The rivalry of the great novelists of this time was of signal help to them, and there can be no question that the astounding richness of Tom Jones stirred Smollett to the exercise of increased energy in Peregrine Pickle (1751), a coarse and savage book, illuminated by brilliant flashes of humour. A better, because a tenderer and truer study of life was Amelia, which Fielding published in the same year; yet most readers have found this novel a little languid after Tom Jones. Now Richardson, who had long been silent, reasserted his mastery of epistolary analysis in the huge History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), in which, as its admirers claimed, "all the recesses of the human heart are explored and its whole texture unfolded." New forms, and also new subjects, were to present themselves to the imagination of capable British novelists, but the starting point of every experiment was to be discovered in the ripest work of Richardson, Fielding and Smollett. Their influence was mani fest in the writings of the second school of English novelists, in whom, however, several interesting varieties of subject and treat ment were discovered. The Tristram Shandy (1759-66) of Sterne, is the most masterly example in English of a humour which goes direct to pathos for its most "sentimental" effects, and of the kind of loosely-strung, reflective fiction which is hardly a narra tive at all. Neither Tristram Shandy nor A Sentimental Journey (1768) can properly be included among novels. In Rasselas (1759) Dr. Johnson showed that the new kind of writing could be used to give entertainment to a sermon, and in this he was to have a multitude of followers. In Chrysal (176o) Charles Johnstone (d. i800) showed that the picaresque romance could still exist, tinctured by the newly-found art of the novelist. In The Castle of Otranto (1764) Horace Walpole adapted the meth ods of the novelist to a pseudo-historical theme of horror and romance, and prophesied of Walter Scott. In The Vicar of Wake field (1766) Oliver Goldsmith was indebted to most of his im mediate predecessors, but fused their qualities in an amalgam of gentle wit and delicate sweetness and conversational brevity which has made his one loosely-constructed novel a foremost classic of our literature. Thus, in the one quarter of a century which divides Pamela from The Vicar of Wakefield, English novel-writing was born, grew into full maturity, and adopted its adult and final forms. During the remainder of the i8th century, little or nothing was done to extend the range of prose fiction in England, but one or two of those departments of novel-writing which had already been invented were developed and adapted to changing taste. In particular, the rapid increase of reticence and refinement in conversation made such a novel in letters as Smollett's Humphrey Clinker (1771) repulsively coarse to women of delicacy, who were charmed on the other hand with the Evelina of Frances Burney (1778). These two typical books are composed on the same plan, yet essentially a whole age lies between the former and the latter. What has been called "the novel of the tea-table" now came into existence, and the i8th century was about to close in mediocrity, when its credit was partially saved by a development of Horace Walpole's romance of terror in the vigorous and sen sational narratives of Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823), whose Mys teries of Udolpho appeared in 1794. The same year saw the publi cation of Caleb Williams, in which William Godwin (1756-1836) evolved a tragic theory of politics.
epoch-making dates; in each case a new era opened for the count less readers of novels. The first-named writer, all exactitude, con science and literary art, worked away at her "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory"; the other, with bold and flowing brush, covered vast spaces with his stimulating and noble compositions. It is, however, to be noted that the isolation in which we now regard these great writers—a solitude a deux only broken in measure by the presence of Miss Maria Edgeworth—is an optical illusion due to the veils of distance. The bookshops from 1810 to 182o and onwards were thronged and glutted with novels, many of them in finitely more successful, so far as sales were concerned, than the most popular of Miss Austen's works. The novels of Miss Austen were written between 1796 and 1816, although published from 1811 to 1818; those of Sir Walter Scott date from 1814 (Waver ley) to 1829 (Anne of Geierstein).
The next artist in prose fiction whose force of invention was sufficient to start the novel on wholly fresh tracks was born 4o years later than Scott. This was Charles Dickens, whose Pickwick Papers (1836) marks another epoch in novel writing. His career of prodigal production ceased abruptly in 187o, by which time it had long been obvious that he was the pioneer of a great and di verse school of novelists, all born within the second decade of the century. Of these Thackeray was not really made obvious until Vanity Fair (1849), nor Charlotte Brontë till Jane Eyre nor Mrs. Gaskell till Mary Barton (1848), nor George Eliot till Adam Bede (1859). The most noticeable point on which the five illustrious novelists of the Early Victorian age resembled one another and differed from all their predecessors, was the socio logical or even humanitarian character of their writings. All of them had projects of moral or social reform close at heart, all desired to mend the existing scheme of things. (E. G.) In America during the greater part of colonial life before the Revolution there was no fiction written because there was no fiction-reading public. After the middle of the 18th century novels began to find their way into the hands of the curiosity-seekers and adventurers in literature. By i800 a change had come. Naturally among the English colonies English models were fol lowed in fiction quite as closely as they already had been in architecture, music, poetry and the drama. Three women wrote of a Richardsonian world as sentimentally as their master: Sarah Wentworth Morton in The Power of Sympathy (1789), Susanna Haswell Rowson in Charlotte (1794), later Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster in The Coquette (1797). Gilbert Imlay in The Emigrants (1793) superimposed the formula for Frances Burney's stories of the English town on a shifting American scene from the seaboard over the Alleghenies to the western valley of the Ohio river. Hugh Henry Brackenridge between 1792 and 18o5 published the successive parts of Modern Chivalry, and wrote them avowedly after the fashions of Hume, Swift and Fielding. Royall Tyler smacked rather more of Smollett in The Algerine Captive (1797).
The reading of William Godwin's Caleb Williams led Charles Brockden Brown (1771-181o) to attempt the treat ment of a social thesis in the "Gothic" manner. Arthur Mervyn (1799-180o), especially in the first half, pursued Godwin's theme of an innocent youth branded as an outlaw by the malignance of a guilty patron. In both Arthur Mervyn and Ormond, another English predecessor, Defoe, with his Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is paralleled in Brown's lurid circumstantial memories of the yellow-fever epidemics in Philadelphia, 1793, and New York city five years later. In his most completely gothicized story, and his most powerful one, Wieland (1798), Brown dealt with a devastating pseudo-supernatural influence rationalized away as a feat of diabolical ventriloquism. In Edgar Huntly (1799), he turned to frontier adventure in anticipation of Cooper.