SOURCE: "Licensing Pleasure: Literary History and the Novel in Early Modern Britain," in The Columbia History of the British Novel, edited by John Richetti, Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 1-24.

In the following essay, Warner charts the novel's progress from "scandalous" newcomer on the literary landscape to a serious, legitimate form sanctioned by the efforts of such key figures as Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, and Clara Reeve.

The Scandal of Novel Reading

Novels have been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century. Long before it became an issue for debate in literary studies, a quantum leap in the number, variety, and popularity of novels provoked cultural alarm in England during the decades following 1700. The flood of novels on the market, and the pleasures they incited, led many...