Introducing Life to “the Young, the Ignorant, and the Idle”: Eliza Haywood and Daniel Defoe as Popular Novelists

Abstract

The remarkable commercial success of the novels of Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood in the first few decades of the eighteenth century testifies to a series of cultural phenomena that merit close critical attention. For instance, setting the overwhelming popularity of both writers during their lifetimes in contrast with the scant—though steadily growing—critical recognition accorded to Haywood in our time provides a succinct and vivid illustration of the vagaries of the literary canon. As can be guessed, the snakes and ladders in Defoe and Haywood’s game of fame had mostly to do with their gender, as well as with the genre of their most celebrated productions. Ironically, however, for good or evil, their contemporaries tended to put both writers together in the same basket. While professional critics belittled their talents in public—and perhaps envied them in private—the reading public seemed to have an insatiable appetite for their fictions. In short, Haywood and Defoe were fully-fledged popular novelists, with all the positive and negative connotations attached to this label. A key to gauging their place in the history of the novel lies, then, in the type of readers for whom they vied. This article reviews some of the correspondences between Haywood and Defoe—emphasizing their equality in terms of cultural relevance in their own time—with a view to complicate conventional assessments of Defoe as a star novelist and Haywood as a minor writer of amatory fiction, and to encourage reflection about literary practices then and now.