Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings

Strains of satire are evident throughout Mrs. Haywood's novels of the 1720s and 1730s, but they appear in incongruent forms that adhere to another satiric tradition than the one found in Swift's prose works. Satire was even present in works of high didacticism and pious polemics. In short, it was ubiquitous. During the 1730s the problem was how to satisfy a craving for contemporary realism, especially in its low-life versions, outside the confines of journalism and periodical essays. As John J. Richetti has written, the novel was, especially then, permeated with a "native journalis- -131- tic instinct for the notorious and the sensational." All sorts of prose writing-secret histories, chroniques scandaleuses, romances of many varieties, voyages both real and imaginary, utopian and dystopian prose, rogue and other criminal stories, accounts of spiritual life and salvation, shilling pamphlets-attempted to cope with this demand for contemporary realism, though few fulfilled it with literary mastery. The old masters were no longer writing, the new not yet on the scene ...»