School of Distance Education

School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
57 
novelists were the first storytellers to pretend that their 
stories had never been told before, that they were 
entirely new and unique. Dafoe and Richardson are 
perfect examples.
It has been observed that Old novels are about 
the difference between appearance and reality progress 
from innocence to experience And the propensity of 
human beings to hide their thoughts and feelings and to 
project themselves in a way that is partial and to deceive 
each other. The heroes and heroines of most novels are 
involved in a social world where the achievement of 
their goals requires constant adjustment of their own 
beliefs, and the correct understanding of other people’s. 
This is very clearly illustrated by the first three great 
English novelists, discussed by Ian Watt—Defoe, 
Richardson, and Fielding. The most obvious difference 
between these novelists are their choice of first person 
and the second person narratives. Daniel Defoe is the 
most simplest and the straightforward novelist. All of the 
novels are exactly the same form, Fictitious or 
autobiography or confession. The protagonists, Robinson 
Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and the others, tell their 
life stories in their own words. Samuel Richardson 
enormously extended and refined fiction’s ability to 
represent consciousness when he stumbled on the idea of 
the epistolary novel, first in Pamela and much more 
magnificently in Clarissa. When s story is told through 
letters, the first-person phenomenon of experience is 
reported in a first-person narrative while it is still fresh.
Fielding’s approach was quite different. Though 
he calls his novels “histories”
—The History of Joseph 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
58 
Andrews
,
The History of Tom Jones
—his storytelling 
method is much more traditional, much more overtly 
fictive, than Defoe’s or Richardson’s. They removed all 
trace of themselves from their texts, posing as editors of 
documents written by their characters. Fielding’s 
authorial voice is everywhere in his novels, and indeed is 
the dominant element in them, speaking in the first 
person, describing the characters and their actions in the 
third person, and commenting on them with an 
omniscience that he boldly compares to God’s 
perspective on his creation. Tom Jones teems with 
instances of deception, hypocrisy, and concealed spite, 
of the disparity between people’s private thoughts and 
their outward speech and behavior, but it is the 
omniscient author that tells us this. Ian Watt 
distinguishes between what he calls Fielding’s “realism 
of assessment” and Defoe and Richardson’s “realism of 
presentation.” These were the swings and roundabouts of 
the eighteenth-century novel. It was not possible to 
combine the realism of assessment that belongs to 
thirdperson narration with the realism of presentation 
that comes from first-person narration until novelists 
discovered free indirect style, which allows the narrative 
discourse to move freely back and forth between the 
author’s voice and the character’s voice without 
preserving a clear boundary between them. The first
English novelist to fully exploit its potential was 
Jane Austen. She began writing fiction using the model 
of Richardson’s epistolary novel. Most of her juvenilia 
and early adult experiments, like Love and Friendship 
and Lady Susan, are in that form. These are entertaining, 
but the epistolary form gave no room for Jane Austen to 

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