Aestheticism as a philosophy has not dominated English literature or our critical understanding of it. Literature has long served as a vessel for discussing accepted morality and social norms, protesting injustice, and inviting readers to consider or rethink contemporary issues. This became especially apparent in Renaissance and Augustan literature, where prose satires such as Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ and quasi-biographical novels like Defoe’s ‘True Accounts’ evolved from the established forms of satire and journalism to mark a new era of the novel, whose popular success was enabled by the rise of the mass printing press.

From this point onwards, and largely due to the spread of mass education and literacy, we can observe the novel flourishing as an accessible form of fiction. It was no longer the privilege of the aristocracy alone to read for leisure, and so such classics as ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, and Aphra Behn and Marie de La Fayette’s prose fictions became available for popular consumption. Pierre Daniel Huete’s ‘Traitté de L’Origine des Romans’ (1670) argues that the novel offered insight into unfamiliar cultures, and compared them to Jesus’ parables because of the moral lessons he saw they could contain. This ethical function of fiction had been observed previously in utopias like Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’, satires and melodramas. As the novel became more accepted and prevalent, and these forms became less so (this shift in general consumption indicating that the novel as a form was readable enough and demonstrated enough imaginative potential to appeal to the general public), it can be seen as adopting it from them. This is evident in novels like Aphra Behn’s ‘Oroonoko’ (1688), which has been interpreted as offering a moral commentary on natural kingship and the rights of the individual, and later Samuel Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’ (1748) which condemns rape and fornication in line with contemporary Christian values.

By the 1800s, however, the novel was not only reinforcing accepted morality but, with the birth of the Romantic era, challenging it. Novels such as William Godwin’s ‘The Adventures of Caleb Williams’ (1794) and Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ (1818) took open opposition to the Industrial Revolution and upheld the plight of the oppressed peasant in line with Rousseau’s anti-capitalist philosophy, while Hawthorne’s ‘The Scarlet Letter’ (1850) challenged ideas about morality and legalism in a way that prompted The Church Review and Ecclesiastical Register to condemn it as ‘perpetrating bad morals’ (Wineapple, Brenda. Hawthorne: A Life. Random House: New York, 2003). Similarly,