This considers the relationship between the elevation of the novel into moral respectability and the turn to anti-heroic discourse. The novels of Daniel Defoe (works influenced by rogue narratives) show little interest in representations of feminine virtue of the kind Richardson foregrounds in his influential Pamela. Where Defoe represents martial violence with relatively few reservations, in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, a concern with feminine virtue is accompanied by anti-heroic discourse which entails critical views of war. As novelists, Fielding and Smollett both represent the malign effects of modern war while, in Amelia, Fielding even represents a form of pacifist feeling. The chapter ends with discussion of the anonymous Ephraim Tristram Bates, in which a potentially excellent soldier is defeated by a corrupt system of military patronage, and of Sternes Tristram Shandy, in which martial virtue has become a matter of moral sentiment, destructive of domestic order.

As soon as newspapers, catering to England’s new urbane peoples, began describing common executions, the crowds attending them were seen as indifferent to their moral message. By the middle of the eighteenth century, execution rituals seemed equally problematic. Critics perceived hangings to be so frequent, so large-scale and so brutalizing to an even minimally refined sensibility as to defeat their deterrent purpose. In 1783, London officials sought to redress these problems by devising a new execution ritual, staged immediately outside the prison and courthouse. Within four decades, this quintessentially urban execution ritual had been adopted in almost all other English counties, even as cities on the continent pointedly moved executions outside urban centres. Yet still executions seemed ineffective. Following a particularly intense crisis in the 1780s, England’s traditional ruling elites sought to preserve the “Bloody Code” by reducing the scale of hangings to historically low levels.

The second half of the book turns to the novels of Thackeray, Trollope, and Meredith to demonstrate how stylistic virtues offer an historicized hermeneutic that can change our understanding of texts and Victorian prose forms. It begins with William Makepeace Thackeray because he was considered by many to be the period’s most capable stylist, though few understand this assessment today. The fault lies in part with the traditions of Thackerayan criticism. Obsessed with the quality of his narrative voice, many have focused on Thackeray’s unity (or disunity) of tone, leading to dubious interpretations of key early works. By rethinking these interpretations, which stem from thematically oriented criticism, Chapter 4 shows that there is a difference between Thackeray’s satirical personality and the protean adaptability of his stylistic guises. The consequence for readers of major works like Pendennis or The Newcomes is a hyper-awareness of “grace,” a form of stylistic versatility and detachment that exists in productive tension with the author’s other ethical attitudes.

The first chapter traces the origins of the London police courts and the introduction of courtroom scenes as a literary and journalistic subject in the later eighteenth century. In the absence of an official police force, an orderly, hierarchical courtroom was necessary to sustain magistrates’ public legitimacy and to justify the considerable expansion of the summary court system. In the reformation of summary justice amidst its widening public portrayals, the courtroom’s legal capacity to punish disorder became indelibly linked to its cultural capacity to define public order and the putative threats to it. The first generation of courtroom reporters and the magistrates working in the early decades of the nineteenth century employed the locale to propose distinct visions of moral and social order in the metropolis. They set many of the precedents that would continue to define the courts and their public portrayals in subsequent decades.

This chapter, the second of two chapters on the eighteenth-century novel, focuses on the contractive urge in the novel of the period, and the attempt to picture organically whole bodies in the novel form as it develops from Fielding, Sterne and Richardson to Burney and Goethe. It suggests that this strand in the eighteenth-century novel, in opposition to the expansive drive explored in the previous chapter, is shaped by a desire for what Coleridge theorises as an organic aesthetic, but it argues too that even as the novel of the period is invested in such pictures of organic completion, it opens up forms of distance between mind and body which are the province of the prosthetic imagination.

This chapter argues that eighteenth-century moral philosophers, divines, and literati almost unanimously agreed that theism is necessary to sustain community and social stability. With this correlation in place, atheists were routinely denied the capacity for human sympathy. To make this case, the chapter focuses on two midcentury novels by Sarah Fielding: The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and its sequel, Volume the Last (1753). In these fictions, Fielding employs atheism to explore both the limits of modern selfhood and the limits of literary representation. Alongside eighteenth-century moral philosophers like John Locke, Shaftesbury, and Lord Kames, whom I examine in the chapter’s first section, Fielding casts the atheist as the fundamental incarnation of a completely autonomous self. More to the point, she insists that that self is incapable of integrating successfully into a wider community defined by developing notions of civility, sociability, and fellow feeling.