Few architectural traditions were as deeply affected by the Society of Jesus as those of colonial Latin America, particularly South America between the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. Whereas the Jesuits made a profound impact on the architecture of other parts of the world - notably Baroque Italy, central Europe, and Flanders - Jesuit monuments played a paradigmatic role in certain regions of Latin America, frequently inspiring trends that would prevail for decades thanks to structural, stylistic, and decorative innovations. Such were the cuzqueño Baroque, a bold and unique variant of Baroque architecture that arose phoenix-like from the rubble of the 1650 Cuzco earthquake, and the so-called “Mestizo Style,” an extraordinarily creative movement in architectural sculpture that spread rapidly through the southern Andes between the 1660s and the 1820s. In other regions, such as modern-day Paraguay, parts of Argentina, and lowland Bolivia, the Jesuits so dominated the built environment that Jesuit architecture and regional architecture were one and the same. Despite this profound architectural legacy in colonial Latin America, the Jesuits did not promote any single style. In fact, the buildings they constructed from Baja California to Chilean Patagonia were noteworthy for their lack of stylistic unity, the result both of their policy of adaptation to regional and indigenous forms and the unusually international background of Jesuit architects and designers.

Seventy-five years after the approval of the Society of Jesus by Pope Paul III in 1540 and fifty-five years after the death of its founder, Ignatius Loyola, the French Jesuit priests Pierre Biard (1567-1622) and Ennemond Massé (1575-1646) set foot in New France at Port Royal, 22 May 1601. “It is according to our divine calling,” Ignatius Loyola hadwritten, “to travel to various places and to live in any part of the world where there is hope of God's greater service and the help of souls”; and in New France these “Blackrobes,” as they were soon affectionately called, immediately began to reach out to the aboriginal peoples of the vast new land. They went first to a band of Mi'kmaq living nearby whose chief Membertou had been baptized thirteen months earlier by Jessé Fléché, a diocesan priest accompanying a small expedition sponsored by the governor of Acadia. Membertou and his family were the first aboriginal people to receive solemn baptism in New France. Two years later the two Jesuit priests, having been taken prisoner by the English, were returned to France. In the long run, this first Jesuit mission, despite its short duration, would, in its frequent recounting, inspire many vocations among the students of the Jesuit colleges in France. Jesuits returned to New France in 1625, this time to the settlement founded in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain at Quebec, whose population numbered only around seventy. Three priests, Ennemond Massé again, Charles Lalemant (1587-1674), and Jean de Brébeuf (1593-1649), as well as two Jesuit brothers, François Charton (1593-1657) and Gilbert Burel (1585-1661), landed there on 15 June 1625.

In 1855, James Oliver Van de Velde, Jesuit bishop of Natchez, Mississippi, described the educational ministry of the restored Society in America. “Wherever our Fathers have commenced colleges,” he told an English friend, “they have succeeded beyond their expectations.” They thrived even though “in most cases they were foreigners, Belgians and French, scarcely acquainted with the language of the country.” The bishop's boast underscored a defining feature of early Jesuit schooling: its domination by Europeans. Although American- and English-born Jesuits directed Georgetown College (founded 1789) following the Society's reconstitution in 1814, succeeding institutions were forged by émigré clerics. St. Louis University was run by Belgians; French expatriates launched institutions in Alabama, Kentucky, and New York; and Woodstock College, the Order's national seminary in Maryland, was the creation of exiled Neapolitans. German Jesuits, deported by Bismarck's Kulturkampf, founded five schools across the northeast from New York to the Mississippi River. In the Far West, Italians and other immigrant priests operated colleges in Santa Clara, San Francisco, Denver, Spokane, and Seattle. The schools' foreign provenance had far-reaching implications. As the historian Philip Gleason has observed, Catholic institutions, including those run by Jesuits, stood apart socially, organizationally, and ideologically from native academies. They were socially distinct because the majority of teachers and students were newcomers. Organized along European lines by refugee clerics subject to European oversight, they were also administered differently than mainstream colleges.

Pierre Favre (1506-46) was the first of Ignatius' companions to have stayed with him, and hence the second Jesuit. After the Society was founded in 1540, he was sent on mission to Germany, and in 1542 he began to keep a spiritual journal. He begins by recalling the events of his life, and notably his encounter with Ignatius in Paris. Though Pierre helped Ignatius with his studies, the roles of master and pupil were soon reversed: “As time passed he became my master in spiritual things and gave me a method of raising myself to a knowledge of the divine will and of myself. In the end we became one in desire and will and one in a firm resolve to take up that life we lead today - we, the present or future members of this Society of which I am unworthy.” This quotation expresses two important truths about the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. First, the common life of the Society of Jesus is closely connected to the experience of the Exercises. Favre and the other Jesuit companions share a “firm resolve to take up that life we lead today” - a resolve that proceeds from the goal of the Exercises: “a knowledge of the divine will and of myself.” For Ignatius, both the Exercises and the Society were key means through which he realized his life-project of “the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine.” Jesuits became Jesuits through the Exercises - “most of the good people who are today in the Society have left the world to come to it by using this way.” Conversely, the Exercises were seen, right from the beginning, as the Society's own characteristic ministry - “among the means which our Society uses, this one is very proper to her, and God has used it in large measure among countless souls.”

Gothic fictions of the Romantic period are constructed as curious compounds of the unknown and the too well-known. On the one hand, these narratives traded in obscurity and mystery. This trade (and attendant turn away from the novel of modern life) had gotten underway, vexingly enough, at precisely the historical moment when it looked as if an educated populace, weaned from superstition, schooled in the empiricist protocols of the Scientific Revolution, would at last be ready and able to see the world in its true colors. Gothic fictions reacquainted that populace with the perverse pleasures of uncertainty. Thus, for instance, the preference in many of these books for envisioning landscapes in those atmospheric conditions that Ann Radcliffe, virtuoso of picturesque description, evokes: her heroine admires the vista at times when “the progress of twilight, gradually spreading its tints . . ., steal[s] from the eye every minuter feature of the scene,” or when “long billows of vapour” are seen “excluding the country below, and now opening, and partially revealing its features.” The prospect conjured up in such passages discloses only enough for us to know that mystery is almost literally in the air. The Enlightenment assumption that truth is the product of an unmediated encounter between the eye and its object got sidelined when the novel acquired atmosphere (a word that Romantic-period Britons were already learning to use to identify a text's mood-creating tone, and which we continue to apply to texts that give us the chills).

This title could mean fiction that interested the working classes, in the related senses engaged the attention of and addressed the material interests of. It could also mean fiction that represented the working classes, in the overlapping senses depicted and spoke for. There were at least five kinds of fiction circulating during the Romantic period that interested or represented the working classes. There was fiction by and for them, fiction by but not particularly for them, fiction for but rarely by them, fiction by and for the middle classes but read by some working-class people, and fiction depicting the working classes but written by and for the middle classes. There was a little of the first and second, much of the third, some of the fourth, and a good deal of the fifth. Literature being mainly a middle-class cultural institution, the last has received most attention; in fact, some have argued that middle-class fiction, whether or not it represents/depicts the working classes, can nevertheless represent/speak for them. Most have also assumed that fiction read predominantly by the working classes could not represent their interests, being mere commercial entertainment with little artistic or intellectual value, drugging its “consumers” with escapist fantasy, concealing their exploitation from them, and distracting them from their real political interests. Such fiction may, however, have its own artistry, ideology, and politics. Investigating this possibility requires turning from the poetics of middle-class literature to those of working-class print culture, from authorship to reading, from “original” to recycled texts, from history of texts to history of books, from literary criticism as disciplined or “schooled” reading for professional purposes to unschooled but not unskilled reading for everyday life.

In the first chapter of Our Village, her collection of rural sketches (published as a collection 1824-34), Mary Russell Mitford stages her taste for a confined rural locality through three points of divergence from eighteenth-century aesthetic tastes. First, she shifts attention from the finer classes and their country estates to the village and its inhabitants. Second, she esteems residence over travel. And third, she prefers a detailed, specific, and intimate knowledge of a single place to a broad cosmopolitan knowledge of many places, achieved by propertied aristocratic gentlemen through extensive travel, education, and leisure. Mitford gently mocks this cosmopolitan knowledge gained from a whirl “half over Europe” and subscribes instead to a competing model of knowledge espoused by Gilbert White in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789): “Men that undertake only one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with: every kingdom, every province, should have its own monographer.”

The oil of poetry and the water of prose do not mix easily. There have indeed been exceptions: the carnivalesque mode of Menippean satire; the self-designated (and isolated) medieval “chantefable” (tale with inserted poems) Aucassin et Nicolette; the Renaissance pastoral romance and its parody in Don Quixote. And then there is the genre at the center of this chapter, which I shall designate the “Romantic novel.” Adapted from German, this term will include not just novels with poems in them, but also short prose narratives (stories and novellas) that include poems as well as verse narratives with incorporated lyrics. The first “Romantic novel” in this sense is perhaps Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766), with its famous ballad “Edwin and Angelina,” its “Ode on the Death of a Mad Dog,” and its sentimental lyric “When lovely woman stoops to folly”; in English the last major examples are some tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the familiar twin peaks are Ann Radcliffe and Walter Scott (though instead of Radcliffe I shall discuss the slightly earlier instance of Charlotte Smith, a more productive author and a better poet).

Near the middle of Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), the uncanny figure of Melmoth suddenly appears on the streets of seventeenth-century Madrid, prompting fearful but curious Spanish observers to wonder not only why he has not been seized by the Inquisition but if he has a known country of origin. “He is said to be a native of Ireland,” reports one, “- (a country that no one knows, and which the natives are particularly reluctant to dwell in from various causes).” In an important sense the Irish novel emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century as an effort to remedy the strangely persistent situation defined in Maturin's throwaway parenthesis: to make familiar for both strangers and natives an unknown and unhomely land. “It is only with the last thirty years that the Irish have been very successfully represented,” T.H. Lister wrote in 1831 in an essay on “Novels Descriptive of Irish Life” for the Edinburgh Review, going on to explain that earlier representations had concentrated on isolated single figures in primarily English settings. Thus English readers never saw the Irish as a people or Ireland as a native land: “we never saw them grouped - we never trod with them on Irish ground.” Like most of his contemporaries, Lister credits this shift in representation to Maria Edgeworth whose first novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), was widely identified in the period as the inaugural moment of a distinctive Irish line of English-language fiction. It has retained this status ever since. Not that Castle Rackrent was the first novel written either from or on Ireland but that Edgeworth's fictions, along with those of her compatriot Sydney Owenson (better known in the period by her married name of Lady Morgan), mark the emergence in the British literary field of what Terry Eagleton has called “a whole distinctive object known as Ireland,” one that commanded attention in and for itself precisely because of its heightened “problematical” nature.

This Companion offers an introduction to British fiction written between roughly the mid-1760s and the early 1830s. Across Europe, these seventy years encompass a large number of artistic works conceived in Romantic styles: symphonies by Ludwig van Beethoven, picturesque landscape gardens, paintings by Eugène Delacroix, the visionary domestic architecture of Sir John Soane, and the Gothic novel. Yet many novels and tales of these decades are not identifiably Romantic in style or sensibility. On the whole, the era may be characterized less by a unifying artistic sensibility than it is by a spirit of experimentation, and an overall political situation, a civic unrest traceable throughout Europe and North America.

The period was turbulent. The Russians, under Catherine the Great, fought the Ottoman empire (1768-74), while waging a less direct battle against their allies, the Bourbons of France, and fomenting political unrest on a European scale. One country affected was Greece, where Catherine's agents helped start a revolution against Turkish rule; the conflict lasted decades, becoming celebrated for its horrors and heroism. Catherine's domestic troubles included the peasants' revolt led by Pugachev (a Cossack soldier and pretender to the Russian throne, executed in 1775). Meanwhile, as historian Franco Venturi observes, rebellions and insurrections of many different kinds broke out all over Europe, especially “in unexpected and peripheral places.“ Among the countries affected were Corsica, Montenegro, Bohemia, Geneva, Denmark, and Sweden, each in turn seeming to provide another view of a confusing new world in revolt against old forms of social order. The culminating event of these decades of crisis was, of course, the French Revolution (beginning in 1789), with the long, bloody aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, but the French upheaval was not an isolated event; almost everywhere in Europe, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, a major realignment seemed to be under way.

‘Useful books’: The use and abuse of novels in the Romantic age

In his autobiography, the London Corresponding Society activist Francis Place reflected on the ways that “a love for reading, and a desire for information” which had been “implanted” by his “good schoolmaster” encouraged him to embark on a program of self-education which was as relentless as it was serious: “even while I was an apprentice, I always found some time for reading, and I almost always found the means to procure books, useful books, not Novels.” Eager to establish his credentials for political enfranchisement in the service of a broader vision of democratic republicanism in which the status of citizenship rested on the sure ground of individual merit rather than the idle privilege of landed wealth, Place was understandably anxious to demonstrate the intellectual rigor of his reading habits:

No sooner had George Crabbe learned to read than he “devoured without restraint whatever came into his hands, but especially works of fiction - those little stories and ballads about ghosts, witches, and fairies, which were then almost exclusively the literature of youth, and which, whatever else might be thought of them, served, no doubt, to strike out the first sparks of imagination in the mind of many a youthful poet.” The child Samuel Taylor Coleridge became so haunted by chapbook stories that his father burned his chapbooks. John Clare's childhood “stock of learning” was all “gleaned from the Sixpenny Romances of 'Cinderella', 'Little Red Riding Hood', 'Jack and the Bean Stalk' . . . etc and great was the pleasure, pain, or supprise [sic] increased by allowing them authenticity, for I firmly believed every page I read and considerd I possesd [sic] in these the chief learning and literature of the country.” Clare spent all his money on such chapbooks. And since “it is common in villages to pass judgment on a lover of books as a sure indication of laziness,” he was forced to “hide in woods and dingles of thorns in the fields on Sunday” to read them.

Around 1800, London schoolboys at Christ's Hospital would offer to exchange the matron's library book, speed-read it on the way back to school, then recount it to each other in bed at night. Such stories and their miscellaneous chapbook reading seemed to them far more interesting than the Greek and Roman classics they spent their schooldays translating. A generation earlier, precocious children just as happily immersed themselves in classical works of drama, poetry, and historiography.

There is widespread agreement that the Romantic period exists as a meaningful span of time - even if it is defined less by Romanticism per se than by a strong revolutionary trend. By contrast, the fiction written in the Romantic period has only occasionally been treated as an integral subject. It is true that Walter Scott never disappeared from view (even when most people stopped reading him), that Jane Austen had strong admirers from the beginning - including Scott - and that the creature of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein became a general byword and remains one, even or especially for people who don't know the book Frankenstein itself. A few other writers, such as Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Love Peacock, managed to keep readers and reputations. However, that doesn't make quite enough books to constitute a larger entity called “fiction of the Romantic period.” For an era rich both in brilliant experimentation and achieved masterpieces, this one has tended to drop off the map, despite various attempts during the last two centuries to demarcate it.

Such recovery efforts and their often equivocal success will be the focus of this chapter, which looks at four moments - windows of opportunity - when for one reason or another the idea of a body of fiction produced during the Romantic period and conceivable as an overall topic of inquiry and opportunity for reading came into focus. One such moment is early (1785); one, around 1830, provides a sort of instant retrospect; one occurs just after World War I, marking a decisive turn in modern literary studies; one is the present - which is to say, the last few decades, culminating in the publication of Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling's The English Novel: 1770-1829.

When Catherine Morland of Austen's Northanger Abbey explains to her more experienced and rather arch new friend, Henry Tilney, that she is acquainted with the landscape of southern France only through the pages of Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, she hastens to add, “But you never read novels, I dare say?” Although she has herself become deeply absorbed in the reading of novels, and of Gothic novels in particular, Catherine anxiously acknowledges to Henry her awareness that such books “are not clever enough for you - gentlemen read better books.” Henry quickly corrects Catherine's assumption; but Catherine's generalization, deprecating both to women and to novels, is founded not only on an earlier conversational rebuff by the rude John Thorpe but also on a commonplace of eighteenth-century culture: novel-reading is for women. The first literary history of the genre, published in 1785 by a woman novelist, Clara Reeve, reflects this commonplace, presenting its history of “the progress of romance” and of its offspring, the novel, through a debate between a female defender, Euphrasia, and a male opponent, Hortensius, who explains that it is in fact for women's sake that he wishes to ban such books: members of the female sex “are most concerned in my remonstrance for they read more of these books than ours, and consequently are most hurt by them.” From Hortensius's point of view, the phrase “the woman's novel” is redundant, with that redundancy conveying a special suitability and therefore susceptibility and therefore danger.

Hortentius's apprehension of novels' special dangers for female readers was nothing new in 1785: in 1712, Addison and Steele had warned women against consuming “Romances, Chocolate, and the like Inflamers”; in 1766, when James Fordyce declared in his Sermons for Young Women that “we consider the general run of Novels as utterly unfit for you . . . They paint scenes of pleasure and passion altogether improper for you to behold, even with the mind's eye,” he was summarizing a familiar view.

The economic conditions within which works of prose fiction were printed for sale in Great Britain during the Romantic period were set by a legal decision of 1774. In that year, following a struggle that had lasted for decades, the House of Lords, acting as the supreme court for civil cases in Great Britain, confirmed that the practice of perpetual intellectual property, which had been a central feature of the English book industry since around 1500, was unlawful - indeed that it had been unlawful for over sixty years. Since the passing of the Act of Parliament of 1710, commonly known as the Act of Queen Anne, the court determined, the only intellectual property regime permissible under the law of Great Britain was the precise set of statutory provisions laid down in that Act. Queen Anne's Act had formally recognized that an exclusive right to make printed copies of a text for sale - “copyright,” although the word was not used - is an authorial right that comes into being with the act of composition.

The statute gave an author the legal right to assign his or her copyright to a publisher for a period of fourteen years, with provision for a possible further fourteen years if the author were still alive at the end of the first fourteen. Provision had been made for a transitional period after the Act first came fully into force, but after 1774, the maximum length of time during which an intellectual property holder could exercise a monopoly right to sell printed copies was twenty-eight years “and no longer” in all circumstances. Queen Anne's Act applied, with a handful of exceptions (mainly official religious texts whose status was laid down in other legislation), to all texts printed in Great Britain since the arrival of printing.

The historical novel begins as a French genre. Its formative instance, The Princess of Cleves (1678), was the work of Madame de Lafayette, a sophisticated insider at the court of Louis XIV. Cleves is focused on a disastrous moment in French history, when Henry II died from injuries suffered at an anachronistically feudal tournament, thus accelerating the country's path towards the Wars of Religion (1562-98), fought over freedom of religion and the division of power among various cliques. This national crisis is counterpointed with the heroine's dazzling debut at court and the irresolvable love dilemmas that develop out of it. The fictive princess is held up as both exemplary and inimitable: an impossible figure of virtue in a corrupt world collectively headed for disaster.

Until the early nineteenth century, Cleves remained the most famous and widely read example of historical fiction. A generation later, the abbé Prévost developed a second persuasive version of this long-lived but elusive genre. A much less respectable character than Lafayette, Prévost fled to Holland and England in an effort to avoid various theological and financial quandaries. Partly as a result of his exile, he became fascinated with English, Scottish, and Irish history, which provide the main historical mooring for his three great novels of the 1730s: Memoirs and Adventures of a Man of Quality (1728-31), The English Philosopher, or the History of Monsieur Cleveland (1731-9), and The Dean of Killerine (1735-40).