The Rise of the Novel

The novel, a long work of prose fiction telling the story of imagined characters, is so central to modern reading that it can be hard to remember it is a comparatively recent form. For most of literary history, the dominant forms were poetry and drama, and prose tales tended to deal with heroes, myths and romances rather than the ordinary lives of ordinary people. The novel as we know it, concerned with individuals and their inner experience set against a realistic social background, emerged only a few centuries ago and rose to prominence with remarkable speed.

Several developments helped to make the rise of the novel possible. The spread of printing had gradually reduced the cost of books and increased their availability, so that reading was no longer confined to a small educated elite. At the same time, a growing and increasingly prosperous middle class provided a new body of readers with the leisure and money to buy books for entertainment. Rising levels of literacy, especially among women, expanded this readership further. Together these changes created a market for a new kind of writing aimed at a broad audience.

The novels that emerged to meet this demand differed from earlier prose fiction in important ways. Rather than recounting the fantastic adventures of legendary figures, they told stories about characters who resembled the readers themselves, placed in recognisable everyday settings. They paid close attention to the details of daily life, to money, work, family and social position, and above all to the thoughts and feelings of their central characters. This concern with individual experience and with a convincing picture of society gave the new form its distinctive realism.

Early novels experimented with various ways of telling their stories. Some were written as a series of letters exchanged between characters, a method that allowed readers to follow events through the differing viewpoints and private feelings of those involved. Others adopted the form of a fictional memoir or confession, in which a character appeared to look back and narrate the events of his or her own life. These techniques helped to create the sense of intimacy and psychological depth that readers found so absorbing.

The new form was not universally admired. Some critics and moralists regarded novels with suspicion, fearing that they filled the heads of readers, particularly young and female readers, with unrealistic expectations and idle fantasies. Reading fiction was sometimes condemned as a waste of time or even as a corrupting influence. Such disapproval did little to slow the growth of the form, however, and may even have added to its appeal. Novels continued to be produced and consumed in ever greater numbers.

The way novels reached their readers also shaped how they were written. Many were published not all at once but in instalments, appearing chapter by chapter over a period of weeks or months in magazines or as separate parts. This method of publication encouraged authors to end each instalment at a moment of suspense, so that readers would be eager to buy the next one. It also allowed writers to gauge the reaction of their audience as a story unfolded and, in some cases, to adjust the course of the plot in response.

By the nineteenth century the novel had become the dominant literary form of the age, and some of its practitioners achieved enormous fame and popularity. Novels were widely read and discussed, and successful authors could reach a vast public. The form proved capable of great variety, ranging from tales of romance and adventure to serious explorations of society, morality and the human mind. Writers used the novel to entertain, but also to comment on the injustices and problems of their time, and some works helped to shape public opinion on important questions.

The novel has continued to evolve ever since, adapting to changing tastes, technologies and ideas while retaining its essential character as an extended prose story about imagined lives. Its rise transformed the reading habits of the modern world and gave literature a new way of exploring individual experience in depth. What began as a form regarded by some with distrust has become perhaps the most widely read and influential kind of writing of the past few centuries.