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 and unattractive to most modern readers—of directness, a feeling that the author is right there with us, intruding as we read, observing and sorting us.”19 Celebrating a tradition of fictions that draw attention to their artifice, Brian Stonehill contends that “by virtue of its greater honesty, its manifest awareness of its own limitations, and its peculiarly sophisticated humility before life itself, self-depicting fiction can in fact be more persuasive than purely naturalistic fiction.”20 The category of writers he describes includes Fielding and Sterne as its eighteenth-century founders, and he praises the way both achieve intimacy with their readers through their narrators’ concessions to the operation of fiction. Wolfgang Iser and John Preston also celebrate the openness of eighteenth-century fiction to the subjective discoveries of the reader. In Iser’s terms, Fielding’s reader has to formulate meaning: “the text offers itself as an instrument by means of which the reader can make a number of discoveries for himself that will lead him to a reliable sense of orientation.”21 For Preston, this extends more widely to the novelists of the eighteenth century who invite the reader to participate: “They are interested in creating a text which will, as it were, give instructions to the reader. They wish to keep the form open; they think of the novel as a process, not a product, and as a situation for the reader, not as a received text.”22
Although these reader-response theorists focus on canonical works rather than on writers who package the derivativeness, disposability, or obsolescence of their single-edition productions, some of the less celebrated novels of the 1750s and ’60s can be understood in their terms. The dramatized narrator of John Shebbeare’s Lydia, for instance, comes across as charmingly open about the mechanics of novel writing. Early in Lydia, he interrupts a description of his heroine with a long paragraph comparing his making characters to an army tailor’s cutting out clothes for off-the-rack consumption: “when we have gotten together our materials, and, like the … army-taylors, we have cut them out into characters, and spread them upon the ground, we let people chuse for themselves, till they are fitted” (1:73). Shebbeare uses this analogy to distinguish his work from the common romance, which he claims only dupes readers by taking existing literary material and “tacking it together” under a new title, “like rags gathered by old women, and then beaten into paper to form a new manufacture” (1:22). In preference, he suggests, the writer of a “true history” works openly with words, cutting them out and presenting them as material offerings, acknowledging the freedom his readers have to apply the general truths of his story to their own particularity: “by Tom’s being too tall, and Dick’s being too short, the clothes are all out of fitting at first, till, changing round, every man in the regiment settles into the coat that suits him” (1:72).
Shebbeare’s pun on textiles cleverly connects the material process of paper-making with the metaphorical one of dressing readers and characters according to well-worn conventions. It also allows him to think of “pulp” literature in two ways: one that involves the literary product compromised and beaten flat by the recycling of conventions, and the other that foresees the scale of production as an occasion for physical multiplicity and flexibility. The readymade novels Shebbeare advertises as his line of business are visible generally on book stalls and in libraries as an array of objects belonging to the first category, but those that qualify as “true histories” are elevated to the second category, making their popularity into the capacity to accommodate the preferences of different readers.
In this spirit, many of the self-conscious novels of the 1750s and ’60s distinguish themselves by soliciting readers literally as partners in the processes of bringing characters to life, solving problems, and finishing or destroying the book they are reading. Readers of mid-century fiction are asked in various tones of joviality and condescension to fill in blanks and help out with scenes authors have failed to complete. Capt. Greenland’s “amorous readers” are told they will “save our Pen almost a quarter an hours Labour if they will here be pleased to conceive the extraordinary situation of our poor entangled Silvius” (1:61). The narrator of Pompey the Little complains, “had I a hundred Hands, and as many pens, it would be impossible to describe the Folly of that Night” before “begging the Reader to supply it by Help of his own imagination” (156). The narrator of Charlotte Summers cedes power to the reader by rhetorically excusing himself from the scene of composition while assuming that the reader’s imagination continues to work in his absence:
as it is almost Morning, the reader must excuse me if I return to Bed and take a Nap, after the Fatigue of this Chapter, before I proceed any further, if he is not so disposed, he may entertain himself with Miss Summers under the old Oak, till I am at leisure to conduct her further on her Journey. (1:56)
Later, once Sterne has made the invitation to readers to fill in narrative blanks well known, readers of Jenner’s The Placid Man (1770) are praised for having stuck with the book as long as they have, then asked to step in and write the final wedding scene: “as describing wedding ceremonies is not so much my talent as Mr. Richardson’s, let him (the reader) be so good as to take the two brides and the two bridegrooms … and having marshalled them in as many coaches as he thinks proper, convey them safe to St. Georges church.”23
These representations of author-reader collaboration carry through the carefully controlled appeals Fielding makes in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones to the judgment and imagination of his audience, described by Warner as “a novelistic species of performative entertainment which concedes to the reader his or her essential freedom as a pleasurable responsibility.”24 But the specific trick of less accomplished authors is to position readers as physical co-authors of a text, rather than as imaginative collaborators in an unfolding story. Arguably, second-rate authors make their interpretive openings wider than
