It’s easy to think about the past as one long, undifferentiated stretch of sexual repression for women, during which rich men sexually harrassed the servants, kept mistresses, and picked up prostitutes, all while maintaining their status as upstanding members of the community, and single women who had the bad luck to become pregnant were tossed out into the snow to become prostitutes because what else was left for them and, after all, how else was the supply of prostitutes to be maintained?

That’s not completely off base, but it’s also not completely on base either. Nothing’s ever that simple.

Irrelevant photo, with an important update: I originally said I was reasonably sure this is a speedwell. I was wrong. It’s alkanet. A wildflower, though, growing in what it decided was the right place.

The Georgian Era

Let’s plunk ourselves down in the Georgian era (that’s, oh, say 1714 to 1830), because sexual attitudes were changing, especially among what one essay I read calls, without defining them, the upper classes. Think of those classes as the zone where the aristocracy met the monied upstarts. As attitudes shifted, upper-class men could be open about having mistresses, and upper-class married women could conduct affairs, although if one of them got pregnant decency demanded that she give up her child.

Decency’s a strange old bird and not prone to making logical demands.

Why the change? Several reasons: One, more of the population had moved to cities, where people couldn’t do as good a job of watching (and gossiping about) each other as they had in villages and small towns, so community sexual policing wasn’t as efficient as it had been. Two, the power of both extreme Protestantism and the Church of England were fading. People were sizing their morality to fit themselves rather than having it handed to them, all stitched and starched into predetermined dimensions. And three, printing–the technology that had made the Bible accessible to anyone who could read it–now made male-oriented pornography (or erotica if you’re happier thinking of it that way) available to anyone who could afford it (and, of course, read–this was before photos).

Increasing numbers of people could read.

That sound you hear is history’s cracked laughter.

Printing also made written advice about sex available, in the forms of both sex manuals and anti-masturbation tracts. You can date the culture’s obsessive fear of masturbation to this era.

Men were assumed to have sexual needs. Women were assumed to be, by nature, more virtuous. This edged out the earlier belief that women were naturally more lustful, which somehow coexisted with the belief that men just kind of naturally raped women if they wanted to and could.

Don’t try to make sense of it. Your brain will catch on fire.

So sexuality (at least for the upper class) was changing, but only within limits. Step outside the limits and society wouldn’t be forgiving–at least not if you’d shown the poor judgement to be of the female persuasion. But society had at least drawn a larger circle for people to stay within, and stepping across that new line was not only imaginable but thrilling. So writing about it could be lucrative.

Enter the novel

We could argue about who wrote the first English novel, but since you’re not actually present and I don’t much care, we won’t. Let the experts place their bets on Chaucer or Defoe or–oh, never mind, other people. We’ll just date it to the early eighteenth century (locking Chaucer out; sorry Geoff) and slam the door in case the experts get noisy. We–or to be more accurate, I–are or am more interested in using the novel as a way to drop into eighteenth century English society.

If you want to argue that we should be talking about Britain instead of England, please do. I have trouble finding the borders. They danced back and forth a bit over the centuries, and no matter where they were people flowed back and forth, books flowed back and forth, even kings and politics flowed back and forth, so how would I know where they were at just the badly defined moment when the novel came into existence?

But while you’re putting your arguments together, I’m going to take advantage of the silence and talk about the novel’s position in eighteenth-century England: Decent people looked down their upper-class noses at it.

What was wrong with it? Well, it appealed to–and was often written by–the middle class. And if that wasn’t bad enough, it was read for the most part by (oh, the shame of it) women. On top of which, it was commercial, and that’s another way of saying it was popular, which even today is understood to mean that it couldn’t possibly be any good.

Who understands popular that way? Why, the people who matter, of course, and I’m always in favor of annoying them.

So the novel was a way for silly people to waste their time, and that attitude still hangs in our cultural corners like a cobweb. As late as the 1980s, when a friend of mine taught at a girls’ public school (if you’re not British, understand that public means private; don’t try to make sense of it), the school librarian informed her that one didn’t read novels in the morning. They were (just barely, I’m guessing) acceptable in the afternoon, but the morning was for nonfiction–in other words, for books that improved one’s mind and character.

Ah, but the novel committed worse sins than frivolity and popularity and keeping bad company. Any number of women wrote novels–some even under their own names–and what’s worse they made a success of it.

Well, no wonder people looked down on the form. And by people, of course, I mean people who thought they were better than women and the middle class. In other words, we’re talking about a small but influential number of folks.

The middle class

Here we’d better stop and define the middle class, because it’s easy to find people who’ll tell you how important it’s emergence was, politically, culturally, or economically, but it’s hard to find a solid definition of what they’re talking about. Does being middle class depend on your income, your lifestyle (don’t get me started on what, if anything, lifestyle means), your aspirations, your education, your relationship to the means of production? Or since we’re talking about Britain (or possibly England), your accent or your ancestors?

The answer depends on who you ask, and anything that hard to define should be approached with caution and a supply of dog treats in case it bites. As (at least in part) an American, I’m acutely aware of this, since almost the entire U.S. population considers itself middle class. Dog treats may not be enough.

In Britain of the eighteenth century, the definition was either complicated or clarified, or possibly both, by the existence of a hereditary aristocracy and an impoverished urban and rural working class. Pretty much anyone you couldn’t slot into either of those two groups qualified as middle class.

The problem there is that such a varied collection of people got dumped into the middle class bucket that they didn’t have a whole lot in common. The bucket accumulated everyone from threadbare clerks to mega-industrialists, along with lawyers (great and small) and managers and engineers and the most marginal shopkeepers. But hazy as the definition is, large as the bucket had to be to hold them all, it’s the definition we have. Let’s work with it.

Whatever the middle class was, it grew rapidly in the seventeenth century, both in numbers and in (unevenly distributed) power. A number of people who weren’t part of the aristocracy were rude enough to get rich off the industrial revolution, and the aristocracy resented that. In the logic of the times, it made sense that the aristocracy looked down on them all. The only respectable way to make money was from land—preferably land that had been in your family since the Norman invasion—and the newly rich were making their money from (do forgive me if I use coarse language here) trade.

And then, to further complicate the picture, a group of people who didn’t get rich got solvent (in either absolute or relative terms), and they had the nerve to proliferate.

But despise the middle class as they would, the aristocracy was stuck with them–especially with the brash industrialists who had too much money to dismiss entirely. So much money, in fact, that the aristocracy shamefacedly married some of their kids to industrialists’ kids.

So parts of the middle class lived very comfortably, thanks, while other parts clung as hard as they could to the lower edges of respectability. And many of them, on all parts of the spectrum, wanted a bit of culture, some because it brightened their lives and their brains and others because culture was the kind of thing that people with money were supposed to buy and at least pretend to appreciate.

Put that together with the growing number of people who could read and had a bit of leisure and what happened? The publishing industry invented itself. Booksellers popped up–mostly men but a few women–and they often doubled as publishers.

But this growing middle class audience wasn’t impressed with the books the aristocracy liked. They wanted books that spoke to their experience of the world, and when the novel came along, that’s what it spoke to, so the novel became an important part of the book trade. Some of those novels were what we think of today as the classics, but they were joined by any number of now-forgotten (probably forgettable and often anonymous) novels that writers cranked out to pick up on the trend of the moment.

If you want a modern parallel, think about science fiction or mysteries. They’re popular, so a lot of pretty awful ones get published on the theory that someone’ll buy them–and someone often does. If you want to look down on either genre, you’ll find lots of ways to prove they’re schlock. Some, though, are competent entertainment and others are not only well written but look deeply into our convoluted world. Both forms have opened up ways to consider the world that earlier genres didn’t make possible.

The same thing happened when writers who weren’t straight, white, middle-to-upper class, Christian, and male broke into print. They spoke to new groups of readers, and they brought new life, energy, understanding, and excitement to publishing–along with new readers.

And a predictable number of people despised them for it and blew trumpets announcing the end of literature, or possibly Western civilization and culture in general.

That’s what it was like when the novel brought middle-class voices into the public conversation. A whole new world became visible. The books may look like the same-old same-old now, but in their time they were a quiet revolution.

By the mid-eighteenth century, circulating libraries (as opposed to the private libraries belonging to either institutions or the wealthy) had come along, and by the end of the century you could find them even in small towns. Books were expensive, but you could pay a library subscription and borrow one after another after another. And again, novels made up a healthy portion of the libraries’ stock.

The public library hadn’t been dreamed of yet. If a poor person could read and was hungry for books, they’d be well advised to steal them. And to be careful about how they did it, because the punishments for even small thefts were horrifying.

What’s all this got to do with morality?

Dragging along in the novel’s wake, with their heads dipping below the waves as they went, came the moralists, sputtering disapproval every time they surfaced. The novel’s reader, they reminded anyone who’d listen, was typically a woman. A young woman. An impressionable young woman (sorry—this level of hyperventilated disapproval demands italics; be grateful I haven’t broken into the exclamation points), who could easily be led astray or overstimulated.

No, I’m not sure what they meant by overstimulated either. I suspect it had something to do with sex, which impressionable young women weren’t supposed to know about or be interested in, although they were prone to falling in love inconveniently, but that, of course, was sentimental, not sexual because see the beginning of the sentence, Q.E.D. And if that seems like circular reasoning, it lost none of its power just because it made no sense. It kept a fair number people trapped in its eddy for many a circuit.

Did I mention that the above applied only to decent impressionable young women? If we’re talking about fallen women and women of the lower classes, a whole different set of truisms would have to be taken out of mothballs.

Middle-class women read novels in part because the more respectable they–that’s the women, not the novels–were, the less likely they were to be able to take any action in the world. They couldn’t work. They couldn’t run a business or own anything in their own names. They couldn’t vote. They had no legal claim even on their children. If their husbands had enough money, they couldn’t clean or cook or get muddy in the garden, because lesser mortals would do that for them. Their education had suited them better for decorative roles than for useful ones.

If they read, it was because they could. Sitting around looking decorative can get old, and a book can open a larger world. And it doesn’t leave dirt under your fingernails, so no one has to know what you’ve been up to.

I started out by saying that sexual conventions were changing, and they were, but they were contradictory and still powerful, especially for marriageable young women, whose sexuality had to be controlled. A good marriage depended on the bride being a virgin, or at least passing for one.

Conventions and morals, though, are never a perfect fit for the real world. Young women faced twin perils: men and themselves. Even the best-protected woman might be raped, and forget the trauma that caused, it would ruin her on the marriage market unless it could be covered up. As for herself, even the most carefully brought up young woman might fall in love with an inconvenient man.

This was the novel’s home turf: convention and transgression. The novel needed both. Without rigid conventions, it couldn’t have transgression. Without transgression, it couldn’t have thrills.

Tune in next week . . .

. . . for the next exciting installment, because this is already too long. I’ll post the second half of it, which at long last makes use of a dismal novel I had to read in high school.  What could be more enticing?