page_title: Augustan literature
section_title: After 1740: Sentimental novel
hierarchical_section_title: Augustan literature / Prose / The novel / After 1740: Sentimental novel
context_page_description: Augustan literature is a style of British literature produced during the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and George II in the first half of the 18th century and ending in the 1740s, with the deaths of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, in 1744 and 1745, respectively. It was a literary epoch that featured the rapid development of the novel, an explosion in satire, the mutation of drama from political satire into melodrama and an evolution toward poetry of personal exploration. In philosophy, it was an age increasingly dominated by empiricism, while in the writings of political economy, it marked the evolution of mercantilism as a formal philosophy, the development of capitalism and the triumph of trade.
  The chronological boundary points of the era are generally vague, largely since the label's origin in contemporary 18th-century criticism has made it a shorthand designation for a somewhat nebulous age of satire. Samuel Johnson, whose famous A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755, is also "to some extent" associated with the Augustan period.
context_section_description: The sentimental novel, or "novel of sentiment", developed after 1740, and among the most famous examples in English are Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–67), Sentimental Journey (1768), Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1765–70), Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) and Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800). Continental examples are Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel Julie, or the New Heloise, his autobiography The Confessions (1764–70) and Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).
  Although there were novels in the interim, Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) is the next landmark development in the English novel. Richardson's generic models were quite distinct from those of Defoe.  Instead of working from the journalistic biography, Richardson had in mind the books of improvement that were popular at the time. Pamela Andrews enters the employ of a "Mr. B". As a dutiful girl, she writes to her mother constantly, and as a Christian girl, she is always on guard for her "virtue" (i.e. her virginity), for Mr. B lusts after her. The novel ends with her marriage to her employer and her rising to the position of lady. Pamela, like its author, presents a dissenter's and a Whig's view of the rise of the classes. The work drew a nearly instantaneous set of satires, of which Henry Fielding's Shamela, or an Apology for the Life of Miss Shamela Andrews (1742) is the most memorable. Fielding continued to bait Richardson with Joseph Andrews (1742), the tale of Shamela's brother, Joseph, who goes through his life trying to protect his own virginity, thus reversing the sexual predation of Richardson and satirizing the idea of sleeping one's way to rank. However, Joseph Andrews is not a parody of Richardson, for Fielding proposed his belief in "good nature", which is a quality of inherent virtue that is independent of class and which can always prevail. Joseph's friend Parson Adams, although not a fool, is a naïf and possessing good nature. His own basic good nature blinds him to the wickedness of the world, and the incidents on the road (for most of the novel is a travel story) allow Fielding to satirize conditions for the clergy, rural poverty (and squires), and the viciousness of businessmen.
  In 1747 through 1748, Samuel Richardson published Clarissa in serial form. Unlike Pamela, it is not a tale of virtue rewarded. Instead, it is a highly tragic and affecting account of a young girl whose parents try to force her into an uncongenial marriage, thus pushing her into the arms of a scheming rake named Lovelace. In the end, Clarissa dies by her own will. The novel is a masterpiece of psychological realism and emotional effect, and when Richardson was drawing to a close in the serial publication, even Henry Fielding wrote to him, begging him not to kill Clarissa. As with Pamela, Richardson emphasized the individual over the social and the personal over the class. Even as Fielding was reading and enjoying Clarissa, he was also writing a counter to its messages. His Tom Jones of 1749 offers up the other side of the argument from Clarissa. Tom Jones agrees substantially in the power of the individual to be more or less than his or her birth would indicate, but it again emphasizes the place of the individual in society and the social ramifications of individual choices. Fielding answers Richardson by featuring a similar plot device (whether a girl can choose her own mate) but showing how family and village can complicate and expedite matches and felicity.
  Two other novelists should be mentioned, for they, like Fielding and Richardson, were in dialogue through their works. Laurence Sterne's and Tobias Smollett's works offered up oppositional views of the self in society and the method of the novel. The clergyman Laurence Sterne consciously set out to imitate Jonathan Swift with his Tristram Shandy (1759–1767). Tristram seeks to write his autobiography, but like Swift's narrator in A Tale of a Tub, he wor
caption: A portrait of Tobias Smollett
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