ABSTRACT
What, Henry James asked in 1899, would the novel of the twentieth century be like? That there would be a future for the form he was certain: ‘till the world is an unpeopled void,’ he prophesied, ‘there will be an image in the mirror.’ But the quality of that image, the ‘art’ which he had laboured to raise, James saw as threatened by fiction’s spectacular success as a market commodity. There had been ‘monstrous multiplications’:
The great novelist’s overture to the new century finishes on an uplifting note. But the essay as a whole is haunted by James’s ‘uneasiness’ at the perceived ‘triumph’ of the ‘general preference’ of the ‘millions’. Trampling through the neat parterres of the House of Fiction is Demos, emancipated by the Common Schools Act of 1870 and sodden with an excess of those low novels that George Eliot memorably called ‘spiritual gin’. The Hogarthian allusion is not quite right, however, for it was the newness and, in an obscure way, the new technology which alarmed the nineteenth-century clerisy. Matthew Arnold, for example, picked on the same associations of ‘flaring’ gaslight and steam engines in his description of ‘the tawdry novels which flare in the bookshelves of our railway stations, and which seem designed, as so much else that is produced for the use of our middle class seems designed, for people with a low standard of life’ (Williams, 1961, p. 169).
