We have observed in the earlier works of fiction of the eighteenth century, together with great coarseness of thought and manners, the reflection of a strong moral and reforming tendency.  As early as the reign of William III, Parliament had requested the king to issue proclamations to justices of the peace, instructing them to put in execution the neglected laws against open licentiousness.[184] In 1698, Collier published his “Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage,” a powerful and effective protest against the depravity of the drama.  At about the same time had been formed the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which energetically attacked the more flagrant forms of crime.  “England, bad as she is,” wrote Defoe in 1706, “is yet a reforming nation; and the work has made more progress from the court even to the street, than, I believe, any nation in the world can parallel in such a time and in such circumstances.”  Toward the middle of the century, these tendencies took effect in the Methodist Revival, a movement destined to exert a profound influence on society.  Accompanying this revival, or resulting from it, were many important reforms.  The corruption of political life gradually diminished.  A new patriotism and unselfishness began to appear in public men.  A spirit of philanthropy arose which corrected some of the worst social abuses.  Under the leadership of the noble John Howard, the prisons, so long the abandoned haunts of squalor, oppression, and misery, were considerably redeemed from their shameful condition.  Beau Nash marked the progress of peaceful and law-abiding habits by formally forbidding the wearing of swords wherever his fashionable authority was recognized.  In the fiction of the latter half of the eighteenth century is illustrated a gradual transition of morals and taste from the unbridled coarseness of the century’s earlier years to the comparative refinement of our own times.

There lived in Sussex about the time of the Methodist revival, a thriving shopkeeper named Thomas Turner.  He had received a good education, and in early life had been a schoolmaster.  On reading “Clarissa” he had exclaimed, what would have gladdened the heart of Richardson:  “Oh, may the Supreme Being give me grace to lead my life in such a manner as my exit may in some measure be like that divine creature’s!” His literary tastes were so pronounced and varied that in the space of six weeks he had read Gray’s “Poems,” Stewart “On the Supreme Being,” the “Whole Duty of Man,” “Paradise Lost and Regained,” “Othello,” the “Universal Magazine,” Thomson’s “Seasons,” Young’s “Night Thoughts,” Tournefort’s “Voyage to the Levant,” and “Perigrine Pickle.”  This scholarly tradesman kept a diary, in which he recorded his thoughts, his studies, and his amusements with a frankness which deserves the thanks of posterity.  Some passages of his diary, in their illustration of the combination of licence, coarseness, and moral earnestness characteristic of the writer’s time may greatly assist us in appreciating the power and influence of the religious revival.[185]