The important principle of prose fiction which Richardson and
Warburton recognized--that there is power in a detailed picture of
the private life of the middle class--had been suggested earlier.
Mrs. Manley could not voice it, at least not in _Queen Zarah_, where
the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Godolphln, and Queen Anne were
to be leading characters. But her sometime-friend Richard Steele
could. Having laughed in _The Tender Husband_ (1705) at a girl whose
judgment of life was seriously--or, rather, comically--warped by her
reading of heroic romances, Steele made a positive plea in _Tatler_
No. 172 for histories of "such adventures as befall persons not
exalted above the common level." Books of this sort, still rare in
1710, would be of great value to "the ordinary race of men." The
anonymous preface to _The Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclia_
seven years later attributed to Heliodorus's romance the value of
suggesting rules "for conducting our Affairs in common Actions of
Life." In 1751 when the new realism was a _fait accompli_, the
author of _An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr.
Fielding_ declared roundly (p. 19) that in the new fiction the
characters should be "taken from common Life." A good argument in
favor of books about "private persons" was offered in the preface to
the English translation of the Abbé Prévost's novel, _The Life And
Entertaining Adventures of Mr. Cleveland, Natural Son of Oliver
Cromwell_ (1741): "The history of kingdoms and empires, raises our
admiration, by the solemnity ... of the images, and furnishes one of
the noblest entertainments. But at the same time that it is so well
suited to delight the imagination, it yet is not so apt to touch and
affect as the history of private men; the reason of which seems to
be, that the personages in the former, are so far above the common
level, that we consider ourselves, in some measure, as aliens to