THE GASES OF THE LEVITE'S CONCUBINE

Sometime during the eighteenth century there occurred in England one of those momentous sea-changes in reading that permanently altered the way in which books, whether sacred or secular, were understood and interpreted. The effectiveness of the new approach, and its success in obliterating its predecessor, can be judged by the fact that we are now hardly conscious of it ever having taken place at all. What makes it very different from previous appropriations is that it was not the work of any organised party or faction, and it was only in retrospect that a theory of reading emerged to justify what had happened.

Though one can find examples enough of realistic secular narrative fiction in the seventeenth century, it was probably not until the extraordinary success of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in 1719 that one becomes aware of how the new art-form, the so-called ‘novel’, was altering not merely standards of realism, but – less obvious, though in the long run perhaps even more important – also the way in which other kinds of narrative were being read and understood. That such a new and, for a long time, low-status form of entertainment could or should affect the reading of God's Word would no doubt have seemed utterly incredible to contemporaries. Only with hindsight can such changes be seen to have happened, and explanations sought.