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Obviously, there are mavericks and wild cards out there, but this comparison
works on average. Until the very late nineteenth century, novelists did not think
of their work as art. Literary art consisted of lyric or narrative poetry and drama.
Fiction in prose was more or less a branch of commerce, which was not an
entirely unfair characterization. Hard to feel like Michelangelo when the
printer’s boy is standing impatiently in your doorway waiting for the ink to dry
on your latest chapter. It’s not until fairly late in the century, in 1884, when
Henry James begins writing about the novel as a serious art form in The Art of
Fiction. (Defense Counsel stipulates that this shift occurred somewhat earlier in
France, just after midcentury, owing to one Gustave Flaubert.) One would hardly
demand an aesthetic response above all else for a form one regarded as second￾tier art, if even that. Aesthetic considerations are distinctly modern, much more
the province of Virginia Woolf or Ernest Hemingway. Nor were the intellectual
demands terribly high on the Victorian reader; not for their novels the word
games and puzzles of Nabokov, Fowles, or Italo Calvino. No, the peg on which
the Victorian hat hung was emotional.
Their goal: make us love (or hate) the characters. There aren’t a lot of
terribly subtle shadings of character in Dickens or Thackeray. We cheer and hiss
with enthusiasm. Readers responded to these characters as if they were family
members (or threats to them). Character is absolutely central to the ongoing
serial. Think of J.R. and Bobby Ewing. Why has Susan Lucci been able to keep
the same role for three hundred years? Because viewers respond viscerally to her
character. In Victorian times, readers wrote to novelists with their thoughts on
the current book, and writers listened. Thackeray was told that readers wanted
“less of Amelia,” the sugary-sweet, somewhat boring girl in Vanity Fair, that
they wanted to see Laura marry Warrington in Pendennis (which title has always
struck me as more than vaguely obscene, but no matter). Novels were changed
based on fan reaction, sometimes even to projected reaction, as in Bulwer￾Lytton’s famous advice to Dickens not to attempt the more logical, unhappy
ending of Great Expectations. Again, I give you Dallas: why did they
miraculously revive the dead Bobby Ewing? Fan unrest.
In all these cases, the central reality is that readers wish to be involved in
their novels. Wish? Nay, need. The earnestness with which nineteenth-century
readers engaged with characters and their stories is touching in its naïveté. At the
same time we know that, in our own day, characters on series television
sometimes receive fan or hate mail (more often the latter) and stars of soap
operas are often greeted with either the love or venom their characters, and not
they, merit. Whence comes that need for involvement? I believe it grows out of
the desire to be swept away to somewhere else, and that’s what novels do, even
when the place they sweep us to looks a great deal like our own. A reader in
Dorset or Wiltshire might recognize the landscapes and notable buildings of
Hardy’s Wessex, might see exterior Dorchester in his Casterbridge, but the place
in which Tess or Jude live and struggle bears scant resemblance to any place
current or historical. Joyce’s Dublin has real place-names in it, and one can map
out every story and novel (and indeed, someone has, in many cases more than
once). And those of us who have been to academic conferences learn, to either
our consternation or, more likely, relief, that they are neither as hilarious nor as
disastrous as those in the novels of David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. They are
just close enough to the originals to give a frisson of recognition, just far enough
away to be entertaining. The American poet Marianne Moore characterized her
poetry as the making of “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” In the case
of novels, the real—or potentially real—toads are characters, persons we can
react to, relate to, accept or reject, identify with, suffer over.