The Early English Novel and Class Structure

The Literature of British Society in the Eighteenth Century

Feb 23, 2009

As realism strongly influenced by a materialistic bourgeois ideology, the early novel affirms the myth of a fixed class structure yet subtly encourages class mobility.

Patricia McKee, in Public & Private: Gender, Class, and the British Novel (1764-1878), sees British literature as being able to "reform social experience through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by eventually reforming practices of productivity and consumption into stable dimensions of social order" (6). McKee claims that commodification and consumption of knowledge "defines to a great extent the experience of publicness and privacy in novels during this period" (1).

According to McKee, this is a way to see how the myth of stable class boundaries informs the way social experience was perceived and expressed in the novel. The novel becomes "a crucial means by which both public and private life are reordered in the course of a century to provide stable categories of experience" (1).

Public and Private Distinctions Vanish

Instances of novelistic disclosure, in which the reader becomes party to a nexus of shame, female sexuality, drunkenness, and pre-marriage maneuvering, make meaningful separation between what is public and private disappear. Further, Leonore Davidoff says, in Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class, that the novel has "become a basic part of the way our whole social and psychic worlds are ordered, but an order that is constantly shifting, being made and remade" (228).

Similarly Dr. Samuel Johnson's envisioned the novel as a way to isolate and examine potential life-experiences. For example, Daniel Defoe's much observed need to impose editorial order on authorial chaos and his presentation of the public and private life of his characters in novels like Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe show McKee's "development and distribution of different kinds of knowledge" (2) via the novel.

The Early Novel as an Artifact of the Middle Class

Moreover, as a way of, at least superficially, stabilizing experience, as a discursive way of delimiting and schematizing this unpredictability and instability (in what could perhaps be called a panoptic vision of the social strata in which the presence of each class appears to be distinct and imminently visible), the early novel makes the middle class its chief beneficiary.

McKee argues that this "gradual shift in power from aristocracy to middle class" (8) establishes middle class-ness as a matter of bourgeois ideology that favors the acquisition of wealth coupled with a certain frugality and restraint-production as an end in itself, not as a means to a decadent, sumptuary, ultimately aristocratic end.

As an embodiment of these values, the novel shows the middle class to itself: its work ethic, its virtuous frugality, and its emerging power within a schematized (if fictive) social framework. The English middle class now had a distinctive socio-cultural position and yet was dynamic, gaining on an ancient aristocracy that was being diminished by new technologies of production and consumption.

Davidoff, Leonore. Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class. New York: Routledge, 1995.

McKee, Patricia. Public & Private: Gender, Class, and the British Novel (1764-1878). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.

The copyright of the article The Early English Novel and Class Structure in 18th & 19th Century British Fiction is owned by Michael Davis. Permission to republish The Early English Novel and Class Structure in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.