"In truth, the story of the novel has no end and no beginning."
S. Diana Neill, A Short History of the English Novel, 9

    The roots of the novel extend as far back as the beginning of communication and language because the novel is a compilation of various elements that have evolved over the centuries.  The birth of the English novel, however, can be centered on the work of three writers of the 18th century: Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and Henry Fielding (1707-1754).  Various critics have deemed both Defoe and Richardson the father of the English novel, and Fielding is never discussed without comparison to Richardson.  The choice of these three authors is not arbitrary; it is based on central elements of the novel that these authors contributed which brought the novel itself into place.  Of course, Defoe, Richardson and Fielding added onto styles of the past and writing styles of the period, including moralistic instruction and picaresque stories.  Using writing of the time and the literary tradition of the past, Defoe first crafted the English novel while Richardson and Fielding completed its inception.

    Critics disagree on a strict definition of the novel; D.H. Lawrence has remarked, "You can put anything you like in a novel" (Stevenson 2), and Wagenknecht in his Cavalcade of the English Novel has claimed the "…'novel' has never been satisfactorily defined" (xvii).  Henry James had a unique perception of the novel:

"A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of the other parts."      (Kettle 12)

"Novel" comes from the Italian "novelle," which was used for sensational news stories.  One collection, Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, was popularized in the 14th century (Phelps 11).  The term carried over into English to form the basis of the English novels.

    There are certain components that a novel should contain.  George Phelps has come up with a six-part basis for identifying novels: the writing must be fictitious, or in other words "not pretend to tell the truth," have a certain length, attain a unity of "plot, theme, tone, atmosphere, or vision," create an illusion of reality, be concerned with character, and be prose (Phelps 7-8).  Kettle, in his An Introduction to the English Novel, argues a novel must have two elements -- a quality of life and a significant pattern (13).  "Life and pattern are not, in truth, separable.  Pattern is the way life develops" (24).  The novel must also be different from two closely related literary forms, the short story and the moral fable.  The short story involves only one situation while the novel involves a "chain of circumstances" (Wagenknecht xvii).  Moral fables, such as Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Johnson's Rasselas should not be considered novels because of the satire or allegorical aspects in them (Phelps 9).

    Another unique aspect of the novel is its importance or value (Kettle 12).  For example, both Uncle Tom's Cabin and Wuthering Heights are novels, but they differ in importance.  Uncle Tom's Cabin had a historical immediacy which pointed people's minds towards slavery, while Wuthering Heights changed "men's consciousness and [made] them aware of what previously they had not even guessed" (13).  They are from different realms, yet both are novels.  Therefore, perhaps only a broad definition of the novel suffices; its ancestry is one of the most complex of literary forms.

    The novel had been brewing worldwide for many centuries before Defoe came onto the scene.  Before even being written down, stories were told and over time and evolved either into ballads, fairy tales and short stories, or into sagas, epics and novels (Phelps 10).  Many of the themes and ideas for plots came from ancient Greece, from the stories of Troy, and Thebes (Neill 10-11).  From the Greek, Roman and Byzantine civilizations came the Grail legend, the idea of pirate legends and that of star-crossed lovers.  What many consider the first world novel, The Tale of Genji, came out of Japan around 1000 AD.  Others developed in China, usually centering on the themes of bandits, war, chivalry and love affairs (Kroeber 505).  Before the Norman Conquest, ballads and stories such as Beowulf were told plentifully.  It has even been suggested that the prevalence of poetry and drama in the ensuing period stopped the novel from appearing earlier, as the population was satisfied with literature the way it was (Neill 9).  After the conquest, as French writers moved into the English court, they were inspired with stories of the Crusades (11).  From the ancient civilizations to the Middle Ages, elements of later novels began to appear.

    The next development occurred during the medieval times; the romances of Arthur, Lancelot and Robin Hood fill the period (Neill 15), though according to one critic, Morte d'Arthur did "not add up to a novel in any meaningful sense of the word" (Phelps 14).  Much of the appeal of these romances was due to the system of feudalism and social separation of the classes.  Readers could escape to unrealistic, imaginary worlds from the harsh life (Kettle 29).  On romance, "its crudest form is pornography, but it has many other forms less crude though scarcely more desirable" (31).  The transition from romance to realism is paralleled in the collapse of feudalism and rise of the bourgeois.  This break required tearing "the veil of romance from the face of feudalism" (35).

    This transition concerned itself mainly with the picaresque style that began in 1554 with the Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes.  The story was that of a picaro's, or rogue's, life of adventures (Kroeber 505).  At the beginning of the realism movement, the picaresque style was the "literature of feudal outcasts" or "rebels and adventurers who had not yet become a self-conscious class" (Kettle 52).  The tales generally appealed to the upper-class males (Kroeber 506) and were long adventure stories without connection -- differentiating themselves from novels (Kettle 70).  The first English picaresque writer was Thomas Nashe, with his 1594 The Unfortunate Traveler, or The Life of Jackie Wilton (Neill 28).  The only other major development was Don Quixote by Cervantes, the "premier novel of Spain" (Kroeber 508).  The picaresque idea died out:

    "By the beginning of the eighteenth century the picaro was no longer an outcast and therefore no longer a picaro; he might not be a fully fledged bourgeois, but he participated in a society…"       (Kettle 52)

As the seventeenth century progressed, Spain lost its world power and the Spanish novel lost its vitality (508).  As the romantic ideals were deemed of secondary importance, the novel drew near.

    The 18th century holds not only the birth of the English novel, but also the new theories of John Locke and Isaac Newton.  "Hope and confidence replace the doubt and uncertainty," as science and new ideas come onto the scene (Kettle 56).  Writers' purpose in this time is to show "the contemporary world in broad realistic strokes" (Neill 80).  There is a new institution called the tribunal, a professional who reviews books as they come out.  Tribunals appear after Defoe's death, but in time to help the public appetite for Richardson and Fielding (Stevenson 13).  The changing times are ready for the new authors.

    Daniel Defoe, before turning to writing, held jobs as diverse as running a brick factory or being an accountant (Baker 3: 8).  Monk, in his "Introduction to Colonel Jack" wrote:

    "During his long career as a writer, Daniel Defoe was to lead what may be the busiest, most varied, most vicissitudinous life of any English writer." (ix)

Defoe was a Dissenter and supported the Protestant rebellion and William of Orange (Phelps 39).  For his satire The True-Born Englishman, Defoe simultaneously became "the most popular man in England" and was sentenced to the pillory (Baker 3: 8).  However, he was surrounded by admirers who supported his ideas (8).  His other famous controversial works were The Shortest Way with Dissenters and Jure Divine.  Defoe "was a culture hero even when few of his books were read and fewer still admired."  In fact, he wasn't famous for his works until long after his death…Defoe is notable for the quantity of hostile material directed against him in his lifetime" (Rogers 3-4).

    "Daniel Defoe was not, it seems, a lucky man, suffering as he did the indignities of bankruptcy, the pillory, and Newgate prison; nonetheless, in 1719 he serendipitously invented the English novel."    (Stevenson 5)

It is remarkable that Defoe's novel writing carried through the obstructions of being a Dissenter.

    The second English novelist, Samuel Richardson -- whose nickname was "Serious and Gravity" in school -- learned the trade of printing and eventually rose to the position of Law Printer to the King (Phelps 62).  His experience as an amanuensisx led to his commission to construct a series of informative letters.  Before he finished (but well over the age of fifty) Richardson came out with his first novel, written in epistolaryV form (Wagenknecht 9).  Colerige once remarked:

"I confess that it has cost, and still costs, my philosophy some exertion not to be vexed that I must admire, aye greatly admire, Richardson.  His mind is so very vile, a mind so oozy, so hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent."  (Phelps 65)

Richardson integrated work experience and writing when he printed his first novel.

    Henry Fielding concentrated more on writing than did Richardson, though again after some career changes.  Fielding, after Eton and the University of Leyden, moved from drama to law and finally to writing - though "Fielding was dead in his grave before reaching the age at which Richardson began to write" (Wagenknecht 58-59).  Fielding's schooling contributed to his writing.

    With The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived eight and Twenty Years, all alone on an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Ship-Wreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself.  With an Account how he was at last as strangely delivered by Pyrates.  Written by himself., Defoe published the first English novel.  Defoe was criticized in his time, however appropriately, for his wordiness (Stevenson 11) though today he is lauded for his "minute and inexhaustible realism" (Baker 3: 146).  Crusoe's importance is in this attention to detail; his focus on concrete actions was a large part of Defoe's contribution to the novel (Phelps 43).  Typical of his detail is a passage concerning the cannibals:

"This was a dreadful Sight to me, especially when going down to the Shore, I could see the marks of Horror, which the dismal Work they had been about had left behind it, viz.  The Blood, the Bones, and part of the Flesh of humane Bodies, eaten and devour'd by those Wretches, with Merriment and Sport; I was so fill'd with the Indignation at the Sight, that I began now to premeditate the destruction of the next that I saw there, let them be who, or how many so ever."
    From Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, 143

Defoe's story is the mock autobiography of a man who's life is a series of adventures - that of a picaro.  "What places Defoe in the picaresque tradition is his anti-romantic, anti-feudal realism…" (Kettle 52), though Crusoe has much more than a picaresque story.  Crusoe's adventures are connected by the overall storyline of his life.

    In telling the story, Defoe drew upon many writing styles of the time: providence literature, the spiritual biography, the experiences of a true-life Crusoe named Alexander Selkirk, and the guide tradition.  Providence literature was comprised of stories in which a religious aspect was taken: for example, in Defoe's 1704 The Storm: Or, a Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters which Happen'd in the Late Dreadful Tempest, Defoe claimed the extreme storms were caused by the sins of England (Hunter "The Providence" 270-71).  Readers of the time were probably to associate Crusoe with the providence tradition, though perhaps not entirely with religion (271).  The spiritual biography was a Puritan form of the biography where instruction was interspersed with the narrative of a person's life (Hunter "The Spiritual" 272).  Defoe drew from the method of the spiritual biography - explaining events related to "the basic pattern of his subject's life" (273).  A more direct influence was Alexander Selkirk, a man stranded on an island for four years, though he reportedly became half-savage during his stay.  Defoe was probably familiar with Selkirk's own account of his adventure.

    However the greatest influence to Crusoe having developed into the first English novel was the Puritan guide tradition.  Crusoe's first moral guidebook, The Family Instructor was published in 1715.  Guidebooks usually told a story designed to teach young people how to behave; in fact, the only difference between the novel and the guidebook "lay chiefly in the prominence now given the story, which took the leading place, hitherto occupied by the moral" (Hunter "The Puritan" 267).  The Puritan influence in Defoe's time provided him with stylistic ideas to use in Crusoe.

    Defoe's Crusoe had quite an impact on society; Jean Jacques Rousseau praised it in his Emile, ou de l'Education, the hypothetical instruction of a child.  Rousseau declares, "I loathe books: they only teach you to speak about things of which you know nothing," then continues to clarify his position.  He is looking for one book that presents and develops situations in real life, which also exercises the imagination (Rousseau 52).  "What is this wonderful book then?  Is it Aristotle, or Pliny, or Buffon?  No - it is Robinson Crusoe" (52-52).  Rousseau writes of Crusoe's solitude on the island and its supposed effect on Emile:

"This state, I admit, is not that of a man in society, and most probably it will not be Emile's: but it is through this state that he will come to value all others…[Emile] will want to know everything useful, and nothing else; you will no longer have to guide him, only to restrain him."
    From "Rousseau on Robinson Crusoe" (53)

Crusoe was obviously an important novel, as Rousseau would espouse it.

    Despite the praise of Rousseau and others, who agreed "Fiction was never nearer the truth" (Kettle 53), Defoe's Crusoe lacks some specific elements.  One charge that Defoe is not the true father of the novel centers on the fact that he mainly wrote under an economic motive.  Crusoe salvages money from his dead shipmates even when he knows it will have no use on the island (Phelps 42).  In addition, Crusoe's relationship with Friday centers on the tasks that need to be finished, such as building the raft and obtaining food (45).  Dickens remarked once, "I will venture to say that there is not in literature a more surprising instance of an utter want of tenderness and sentiment than the death of Friday" (Wagenknecht 38).  Because there is no psychological insight, purists do not consider Defoe a "true novelist" (Monk ix).  Monk, in his "Introduction to Colonel Jack," has a rebuttal to this:

"But if to write a novel is to create a coherent world populated by credible people at least one of whom dominates the main action, then Defoe's romances or tales of adventure are indeed novels" (ix).

Despite a few dissenters, Defoe is definitely due credit for his work at the origin of the English novel.

    After Crusoe, Defoe continued to write novels beginning with The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of his Life, And of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three parts of the Globe and the failed third part of the story (Baker 3: 8).  Further novels were in the same style as Crusoe - that of a man or woman telling his or her life story.  Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, Colonel Jack and Roxana came out from 1720 to 1724 (Wagenknecht 33-34).  These books popularized the novel in its earliest stage.

    As Defoe is considered the turning point in the history of the English novel (Baker 3: 130), Richardson and Fielding were the first to truly take advantage of the new form.  Phelps, in his 50 British Novels: 1600-1900, has seen "Richardson and Fielding as the two main pillars of the early English novel - at opposite ends of the building" (72).  Richardson and Fielding complemented each other in the further development of the novel by each advancing a different component.

    Richardson's Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded appealed to a wide audience - including upper-class servants and women in general (Phelps 67).  Pamela, the popular novel comprised of 32 letters, was the story of a maid who resisted several advances of her lord until he proposed to her (Wagenknecht 52).  Richardson wrote with a moral purpose; "he would not have faced the labor of writing a single sentence for art's sake alone" (54).  This appealed to the public, whose taste was largely set in ethically meaningful writing (Kettle 65).  "In fact, the prim, fussy, fifty-one year old printer had produced what was in effect the world's first best-selling novel" (Phelps 63).  Richardson's greatest contribution, however, was his introduction of character insight to the novel.  His use of the letter form eased the discussion of Pamela's thought, though perhaps he went to the point where it was "difficult to believe that Pamela could have found time to write six long letters on her wedding day" (Wagenknecht 53).  Phelps believes Richardson introduced "the deliberate and detailed analysis of conduct, motive, action and reaction which was essential for further progress" (69).  Richardson, with his Pamela extended the scope of the novel to include a new meaning in character emotion.

    Fielding's first novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, was taken from a similar storyline as that of Pamela - Joseph Andrews is Pamela's sister and a similar plot develops.  Fielding was different, though, in that he has been called "the first unashamed novelist in England" for his use of an omniscient narrator over a letter or autobiography form (Wagenknecht 59).  In his writing, Fielding knew he was creating something new - what he called the "comic prose era" (Neill 58).  He parodied religion and added satire to his writing; his greatest contribution was the addition of social context to his novel (Phelps 76).  Fielding's Andrews furthered the scope of the novel.

    Smollet, Austin and Scott took the newly developed English novel and brought it to its prime in the decades following Fielding's death.  They combined Defoe's adventure and detail, Richardson's character depth and Fielding's broader view to create their own great novels.  The legacy of past civilizations from Europe and Asia were included, as well as the romance and picaresque traditions.

The novel is a summary of the literature of the world.  The writing and ideas that have survived the passage of time have been combined by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding into the most complex of literary forms, the English novel.
 

William Chen
 

Works Cited

Baker, Ernest A.  The Later Romances and the Establishment of Realism. Vol. 3 of The History of the English Novel.  10 vols.  New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963.

Defoe, Daniel.  Robinson Crusoe: The Critical Heritage.  Ed. Michael Shinagel.  New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975.

Hunter, J. Paul.  "The Providence Tradition."  Robinson Crusoe: The Critical Heritage.  By Daniel Defoe.  Ed. Michael Shinagel.  New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975.  270-271.

Hunter, J. Paul.  "The Puritan Emblematic Tradition."  Robinson Crusoe: The Critical Heritage.  By Daniel Defoe.  Ed. Michael Shinagel.  New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975.  266-268.

Hunter, J. Paul.  "Spiritual Biography."  Robinson Crusoe: The Critical Heritage.  By Daniel Defoe.  Ed. Michael Shinagel.  New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975.  272-274.

Kettle, Arnold.  An Introduction to the English Novel: Defoe to the Present.  New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

Kroeber, Karl.  "Novel."  The Encyclopedia Americana.  1997 ed.

Monk, Samuel Holt.  Introduction.  Colonel Jack.  By Daniel Defoe.  London: Oxford University Press, 1965.  ix-xxiii.

Neill, S. Diana.  A Short History of the English Novel.  New York: Collier Books, 1964.

Phelps, Gilbert.  50 British Novels: 1600-1900.  London: Heinemann Educational Body Ltd., 1979.

Rogers, Pat.  Introduction.  Defoe: The Critical Heritage.  Ed. Pat Rogers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.  1-28.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques.  "A Treatise on Natural Education."  Defoe: The Critical Heritage.  Ed. Pat Rogers.  London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.  52-53.

Stevenson, John.  The British Novel: Defoe to Austin.  Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Wagenknecht, Edward.  Cavalcade of the English Novel.  New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954.