Of Character and the Larger Scene: A Note on Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel

Recently reading Ian Watt's classic of literary criticism, The Rise of the Novel, one of the book's more compelling aspects seemed to me his attentiveness to the differing emphases novels can have--what I tend to think of as the Henry James-like emphasis on character and the "play of individualities" as the cornerstone of good writing, and an H.G. Wells-like stress on the larger social scene. Where the "highbrows" are concerned, James carried the day.

As Watt makes clear, however, both approaches were strongly represented among those foundational writers of the eighteenth century English novel. Watt identified Samuel Richardson with the stress on character (and the domestic themes to which such writing inclines), Henry Fielding with society. Consequently, while they share comparable status as founders of the English novel (indeed, in that long-ago eighteenth century lit course I had, we read both Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's Tom Jones), it would seem to be that James' victory over Wells' was also Richardson's over Fielding's.