‘Hints from Various Quarters’: Emma and the ‘Plan of a Novel’

‘The judicious reader will see at once’, writes Walter Scott in his review of Emma, that in defending the novel as a genre, ‘we have been pleading our own cause’: he confesses to a ‘more general acquaintance with this fascinating department of literature, than at first sight may seem consistent with the graver studies to which we are compelled by duty’. Scott’s review belongs to an emerging trend in criticism of the novel in the first decades of the nineteenth century, one that began to value artistry equally with morality. Scott takes in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, but saves his lengthiest discussion for Emma, which he sees as the example par excellence of the ‘class of fictions which has arisen almost in our own times, and which draws the characters and incidents introduced more immediately from the current of ordinary life than was permitted by the former rules of the novel’.1 The ‘judicious reader’ to whom Scott ‘s review is addressed is a member of an unprecedentedly literate and critically literate class, thoroughly versed in the opinions of The Edinburgh and The Quarterly; ‘l’homme moyen intellectuel, “the reader to whom everything did not always have to be explained”’.2 As the ‘Opinions of Emma’ show, there remained plenty of conservative, moralistic, unskilful novel readers, whose responses to innovative fiction are as old-fashioned as they are tedious.