Here is the video from the most recent Austen book club about Northanger Abbey. Below is a summary of some of the ideas from Samuel Johnson that inform the book. Later on I will write about Northanger Abbey and the critics.
Also, BDM has just written about Northanger Abbey for the Paris Review. I cannot recommend her piece highly enough. Unlike me, she really loves this novel. You really ought to read her thoughts.
Northanger Abbey is a novel about reading. The heroine, Catherine Morland, not only learns to read books properly, but also people—, their insinuations, body language, hints, behaviour, and so on. At the start of the novel, Catherine is a naïve reader of both social situations and fiction; by the end she is a mature and capable reader of both. Reading is a moral act and must be learned properly, not treated lightly.
This was a lively debate in the eighteenth century. In Rambler No. 4 (31 March, 1750), which Austen certainly knew, Samuel Johnson took up the topic of “The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted.” Unlike the old romances of the previous century, which were full of hermits, woods, battles and shipwrecks, these new fictions “are such as exhibit life in its true state.”
This new realism created moral risks. “These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life.” As such, writers ought to take care, said Johnson, to set a good moral example.
They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account.
This might seem quaint to us, the idea that a young impressionable person can be corrupted by a novel! But we share this exact worry about our own new forms of popular entertainment. When I was a child, there were concerns about the morally corrosive effects of playing violent video games. Today we are worried about the effects of social media. Whether or not Johnson was right, he was not wrong to worry about the new experiment being conducted in fiction.
In the old romances, everything was so absurdly unreal—knights and dragons and so on—that they would hardly be a danger to the young. But when the heroes of novels are more real, more ordinary, when they are, as Johnson says, “levelled with the rest of the world”, young readers look at them more closely, and are liable to follow their example.
if the power of example is so great as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken, that, when the choice is unrestrained, the best examples only should be exhibited
Don’t we think this today? Don’t we worry that all the dark corners of the internet will “take possession of the memory by a kind of violence”? Aren’t we concerned about the way alcohol, gambling, drugs, sex, political ideas, and many other things are presented to children in ways that “produce effects almost without the intervention of the will”? We don’t advertise cigarettes to the young, and Johnson, in like mind, thinks we should advertise immoral behaviour to them either.
As such, he makes dramatic prescriptions: “many characters ought never to be drawn”; “that observation which is called knowledge of the world, will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good”. Don’t let them read about rakes! It will only entice them to mischief! What he is worried about is that by mingling good and bad together, novelists give a sheen of acceptability to roguish behaviour.
There have been men indeed splendidly wicked, whose endowments threw a brightness on their crimes…
We still talk so much about the “splendidly wicked” characters of literature, it is a marvellous phrase (and plays neatly in subtle parallel on brightness).
These “great corrupters of the world” are the characters Catherine must learn to see for what they really are. Although Austen’s novel is clearly not a simple act of proselytising for Johnson’s idea, she ends in a Johnsonian equilibrium. Catherine learns not that she ought to be given a censored world, but that she must learn to see it for what it really is.
Johnson says “Vice, for vice is necessary to be shewn, should always disgust”. We saw last time when we discussed Sense and Sensibility that the world does not feel disgusted by Willoughby. Austen’s youthful anger flares up on every page of that novel about how readily the world accepts and tolerates Vice.
Northanger Abbey makes the point another way, more gently, more humorously. The Thorpes are thoroughly shown up for what they really are. We are desperate for Catherine to learn to see their Vice, and we are glad when she does so.
