Representing Reality: Strategies of Realism in the Early English Novel

Representing Reality: Strategies of Realism in the Early English NovelClinton Bond Some's fiction and some's not, and you can't be sure. I wanted that feeling of when you're lying, people think you're telling the truth.' Ken Kesey Alexander Pope read Samuel Richardson's Pamela "with great Approbation and Pleasure," and, according to Dr George Cheyne, commented that "it will do more good than a great many of the new Sermons."2 However we read this comment, and I believe there are several layers of irony, Pope enjoyed the book well enough to make sure his appreciation and his understanding of it as a work of practical morality were forwarded to its author. His linking Pamela to the sermon would have won Richardson's gratitude, by placing it in that world of homiletic morality where Richardson consistently believed his works belonged. That Pamela was a fiction Pope did not doubt, but those features that make the text a novel for the modern reader apparently made little impression on him. He seems not to have responded to Pamela's originality, nor did he recognize that the work's subtext attacked the world he had dedicated his life to defending. 1 Interview, San Francisco Examiner, Sunday 26 October 1986, p. A29. 2 Quoted in Maynard Mack, Pope: A Life (New York: W.W. Norton; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 761; quoted in T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 124. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 6, Number 2, January 1994 122 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Pope's sort of humanism, descended from the Roman Catholic thinkers ofthe sixteenth century, was in decline, and even though Pope would "not bear any faults to be mentioned in the story" oíPamela? he was certainly willing to offer advice about the sequel, advice which Richardson could not or would not follow. Pope was so insensitive to the nature of the work that, according to Warburton, he suggested that Richardson turn the continuation of Pamela into a set of satirical "spy" letters, written by the naive serving girl: Mr. Pope and I, talking over your work when the two last volumes came out, agreed, that one excellent subject of Pamela's letters in high life, would have been to have passed her judgment, on first stepping into it, on every thing she saw there, just as simple nature (and no one ever touched nature to the quick, as it were, more certainly and surely than you) dictated. The effect would have been this, that it would have produced, by good management, a most excellent and useful satire on all the follies and extravagancies of high life; which to one of Pamela's low station and good sense would have appeared as absurd and unaccountable as European polite vices and customs to an Indian. You easily conceive the effect this must have added to the entertainment of the book; and for the use, that is incontestable. And what could be more natural than this in Pamela, going into a new world, where every thing sensibly strikes a stranger.4 As a moral tale, Pope links Pamela to sermons and, as an epistolary tale, he links it to the Lettres persanes type of satirical comment— genres which, I argue below, were displaced and subverted by the novel.5 Richardson, however, understood that what he had created was something very different and very new and, as we shall see, he sought to deflect Warburton' s further solicitations when he readied Clarissa for publication. As Pope's response to Pamela indicates, eighteenth-century novels were at first misunderstood; the tasks of the present essay are to explore the cultural fissures that separated authors and, more particularly, to discover what the unspoken and elusive claims of realistic fictions were. 3 Cheyne, quoted in Eaves and Kimpel, p. 124. 4 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, The Correspondence ofSamuel Richardson, 6 vols (New York: AMS Press, 1966) 1:134-35. 5 In Novels of the 1740s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), Jerry C. Beasley remarks that Pamela, along with other "heroes and heroines of the major novels," bears a...