Vicars and Squires: Religion and the Rise of the English Marriage Plot

Abstract

This paper re-historicises the eighteenth-century marriage plot by shifting attention away from both the history of literary genres and the modes of social history that have generally informed accounts of the rise of the novel. Drawing instead on recent historiography of the period's religious-political currents, I argue that the novel's marriage plot emerged as a cultural agent of the Erastian state, or, more concretely as an expression of two different strains of opposition to the Court Whigs and their policies. In its Richardsonian form ( Pamela ), it belonged to a High Church missionary project that viewed the Anglican wedding ceremony as a tool in the resacrilization of everyday life, and in its Fieldingesque form ( Joseph Andrews ) it inaugurated a literature that placed the country parish, and, more particularly, negotiations between vicars and squires, at the heart of an imagined English nation. I conclude by suggesting that the English marriage plot finds its original conditions of possibility exactly where Richardson's and Fielding's fictions intersect. That is, where English theopolitics produced a Christian literature committed to emulative fictions on the one side, and a literature committed to the parish-based imaginary of a certain nostalgic English nationalism on the other.