On the contrary, far from being obvious ‘utter nonsense’, the idea that Newtonian science was a factor in the rise of the novel has been something of a cliché among specialists on early-eighteenth-century English literature. That both can be linked so easily to the endless controversies on the ‘rise of the public sphere’ only made it more so. But unpicking the details of the idea is far from straightforward.
Let’s start with the distinction between ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’. Was this new? No, of course, not. Most people had always understood that some narratives were true, that some were imaginary and that some were imaginary but purported to be true. But what many historians have detected is a shift in this period in how contemporaries understood the concept of a ‘fact’. Or rather the supposed shift is more about how contemporaries thought they could recognise a factually true statement, with the point being that they became less sure than they had been before that they – or anyone else – could do so. Nor was this just some arcane philosophical debate. The claim instead is that this was a widespread concern which affected almost every aspect of the culture. (Note however that one doesn’t actually need to think the various intellectual grounds for such scepticism were themselves new; it was their popularity that is claimed as being unprecedented.)
The traditional line would be to place the development of ‘science’, particularly experimental empiricism, at the centre of that story. The standard claim would be that scientists in and around the seventeenth century began doing experiments and so changed the way everyone thought about the fundamental foundations of knowledge. That was always a crude simplification.
(Moreover, linking that process specifically to Newton also had its complications. Newton wasn’t really directly contributing to the debates about what science was and, in any case, the main lines of those debates had already been set out well before he published Principia. But he does then become the poster boy for the new experimental empiricism, with his reputation helping to popularise it. Except that there is then an issue about how quickly or slowly this happened. But this does mean that, if the discussion is about the popular reception of experimental empiricism in England in the early eighteenth century, it is fair enough to call that Newtonianism.)
But, meanwhile, many historians would no longer see experimental empiricism as quite so central after all. Partly that is because, in the wake of Steven Shapin, not all historians of science are confident that experimental empiricism was ever just about experimental empiricism. There were other nuances to the rhetoric used by contemporaries in debating scientific experiments and those can be linked to parallel debates about the nature of knowledge in other fields. Even more importantly, other historians have stressed the significance of those parallel debates, in fields such as history, religion and law. They would argue that those debates were at least as crucial to the changing assumptions about what constituted knowledge. Barbara Shapiro has even gone so far as to argue that the decisive shift in those other fields (she particularly stresses legal ideas) predated that in the debates about science and that they were then the cause of the shift in scientific ideas. In other words, this reverses what has often been assumed to have been the case. Shapiro’s A Culture of Fact (Cornell University Press, 2000), as the latest major contribution to it, would be the most obvious way into that ongoing controversy.
Then there’s the journalism angle. News reporting was not new. It’s as old as gossiping and printed works reporting news were common long before the seventeenth century. But almost all seventeenth-century historians would emphatically argue that journalism was new. (Many would consider it laughable to suggest otherwise.) Moreover, the various factors which, in combination, made it new are also those that link it to the debates on changing ideas about knowledge. Firstly, the new serial publications were regular. They were no longer ad hoc publications about a particular event and, by appearing regularly, they were able to build a readership which then read successive issues over time. That, in turn, relates to the second factor, which was their topicality. They were reporting events in the very recent past and so had to cover stories as they unfolded. Thirdly, the number of newspapers proliferated, providing readers with a choice of newspapers and encouraging rivalry between the different titles. Which meant that the new journalists very quickly learned to use their newspapers to attack each others’ stories. Such attacks were much more effective than previously because they could make rebuttals within days and know that they had regular readers who would follow the resulting controversies. And that’s where this links into the question of what was a ‘fact’. Seventeenth-century newspapers did not give rise to the idea that news stories were untrustworthy, but what they did do was to debate that issue repeatedly with an intensity that had only ever before been sporadic and, in doing so, made such arguments absolutely central to contemporary popular culture. A good example of how this is all now utterly uncontroversial among the experts would be Mark Knights’s Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford University Press, 2005). Oh, and Knights explicitly links all this to ‘the rise of the novel’ in the early eighteenth century.
But did the novel ‘rise’ in the early eighteenth century? That there are earlier examples of extended fictional prose narratives is both obvious and irrelevant. No one believes that the novel was invented in the early eighteenth century. The claim is instead that something happened to the form in that period that was significant. What that was is something about which the experts can never agree, but that something had changed is not. At the simplest level, there are the obvious points that the growth in the popularity of novel reading in the early eighteenth century Britain (and elsewhere in Europe) was unprecedented, that this was arguably the most striking cultural phenomenon of the age and that lots of people at the time thought that what they were reading was somehow different from earlier prose works. This is thus another example of how the fact one can find earlier examples of something does not mean that that something did not subsequently became decisively more pervasive.
Nor is linking this back to the invention of journalism a couple of generations earlier at all ridiculous. The observation that novels of this period mimicked the evolving journalistic conventions is hardly an original one. It is therefore not the boldest of steps to then say that readers happily accepted the idea of a fictional work that was pretending to be true because they had already become used to the idea that non-fictional works might well be untrue. Which is also why it is often argued that, paradoxically, the novel develops as a distinct genre by imitating other genres.
So, to return to the OP, was Newtonianism a factor in the rise of the novel? Personally I would say, ‘not really or, at best, only very indirectly’. But, as I say, plenty of experts have suggested that it was (although quite a few of them have been guilty of doing so on the dodgy old assumption that Newtonianism was a factor in everything in the eighteenth century). Making broad generalisations about shifts in academic opinion is always difficult, but my guess would be that this idea is now rather less fashionable than was once the case, with it having recently lost ground to the emphasis on the rise of journalism (although the two approaches are not actually incompatible). I would also suggest that this is mainly a reflection of the way in which historians of that period have taken the linguistic turn. Which, in itself, isn’t such a bad thing.