The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics

229 Pages·2010·4.177 MB·English

by  Carol Stewart

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
AND THE SECULARIZATION OF ETHICS
To Stephen
The Eighteenth-Century Novel
and the Secularization of Ethics
CAROL STEWART
First published 2010 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright © Carol Stewart 2010
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Stewart, Carol.
The eighteenth century novel and the secularization of ethics.
1. English fiction – 18th century – History and criticism. 2. Ethics in literature.
3. Women in literature. 4. Women – Great Britain – Social conditions – 18th century.
5. Books and reading – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 6. Religion and ethics.
I. Title
823.5’09353–dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stewart, Carol (Carol Ann)
The eighteenth-century novel and the secularization of ethics / by Carol Stewart.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6348-5 (hardback: alk. paper)
1. English fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Ethics in literature.
3. Christian ethics in literature. 4. Religion and literature—England—History—18th
century. 5. Latitudinarianism (Church of England)—History—18th century. I. Title.
PR858.E67S74 2010
823’.509353—dc22
2009052680
ISBN 9780754663485 (hbk)
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Secularizing Ethics: From Pamela to Tom Jones 33
2 Opposition and Persuasion: From Roderick Random
to Humphry Clinker 71
3 Rewriting Ethics: David Simple, The Female Quixote,
and Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph 101
4 Tristram Shandy: Latitudinarianism and Liberty 131
5 ‘Hurtful Insignificance’?: The Novel in the Later
Eighteenth Century 165
Works Cited 195
Index 211
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Acknowledgements
This book began life as a doctoral thesis supervised by Ian Campbell Ross at
Trinity College, Dublin. His consistent support for this project, from its earliest
days until publication, has been invaluable. He brought rigour, scholarship and
remarkable patience to his reading and re-reading of my writing, and continues to
go well beyond the call of duty as a supervisor. I want to take this opportunity to
record my thanks. All mistakes contained herein are, of course, my own.
Parts of Chapters 1 and 5 previously appeared as ‘Pamela and the Anglican
Crisis of the 1730s’, in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32.1 (March
2009), and ‘The Anglicanism of Tristram Shandy: Latitudinarianism at the Limits’,
in the British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28.2 (Autumn 2005).
My thanks also go to Stephen Stewart, whose encouragement and faith in me
have been unwavering over very many years. This book is dedicated to him.
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Introduction
Writing to a friend in April 1749, Captain Lewis Thomas recommended Henry
Fielding’s recently published Tom Jones as a work of great moral efficacy, which
was likely to do more good than any number of clerical homilies: ‘If my design had
been to propagate virtue by appearing publickly in its defence, I should rather have
been ye Author of Tom Jones than of five Folio Volumes of sermons’.1 This view
was not universal. Samuel Johnson was famously shocked to hear Hannah More
quote from ‘so vicious a book’. In 1750 Thomas Sherlock, Bishop of London,
issued a pastoral letter on the occasion of the earthquake tremors experienced
in London, warning of divine retribution for the publication of ‘Histories and
Romances of the vilest Prostitutes’.2 The bishop could have been referring to
John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–1749), more usually
known as Fanny Hill, but ‘Eubulus’, writing in Old England, a journal happy to
publish attacks on Fielding and his friend and patron George Lyttleton, took the
opportunity to interpret Sherlock as meaning the hero of Fielding’s novel ‘who is a
Male-Prostitute’.3 Still, if the moral credentials of Tom Jones (1749) were disputed
– as had been other novels before it, not least Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or,
Virtue Rewarded (1740) – the idea that particular novels, if not the novel as a
genre, could promote morality in a way that sermons failed to do was beginning
to take hold in the mid-eighteenth century. Alexander Pope believed that Pamela
would do more good than a sermon and the novel was recommended from the
pulpit of St. Saviour’s Church in Southwark. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
considered that Lady Vane’s scandalous memoirs, which form a significant part
of Tobias Smollett’s novel Peregrine Pickle (1751), might, if ‘rightly consider’d’,
be ‘more instructive to young Women than any Sermon I know’.4 The idea that the
clergy were not the most effective communicators of moral teaching was certainly
commonplace. The Postscript to the third edition of Richardson’s Clarissa (1751)
makes a forceful statement:
[The Author] has lived to see Scepticism and Infidelity openly avowed and
even endeavoured to be propagated from the Press: The great doctrines of the
Gospel brought into question: Those of self-denial and mortification blotted
out of the catalogue of christian virtues: and a taste even to wantonness for
1 Ronald Paulson and Thomas Lockwood (eds), Henry Fielding: The Critical
Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 162.
2 Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage, 235.
3 Ibid.
4 Lionel Kelly (ed.), Tobias Smollett. The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1987), 88.