Table Of ContentPalgrave Studies
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RogerMaioli
Empiricism
and the Early Theory
of the Novel
Fielding to Austen
RogerMaioli
UniversityofFlorida
Gainesville,FL,USA
PalgraveStudiesintheEnlightenment,RomanticismandtheCulturesofPrint
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Eliseu dos Santos& Lurdes Maiolidos Santos
P
REFACE
Between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the philosophy and
theprosefictionofGreatBritaincametoevinceanunprecedentedinterestin
the particulars of experience. Classical empiricism from Francis Bacon to
David Humeredirected theattentionof philosophers fromthestratosphere
ofrationalismtothediscretedataofthesenses.Atthesametime,fictionists
from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen turned their gaze from the high plains of
romance towards the minute details of everyday life.1 Modern historians of
the novel have come to see these two developments as aspects of a single
tendencyinEuropeanculture.InhishighlyinfluentialTheRiseoftheNovel,
Ian Watt described the shift towards particularity in British philosophy and
literature as the common expression of a new world picture that had been
takingshapesincetheRenaissance,“onewhichpresentsus,essentially,witha
developingbutunplannedaggregateofparticularindividualshavingparticu-
larexperiencesatparticulartimesandatparticularplaces.”2ForWatt,philo-
sophersandnovelistswerecommoninheritorsofthisworldview,whichthey
promotedbymeansofanalogousmethods.Theproceduresdevelopedbythe
empiriciststoinvestigatetheworldofexperienceanddocumenttheirfindings
were equally recognizable in the “formal realism” that came to characterize
prosefiction.“Thenovel’simitationofhumanlife,”saysWatt,“followsthe
procedures adopted by philosophical realism in its attempt to ascertain and
reportthetruth”(31).Likethenewphilosophy,therisingnovelendeavored
toportraythecircumstantialityofobservablelifewithfaithfulness,anditdid
so in order to “report the truth” and thus enlighten its readers about the
world. From Watt’s perspective, the realist novel was more than romance
descended from the clouds to please a lowlier taste. It was an agent of the
vii
viii PREFACE
Enlightenment. Through its subject matter and its methods, the novel
participated in the contemporary campaign to popularize knowledge of the
observableworldbymeansofaccessible,unadornedreports.
Modern scholars have come to be suspicious of Watt’s progressive
narrative, especially for its strict separation between romance and the
novel. Still, Watt’s belief that the rises of empiricism and the novel were
somehowconnectedhasretaineditsappeal,andthemaintendencyoflater
scholarship has been to reaffirm and refine rather than contest it. The
original thesis was given extensive elaboration in Michael McKeon’s The
Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740, and subsequently taken in new
directions in a number of studies by J. Paul Hunter, John Bender,
Jonathan Lamb, Jonathan Kramnick, Cynthia Wall, and others.3 For all
their variety, these studies broadly conform to Watt’s “collaborative”
model;theyofferapictureofamutuallyreinforcingrelationshipbetween
empiricism and the novel, showing how the latter either mirrored or
appropriated the methodological procedures and pedagogic goals of the
former.Thepictureisessentiallythis:likeempiricism,thenovelsoughtto
collect,organize,andmakesenseofthedataofsensoryexperience,giving
pride of place to the here-and-now of English life and inspecting with
clinicalthoroughnesstheinnerworkingsofhumansubjectivity,alwaysina
stylistic register in which denotation trumps adornment. The ultimate
goal, again, was to convey knowledge. Defoe and Richardson, no less
thanLockeorHume,basedtheirwritingsontheparticularsofexperience
in order to help readers understand and navigate the real world. The
empirical genesis of Moll Flanders or Clarissa allegedly enhanced the
powerofthesenovelsasvehiclesforinstruction,makingthemimaginative
counterparts of the political treatise or the moral essay. The empiricist
program had only to gain from these developments, as it found in the
novel apowerfulally forthe popularizationof socio-ethicalknowledge.
Asfarastheattitudeofeighteenth-centurynovelistsgo,thiscollaborative
picture has much to recommend it. Fictionists in the period consistently
capitalized on the purported connection between the protocols of empiri-
cismandthenovel’spedagogicvalue.Stressingthemoralaccompanyingthe
fablewasaroutinegestureintheaddressestothereaderthatprefacedmost
narratives atthe time, and the moralwasusually characterized as a typeof
empirical inference – a set of conclusions to be drawn from the dizzying
arrayofparticularfactsdocumentedbythenovel.Thus,Defoecharacterizes
Moll Flanders as “a Work from every part of which something may be
learned, and some just and religious Inference is drawn, by which the
PREFACE ix
ReaderwillhavesomethingofInstruction”;bythesametoken,thestoryof
Colonel Jack, according to Defoe’s preface, is so rich in lessons “that it
wouldemployaVolume,largeasitself,toparticularizetheInstructionsthat
may be drawn from it.”4 Richardson went Defoe one better and actually
produced the volume, listing the lessons yielded by his novels in A
Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and
Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles
Grandison (1755). Since it was a matter of no slight importance that the
facts yielding the inferences be authentic, novelists often buttressed their
teachingsbydenying(or,inRichardson’scase,de-emphasizing)thenovel’s
fictionality.Throughthiswell-knownmaneuver,theywereabletovalidate
their lessons by alleging their historical (and hence empirical) grounded-
ness.Now,whilethefalseclaimtohistoricityisthemostwellknown,itwas
nottheonlywayofenlistingtheepistemicprestigeofempiricisminsupport
of the novel. The genre’s pedagogic program retained its association with
empiricism even after the 1740s, when the old authenticating devices
entered their slow descent into obsolescence. Midcentury novelists like
Fielding, who made no attempt to sell their fictions as fact, nonetheless
staked the cognitive value of their novels on a professed faithfulness to
observation and experience. Whether in the early or the late eighteenth
century, therefore, fictionists with a pedagogical agenda invoked the
principles of empiricism as an epistemic warranty stamp.
Naturally, not everyone agreed that they were entitled to do so. The
claimtohistoricityprovedhighlycontroversial,andMcKeonhasdocumen-
ted with unprecedented thoroughness the reaction it elicited in more
skepticalquarters.Buttherevampedcommitmenttoempiricismthatchar-
acterizedtheexplicitfictionsofthemidcenturywasequallycontested,and
facedatypeofcritiquethatstudiesofthenovelhavemostlytendedtogloss
over.Theassumptionthatempiricismcanunderwritethelessonsofundis-
guised fictions had no currency in more philosophical quarters, where
Watt’s collaborative picture would have seemed very alien. Empiricist phi-
losophers for the most part saw no compatibility between their quest for
knowledge and what they regarded as the misleading tendencies of imagi-
nativeliterature.Bacon,Locke,Hume,GeorgeCampbell,AdamSmith–all
drewafunctionaldistinctionbetweenphilosophyorhistory,bothofwhich
seek to instruct, and “poetry,” whose purpose, they thought, is merely to
please. Bacon spoke for generations of empiricists when he declared that
those who seek “to dissect the nature of the real world” should seek
“everything...from the things themselves,” rather than “fabricate apish
x PREFACE
mockeriesofworlds[simiolas&fabulasMundorum].”5Nature,ratherthan
reason or the imagination, is for Bacon the proper court of appeal in
empirical matters. Narratives, he acknowledges, can be suitable replace-
ments for the observation of nature, as long as they are “unsullied and
undefiled by fables and vanity” (41) – as long, in other words, as they are
strictlyfactual.Whiletherealistnovelwaslessguiltyofwildinventionsthan
the forms of fiction Bacon was acquainted with, the empiricists who wit-
nessed the novel’s emergence made no exception of it; in fact, they found
that the genre’s realism only heightened the risk of delusion. As Hume
complained, young readers are blinded by the “false representations of
mankind”offeredbynovels.6JamesBeattie,whodissentedfromHumein
almost everything, nonetheless concurred that novel reading “breeds a
dislike to history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge,” and “with-
draws the attention from nature, and truth.”7 Rather than an outpost of
empiricismbringingenlightenmenttoabroaderaudience,thenovelstruck
theempiricistsasavulgarpeddlerofmisconceptions.
Unlike the response to the early claim to historicity, the proscription
of explicit fictions by eighteenth-century empiricists has played no
substantial role in discussions of the alignment between empiricism
and the novel. To some extent the omission is understandable. After
all, studies of the topic undertaken from the perspective of literary
studies are interested in what empiricism means for the novel, not
vice-versa.8 Conversely, philosophical studies of empiricist aesthetics
have prioritized broad theoretical questions over the empiricists’
applied criticism. As a result, we still lack an appropriate account of
what the novel meant for those thinkers whose philosophical principles
it ostensibly shared. While understandable, however, this omission is
by no means inconsequential. There are two reasons why it should
concern us. The first is that the perspective of the empiricists has direct
implications for our picture of the parallel rises of empiricism and the
novel. As I show in my introduction, extant accounts of empiricism’s
relation to the novel have tended either to suggest that empiricism lost
its purchase on prose fiction as the claim to historicity waned, or that
the explicit fictions following the 1740s fostered the empiricist enter-
prise in ways that were envisioned and even endorsed by the classical
empiricists. Neither view satisfactorily accounts for the ongoing con-
flict between the demands of empirical epistemology and the proce-
dures of literary representation in that period. Taking account of the
empiricist standpoint thus serves a corrective function. The second
