Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print Series Editors Anne K. Mellor Department of English, University of California Los Angeles, California, USA Clifford Siskin Department of English, New York University New York, New York, USA Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print features work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries – whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it combines efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explora- tions of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersections of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series enables a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity. Editorial Board: Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK; John Bender, Stanford University, USA; Alan Bewell, University of Toronto, Canada; Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge, UK; Robert Miles, University of Victoria, Canada; Claudia Johnson, Princeton University, USA; Saree Makdisi, UCLA, USA; Felicity A Nussbaum, UCLA, USA; Mary Poovey, NewYorkUniversity,USA;JanetTodd, University of Cambridge, UK. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14588 Roger Maioli Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel Fielding to Austen Roger Maioli University of Florida Gainesville, FL, USA Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print ISBN 978-3-319-39858-7 ISBN 978-3-319-39859-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39859-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948406 © The Editor(s) (If applicable) and the Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To my parents, | Dedico este livro aos meus pais, Eliseu dos Santos & Lurdes Maioli dos Santos PREFACE Between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the philosophy and the prose fiction of Great Britain came to evince an unprecedented interest in the particulars of experience. Classical empiricism from Francis Bacon to David Hume redirected the attention of philosophers from the stratosphere of rationalism to the discrete data of the senses. At the same time, fictionists from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen turned their gaze from the high plains of romance towards the minute details of everyday life.1 Modern historians of the novel have come to see these two developments as aspects of a single tendency in European culture. In his highly influential TheRiseoftheNovel, Ian Watt described the shift towards particularity in British philosophy and literature as the common expression of a new world picture that had been taking shape since the Renaissance, “one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particu- lar experiences at particular times and at particular places.”2 For Watt, philo- sophers and novelists were common inheritors of this worldview, which they promoted by means of analogous methods. The procedures developed by the empiricists to investigate the world of experience and document their findings were equally recognizable in the “formal realism” that came to characterize prose fiction. “The novel’s imitation of human life,” says Watt, “follows the procedures adopted by philosophical realism in its attempt to ascertain and report the truth” (31). Like the new philosophy, the rising novel endeavored to portray the circumstantiality of observable life with faithfulness, and it did so in order to “report the truth” and thus enlighten its readers about the world. From Watt’s perspective, the realist novel was more than romance descended from the clouds to please a lowlier taste. It was an agent of the vii viii PREFACE Enlightenment. Through its subject matter and its methods, the novel participated in the contemporary campaign to popularize knowledge of the observable world by means of accessible, unadorned reports. Modern scholars have come to be suspicious of Watt’s progressive narrative, especially for its strict separation between romance and the novel. Still, Watt’s belief that the rises of empiricism and the novel were somehow connected has retained its appeal, and the main tendency of later scholarship has been to reaffirm and refine rather than contest it. The original thesis was given extensive elaboration in Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740, and subsequently taken in new directions in a number of studies by J. Paul Hunter, John Bender, Jonathan Lamb, Jonathan Kramnick, Cynthia Wall, and others.3 For all their variety, these studies broadly conform to Watt’s “collaborative” model; they offer a picture of a mutually reinforcing relationship between empiricism and the novel, showing how the latter either mirrored or appropriated the methodological procedures and pedagogic goals of the former. The picture is essentially this: like empiricism, the novel sought to collect, organize, and make sense of the data of sensory experience, giving pride of place to the here-and-now of English life and inspecting with clinical thoroughness the inner workings of human subjectivity, always in a stylistic register in which denotation trumps adornment. The ultimate goal, again, was to convey knowledge. Defoe and Richardson, no less than Locke or Hume, based their writings on the particulars of experience in order to help readers understand and navigate the real world. The empirical genesis of Moll Flanders or Clarissa allegedly enhanced the power of these novels as vehicles for instruction, making them imaginative counterparts of the political treatise or the moral essay. The empiricist program had only to gain from these developments, as it found in the novel a powerful ally for the popularization of socio-ethical knowledge. As far as the attitude of eighteenth-century novelists go, this collaborative picture has much to recommend it. Fictionists in the period consistently capitalized on the purported connection between the protocols of empiri- cism and the novel’s pedagogic value. Stressing the moral accompanying the fable was a routine gesture in the addresses to the reader that prefaced most narratives at the time, and the moral was usually characterized as a type of empirical inference – a set of conclusions to be drawn from the dizzying array of particular facts documented by the novel. Thus, Defoe characterizes Moll Flanders as “a Work from every part of which something may be learned, and some just and religious Inference is drawn, by which the PREFACE ix Reader will have something of Instruction”; by the same token, the story of Colonel Jack, according to Defoe’s preface, is so rich in lessons “that it would employ a Volume, large as itself, to particularize the Instructions that may be drawn from it.”4 Richardson went Defoe one better and actually produced the volume, listing the lessons yielded by his novels in A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison (1755). Since it was a matter of no slight importance that the facts yielding the inferences be authentic, novelists often buttressed their teachings by denying (or, in Richardson’s case, de-emphasizing) the novel’s fictionality. Through this well-known maneuver, they were able to validate their lessons by alleging their historical (and hence empirical) grounded- ness. Now, while the false claim to historicity is the most well known, it was not the only way of enlisting the epistemic prestige of empiricism in support of the novel. The genre’s pedagogic program retained its association with empiricism even after the 1740s, when the old authenticating devices entered their slow descent into obsolescence. Midcentury novelists like Fielding, who made no attempt to sell their fictions as fact, nonetheless staked the cognitive value of their novels on a professed faithfulness to observation and experience. Whether in the early or the late eighteenth century, therefore, fictionists with a pedagogical agenda invoked the