ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the experience of social change as it reveals itself in the work of Walter Besant and Henry James, nineteenth century novelists. Besant's lecture on 'The Art of Fiction', delivered at the Royal Institution in 1884, is remembered primarily today because it provoked one of James' greatest theoretical statements about his art. But it also has an intrinsic interest, for it represents the point of view of a novelist who made a stand against the prevailing self-awareness which is common (for all their other differences) to Gissing, Moore and Hardy as well as to James. A ten-year partnership which had begun in 1872 when he and James Rice had published Ready Money Mortiboy, resulted in an extremely successful series of twelve novels. For James, the audience is an impingement, and the extent to which he feels it as such is indicated by the force of the irony with which he describes the pragmatic attitude to the novel.
