ABSTRACT
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. This was the century when modern journalism took shape, the first great biography was written, and private correspondence was cultivated as an art. It is no accident that Defoe not only has claims to be our first eminent novelist but was our first eminent journalist, and that Richardson's novels are composed of letters exchanged between the characters. It is relevant that Fielding, before he became a novelist, was a dramatist and theatre manager: the eighteenth-century comedies of sentiment and manners, undistinguished as most of them were, also had lessons to teach the novelist, in setting a scene and conveying its meaning through dialogue. Fanny Burney does not retain the high status of the other writers.
