THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Gay’s poetry has been comparatively neglected. Rural Sports of 1708 and The Shepherd’s Week of 1714 suggest a
writer experimenting both with the bucolic and with a burlesque commentary on Arcadian escapism and Arcadian
moonshine (though he returned to Arcady in a more serious mood in his majority contribution to the libretto of
Handel’s Acis and Galatea of 1718). Gay’s finest achievement in verse, Trivia: or, The Art of Walking the Streets of
London (1716), abandons the pastoral in favour of a novel urban ‘eclogue’, a gentle reversal of the taste for rustic
idylls. The three books of the poem abruptly shift rural conventions to the town and they wittily exploit the disjunction
of a mannered verse and the essential indiscipline of London. They blend a lofty, Latinate solemnity of tone with
detailed topographic observation. Trivia, the pretended goddess of the Highways, serves as a Muse leading the
narrator through familiar mazes and hazards, from back lanes to thoroughfares, from day to night, from the
underworld to the world of fashion, and back again to the raucous, untidy lives of tradesmen and hawkers.
Defoe and the ‘Rise’ of the Novel
One theme in particular echoes through Daniel Defoe’s great topographical account A Tour through the Whole Island
of Great Britain of 1724-6. That theme is of pride in the steady and visible growth of the prosperity and well-being of
the newly united kingdom. When, for example, he arrives in Reading he notes ‘a very large and wealthy town,
handsomely built, the inhabitants rich, and driving a very great trade’; he finds Liverpool ‘one of the wonders of
Britain’
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which still ‘visibly increases both in wealth, people, business and buildings’; Exeter is famous for its being ‘full of
gentry, and good company, and yet full of trade and manufactures’; Leeds, too, is ‘a large, wealthy and populous
town’; and Glasgow, since the Union of Scotland with England and the consequent opening up of the Atlantic trade,
has become ‘the cleanest and beautifullest and best built city in Britain, London excepted’. Defoe’s evident
satisfaction at this evidence of national economic success is not confined to the market towns of the south and the
burgeoning manufacturing cities of the north, though it does tend to emphasize urban activity as opposed to
agricultural enterprise. The view of London from its southern suburbs obliges him to seek for superlatives. London
offers ‘the most glorious sight without exception, that the whole world at present can show, or perhaps could ever
show since the sacking of Rome in the European, and the burning the Temple of Jerusalem in the Asian part of the
world’. As his Tour steadily reveals, Defoe is an informed, scrupulous, and sometimes boastful observer of an
expanding nation, but he is systematically drawn back, both in imagination and in fact, to the magnet of his native
London. London is his reference point and the gauge by which he measures the quality of the trade, the expanding
merchant class, and the new architectural development of the provinces.
The claim made by successive generations of literary historians and critics that Defoe (1660-1725) is the first true
master of the English novel has only limited validity. His prose fiction, produced in his late middle age, sprang from
an experimental involvement in other literary forms, most notably the polemic pamphlet, the biography, the history
and, latterly, the travel-book. His novels included elements of all of these forms. Nor was he the only begetter of a
form which it is now recognized had a long succession of both male and female progenitors. He may, in Robinson
Crusoe (probably his 412th work), have perfected an impression of realism by adapting Puritan self confession
narratives to suit the mode of a fictional moral tract, but he would in no sense have seen that he was pioneering a new
art form. Nor would he necessarily have seen fiction as superior to, or distinct from, his essays in instructive
biography such as his lives of Peter the Great and Duncan Campbell, the deaf and dumb conjuror. Defoe was merely
mastering and exploiting a literary form of various and uncertain origins. He would probably not have recognized the
kinship to his own fiction of Crusoe’s vast and diverse progeny.
That the art of prose fiction developed prodigiously in the years 1720-80, and that its potential as both instructor
and entertainer was readily recognized by a new body of largely middle-class readers, are matters of little debate.
Defoe’s fascinated awareness of the increase in the population and the prosperity of Britain in the years following the
‘Glorious Revolution’ and the Act of Union can be related to his responsiveness to the immediate audience for his
books. As a mercantile and manufacturing class grew, so, concomitantly, did literacy and leisure. The wives and
daughters of tradesmen were rarely employed in any form of business; their marginally better educated sisters in
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the professional classes and the provincial gentry were equally likely to have a good deal of enforced leisure. Those
readers who had been alienated from courtly styles either by an inherited Puritan earnestness or by the simple fact of