Sentimental Novel - History

History

Among the most famous sentimental novels in English are Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67), Sentimental Journey (1768), Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1765-70), Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) and Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800). Continental examples are Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel Julie, or the New Heloise, his autobiography The Confessions (1764-70) and Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). American examples are Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), while the "death of Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)" is also an example of this sensibility. Tobias Smollett tried to imply a darker underside to the "cult of sensibility" in his The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). Another example of this type of novel is Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), wherein the heroine, while naturally good, in part for being country-raised, hones her politeness when, while visiting London, she is educated into propriety. This novel also is the beginning of "romantic comedy", though it is most appropriately labeled a conduct novel and a forerunner of the female Bildungsroman in the English tradition exemplified by later writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot.

While this genre is particularly associated with the second half of the 18th century, it continued in a modified form into the 19th century, especially in the works of Mrs Henry Wood, who is remembered especially for East Lynne (1861). However, the question as to whether Charles Dickens is a sentimental novelist more debatable. Valerie Purton in her recent Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition, sees him continuing aspects of this tradition, and argues that his "sentimental scenes and characters as crucial to the overall power of the novels as his darker or comic figures and scenes", and that "Dombey and Son is Dickens's greatest triumph in the sentimentalist tradition". on the other hand, the Encyclopædia Britannica online comments, that despite "patches of emotional excess", such as the reported death of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843), "Dickens cannot really be termed a sentimental novelist".

Sentimental novels also gave rise to the subgenre of domestic fiction in the early nineteenth century, commonly called conduct novels. The story's hero in domestic fiction is generally set in a domestic world and centers on a woman going through various types of hardship, and who is juxtaposed with either a foolish and passive or a woefully undereducated woman. The contrast between the heroic woman's actions and her foils is meant to draw sympathy to the character's plight and to instruct them about expected conduct of women. The domestic novel uses sentimentalism as a tool to convince readers of the importance of its message.

By the end of the 19th century, sentimental literature faced complaints about the abundance of "cheap sentiment" and its excessive bodily display. Critics, and eventually the public, began to see sentimentalism manifested in society as unhealthy physical symptoms such as nervousness and being overly sensitive, and the genre began declining sharply in popularity.