Nation and Novel BY THE SAME AUTHOR H. G. Wells Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching James Joyce The Failure of Theory: Essays on Criticism and Contemporary Fiction Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism 1750–1990 Shadows of the Future (AS EDITOR) H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage Science Fiction: A Critical Guide H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism (with Robert M. Philmus) Learning from Other Worlds The Reception of H. G. Wells in Europe (with John S. Partington) Nation &Novel The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day PATRICK PARRINDER AC AC Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University ’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Patrick Parrinder 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc ISBN 0–19–926484–8 978–0–19–926484–1 For Anna and Monika, and for Mia and Eve This page intentionally left blank Preface and Acknowledgements Nation and Novel is a literary history of the English novel and its dis- tinctive, often subversive contribution to ideas of nationhood. In it I have concentrated for the most part on the major novelists, those whose writings have been most influential and have attracted a lasting and international readership. I have engaged in more detailed textual inter- pretation than is usual in literary history, pursuing the approach to the nature of the novel form and its relationship to English national identity that I outline in Chapter 1. My primary intellectual debt in writing this book has been to the small army of literary critics and cultural historians who have transformed the study of English fiction of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in recent decades. This book could not have been written without their labours of historical research, textual editing, cultural theorizing, and reinterpretation. Few of the scholars on whom I have drawn are explicitly named in the chapters that follow—the alternative would have been to have put their names, which can be distracting for the non-specialist reader, on every page—but my appreciation of their work is no less heartfelt for that. All citations in the text are identified in the notes, and it is there and in the Further Reading that my indebtedness can be traced. Nation and Novel has taken me many years to write—I am embar- rassed to say how many—and there have been a number of false starts. At every stage I have benefited from the encouragement, criticism, and support of more friends and colleagues than I can possibly name. Above all, I would thank the University of Reading for institutional and technical support and for research leave, and my students with whom I have dis- cussed so many of the novels that feature in these pages. I am profoundly indebted to the Leverhulme Trust for granting me a Major Research Fellowship (2001–4), without which this book might never have been completed. I have received invaluable detailed comments from those friends who have been willing to read and criticize draft chapters or sections, including Eric Homberger (a comrade of almost forty years), Andrzej Gasiorek, David Gervais, David Smith, Zohreh Sullivan, and Jim Hurt. Earlier versions of some of this material have been given as seminar or conference papers and, in some cases, published in journals: in this respect I would particularly thank David Blewett, Regenia Gagnier and Angelique Richardson, Annette Gomis, Susana Onega, Max Saunders, viii Preface and Acknowledgements Joseph Wiesenfarth, Lawrence Phillips, Catherine Hall, and Stefan Kohl. Parts of Chapters 6, 9, 12, and 14 have appeared in a different form in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Victorian Literature and Culture, and International Ford Madox Ford Studies, respectively. Others to whom I am deeply grateful for their encouragement, support, and intellectual stimulus include Coral Howells (the best of colleagues), Michael Foot (who sent me back to Disraeli and Hazlitt), Ron Knowles (who presented me with a complete set of Scott’s novels), Robert Baldock, Christine Berberich, Maria Teresa Chialant, Christie Davies, Loraine Fletcher, John Lucas, Cora Kaplan, Hermione Lee, Michelle Reid, John Pilling, Sue Roe, Sita Schutt, Mohammad Shaheen, John Spiers, John Stotesbury, John Sutherland, Darko Suvin, Charles Swann, Marina Warner, Frances Wilson, and Michael Wood. In earlier years I learned much from two peerless critics of the novel, Tony Tanner and Raymond Williams. Some friends and colleagues have helped me most through a single conversation which set me on a track I might not have found for myself: I think par- ticularly of Miche`le Barrett, Andrew Gurr, Athena Leoussi, Giulio Lepschy, Brian Vickers, and others. For unfailing technical support (and so much else) I am indebted to Carole Robb, Jan Cox, and my daughter Monika. Special thanks are due to my editors at Oxford University Press, Sophie Goldsworthy, Andrew McNeillie, and Tom Perridge, and to my copy-editor, Mary Worthington, whose guidance and expertise have contributed immeasurably to this book in its final form. My greatest debt is to Jenny Bourne Taylor, who has spurred me to keep writing, helped me to shape this work in more ways than she perhaps knows, and put up with the burden of living with its author with a love, cheerfulness, and forbearance that have never failed. Of Jenny’s scho- larship, intellectual curiosity, and deep knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and history, all I can say is that they deserve a better book than this one. P. P. Contents Introduction 1 1. The Novel and the Nation 9 2. Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues: English Prose Fiction from 1485 to 1700 35 3. Cross-Grained Crusoe: Defoe and the Contradictions of Englishness 63 4. Histories of Rebellion: From 1688 to 1793 82 5. The Novel of Suffering: Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith 106 6. The Benevolent Robber: From Fielding to the 1790s 126 7. Romantic Toryism: Scott, Disraeli, and Others 145 8. Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte¨, and Elizabeth Gaskell 180 9. ‘Turn Again, Dick Whittington!’: Dickens and the Fiction of the City 213 10. At Home and Abroad in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction: From Vanity Fair to The Secret Agent 232 11. Puritan and Provincial Englands: From Emily Bronte¨to D. H. Lawrence 258 12. From Forster to Orwell: The Novel of England’s Destiny 291 13. From Kipling to Independence: Losing the Empire 321 14. Round Tables: Chivalry and the Twentieth-Century English Novel-Sequence 341 15. Inward Migrations: Multiculturalism, Anglicization, and Internal Exile 380 Conclusion: On Englishness and the Twenty-First-Century Novel 406 Notes 415 Author Biographies 455 Further Reading 472 Index 487 This page intentionally left blank Introduction nglish novels—like French, Russian, and American novels—are Eread all over the world, and the fact that they express and help to define a particular nationality is part of their appeal. Fictional narrative gives us an inside view of a society or nation, just as it gives access to personal experiences very different from our own. There are few more enjoyable ways of increasing our knowledge and satisfying our curiosity than reading a novel that we cannot put down. But the ideas and information that we derive from reading fiction are not always easy to single out. The Frenchness of a French novel, or the Russianness of a Russian novel, is a thing that most readers (whether native or foreign) only vaguely sense. Often it resides in impressions that are wholly or largely subconscious as well as in those that are crudely obvious. The same is true of English novels, with the added complication that English identity has itself come to be seen as notoriously elusive and idiosyncratic. We must begin, then, with a brief preliminary account of what the historian E. P. Thompson once called ‘the peculiarities of the English’.1 There is no written constitution and no readily available national ideo- logy, as in the United States. There is no generally agreed name for the Anglo-British state (England? Great Britain? The United Kingdom? The UK?) except in a formal or ceremonial context. To the extent that the state is held together by time-worn institutions such as the monarchy, the House of Lords, and the national system of patronage and titles, it wins at best a grudging allegiance from many English—and Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish—people.