The Birth of the English Novel

The novel as a sustained prose narrative of everyday life is generally said to take shape in England in the early eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), presented to its first readers as a true account, and Moll Flanders (1722) gave fictional prose a new claim to represent ordinary, plausible experience. Samuel Richardson pushed the form further with Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48), epistolary novels told entirely through letters that allowed an unprecedented immersion in a character's private feelings and moral dilemmas. The critic Ian Watt, in his influential study The Rise of the Novel (1957), linked this development to the growth of a literate middle class, the expansion of print culture, and a new emphasis on individual experience over inherited literary convention.