Charles Lamb's Insight Into the Nature of the Novel

PMLA ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-382
Author(s):  
Charles I. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Critical Essay ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Henry Mackenzie ◽  
External Events ◽  
Insight Into

Charles Lamb exhibited the same genial attitude toward books as toward people; he never expected too much of either, and was therefore seldom disappointed. This whimsical tolerance was especially evident in his reactions to prose fiction. He never went at a novel too seriously—with hammer and tongs, as we say; yet he could distinguish between the enduring works and the pulp. Moreover, he professed to like the same qualities in books as in people: individuality, personality, and even eccentricity. In 1821 he disclaimed a taste for the external events in narrative fiction, contrasting his attitude with that of his sister: “Narrative teases me. I have little concern with the progress of events. She must have a story.... The fluctuations of fortune in fiction ... and almost in real life ... have ceased to interest, or to operate but dully upon me. Out of the way humours and opinions—heads with some diverting twist in them—the oddities of authorship please me most” (ii, 75). There is, however, ample evidence that Lamb read widely in prose fiction and enjoyed the works of the great eighteenth-century masters—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. He also was acquainted with the writings of Sterne, Goldsmith, Henry Mackenzie, Robert Paltock, Aleman, Cervantes, Jane and Maria Porter, Godwin, Scott, and many figures of less note, including the Minerva Press offerings. As Lamb himself put it, “Defoe was always my darling” (i, 524). In 1829, at the request of his friend Walter Wilson, Lamb wrote a critical essay on Defoe's secondary novels for Wilson's book Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe.4

Henry Mackenzie and Italian literature

1933 ◽  
Vol CLXIV (mar25) ◽  
pp. 204-205
Author(s):  
Coleman O. Parsons
Keyword(s):  
Italian Literature ◽  
Henry Mackenzie

Developments in Sentimental Fiction

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Sill
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Laurence Sterne ◽  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Oliver Goldsmith ◽  
Sarah Fielding ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
Moral Sensibility ◽  
The Third ◽  
Henry Mackenzie ◽  
The Reformation

The sentimental strain in English fiction, which represents men of feeling and women of sensibility engaging in acts of sympathy and benevolence, became prominent in the 1760s through the novels of Charlotte Lennox, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, and others, building primarily on the work of Samuel Richardson and Henry and Sarah Fielding. The reformation of male manners, the feminization of taste and consumption, the grounding of ethics in human nature rather than rationalism or faith, and the emergence of a theory of moral sensibility all contributed to the popular reception of sentimental fiction. Frances Burney’s first two novels, Evelina and Cecilia, successfully combined sentiment with the comedy of Fielding and the moral sententiousness of Richardson, but in the third, Camilla, Burney felt the pressure of an increasing taste for realism, which eventually lessened the predominance, though it did not entirely eliminate, the sentimental form.

scholarly journals Butcher, Baker, or Candlestick-maker

1928 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 8-11
Keyword(s):  
Vocational Guidance ◽  
Henry Mackenzie ◽  
Effective Development

Vocational guidance, as an effective development, has come only since the beginning of the century. But as long ago as 1795 Henry MacKenzie protested against wasting the years of youth at school “improving talents without having ever discovered them.”Again in 1836, the idea appears in a book entitled “The Panorama of Trades and Professions,” a copy of which has come to the Society, written by Edward Hazen of Philadelphia. The book was “intended for the use of Schools and Families, as well as for miscellaneous readers.” In the preface, Mr. Hazen deplores the fact that “many individuals mistake their appropriate calling, and engage in employments for which they have neither mental nor physical adaptation,…and hence arise, in great measure, the ill success and discontent which so frequently attend the pursuits of men.”

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