Birth of the British Novel

It's 1749. London is in the grip of an addiction -

gin.

It's dirt cheap

and it's turning the capital into a nest of vice and destruction.

Out of this chaos, the legendary Bow Street Runners,

Britain's first professional police force, were born.

This, one of the most significant social reforms in British history,

was only part of the radical reforming agenda of its founder,

Henry Fielding, a magistrate.

At the same time, Fielding was doing something else

which would have huge social consequences.

He published a novel.

Tom Jones is one of the greatest novels of all time.

Behind the comic story of its hero is a blistering critique of British society,

a moral call to arms.

Henry Fielding was a genius. The novel was a new emergent art form.

Fielding saw in the novel the potential to challenge

and renovate everything that was wrong with society -

and all under the guise of entertainment.

While fiction today may seem a rather cosy business,

back then it was a dangerous and subversive enterprise.

Fielding was one of a handful of trail blazers,

using the novel to challenge the norms of British society.

In just 80 years, writers including Daniel Defoe,

Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne

and Fanny Burney would lay down the basic templates for the novel,

establishing all the literary genres we recognise today -

from horror and chick-lit to the political thriller.

For me, these early novels remain the bedrock of British fiction,

unsurpassed in brilliance and ambition.

I want to uncover the dynamic and radical personalities of their authors

and the places that inspired them,

to find out why they still exert the power and influence they do.

It's a journey that takes us under the skin of 18th Century Britain

as we move from the homes of the good and the great

to the North Yorkshire Moors,

and from Britain's lowliest prisons to its outposts overseas.

Most of all, I want to show how the birth of the British novel

was a revolution, not just for literature but also for society.

The novel as we know it emerged in Britain in the early 18th Century.

The nation, at that time, was in the flush of economic prosperity.

Literacy was on the rise,

thanks to an explosion of print culture - newspapers, pamphlets and magazines.

New laws surrounding censorship and copyright

gave authors greater freedom and commercial opportunity than before.

The ground was set for something remarkable to happen.

But it would take a maverick misfit to make the breakthrough -

and it happened in an unlikely place - the East End of London.

This is the birthplace of the British novel.

And the person who brings it into being

is a man who has a long record as a business practitioner.

He's been a horse dealer, he's been a salt buyer,

he's turned his hand to many other things - tobacco, tiles, hosiery.

He alights on the novel as an extension of his varied career in business.

That man is Daniel Defoe.

And the novel he wrote was Robinson Crusoe.

Published in 1719,

Robinson Crusoe is the account of a castaway, marooned on a desert island.

Crusoe survives against all odds for 28 years

by drawing deep on his own resources,

marking each passing day on his makeshift calendar,

a wooden cross.

What's so brilliant and original about Defoe

is the way he pairs prose back to its bare essentials.

There's nothing florid here. There's no poetry.

What matters to him is one thing and one thing only,

and that's that we believe in this made-up story of his.

And to accomplish this, he feasts on the minute particulars of Crusoe's existence.

There's nothing too mundane, nothing too small.

He absolutely delights in the tiny details of his everyday existence,

like this...

"I saved the skins of all the Creatures that I kill'd,

"I mean four-footed ones,

"and I had hung them up stretch'd out with Sticks in the Sun..."

"The first thing I made of these was a great Cap for my Head

"with the Hair on the Outside to shoot off the rain;

"and this I perform'd so well,

"that after this I made me a Suit of Cloaths wholly of these Skins...

"And after this, I spent a great deal of Time and Pains to make me an Umbrella."

Defoe's literary breakthrough came towards the end of a long and colourful life.

When not hustling for money,

he had taken part in a failed rebellion,

spent time in the stocks and debtors' prison

and worked as a journalist and even as a government spy.

STALLHOLDERS SHOUT FOR TRADE

A pound a bowl, your bananas.

I like to think of Defoe as a visionary.

He detected a new spirit emerging on the streets of London

and saw that commerce could challenge the established social order.

Take away the desert island setting and we're left with a manual for self-sufficiency and personal gain,

one that chimed with the burgeoning merciless, economic values of 18th Century Britain.

And it hit a nerve.

Robinson Crusoe is the first work of fiction that answers

our modern description of a novel.

It's also the first bestseller.

Within four months, it had gone through four editions

and within a year, it had been translated into French, German and Dutch.

Discovering a winning formula, Defoe didn't stop there.

He wrote another novel, exploring new avenues of self-sufficiency.

It's a story set much closer to home.

Moll Flanders, published in 1722, is the tale of a harlot on the make.

Her motto - "With money in the pocket, one is at home anywhere."

She dies a rich woman.

In Moll Flanders, Defoe drags us into a world which propriety usually prevents most of us from entering.

As in Robinson Crusoe, Defoe uses his central character

to confront the key moral and intellectual issues of the age.

Defoe is a pre-enlightenment figure

and whereas by the end of the 18th Century people subscribed to Russo's view

that man is born pure and is then besmirched with sin by life,

Defoe believes that we're born in a state of filth -

and he depicts this in his novel Moll Flanders.

Moll is born in Newgate Prison,

the debtors' prison with which Defoe himself was painfully familiar.

And Moll's life is one of inexorable degeneration -

she ends up again, after her career as a thief,

in Newgate Prison and she's actually applauded there as a master criminal.

And it's here that she experiences something remarkable -

redemption, spiritual regeneration.

This is something new that Defoe is bringing into the novel.

Whereas previously, piety has been instilled through devotional traps,

here we get this grassroots depiction of moral regeneration.

It's something that would have made 18th Century readers believe

that salvation was possible for them too.

Defoe had chanced upon the novel as a money-spinner.

In doing so, he created a radical new art form.

It was a test-bed for provocative, social and political ideas

and could give a voice to society's outsiders.

I'm struck too by the way it delivered its arguments with a real punch

and for one of Defoe's contemporaries, the novel was just that - fighting talk.

Dublin in the early 18th Century -

not technically a colony but a sort of imperial backwater

and the next of our pioneering novelists was less than thrilled to be there.

Jonathan Swift had been a key figure in the inner circle of the Tory government.

After their fall in 1714, he scuttled off as if in exile to Dublin.

This was the city of Swift's birth yet, poignantly,

he describes his existence here as like that of a rat in a hole.

Bitter and frustrated at the collapse of his political career,

he channelled his venom into a stinging rebuttal

of what he saw as the blind optimism of Robinson Crusoe.

Ironically, his pessimism would result in one of the best-loved novels of all time,

Gulliver's Travels.

Swift would have been familiar with this handsome library

in Trinity College, Dublin, where robust now stands in his honour.

This bust presents an idealised image of what Swift was like.

I don't think it does justice to the complexity of his being

but Swift was a person who was extraordinarily conflicted.

There were lots of different things going on within him.

He was a misanthrope but also a moralist.

He was a satirist but also a man of tremendous charity.

One of my favourite stories about Swift

is that he would always carry coins of every available denomination about his person,

so that he would always have exactly the right amount to give to any beggar

that he ran into on the streets of Dublin.

I love how all the contradictions inherent in Swift's personality are expressed in Gulliver's Travels.

On the surface, it's a series of lost at sea adventures with Gulliver as both a giant and a midget -

adventures which have delighted children and adults alike.

But beneath the surface is a pungently satirical illustration

of man's limitations and of the brutality of absolute power.

In the miniature land of Lilliput,

Gulliver calmly extinguishes a fire at the palace by urinating on it.

Gulliver reports that in three minutes, the fire was wholly extinguished

and the rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting,

preserved from destruction.

Pretty provocative visceral imagery to fling in the face of the ruling elite.

I'm looking at a first edition - a first London edition - of Gulliver's Travels.

It's a real goose-bumps moment

because this is such a landmark publication.

It's an incredibly important and influential book.

It's wielded huge cultural influence.

Swift wrote the book between 1721 and 1725

and he knew it had the potential to be hugely provocative,

so when it came to publishing it, he devised an elaborate ruse for doing so

and he did this in collaboration with his friends, Alexander Pope and John Gay,

with whom he'd worked on other satirical projects. They'd been known as the Scriblerians.

What they actually did was they presented the book as the work of Lemuel Gulliver, himself.

This was presented to the publisher Benjamin Motte and he bought this,

hook, line and sinker and he was so excited about the book

that he used five different printers in order to bring it to the public as rapidly as possible.

What this also did was it eliminated the risk of piracy.

Motte cleaned the text up.

Swift, obviously, wasn't consulted.

Motte was afraid of being prosecuted because of the salacious elements,

because of some of the satirical elements, so he made alterations - he changed things in the text.

When we come here, to the Dublin edition, also 1726,

this actually has those bits of the text restored,

so this is an unexpurgated version of the novel.

It's the novel as Swift intended to set it before the public.

And it's an important feature of publishing at this time,

that publishers were very wary of the reaction that books might get

and sometimes felt that they had to cut things down

in order not to get themselves into really quite deep trouble.

This really underscores the idea that the novel is still something new and upstart and dangerous

and those involved in setting it before the public were exposing themselves to tremendous danger.

It was something that laid everyone involved in the enterprise open to all kinds of very serious charges.

Gulliver's Travels sold out in a week.

It remains one of the most reproduced printed works in the history of literature.

We have only to visit one of the nation's quirky miniature villages

to be strikingly reminded of the power Swift's book has over our imaginations.

But for me, the most significant of Gulliver's journeys is the most neglected.

Gulliver visits the lands of the Houyhnhnms, a breed of rational horse,

who at first appeared to be ideal noble creatures, superior to man.

They exist alongside the Yahoos - base and deformed people

who seem to represent humanity at its very worst.

Swift appears to be asking us to choose between the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos

but the truth is that both the kinds of existence that they represent

are, in some ways, deeply flawed.

Swift was absolutely consumed by moral indignation,

by repulsion at humanity in its most shocking colours,

and we see this really coming to the fore.

The books ends with Gulliver finally returning home, deranged by his travels,

unable to bear the proximity of his family, finding comfort only in the company of horses.

Swift used satire to attack flaws in society,

providing inspiration to successive generations of writers.

What do you think are the sort of personal attributes that somebody has that make him or her a satirist?

I think a satirist gets up in the morning and thinks,

"Why cars? Why huts with wheels on the corner?

Why do we go about in this?

Why do people... Why do men wear trousers?

"Why do we have sex lying down?"

I think what Swift brings very, very strongly to satire,

which hadn't been done before, and in a way is still incredibly unsettling for people,

is what you might call the anthropological,

or even martian viewpoint on human society.

And so when you come to Gulliver's Travels,

everybody who read it at the time of publication

would have absolutely recognised exactly what was being satirised at every point.

Of course, it's part of his genius that we still recognise what he's satirising.

Swift was as great in terms of satire

as Shakespeare was in terms of tragedy.

He is the kind of archimendrite of alienation in that way

so, you know, his real fruit,

you know, his real kind of literally heirs,

therefore don't emerge until you have a real period

of comparable alienation from the social process,

so you have to look to the late 19th and 20th Century.

All of those writers, from Edward Bellamy to HG Wells

to - coming into the 20th Century - Orwell to Huxley,

they're all channelling Swift in one way or another.

He's that powerful a writer.

Who isn't indebted to Swift?

Swift ended his days as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin,

embracing the city he once spurned.

Misanthropic yet humane, a depressive with an astounding wit,

Swift to me appears an almost unfathomable character.

He wrote his own epitaph in Latin on this memorial plaque.

When we look at the inscription to Swift,

we see these words "savage indignation".

This was how he was characterised

and we read that in the moment of his death

he's finally going off to somewhere where that savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart.

It's an image of extraordinary violence to be left with at the end of Swift's life,

but Swift's life had had violence inscribed all the way through it -

and it's that violence which is absolutely central to his incredibly original creative vision.

'Today, women are the majority consumers of novels,

'and it was no different back in the 1740s.'

'For a growing readership of middle-class women with time on their hands,

'the novel allowed entry into other people's worlds.'

The novel was intrinsically an intimate genre,

and the potential for exploiting that intimacy

for penetrating human consciousness deeply was about to be exploited.

'Samuel Richardson used the novel as a moral mechanism

'to glorify female virtue and denounce sexual temptation.

'He was a prig, but also a virtuoso.'

'In his novels, he explored the tiniest nuances

'of his characters' thoughts and behaviour.

'His fiction would lay bare the workings of the human mind,

'a full 150 years before Freud.'

'But this master of psychology began his career as a humble printer,

'part of the Stationers' Company in London.'

Richardson is a printer before he's a novelist,

and indeed his becoming a novelist

is an extension of his activities as a printer.

He's a central figure in the print culture of this age

and we see here the documentary evidence of his career as a printer.

So here he's been bound as an apprentice,

and then here seven years later he's been freed from his apprenticeship.

And then we see him taking the livery of the company

before finally, in 1754, ascending to be the master of the company.

And that completes a remarkable passage through the ranks

to reach the very top of the stationer's company

and of print culture of the age.

'Richardson's first novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,

'was published anonymously in 1740.'

'It's a series of letters concerning the attempted seduction of a young maid by her aristocratic master.

'She resists. He falls in love.

'Pamela's unflinching virtue nets her the man and the country estate.

'Richardson championed the epistolary form

'to draw us deep into the minds of his characters

'as they agonise over their own motivations and desires.'

A woman who writes six letters on her wedding day,

one at eight in the morning, one at ten,

one at two in the afternoon, one at 3.30, it is ridiculous.

On the other hand, it is also quite close to the moment, and people appreciated that.

'Richardson became a celebrity,

'surrounded by admiring cultivated ladies.

'So he wrote a follow-up using the same storyline,

'except this time, as though tiring of relentless virtue,

'Richardson allowed the villain to have his way.

'Clarissa, published in 1748, charts the pursuit, rape

'and ultimate death of its heroine,

'who falls thanks to being drugged by the libertine Lovelace.'

Here we have Lovelace writing to his friend Belford about Clarissa.

"The devil indeed, as soon as my angel made her appearance, crept out of my heart.

'But he had left the door open and was no further off than my elbow.

"Night, midnight, is necessary, Belford.

"Surprise, terror, must be necessary to the ultimate trial of this charming creature.

'When I first tackled Clarissa, it overwhelmed me.

'A monster of a novel, its narrative plays out over eight volumes.

'It is still one of the longest novels ever written.

'A million words and fabulously labyrinthine,

'it covers a period of a mere 11 months.'

Clarissa, unlike Pamela, has been greatly admired as an example of the tragic novel.

I don't find it tragic. I find it verbose, cruel, vindictive, sadistic.

There is Clarissa, the innocent Clarissa,

who is tormented all the way through the book

and is finally raped and dies at inordinate length in a very religious mode,

preparing her dying dress instead of her wedding dress.

I now find it more offensive than I did when young.

I can now hardly lift it up, partly because it's very heavy

and my hands grow weak but I actually physically find it repulsive now.

What do you think Richardson's great achievement is in terms of taking the novel forwards?

In Richardson you have the extreme development of

a form of psychological novel which, of course, continued.

I mean, Henry James, you could say, is a direct heir to Richardson.

This eternal kind of going over motive,

going over little movements of the spirit and the body.

'Richardson's morality was of a starchy, black and white sort,

'at odds with the true conditions of his society.

'Outside on the streets it was a very different story.'

18th-century London is a roiling mass of contradictions.

It's a city where on the one hand

you've got people attending cock fights and freak shows,

there's this whole culture of the coffee house and the tavern,

and yet on the other hand there are tremendous philanthropic works going on.

There's a great sense of scientific endeavour.

It's a city where you can get dead drunk for tuppence,

you can buy a dozen French lessons for £1.

So there's this wonderful blend of the high and the low.

'There was one writer who passionately believed

'that if the novel was going to have a moral message,

'it must reflect these startling contrasts.'

'To me, it's impressive that he saw the imperfections of humanity

'as something not to shy away from, but to salute.'

'This was Henry Fielding - Justice of the Peace,

'founder of the Bow Street Runners, a man devoted to social reform.

'He also recognised the role of art and entertainment

'in getting his message across to the populace.

'He wrote satirical plays, but after succumbing to censorship, he turns to the novel.

'In all this, he was steered by his close friend and mentor,

'the painter William Hogarth.'

Jenny, we've got a couple of fantastic Hogarth prints here.

Can you tell me a little bit about them?

Yes. They're connected with Fielding, and Hogarth's friendship with Henry Fielding.

This is Gin Lane.

This is 1751, and this is when both Hogarth and Fielding

had, as it were, grown up. They're no longer wanderers

around Covent Garden and putting on exciting plays.

They're serious men.

Hogarth was working with Fielding at this point

to develop a particular campaign.

Fielding was a Justice of the Peace.

He was a very compassionate JP

and he felt that much of the crime in the slums of London

was due to the sale of this adulterated gin,

and so with Hogarth's help he mounted a campaign

against the Gin Act to actually get gin licensed.

So this is a very didactic print,

and it's much sharper, much clearer, less effusive,

so that people would see it and immediately see its message.

So is there a sense that this is a kind of golden moment in British history

where art and literature are almost in a kind of symbiotic relationship?

That's a lovely idea, and it's absolutely right.

In the 1730s, when Hogarth and Fielding both began,

they're young men, they want to overturn the cultural establishment.

They don't have a manifesto but they really, really have a programme.

And they're very concerned about the future as well.

If you think of Hogarth's works, they're full of children,

like the child falling, just being dropped by her drunken mother,

into the abyss in Gin Lane, and of course, Tom Jones is the foundling.

They criticise the powers that be,

they criticise the hypocrites in society

so that it will be a place where people can grow up in a different way.

'It was Hogarth's collaboration

'in one of the great charitable enterprises of the age

'that inspired Henry Fielding to write Tom Jones.

'The foundling hospital, created in 1739, provided shelter for orphans.

'Leading artists rallied to the cause,

'raising awareness of the plight of Britain's abandoned children.'

This is Hogarth's contribution to this space.

It's a painting of Moses, the original foundling,

being presented to Pharaoh's daughter.

And Hogarth is using art here,

he's appealing to the refined sensibilities of his audience

and he's getting them to overcome their existing perceptions of the foundling.

The foundling is associated with sin and shame.

Hogarth is using art to reverse social prejudice.

'Fielding decided to do his bit

'by making an orphan the hero of his greatest novel.

'Originally called The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling,

'it was published in 1749.

'In the story, the low-born but lovable Tom

'pursues Sophia, the unattainable woman of his dreams,

'leaping into bed with a fair few others on the way.

'Behind all this, there's a resonant message.

'Tom may be a foundling, but he is more generous and humane

'than the high-born characters who surround him.

'I love these illustrations which capture its romping spirit,

'complete with slapstick, comic misunderstandings and bedroom farce.

'The word-of-mouth buzz in the coffee houses was so strong

'that the first edition of 2,000 copies sold out in advance.

'It was sumptuously new and entertaining, with one of the most elaborate plots ever conceived.'

Whenever a new product comes on the market,

you have to tell people how to use it,

and Fielding does this emphatically in Tom Jones

using prefaces and guidelines to steer the readers' attention.

He's very involved, he's very intrusive,

and there's a reason for this that we don't necessarily think of.

Fielding had probably read fewer novels than we have.

The novel was still something new, something provisional.

You have to explain to people how to wend their way through it.

You have to provide them with a kind of helping hand.

'The contrast with Richardson's Clarissa,

'published just the year before, couldn't be greater.'

I think Fielding is unquestionably

the central novelist of the 18th century.

Richardson...is a horrible excrescence in my view,

I mean, pious AND lecherous, and, er...

rotting with fantasies about drugs and rape and ravishment,

whereas there's something marvellous and sane about Fielding.

He gives us a sort of humour that has lasted,

and, you know, we're still doing it,

which is essentially the mock epic -

that he describes low life in a high style.

And this has been... Dickens does it too,

and it's been a tremendously fertile vein in the English novel.

There's a sense, isn't there, at this time that being a novelist is dangerous and precarious?

Fielding crossed the border into taboo territory.

He had a what we would call healthy interest in sex.

No-one had the courage or the freedom to look at it squarely,

and it was two and a half centuries before those inhibitions were made to evaporate.

Fielding is beautifully relaxed about it

and can be read with unaffected pleasure, you know, centuries on.

The first 200 pages of Tom Jones are an idyll for the writer

and for the reader and for the characters.

'In just four decades, the novel had evolved

'to combine both juicy entertainment

'and complex rifts on contemporary philosophy and morality.

'But where else could it go?

'The desire to test its limits would result in what I consider

'the most wonderfully demented masterpiece of the century,

'and one of the most original novels ever written.'

'This is Coxwold, in North Yorkshire.

'It was home to Laurence Sterne,

'the author of Tristram Shandy, published in 1759.'

'I find Tristram Shandy pretty much impossible to describe.

'On the surface, it's about a group of eccentric characters who live at Shandy Hall.

'It's also a carnivalesque philosophical romp,

'stuffed with references to its own creation.'

'The word "shandy" was in Sterne's time

'Yorkshire slang for a crack-brained individual.

'As these contemporary prints of scenes from the books suggest,

'one of its crack-brained obsessions was sex.

'Sterne's book positively throbs with innuendo and sexual imagery.'

This is a first edition of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.

This is a landmark book. It's incredibly innovative and influential.

That influence endures to this day.

So peculiar was his vision for the novel

that he ended up having to publish the first two volumes himself, it was a vanity project,

but it was important for him to do things exactly in this way.

He had this very definite vision of what he wanted to do.

The book is called The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.

We don't get terribly much of either the life or his opinions.

He isn't even born until the fourth of these nine volumes.

In the first volume, one of the most extraordinary things is when a character dies,

there's actually a black page to reflect that.

This is something which when you read the novel for the first time,

really kind of makes you sit up

and you realise, if you haven't already realised by page 73,

that you're in the presence of an extraordinarily audacious

and really quite puckish authorial sensibility.

He actually has a marbled page in it,

which is a very strange thing to find in any novel,

and certainly an 18th-century one.

And when you just chance upon it, it really knocks you sideways.

Another thing Sterne does is he actually produces bizarre squiggles.

At one point he uses those squiggles to try and suggest something of his narrative method.

This incredibly self-reflexive, refractory, strange, digressive,

bumpy narrative journey that he takes the reader on.

They are jokes, but at the same time

they are rather intriguing attempts to provide

a pictorial representation of what it means to be going on the journey of telling a story.

So the reader is being asked to make this huge imaginative investment in Tristram Shandy.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Sterne is bringing to the novel.

The very idea of expectation,

of what a reader might expect to find between the covers of a book,

is thrown into disarray.

'As the book was published anonymously,

'the public had no idea that this raunchy and outrageous novel

'was in fact the work of a man of the cloth.'

'When the vicar Sterne was identified as the author,

'there was outcry, but that didn't stop him

'from continuing to either write or preach.'

In terms of the character - of Sterne, the man - I mean,

this is someone who was a clergyman, wasn't this a big problem for him?

Well, it was a bit of a problem for the church

because he wasn't exactly a jewel in the Episcopal crown.

He's an Anglican clergyman

who is writing a book which is stuffed with bawdy.

Admittedly, the bawdy is there for you to interpret,

so he has the excuse of saying at any time

that if that's the interpretation you as a reader wish to put on,

then that's entirely up to you.

So to some extent he's affecting his position,

but his sermons were so good, I think, that he exonerates himself.

When the first two volumes were written, he was painted by Reynolds,

which certainly altered his perception within society,

and as a result of that he became fashionable.

He said that he writes "not to be fed but to be famous",

so fame was what was driving him.

What do you like most about him?

Well, the fact that he's entertaining and that he's funny

and that he has the ability to be able to switch

from something which is deeply moving and poetic

to something which is completely flip,

and that, I think, requires a great deal of skill.

'Tristram Shandy may have seemed a playful literary frolic,

'yet it also explored the ideas of one of the key enlightenment philosophers, John Locke,

'who defined the self not as a fixed entity,

'but as a mere collection of fleeting memories and impressions.'

'It's just this evanescent quality of experience

'which Tristram Shandy aims to capture,

'and which makes it, I believe,

'one of the most daring and fascinating books ever written.

'It's still the ultimate experimental British novel.'

The experience of reading Tristram Shandy is beautifully frustrating, right?

I mean, he never gets to the point, he's continually interrupting himself

and digressing and digressing from the digression.

But what's really interesting

is that this doesn't result in some kind of chaos.

It's actually a very, very carefully constructed book.

In a way, it kind of anticipates almost three centuries early

what Joyce will do with Ulysses.

In its ellipses and blank pages, it anticipates lots of what Beckett will do,

like with his attempts to make language finally disappear,

in its incredibly kind of...

..before-its-time understanding of our psychic activities,

which is just way off the map of anything that had been proposed then.

This is the mark of a really, really good novel.

It's one of those books to which the theory doesn't yet exist to explain it.

Does that feed into your idea of what a novel should be?

-Yes.

-What is a novel?

HE LAUGHS

A novel is something that contains its own negation, right?

So a novel is not a novel without an anti-novel lodged in it.

Like an oyster, it's not interesting unless it's got a bit of grit in it,

that not-oyster bit that produces the pearl.

In Tristram Shandy, this is precisely the drama,

this is the central drama of that book, is its own undermining.

And I think, in a way, this is what every book should be in one way or another.

Tristram Shandy pushed the boundaries of the novel as far as they would go.

Boundaries which have yet to be breached.

I'm rather seduced by the argument that it's the archetypal novel.

A new literary era would surface in its wake.

With the narrative possibilities of the novel established, it becomes possible for the novel to branch out

and move in new directions and this is when we get genre fiction.

The first genre fiction is the gothic novel and the inventor of the gothic novel is Horace Walpole.

Walpole is the son of the first British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole.

He is socially an insider, but creatively an outsider.

Expected to follow in his father's footsteps,

Walpole didn't quite have the political charisma

needed for the 18th-century House of Commons.

Instead, he created an extraordinary shrine to his own imagination,

here at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham.

Modelled in part on medieval castles, this house was also

the inspiration for Walpole's book The Castle Of Otranto.

The novel tracks the attempts of Manfred, the sinister Lord of Otranto,

to make off with his sickly son's bride.

To me, it's poor on plot, but suffused with a hallucinogenic atmosphere.

Walpole was establishing the ominous idiom of horror fiction.

This was his summer villa and he created here

a kind of gothic dream,

what he called "the castle I am building of my ancestors".

It was gloomy and gothic and in fact, Walpole, for this building,

created a new word, which was "gloomth",

which was the quality he was trying to bring

to this gothic revival building which actually pioneered the gothic revival that we know today.

So the house actually inspired the novel The Castle Of Otranto?

Yes. It was here at Strawberry Hill

that Walpole had a dream in which he dreamt of a gigantic fist in armour

on the uppermost banister of the great staircase,

which of course is this banister here,

and where he had the dream was actually his bedroom,

which is that door up there on the left,

so that in fact this is the birthplace, literally the birthplace, of the gothic novel.

And if you read The Castle Of Otranto carefully, you will in fact find

a number of instances of exact references to the house.

The book is crammed with diabolical pacts,

sinister apparitions and supernatural forces.

Here's a taste.

"Manfred's eyes were fixed on the gigantic sword, but his attention

"was soon diverted by a tempest of wind that rose behind him.

"He turned and beheld the plumes of enchanted helmet,

"agitated in the same extraordinary manner as before."

This was the greatest room in his state apartment here at Strawberry Hill.

This room plays a central role in the story of The Castle Of Otranto

because it's in this room that the evil ruler of the Castle of Otranto, Manfred,

actually proposes to his recently widowed daughter-in-law Isabella.

She is, of course, utterly horrified.

And we know it's set in this room because Walpole writes that they are sitting down on a bench

which Walpole had against the wall here

and that above them was a picture of Manfred's grandfather.

At that instant, Walpole writes, the portrait of his grandfather,

which hung over the bench where they had been sitting,

uttered a deep sigh and heaved its breast.

While they're sitting on the bench, Manfred's grandfather steps out of the picture.

This is the first time this happens in fiction,

and the grandfather steps out as a dreadful warning to Manfred

of what's going to happen, which of course does happen later in the novel,

and the dreadful figure of the grandfather

walks across the gallery floor and then exits through a door

on the right of the gallery, as Walpole says in the book,

which of course is still existing here today.

Manfred finally gets his comeuppance.

He accidentally stabs and kills his own daughter

and is forced to gorge on miserable repentance.

Strawberry Hill was the great project of Walpole's life.

The Castle Of Otranto was only a small part of it, yet it's the novel

that's endured, it's the novel that has exerted a massive influence.

It spawned a huge number of other books in this gothic tradition.

The key writers in that included Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin and Mary Shelley.

Walpole was an aristocratic dilettante, writing from a position of wealth and privilege.

It was precisely this world that would be unmasked and lampooned in the work of Fanny Burney.

The daughter of musician Charles Burney, a child of the emerging middle classes,

Fanny grew up with an excruciating awareness

of her precarious position in a society preoccupied with status.

At the age of just 26, she published Evelina,

the story of a naive country debutante

who must navigate cosmopolitan society before securing her reward,

an advantageous marriage.

Burney wrote the novel in secret, drawing on the world in which she moved.

The action shuttles between the pleasure gardens and theatres of London and spa resorts such as Bath.

Here we are in the pump room at Bath,

which is an incredibly important 18th-century location.

Bath was where fashionable people, particularly fashionable London people, went when they wanted

to get away from it all, except they didn't.

Bath was even more pretentious than London was, even more steeped in fashion.

And in Evelina, Fanny Burney takes us right inside that world.

She gives us an outsider's perspective on it.

Evelina isn't born to this world.

She views it sceptically, she views it doubtfully, and yet there's a tremendous perceptiveness.

The perceptiveness is Evelina's but it's also Burney's.

Burney is a hugely influential figure in terms of creating the comedy of manners,

the comedy of social behaviour, something that ultimately leads to Jane Austin,

but Burney does it exquisitely, observing the foibles, the pretensions,

the affectations of polite society.

Evelina made a deep impression on Jane Austen, and Burney's work is celebrated,

along with that of other early women writers, at Chawton House Library,

once the property of Jane Austen's brother, Edward.

Frances Burney, often known as Fanny, is one of a great array of women writers,

particularly female novelists in the period

from around the 1780s onto the 1810s, were dominant,

they outnumbered the male fiction writers and they earned more.

She worked, didn't she, as her father's copyist

and this posed some problems for her when it came to getting Evelina published?

She wanted to preserve her anonymity with this fictional work.

She had to write the whole thing in a feigned hand.

Then she conducted the negotiations with the bookseller Thomas Lowndes anonymously.

Eventually, when the manuscript was delivered to him, it was delivered

by her brother Charles in disguise, so he wouldn't be known,

so it was all very cloak and dagger stuff, really.

Evelina was a prodigious success and played a role in securing

Burney a job at court as a keeper of the Queen's robes.

But writing remained her first love.

In 1796, she published her third novel, Camilla.

Now, by this stage, her circumstances had entirely changed because she was married.

She needed the money in order to set up a household

with her husband, who was a penniless aristocrat fleeing from the French Revolution, an emigre.

And so this time she wanted to do things properly so she would get

more of the profit and less of it would go to the booksellers.

And so the way to do that was to publish the work by subscription.

And thanks to the position that she'd held for a while at court,

she was able to get some very impressive names on the subscription list.

There are one or two rather eye-catching names.

I noticed one just here.

Absolutely. Yes, this is such an interesting document because here

we see the concrete evidence that Jane Austin was a fan of Frances Burney.

We know that from her writings anyway but it's lovely to have her here among this list of 300 subscribers.

So, clearly, she felt that she wanted to be part of this group of people

who were showing their public support

for Burney as a writer, as an important writer of the period.

The work is also dedicated to the Queen.

So by this stage, her writing celebrity had brought her immense fame, really.

I mean, she had a standing that no other novelist did at the time.

It's really quite remarkable.

Burney wrote four novels in total, but her debut remains the best.

What I love about Evelina is that it has this really modern dimension to it.

It's a book which contains some shocking, physical comedy.

There's a real violence in it. There are some extraordinary incidents.

One, for example, where Evelina's grandmother is toppled into a ditch

as a practical joke and loses her wig in the process.

And then towards the end of the novel, a character is being compared with a monkey

and he gets bitten on the ear by the monkey and he's left with blood cascading down his face.

But both of these episodes pale into insignificance compared

with the occasion when two old ladies are obliged to have a foot race

so that other people can bet on the outcome.

People sometimes say that if you love Jane Austen, you should read Burney

because she provides the same kind of humour and irony,

but with Burney there's an extra level of expressiveness,

of horror, of violence, and that was what made her exciting at the time

and it's certainly part of her enduring appeal.

As the 18th century drew to a close, storm clouds were gathering.

The world Fanny Burney so elegantly mocked was being menaced by a stark new threat.

The French Revolution of 1789 and images of the ensuing terror

transfixed Britain's ruling class.

Could this butchery come to bloody these shores, too?

Reacting in fear, the government clamped down on intellectual freedoms,

rebel voices were swiftly put on trial for treason.

This was the backdrop for the creation of the first political thriller

and what seems to me the last groundbreaking novel of the era.

It was the work of a revolutionary philosopher William Godwin.

In 1793, Godwin's essay, an Enquiry Concerning Political Justice,

introduced the idea of anarchism.

The following year, he published a novel, Caleb Williams.

Godwin takes the ideas that he sets out in Political Justice

and articulates them in a different form in his novel Caleb Williams.

He embraces the idea that the novel enables him to package his ideas in a more accessible fashion

and in the preface to that novel he says that the spirit of government

intrudes itself into every rank of society.

This is one of the big ideas of both Political Justice and Caleb Williams.

The government gets everywhere and that that is tyranny.

In the story, Caleb, the lowborn clerk on Squire Falkland's country estate,

discovers his master's terrible secret.

He is a murderer.

Caleb's curiosity will have appalling consequences.

The book opens mid-action, delivering a narrative hook,

an essential ingredient of all thrillers to come.

"My life has for several years been a theatre of calamity.

"I have been a mark for the vigilance of tyranny and I could not escape."

William Godwin's Caleb Williams depicts the changing nature

of society, the increasing polarisation of the aristocrat and the democrats.

The democrat in the novel is represented by Caleb,

the servant, the aristocrat by his master Ferdinando Falkland.

He really represents the squirearchy.

What's interesting is that Caleb is a product of the Enlightenment.

He's someone who believes in the pursuit of truth,

but he battles incredibly hard to try and persuade others

to embrace this truth and we see here one of the fundamental problems

of the Enlightenment, that it's incredibly difficult to persuade the people who possess power,

the existing hierarchy, to embrace the new knowledge that's become available.

When Falkland realises that Caleb has uncovered his secret,

he turns all his dark power upon him.

It can only end in one place.

This is an intact, authentic 18th-century prison cell.

William Godwin's novel, Caleb Williams, is an extraordinarily powerful picture of incarceration.

Being in prison is one of the things that actually happens to Caleb,

but in a broader sense, the whole novel is like a prison.

It's a novel of persecution and paranoia, it's a novel

about the walls closing in on you,

it's a novel about the oppressive nature of the social hierarchy.

When we see these graffiti on the wall, perhaps that casts our minds back to Robinson Crusoe,

perhaps we can imagine the castaway inscribing similar things.

But over the course of our journey, there's been a transition. The novel has evolved.

Robinson Crusoe is optimistic.

With Caleb Williams, there's a sense of darkness,

of gathering storm clouds, of a society which is increasingly complex and dangerous,

and in a sense this is a mark of the novel's confidence over a period of approximately 80 years.

It's made this transition to a point where it can really embrace

the full spectrum of social and political colour of the age.

As the 18th century drew to its end,

the whole character of Britain underwent a sea change.

The long, gruelling Napoleonic Wars ushered in an age of austerity,

one in which a maverick, freewheeling sensibility was no longer welcome.

The golden age of the British novel had come to a close.

We've been on a long journey and yet, in the 19th century, the novel goes further.

We think of Jane Austen, but there are others who take it further still.

There's more social comment, more political comment and more psychological complexity.

And yet there's a sense that in the 18th century

the novel has an extraordinary dynamism which has never really been recreated.

There's a sense of the templates being laid down,

of a very exciting time when everything's there to play for, when everything's up for grabs.

And that vitality is inscribed on every single page.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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