routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

164 Restoration to Romanticism 1660–1789
their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters
that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the
very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering
from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among
other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their
houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they
were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.
(Samuel Pepys, Diary)
The conflagration was so universal, and the people so astonish’d,
that from the beginning – I know not by what desponding or fate –
they hardly stirr’d to quench it, so that there was nothing heard or
seene but crying out and lamentation, and running about like distracted
creatures without at all attempting to save even their goods.
(John Evelyn, Diary)
Letters gave fiction the basis of the epistolary novel, echoing the newly
established fashion of letter-writing among the middle and upper classes.
The eighteenth century was the great era of letter-writing. The best-known
letters of the century are those written by Lord Chesterfield to his son, from
1737 until the son’s death in 1768. They were not intended for publication,
and only appeared after the writer’s death, in 1773. The letters then became
a kind of handbook of good behaviour, a vivid manual of how society saw
itself, and an indication of how appearance and ‘manners maketh the
man’. The letters were much ridiculed, notably by the critic Dr Samuel
Johnson, who asserted that they ‘teach the morals of a whore and the
manners of a dancing-master’. But they remain a unique insight into mideighteenth-century
upper-class attitudes and life-style.
The writing of history as a contribution to literature can be traced
back to the twelfth century and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia
Regum Britanniae. This drew on earlier documents and on British
and Welsh traditions to affirm a glorious historical past for the
emerging nation of Britain. Later history both affirms the nation’s
heritage and questions its cultural influences.
In the eighteenth century, with the growth of publishing and with
the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment, there was a great demand
for new historical writing. The greatest product of this was The Decline