The Metropolis and Women Novelists in the Romantic Period

The relationship between London and the novel has been relatively neglected in critical discussions of fiction written and published in the Romantic period. Marilyn Butler has drawn attention to the general absence of literary representation of the metropolis between 1790 and 1820: 'It seems puzzling that London as an environment, a society, an idea, received so little written attention at a time when the London printing industry and those who lived by it were fashioning themselves so successfully'.¹ Butler identifies a renaissance in metropolitan writing in the 1820s and points to the London essays of Lamb, De Quincey and Hazlitt as examples of the most successful urban literary genre during this decade; she also identifies the growing popularity of the silver-fork novel as the revitalisation of the city novel after its apparent disappearance toward the end of the eighteenth century. Between 1790 and 1820, she suggests, London was almost absent from fiction. Published in the same year but in contrast to Butler's more selective and canonical evaluation, James Raven's review of a wide range of fiction published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has identified a relationship between the city and the novel in this period.² His inclusive survey reveals broad trends that emerge in frequently reprinted new novels that 'ferociously condemned the city and the fashionable' (Raven, 165). He gives as examples novels by Eliza Parsons, Samuel Jackson Pratt, Frances Burney, and Charlotte Smith. To this list one could add the works of Frances Brooke, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Mary Meeke, Sarah Green, Rachel Hunter, and anonymous writers such as the authors of The Delicate Embarrassments (1769) and The Follies of St. James's Street (1789).³ In Raven's analysis, these novels demonstrate London's continued position at the centre of a distinctive consumer culture and anticipate the later silver-fork or 'fashionable' novel.

Although these respective investigations into the relationship between London and the novel are predicated on different assumptions and selection of material, they draw similar conclusions about the depiction of the metropolis in this period. Butler's choice of more canonical works suggests the disappearance of the city from fiction published between 1790 and 1820; Raven's broader study places London at the centre of narratives dominated by luxury and urban decadence. Both, however, suggest thematic and generic continuities with earlier literary periods. Raven's survey describes a line that stretches from mid eighteenth-century authors Eliza Haywood and Sarah Fielding to later writers like Frances Brooke and Frances Burney, through to novelists writing in the first two decades of the 1800s. In these narratives, city amusements and excursions are identified with a schematised moral geography of urban vices and pleasures. Butler, on the other hand, argues for the disappearance of London in novels of the second half of the eighteenth century: the increasingly provincial and rural settings of sentimental fiction, in particular, written and published in the decades before 1790 adumbrates the disappearance of London from novels of the subsequent period until 1820. Writers like Sterne, Goldsmith, and Mackenzie are 'convinced provincialists . . . [who] use an idealised countryside as a counter in an anti-metropolitan rhetoric' (Butler, 190). Butler's argument draws on the conventional country-city opposition that structured many city narratives of the eighteenth century. She cites the 'idealised provincial businessmen' in Thomas Amory's The Life of John Buncle (1756, 1766), Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1766–70), and Robert Bage's Mount Henneth (1781) as 'alternative heroes championing the sentimental novel's alternative and utopian sociology, its group-portrait of the nation without London as whole, healthy and happy' (Butler, 191). Butler's point – a perennial, perhaps predictable, urban theme: namely, that the city is a venal and corrupt space – is not dissimilar to Raven's; the main difference lies in their respective selection of novels demonstrating the city's presence or absence in fiction of the period.

In her brief discussion of writing and the book trade in this period, however, Butler's earlier foregrounding of provincial life is reordered and she argues for London's continuing...