Knowing Books. Christina Lupton
in a pattern that is not corrected until the appearance of Tristram Shandy, with which Sterne skillfully sublates the progressive function of narrative entirely to the humor of digression. Because his main interest is in pegging the development of mid-century fiction to the work of better-known authors, Booth shows little interest in the self-reflexivity of these mostly forgotten, mid-century novels being of its own order. Yet the frequency and creativity with which mid-century novelists refer to readers and introduce them as locked in combat with the materiality of the page is unrivalled in the more famous examples of eighteenth-century, self-conscious fiction Booth privileges. Although Fielding anticipates such a field of reference, imagining reading as a form of physical travail and presenting chapter headings as physical breaks in his narrative journey, he never goes so far as to write prose that explicitly anticipates its mediation in print, or on paper. On the contrary, while he promotes the spirit of transparency about the production of fiction that carries over from Cervantes into so much mid-century fiction, he generally does so by suggesting the conversational presence of an author accountable to the demands of a live audience.
The most significant feature of self-reflexive, mid-century fiction, however, is its genuine engagement of its own qualitative limitations. Neither Cervantes, Fielding, nor Sterne is in the position of most mid-century authors, of candidly referencing the limited quality of the reading material they are producing. The frequency with which sub-canonical authors acknowledge that their work is boring, incoherent, written only for profit, and likely to be used as scrap paper is productive of an unusually flat kind of reflexivity. When Shebbeare invites readers to bet on the turn his story is to take, he highlights a novel written conspicuously on the fly; when authors pronounce their powerlessness to produce a certain quality of prose, the gesture becomes disarmingly honest. “It would be tedious and disgusting to our readers, to give a particular and minute account of the little accidents and trifling circumstances which befell our heroines on their journey,” writes William Dodd in The Sisters (1754), a novel full of tedious descriptions and concessions to the inability of the narrator to complete unfinished scenes. When Long uses his novel to deplore “a Tribe of Novelists [who] have started into Business, and carried on a very extensive and lucrative Trade,” the joke rebounds as an indictment of his own ambition (ii). And when the narrator of Sarah Scott’s Agreeable Ugliness (1754) grants readers “full Liberty to forget me,” her claim that she will also try to forget herself rings true with a novel in which the artifice and conventionality of the prose make this patently difficult.9 These metanarratives seem to nullify any critical debate about how good the novels actually are by anticipating every criticism that might be thrown their way.
Yet the novels I discuss in this chapter, and the it-narratives I discuss in the next, cultivate a consciousness about the production of bad fiction for a target audience inclusive of middle-class readers that does not rely on the production of distinction for either readers or books. Instead it yields the impression of a book sentient about its limited conditions of production and reception and resistant to human efforts to usurp its ironic, critical authority. With mid-century novels, this ruse relies on various representations of readers having to contend with the stuff of narrative. The page and the conventions of novel writing are presented as impasses to reader involvement. Later in the chapter I argue that this shows up as books are likened to more mechanistic forms of transport. In providing perspectives on their own production and consumption, these novels achieve a certain status as entertaining objects. They do so, however, at the cost of instilling in readers a sense of the way in which print prevents people from intervening in the events unfolding on the page and from controlling the fate of the narratives they consume.
The Appeal of Self-Conscious Novels
It is in some sense difficult to explain why candidly self-deprecating novels should sell at all. In drawing attention to the ephemeral and material aspects of their literary enterprise, surely inferior authors drive potential readers away? To some extent, this was the case of mid-eighteenth-century novels, which were lambasted by critics in disdainful reviews published in the Monthly Review, established in 1749, and the Critical Review, established in 1756. In 1761, the preface of the Critical Review looked back at recent history and compared novelists to “the insects of a summer’s day that have buzzed, and stung, and sunk and expired.”10 James Raven suggests that two-thirds of reviewers in the 1760s shared this negative opinion of the novel and cites as typical one vehement judgment of A Fair Citizen (1757) as “a puny, miserable reptile that has here crawl’d into existence, happily formed to elude all attack by its utter insignificance.”11 However, as Raven also points out, such reviews evidence the frustration critics felt as readers continued to buy novels under these conditions, against their advice. Even as the general opinion of the form remained low, the number of self-proclaimed novels in circulation increased from 50 in 1759 to more than 100 in 1769.12 Most of these were slim volumes, commodious to experimentation, rash to announce their own popularity, and aligned with fashion rather than erudition.13 Their success was closely connected to the fortunes of a new class of booksellers and printers engaged in a period of frenzied economic activity. Between 1750 and 1770, the number of fiction publishers in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin doubled.14
There is also evidence that at least some readers found more pleasure in this faddish, reflexive fiction than in the works of realism on offer at the time. The mood in which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu opened a box of newly published novels sent to her in Italy in 1752 shows her genuine taste for the humor of self-conscious productions. Perusing the contents of the package, she has little to say about Smollet’s Peregrine Pickle, finds the style of Leonora “most affectedly florid, and naturally insipid” and calls Clarissa, on the whole, “most miserable stuff.” The novels she reads with interest are Charlotte Summers, which she finds good enough “not to be able to quit it till it was read over,” and Francis Coventry’s Pompey the Little, “which has really diverted me more than all the others, and it was impossible to go to Bed till it was finish’d. It was a real and exact representation of life, as it is now acted in London.”15 Pompey, a sharp satire of London life delivered from the perspective of a lap-dog, includes chapter titles such as “Containing what the Reader will know, if he reads it,” “a dissertation upon nothing,” and frequent representations of bad readers and novelists. These devices are integral enough to the novel that Montagu can hardly have found herself engrossed in its depiction of real life in spite of them.16
Thus, while self-conscious novels like Pompey are openly derivative of Fielding and inferior in obvious ways to Tristram Shandy, it is misleading of Booth to imply that they were not enjoyed at all.17 The most compelling evidence for their entertainment value may be the fact that Sterne looked to them when he planned his own entry in the race to please and attract consumers of the novel. Keymer’s work situating Sterne squarely in the 1750s, articulating his debt to the minor novelists writing before and during the publication of his best-selling volumes, has made it clear that Sterne’s choice of models went beyond Cervantes and Scriblerian satire and almost certainly included Capt. Greenland and the equally self-conscious Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756). As an author responsive to the newest fashions in fiction, it is significant that Sterne chose to follow the lead of modern authors who were exposing and ridiculing realist tendencies. Tristram Shandy becomes in this sense a confirmation, not only of the fascination of eighteenth-century readers with experimentation, but of the tolerance for “self-consciousness about innovation and novelty” that Hunter lists as characteristic of the novels to emerge in the eighteenth century.18
What is it, then, that made Montagu and Sterne amenable to novels boasting of their own devices, shoving the reader conspicuously from scene to scene, and reminding her of the papery world in which she is unwittingly ensconced? The appeal of self-conscious fiction is often explained by theorists of the novel as liberating readers from their belief in an alternative reality. Rather than forcing them to surrender to the effects of mimesis, fiction that announces its own operation can be seen as disseminating power among its readers, making them visible and dialogically active in ways that are normally opposed by the impersonality of print. “These strategies,” argues Hunter of the tendency of early novels to address their readers directly, “create an atmosphere—intrusive