The Terrible Influence of Novels
Or, how Pamela turned into Elizabeth Bennett via Emily St Aubert
There’s a meme which goes around periodically which lists the reasons that 19th century women could be declared insane and shut up in an asylum. One of the reasons is ‘novel reading’.
While we find this funny and also very sad, novels did have a terrible reputation in the early years of the 19th century, and were considered suspicious for most of the Victorian era too. Methodist and Evangelical preachers, in particular, were prone to hellfire and brimstone sermons about them.
In 1864, for example, an anonymous American preacher wrote: ‘there are publications issuing from great men and small, but of corrupt hearts and perverted tastes, which address themselves to the lowest passions of their readers, polluting their principles, and so acting on them as to make them ready to do all that is sinful before God and injurious to society.’ And yes, he was talking about novels.
A heavy burden to lay on the backs of we poor, apparently misguided, writers!
But surely our dearly loved Jane Austen wouldn’t be classed as having a ‘corrupt mind and perverted taste’?
Well, no. Most of the contemporary reviews of Austen’s novels (there weren’t many) were approving, and she herself made fun of the more outré Gothic novels in Northanger Abbey.
This was partly because the role of the heroine in a novel—and the woman author—had gone through some striking changes in the hundred or so years since the first woman-centred novel, Moll Flanders, was published (it pretended to be an autobiography, but it’s generally agreed that Daniel Defoe wrote it based on interviews with the real Moll while she was in prison, and then made up a pious ending.) Its full title is: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother) Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent.
Enough said.
Then there was the opposite: Pamela (or, Virtue Rewarded) by Samuel Richardson, also with a claim to being the first English novel (because Moll Flanders was an ‘autobiography’, maybe?). Unlike Moll, whose story is a spiritual one from sin to repentence, Pamela, a serving maid propositioned by her master, stoutly resists temptation and is rewarded by him marrying her. It takes two volumes for this to happen, and much tribulation alone the way. The books were wildly popular, and were among the few novels suitable for young women, because the heroine was so upright and virtuous.
The problem, as far as the upper classes were concerned, was that they preferred reading about people from their own class.
And maybe something with a bit of zing to it?
Enter the Gothic Novel. Introduced by Horace Walpole with The Monk of Otranto, the Gothic novel held the cultural place that slasher films do now. Really looked down on, and yet, somehow, everyone has seen at least one.
But even The Castle of Otranto lacked a woman’s point of view (though it had not one, but two damsels in distress!). Enter the woman novelist, via the Gothic novel.
The woman’s Gothic novel, which Jane Austen satirised in Northanger Abbey, is best represented by Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, whose heroine, Emily St Aubert, is a Gascon girl of good family. She has a lot in common with Pamela in terms of moral purity, but she is subjected to an over-the-top plot, including imprisonment in the castle of Udolpho by an evil Italian nobleman. Interestingly, unlike in Otranto, Emily saves herself rather than waiting for her hero, and by the time he returns she’s set herself up nicely on the family estate.
For readers used to a diet of this kind of sensationalist story, Pride and Prejudice came as a welcome change. Its realism, the easily-understood fears and desires of its characters, and above all the wit of Austen’s writing, was thoroughly enjoyed—although it has to be said that Austen became far more popular in the late 19th century than she had been during her life. It was also daring in its assumption that women’s ordinary lives are interesting, and paved the way for greater exploration of those lives by the Bronte sisters.
It’s unlikely anyone was sent to an asylum for reading Jane Austen, but she was probably considered a gateway drug to the really harmful, ‘perverted tastes’ of the sensationalist story. Wuthering Heights, for example!
Novels may have been criticised, but novelists hit back. As Jeremy Sell puts it in his thesis on 19th century sermons: ‘Whether one considers the scheming,crafty, and ever-perspiring Reverend Slope from Trollope’s Barchester Towers or the hypocritical preacher Mr. Chadband from Dickens’s Bleak House or the smooth-talking, stage-performer-style preacher Godfrey Ablewhite in Collins’s The Moonstone, the preacher, especially the Evangelical preacher, does not fare well at the hands of Victorian novelists.’ And anyone relying on Pride and Prejudice for an unbiased description of a vicar will meet Mr Collins, surely one of the most brilliant depictions of a fawning bore ever written.
Still, we novel readers should beware! That anonymous preacher I quoted earlier went on to say: ‘The minds of novel readers are intoxicated, their rest is broken, their health shattered, and their prospect of usefulness blighted.’
I confess, I’d quite like to intoxicate my readers and break their rest by making them so keen to finish the book they don’t get to sleep until the wee hours. But I’m pretty sure books are good for your health and usefulness!
ps I have a new novella, The Baboon at the Ball, which you might remember me mentioning in the post about Regency menageries. It’s out soon in a funny, sweet anthology, The Regent’s Menagerie, and you can get it at the moment for a pre-order price of only $0.63!