The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns – indeed that in one sense of ‘our own concerns’ we are incapable of doing anything else – might be one reason why certain works of literature seem to retain their value across the centuries. It may be, of course, that we still share many preoccupations with the work itself; but it may also be that people have not actually been valuing the ‘same’ work at all, even though they may think they have. ‘Our’ Homer is not identical with the Homer of the Middle Ages, nor ‘our’ Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is rather that different historical periods have constructed a ‘different’ Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to value or devalue, though not necessarily the same ones. All literary works, in other words, are ‘rewritten’, if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’. No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process; and this is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
I think Fielding is unquestionably the central novelist of the eighteenth century. Richardson is a horrible excrescence in my view: pious and lecherous. Martin Amis
What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired. More than that, they both lived their lives ‘beautifully’ – not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been a prerequisite), but in the droll fortitude of their perseverance. They got the work done, with style. Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir
It’s 1749. London is in the grip of addiction. Gin. It’s dirt cheap. And it’s turning the capital into a nest of vice and destruction. Henry Hitchings, Birth of the British Novel, BBC 2011
Tom Jones is one of the greatest novels of all time ... The novel was a new and emerging art form. Fielding saw in the novel the potential to challenge and renovate everything that was wrong with society. And all under the guise of entertainment ... It was a dangerous and subversive enterprise. Fielding was one of a handful of trailblazers using the novel to challenge the norms of British society. In just eighty years writers including Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne and Fanny Burney would lay down the basic templates for the novel. ibid.
The novel as we know it emerged in Britain in the early eighteenth century. The nation at that time was in the flush of economic prosperity. ibid.
New laws surrounding censorship and copyright gave authors more freedom and commercial opportunity than before. ibid.
What’s so brilliant and original about Defoe is the way he pares prose back to its bare essentials. There is nothing florid here. No poetry. ibid.
Moll Flanders, published in 1732, is the tale of a harlot on the make. Her motto: with money in the pocket one is at home anywhere. She dies a rich woman. ibid.
I love how all the contradictions inherent in Swift’s personality are expressed in Gulliver’s Travels. ibid.
Richardson is a printer before he becomes a novelist ... Richardson became a celebrity, surrounded by cultivated ladies. ibid.
Clarissa, published in 1748, charts the pursuit, rape and ultimate death of its heroine. ibid.
This was Henry Fielding: Justice of the Peace, founder of the Bow Street Runners, a man devoted to social reform. He also recognised the role of art and entertainment ... He turned to the novel ... His friend and mentor the painter William Hogarth. ibid.
Tom may be a foundling but he is more generous and humane than the high-born characters who surround him. ibid.
I find Tristram Shandy pretty much impossible to describe. On the surface it’s about a group of eccentric characters who live at Shandy Hall. It’s also a carnivalesque philosophical romp stuffed with references to its own creation. The word shandy was in Stern’s time Yorkshire slang for a crack-brained individual ... This is a landmark book ... He’s not even born till the fourth of his nine volumes ... It’s still the ultimate experimental British novel. ibid.
The inventor of the Gothic novel is Robert Walpole. ibid.
The last ground-breaking novel of the era. It was the work of a revolutionary philosopher – William Godwin. In 1793 Godwin’s essay An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice introduced the idea of anarchism. The following year he published a novel Caleb Williams. ibid.
When the novel was invented life seemed more straightforward. There were those who owned the land and those who worked it. And both groups knew where they stood. But when people started to move from place to place they also began to move up and down in the world. This brought friction and misunderstanding. Sometimes just in the words you used. If language didn’t give you away, your taste would. We all think we know what a snob looks like. They think they are the bees’ knees. And never understand that in fact the joke’s on them. In books though it’s quite a different matter. Far from being odious a snob in a novel can be surprisingly good value, and offer not just laughs, they also provide a shortcut into larger themes about who we are and where we fit in. In fact for the novelist the snob is a secret weapon. Some of the greatest novels ever written have a snob at their heart. Faulks on Fiction: The Snob, BBC 2011
In 1861 for the first time Charles Dickens showed the creation of a snob ... Great Expectations. ibid.
Diary of a Nobody by Gordon & Weedon Grossmith was published in 1892 and records the daily battles against Life’s minor injustices of a Mr Charles Pooter. ibid.
In the real world villains alarm us. But what we find repugnant in life can in a novel become oddly alluring. The fictional villain can say things we can’t. And can do things we don’t. This makes them the characters we most enjoy. But the great thing about villains in the novel is that they know what is going on. Faulks on Fiction 4/4: The Villains
The villain is the author’s accomplice driving the plot forward. ibid.
The fictional villain could resemble a hero. ibid.
There is no doubt who is the star of the show, and that is Fagin. ibid.
But Dickens didn’t only make Fagin a nasty piece of work. He also made him a Jew. And that was a decision that would trouble him for the rest of his life. ibid.
Now the villain was to be an even more unlikely figure, one who initially looks like an angel in Paradise. At first sight it would seem an idyllic setting. An island deserted apart from a handful of innocent schoolboys. Yet it was here that William Golding proposed to look evil straight in the face. And that face belonged to perhaps the most shocking villain in British fiction – a twelve-year-old choirboy called Jack Meridew. ibid.
The draw of the supernatural proved addictive to readers of fiction. ibid.
Frankenstein: one of the darkest tales ever told was born in a nightmare. From a nineteen-year-old girl whose life was full of demons came a monster who terrorised generations to come. Mary Shelley began Frankenstein in Switzerland at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Professor Robert Winston, Frankenstein: Birth of a Monster, BBC 2003
People believed that electricity and magnetism could bring the dead back to life. As a child Mary had heard of experiments to reanimate hanged convicts. ibid.
Mary Shelley’s intellectual gene pool was a rich one; both her parents were revolutionary thinkers. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the founder of feminism. Mary Wollstonecraft was a unique woman. Beautiful. Fierce. Independent ... Her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is still taught in colleges today. ibid.
Percy Bysshe Shelley: he was the bad boy of Oxford University. For some time he had been writing long letters to [William] Godwin. ibid.
Mary was Percy’s soul mate. ibid.
Common sense got to Shelley before the bullet did. But he was distraught. Later that night he took an overdose of Laudanum. His two suicide attempts had failed. ibid.
Mary Shelley’s hero – Victor Frankenstein – was a doctor seeking the ultimate truth about life. ibid.
This gruesome trade in dead bodies inspired Mary. ibid.
The summer of 1816 when Lord Byron entertained his friends on the shores of Lake Geneva. They called it the Summer of Darkness. ibid.
Mary took the ghost story challenge seriously. ibid.
A few days after the ghost story challenge Mary was to have her famous dream. ibid.
Mary and Percy’s lives were becoming a soap opera of births, marriages and deaths, often involving Byron. ibid.
It is as if the monster is crying out for Shelley. ibid.
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. Helen Keller
The regular resource of people who don’t go enough into the world to live a novel is to write one. Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes