The early nineteenth-century publication of two important collections, Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s fifty volume The British Novelists (1810) and Walter Scott’s ten volume Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (1821–4) signaled the enhanced status and commercial viability of novels in the post-revolutionary age. While both collections built on James Harrison’s successful weekly installments of reprinted fiction in The Novelist’s Magazine (1779–88), they had a cultural prestige Harrison’s lacked. That authority owed much to the introductory essays Barbauld and Scott included, essays that satisfied a growing period taste for literary criticism, with its mandate to order, catalog, and appraise. But the presuppositions embodied in the two collections were not equally influential. The rapid eclipse of Barbauld’s progressive narrative by Scott’s more conservative one had significant implications for later representations of the eighteenth-century novel. Understanding the principles that shaped their observations and the choices they made of authors and texts helps to explain why Scott’s account prevailed well into the twentieth century.

As exercises in evaluation, Barbauld’s prefatory “On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing” and Scott’s individual biographies contributed to the formation of a novelistic canon, a grouping of fictions designed to exemplify and endorse the new genre’s standing. Or, perhaps, given the afterlives of their collections, the authors should more properly be said to have projected two canons, directed by distinctive principles of selection and commentary. Barbauld’s The British Novelists assigned first place to Richardson, gave priority to epistolary and domestic fiction, and emphasized the contributions of women writers. Walter Scott, by contrast, was narrower in his range of preferred texts and very nearly exclusionary in terms of gender. The endurance of his catalog of noteworthy authors can be measured by its closeness to Ian Watt’s triumvirate of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (with nods to Smollett, Sterne, and Burney as partial exceptions to Watt’s judgment that there was little of “intrinsic merit” [290] after 1750). Scott’s mapping of early fiction – in part an expression of a desire to present his own novel writing as a suitably gentlemanly occupation – proved easily adaptable, unlike Barbauld’s, to the conservative institutional priorities of the rapidly expanding numbers of schools and universities in the nineteenth century and beyond.