Frankenstein by Mary Shellley

Social and economic background

The French Revolution in 1789 was a reference point for the Romantic movement. It marked the shift of economic power from the aristocracy to the middle classes, provoked by the rise in industrialism. Advances in technology also alarmed the working classes who saw their jobs in jeopardy, replaced by machines. With the rise of Napoleon war broke out between the UK and France, ending in 1815. However the economic and social problems of the country were not addressed due to a laissez-faire government policy which favoured deregulation and did not attempt to solve the economic shift from an agricultural to an industrial society. This led to poor wages and conditions for the working class who were forbidden by law to unionise. Eventually the workers turned to violence to protest and the Luddite movement was born.

Literary thinkers, like Shelley's father, grasped the opportunity to argue for a more equal distribution of property. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), demanding equality between the sexes.

As well as technological advances scientific ideas also matured and one of the most significant was Erasmus Darwin’s thinking on biological evolution, which prefigured his grandson Charles' later research. Mary Shelley joined discussions in Byron's house on Erasmus' notions. She was also influenced by Crosse's galvanism, the study of electrical experiments.

The Gothic Novel

By the second half of the eighteenth century Walpole's gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) had appeared. It deviated from the traditional novelistic theme of fictional realism, pretending to describe the world as it exists. The gothic novel ignored the contemporary Augustan Age neoclassical culture of rationalism and gentility and its rejection of enthusiasm and superstition. 

Yet, the gothic novel was widely read at the time, possibly as a reaction against the culture of restraint and the Protestant ethic. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1811) carried over the gothic tradition into the next century as the novel of experimental science.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

 

Historical context

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Augustan Age continued its advances in capitalism and industrialism, legitimised by the economic theories of Adam Smith. This boom would also help lead to the rise of the Empire in the same century.

Literary context

The end of the eighteenth century was characterised by a growth in literacy promoted by charity schools, increased opportunities for women and the tradition of circulating libraries. This period also saw a questioning of the Enlightenement movement by gothic novelists and some poets. This led to the triumph of individualism and the Romantic movement.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) harked back to the Age which has already passed. Her novels are the final ones of the Enlightenment and her characters are the landed gentry whose desire was for stability in an era of change. They are portrayed as only interested in issues that concern themselves: social position managed through marriage and inheritance. 

Along with Walter Scott (1771-1832), Austen is an historic anomaly. She summarises the concerns of the Augustan Age, while Scott is spokesman for the new Romantic era. Both chose to exclude the Industrial Revolution, the wars waged in their own times and the social revolution in which the middle class replaced the gentry. Their narratives can be seen as an assertion of traditional values in a turbulent time. 

The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith

Historical Background

When The Vicar of Wakefield was published in 1766 the British Empire was in expansion and the Industrial Revolution had begun. However, despite the rising economic activity in British cities, rural areas like that of Goldsmith's childhood remained untouched, as is reflected in his prose and poetry.

The 18th. century applied the tools of the scientific revolution, empirical observation and research, to law, religion, economics and politics. This replaced the traditional faith in divine revelation as the source of knowledge.

Revolutionary ideas opposing the Absolute Monarchy and replacing it with accountability, were led by Locke in the UK the previous century and Rousseau in the 18th. They argued that authority came from the people, not from God. French soldiers returning home from the US war of independence (1775-1783), where they had supported the colonies against the British, brought republican values. Inspired in the Enlightenment these ignited France and led to the revolution of 1789 that abolished the absolute monarchy. 

In economics Adam Smith complained about mercantilism, the prevailing model of economic isolation, instead of trade. He proposed the novel theories of supply and demand, laissez-faire capitalism and minimum market regulation. The aim was that countries produce what they manufactured well and import what they did not. These ideas set a basis for neoliberalism in modern economic thinking.

In art there was a reaction to the previously Baroque and Rococo extravagances. The neoclassical movement looked to the Greco-Roman artistic ideals. This return to simplicity and harmony fitted well with the 18th. century philosophical vision based on rationality. The novel format arose, too, in this century with its insistence on fictional realism, consistent with contemporary scientific objectivity.

The Enlightenment debate also attempted to overcome traditional thinking by integrating the physical and the metaphysical. These were expressed in philosophical terms by British empiricism and French metaphysicians.

Literary background

The Vicar of Wakefield is a prime example of the sentimental novel, a late 18th-century genre, that traced the emotional responses of characters and readers to their situations.

It was a reaction to the previous century's rationalism, in line with novels like Ricardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). This tradition laid the way for later Gothic and Romantic novels.

The Vicar of Wakefield is similar to Tristram Shandy in its satire of the clichés of the sentimental novel which mixed tearful scenes and morality and where a pure heart is portrayed in characters' feelings about the beauties of nature and empathy with the sorrows of others. Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811) would later develop this satire with its sharp criticism of sentimentalism.

Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne

1. Literary background

Narrative presentation:

In Don Quixote (1605 & 1615) the knight lives out his own fiction by re-enacting fictions of chivalric romances. Following Cervantes' lead, Tristram, another fictional character, writes his own fictional autobiography in Tristram Shandy (1759-1767). Both books are metafictions: fictions about fiction. This is Sterne's 18th. century comment on reality, which is not something solid, but a construct of perceptions, narratives, fictions. The lesson for readers is that this applies, not only to Tristram's thoughts, but to their own thinking.

Applying the novel's traditional approach of characters over plot Richardson presented his narrative in realistic fashion by showing the momentary thoughts, feelings and gestures of his characters, who are more important than the plot. 

Fielding's realism, on the other hand, followed the aristotelian design of plot over characters by focusing on the verisimilitude of his storyline and relying for credibility on probability.

Sterne found a way of bringing together both plot and characters by presenting Tristram as biographer of his autobiography, thus joining his character's perception from inside and outside.

However, what sets Sterne's narrative apart is that it parodies the new approach of the novel: formal realism. Tristram Shandy is a novel satirising the novel's pretended realism, just as Cervantes satired Don Quixote's knightly identity as a fantasy.

The hero

Tristram is the focus of Sterne's ironical characterisation. Trist(ram) is his name and defines his sad character. His novelistic identity is fused with his naming, yet his personal identity is a puzzle. 

Time

The passing of time in the novel depends, not on the clock, but on the narrator's stream-of-consciousness. This links Sterne's novel to Richardson's timing, which was expressed in the present tense in his characters' epistles. However, Tristram is also recounting his personal 'life and opinions' which allows him to adapt to a longer timeline, similar to Defoe's autobiography in Robinson Crusoe. Sterne also emulates Fielding's chronology, correlating his fiction with such family dates as those of Uncle Toby's battles in Flanders. Nevertheless, Tristram Shandy goes even further and presents a correspondence between literature and reality by offering the reader an hour's reading matter for every hour in his fictional life. This, of course, reduces the fictional realism of the novel to an absurdity since Tristram will employ more than an hour to pen an hour of his experiences: the more he writes the more the reader's time recedes.

Narration

Fielding organised his narrative sequences into scenes which counterpoint each other ironically. This occasionally appears overmanipulative on the author's part. Sterne, on the contrary, can manipulate all he wants without losing authenticity because his narrator is inside his own head and so unconcerned with external chronology. A chaotic narration is accepted by the reader since it is the reflection of the narrator's mental disorder.

Thematics

Richardson's Clarissa has ideal goodness as a central theme. Sterne presents Uncle Toby in the same manner, as the embodiment of goodness. Fielding, of course, criticised Richardson's ideal as Shamela and Sterne, too, introduces an opposite to goodness: the villainous Widow Wadman.

Characterisation

Tristram Shandy owes much to Don Quixote's main characters who are dualistic representations of realism in Sancho and idealism in Don Quixote himself. Tristram's story also incarnates ideas and sensory input, but in one person. Sterne, following Cervantes, suggests that truth is neither completely external, as science would have it, nor only introspective, as humanism perceives it, but that reality is a collection of different narratives.

Richardson was distinguished from Fielding by their differing emphasis on the individual and the social. This double realism in the novel is later exemplified in French literature by Balzac's sociological emphasis on the exterior and Proust's psychological analysis Yet both are considered realists. Sterne synthesises both approaches since he explores both the inner and outer worlds from inside Tristram's head. 

2. Philosophical background

The dualistic approaches to knowledge go back to the realism and idealism of platonic ideals and aristotelian pragmatism.

However, the Enlightenment emphasised this distinction further in Descartes' dualistic vision of inner and outer: "I think therefore I am." The philosophical problem led, logically, to the question of how the inner I could know the exterior world.

Novelists, however, though recognising the differences between interior and exterior have chosen to accept both as 'real' and focus on the problematic relationships between them. Defoe's memoir style is especially suited to displaying the tensions between inner and outer worlds. He uses the Cartesian individualistic view to define both the internal and external worlds more clearly. Later Proust also presented both the Third Republic and his personal introspective analysis.

Locke defined identity through memory of the past, which enables a continuity of self-awareness. Hume continued this theme when he analysed the development of personal identity as causation, the perception of previous cause and later effect which are not related in reality, only through perception. Sterne's Shandy is conscious of his own personality through the comparison of past and present experiences, but in the end is unsure of who he is.