The "kids these days" problem in literary history
I'm spending my spring break at Baylor University, conferencing, as one does when one is an academic. (The conferencing part. Not necessarily the conferencing at Baylor part.) The talk is about early nineteenth-century attempts to deal with this weird new genre, the religious novel, which (needless to say) almost nobody liked. But it's also about a "kids these days" problem. When academics grumble about "kids these days," it's easy enough to point out that, if one believes teachers, records demonstrate that the intellectual and applied capacities of the student population have been in decline since the time of ancient Greece. The "good" student population has always been located in the not-so-distant past, perhaps a generation or so earlier, frequently when the instructor was a student themselves (strange how that is...). As it happens, the "kids these days" narrative also informs even the nineteenth-century literary historiography of the religious novel: from the POV of late-Victorian observers, religious fiction didn't really get hot-and-bothered until the 1820s. Earlier novelists (e.g., Hannah More) were gentler, less impassioned in their approach. Now, from the POV of the late twenty-first century, this seems like a valid position, as the early nineteenth-century novels frequently adhere to the norms of post-Enlightenment sociability; Michael Ledger-Lomas rightly refers to the "polite evangelical fiction of the 1810s."1 For example, there's a great (I mean, great for my argument, not so great otherwise) moment in John Satchel's Thornton Abbey (1806) in which a controversial debate suddenly resolves into a charming afternoon tea. That sort of carefully convivial resolution just doesn't happen three decades on. But Thornton Abbey and its immediate contemporaries often struck contemporary critics as being the very opposite of sociable--they were too opinionated, too hung up on their theological hobbyhorses, too ready to represent the "wrong" (divisive) opinions, &c. In other words, depending on whom you're asking, the religious novel has always been offensive, even when it presented itself otherwise. Kids these days!
1 Michael Ledger-Lomas, "Evangelical Fiction," The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 2, English and British Fiction 1750-1820, ed. Peter Garside and Karen O'Brien (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 261.