18th Century

18th Century

British writing in the 1700s was shaped by big changes in society and thought. Ideas about reason and science, known as the Enlightenment, were very important, influencing writers to value order and clarity. At the same time, more people were learning to read, cities were growing, and new forms of writing like magazines became popular. This century acts as a bridge, moving from the more formal styles popular earlier towards the focus on personal feeling that would define the next era.

Early in the century, writers like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift were known for their clever and often critical works, using satire to comment on society and politics, often looking back to classical Greek and Roman styles. However, the most significant development was the rise of the novel as a major form of storytelling. Writers like Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Samuel Richardson (Pamela), and Henry Fielding (Tom Jones) explored realistic situations, personal lives, and social issues in ways that captured the public's imagination and established the novel's popularity.

As the century progressed, there was a growing interest in feelings and personal experience, sometimes called the Age of Sensibility, with Samuel Johnson being a central literary figure and writers like Thomas Gray exploring emotion in poetry. Towards the end of the 1700s, this focus intensified, leading towards Romanticism. Poets Robert Burns and William Blake celebrated nature, emotion, and the individual. Gothic novels filled with mystery, suspense, and the supernatural also became fashionable. Important non-fiction included influential essays, dictionaries, biographies like Boswell's Life of Johnson, and histories, alongside witty stage comedies by Goldsmith and Sheridan.

18th-century British literature explored the balance between reason and emotion, offered sharp social commentary, and began to focus more on individual lives and feelings. Its most lasting contribution was establishing the novel as a central part of British culture, creating a form that allowed writers to explore human experience in new depth. The growing emphasis on emotion and nature towards the end of the century directly paved the way for the Romantic writers who followed.

Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719, stands as a landmark in English literature and is often regarded as one of the very first novels. It tells the famous story of a man shipwrecked on a deserted island off the coast of South America. Presented as a realistic autobiography, the book captured the public's imagination with its detailed account of survival and adventure, making it an instant bestseller.

The novel follows the experiences of Robinson Crusoe who, as the sole survivor of his ship, finds himself utterly alone. Over twenty-eight years, he painstakingly builds a life for himself from scratch. Using salvaged tools and his own resourcefulness, he constructs shelters, learns to cultivate crops like barley, domesticates goats, and keeps a journal. His long solitude is eventually broken when he rescues a native man from cannibals, names him Friday, and takes him on as a servant and companion, teaching him English and converting him to Christianity.

Defoe’s writing style is key to the book's enduring appeal. He uses plain, direct language and fills the narrative with practical details – how things were built, how food was found, the challenges faced daily. This focus on realism, known as verisimilitude, made Crusoe's extraordinary circumstances feel believable to readers. Major themes explored include survival, self-reliance, the struggle between humanity and nature, the role of religious faith and Providence in Crusoe's life, and the complexities of solitude and society, including the master-servant dynamic established with Friday, reflecting early colonial ideas.

Robinson Crusoe had a massive impact. Its success helped cement the novel as a popular and respectable form of literature, appealing particularly to the growing middle class who admired Crusoe's practical skills, hard work, and economic independence. The story was so influential that it spawned a whole genre of imitation castaway stories, often called 'Robinsonades'. It remains a widely read classic, studied for its narrative techniques, its exploration of individualism, and its reflection of the cultural attitudes of its time.

Discussion

Besides finding food and water, what one skill, personal quality, or object do you think would be most important to help you survive long-term if you were stranded alone on a desert island?

Activity: Writing a survival plan

Scenario: You've survived a shipwreck and are alone on an unknown, uninhabited island, like Robinson Crusoe. You only have the clothes you're wearing and one or two small items you managed to keep.

Your Task: Write a clear plan explaining how you would survive on the island. Use Robinson Crusoe as inspiration for being resourceful.

Your Plan Should Cover:

• First 24 Hours: What are the absolute first things you'd do? What's your top priority (water, shelter, food?) and why?

• Finding Needs: How would you find fresh water, food, and make fire?

• Shelter: Where would you build it, what would you use, and what would it look like?

• Exploring: How would you explore the island safely? What would you look for? How would you use any items you found?

• Long-Term: How would you make life sustainable over time? How would you keep track of days and stay sane alone?

• Rescue: How would you try to signal for help?

Tips: Be practical and think step-by-step. You can use bullet points or paragraphs.

Further reading

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Edited by John Richetti, Penguin Classics, 2001.

This seminal novel, often considered one of the first in English, recounts the adventures of a man shipwrecked on a desert island. It explores themes of individualism, colonialism, economic utilitarianism, and spiritual introspection. Defoe's use of realistic detail and first-person narration was innovative for the time and contributed significantly to the development of the novel form.

Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Doody’s scholarly work offers a comprehensive and revisionist history of the novel, challenging the traditional Anglocentric view of its emergence solely in 18th-century England. She traces the novel's roots to ancient Greek and Roman literature, arguing for a much broader and more diverse lineage. This book provides crucial context for 18th-century scholarship, reframing the rise of the English novel within a wider global literary history and prompting a re-evaluation of the novelistic forms of the period.

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

McKeon’s influential study examines the complex historical and cultural forces contributing to the English novel's emergence. He argues that the novel arose from the dialectical interplay between older romance conventions and newer empiricist and historicist epistemologies. The work details how changing notions of truth, virtue, and social status shaped early narrative forms, making it a foundational text for understanding the generic instability and intellectual currents that influenced Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.

Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock. 1712. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed., vol. C, W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 2699-2718.

This mock-heroic epic poem masterfully satirises high society in early 18th-century London. Pope employs the grand conventions of classical epic poetry to narrate a trivial social spat – the theft of a lock of hair – thereby humorously exposing the vanity, frivolity, and social rituals of the aristocracy. The poem showcases Pope's brilliant wit, his command of heroic couplets, and his use of classical allusions, while also commenting on gender roles, social decorum, and the power of appearances.

Richardson, Samuel. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. 1740. Edited by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely, Oxford World's Classics, 2001.

An epistolary novel, Pamela tells the story of a young servant girl who steadfastly resists her master's advances, ultimately leading to his reform and their marriage. Immensely popular and controversial, it was praised for its psychological realism and moral focus, but also criticised for its portrayal of virtue and class mobility. The novel is significant for its development of the sentimental tradition, its exploration of female interiority, and the contemporary debates it sparked about morality, class, and gender.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. 1726. Edited by Albert J. Rivero, W. W. Norton & Company, 2002.

A cornerstone of satirical literature, Gulliver's Travels chronicles Lemuel Gulliver's voyages to fantastical lands, including Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Through these encounters, Swift satirises human nature, politics, science, and European society. The work presents complex layers of satire, comments on colonialism and rationality, and offers an enduring critique of human pride and folly, reflecting the Enlightenment's darker, more sceptical undercurrents.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. University of California Press, 1957.

Watt’s groundbreaking work is a foundational text in the study of the English novel. He posits that the novel's rise in the 18th century is closely linked to the ascent of philosophical realism, the growth of the middle class, and increasing individualism. Focusing on Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, Watt analyses how their techniques of formal realism – such as detailed particularity of character and setting, and plausible plotting – distinguished the novel from earlier prose fiction. While debated and revised by later scholars, its influence on novel studies remains profound.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. Edited by Eileen Hunt Botting, Yale University Press, 2014.

Published at the century's close, this is a crucial work of political philosophy and early feminism emerging from the 18th century's intellectual ferment. Wollstonecraft passionately argues for women's education, asserting their rational equality with men, which is obscured only by a lack of educational opportunity. She critiques prevailing notions of femininity and calls for women to be treated as rational beings, engaging with Enlightenment ideas of reason and rights and laying a foundational stone for subsequent feminist thought.