Mary Davys's "Probable Feign'd Stories" and Critical Shibboleths about "The Rise of the Novel"

Mary Davys's "Probable Feign'd Stories" and Critical Shibboleths about "The Rise of the Novel" J.A. Downie The World is so taken up of late with Novels and Romances, that it will be hard for a private History to be taken for Genuine, where the Names and other Circumstances of the Person are concealed, and on this Account we must be content to leave the Reader to pass his own Opinion upon the ensuing Sheets, and take itjust as he pleases.' 'Tis now for some time, that those Sort of Writings call'd Novels have been a great deal out of Use and Fashion, and that the Ladies (for whose Service they were chiefly design'd) have been taken up with Amusements ofmore Use and Improvement; ImeanHistory andTravels: with which the Relation of Probable Feign'd Stories can by no means stand in competition.2 Although only just over three years separated the publication of Moll Flanders in January 1722 and The Works of Mrs. Davys in 1725, the evidence they offer about the contemporary appeal of "the novel" appears to be peculiarly conflicting. Whereas the preface to the former opens by referring to the popularity "of late" of "Novels and Romances," the preface to the latter expresses fears that "Probable Feign'd Stories" are 1 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. G.A. Starr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. [I]. 2 Mary Davys, The Works ofMrs. Davys: Consisting of, Plays, Novels, Poems, and Familiar Letters (London, 1725), p. iii. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 310 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION out of fashion and unable to compete with the new vogue for "History and Travels." As it is a commonplace of accounts of the emergence of the English novel since the publication of Ian Watt's The Rise ofthe Novel in 1957, if not before, that "novels" increased in popularity during the early decades of the eighteenth century, Mary Davys's contention that, from the perspective of 1725, "Novels have been a great deal out of Use and Fashion ... for some time" is rather disconcerting and appears to be in need of investigation and explanation. Indeed, it seems to me that, in a single sentence, Davys succeeds in complicating several issues at the heart of debates about the "rise of the novel." Since its publication in 1957, Ian Watt's classic study has been criticized on a number of grounds: its "teleological bias";3 its assumption that "the novel" was "a new literary form ... begun by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding"4—an assumption that not only rules out earlier writers of fiction but contemporaries of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, especially women writers such as Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Jane Barker, Elizabeth Rowe, Penelope Aubin, and Mary Davys herself;5 its identification of the "lowest common denominator" of the novel, formal realism, which, Watt maintains, is "the narrative embodiment of a premise that Defoe and Richardson accepted very literally, but which is implicit in the novel form in general";6 and, more recently, the very soundness ofthe "triple-rise" thesis itself—the argument, in other words, that the rise of the middle class leads to the rise of the reading public which leads, in turn, to the rise of the novel.7 Mary Davys's observation, then, has a bearing on most if not all of the issues at dispute: the assumption that "the novel" was "a new literary form ... begun by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding"; the assumption that a growth in the reading public in the early eighteenth century led to an increase in the popularity of "the novel"; the assumption that "formal realism" was the 3 John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 2. 4 Ian Watt, The Rise ofthe Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 9. 5 Cf. Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 6 Watt, p. 32. 7 See my essay "The Making of the English Novel," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 ( 1997), 249-66. Cf. J. Paul...