Novels.

Novels. 'Novel,' as the name of a thing, came to us with the thing itself from Italy early in the reign of Elizabeth. Boccaccio, from whom Painter took the 'excellent nouvelles' in his Palace of Pleasure, applies 'novella' somewhat indiscriminately, and in his preface speaks of 'novels or fables or parables or stories' as if they meant pretty much the same thing; but in Provençal, and according to the Cento Novelle Antiche, 'noella' or 'novella' seems to have meant originally some new drollery, jest, or bon-mot—something, as Borghini explains, that pleased by its freshness, and the 'noellaire' or 'novellatore' to have been a kind of jester who collected and retailed such things. Most of the Cento Novelle and a large number of Boccaccio's, notably those of the sixth, seventh, and eighth days, are of this sort, and in the collections of Sacchetti and Ser Giovanni the proportion is still greater. In fact the primitive novella was something much more akin to the facetie of Poggio, the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, the stories of the Heptameron, the Hundred Merry Tales, and even their humble relatives, the jests attributed to Joe Miller, than to the long, grave, and often tragic narratives that appeared under the title when it had grown elastic in the 16th century. But if 'novel' has departed from its original signification, 'romance' has wandered still farther. The word originally had nothing whatever to do with any form or species of composition. It was simply the name given in the middle ages to the spoken language of the commonalty, particularly in France and Spain, in contradistinction to the Latin or Letra, the language of the learned classes and the language used in documents and writings of all kinds. In time, however, it came to mean not only the vehicle but also the thing conveyed; anything in Romance was called romance, and naturally the term was extensively applied to the great source of popular recreation, the songs of the minstrels and trouvères, by which it was in the end almost monopolised. Hence the two meanings of 'romance' in Spanish—(1) the vernacular ('en buen Romance' is the precise equivalent of our phrase 'in plain English'); (2) a piece of popular narrative poetry such as we mean by the word 'ballad.' In France the place of the ballad was supplied by much longer and more elaborate compositions, like the chansons de geste, and to these the title of 'romans' was very generally given. But it is noteworthy that, 'romance' or 'romans,' it was applied, in Spain exclusively and in France all but exclusively, to compositions in verse, and that the prose-works which we now call the romances par excellence were not so styled in their own time. The romances of chivalry were called by their authors or editors chronicles, histories, or books; but, except in one edition of Lancelot, never romances; and the still more typical romances, the heroic romances of the 17th century, Polevandre, Cassandre, Pharamond, Ibrahim, and the like, seem to have been indebted to Scarron, but certainly not to their authors, for the name. Neither 'novel' nor 'romance,' in short, has any historical or etymological claim to stand for the latest development of prose fiction; nor is there any warrant for a distinction between the novel and the romance founded on a predominance of the real or the ideal, the ordinary or the extraordinary, the comic or the tragic, a distinction which, in practice, it would be impossible to draw. The names are purely conventional. What we call a novel the French call a roman; if they shared our somewhat contemptuous feeling for the romantic perhaps they would have followed our example, as we perhaps might have followed theirs if, instead of bad news, we talked of hearing bad novels.

For the origin of the thing so called there is no need to search very far. To ask where fiction came from, or what particular race or people were the inventors of it, is very much like asking who invented singing. If we must find a source for it, or fix it upon someone, a child in a corner telling a story to itself, with its playthings for dramatis personæ, or Maggie Tulliver unfolding the tale of the earwig's domestic troubles to her cousin Lucy, will be as near the fountain-head of fiction as we need go. The demand for fiction seems to follow very closely upon the demand for food. 'Tell me a story' is among the earliest expressions of our wants in life, and so far as we can see it has been one from time immemorial, and everywhere and always story-tellers of one sort or another are to be found striving as best they can to comply with the call. It is true that we cannot see very far back, and that our only available sources of information convey a very imperfect idea of story-tellers and story-telling in the remote past. The fragments and specimens that have come to us through tradition and literature can no more give a complete view of the fiction of the age they belong to than the fossils in a cabinet of the fauna and flora of the globe when they were living things. They have been preserved by accident, or by the possession of some property or feature conducive to preservation, while types and species less favoured have left no trace behind them of their existence. To take an example, every one at all acquainted with it must have noticed how strongly the didactic element asserts itself in early eastern fiction. By far the greater number of the specimens that have come down to us through the Panchatantra, Hitopadesa, Bidpai, Lokman, Æsop—for in strictness he must be counted among the Orientals—and other channels are fables with a moral attached. Now it is obvious that these cannot be the earliest type of fiction. Children call for stories, but not (in real life at least) for instruction or improvement until some years have passed over their heads; and what is true of children is true of humanity. But the very earliest productions of the fable family are entirely destitute of this appendage, and are mere stories told for their own sake. Properly they belong to a still earlier type than the fable, the story where animals and inanimate things speak and act like human beings, the immediate descendant, no doubt, of the story the child tells to itself about such objects as take its fancy (see BEAST-FABLES). It is easy to see how the moral came to be added, and how, once added, it became protective. The story furnished with a moral was preserved by and for the sake of its moral when those told for the story's sake alone dropped out of circulation; and in virtue of its moral it found its way into literature as soon as there was a literature to receive it. It is simply an instance of survival of the fittest; not necessarily of the best, but of the best fitted to survive in the struggle for existence.

The case of Æsop above referred to is an illustration of the connection between oriental and European fiction. Some critics maintain that he was an Oriental himself, and identify him with Lokman; but without going so far it may be safely said that the fables bearing his name are mainly of oriental origin, and from some source in common with the Panchatantra. But this is not the only instance. It is significant that, with scarcely an exception, Greek prose fiction came from Asia Minor, or from islands off the coast, and in most instances the Asiatic influence is distinctly perceptible. Of the Milesian tales we know little, but from that little it seems likely that they were compositions somewhat in the nature of the French fabliaux, and like them largely indebted to the eastern storytellers. Iamblichus, the author of the Babylonica, and Heliodorus, the author of the more famous Theagenes and Chariclea, were both Syrians, and clearly drew their inspiration from the same quarter. Achilles Tatius, the follower of Heliodorus, was of Alexandria. Xenophon, who wrote the tale of Abrocomas and Anthia, was of Ephesus. Josaphat and Barlaam was by John of Damascus. Lucian was another Syrian, but he cannot be properly included among those who wrote stories for the story's sake, nor indeed among those distinctly influenced by eastern fiction, any more than the author of the graceful pastoral of Daphnis and Chloe, whoever he may have been, for 'Longus' is probably a mere clerical error. As M. Chassang says, in his Histoire du Roman: 'The taste for the romance passed from the East to Greece;' but it was to the artistic instinct of the Greeks that the novel or romance owed the remarkable development we see in Daphnis and Chloe and Theagenes and Chariclea. The taste passed into Italy also about the same time, but more probably through the medium of the Milesian and Sybarite tales than directly from the East; and it bore fruit in the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter and the Metamorphosis, or Golden Ass, of Apuleius, in each of which the best-known episode is derived from an eastern story. The Cupid and Psyche of Apuleius and Petronius' Widow of Ephesus are found in divers forms, and of the latter there is even a Chinese variant.

The collection of fables, partly from the Panchatantra and Hitopadesa, called Kalila wa Dimna had a great share in the spread of oriental stories in the middle ages throughout western Europe, but chiefly in Spain, where, introduced probably by the Arabs, it helped to furnish material for the Disciplina Clericalis of Pedro Alfonso and the Conde Lucanor of Don Juan Manuel. But even more influential was a work that still circulates as a chap-book in most European countries, The Seven Wise Masters of Rome, which, under a variety of titles, Erastus, Dolopathos, Syntipas, Sindebad Nameh, Sandabar, The Seven Vizirs, and through Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian, may be traced back to Sanskrit. Such collections of fables, apologues, and tales, each in a setting more or less ingenious of its own, and borrowing freely from its predecessors—story-books of a class that has been made familiar by The Thousand and One Nights—were very numerous at the time, and served as a mine of oriental fiction to mediæval Europe. The Gesta Romanorum, which is in fact a European story-book on the oriental model, was largely indebted to this source, but not nearly so much as the fabliaux (properly 'fableaux,' diminutive of 'fables') of the trouvères, who found in the inventions of the eastern story-tellers precisely the sort of tale which their easy verse and esprit gaulois could readily adapt to the taste of their audiences. It was from the fabliaux that the Italian novellieri, from Boccaccio to Bandello, and not only they, but also the compilers of the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles and of the Heptameron, and the gay novel-writers of the 16th century in general, chiefly took their lightest, liveliest, most satirical, and sometimes most licentious tales; and in this way the fiction of the East came in numberless instances to be incorporated in the literature of Europe.

But the trouvères were at the same time laying the foundations of another very different species of novel. There were audiences for whom the fabliaux were too light and trivial, and who demanded a lay of a more serious and earnest character and of deeper interest, and for these they had the chanson de geste, a sort of minor epic, dealing for the most part with the deeds or adventures of some real or legendary hero, and standing in much the same relation to the fabliaux as tragedy, or at least serious drama, to light comedy and farce; and from these chansons de geste in process of time, as reading became a more common accomplishment, and books began to take the place of the lays of the minstrels, came the prose romance of chivalry. Not, of course, that every romance of chivalry had its origin in the verse of a trouvère; there is no evidence, for instance, that the story of Lancelot was ever the subject of a chanson de geste, though there can be little doubt that it furnished a theme for Welsh and Armorican ballads long before Walter Map took it in hand. But unquestionably the early romances of chivalry were as a rule made from earlier metrical romances, as these again, no doubt, from shorter and ruder pieces of verse; the process being, presumably, first legend or tradition, then ballads of some sort embodying incidents of the legend, then the isolated ballads connected, unified, and polished into a chanson de geste by a bard of a higher order, and finally the prose romance, sometimes curtailing, but oftener expanding the chanson. The process is well seen in the romances of the Charlemagne cycle: the connecting-link between the legend and the chanson has, of course, disappeared, but it has left its traces plainly visible in the Chanson de Roland, the germ of the whole; and we find the legends of Gascony and the Ardennes and of Charlemagne's troubles with his foes and vassals first furnishing a subject for the trouvère, and then passing into prose romances like Huon de Bordeaux, Les Quatre fils Aymon, Fierabras, and Ogier le Danois. Nor is it confined to the romances of chivalry proper, of Arthur and the Round Table and Charlemagne and the Peers; for the romances of the borderland between chivalry and faerie, Parthenopea of Blois, The Knight of the Swan, Mélusina (q.v.), and the like, were all apparently sung by the trouvères before they sought readers in prose. See ROMANCES.

The Spanish family of romances of chivalry came into the world long after the age of the trouvères, though it is very likely that Amadis of Gaul, the founder of it, may have made his first appearance in verse. He is mediæval, but all his progeny, which includes not merely the Amadis series, but also the Palmerins and isolated romances, are of modern birth, and a connecting-link between the novel of the middle ages and the novel of our own day. They were the products of a variety of causes—the taste created by the Amadis, the recent invention of printing, which made such reading a comparatively cheap luxury, and, above all, the condition of Spain at the time. M. Chassang, in the book already quoted, has a remark not wholly complimentary to novelists and novel-readers, to the effect that story-telling flourishes most where the people are most idle. The peoples of the East were, and still are, the most prolific of story-tellers, because, living under paternal governments, they have always had a surplus of time upon their hands. The Greeks and Romans did without stories so long as their republics lasted, for his share in the affairs of the state gave each man employment enough for his spare time and thought, and it was not till Greece became subject to Rome and Rome to the emperors that the Greek and Latin romances came into existence. This theory, if we accept it, will account for the passion for romances that raged in Spain in the 16th century, until cured by the drastic remedy of Cervantes. The end of the great national struggle with the Moors, the establishment of the Inquisition, the absorption of all political power and authority by the sovereign, and the general stagnation in public life left the upper and middle classes to a great extent without occupation. Only a few could follow Cortes and Pizarro, and the majority had to resign themselves to inaction, made all the more irksome by the memories of a stirring past, and warm their blood as best they could with the imaginary adventures and sound and fury of the chivalry romances. The chief charge brought by every assailant of these productions, from Pedro Mexia to Cervantes, is that they infected their readers with their own extravagance, and made them think in their style and fancy themselves acting the scenes they read of. But this was the great attraction; they were indulged in, like bhang or opium, for the sake of the pleasant insanity that attended indulgence. Don Quixote's madness, if an extreme, was not a solitary case; and astute romancers, like Feliciano de Silva and Marcos Martinez, knew well that the stronger they made the dose the better they pleased their readers, and on principle kept them well plied with rant, bombast, and absurdity, and fooled them to the top of their bent.

But if Cervantes purged his country of sham chivalry, from the bonfire of Don Quixote's books—to borrow the witty image of M. Demogéot—an unlucky phoenix rose up for the ennui of the 17th century, the heroic romance, Polexandre, Cléopatre, Cassandre, Ibrahim, Clélie, and the rest. Another variety of romance, however, the pastoral, had some share in the genesis of the heroic romance. The Spanish pastorals, supposed by some to have been the descendants of Daphnis and Chloe, were in reality, through the Arcadia of Sannazaro, the offspring of the Renaissance worship of Virgil, of which were born all the pining shepherds and obdurate shepherdesses that haunt the poetry of the 16th century. For a time they disputed in a feeble way the ascendancy of the chivalry romances, and were threatened with the same fate by Cervantes; but they were left to live out their innocent lives in peace and die at last of their own insipidity. To them, or rather to Montemayor's Diana, the first and best of them, we owe one of the patriarchs of the English novel, Sidney's Arcadia, and the French owe Honoré d'Urfé's Astrée, the precursor of the heroic romances. These were based partly on chivalry, partly on pastoral romance; their strength lay in their combination of sentiment and swagger, the latter borrowed from the chivalry romances, the former from the pastorals; and their one merit, perhaps, was that they provoked some excellent satires, such as Boileau's 'Héros de Roman,' Furetière's Roman Bourgeois, Sorel's Berger Extravagant, Scarron's Roman Comique, and Mrs Lennox's Female Quixote.

But a far more important variety of fiction came into existence in Spain in the time, and partly through the influence, of the chivalry romances. These were every day growing wilder and wilder and more and more regardless of all common sense and observance of decent probability, when a little book, called The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, made its appearance. It did not pretend to be a satire or even a protest against the romances in fashion; it merely suggested that a story just as interesting and amusing might be got out of real, everyday life, without magicians, giants, flying dragons, or enchanted palaces, seeing that tastes varied, and that, as Jean Saugrain of Lyons put it in the French translation of 1560, it was not everybody that took delight in reading of heroic deeds. And in fact the Lazarillo is studiously unheroic, and the exact opposite of a romance of chivalry. The hero is a beggar boy, or rather a beggar-man's boy; hunger and thrashings are the dragons and giants he has to encounter; his adventures and achievements are cheating and outwitting his masters; the empire of Trebizond that crowns his career is the office of town-crier of Toledo, and the princess that bestows her hand upon him, the doubtful housekeeper of a sly old priest. It was the first genuine attempt at realism in literature, and for the first time in the history of fiction readers found themselves taking pleasure in the creations of the storyteller, not because they were remote from ordinary experience, but because they were familiar. Finding favour, as a matter of course it had successors. It was followed by the gusto picareresco novels, the tales of Spanish rogue and vagabond life, of which Guzman de Alfarache, Marcos de Obregon, and Quevedo's Vida del Buscon are the best-known examples. They took up with this phase of life partly in deference to the precedent of Lazarillo, partly because it was a life rich in adventures and incidents, but chiefly because it was a phase of life familiar and real to all readers in Spain in the 17th century. And not in Spain alone, apparently, for the truth of the picareque novels seems to have been recognised wherever there were readers in Europe; the best of them were translated almost immediately into French, and very soon into English, Italian, German, and Dutch, and, as repeated editions show, took their place everywhere among the acknowledged purveyors of amusement. In Germany, indeed, they may be said to have laid the foundation of the novel in Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, and in England we need only turn to Defoe for proof of their influence. Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders are picareque novels pure and simple, with their parentage stamped upon their features, and there are marks about Captain Singleton and Roxana that show them to be of the family.

But it was through Le Sage that the picareque novel came to be influential in shaping modern fiction. Like a keen-eyed horticulturist who detects in some wild plant useful properties that may be indefinitely developed by cultivation, or germs that only need the gardener's skill to expand into endless varieties of form and colour, Le Sage saw the capabilities of this rough growth of Spanish humour, and how its asperities might be removed without impairing its virtues. It may be said it was no great discovery to perceive that disreput- able life is not the only one that affords material available for a story of real life, that rascality and roguery are not the only qualities from which amusement may be extracted, and that whatever may be the artistic advantages of a scoundrel, there is on the whole more to be made of a hero who will be accepted by the reader as a man and a brother. But this is only what is said of every discovery as soon as men have come to look upon its consequences as matters of course. Great or small, however, this was Le Sage's discovery, and whether it was of importance or not the modern novel of real life and character will show. It would be difficult, perhaps, to define with precision the extent of Le Sage's share in the formation of this great necessary of 19th-century existence, but of its reality there can be no question. To take only one illustration out of many—in David Copperfield and elsewhere Dickens has left it on record that the favourite stories of his boyhood were Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, a training which shows its fruits in Pickwick and all his early works; but if Gil Blas was not in the same way Smollett's primer in fiction we have his own word for it that it was the model he set before him when he undertook to 'point out the follies of ordinary life.' This much, at least, cannot be disputed, that he was one of the great masters of the art of story-telling, the first to show an artist's knowledge of the value of details and the right use of realism, and the first to make clear the distinction between the novel and prose fiction in general. Pantagruel and Gulliver's Travels are not novels, not because the ordinary characteristics of the novel are wanting, but because Rabelais and Swift have merely assumed the disguise of a storyteller for the sake of gaining access to quarters otherwise inaccessible, precisely as Burton put on a pilgrim's dress in order to get into Mecca. In Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe there may be just as little of the conventional features of the novel, but there is no disguise; they take their places among the novels unchallenged, while the title of Tristram Shandy must remain at least questionable, for though it may be called 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,' it is in reality 'the freaks and grimaces of the Rev. Laurence Sterne.' Le Sage's theory, so far as we may infer one from his practice, seems to have been that to tell a story is the novelist's business, and to keep to it with singleness of purpose his duty as an artist.

In the foregoing necessarily brief outline of the history of the novel it will be seen that in its growth there has been at work a process very much like that which regulates other growths. One form springs from another, supplants it through being better adapted to surrounding circumstances, and lasts just so long as the adaptation lasts. In the novel, too, as in other cases, forms that have been in this way pushed aside have a tendency to reappear if circumstances favour them. The long-winded sentimental novels of the 18th century were only a reversion of the romances de longue haleine of the 17th in a soil that happened to suit them; and in the novels of Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Mrs Radcliffe the spirit of the later romances of chivalry asserted itself, just as the spirit of the older and truer chivalry romance found expression in Scott. Quentin Durward is a genuine romance of chivalry, modified only by genius and modern influences. In its extraordinary powers of multiplication and variation also the latter-day novel seems to be subject to natural law. The varieties of wild animals and plants are few, and seldom strongly marked; but no sooner does man for his pleasure or comfort appropriate any living thing, dog or pig, rose or cabbage, than it acquires a variability and fertility apparently limitless. Thus it has fared with the novel ever since Le Sage undertook the domestication of an adaptable species. Having become not merely a source of amusement, but a necessary adjunct of modern life, it now rivals the rabbit in fecundity, and runs into varieties more widely different than greyhound, bulldog, and toy-terrier. This luxuriance of growth, however, cannot be regarded with unmixed satisfaction. It would be no small evil if the novel from an honoured branch of literature were to degenerate into a manufacture, and yet a certain tendency that way cannot be denied. Another, due to the same cause, is the tendency of the modern novel to usurp functions that do not properly belong to it. In some cases, to be sure, the pretence of lofty motives is sufficiently transparent. It is no more true that excursions into the slums of realism and naturalism have for their object the scientific study of social evils than that exhibitions of fasting men are got up in the interests of science. But the novel that is a preaching, a treatise, a dissertation in disguise, though less disingenuous and disagreeable, is no less an abuse. The prodigious development of novel literature in recent times seems to have led to overweening pretensions. We are sometimes told that the novelist has become the hierophant of the age, the teacher who holds the keys of philosophy, science, all human knowledge. But fine words will not alter facts. The raison d'être of the novelist is the old craving for a story, and those of the craft who have most frankly recognised this have always been those most beloved in their own generation and most honoured by posterity. Scott, the master of them all, claimed to be no more than a story-teller, and was proud of the title.

The best histories of the novel are Dunlop's History of Prose Fiction (1814; 3d ed. 1845; German trans., with large additions, by F. Liebrecht, 1851; a completely new edition by H. Wilson, 1888); O. L. B. Wolff's Allgemeine Geschichte des Romans (Jena, 1850); and Alexis Chassang's Histoire du Roman, et de ses Rapports avec l'Histoire (Paris, 1862). To these may be added D. Masson's British Novelists and their Styles (Camb. 1859); W. N. Senior, Essays on Fiction (1864); Landau's Beiträge zur Geschichte der Italianischen Novelle (Wien, 1875); and Quellen des Dekameron (2d ed. Stuttgart, 1884); Professor Erwin Rohde, Der Griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer (Leip. 1876); F. Robertag's Geschichte des Romans in Deutschland (Breslau, 1876-79); B. Tuckerman, History of Prose Fiction (1882); H. Courthope Bowen's Descriptive Catalogue of Historical Novels and Tales (1882); S. Lanier, The English Novel and Principles of its Development (New York, 1883); Ten Brink, Causieren over moderne Romans (1885); Vte. E. M. De Vogüé, Le Roman Russe (2d ed. 1886); André Le Breton, Le Roman au Dix-septième Siècle (Paris, 1890); Huet's Traité de l'Origine des Romans; Lenglet du Fresnoy's De l'Usage des Romans, and Bibliothèque des Romans; and Bougeant's amusing satire on them, the Voyage du Prince Fan-Férédin dans la Romancie; M. Jussierand's The English Novel in the Time of Elizabeth; Quaritch's Catalogue of Romances of Chivalry, &c.; and for examples of fiction in its primitive form, Miss Frere's Old Deccan Days and Miss Stokes's Indian Fairy Tales.

The more important novelists of foreign lands are discussed in connection with the literature to which they belong in the sections on literature under the several heads, FRANCE, GERMANY, ITALY, SPAIN, NORWAY, RUSSIA, &c., and are also dealt with in separate articles in this work. It may, however, be convenient to append here a list of the more eminent British and American novelists, referring for details and criticisms to the articles on each of them.

John Lyly (1553-1606).
Sir P. Sidney (1554-86).
Thomas Lodge (1556-1625).
Robert Greene (c. 1560-92).
Thomas Nash (1567-1601).
Aphra Behn (1640-89).

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731).
Samuel Richardson (1689-1761).
Henry Brooke (1703-83).
Henry Fielding (1707-54).
Laurence Sterne (1713-69).
Sarah Fielding (1714-68).

Horace Walpole (1717-97).
Tobias Smollett (1721-71).
Clara Reeve (1725-1803).
Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74).
Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831).
Madame D'Arblay (1752-1840).
Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821).
W. Godwin (1756-1836).
W. Beckford (1759-1844).
Mrs Radcliffe (1764-1823).
Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849).
Walter Scott (1771-1832).
Jane Austen (1775-1817).
M. G. Lewis (1775-1818).
Jane Porter (1776-1850).
John Galt (1779-1839).
James Morier (1780-1849).
Miss Ferrier (1782-1854).
T. L. Peacock (1785-1866).
T. Hook (1788-1841).
Captain Marryat (1792-1848).
J. G. Lockhart (1794-1854).
Mary W. Shelley (1797-1851).
G. P. R. James (1801-60).
Miss Martineau (1802-76).
Douglas Jerrold (1803-57).
Lord Lytton (1803-73).
Beaconsfield (1804-81).
W. H. Ainsworth (1805-82).
Charles Lever (1806-72).
Samuel Warren (1807-77).
Mrs Gaskell (1810-65).
Thackeray (1811-63).
Dickens (1812-70).
Charles Reade (1814-84).
Anthony Trollope (1815-82).
Charlotte Brontë (1816-55).
Emily Brontë (1818-48).
Charles Kingsley (1819-75).
'George Eliot' (1819-80).
Anne Brontë (1820-49).
Mrs Henry Wood (1820-87).
Whyte Melville (1821-78).
Mrs Lynn Linton (1822-98).
Miss Yonge (b. 1823).
Julia Kavanagh (1824-77).
Wilkie Collins (1824-89).
George Macdonald (b. 1824).
Annie Keary (1825-79).
R. D. Blackmore (1825-1900).
Mrs Craik (1826-87).
George Meredith (b. 1828).

Mrs Oliphant (1828-97).
Laurence Oliphant (1829-90).
Henry Kingsley (1830-76).
Justin M'Carthy (b. 1830).
James Payn (1830-98).
J. H. Shorthouse (b. 1834).
Miss Braddon (b. 1837).
Rhoda Broughton (b. 1837).
Miss Thackeray (b. 1837).
Sir Walter Besant (b. 1838).
Thomas Hardy (b. 1840).
'Ouida' (b. 1840).
William Black (1841-98).
W. Clark Russell (b. 1844).
R. L. Stevenson (1850-94).
Mrs Humphry Ward (b. 1851).
T. H. Hall Caine (b. 1853).
Stanley J. Weyman (b. 1855).
H. Rider Haggard (b. 1856).
S. R. Crockett (b. 1859).
A. Conan Doyle (b. 1859).
J. M. Barrie (b. 1860).
Rudyard Kipling (b. 1864).
'Edna Lyall'.
'Lucas Malet' (b. 1852).

C. Brockden Brown (1771-1810).
Washington Irving (1783-1859).
Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851).
N. Hawthorne (1804-64).
H. P. Willis (1806-67).
W. G. Simms (1806-70).
E. A. Poe (1809-49).
O. W. Holmes (1809-94).
Mrs Beecher Stowe (1811-96).
J. G. Holland (1819-81).
Susan Warner (1819-85).
Herman Melville (1819-91).
Bayard Taylor (1825-78).
Theodore Winthrop (1828-61).
F. R. Stockton (b. 1834).
T. B. Aldrich (b. 1836).
W. D. Howells (b. 1837).
E. P. Roe (1838-88).
Bret Harte (b. 1839).
Henry James (b. 1843).
G. W. Cable (b. 1844).
Eliz. S. Phelps (b. 1844).
Julian Hawthorne (b. 1846).
Frances H. Burnett (b. 1849).
F. Marion Crawford (b. 1854).