s novels were written in the first person, as if they were
factual accounts of events from the speaker’s own life.
• Life.
Daniel Defoe, the son of a butcher, was born in London in 1660. He

attended Morton's Academy, a school for Dissenters at Newington Green with
the intention of becoming a minister, but he changed his mind and became a
hosiery merchant instead.
In 1685 Defoe took part in the Monmouth Rebellion and joined William III
and his advancing army. Defoe became popular with the king after the
publication of his poem, The True Born Englishman (1701). The poem attacked
those who were prejudiced against having a king of foreign birth.

The publication of Defoe's The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702)
upset a large number of powerful people. In the pamphlet, Defoe, a Dissenter,
ironically demanded the savage suppression of dissent. The pamphlet was
judged to be critical of the Anglican Church and Defoe was fined, put in the
Charing Cross Pillory and then sent to Newgate Prison.
In 1703 Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, a Tory government official,
employed Defoe as a spy. With the support of the government, Defoe started
the newspaper, The Review. Published between 1704 and 1713, the
newspaper appeared three times a week. As well as carrying commercial
advertising The Review reported on political and social issues. Defoe also wrote
several pamphlets for Harley attacking the political opposition. The Whigs took
Defoe court and this resulted in him serving another prison sentence.
In 1719 Defoe turned to writing fiction. His novels include: Robinson
Crusoe (1719), Captain Singleton (1720), Journal of the Plague Year (1722),
Captain Jack (1722), Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxanda (1724).
Defoe also wrote a three-volume travel book, Tour through the Whole
Island of Great Britain (1724-27) that provided a vivid first-hand account of the
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state of the country. Other non-fiction books include The Complete English
Tradesman (1726) and London the Most Flourishing City in the Universe
(1728). Defoe published over 560 books and pamphlets and is considered to be
the founder of British journalism. Daniel Defoe died in 1731.
• Themes and style.
Defoe’s first novel was Robinson Crusoe (1719). It revealed his ability to
organise and present detail in order to complement a view of the relation
between man and nature that sprang from the depths of the English middle-
class view of life.
The novel narrated in the first person as though it were an actual
autobiographical account, shows the shipwrecked trader on his desert island
trying to remould in his distant isolation the whole pattern of the material and
moral civilisation he lad left behind him. Crusoe is not an adventurer who goes
to sea in search of excitement, but a sober and prudent merchant engaged in a
business enterprise.

Prudence rather than heroism is the key to his actions; he is, in fact, the
first significant example in English literature of the prudential hero. Robinson
Crusoe is the first full-length piece of prose fiction written in the plain style of
early eighteenth century expository prose with continuous colloquial overtones.
The success of Robinson Crusoe led Defoe to write many other works of
fiction, again presented as true accounts of what happened to real people rather
than frankly as fiction.
The most interesting of his novels after Robinson Crusoe is Moll Flanders
(1722), the autobiography of a prostitute, done with the liveliest realistic detail,
in the handling of which Defoe showed his knowledge of English social and
economic life. Moll uses her beauty to try and achieve financial security; her sex
is a commodity which she is continually trying to sell in the highest market.
Though she is penitent at the end, and is thus allowed to find happiness and
peace after all her adventures, she has no moral sense at all, only a deep and
constant sense of money.
Defoe is a novelist almost in spite of himself. His intention was to reduce
all literature to journalism, to tell invented things as though he were a reporter
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writing an account for the press. His eye for detail, his fascination with material
things and with the surface of human behaviour, and his deep roots in the
middle-class, combined to make his best fiction, both historically important and
intrinsically interesting.
3.1.2. Samuel Richardson.
Richardson, often considered the first English psychological writer,

introduced the fiction of sensibility that was so popular during the 18th century.
Known as epistolary novels, his books consist mainly of long letters that
express his character’s thoughts and reactions.
• Life.
He was born in Derbyshire, England, in 1689 and died in London on July

4, 1761. Richardson was one of nine children of a joiner, or carpenter. He
became an apprentice printer to John Wilde and learned his trade well from that
hard master for 7 years. After serving as "Overseer and Corrector" in a printing
house, he set up shop for himself in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, in 1720,

where he married, lived for many years, and carried on his business. Within 20
years he had built up one of the largest and most lucrative printing businesses
in London. Although he published a wide variety of books, including his own
novels, he depended upon the official printing that he did for the House of
Commons for an important source of income.
Richardson claimed to have written indexes, prefaces, and dedications
early in his career, but his first known work, published in 1733, was The
Apprentice's Vade Mecum; or, Young Man's Pocket Companion, a conduct
book addressed to apprentices. A Seasonable Examination ... (1735) was a
pamphlet supporting a parliamentary bill to regulate the London theatres.
The English novelist Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) brought dramatic
intensity and psychological insight to the epistolary novel.
Fiction, including the novel told in letters, had become popular in England
before Samuel Richardson's time, but he was the first English novelist to have
the leisure to perfect the form in which he chose to work. Daniel Defoe's travel
adventures and pseudobiographies contain gripping individual episodes and an
astonishing realism, but they lack, finally, the structural unity and cohesiveness
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characteristic of Richardson's lengthy novels. Unlike his great contemporary
Henry Fielding, who satirized every echelon of English society in such
panoramic novels as Tom Jones, Richardson chose to focus his attention on
the limited problems of marriage and of the heart, matters to be treated with
seriousness. In so doing, however, he also provided his readers with an
unparalleled study of the social and economic forces that were bringing the
rising, wealthy English merchant class into conflict with the landed aristocracy.
When he was 50, he was commissioned to write a guide for letter writing.
He then conceived the idea of telling a story through a series of letters and
wrote Pamela (1740). The theme of Pamela is basically a folk theme, but the
treatment is very different from anything to be found in folk literature. The class
background is far form being the simple one of low-born maiden and high-born
lord.
Richardson’s class was committed to the view that worth depended on
individual effort rather than on status, yet they were fascinated by status and

could not help admiring and envying it. This gives an ironic ambivalence to the
whole moral pattern of the novel.
Plot: Squire B., whose mother had employed Pamela as her maid, is bent
first on seduction and then on rape, he is dishonest, malevolent, cruel, and
persecuting, finally, due to her successful resistance he falls in love with her
and offers her marriage, then he is seen by Richardson as a wholly admirable
person, not only worthy of the love of a virtuous girl like Pamela, but deserving
of her humblest obedience and veneration.
Clarissa (1748) is a subtler and profounder work than Pamela, and by
general agreement Richardson’s masterpiece. The development of the plot is a
remarkable achievement. Clarissa, the virtuous, beautiful talented younger
daughter of the wealthy Harlowes, is manipulated from the position which
combines the height of virtue with the height of material good fortune, to one in
which she is despised and rejected, becoming an almost Christlike figure of the
suffering servant. This is achieved by a brilliantly deployed series of little
incidents which combine to deny Clarissa the fruits of prudence. Without
actually making her an imprudent character and eventually close in on her to
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prevent any return to the world of material happiness. The situation here
developed enables Richardson to unfold a much richer moral pattern then
anything to be found in Pamela.
In his final novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1754), the lack of moral conflict
makes it less interesting than the other two. Sir Charles, who first meets the
beautiful and virtuous Harriet Byron through rescuing her from being carried off
by the villainous Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, soon reveals to her the complicated
story of his emotions entanglements in Italy, and she is referred to letters in the
hands of Sir Charles’ Chaplain for further details.
The portraits of the characters in all his novels are full of realistic detail,
probably inherited from Defoe, but Richardson was more interested in analysing
feelings and mental processes than Defoe.
The ideals that Richardson employs and manipulates in his novels are:
prudence and virtue, gentility and morality, reputation and character. The
relation between them is often complex.
Richardson is very much aware of the social context and the difference
between classes.

Publicity is important for him; virtue must be publicly known and admired.
The moral is a public life, something to be seen, approved, and imitated or at
least admired.
Richardson created the ‘dilated novel’, and his performance was
revolutionary so far as material and structure went. His success led to the great
vogue of epistolary novels, though he himself used the letter form loosely.
Richardson’s great influence was due to his focus on sensational love
problems, and his use of the highest and purest ideals in morals.
Its important the treatment of time in his novels: letters give the illusion of
living in the time-scale of the characters. The reader feels as he is enduring the
sequence of events at the same rate of time as the character is.
3.1.3. Henry Fielding.
Fielding was an outstanding figure in the development of the novel as an

important literary form. He was one of the first novelists to base comic plots on
realistic observations of society. Most of his novels are vivid satires of life in
eighteenth century England.
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Fielding’s innovations in structure and style established the pattern of the
traditional English novel.
• Life.
British writer, playwright and journalist, founder of the English Realistic

School in literature with Samuel Richardson. Fielding's career as a dramatist
has been shadowed by his career as a novelist. His aim as a novelist was to
write comic epic poems in prose - he once described himself as "great, tattered
bard."
Henry Fielding was born in 1707 at Sharpham Park, Somerset. He was
by birth a gentleman, close allied to the aristocracy. His father was a nephew of
the 3rd Earl of Denbigha, and mother was from a prominent family of lawyers.
Fielding grew up on his parents’ farm at East Stour, Dotset. His mother died
when Fielding was eleven, and when his father remarried, Henry was sent to
Eton. He studied at Eton College (1719-1724), where he learned to love ancient
Greek and Roman literature.

Encouraged by his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Fielding started

his career as a writer in London. In 1728 he wrote two plays, of which LOVE IN
SEVERAL MASQUES was successfully performed at Drury Lane. In the same
year, he went to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, enlarging his
knowledge of classical literature. After returning to England, he devoted himself
to writing for the stage. Fielding also became a manager of the Little Theatre in
the Haymarket. In 1730, he had four plays produced, among them TOM
THUMB, which is his most famous and popular drama. According to a story, it
made Swift laugh for the second time in his life. In 1736 Fielding took over the
management of the New Theatre, writing for it among others the satirical comed
y PASQUIN. For several years Fielding's life was happy and prosperous.
However, Fielding's sharp burlesques satirizing the government gained
the attention of the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole and Fielding's career in
theatre was ended by Theatrical Licensing Act - directed primarily at him. In
search for an alternative career he became editor of the magazine Champion,
an opposition journal. After studies of law Fielding was called in 1740 to the bar.
Because of increasing illness - he suffered from gout and asthma - Fielding was
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unable to pursue his legal career with any consistency.
Between the years 1729 and 1737 Fielding wrote 25 plays but he
acclaimed critical notice with his novels. The best known are THE HISTORY OF
TOM JONES, A FOUNDLING (1749), in which the tangled comedies of
coincidence are offset by the neat, architectonic structure of the story, and THE
HISTORY OF THE ADVENTURES OF JOSEPH ANDREWS (1742), a parody
of Richardson's Pamela (1740). Although Fielding wrote in Tom Jones "That
monstrous animal, a husband and wife", he married in 1734 Charlotte
Cradock, who became his model for Sophia Western in Tom Jones and for the
heroine of AMELIA, the author's last novel. It was written according to Fielding
"to promote the cause of virtue and to expose some of the most glaring evils, as
well public as private, which at present infect the country..." In the story an army
officer is imprisoned. His virtuous wife resists all temptations and stays faithful
to him. With Charlotte Fielding enjoyed ten years of happiness until her death in
1744. Fielding's improvidence led to long periods of considerable poverty, but
he was greatly assisted at various periods of his life by his friend R. Allen, who
was the model for Allworthy in Tom Jones.

In 1747 Fielding caused some scandal by marrying his wife's maid and
friend Mary Daniel - he was condemned by every snob in England. Actually, she
was about to bear his child, and Fielding wished to save her from disgrace.
After Walpole had been replaced by another prime minister, Fielding came to
the defence of the Establishment. As a reward for his governmental journalism
he was made justice of the peace for the City of Westminster in 1748 and for
the county of Middlesex in 1749. Together with his half brother Sir John
Fielding, he established a new tradition of justice and suppression of crime in
London, organizing a detective force that later developed into Scotland Yard.
Fielding's writings became more socially orientated - he opposed among others
public hangings. From the court in Bow Street he continued his struggle against
corruption and saw successfully implemented a plan for breaking up the
criminal gangs who were then flourishing in London.
When the author's health was failing and he was forced to use crutches,
he went with his wife and one of his daughters to Portugal to recuperate.
Fielding died on October 8, 1754 in Lisbon. His travel book, THE JOURNAL OF
A VOYAGE TO LISBON, appeared posthumously in 1755.
• EPO English
Themes and style.
Fielding published his first novel, Shamela, in 1741. Fielding published

Shamela anonymously, but upon its publication he was widely suspected as
being the author of the parody. Because of the enormous success of Pamela,
Fielding's burlesque enjoyed considerable notoriety, and indeed it spawned
several other, lesser satires of Richardson's novel. Shamela was hardly a
critical success upon initial publication, however, and it was not only until the
early twentieth century that scholars began taking it seriously as a work of
literature.
As a parody of Pamela, Shamela aims to overturn what Fielding
considered to be the sententious moralizing of Richardson's novel. Richardson
claims that Pamela is a model of virtue, whose chastity is rewarded, but Fielding
in his novel equates morality with expediency, as Shamela behaves as she
does in order to secure material comforts for herself. Throughout the novel
Shamela uses words such as “feign,” “act,” and “pretend.” She tempts Booby
but pretends to do so unwittingly, thus retaining her virtuous image, resisting

him in order to appear virtuous and lure him into marriage and elevate herself
socially. Shamela is not the virtuous woman Richardson supposes but rather a
calculating, conniving creature. While Fielding parodies Richardson's views on
morality and virtue, at the same time he presents his own moral message about
hypocrisy and feigned goodness. His criticism of hypocrisy extends also to the
clergy (represented by Parson Williams), the gentry (in Squire Booby), and the
political establishment. The theme of faith versus good works is also explored in
the character of the parson. Fielding, with his novel attacks, corruption on many
levels, from the perversion of language to the exploitation of the nature of
decency and uprightness for political purposes.
Then in the next year, 1742, he wrote Joseph Andrews, which is a
second satire of Pamela. Why Fielding wrote two parodies of one novel is
puzzling and a variety of explanations have been offered. What is clear is that,
though Joseph Andrews may have started as a satire of Pamela, it quickly
outgrew that narrow purpose and has amused generations of readers who
never heard of Pamela.
As Fielding indicated on the title page of Joseph Andrews, he was
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imitating Cervantes's Don Quixote, so that his novel is also a picaresque novel–
or novel of the road–and an adventure novel. With the introduction of Parson
Adams, who has been called the first great comic hero in the English novel and
one of the glories of human nature, it also becomes a novel of character. In
keeping with Fielding's bent as a moralist and reformer, the satire extends
beyond literary matters to society itself, and Fielding exposes the vices and
follies not merely of individuals, but also of the upper classes, institutions, and
society's values.
Its hero is supposed to be a brother of Pamela, a servant in the
household of Lady Booby, whom Fielding makes an aunt of Richardson’s
Squire B. But this was also a moral novel which reveals another aspect of the
moral sensibility of the age. The laugh at Richardson, when introducing Pamela
and Squire B., though it is real, is less important than the developing texture of
the plot, both richly comic and seriously moral.
In Tom Jones (1749) Fielding developed the comic epic on a more
impressive scale and found the proper kind of expansive form for his
characteristic genius. This novel is also both comic and moral. The hero, Tom

Jones, is a passionate, highly sexed young man, as well as impulsively

generous and easily moved by others’ sufferings.
The plot is constructed with the greatest ingenuity. From one point of
view, it is built round the question of the identity of Tom, who is found as a new-
born infant in the bed of the benevolent Squire Allworthy and brought up by that
good man until the evil machinations of the Squire’s nephew, Blifil, who also
lives with Allworthy and has been brought up by him, result in Tom’s being
vanished in disgrace for crimes he did not commit, but which his imprudence
and passionate nature make it easy for the malevolent Blifil to fasten on him.
The central third of the book follows Tom’s adventures on the road, and the final
third is set in London. It turns out in the end that Tom is really a half brother of
Blifil, though illegitimate, and in the light of this knowledge the reader is able to
look back and see clues to Tom’s real identity artfully planted throughout the
book.
In his novels, we see that for him virtue and reputation rarely go together,
for virtue is a matter of innate disposition and intention rather than of public
demonstration, and the signs of morality which are publicly approved bear little
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relation to the real goodness.
In his hatred of cruelty and hypocrisy and his love of frankness and
generosity even when accompanied by weakness of the flesh, Fielding is
consciously rebelling against the tendency to equate morality with sexual
control which has long been a feature of Puritan and middle-class thought and
was long to continue to be so, and he is rebelling, too, against the equation or
virtue and outward respectability. Although it was unthinkable for him to have as
his heroine a girl who was not perfectly chaste and modest.
Fielding was influenced by Cervantes in exploring between the privately
good and the publicly ridiculous, with the result that in Joseph Andrews he
produced a novel in which the dangers of convention and the ambiguities of
innocence are explored for the first time in English literature.
Fielding also draws on the picaresque tradition to set his characters on
the road and by involving them in a great variety of adventures by the roadside,
at inns, and in various places through which they pass, gives a sense of the
colour and variety of English life and gives freshness and vitality to the novel.

For Fielding goodness, innocence, and ignorance of the world go

together.
Fielding’s works are also referred to social and economic life of the age.
For Fielding, the writing of social history was necessary if he was to produce his
kind of moral social comedy; it is never introduced simply for its own sake, yet it
is there, and gives an extra dimension to his work.
He thought of the novel as a ‘comic epic poem in prose’. He believed that
a novel, like the epic, should have a central plot and that the episodes of the
story should contribute to the development of the main narrative idea. His
method is a panoramic narrative of manners and behaviour seen externally.
Fielding’s last novel, Amelia (1751), is altogether different in tone from
any of his previous fiction. Pathos replaces humour, moral gravity rather than
comic violence or irony sets the mood. The heroine, a latter-day Patient
Griselda, is drawn with tenderness and a personal sympathy quite new in
Fielding. The patient suffering of the virtuous wife is treated against a
background of quietly and precisely drawn middle-class life, and in the cause of
the action. Fielding draws attention to a variety of social abuses. There is no
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breath of epic here, the emphasis is domestic, and all the moral feeling is
lavished on the good and gentle heroine, whose character and behaviour shine
in a naughty world to justify and redeem human nature.
Amelia for all its charms suffers from its lack of vitality and may reflect the
author’s declining health, which led him to take a voyage to Portugal, where he
died.
3.1.4. Tobias Smollett.
Tobias Smollett had no desire to rival Fielding as a formal innovator, and

his novels consequently tend to be rather ragged assemblings of disparate
incidents. But, although uneven in performance, all of them include extended
passages of real force and idiosyncrasy. His freest writing is expended on
grotesque portraiture in which the human is reduced to fiercely energetic
automatism. Smollett can also be a stunning reporter of the contemporary
scene, whether the subject be a naval battle or the gathering of the decrepit at a
spa. His touch is least happy when, complying too facilely with the gathering

cult of sensibility, he indulges in rote-learned displays of emotionalism and

good-heartedness. His most sustainedly invigorating work can perhaps be
found in The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), The Adventures of
Peregrine Pickle (1751), and (an altogether more interesting encounter with the
dialects of sensibility) The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771).
3.1.5. Laurence Sterne.
An experiment of a radical and seminal kind is Laurence Sterne's

Tristram Shandy (1759-67), which, drawing on a tradition of learned wit from
Erasmus and Rabelais to Burton and Swift, provides a brilliant comic critique of
the progress of the English novel to date. The focus of attention is shifted from
the fortunes of the hero himself to the nature of his family, environment, and
heredity, and dealings within that family offer repeated images of human
unrelatedness and disconnection. Tristram, the narrator, is isolated in his own
privacy and doubts how much, if anything, he can know certainly even about
himself. Sterne is explicit about the influence of Lockean psychology on his
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writing, and the book, fascinated with the fictive energies of the imagination, is
filled with characters reinventing or mythologizing the conditions of their own
lives. It also draws zestful stimulus from a concern with the limitations of
language, both verbal and visual, and teases an intricate drama out of
Tristram's imagining of, and playing to, the reader's likely responses. Sterne's
Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) similarly defies
conventional expectations of what a travel book might be. An apparently
random collection of scattered experiences, it mingles affecting vignettes with
episodes in a heartier, comic mode, but coherence of imagination is secured by
the delicate insistence with which Sterne ponders how the impulses of
sentimental and erotic feeling are psychologically interdependent.
3.2. Minor Novelists.
The work of these five giants was accompanied by interesting

experiments from a number of lesser novelists.

▪ Sarah Fielding, for instance, Henry's sister, wrote penetratingly and gravely
about friendship in The Adventures of David Simple (1744, with a sequel in
1753).
▪ Charlotte Lennox in The Female Quixote (1752) and Richard Graves in The
Spiritual Quixote (1773) responded inventively to the influence of Cervantes,
also discernible in the writing of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne.
▪ John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (known as Fanny Hill;
1748-49) chose a more contentious path; in his charting of a young girl's
sexual initiation, he experiments with minutely detailed ways of describing
the physiology of intercourse.
In emphatic contrast:
▪ Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) offers an extremist, and rarefied,
version of the sentimental hero,
while
▪ Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1765) somewhat laboriously initiated
the vogue for Gothic fiction.
▪ David Navaro Sarabia
William Beckford's Vathek (1786),
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▪ Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis' Monk
(1796) are among the more distinctive of its successors.
But the most engaging and thoughtful minor novelist of the period is:
▪ Fanny Burney, who was also an evocative and self-revelatory diarist and
letter writer. Her Evelina (1778) and Camilla (1796) in particular handle with
independence of invention and emotional insight the theme of a young
woman negotiating her first encounters with a dangerous social world.
4. SATIRE.
4.1 Jonathan Swift.
If we consider the fact that the title of this topic refers only to the
eighteenth century Great British Novelists, Swift should not be included as he is
considered rather as a poet and a satirist; on the other hand, he was born in
Ireland, but at that time Ireland belonged to Great Britain, therefore he was a
British citizen. Nevertheless, he had a great influence in his time and has also

been widely known mainly because of his work Gulliver’s Travels. The work has
been adapted into graded readers at different levels1 or stages, according to the
number of headwords included. Swift is one of the authors best known by
youngsters at Secondary School, both Compulsory and Post-compulsory levels,
as literary plots based on fantastic or imaginary worlds have been very
interesting for young readers. Apart from that, a film based on the book by Swift
was made and has been very successful among a rather young audience.
Once having pointed out these remarks, we will look into Swift’s life,
themes and style.
• Life.
He was born in Dublin in 1667, after the death of his father. From about
1674 to 1682, he attended Kilkenny Grammar School and entered Trinity
College in Dublin, on 1682; he graduated as a BA

He continued at Trinity until the outbreak of the troubles following the
abdication of James II in 1688, when he joined the stream of English refugees
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fleeing from the Catholic rebellion in Ireland. In 1689, he briefly lived with his
mother in Leicestershire, and then became secretary to Sir William Temple at
Moor Park in Surrey. He returned to Ireland and in 1692 he took a MA at Hart
Hall, Oxford, as a preparation perhaps for hoped-for Church preferment in
England. In 1694-5 he was ordained priest in the Anglican Church of Ireland,
and appointed to the prebend of Kilroot, near Belfast. His isolation there drove
him back to Temple’s service until Temple’s death.
As the 1730s closed, Swift’s memory began to fail; his infirmities, the
disease of the inner ear which he suffered from all his life and old age began to
oppress him more and more. On 17 August 1742, he was found ‘of unsound
mind and memory’, and his affairs were entrusted to guardians. He died on 19
October 1745, leaving his greater part of his state to endow a hospital for the
insane.
1
Gulliver Travels, Longman Classics, Stage 2; Gulliver Travels, OUP, Bookworms, Stage 4.

He started writing poetry and he first appeared in print with Ode of the
Athenian Society (1692). During the time, he was last at Temple’s service
(1696-99) he wrote the perhaps his greatest work, the dangerously exuberant
satire on the ‘abuses of learning’ and religious dissent A Tale of a Tub.
In April 1701, one of his journeys to London, he published his first
political pamphlet, A Discourse of the Contests and Discriminations between the
Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (1701).
In 1704, The Battle between the Ancient and Modern Books in St James’
Library was published. It is about an excursion in defence of Temple into the
‘ancients and moderns’ controversy; it is important in understanding Swift’s
philosophical conservatism, as well as his poetic imagination and sardonic wit.
In 1708, he published the amusing Bickerstaff Papers: Predictions for the
Year 1708.

Swift had considerable power and influence as a public relations man,
and also as an important member of a literary group of wits, of congenial
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political sympathies. The death of the Queen and the dismissal of his friends
from power ended his career in London and he returned to Ireland in September
1714.
A Proposals for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures appeared in
1720, but his most effective works in this connection were The Drapier’s Letters
(1924), in which Swift presented a devastating indictment of a heartless and
ineffective English policy. These works were anonymous, and a price was put
on the author’s head; everyone knew, including the English Government, who
had written them, but Swift was never prosecuted.
Sometime after his return to Ireland in 1714, Swift began work on his
most famous book, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by
Lemuel Gulliver, published in London in 1726, soon after Swift returned to
Ireland after a brief stay of six months in England. He also published a poem
Cadenus and Vanessa.
During his last years he continued to write a good deal, including two of
his best poems: Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (composed in 1731; published

in 1739) and The Legion Club (1736), a savage attack on the Irish House of
Commons.
One of the greatest satirists in the language, Swift’s power as writer was
created by the savage indignation he felt when he saw men behaving so far
below their capacity as beings endowed with reason and created in God’s
image. His religious faith was profound, and this knowledge should act as a
control on too easily interpreting his view as nihilist pessimism. He was
pessimist, as all great moralists have been, when they consider that man
misuses his reason to aggravate his ‘natural corruptions, and to acquire new
ones, which Nature had not given him’.
Swift published only one inconsiderable pamphlet under his own name;
his characteristic tactic was to create a mask (such as the Dublin Drapier or
Gulliver), and to present his moral judgements by complex and energetic
argument and irony.
Swift is a witty writer with a serious purpose, whose most controlled work,
Gulliver’s Travels, has been misread and misunderstood by a too easy
acceptance of the surface joking.
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In his own day, he was recognised as one of the greatest living writers in
English.
5. EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS
Literature, and therefore, literary language is one of the most salient

aspect of educational activity. In classrooms, all kinds of literary language
(poetry, drama, novel, prose, periodicals –newspapers, pamphlets-), either
spoken or written, is going on for most of the time. Yet, handling literary
productions in the past makes relevant the analysis of ‘literature in the
Augustan period’ and, in particular, the rise of one of the most relevant
literary forms for students: the novel, as well as letters, newspapers, essays,
and so on. Hence it makes sense to examine relevant figures such as of
Pope (poetry), Swift, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding (novel), Gibbon (history),
and Walpole and Radcliffe (terror novel).

Currently, action research groups attempt to bring about change in

classroom learning and teaching through a focus on literary production under
two premises. First, because they believe learning is an integral aspect of any
form of activity and second, because education at all levels must be conceived
in terms of literature. The basis for these assumptions is to be found in an
attempt, through the use of various modes of literary genres, to develop
understanding of students’ shared but diverse social and physical
environment.
Learning involves a process of transformation of participation itself which

has far reaching implications on the role of the teacher in the teaching-learning
relationship. This means that literary genres are an analytic tool and that
teachers need to identify the potential contributions and potential limitations of
them before we can make good use of the genre analysis techniques: poems,
comedies, historical accounts, tragicomedies and romances. We must bear in
mind that most students will continue their studies at university and there, they
will have to handle successfully all kind of genres, especially the non-fiction
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ones within a worldwide framework.
But how does Augustan literature tie in with the new curriculum?
Augustan literature may be approached in linguistic terms, regarding form
and function (morphology, lexis, structure, form) and also from a cross-
curricular perspective (Sociology, History, English, French, Spanish
Language and Literature). Spanish students are expected to know about the
British culture and its influence in Europe since students are required to
know about the culture and history of its own language. So, Augustan
literature is easily approached by means of the subjects of History, Language
and Literature by establishing a parallelism with the Spanish one (age,
literature forms, events).
In addition, one of the objectives of teaching the English language is

to provide good models of almost any kind of literary productions for future
studies. Following van Ek & Trim (2001), ‘the learners can perform, within

the limits of the resources available to them, those writing (and oral) tasks
which adult citizens in general may wish, or be called upon, to carry out in
their private capacity or as members of the general public’ when dealing with
their future regarding personal and professional life.
Moreover, nowadays new technologies may provide a new direction to

language teaching as they set more appropriate context for students to
experience the target culture. Present-day approaches deal with a
communicative competence model in which first, there is an emphasis on
significance over form, and secondly, motivation and involvement are
enhanced by means of new technologies. Hence literary productions may be
approached in terms of films and drama representations in class, among
others, and in this case, by means of books (novels: historical, terror,
descriptive), paper (essays), among others.

The success partly lies in the way the language becomes real to the
users, feeling themselves really in the language. Some of this motivational
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force is brought about by intervening in authentic communicative events.
Otherwise, we have to recreate as much as possible the whole cultural
environment in the classroom. This is to be achieved within the framework of the
European Council (1998) and, in particular, the Spanish Educational System
which establishes a common reference framework for the teaching of foreign
languages where students are intended to carry out several communication
tasks with specific communicative goals, for instance, how to produce a literary
text (oral or written): writing a chapter of a novel, a terror story, a poem,
acting out in a theatre play, representing a film scene orally, and so on
6. CONCLUSION.
We have studied the historical background of the 18th century, the

evolution of a still rural society whose pattern of life was more stable than that of
merchants who followed the traditions of 17th century life and were attached to

puritan attitudes. It has also been studied the political events, the cultural
activities and technological innovations.
Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett
and Laurence Sterne, the great novelists of this period, were also studied in
detail, together with an overall view of the minor novelists of the 18 th century.
Very exceptionally, the poet and satirist Jonathan Swift has also been analysed,
because of his influence on youngsters’ literature, despite the fact that his most
famous book was not meant for young readers.
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY.
 Daiches, D., A Critical History of English Literature, volume III. Second

Edition. Secker & Warburg. London, 1972.
 Duff, A. & Maley A., Literature. OUP. Oxford, 1992.
 Ford, B., The New Pellican Guide to English Literature, volume IV. From

Dryden to Johnson. Penguin Books. Great Britain, 1982.
 Gillie, C., Longman Companion to English Literature. Second Edition.
EPO English
Longman. London, 1980.
 Plumb, J. H., England in the Eighteenth Century from the Pellican History of
England. Penguin Books. Great Britain, 1985.
 http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_18c/websites.html
 http://18th.eserver.org/
 http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/%7Ejlynch/18th/etext.html
 http://www.enotes.com/literary-criticism/shamela-henry-fielding

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David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO

GREAT BRITAIN IN THE EIGHTEENTH

By David Navarro Sarabia

David Navaro Sarabia

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 1

David Navaro Sarabia

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 2

In this unit, we will deal with Britain’s socioeconomic development and

David Navaro Sarabia

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 3

1.1 Aims of the Unit

David Navaro Sarabia

In fact, this body of writing (eighteenth century literature in England)

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 4

1.2 Notes on Bibliography

An influential introduction to the historical and literary background of the

David Navaro Sarabia

Other sources on literary background are the following three network

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 5

David Navaro Sarabia

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 6

It also made the possession of great states a highly desirable form of

David Navaro Sarabia

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 7

The 18th century was the age of classicism: of harmony, proportion,

David Navaro Sarabia

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 8

As for craftsmanship, taste was dominated by an extremely refined sense

The Industrial Revolution was mainly due to the developments in

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David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 9

3. GREAT NOVELISTS OF THIS PERIOD.

3.1. The Novel in the Eighteenth Century.

David Navaro Sarabia

Defoe is generally considered the first great realistic novelist in English

Daniel Defoe, the son of a butcher, was born in London in 1660. He

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 10

• Themes and style.

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3.1.2. Samuel Richardson.

Richardson, often considered the first English psychological writer,

He was born in Derbyshire, England, in 1689 and died in London on July

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• Themes and style.

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3.1.3. Henry Fielding.

Fielding was an outstanding figure in the development of the novel as an

British writer, playwright and journalist, founder of the English Realistic

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Encouraged by his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Fielding started

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Fielding published his first novel, Shamela, in 1741. Fielding published

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 17

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Jones, is a passionate, highly sexed young man, as well as impulsively

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 19

For Fielding goodness, innocence, and ignorance of the world go

3.1.4. Tobias Smollett.

Tobias Smollett had no desire to rival Fielding as a formal innovator, and

David Navarro Sarabia Secondary Unit 45 Updated Edition EPO 20

cult of sensibility, he indulges in rote-learned displays of emotionalism and

3.1.5. Laurence Sterne.