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how the novels became popular ?

The novel is only one of many possible prose narrative forms. It shares with other narratives, like the epic and the romance, two basic characteristics: a story and a story-teller. The epic tells a traditional story and is an amalgam of myth, history, and fiction. Its heroes are gods and goddesses and extraordinary men and women. The romance also tells stories of larger-than-life characters. It emphasizes adventure and often involves a quest for an ideal or the pursuit of an enemy. The events seem to project in symbolic form the primal desires, hopes, and terrors of the human mind and are, therefore, analogous to the materials of dream, myth, and ritual. Although this is true of some novels as well, what distinguishes the novel from the romance is its realistic treatment of life and manners. Its heroes are men and women like ourselves, and its chief interest, as Northrop Frye said, is "human character as it manifests itself in society."

Since the eighteenth century, and particularly since the Victorian period, the novel, replacing poetry and drama, has become the most popular of literary forms--perhaps because it most closely represents the lives of the majority of people. The novel became increasingly popular as its social scope expanded to include characters and stories about the middle and working classes. Because of its readership, which included a large percentage of women and servants, the novel became the form which most addressed the domestic and social concerns of these groups.