ABSTRACT
The novel has always been a social form in two special senses: it has concerned itself more closely than any other literary form with social problems, manners, and organization; and (at least in England) it has been the product of one particular class—the middle class. Other narrative forms, of course, have had affinities with one social class rather than another: the medieval high romance belonged to the aristocracy; the ballad, to the folk. But these older forms did not necessarily express the values and the way of life of the classes that favoured them, although they tended to do so. The novel, in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries, was more distinctly the outcome of middle-class values and outlook, not only in its characteristic content but in its characteristics as a composition. It is true that the middle class was so broad as to include widely various categories: Bunyan, who had intimate ties with village folk, perhaps marked its lower extreme, and Fielding, with his aristocratic relations, its upper one. Both contributed with distinction to the development of the novel form, for though Pilgrim's Progress (1678) can scarcely be called a novel, it has important novelistic qualities.
