The previous chapter showed that in mid-century England, where marriage loomed large as a political and moral topic, Richardson’s Anglican marriage plot elevated the novel form by figuring marriage as an institution joining the church and the state, and then by imagining characters like Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison who enact and embody that nexus. In the end, Richardson’s novels authorise their own imaginative – that is to say, literary – power by mediating between faith and citizenship (or better, by relaying faith into conjugality) inside the Erastian nation state.

It turns out, however, that the latent nation-buildingtendencies of Richardson’s marriage plots are more fully realised in a different programme: in a series of mid-century oppositional and satiric-sentimental novels that respond to Pamela. Of these, the most important are Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), John Shebbeare’sThe Marriage Act (1754) and Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766).