a place in their immortal Register, this elaborate Representation of a Message is devoted to the Perusal of the curious. By this artifice doth the Author ingeniously project a message to preserve himself from total oblivion; humbly conceiving, that when this neglected Treatise under the character of waste-paper, shall be doomed to share the Fate of it, some little Master or Miss may be kindly advertised of the picture of that harmless Card which adorns one happy leaf of it, and which began about the year one thousand Seven hundred and Fifty, to be universally respected as a high Messenger of Honour.4
The inclusion of an illustrated page works here as occasion to flaunt the author’s perception of novels being fashionable items, quickly cast aside and reduced to paper. In a similar spirit, William Toldervy includes songs that he hopes will catch the eye in a novel his narrator otherwise admits is thin on remarkable events.5
Other authors describe more broadly the mood of their disgruntled audience and their possible reactions to the page. Readers of William Goodall’s Adventures of Capt. Greenland (1752) are invited to “indulge their spleen” by tearing out digressive passages they don’t like or “if it should better please them, by throwing the Whole Book into the consuming flames,” and Shebbeare’s Lydia, or Filial Piety: a novel (1755) challenges readers discontent with a chapter to “write a better themselves.”6 The cocky narrator of The Marriage Act (1754) encourages readers to leave off reading and head down to the club to bet on the events to come in the novel—“Now in this very Place, if an Author could lay Wagers with his Readers, Thousands of Pounds might be won; but as he cannot, it may serve a Bet a White’s, where the Lives of men are play’d at Chuck-Farthing.”7 In return for their assumed animosity toward the novels being written, readers are cast in these asides as distractible gamblers, volatile and impatient.
Until recently, these novels have been discussed very little by critics. In the 1950s, Wayne Booth reviewed them as part of the fashion in intrusive narration that began in England with Fielding and culminated with Sterne. Booth imagines the mounting tension readers felt as they saw devices used by Fielding—the chapter headings, intrusions, prefatory material—implanted in the works of lesser authors “with almost complete disregard for their artistic function.”8 For Booth, these intrusions register as distractions, impinging on otherwise limp but progressive narratives 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
