the 54 people in the entire 18th century british novelists wikipedia category

has anyone read some of the more obscure entries itc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:18th-century_British_novelists

Phebe Gibbes possesses one of the most elusive histories of the 18th-century women writers. Almost all of the information on Gibbes’ life is derived from an application to the Royal Literary Fund for financial support in 1804.[2] As noted in her application, Gibbes, a widow for most of her life, married early and mothered two daughters and one son. One can conjecture that she spent part of her life in British India, as some of her novels, particularly Hartly House, avow a markedly accurate knowledge of Indian lifestyle as perceived through contemporary records.

The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is somewhat on the same plan as Robinson Crusoe, the special feature being the gawry, or flying woman, whom hero discovered on his island, and married. John W. Cousin, author of A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature was not impressed by it saying:

"The description of Nosmnbdsgrutt, the country of the flying people, is a dull imitation of Swift, and much else in the book is tedious."

john shebbeare's portrait is almost exactly the same as william hogarth's famous self-portrait except it does not contain a pug

Graves was a student at Abingdon School and Pembroke College, Oxford. He was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, until January 1749, when the college revoked his fellowship because of his marriage to Lucy Bartholomew, a yeoman's daughter from Aldworth. Lucy was much younger than Graves and uneducated but he sent her to a private school in London before the marriage so that she would acquire the accomplishments considered important for women in the eighteenth century.

William Godwin's Caleb Williams is probly the obscurest of these i've read - i.e. not terribly

His Letters to a Friend, 1836, is a vitriolic on Irish Catholicism, in which he assured the Irish that they lived under a vigorous and paternal government. The duty of that government, he insisted, was to repress Roman Catholicism in Ireland as well as in Great Britain.

the Guildhall bells in Hull play Lillibullero ever few days which seems a bit off tbh

Horace Walpole credited Hall-Stevenson with "a vast deal of original humour and wit", but Smollett and The Critical Review were contemptuous, with the result that in 1760 Hall-Stevenson abused Smollett and his associates in A Nosegay and a Simile for the Reviewers and Two Lyrical Epistles, or Margery the Cook Maid, to the Critical Reviewers.

Pretty sure I read "Letters to a Friend" in college

have just realised Sterne isn't on this list, Swift's omission is more understandable

he would be with the other protestant ascendancy vermin in the 18th century irish novelists category (13 in total)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:18th-century_Irish_novelists

Sterne's Irishness feels more tenuous than Swift's to me - it's perhaps revealing of Wikipedia's Platonism that they can't just sit on both lists

shakespeare cockroaches itt

like Smollett's aggro North Britonisms feel further from Henry Fielding than Sterne the wannabe society swinger

the entire encyclopedic imperative (coeval though largely foreign) is to disregard their individual whims or fancies in favour of the crudely verifiable, so in that sense sterne will forever be a colonial outlier

he qualifies for
English memoirists
English novelists
English satirists
English sermon writers
Infectious disease deaths in England
anyway, whatever his debilities in terms of britishness

this looks borderline interestng but it's from 1796, so not really in the thick of it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungay_Castle_%28novel%29

If there be any so fastidious and unfeeling as to condemn and deprecate the romantic hopes and flattering visions cherished in he buoyant bosom of nineteen, I am sorry for them, and here avow, I wish never entirely to forget the fascinating pleasure of such air-built hopes. Should they be sometimes attended with danger to the weak and frail, they are likewise accompanied with their advantages to the good and virtuous, and often enable us to encounter trials with a resolution and fortitude, which, at a more advanced period of our lives, when time has weakened our bodily frame, and experience deprived us of those gay illusions, we find it difficult and painful to acquire.—The philosophy of nineteen, though not abstruse, is flattering and conclusive; so much the more valuable; for, after all the researches of philosophy, what are we taught to know, but that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards?—that we are merely the pilgrims and passengers of a day,—that our resting place must be found in a better, an unknown world,—that we must encounter innumerable trials on our journey, and at last die and be forgotten, even by those for whom we have toiled, and to whom we are most tenderly attached?—Surely then we may be allowed to snatch, or steal, a few of those innocent enjoyments just thrown in our way, to encourage our fortitude, and clear our path from some of the briars and thorns with which it is so profusely planted

18th century sensibility runs a ways into the 1800s i think, think of Austen for example, Thomas Love Peacock feels pretty 18th century too, big shift comes around the 1830s imo

hey i never saw this. good thread!

Sterne's Irishness feels more tenuous than Swift's to me

otm - I think 'Irish-born' or similar is more accurate - he doesn't really have much of a relation to Ireland that I can see & it feels a reach when ppl try to claim him for Irish lit.

This one---hate to mention Kafka, but seemed increasingly closer to him than to Dickens, Zola (Balzac prob read it)---the following incl both endings, beware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_as_They_Are;_or,_The_Adventures_of_Caleb_Williams

ha I did not notice this was an old thread. oh well

the reason for posting this is evidently that i was surprised how few there were, and how many of them are (in categorical if not in aesthetic terms -- it's not like i have read any of them) minor and seemingly only 'kept alive', inasmuch as they are, by historicist literary criticism

even if it's assumed there are a few who have not caught the eye of the wikipedia editor coven panopticon, that is a very small number

and yeah it's a truism long observed that there were probably only a hundred painters in flanders at any point in the 15th century even if 10% of them were of world-historical significance

even so

hm

I suspect others will have the numbers closer to hand but I think Wikipedia must be out by at least one significant figure. idk. ECCO has two hundred thousand books published in the uk in the century, if anyone feels like perusing the full title list it might have some indication how many of these are novels -- http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/history/eighteenth-century-collections-online.aspx

the set of published prose works would probably be fairly voluminous given the small editions of those days and vanity publishing, more the set of novelists with at least some degree of notoriety attested to, which would probably be something closer to writers who were written about

this is probably overstating the inclusivity of the wikipedia category by extrapolating from the marginality of some of the listed names though

more saliently i suppose im drawn to the supporting cast behind the names a reasonably literate person would recognise and it becomes clear that there really aren't more than perhaps a couple of dozens novelists there who suffice as minor writers in that sense, the drop-off to obscurity happens quickly thereafter

id be interested to see a list drawn up by a current scholar of 18th novels, probably such a thing exists

and then to place them in a minority tree, tiers of minors to minors

I'm at work, so this might be a bit fragmentary.

Basically, Nakh otm - the canon isn't really that big, and even the sub-canon isn't huge really(*), and it's still more messy w/r/t novels, particularly over the first half of the century because there isn't much that looks like The Novel & lots of blurry (often anonymous or pseudonymous) edge cases – even Crusoe is passing itself off as a real-life memoir by Crusoe at first, and from the wiki list I might be iffy about calling Delarivier Manley a *novelist* – The Secret History doesn't look that much like a novel imo.

So pulled the Literature and Language title list xls from ECCO, and it gives about 8000 titles. looks a bit like you/I might expect: lots of plays, lots of poems, editions of earlier stuff, language books, dictionaries, not many extended prose fictions. It might not be comprehensive (and I might have misunderstood the classification system), but it sort of fits with what I've run into before – there isn't that much fiction printed at any given point.

Things are exploding towards the end of this period, though, and I don't know that end anything like as well.

(*) Like it's definitely possible to read through the old canon down to a minority level of Lyly or Peele say. Maybe not everything by every author, but beyond the greatest hits.

the target audience is reasonably small for most of the century, i guess

18th century sensibility runs a ways into the 1800s i think, think of Austen for example, Thomas Love Peacock feels pretty 18th century too, big shift comes around the 1830s imo

This is def true, but I think of ~1780-1830 as a kind of unit for prose fictions – odd – gothic, but not just that – quite hard to fit together - Vathek, Rackrent, Peacock, M Shelley, The Monk, Melmoth, Justified Sinner, Scott, Godwin, Austen… Something's changed from the mid-century Richardson/Fielding dialectic, but I dunno – maybe Burney would be a bridge figure to the sensibility end of things.

(but dark territory for me – I've read very little. Would love to get to know it properly.)

xp right - gender, class and literacy issues + i've never looked closely at the economics of it but would guess that paper isn't cheap, printing still fairly labour intensive… it's a hard environment to make any money with prose fiction.

It might not be comprehensive (and I might have misunderstood the classification system)

hmmm no Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure that i can find. Makes me a bit suspicious.

idly curious - made list of titles of everything from the xls that describes itself as a novel. (so missing stuff that doesn't use 'novel' in the title + some false hits).

thanks woof

'sub canon' captures it quite well i think, it's the paucity within that sort of sedimented category between the starry names and the marginalia that surprised me, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising but there you go

the xls of course contains lots of anonymous works which would escape the author list

http://i.imgur.com/E4WnxOz.png

yeah, I think the list of sub-canon names seems an immense, obscure and terrifying mine in youth, so reading through one of the old volumes of the Oxford History of English Literature was just intimidating - like panicking thinking 'no-one has read Gondibert should I have read Gondibert?' – but then somewhere down the line you've run into eg Walter Pope (or Mary Pix for more recent survey histories) a few times so it doesn't seem that odd there's a couple of pages on him (her). Up to somewhere in the 18th century the British literary world is quite small.

otoh the an/pseudonymous para-literary stuff can seem endless – pamphlets, broadsides, occasional poems, journals, etc etc.

and religious stuff of course. that's really immense.

no one has linked that "100 actual titles of eighteenth century novels" thing at any point, is how i should have realised this is an old thread

on that humphry clinker rn, feels like atypical smollett in that no one has like stabbed anyone for lolz yet. pretty fun even if the lengthy description of the water in the baths at bath nearly made me retch on the subway.