Introduction to the English Novel: Up to George Eliot

by Arnold Kettle

An examination of a number of eighteenth century writers

Genres: Literary Criticism

189 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1951

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really good and fabulously old-fashioned sprint from the beginnings of English noveldom to George Eliot. How old-fashioned? Check it out :

History is not just something in a book; history is men’s actions. History is life going on, changing developing. We, too, are characters in history. Men make history.

Okay, unreconstructed language aside, this was written in 1951 before English studies were overtaken by the tsunami of CULTURAL THEORY (aargh, run away, run away) and is therefore entirely jargon-free.

I will give a quick tour of Professor Kettle’s quick 177 page tour.

Early on, he says that in art you can easily separate importance from quality. In novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was immeasurably more important, but was completely inferior to Wuthering Heights. An obvious point but worth making. We can translate this : Fifty Shades of Grey is immeasurably more important than Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce but in terms of quality if Fifty Shades of Grey is a hydrogen atom then Love Me Back is a whole entire galaxy far far away.

The good novel, says the professor, must convey life itself, the very pith and ketchup of the thing as it is lived each day, but must also show us pattern and meaning and significance. David Copperfield for instance, is “almost completely lacking what I mean by pattern”, containing only plot, anecdote, contrivance and kooky weird-ass characters. So DC conveys something of life but tells us very little about life. What is DC about? Who the flook knows. All quite interesting but no pattern.

Your early novelists were either coming from the picaresque, which is like DC, all plot & character and no pattern, or coming from the moral tale like Pilgrim’s Progress, and had names for their characters like Mrs Going to be Violated or Mr Wants to Crush the Poor – this is a good way of telling that you are reading a moral tale, the stupid giveaway names of the characters.

To be cute you can say that the moral tale began with the Bible and the picaresque tale began with journalism.

He says that before the 18th century only Don Quixote and Pilgrim’s Progress can be classed “with certain reservations” as novels.

WHY DID THE NOVEL BEGIN AT ALL?

We think of long prose narratives about stuff which never happened as the basic component of literature but the reading public (tiny as it was) got along without any such thing from the beginning of writing to the 18th century, so this is a question worth asking.

Prof Kettle says that it was a class thing. In the 17th century in England there was the puritan revolution. This was where a new class, the bourgeoisie, couldn’t get the aristocracy to give them a break, so they had to insist, and they cut off the King’s head, which made a very clear point.
Up to then, the popular reading material was romances, which was all about medieval courtly love and that gubbins, the very stuff that Don Quixote was a parody of.

The revolutionary bourgeois (how strange a phrase that is) needed a literature to express their own desires. Realism smashed the suffocating stasis of romance. This new class were infinitely curious about the world (new lands! New sciences!) Their “every need and instinct urged them to expose and undermine feudal standards and sanctities”.

I DON’T LIKE THE LOOK OF THAT ALP

If you want to be a literature professor then hard cheese to you you have to put in the hours reading a lot of stuff normal people would think life is too short for. I would probably say the afterlife is too short for some of these.

I mean to say, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene…. Milton, Paradise Regained…. Noooooooooo

And when it comes to novels, well, Swift and Defoe are fine fellows, but then comes Samuel Richardson :

PAMELA, OR, VIRTUE REWARDED – 600 pages

And

CLARISSA or THE HISTORY OF A YOUNG LADY – 1576 pages

Interestingly, Prof Kettle trashes Pamela and thinks Clarissa is a masterpiece. Well, I’ll never find out if he’s right.

THE 19TH CENTURY – IT CAME AFTER THE 18TH CENTURY AND BEFORE THE 20TH CENTURY

By the time of Jane Austen, the post-revolutionary bourgeois period –

that apparently secure society ruled by a self-consciously enlightened alliance of landed aristocrats and commercial gentlemen

is almost gone. There has been another convulsion – The Industrial Revolution! Choo choo! This revolution erected

a whole complex structure of inhumanity and false feeling that ate into the consciousness of the capitalist world

Yes, capitalism! (Boo, hiss.) Another revolution, bringing another painful lunge forward – well, you have to break those eggs to make the perfect omelette we all live in now.

The new capitalists “hated and feared the implications of any artistic effort of realism and integrity” so that after Jane Austen “the great novels are all novels of revolt”. By which he mostly means protest. But it’s not like he’s saying we might have avoided all of the dark Satanic mills if only we’d have read Karl Marx in 1848.

19th century English novels as protest literature: well, it’s a point of view, and can easily be illustrated by the trajectory of Dickens’ novels, from the sunny pre-industrial Pickwick Papers to the deep pessimism of Dombey and Son and Bleak House. But hmm, aren’t all the great novels from all cultures in all times protest novels too?

Well, I liked old Prof Kettle, he sounds like an old leftie with his pipe and his copy of the Morning Star and his Weetabix with milk which has slightly gone off (in 1948 only 2% of British households had refrigerators). He wrote a Part 2 taking the story up to 1950 so I am looking forward to more of his company.

[A L]

This kind of practical criticism that still works in ideology and the history of forms and delivers Marxist ideas in a concise way is a lost art.

[Stefan · Rating 4 out of 5]

These comments apply to volumes 1 and 2. A Leavisite-Marxist (!) interpretation of the history of the English novel. Lots of insightful observations but the pearls are intermixed with fairly regular disparagements of novels for not reflecting the Communist understanding of reality. Kettle often seems to be saying: "Bravos to this book for understanding the problems of human existence, but minus points for not understanding and conveying the true explanation and solution to these problems [i.e. the communist one]." He often seems to express regrets, more or less of the following sort (for example)"If only Conrad had been a true believer!" The communist view is only expressed indirectly, without direct reference to Marx, Engels, or Lenin.NB There is an interesting article on the web about Arnold Kettle's communism by his son available on the web.