Experimentalism in the Irish Novel, 1750-1770 (Essay‪)‬

When William Chaigneau jokingly accused Henry Fielding of plagiarism and Samuel Richardson of boring his readers, he boldly promoted his own novel, The History of Jack Connor (1752), as a rival to their celebrated fictions. (1) Such confidence is striking in a decade which saw the new literary reviews--The Monthly Review and The Critical Review (established in 1749 and 1756)--endorse Richardson and Fielding as the authors against whom all other fiction-writers would be measured and, inevitably, found wanting. Setting themselves the task of reviewing all publications, the reviews often relegated fiction to their final pages, where it was dismissed in scathing lists, ridiculed, in one notable example, as being 'beneath censure, we want words to express our contempt'. (2) Unsurprisingly, therefore, Ian Watt, when he sketched his famous theory of the 'rise of the novel', simply omitted fictions of the mid-eighteenth century, with the singular, particular exception of Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767). Half a century of scholarship on the eighteenth-century novel has subsequently corrected Watt's many omissions--of female writers, of popular amatory fictions, of sentimental and Gothic fiction--and a number of recent studies have turned their attention to the diverse experimentalism of mid-century fiction in particular. (3) Criminal biographies, travel accounts, 'spy' narratives, sentimental tales, Oriental fictions, utopian voyage narratives, satirical lives and Gothic narratives: such a list suggests the proliferation of novelistic genres in the mid-century. While 'experimentalism' might be cited as the only possible defining feature of eighteenth-century fiction more generally, the experimentalism of mid-century fiction is peculiarly situated: published in the wake of the popular and critical successes of novels by Richardson and Fielding and in advance of the acceptance of the novel as a genre, persuasively dated in recent critical work to the 1770s. (4) This essay thus turns to a range of Irish fiction published in the 1750s and 1760s, to examine the particular significance of experimentalism in the mid-century novel. One of the many ways in which mid-century novelists responded to the challenge of writing in the shadow of Richardson and Fielding was to become self-conscious innovators. At times, such 'innovation' simply consisted of a fresh imitation of the innovations of their predecessors, rather than the creation of genuinely original features. Fielding's self-conscious narrator, who continually addresses his readers as intimate friends, or as resisting readers to be scolded, recurred in countless fictions of the period. Chaigneau, for example, suggests that his reader may skip over various sections of the novel if he pleases, asks him to fill in missing details, gives permission to him to re-read if he has forgotten earlier sections, apologises for trying his patience, and ends his novel with a formal farewell to his reader. Thomas Amory's narrator in The Life of John Buncle, Esq (1756, 1766) frequently addresses his readers as like-minded men, and women, of letters, who might follow his advice concerning books to read, specific editions to buy and ways of travelling in the most remote locations. The spirit-narrator, Chrysal, who gives his name to Charles Johnstone's Chrysah or, The Adventures of a Guinea (1760-65), has to stop his description of a feast for fear of awakening his reader's appetite, and, at one point, turns angrily on the reader, accusing him of ingratitude in his failure to recognise the advantages of British citizenship. (5) And each chapter in the first two volumes of Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1765-66) ends with a comic dialogue between the author and his 'friend', who appears as an importuning, questioning reader of the unfolding novel. (6) Part-imitation, part-invention, the turn to the reader of mid-century fiction is so widespread that it reminds us of