This book has attempted to argue that within the novels of the eighteenth century lies an important debate about the relationship between public and private virtue, and the role and nature of each. This debate was both stimulated and fuelled by the absence within eighteenth century society of any single discourse which could be taken to embody contemporary morality. The widespread apprehension that society was losing its social cohesion, and was becoming increasingly fragmented into economic and political interest groups, was accompanied by an anxiety that there was no single genre within which clear and unequivocal moral guidance could be sought. The conflicts between orthodox Christianity, civic humanism and the new economic code gave a particular imperative to the role of the novel as a locus for moral debate, and the form was increasingly recognised as appropriate for the expression of moral values and the formulation of a sense of national identity. Yet while the structure of the novel made it peculiarly suitable for the articulation and analysis of private morality, the maintenance of traditional epic ideas of the function of literature ensured that in the midcentury the fictional portrayal of private virtue was juxtaposed with an ostensible adherence to more public codes of behaviour. It was only with the twin processes of the growing dominance of private morality and the increasing respectability of the novel form, that adherence to public virtue and epic moral and mimetic codes were gradually abandoned.