observing and sorting us.”19 Celebrating a tradition of fictions that draw attention to their artifice, Brian Stonehill contends that “by virtue of its greater honesty, its manifest awareness of its own limitations, and its peculiarly sophisticated humility before life itself, self-depicting fiction can in fact be more persuasive than purely naturalistic fiction.”20 The category of writers he describes includes Fielding and Sterne as its eighteenth-century founders, and he praises the way both achieve intimacy with their readers through their narrators’ concessions to the operation of fiction. Wolfgang Iser and John Preston also celebrate the openness of eighteenth-century fiction to the subjective discoveries of the reader. In Iser’s terms, Fielding’s reader has to formulate meaning: “the text offers itself as an instrument by means of which the reader can make a number of discoveries for himself that will lead him to a reliable sense of orientation.”21 For Preston, this extends more widely to the novelists of the eighteenth century who invite the reader to participate: “They are interested in creating a text which will, as it were, give instructions to the reader. They wish to keep the form open; they think of the novel as a process, not a product, and as a situation for the reader, not as a received text.”22
Although these reader-response theorists focus on canonical works rather than on writers who package the derivativeness, disposability, or obsolescence of their single-edition productions, some of the less celebrated novels of the 1750s and ’60s can be understood in their terms. The dramatized narrator of John Shebbeare’s Lydia, for instance, comes across as charmingly open about the mechanics of novel writing. Early in Lydia, he interrupts a description of his heroine with a long paragraph comparing his making characters to an army tailor’s cutting out clothes for off-the-rack consumption: “when we have gotten together our materials, and, like the … army-taylors, we have cut them out into characters, and spread them upon the ground, we let people chuse for themselves, till they are fitted” (1:73). Shebbeare uses this analogy to distinguish his work from the common romance, which he claims only dupes readers by taking existing literary material and “tacking it together” under a new title, “like rags gathered by old women, and then beaten into paper to form a new manufacture” (1:22). In preference, he suggests, the writer of a “true history” works openly with words, cutting them out and presenting them as material offerings, acknowledging the freedom his readers have to apply the general truths of his story to their own particularity: “by Tom’s being too tall, and Dick’s being too short, the clothes are all out of fitting at first, till, changing round, every man in the regiment settles into the coat that suits him” (1:72).
Shebbeare’s pun on textiles cleverly connects the material process of paper-making with the metaphorical one of dressing readers and characters according to well-worn conventions. It also allows him to think of “pulp” literature in two ways: one that involves the literary product compromised and beaten flat by the recycling of conventions, and the other that foresees the scale of production as an occasion for physical multiplicity and flexibility. The readymade novels Shebbeare advertises as his line of business are visible generally on book stalls and in libraries as an array of objects belonging to the first category, but those that qualify as “true histories” are elevated to the second category, making their popularity into the capacity to accommodate the preferences of different readers.
In this spirit, many of the self-conscious novels of the 1750s and ’60s distinguish themselves by soliciting readers literally as partners in the processes of bringing characters to life, solving problems, and finishing or destroying the book they are reading. Readers of mid-century fiction are asked in various tones of joviality and condescension to fill in blanks and help out with scenes authors have failed to complete. Capt. Greenland’s “amorous readers” are told they will “save our Pen almost a quarter an hours Labour if they will here be pleased to conceive the extraordinary situation of our poor entangled Silvius” (1:61). The narrator of Pompey the Little complains, “had I a hundred Hands, and as many pens, it would be impossible to describe the Folly of that Night” before “begging the Reader to supply it by Help of his own imagination” (156). The narrator of Charlotte Summers cedes power to the reader by rhetorically excusing himself from the scene of composition while assuming that the reader’s imagination continues to work in his absence:
as it is almost Morning, the reader must excuse me if I return to Bed and take a Nap, after the Fatigue of this Chapter, before I proceed any further, if he is not so disposed, he may entertain himself with Miss Summers under the old Oak, till I am at leisure to conduct her further on her Journey. (1:56)
Later, once Sterne has made the invitation to readers to fill in narrative blanks well known, readers of Jenner’s The Placid Man (1770) are praised for having stuck with the book as long as they have, then asked to step in and write the final wedding scene: “as describing wedding ceremonies is not so much my talent as Mr. Richardson’s, let him (the reader) be so good as to take the two brides and the two bridegrooms … and having marshalled them in as many coaches as he thinks proper, convey them safe to St. Georges church.”23
These representations of author-reader collaboration carry through the carefully controlled appeals Fielding makes in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones to the judgment and imagination of his audience, described by Warner as “a novelistic species of performative entertainment which concedes to the reader his or her essential freedom as a pleasurable responsibility.”24 But the specific trick of less accomplished authors is to position readers as physical co-authors of a text, rather than as imaginative collaborators in an unfolding story. Arguably, second-rate authors make their interpretive openings wider than those of accomplished authors by building them into less-polished works of fiction, where references to the book’s improvised quality, the condition of its pages, or its vulnerability to public opinion have their own degree of candor. The possibility that pages will be missing or scenes incomplete is quite real in these faddish novels, which would much less often have been bound, and much more quickly have been recycled as paper, than the works of major literary figures. Gestures of authorial distress are not, in Goodall’s or Shebbeare’s case, quite the “false scent” that Dorothy Van Ghent shows them to be in the case of Sterne.25 In this perspective, Sterne capitalizes on the self-deprecating humor of the relationship professional novelists had established with their public. Expanding his cast of fictional readers to include distinct characters and their various interpretive hobbyhorses, blank pages, and jokes about sexual imagination, Sterne plays in a new realm of confidence with the dangerous alliance forged in these earlier novels, between an author genuinely uncertain about the objective shape of his output and his sceptical customer.
Artificially Intelligent Books
In this light, the novels of the mid-century provide important evidence that eighteenth-century readers were not simply, or even primarily attracted to novels as a credible, alternative realities. Even their moderate success attests to the presence of a reader different from the one imagined, for instance, by Julie Park in her account of eighteenth-century novels beloved as part of a culture devoted to making non-human characters as lifelike as possible.26 Readers of Shebbeare and Goodall and Coventry were keenly attuned to the quality and economy of entertainment as a human construction. And yet the mid-century fiction that reminded readers of the material constraints of novels did not necessarily encourage them to command or improve the production of fiction or to deploy the spirit of critique for their own purposes.
One sign that gestures of transparency and collaboration worked against a feeling of human empowerment in mid-century novels is the number of fictional narrators pursuing a combative relationship with their reader. Shebbeare, Goodall, and their contemporaries are artful at making the environment of the printed book a barrier to the human involvement in the technical production of a story. Tristram Shandy has been described as a narrator whose collaborative gestures frequently turn out to have no substance: although he relinquishes passages of his narrative, he frequently recants on these moments. At one point, after inciting readers to guess what is to come next, Tristram announces that “if I thought you was able to form the least judgement or probable conjecture to yourself, of what was to come in the next page,—I would tear it out of my book” (70). “It is in vain,” he exclaims at another point, “to leave this to the Reader’s imagination …. ’Tis