So, my dear friends, I am back with this amazing insight into the history of the novels and how they changed the world.

Let’s start with printing presses, print as you all know, my dear friends, was a mechanical invention. So it came much later. Previously there used to be manuscripts, but listen, how many people could read a manuscript, in tens, in hundreds, maybe in thousands, that’s it. How could they reach the other people? How could they reach into all corners of the world, especially at a time when in Europe, in countries like England and France, in cities were growing were expanding rapidly like London, and they were now connected to smaller towns and rural areas. So, print and improved communication was a must.

You had amazing authors at such times. Sir Walter Scott remembered for his fantastically popular Scottish ballads and his historical novels about the fighting between the tribes and the clans of Scotland, amazing ones, they were fiercely loyal to their tribes and clans.

You had the epistolary novel, so, what is an epistolary novel, in which letters are used to tell a story and take it forward. Just like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, in which stories between an exchange of letters between two lovers. The story is told by an exchange of letters between two lovers and these letters believe me when the readers read the story and they read the letters they actually come to realize the inner conflicts in the mind of the heroine.

Moving on, look at Tom Jones, the most famous series of books in those days. Believe me, each book was prized at three shillings and in those days, three shillings was more than what a labourer earned in a week.

So, my dear friends, come to think about this, were these novels only for the rich, could they reach the middle classes and the lower classes. Yes they did, how did it happen, let’s see it in the next module. I will see you there.