The English novel of real life had its origin at this time.  Books like De Foe’s Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Journal of the Plague, etc., were tales of incident and adventure rather than novels.  The novel deals primarily with character and with the interaction of characters upon one another, as developed by a regular plot.  The first English novelist, in the modern sense of the word, was Samuel Richardson, a printer, who began authorship in his fiftieth year with his Pamela, 1740, the story of a young servant girl who resisted the seductions of her master, and finally, as the reward of her virtue, became his wife. Clarissa Harlowe, 1748, was the tragical history of a high-spirited young lady who, being driven from her home by her family because she refused to marry the suitor selected for her, fell into the toils of Lovelace, an accomplished rake.  After struggling heroically against every form of artifice and violence, she was at last drugged and ruined.  She died of a broken heart, and Lovelace, borne down by remorse, was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa. Sir Charles Grandison, 1753, was Richardson’s portrait of an ideal fine gentleman, whose stately doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the modern reader a bore and a prig.  All these novels were written in the form of letters passing between the characters, a method which fitted Richardson’s subjective cast of mind.  He knew little of life, but he identified himself intensely with his principal character and produced a strong effect by minute, accumulated touches. Clarissa Harlowe is his masterpiece, though even in that the situation is painfully prolonged, the heroine’s virtue is self-conscious and rhetorical, and there is something almost ludicrously unnatural in the copiousness with which she pours herself out in gushing epistles to her female correspondent at the very moment when she is beset with dangers, persecuted, agonized, and driven nearly mad.  In Richardson’s novels appears, for the first time, that sentimentalism which now began to infect European literature. Pamela was translated into French and German, and fell in with the current of popular feeling which found fullest expression in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise, 1759, and Goethe’s Leiden des Jungen Werther, which set all the world a-weeping in 1774.

Coleridge said that to pass from Richardson’s books to those of Henry Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by stoves.  Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew man, but Fielding knew men.  The latter’s first novel, Joseph Andrews, 1742, was begun as a travesty of Pamela.  The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a young footman in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue suffered a like assault to that made upon Pamela’s by her master.  This reversal of the natural situation was in itself full of laughable possibilities, had the book gone on simply as a burlesque.  But the exuberance of Fielding’s genius led him beyond his original design.  His hero, leaving Lady Booby’s service, goes traveling with good Parson Adams, and is soon engaged in a series of comical and rather boisterous adventures.