page_title: Augustan prose
section_title: The novel
hierarchical_section_title: Augustan prose / The novel
caption_attribution_description: Illustration of Pamela: or, Virtue rewarded. In a series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to her Parents by Samuel Richardson (1741)
context_page_description: Augustan prose is somewhat ill-defined, as the definition of "Augustan" relies primarily upon changes in taste in poetry. However, the general time represented by Augustan literature saw a rise in prose writing as high literature. The essay, satire, and dialogue thrived in the age, and the English novel was truly begun as a serious art form. At the outset of the Augustan age, essays were still primarily imitative, novels were few and still dominated by the Romance, and prose was a rarely used format for satire, but, by the end of the period, the English essay was a fully formed periodical feature, novels surpassed drama as entertainment and as an outlet for serious authors, and prose was serving every conceivable function in public discourse. It is the age that most provides the transition from a court-centered and poetic literature to a more democratic, decentralized literary world of prose.
context_section_description: As has been indicated above, the ground for the novel had been laid by journalism.  It had also been laid by drama and by satire.  Long prose satires like Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) had a central character who goes through adventures and may (or may not) learn lessons.  In fact, satires and philosophical works like Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64), and even Erasmus's In Praise of Folly (1511) had established long fictions subservient to a philosophical purpose.  However, the most important single satirical source for the writing of novels came from Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615), which had been quickly translated from Spanish into other European languages including English. It would never go out of print, and the Augustan age saw many free translations in varying styles, by journalists (Ned Ward, 1700 and Peter Motteux, 1712) as well as novelists (Tobias Smollett, 1755).  In general, one can see these three axes, drama, journalism, and satire, as blending in and giving rise to three different types of novel.
  Aphra Behn had written literary novels before the turn of the 18th century, but there were not many immediate successors.  Behn's Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684) had been bred in satire, and her Oroonoko (1688) had come from her theatrical experience.  Delarivier Manley's New Atlantis  (1709) comes closest to an inheritor of Behn's, but her novel, while political and satirical, was a minor scandal.  On the other hand, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) was the first major novel of the new century.  Defoe had written political and religious polemics prior to Robinson Crusoe, and he worked as a journalist during and after its composition.  Thus, Defoe encountered the memoirs of Alexander Selkirk, who was a rather brutish individual who had been stranded in South America on an island for some years.  Defoe took the actual life and, from that, generated a fictional life.  Instead of an expelled Scotsman, Crusoe became a devout Puritan.  Instead of remaining alone the entire time, Crusoe encountered a savage named Friday, whom he civilized.  The actual Selkirk had been a slave trader, and Crusoe becomes a far more enlightened teacher and missionary.  Travel writing sold very well during the period, and tales of extraordinary adventures with pirates and savages were devoured by the public, and Defoe satisfied an essentially journalistic market with his fiction.
  Defoe would continue to draw from life and news for his next novels.  In the 1720s, Defoe wrote "Lives" of criminals for Applebee's Journal.  He interviewed famed criminals and produced accounts of their lives.  Whenever a celebrated criminal was hanged, the newspapers and journals would offer up an account of the criminal's life, the criminal's last words, the criminal's gallows speech, etc., and Defoe wrote several of these.  In particular, he investigated Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild and wrote True Accounts of the former's escapes (and fate) and the latter's life.  Defoe, unlike his competition, seems to have been a scrupulous journalist.  Although his fictions contained great imagination and a masterful shaping of facts to build themes, his journalism seems based on actual investigation.  From his reportage on the prostitutes and criminals, Defoe may have become familiar with the real-life Mary Mollineaux, who may have been the model for Moll in Moll Flanders (1722).  As with the transformation of a real Selkirk into a fictional Crusoe, the fictional Moll is everything that the real prostitute was not.  She pursues a wild career of material gain, travels to Maryland, commits incest, returns to England, and repents of her sins.  She returns to the new land of promise for all Puritans of Maryland, where she lives honestly, with a great sum of money (derived from her licentious life).  In the same year, Defoe produced a flatly journalistic A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and an attempted tale of a working class male rise in Colonel Jack (1722).  His last novel returned 
caption: An illustration from the 1742 edition of Pamela showing Mr. B intercepting Pamela's first letter to her mother and reading it.
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