Somewhere between the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, the modern novel was born. The romances of the twenties are, for the most part, old-fashioned in tone, and speak of an earlier age; but in the thirties, the modern novel, with its exact reproduction of places, customs, and speech, and strong local flavour, was full-grown. Dickens, under the name of Boz, was contributing his sketches to The Old Monthly Magazine and the Evening Chronicle. Thackeray was beginning to contribute articles to Fraser's Magazine, established in 1830. Annuals and monthlies sprang up in the night, and paid large sums for long and short stories. The thirst for them was unquenchable. Many women were supporting themselves by writing tales which did not live beyond the year of their publication. Mrs. Marsh was writing stories of fashionable life varied by historical romances. Mrs. Crowe wrote stories of fashionable life varied by supernatural romances and tales of adventure. In The Story of Lilly Dawson, published in 1847, the heroine was captured and brought up by smugglers, and the gradual development of her character was traced; thus giving to the story a psychological interest. Lady Blessington earned two thousand pounds a year for twenty years by novels and short stories of fashionable life. Lady Blessington had a European reputation as a court beauty and a brilliant and witty conversationalist. This with the coronet must have helped to sell her books. They do not contain even a sentence that holds the attention. A friend said of her, "Her genius lay in her tongue; her pen paralysed it." More enduring work in fiction was done by Julia Pardoe, Mrs. Trollope, and Harriet Martineau.
The novels of Julia Pardoe, like those of Mrs. Bray, owe their value, not to their intrinsic merit, but to the comparatively unknown places to which she introduces her readers. She accompanied her father, Major Pardoe, to Constantinople, where they were entertained by natives of high position, to whom they had letters of introduction, and Miss Pardoe was the guest of their wives in the harem. Her knowledge of the mode of life and habits of thought of Turkish women is considered second only to that of Mary Wortley Montagu.
The material for her story The Romance of the Harem was obtained during her visits to these Turkish ladies. In this she has caught the languid, heavily perfumed atmosphere of the Orient. Besides the main plot, stories of adventure and love are related which beguiled the slowly passing hours of the inmates of the seraglio. Some of them might have been told by Schehezerhade, if she had wished to add to her entertainment of The Thousand and One Nights.
After Miss Pardoe's return to England, she wrote a series of fashionable novels, inferior to many of those of Mrs. Gore, and better than the best of those by Lady Blessington. Confessions of a Pretty Woman, The Jealous Wife, and The Rival Beauties were the most popular of these, although they have long since been forgotten.
In 1849, Miss Pardoe published a collection of stories under the title Flies in Amber. The title, she explains in the preface, was suggested by a belief of the Orientals that amber comes from the sea, and attracts about it all insects, which find in it both a prison and a posthumous existence. Some of the stories of this collection were gathered in her travels. An Adventure in Bithynia, The Magyar and the Moslem, or an Hungarian Legend, and the Yèrè-Batan-Seraï, which means Swallowed-up Palace, the great subterranean ruin of Constantinople, have the interest which always attaches to tales gathered by travellers in unfrequented places.
Mrs. Frances Trollope, the mother of the more famous author Anthony Trollope, like Miss Pardoe, found material for stories in unfamiliar places. Mrs. Trollope had the nature of the pioneer. With her family, she sought our western lands of the Mississippi Valley, where the virgin forest had resounded to the axe of the first settler but a short time before. She wrote the first book of any note describing the manners of the Americans; the first strong novel calling attention to the evils of slavery in our Southern States; and the first one describing graphically the white slavery in the cotton-mills of Lancashire; and she is, perhaps, the only writer who began a long literary career at the age of fifty-two.
On the fourth of November, 1827, Mrs. Trollope with her three children sailed from London, and, after about seven weeks on the sea, arrived on Christmas Day at the mouth of the Mississippi. After a brief visit in New Orleans, this party of English travellers sailed up the river to Memphis, where, remote from the comforts of civilisation, they abode for a time under the direction of Mrs. Wright, an English lecturer who had come to America for the avowed purpose of proving the perfect equality of the black and white races. But Mrs. Trollope and her family soon tired of life in the wilderness, and sought Cincinnati, at that time a small city of wooden houses, not over thirty years of age. After two years' residence in Cincinnati, she went by stage to Baltimore, visited Philadelphia and New York, and returned to England, after a sojourn of three and a half years in this country.
During her residence in the United States, she made copious notes of what she saw and heard. These she published the year after her return to England, under the title Domestic Manners of the Americans. At once the pens of all the critics were let loose upon the author. Her American critics declared that she knew nothing about them or their country; and their English friends refused to believe that the people of America had such shocking bad manners.