British Novelists and Their Styles Author:David Masson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: five together, in the neglected shelves of large libraries, we alight, in the reign of George II., on a new group of British Novelists, remembered pre-eminently ... more »under that name. When we speak of the British Novelists of the Eighteenth Century, we think of Kichardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and of the others as arranged round them,. It is common even, in consideration of the great extension which the prose form of fiction received at their hands, to speak of them as the fathers of the present British Novel. It was in the year 1740, nine years after Defoe's death, and when Swift was lingering on in the world as a speechless maniac under the care of his friends, that Richardson—a prosperous London printer, of a plump little figure and healthy complexion, who had lived to the age of fifty-one without distinguishing himself in any way, except as an upright and careful man of business, and a great favourite in a circle of ladies who used to visit at his house for the pleasure of hearing him talk—published his Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. He had been asked by two of his publishing friends, who knew his talent for letter- writing, to write " a little book of familiar letters on the useful concerns of common life;" but, on his setting himself to comply with the request, it occurred to him, he says, that, if he wrote a story in an easy and natural manner, "he might possibly " introduce a new species of writing that might pos- " sibly turn young people into a course of reading " different from the pomp and parade of romance- " writing, and, dismissing the improbable and mar- " vellous, with which novels generally abound, might " tend to promote the cause of religion and virtue." Remembering to have heard many years before of a poor girl who, after resisting all the arts and pe...« less