The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1830

Abstract

This essay profiles anonymity in novel writing in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. The great majority of these novels are, in literary terms, essentially worthless: their interest is entirely historical, as the colorful and ramshackle foot-soldiers in the advance of the novel during the Romantic period. Investigation of the writing, production, publication, circulation, and reception of these books offers a new understanding of many aspects of the cultural history of these years. For many, the writing of a novel was an apprentice piece—and one from which they did not always recover. Much of this fiction slavishly followed model forms, predictable and with restrained ambition. Several novels even seem to have been put together above the print-room—a few chapters from a hack writer, other parts culled from an old romance, something more translated from a foreign potboiler. 1 The reason for writing was sometimes spelled out in a preface or (not necessarily more succinctly) in a title page. The diversity of writers and circumstances matched the range of success and failure. A few novels were quickly reprinted; others were revived after a few seasons or achieved a limited success in the writer s own circle or locality. The bulk of these novels were soon left to gather dust, summarily disposed of, or returned, after brief reading, to the fashionable circulating libraries for which so many of them were chiefly written.

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