This passage illustrates with remarkable fidelity the attitude, not only of Smollett, but of the other novelists and the general public of the first half of the eighteenth century, toward vice and crime.  The consciousness of evil and the desire for reformation were prominent features of the time.  But to deter men from wrong-doing, fear was the only recognized agent.  There was absolutely no feeling of philanthropy.  There was no effort to prevent crime through the education or regulation of the lower classes; there was no attempt to reform the criminal when convicted.  The public fear of the criminal classes was expressed in the cruel and ineffective code which punished almost every offense with death.  The corruptions which pervaded the administration of justice made it almost impossible to punish the wealthy and influential.  When Smollett declared that the miserable fate of Count Fathom would deter his reader from similar courses by a fear of similar punishment, when Defoe urged the moral usefulness of “Moll Flanders” and “Roxana,” the two novelists simply expressed the general feeling that the sight of a malefactor hanging on the gallows was the most effective recommendation to virtue.  In the same spirit in which justice exposed the offender in the stocks to public view, the novelist described his careers of vice ending in misery, and Hogarth conducted his Idle Apprentice from stage to stage till Tyburn Hill is reached.  The same moral end is always in view, but the lesson is illustrated by the ugliness of vice, and not by the beauty of virtue.  In our time we have reason to be thankful for a criminal legislation tempered by mercy and philanthropy.  We have attained, too, a standard of taste and of humanity which has banished the degrading exhibitions of public punishments, which has largely done away with coarseness and brutality, and has added much to the happiness of life.  In fiction, the writer who wishes to serve a moral purpose attains his end by the more agreeable method of holding up examples of merit to be imitated, rather than of vice to be shunned.

But when the great novelists of the eighteenth century were writing, the standard of taste was extremely low.  The author knew that he was keeping his reader in bad company, and was supplying his mind with coarse ideas, but he believed that he might do this without offense.  Defoe thought that “Moll Flanders” would not “offend the chastest reader or the modestest hearer”; Richardson, that the prolonged effort to seduce Pamela could be described “without raising a single idea throughout the whole that shall shock the exactest purity”; Fielding, that there was nothing in “Tom Jones” which “could offend the chastest eye in the perusal.”  Nor, as concerned their own time, were they mistaken.  They clearly understood the distinction between coarseness and immorality.  The young women who read “Tom Jones” with enthusiasm were not less moral than the women who now avoid it, they were only less refined.  They did not think vice less reprehensible, but were more accustomed to the sight of it, and therefore less easily offended by its description.