Novel ideas
PANKAJA SRINIVASAN
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Have you ever wondered about the birth of the novel?
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Photo: AFP
Antique: One of the three first edition copies of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
The ‘Novel’ is a fictional prose work with a relatively long and often complex plot, usually divided into chapters, in which the story traditionally develops through the thoughts and actions of its characters —Encarta Dictionary
It was in the early 18th Century that writers started experimenting with a new genre, the novel. The middle class was coming into its own.
The common man was making more money and he wanted to read too. That is why most of the early novels depicted middle class people, characteristics and morality.
If you have read Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719), then you have met the pioneer of the novel form.
Samuel Richardson was another of England’s earliest novelists. He wrote Pamela (also known as Virtue Rewarded) and Clarissa (written in 1740, 1741). These were considered to be novels of c
haracter because they were about human beings who were complex and real.
Henry Fielding’s novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones also fell into this category.
Jane Austen though born only in the fag end of the 18th Century was very much influenced by its trends. You will enjoy the humour and style in her Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.
The sunset years of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th Century saw a very important movement in art and literature.
It was called Romanticism. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), her sister Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights in the same year and The
Last of the Mohicans by James Cooper and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick were among the major Romantic novels.
Literary style
But, it was probably in the Victorian Age (defined by the reign of Queen Victoria between 1837-1901) that the novel became firmly established as a literary style. They were now being published in instalments so that most people could afford to buy and read them.
The novels of this period usually presented the world as the middleclass would recognise it, their characters were well rounded — they had both the good and the bad in them.
If you read the novels of Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, George Eliot (her real name was Mary Ann Evans), Thomas Hardy and Lewis Carroll, you will know. A notable American writer Mark Twain who wrote the irresistible Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
was also of the same vintage.
Then came the 20th Century. The novels now had plenty to draw upon.
Momentous events took place in the 100 years, including both the World Wars, the Holocaust, the Great Depression, man’s trip to the moon and the end of Colonialism.
Mankind became more cynical, disillusioned and preoccupied with the self.
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka and D.H Lawrence were but a few of the many 20th century writers who made a deep impression on people who read their novels.
From 1945 to the present the world has seen hundreds of novels in the English language.
There are a lot of Indians too amongst the novelists who continue to write. Amitava Ghosh, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Chetan Bhagat and Vikram Seth are only a handful of them.
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