No one who has not dabbled among old books knows how rare have become the strictly popular publications of a non-literary kind which a generation of the lower middle class has read and thrown away.  Eliza Haywood lives in the minds of men solely through one very coarse and cruel allusion to her made by Pope in the Dunciad.  She was never recognised among people of intellectual quality; she ardently desired to belong to literature, but her wish was never seriously gratified, even by her friend Aaron Hill.  Yet she probably numbered more readers, for a year or two, than any other person in the British realm.  She poured forth what she called “little Performances” from a tolerably respectable press; and the wonder is that in these days her abundant writings are so seldom to be met with.  The secret doubtless is that her large public consisted almost wholly of people like Ann Lang.  Eliza was read by servants in the kitchen, by seamstresses, by basket-women, by ’prentices of all sorts, male and female, but mostly the latter.  For girls of this sort there was no other reading of a light kind in 1724.  It was Eliza Haywood or nothing.  The men of the same class read Defoe; but he, with his cynical severity, his absence of all pity for a melting mood, his savagery towards women, was not likely to be preferred by “straggling nymphs.”  The footman might read Roxana, and the hackney-writer sit up after his toil over Moll Flanders; there was much in these romances to interest men.  But what had Ann Lang to do with stories so cold and harsh?  She read Eliza Haywood.

But most of her sisters, of Eliza’s great clientele, did not know how to treat a book.  They read it to tatters, and they threw it away.  It may be news to some readers that these early novels were very cheap.  Ann Lang bought Love in Excess, which is quite a thick volume, for two shillings; and the first volume of Idalia (for Eliza was Ouidaesque even in her titles) only cost her eighteen-pence.  She seems to have been a clean girl.  She did not drop warm lard on the leaves.  She did not tottle up her milk-scores on the bastard-title.  She did not scribble in the margin “Emanuella is a foul wench.”  She did not dog’s-ear her little library, or stain it, or tear it.  I owe it to that rare and fortunate circumstance of her neatness that her beloved books have come into my possession after the passage of so many generations.  It must be recollected that Eliza Haywood lived in the very twilight of English fiction.  Sixteen years were still to pass, in 1724, before the British novel properly began to dawn in Pamela, twenty-five years before it broke in the full splendour of Tom Jones.  Eliza Haywood simply followed where, two generations earlier, the redoubtable Mrs. Aphra Behn had led.  She preserved the old romantic manner, a kind of corruption of the splendid Scudery and Calprenede folly of the middle of the seventeenth century.  All that distinguished her was her vehement exuberance and the emptiness of the field.  Ann Lang was young, and instinctively attracted to the study of the passion of love.  She must read something, and there was nothing but Eliza Haywood for her to read.