Samuel Richardson had a simple story to tell about the invention of the epistolary novel, a genre that embodies its narrative in fictional letters. By the age of fifty he had established himself in business as one of the leading master printers in London, and was also known in the trade for his ability to write good copy; he had composed numerous prefaces, dedications and ‘other little Things of the Pamphlet-kind’, he later told his Dutch translator, only some of which can now be traced. It was doubtless with this reputation in mind that Richardson had been urged for years by two influential publishers to produce a letter-writing manual for which they sensed a market opening, aimed at a predominantly rural readership and offering template letters for practical implementation in everyday life. Richardson was slow to accept the commission, but on starting work in 1739 he became absorbed by the imaginative and moral potential of the project, and began developing scenarios that involved fictionalised ethical dilemmas as well as epistolary solutions. One such scenario grew under his hands, about a maidservant importuned by her predatory master, and within a mere two months that winter he drafted a full-length novel from scratch while the manual limped slowly behind: ‘And hence sprung Pamela’, he briskly recalled (Selected Letters, 232). Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded was published to immediate acclaim in November 1740, almost a year to the day after composition began; Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, On the Most Important Occasions, appeared early the next year, and then – as its miraculous offspring became an international craze – disappeared again.

Thirty years after publishing Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–1749), the most celebrated erotic novel in the language, John Cleland was still boasting about its periphrastic delicacy of style. His ornate diction originated in a kind of wager, he told James Boswell, undertaken to demonstrate “that one could write so freely about a woman of the town without resorting to the coarseness of [L'École] des filles, which had quite plain words.” This was a telling contrast, for L'École des filles, a libertine dialogue of 1655, had long been a byword for brazen obscenity. Seized and burned by the Paris authorities within weeks of its first appearance, it was also suppressed in London when the publisher of an English translation was fined “for printing divers obscene & lascivious bookes, one called The School of Venus.” But Cleland's claim was not only to have transcended, in his elaborate circumlocutions, the most scandalous pornographic writing of the previous century. By eschewing the gross literalism of L'École des filles, he had also achieved a sensuality unmatched by the most sophisticated literary bawdry of his own day. The language of the body in Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne's Rabelaisian masterpiece of 1759–1767, was likewise “too plain,” and Cleland had told Sterne so to his face. “I reproved him, saying, ‘it gives no sensations.’ Said he: ‘You have furnished me a vindication. It can do no harm.’

Walter Scott was reviewing Emma when he noted Jane Austen’s resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much modern fiction – ‘the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering-places and circulating libraries’ – and her commitment instead to close, nuanced representation of quotidian life. Yet it is in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, respectively the first of Austen’s novels to be accepted for publication and the first to be actually published, that the process Scott described is best observed. As well as showing the emergence of Austen’s own distinctive manner, these novels make clear that her relationship to the extravagant themes and overwrought conventions of fashionable genre fiction involved something more complex and interesting than outright rejection. Scott was right, of course, that Austen distances herself from escapist romance, and on some counts we might compare her stance with the contrarian aesthetic of William Wordsworth, whose 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads excoriates ‘frantic novels’ and the ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’ to which they catered, insisting instead that ‘the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants’. In Austen too, as in Wordsworth, we find a writer of great innovative power substituting new kinds of discipline and measure in place of hyperbole and excess, convinced that rhetorically less is artistically more. Yet Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility also display an exuberant immersion in, even a wry appreciation of, the nervy routines and tawdry formulas of circulating library fiction. In their close parodic attention to the Gothic novel and the novel of sensibility in particular, they show Austen’s engagement with the market-leading genres of fiction in her day – the fiction disparaged by Scott and denounced by Wordsworth – to be a matter of creative transformation, not fastidious recoil.

Confronted by calamity on a scale 'impossible to describe, or indeed conceive', the narrator of Defoe's fictionalised memoir of the Great Plague, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), zooms in on an individual case: that of two brothers who flee the city to maximise their chances of survival. Shunned by wary villagers, and shunning their fellow refugees, the brothers typify the indigent, solitary state of displaced Londoners who scatter themselves across the fields in isolated, improvised shacks. 'Nor is it unlikely', adds Defoe's narrator (whom we know only by his initials, H.F.), “but that some of the unhappy Wanderers might die so all alone, even sometimes for want of Help, as particularly in one Tent or Hutt, was found a Man dead, and on the Gate of a Field just by, was cut with his Knife in uneven Letters, the following Words, by which it may be suppos'd the other Man escap'd, or that one dying first, the other bury'd him as well as he could; / O m I s E r Y! / W e B o T H S h a L L D y E, / W o E, W o E.” ( JPY, 151) / With its faithful, even fussy transcription of an utterance pitched somewhere between elemental cry and grunting bathos, the passage flirts with absurdity in ways already acknowledged by Defoe's narrator. As he uneasily recognises, there are comic as well as tragic aspects to the incongruous condition of these early modern urbanites, torn by catastrophe from their humdrum world, 'who liv'd like wandring Pilgrims in the Desarts' ( JPY, 57).

Scholarly editions of Tristram Shandy, the Sermons, and A Sentimental Journey in the standard Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, six vols. to date (Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1978- ) are listed in the List of abbreviations at the start of the book; The Letters of Laurence Sterne, eds. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd, two vols., is forthcoming in the same series. There are good paperback editions of Tristram Shandy by Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), Melvyn New (London: Penguin, 2003), and Robert Folkenflik (New York, NY: Random House, 2004). Tim Parnell's Oxford World's Classics edition of A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) also includes A Political Romance, the Journal to Eliza, and selected sermons; an excellent alternative, though lacking A Political Romance, is A Sentimental Journey and Continuation of the Bramine's Journal, with Related Texts, eds. Melvyn New and W. G. Day (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006). Two specialist periodicals contain valuable material, a few examples of which are listed below: the Shandean, a volume devoted annually since 1989 to scholarly research on Sterne, and the semi-annual Scriblerian, which since 1986 has carried reviews and digests of new work plus updates to the Florida annotations.

It was Tristram Shandy that propelled Sterne to fame, and his reputation centres today on the virtuoso combination of erudite, transgressive wit and playfully disrupted textuality for which 'Shandean' remains our shorthand term. In the decades following his death, however, Sterne was celebrated above all for A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, and in Britain, Europe, and North America, editions of this later, shorter work outnumbered reprints of Tristram Shandy well into the nineteenth century. Overarching trends and local contingencies combined to shape this episode in the history of taste. In the first category was an increasingly dominant culture of politeness and sensibility in which Sterne's Rabelaisian side was deplored while his focus on sympathy and benevolence gained prestige; in the second, Sterne's death just weeks after publishing A Sentimental Journey, which irresistibly dramatised the pathos of the work, and the damage done to Tristram Shandy by John Ferriar's allegations of plagiarism in the 1790s, which left the Journey relatively unscathed. Cultural change and individual initiative can both be seen at work in The Beauties of Sterne (1782), an enterprising compilation by the young William Holland, later a fashionable publisher of satirical prints, which exploited the recent collapse of perpetual copyright by reprinting affecting extracts from the novels, 'selected', Holland's subtitle declares, 'for the heart of sensibility'. More than any other, it was this mawkish volume that fixed Sterne's reputation as the genius of the sensibility vogue.

In the 250th anniversary year of Tristram Shandy, and with the tercentenary of his birth impending, Laurence Sterne remains at the heart of our thinking about narrative representation, the traditions of satire, and some of the most intriguing cultural phenomena of the eighteenth century: the sensibility vogue; the rise of celebrity authorship; transformations in the understanding of personal identity and selfhood. Yet Sterne’s formidable achievement as an author was the work of less than a decade. He lived in obscurity as a provincial clergyman for a quarter of a century, and witnessed the suppression of his first sustained work of satire, A Political Romance, by church authorities, but shot to international fame with his comic masterpiece Tristram Shandy, the inaugural volumes of which appeared in the closing weeks of 1759. With four further instalments published over the next seven years (closing with a ninth volume of 1767, at which point Tristram Shandy, as one early reader beautifully put it, ‘could not either be properly said to have been left finished or unfinished’ (CH 236)), Sterne held a central position in the literary culture of his day until his death from consumption in 1768. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, his most popular and influential work in the decades to follow, had appeared just three weeks beforehand. To many readers at the time, the innovative gestures and experimental techniques of Sterne’s writing, alongside its insouciant defiance of established decorum, marked a decisive break with the literary past, or even seemed to usher in what the dominant novelist of the previous generation resentfully called a ‘Shandy-Age’.

It is hard to avoid the teleological fallacy when considering Fielding’s plays: the fallacy, that is, of viewing his theatrical career entirely through the lens of later events, and of allowing these events to limit our sense of its scope, direction, and meaning. Two particular developments have dominated thinking about Fielding’s output as a dramatist, though neither of them fully explains it. The first came with the passage and implementation in June 1737 of the Stage Licensing Act, a stringent piece of antitheatrical legislation that limited to two the number of playhouses authorized to operate in London and subjected new drama to advance censorship by the Lord Chamberlain, especially on political grounds. Fielding was put out of business as a playwright, and theatre was stunted for decades. The second key event was more gradual and protracted: Fielding’s reinvention of himself as a novelist in the 1740s, and the steady elevation of his fiction to a canonical status that seemed to efface the plays or identify them as creative false starts.

For many of Fielding’s contemporaries, and in later accounts of his career, the Licensing Act was an ad hominem measure targeted by a wounded ministry against a single theatrical bugbear. ’the Legislature made a Law, in order merely to curb one private man', as James Harris bluntly put it in 1758. The truth is rather more complex, but Fielding was certainly a prime contributor to ministerial anxieties about the theatre, and the retaliatory clampdown his plays provoked conferred on them a lasting reputation as works defined and dominated by a specific political campaign.

Mr Elliot's bland assertion that ‘rank is rank’ (P, 2:4) makes plain the gulf between Jane Austen's characters and first audience, for whom rank is an intricate but self-evident system of social organisation and signification, and modern readers, for whom the nuances and gradations of the system are often obscure. Social position is of consuming importance in the novels, with individuals and families measuring their relative standings to the finest degree while devising long-term strategies for advancement in status. Yet these concerns are articulated in terms predating the class-based language of politics that grew up among radicals such as Paine, Spence and Thelwall in the 1790s, became consolidated in the work of social theorists such as Robert Owen and David Ricardo in the 1810s and 1820s, and continues to shape modern assumptions. The term ‘class’ was already current by Austen's day – P. J. Corfield cites a writer of 1753 who itemised English society in ‘five Classes; viz. the Nobility, the Gentry, the genteel Trades (all those particularly which require large Capital), the common Trades, and the Peasantry’ – but as an organising concept it was yet to diverge significantly from traditional specifications of rank, station or degree. ‘Rank’ remained the established model, and dictated conventional thought. Where ‘class’ would be measured in terms above all of productivity and income, locating individuals in socio-economic positions attained through material success, ‘rank’ placed primary emphasis on lineage, implying that social status was more or less inalienably conferred by birth and descent. Where ‘class’ brings with it overtones of structural antagonism and conflict, moreover, ‘rank’ suggested stratifications that were harmonious, orderly and stable – ranks being nothing if not serried. For Samuel Johnson, who teased the genteel republican Catherine Macaulay by inviting her servant to dinner (‘She has never liked me since’), social hierarchy was guaranteed by ties of interdependence and mutual advantage, and consisted of ‘fixed, invariable external rules of distinction of rank, which create no jealousy, as they are allowed to be accidental’ (i.e. given).

It is among the paradoxes of the lachrymose fiction that bedewed the eyes of novel readers in the later eighteenth century that the foremost exponents of the sentimental mode were also its most cogent detractors. The prime example is Henry Mackenzie, whose much-reprinted The Man of Feeling (1771), with its successors The Man of the World (1773) and Julia de Roubigné (1777), made him the most fashionable novelist of his day. With its trembling alertness to the minutiae of suffering and sympathy, and the plaintive silences of its fractured narrative form, The Man of Feeling is the exemplary sentimental text. Yet Mackenzie was to retire from novel writing in his early thirties, and in an essay of 1785 he gave systematic development to anxieties about sentimental fiction and its ethical basis that had already quietly haunted his three novels. Surveying the emergent subgenres of fiction, he detects in ‘that species called the Sentimental’ a dangerous subversion of its central claim: that by engaging readers' sympathies with misfortune, it could activate, as well as merely represent, ‘the most exalted benevolence’. Feeling had become an end in itself, narcissistically attentive to nothing more than its own exquisiteness. Deploring the inertia of ‘refined sentimentalists … who open their minds to impressions which never have any effect upon their conduct’, Mackenzie attributes to sentimental fiction a ‘separation of conscience from feeling’ which is, he adds, ‘a depravity of the most pernicious sort’. Even in its foremost examples, it cultivates nothing better than self-admiration, and disengages the will from forms of practical action that only less modish virtues – duty, principle – have the power to impel.