More instructive than any sermon I know' : the eighteenth-century novel and the secularisation of ethics

Abstract

This thesis argues that there is a connection between the secularisation of ethics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the rise to moral legitimacy and literary respectability of prose fiction from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. The Introduction traces the separation of ethics from religion from the mid-seventeenth century, when the Anglican Church began to define religion in terms of morality. After 1660, the authority of the Church tended to be subsumed within the authority of the State, and the cause o f moral reform was taken up by lay agencies, and lay writers. In the highly influential Tatler and Spectator, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele argued for an idea of morality and 'politeness' around which the nation could cohere. The dominance of Whig politics ensured the subordinate position o f the Church, and when a challenge to Anglican practice and teaching emerged in the form of Methodism in the 1730s, the Church lacked an effective means of reply.