"A Matter Discutable": The Rise of the Novel

"A Matter Discutable": The Rise ofthe Novel W.B. Camochan As an undergraduate in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1950s, I think I never read a novel in a course unless one counts Gulliver's Travels or Rasselas, both of them included in chronological surveys of the eighteenth century, and somewhere along the way I must have read Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, though not in George Sherburn's course on the novel before 1800—because I didn't take it, notwithstanding my inclination to the eighteenth century. I doubt that I was unique in my indifference to the novel, and I know it was not because I had an especially greater aptitude for poetry or drama. Nor was it because I had any special aversion to the novel: I occupied one summer with The Magic Mountain. It was merely that at Harvard in the early 1950s the novel did not claim the attention it does now because it did not have the same canonical standing. I read Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Romantic poetry, I read the triumvirate of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold; and I read twentiethcentury American poetry. I took drama from the beginning to the closing of the theatres and modern drama, including Chekhov and Strindberg and O'Neill. I wrote an honours essay on Swift's sermons. But it was graduate school before I took a seminar on the eighteenth-century novel, catching up on Sterne and Smollett and Goldsmith and being taught to dislike Richardson. I took a seminar on James, and I also caught up with Cooper and Melville and Hawthorne and the American naturalists. My undergraduate curriculum would now seem unusual if not perverse. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 168 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION To be sure, other undergraduate courses besides Sherburn's that were available but that I didn't take included Harry Levin's famous "Proust, Joyce, and Mann" and "Forms of the Modern Novel," taught by Ian Watt's fellow Conradian and future colleague Albert Guerard and, because its formal designation was Comparative Literature 166, known affectionately as "Comp. Lit. One Sexty-Sex." I didn't take these courses not only because I didn't need to, but also because I thought of them as outside the mainstream, which indeed they were in the early 1950s. They were also hugely popular. That seemed to me to reflect the status of the novel: popular , certainly, and avant-garde, sometimes, but really serious stuff, maybe not, unless you dealt with it in the rarefied air of a graduate seminar. And when it came time to write a dissertation, I did an (uninspired) essay on the poetic satires of Charles Churchill. The novel was simply not where the main action was, no matter how popular Levin's and Guerard's courses were. Now, going on fifty years after my novel-deprived undergraduate days, things could hardly have changed more than they have. By the mid-1980s the Stanford English Department had introduced a new requirement for undergraduates in "Poetry and Poetics" because students tended to read novels to the exclusion, so far as they could, of everything else. Poetry generally scared them. Why was the novel, at Harvard, in the early 1950s, so marginal? In the first place, as is familiar by now, even English "literature" was a latecomer to the academy, and the novel, being a latecomer to the territory of "literature," had to shoulder its way gradually into the curriculum. In the second place, Harvard was no hotbed of academic novelty, and the English faculty, with the exception ofthe young, brilliant, outspoken, and irreverent Guerard, was simply less interested in the novel than more traditional forms, even though Bliss Perry, who taught at Harvard from 1907 to 1930, had lectured on the novel at Princeton in the 1 890s, and even though the novel had shown up in the Harvard English curriculum by the turn of the century.1 But in the early 1950s, if you wanted something different and striking, you might look instead (as I did) to the moral-psychological view of Samuel Johnson offered by Walter Jackson Bate. And in the third place...