SOURCE: "Realism and the Novel: The Eighteenth-Century Beginnings," in The Age of Realism, Penguin, 1974, pp. 9-35.

Below, Hemmings discusses literary realism in the epistolary tradition and in particular in Henry Fielding's novel Tom Jones.

Gi; the Epistolary Novel =~ Sthe Epistolary Novel

In due course the novelists came to realize that their business was not to hoax the reader with these elaborate and, finally, transparent confidence-tricks, but rather to persuade him that what he experiences when reading is as real as what he might experience in the ordinary transactions of life. Between childhood and the grave, we all of us come into contact with hundreds of our fellow beings; but our knowledge of most of them, and hence their reality for us, is for the most part sketchy, superficial, and monochrome. If we were honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that they are a good deal less...