[In the following excerpt, first published in 1911 and reprinted in 1963, Morgan characterizes Rowe's work as didactic character sketches similar to those found in popular periodicals.]

Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe (1674–1737) belongs in many respects to the same school as the Duchess of Newcastle, but this well-bred lady would have been unutterably shocked by her plainspoken predecessor. Mrs. Rowe undertook to inculcate principles of right living by means of sentimental piety. In 1728 appeared Friendship in Death in twenty letters from the Dead to the Living, in which the recently departed give their friends sound advice, timely warnings, and glowing accounts of heaven. There is nothing mysterious or even impressive about these ghosts, who are of the world, worldly. In fact, the Letters do not differ essentially from the superior, but less popular, Letters Moral and Entertaining, which appeared in three installments, in 1729, 1731 and 1733. In these epistles, supposedly written to intimate friends, we have some interesting stories told by one of the participants, usually the heroine. There is no differentiation of character, very little subjective emotional analysis, and but slight variety in scenes and episodes. Most prominent among the stock themes is the story of a young woman who having retired to the country to recover from an unhappy passion was led by solitary meditation "to religion," and shortly thereafter, was wooed and wed by a worthy and devout young man, "a match far above her expectations." Then there is the story of the pious country maid who was preferred by the wealthy lord to the court beauties on the score of her "virtue." Also, there is the tale of the rake who was led to repent and to reform by his passion for a pious woman, and was rewarded for his improvement by winning her hand and her wealth. And finally, there occurs the story of the pious girl who fell into a decline after the death of her lover and soon joined him in immortality. The heroines are all sensitive, emotional beings, less sophisticated than Pamela, but not unmindful of the things of this world. In their cult of nature, morbid sensibility, and sentimental piety they are closely akin to the heroines of the Rousseau school and to the Elsie Dinsmore of our own day. The hero is the self-satisfied prig familiarized to us by Richardson and his successors.

The popularity of Mrs. Rowe's prose and verse was very great. Her Friendship in Death reached its third edition in 1733, its fifth in 1738, and was continuously printed until 1816. Her verse History of Joseph, first printed in 1736 was in its fourth edition in 1744, the Devout Exercises of the Heart, edited by her admiring friend Dr. Watts, in 1737, was many times reprinted until 1811. In 1739, appeared a collection of her Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse which was reprinted in 1744, 1750, 1756, 1772, and several times thereafter, while as late as 1796, a still fuller collection was made. There were two French translations of Friendship in Death, one in 1740 and the other in 1753. Moreover, she was most highly esteemed by the literary men of the time. Prior was won by her slim volume of mildly sentimental verse, Poems on Several Occasions, issued in 1696. Dr. Isaac Watts wrote of "her divine poems," and Pope thought so highly of her elegy on her husband that he appended it to the second edition of Eloisa to Abelard (1715). Klopstock and Wieland referred to "die göttliche Rowe," "die himmlische und fromme singer." Finally, Dr. Johnson (Boswell, I, 312), calls her the earliest English writer to apply with success 'the ornaments of romance to religion. The only writer who had made a like endeavour was Robert Boyle in the Martyrdom of St. Theodora and he failed.'

We find the themes and the sentiments of these Letters present, not only in other social treatises but also in the bourgeois tragedy and comedy, and in the many stories and sketches in such periodicals as the Spectator, Tatler, Lover and Tea-Table. In the writings of Steele and Addison we have the most perfect expression of the ideal of the age in its finest conception. There we find the perfect urbanity, the sound morality, the staid composure, and the mild sentimentality (well within the bounds of reason) to which all men aspired. "To instruct and to amuse" was the purpose of these papers, and to that end, the authors preached both directly and indirectly, told illustrative stories, and wrote "characters" typifying the various virtues and vices. The stories, without exception, are obviously didactic, and the authors showed much ingenuity and narrative skill in utilizing Oriental tales, in adapting picaresque stories and popular histories, and in turning to good account letters from pseudo-travellers and sketches from domestic life. In the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, all that is needed is a plot to make a novel of manners, but it is the plot, the series of incidents, which is the essential feature of every narrative—the characters, the setting, the dialogue are important, but nevertheless, subordinate elements. The periodicals of the Spectator type were a most important factor in accelerating the development of the novel of daily life, not so much on the score of the narratives they contained, as because they afforded an opportunity for the publication of the short minor forms. Of the numerous devices which contributed to the novel we have already commented upon the memoir, the letter, and the social tract, but the "character" and the dialogue still call for a few words.

In the words of Professor Cross,⁵ the character-sketch "as conceived by Ben Jonson and Thomas Overbury" (and we may add Joseph Hall) "who had before them a contemporary translation of Theophrastus, was a sketch of some person, real or imaginary, who embodied a virtue or a vice or some idiosyncrasy obnoxious to ridicule. One character was set over against another, and the sentences descriptive of each were placed in the antithesis which the style of Lyly had made fashionable." In other words, it was a device for attacking the "humours" of the age in light satiric spirit, and such it remained during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Shortly thereafter, it shared⁶ with all other literary forms the fate of being utilized by theological and political controversialists. With the Restoration there was a return to lighter vein, and follies and foibles instead of vices and theories became the subject of attack. In the meantime, the expository, antithetical method was adopted by the romance writers in their perfectly serious portraits of individuals, and these in turn, modified the later development of the character-sketch. It was still further modified by being combined with the essay, the letter, and the memoir, by being set in a descriptive or narrative framework, and by being grouped with other "characters."⁷ Practically every type of character-sketch can be found in the Tatler and Spectator; in them can be traced every stage of its development from the short, objective, impersonal "anatomy" of a type, to the sympathetic delineation of a typical individual under many different circumstances. That the novelists learned much from the "characters," there can be not the least doubt. In the narratives of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Haywood, Richardson, Fielding, and their contemporaries, there are numerous formal "characters," and the method has survived in the novels of Scott and Dickens, and indeed has not died out to this day.

The dialogue, although for many years a favorite device in social tracts and news-pamphlets,^7a was not so influential. During the Restoration the Dialogues of Lucian were in high favor and stimulated translations and imitations such as Tom Brown's Dialogues of the Dead and the Living and the Dead.⁸ These in many ways suggest the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, and although they lack entirely the finesse, poetry, and exquisite phrasing of the latter, are by no means uninteresting and sometimes show not only a keen sense of the dramatic possibilities of the situation, and a lively sense of humour, but also a comprehension of the characters. Particularly good are the dialogues of "Dido and Stratonica," "Paracelsus and Molière," "Cortez and Montezuma," and "Mrs. Behn and a Young Actress." Better than any of these are Prior's four Dialogues of the Dead,⁹ of which perhaps, the best is the dialogue between "Mr. John Locke and Seigneur de Montaigne" but the one between "the Vicar of Bray and Sir Thomas Moor" is a close rival. The characterization is admirable, and the style easy, natural, and witty. Swift's graphic Polite Conversation is a series of little scenes that might well have been presented on the stage. Novelists took lessons from such dialogues in handling conversations so that the speeches should be in character, and so that shades of meaning should be conveyed to the reader without editorial explanation.

While these contributory forms were being perfected, considerable progress was being made in modifying the narrative to suit the new social conditions, and to make it conform to the new moral standard. In the old novelle the merchants and their wives often figure, but the entire interest centers on the episode, the participants are fixed types. Moreover, the pseudo-classic canon of dramatic usage, that kings and princes alone were suitable subjects for tragedy, or in other words for serious treatment, was reflected in the contemporary romances by the exclusion, except in comic scenes, of all characters not of royal or at least gentle blood, and by the tendency to make comic all episodes and novels of intrigue in which the bourgeoisie figured. The serious and sympathetic portrayal of the life of the middle class was essential for the perfection of the novel of manners, and for that reason such early works of the kind as the mediocre "histories" of Mrs. Haywood, Mrs. Barker, and Mrs. Aubin deserve special comment….

Notes

…⁵ Cross, Development of the English Novel, p. 24.

⁶ For ampler treatment of this subject consult H. Morley, Character Writing of the Seventeenth Century, Carisbrooke Library, 1891; C. S. Baldwin, "The Relation of the Seventeenth Century Character to the Periodical Essay," Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass. of America, 1903, xviii, and 1904, xix, and "Character Books of the Seventeenth Century in Relation to the Development of the Novel," Western Reserve Bulletin, Oct., 1900, and C. N. Greenough, Studies in the Development of Character-Writing in England, Unpublished Harvard Dissertation, 1904. Dr. Greenough is now revising his dissertation which he hopes to publish within a short time as The Character in the series Types of Literature.

⁷Les Caractères de Théophraste traduits du Grec, avec les Caractères ou les Moeurs de ce siècle, by J. de la Bruyère, Paris, 1688, and translated into English in 1708, was a particularly potent factor.

^7a As in Tutchin's Dialogue between a Dissenter and the Observator concerning the Shortest Way with Dissenters.

⁸ Cf. Modern Novels, vol. xii.

⁹ See Dialogues of the Dead and other Works in Prose and Verse, ed. A. R. Waller, 1907.