When the dryly assured narrator of Northanger Abbey introduces a new character by summarily denying “the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself, of her past adventures and sufferings,” Jane Austen effectively kicks Lady Vane, Leonora, Cynthia, Miss Price, Amri and this book’s chorus of motley tale-tellers out of the novel. Of course, as documented by the previous six chapters, Don Quixote, Henry Fielding, and other characters, authors, critics and common readers had been threatening to do as much for generations, and indeed, from the first. However, as we have now seen, that same propensity of eliciting such critical disfavor had already been a proven if unarticulated feature of the interpolated tales that early novelists continued to wield, disrupting their plots. For the two centuries between Don Quixote and Obi, interpolated tales were all but omnipresent: a pervasive, yet still consistently aggravating feature that co-constituted the novel form and provided critics and readers with an off-center vantage point from which to consider it. But sometime on or about 1800, novel relations changed, internally and formally, in a shift of balance from one prevailing version of heteroglossia to another.

The Conclusion explores narrative depictions of the Gordon Riots of 1780, in which many of the prisons outlined in this study were sacked. These narratives instance the four distinct prison types that this analysis has delineated, but they also demonstrate the prisons’ locus as a focal point for public unrest, nine years before the storming of the Bastille. This chapter summarises the reasons for the prison’s prevalence in the eighteenth-century novel, from the personal and biographical to wider philosophical imperatives, and argues that the prisons of the Georgian period overwhelmingly embodied the historical past. This was true architecturally, and it was true in terms of the law that these prisons enabled. It was fundamentally not the case with the New Model Prisons of the Victorian era, which, however malign or inefficient, were wholly contemporary cultural structures. The study ends by elaborating the causes of the novel’s move away from the prison as a fictional motif in later periods.

Chapter 3 focuses on the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and episodes where a character anxiously navigates the gloomy and elaborate gothic castle. Drawing on Andrew Elfenbein’s description of the complicated mental operations involved even in “easy reading,” the chapter argues that these passages subtly convey the many cognitive activities that reading Gothic fiction coordinates. These episodes therefore invite the reader to become impressed by her competency to do such things as inhibit distractions, integrate events into a larger model of the plot, and track the character’s emotional shifts. This sense of competence could have been particularly important for nineteenth-century women readers, whose sense of capability acquired from Gothic reading could feed into their sense of competence to face the unknown and potentially perilous world outside their immediate acquaintance.

If the Minerva Press is the publisher most strongly associated with fictional excess, then the gothic is surely excess’s most representative genre. Readers decried the great length of these novels, their numerousness, their unoriginality, and the over-the-top emotions they depicted. This chapter tracks the phenomenon of ‘imitation’ in the late eighteenth-century heyday of the gothic, first in its role as a convenient denunciation hurled at new gothic novels, and then as a broad and flexible authorial practice that, the chapter argues, allowed gothic novelists to capitalize on their strength in numbers and their dedicated readerships. Minerva Gothic novelists, including Regina Maria Roche and Eliza Parsons, used imitation to define and expand the norms of their genre, and publishers like William Lane used the recognizability of certain genres to creatively advertise their new books, while even highly successful authors like Ann Radcliffe had to grapple with charges of unoriginality.

Chapter 2 reads Austen’s first novel accepted for publication, Northanger Abbey, in terms of a zero-degree of intelligibility in communicative social exchange. Northanger Abbey presents Catherine Morland’s entry not just to Bath society but into the linguistic public. Throughout the novel, Catherine is subject to stratagems of deceit by her false friends, Isabella and John Thorpe. The latter even makes a coercive (and dishonorably deniable) marriage proposal that Catherine, in a state of absent-minded imaginative distraction, does not so much as uptake as information. J.L. Austin once identified untruth and unclarity as “the birthright” of all speakers. This mock birthright is the arrogation and entitlement of Thorpe. In a striking alignment of this kind of threat with its obverse – a critical investment of interest, if not fascination – Cavell explains his renewed reading of Austen only late in life as an exhausted intimacy with minor characters. In the tedious, packed rooms of Bath where nothing meaningful may happen, or originate, the main couple, Catherine and Henry, broach the possibility of intimacy through the precondition of the apartness of other minds.