institution of the English novel: Defoe's contribution, The

Next, and arguably the most influential collection given the great success of the Scott industry, was Ballantyne's Novelist's Library in 1821-24, edited by Sir Walter Scott, with biographical and critical introductions, in ten volumes: I, The Novels of Henry Fielding, Esq. (Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Amelia, Jonathan Wild); II and III, The Novels of Tobias Smollett, M.D. (Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphry Clinker, Smollett's Translation of Cervantes's Don Quixote preceded by his Life of Cervantes, Ferdinand Count Fathom, Sir Lancelot Greaves); IV, The Novels of LeSage and Charles Johnstone (Gil Blas, The Devil upon Two Sticks, Vanillo Gonzales, Chrysal or the Adventures of Guinea); V. The Novels of Sterne, Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, Mackenzie, Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve (Tristram Shandy, Sentimental Journey, Vicar of Wakefield, Rasselas, The Man of Feeling, The Man of the World, Julia de Roubigne, The Castle of Otranto, The Old English Baron); VI-VIII, The Novels of Samuel Richardson, Esq. In Three Volumes (Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, Sir Charles Grandison); IX, (1824) The Novels of Swift, Bage and Cumberland (Gulliver's Travels, Mount Hen neth, Barham Downs, James Wallace, Henry); X, (1824) The Novels of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (A Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne). One notices immediately the curious absence of Pamela in Mrs. Barbauld's collection and the total absence of Defoe's works in the Scott-Ballantyne. Actually Scott proposed an eleventh volume for Defoe, apparently as an afterthought, and revised and expanded his earlier prefatory essay for it, but it wasn't published. Sadleir says this about Ballantyne's Novelist's Library:

It seems almost certain that Scott deliberately supplemented Mrs. Barbauld's Collection when choosing titles.... Olf the thirty-four novels he reprinted, only twelve had also been printed by Mrs. Barbauld; of his remaining twenty-two, many seem to have been chosen in order to amplify her selection from certain authors, while others (notably the novels of Sterne and some by Smollett) could appear without offence under masculine editorship, whereas Mrs. Barbauld, a stickler for feminine decorum and an editor with an eye to family reading, might well have hesitated to include them. (88-90)

In this process of constant and competitive supplementation are issues of gender, comprehensiveness, variety and range, fitness for family consumption, respectability, and affordability appearing perhaps chiefly as market considerations. Right in the middle of this period of "expansion," in the year Scott's Waverley is published, 1814, John Colin Dunlop's The History of Fiction; being a critical account of the most celebrated prose works of Fiction, from the earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Day appeared in three volumes and was reprinted throughout the nineteenth century. Both Scott's and Dunlop's accomplishments here underscore the validation of the historical nature of the collections and with the extensive reviews of all these ventures, the apparent economic stability of a public desiring what amounted to a new form of cultural capital underwritten by the authority of well known editors. All these factors mark a congruence of production and consumption that in turn indicates the viability of the institution of the novel. This institution is accomplished in spite of, or perhaps because of the somewhat frantic competition fired by the relatively new problem of obtaining rights to titles.