Questioning the Romantic Novel

Abstract

Any discussion of the English during the period necessarily begins and ends in paradox, especially when one also considers curricular, pedagogical and canonical issues as they are reflected in undergraduate and graduate course offerings at colleges and universities. First, the most notably canonized novelist of mid-period, Jane Austen, is routinely regarded more as a latter-day eighteenth-century novelist than as a definitively one. Second, perhaps the most prolific novelist of the period, Sir Walter Scott, seldom appears in any but the most exhaustive or chronologically restricted surveys of the English novel. Third, the presence of Mary Shelley's perennially popular Frankenstein in the academic curriculum often reflects on one hand the desire to include women more visibly in the canon, and on the other the impulse among many teacher/scholars to leaven their courses in poetry with an accessible work of prose fiction whose affinities with that poetry are both apparent and compelling. Finally, Gothic novels, whose wave of popularity crested during the period, are typically relegated to the periphery of the fiction scene, their presence acknowledged by the literary-critical equivalent of the inclusion at family holiday meals of the poor relations who have to eat in the back room. In short, the Romantic novel has often seemed to be a non-entity devoid equally of dramatically successful practitioners and of any definable avid readership, either two hundred years ago or today. Whether this sort of casual assessment, which has long washed about in the backwaters of critical discourse concerned with the history and development of the English novel, still has any real value is a matter of some dispute. Certainly a review of the traditional academic offerings in the English would seem to suggest that there is a sizable desert to be crossed between Sterne (and Mackenzie) and the early Dickens. Austen furnishes a pleasant oasis in this arid environment, but as I have already suggested, her work is often represented both in criticism and in the classroom as steeped in a nostalgic sense of a fading gentility and elegance--ven wit and decorum--to which subsequent fiction offers no equivalent. Moreover, considered in historical context, Austen's works strike one as oddly out of place and anachronistic in the flamboyant Regency. One would scarcely associate the publication of Emma, for instance, with the year of Napoleon's final humiliation at Waterloo, nor that of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey with the increasingly brutal political suppressions in England that would culminate in eighteen months in the violence of the Manchester Massacre. Scott's invention of the historical novel, too, tends to lead one away from the actual temporal reality of his times; Waverley appeared the year before Waterloo, for instance, but it focuses by design upon other times, other places, other conflicts--although the events of 1745 were relevant to the emerging sense of a British nationhood which Scott celebrated and which was a theme for other authors as well during the Regency. In this respect the Waverley novels continue the program of nostalgic, post-chivalric tale-telling that had begun with the neo-medieval verse narratives which first established the Scottish bard's reputation. Not surprisingly, surveys of fictional literature, and of the in particular, have for the most part either ignored the period (the skip to the early Dickens is an easy and convenient one) or denigrated it in one way or another. Pronouncements like W. L. Renwick's are typical: The curious inquirer who samples the commercial novels [of 1789-1815] may find, at long intervals, an amusing phrase or touch of observation, but he will soon be content to leave them to the economist, the sociologist, and the bibliographer, and accept the few writers who enjoy established reputations by virtue of some individual significance which cannot be diminished by the mob who exploited the vogues they created. …

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