Augustan literature the theme of fallen women in "" (1724). Thematically, Defoe's works are consistently Puritan. They all involve a fall, a degradation of the spirit, a conversion, and an ecstatic elevation. This religious structure necessarily involved a "bildungsroman", for each character had to learn a lesson about him or herself and emerge the wiser. The sentimental novel, or "novel of sentiment", developed after 1740, and among the most famous examples in English are Samuel Richardson's "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded" (1740), Oliver Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield" (1766), Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" (1759–67), "Sentimental Journey" (1768), Henry Brooke's "The Fool of Quality" (1765–70),
John Hall-Stevenson and Devonshire" (1763), "A Pastoral Puke; a second Sermon preached before the people called Whigs; by an Independent" (1764), "Makarony Fables, with the new Fable of the Bees" (1767), "Lyric Consolations, with the Speech of Alderman Wilkes delivered in a Dream" (1768) and "An Essay upon the King's Friends" (1776). Hall-Stevenson gave some financial support to his friend Sterne, who often visited him at Skelton, and they liked to race chariots over the sands at Saltburn, and Hall-Stevenson appears under the name of "Eugenius" in Sterne's novels "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy". This was unfinished