The Bildungsroman, or novel of self-development, is often said to have originated in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1795), and to have crossed the Channel in Thomas Carlyle's famous 1824 translation. However, it is tempting to include in a history of the English Bildungsroman earlier literary landmarks such as Robinson Crusoe (1719), Clarissa (1748), Tom Jones (1749), Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), the novels of Fanny Burney and a number of those of Scott and Austen. Indeed, the fact that most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novels are deeply concerned with self-development suggests that the term Bildungsroman should be considered as describing a central tendency of the English novel sui generis. Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meister coincided with intensified focus on inward psychological development, as opposed to outward adventures and progress, and the nineteenth-century heyday of the Bildungsroman in English saw significant formal developments tailored to the intensification.

The very unlikeness of Wilhelm Meister to any English Bildungsroman that precedes or follows it points toward the particularities of the English species. Wilhelm's story, like that of the heroes of Scott's Rob Roy (1818) or Thackeray's Pendennis (1848–1850), begins with his struggle to escape a humdrum bourgeois future in favor of a romantic alternative. But Wilhelm inherits a large fortune, and thereby comes to inhabit a social dimension in which rules of conduct are extremely flexible. In contrast English heroes typically find their desires and choices radically constrained by economic realities and sociomoral codes. The economic, moral, and social constraints, or the lack of them, have great formal implications.