ABSTRACT
In English Literature in History 1730-80: An Equal, Wide Survey, John Barrell finds writers “concerned to represent the diversity of English society more fully” than ever before.1 That ambition brings an increasing sense of the impossibility of achieving a comprehensive view of society, now widely perceived as increasingly, bewilderingly complex and diverse. In the face of what Barrell labels a “crisis in social knowledge,” the periodical essay, the georgic poem, and the “picaresque or comic epic novel” seek to elaborate a possibility of comprehensive understanding.2 The main problem is where to place an observer so that he (and, especially in the eighteenth-century novel, she) transcends an encompassing social structure in which individuals are defined by their partial and necessarily self-interested economic and political roles. As the economic structure of society becomes more apparent and what the eighteenth century called the landed interest is revealed as one among several competing factions, even the myth of the gentleman spectator, disinterested by virtue of the leisure guaranteed by his estate, begins to fade. One solution, says Barrell, is worked out in Smollett’s novels, and he quotes the definition of a novel in the dedication to Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753):
A Novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purpose of an uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient. But this plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability or success, without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth and at last close the scene by virtue of his own importance.3
