In another place: “To set against your new novel, of which nobody ever heard before, and perhaps never may again, we have got Ida of Athens by Miss Owenson, which must be very clever because it was written the authoress says in three months. We have only read the preface yet, but her Irish girl does not make me expect much. If the warmth of her language could affect the body it might be worth reading this weather.” [January.]
There were many writers thought highly of at the time of their writing, who have yet dropped into oblivion to all but the student; among these is Jane Porter, born a year later than Jane Austen, who published her first romance, Thaddeus of Warsaw, in 1803, this was a great success, and immediately ran through several editions; it was followed in 1810 by her chef d’œuvre The Scottish Chiefs. In 1809, when it had just come out, and was anonymous, Hannah More’s Cœlebs in Search of a Wife came into Cassandra’s hands.
Jane writes of it: “You have by no means raised my curiosity after Caleb. My disinclination for it before was affected but now it is real. I do not like the evangelicals. Of course I shall be delighted when I read it like other people, but till I do, I dislike it.” And in her next letter she replies to her sister, “I am not at all ashamed about the name of the novel, having been guilty of no insult towards your handwriting; the diphthong I always saw, but knowing how fond you were of adding a vowel wherever you could, I attributed it to that alone, and the knowledge of the truth does the book no service; the only merit it could have was in the name of Caleb, which has an honest unpretending sound, but in Cœlebs there is pedantry and affectation. Is it written only to classical scholars?”
Cœlebs itself it must be admitted is dull, unqualifiedly dull. Jane Austen’s own books are not novels of plot, but they radiate plot in comparison. In Cœlebs a procession of persons stalks solemnly through the pages; they never reveal themselves by action, but are described as by a Greek chorus by the other characters in conversation or by the author, while long dry disquisitions on religion fill half, or more than half, of the book, and Cœlebs himself is a prig of the first water. Yet there are certain little touches which indicate a knowledge of human nature, such as that of the man who has married a beauty, “Who had no one recommendation but beauty. To be admired by her whom all his acquaintance admired gratified his amour-propre.”
A book called Self Control, which appeared in 1810, by Mary Brunton, the wife of a Scotch minister, had a fair measure of success, and was reprinted as lately as 1852. Jane speaks very slightingly of it: “I am looking over Self Control again, and my opinion is confirmed of its being an excellently meant, elegantly written work, without anything of nature or probability in it. I declare I do not know whether Laura’s passage down the American river is not the most natural possible every-day thing she ever does.” Miss Mitford in regard to this book quotes the opinions of two men, one of whom said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman and the other that it ought to be written in letters of gold, which shows that public opinion was as various in those days as it is in these. In 1807, Jane mentions Clarentine, a novel of Sarah Burney’s, who was a younger sister of the famous Miss Burney; though the same author brought out another novel later, it was evidently only because she followed in her sister’s wake, and not from any inherent ability. Jane says, “We are reading Clarentine and are surprised to find how foolish it is. I remember liking it much less on a second reading than at the first, and it does not bear a third at all. It is full of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties, without striking merit of any kind.”
But these impressions of long-forgotten books are hardly worth recording, except as specimens of the quantities of worthless novels to be had at the libraries then.
Samuel Rogers says, “Lane made a large fortune by the immense quantity of trashy novels which he sent forth from the Minerva press. I perfectly well remember the splendid carriage in which he used to ride, and his footmen with their cockades and gold-headed canes. Now-a-days as soon as a novel has had its run, and is beginning to be forgotten, out comes an edition of it as a standard novel.”
In Miss Mitford’s Life is given a list of the books which she had from the circulating library in a month, and which she presumably read, when she was a girl just back from school. It is here quoted as, with one or two exceptions, the titles tell the style of work in vogue.
“St. Margaret’s Cave; St. Claire of the Isles; Scourge of Conscience; Emma Corbett; Poetical Miscellany; Vincenza; A Sailor’s Friendship and a Sailor’s Love; The Castles of Athlin and Dumbayn; Polycratia; Travels in Africa; Novice of St. Dominick; Clarentina; Leonora; Count de Valmont; Letters of a Hindu Rajah; Fourth Vol. of Canterbury Tales; The Citizen’s Quarter; Amazement; Midnight Weddings; Robert and Adela; The Three Spaniards; De Clifford.”
In his History of Eighteenth Century Literature Edmund Gosse says: “The flourishing period of the eighteenth century novel lasted exactly twenty-five years, during which time we have to record the publication of no less than fifteen eminent works of fiction. The fifteen are naturally divided into three groups. The first contains Pamela, Joseph Andrews, David Simple (Sarah Fielding) and Jonathan Wild. In these books the art is still somewhat crude, and the science of fiction incompletely understood. After a silence of five years we reach the second and greatest section of this central period, during which there appeared in quick succession, Clarissa, Roderick Random, Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle, Amelia and Sir Charles Grandison ... there followed another silence of five years, and then were issued each on the heels of the other, Tristram Shandy, Rasselas, Chrysal, The Castle of Otranto and The Vicar of Wakefield—five years later still—Humphrey Clinker, and then, with one or two such exceptions as Evelina and Caleb Williams, no great novel appeared again in England for forty years until in 1811 the new school of fiction was inaugurated by Sense and Sensibility.”