They have supplied
posterity with a picturesque view of the life and manners of their
ancestors which could not be acquired from any other source. But while
the fiction of the eighteenth century includes much that is valuable
from a literary and from a historical point of view, it includes also a
great quantity of worthless and injurious writing. By far the larger
number of novels published were of a kind likely to exert an evil
influence on their readers. Their coarseness and licentiousness had a
strong tendency to disseminate the morbid thoughts and unregulated
passions which dictated their production. So general was the feeling
that a work of fiction would probably contain immoral and debasing
views of life, that the novel and the novelist, were both looked upon
askance. "In the republic of letters," said Miss Burney, "there is no
member of such inferior rank, or who is so much disdained by his
brethren of the quill, as the humble novelist; nor is his fate less
hard in the world at large, since, among the whole class of writers
perhaps not one can be named of which the votaries are more numerous
but less respectable." Miss Edgeworth, in the beginning of the present
century, felt it necessary to call her first novel "a moral tale,"
because so much folly, error, and vice are disseminated in books
classed "under the denomination of novels.
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