more
taste might have enabled Mrs. Trollope to do really great things in it:
but she left them for her son to accomplish. Attempts and "tries" at it
had been made constantly, and the goal had been very nearly reached,
especially, perhaps, in that now much forgotten but remarkable _Emilia
Wyndham_ (1846) by Anne Caldwell (Mrs. Marsh), which was wickedly
described by a sister novelist as the "book where the woman breaks her
desk open with her head," but which has real power and exercised real
influence for no short time.

This new domestic novel followed Miss Austen in that it did not
necessarily avail itself of anything but perfectly ordinary life, and
relied chiefly on artistic presentment--on treatment rather than on
subject. It departed from her in that it admitted a much wider range and
variety of subject itself; and by no means excluded the passions and
emotions which, though she had not been so prudish as to ignore their
results, she had never chosen to represent in much actual exercise, or
to make the mainsprings of her books.

The first supreme work of the kind was perhaps in _Vanity Fair_ and
_Pendennis_, the former admitting exceptional and irregular developments
as an integral part of its plot and general appeal, the latter doing for
the most part without them. But _Pendennis_ exhibited in itself, and
taught to other novelists, if not an absolutely new, a hitherto little
worked, and clumsily worked, source of novel interest. We have seen how,
as early as Head or Kirkman, the possibility of making such a source out
of the ways of special trades, professions, employments, and vocations
had been partly seen and utilised. Defoe did it more; Smollett more
still; and since the great war there had been naval and military novels
in abundance, as well as novels political, clerical, sporting, and what
not. But these special interests had been as a rule drawn upon too
onesidedly. The eighteenth century found its mistaken fondness for
episodes, inset stories, and the like, particularly convenient here: the
naval, military, sporting, and other novels of the nineteenth were apt
to rely too exclusively on these differences. Such things as the
Oxbridge scenes and the journalism scenes of _Pendennis_--both among the
most effective and popular, perhaps _the_ most effective and popular,
parts of the book--were almost, if not entirely, new. There had been
before, and have since been, plenty of university novels, and their
reco