A comprehensive survey of the eighteenth-century English novel situating the major novelists and their works not only against the background of the hundreds of other novels published between the later seventeenth century and the era in which Jane Austen and Walter Scott were writing, but also the cultural background of the period, including contexts not considered by any existing study, but which are central to the emergence of the novel, such as such as the book
trade and the mechanics of book production, copyright and censorship, the growth of the reading public, the economics of culture both in London and in the provinces, and the re-printing of popular
fiction.