A Henry Fielding Companion

A HENRY FIELDING COMPANION Martin C. Battestin GREENWOOD PRESS A HENRY FIELDING COMPANION Martin C. Battestin GREEN...

Author: Martin C. Battestin

70 downloads 1659 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

A HENRY FIELDING COMPANION

Martin C. Battestin

GREENWOOD PRESS

A HENRY FIELDING COMPANION Martin C. Battestin

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Battestin, Martin C. A Henry Fielding companion / Martin C. Battestin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–313–29707–X (alk. paper) 1. Fielding, Henry, 1707–1754 Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Authors, English—18th century—Biography Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title. PR3456.B385 2000 823'.5 [B]—DC21 99–32531 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright 2000 by Martin C. Battestin All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99–32531 ISBN: 0–313–29707–X First published in 2000 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America TM

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of Henry Knight Miller

Contents

Introduction

ix

Abbreviations

xiii

Chronology

xvii

Residences

1

Family and Household

7

Others in the Life

19

Works by Fielding

171

Journalism

171

Legal and Social Works

172

Miscellanies (1743)

174

Miscellaneous Prose

175

Plays

178

Poetry

187

Prose Fiction

191

Puppet Theater

195

Translations

196

Universal Register Ofﬁce

197

Contents

viii

Works Probably by Fielding

199

Journalism

199

Poetry

206

Prose

207

Letters

209

Manuscripts

219

Themes and Topics

221

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

249

In the Plays

249

In the Fiction

269

Index to the Characters

285

Works Cited

293

Bibliography

307

Index

315

Introduction

Henry Fielding was among the more remarkable ﬁgures of his time—an innovator of genius as a dramatist and novelist and a magistrate who addressed serious social problems and invented the modern metropolitan police. He was remarkable as well for his sociable virtues. Few of his contemporaries—perhaps not even the great Samuel Johnson himself—were more agreeable companions or spoke so well and so wittily. His friend George Lyttelton, who knew them all, declared to the moralist James Beattie after Fielding was gone that Fielding “had more wit and humour” than Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and the other wits of his time put together (Beattie 1783: 571). In the space of a few years in the 1730s Fielding became the most dominant playwright in London since John Dryden (Hume 1988: ix). Indeed, no less a judge than George Bernard Shaw declared without irony that Fielding was “the greatest dramatist, with the single exception of Shakespeare, produced in England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century” (Shaw 1909: xiii). Fielding achieved this success in part by experimenting with new concepts and new forms of comedy and satire and in part by adapting to the modern stage the “Old Comedy” of his favorite Aristophanes, who impudently ridiculed reallife characters. In this, Fielding was regrettably too successful: his politically charged satires Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register (1737) were so popular, and so galling to the government, that they precipitated the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, which closed Fielding’s theater and ended his career as dramatist (Liesenfeld 1984). Indeed, the censorial powers it gave to the Lord Chamberlain would remain in force for 230 years and were invoked to stop productions of plays by, among others, Shaw and Henrik Ibsen, Samuel Beckett, and Tennessee Williams. Silenced by an act of Parliament, Fielding entered the Middle Temple in November 1737 in order to prepare himself for the bar, to which he would be admitted less than three years later. But expenses were heavy—for law books

x

Introduction

to read and pleasures to indulge. Fielding struggled with difﬁculty to support his wife Charlotte Fielding and daughter by writing for the antiministerial journals The Craftsman and his own paper, The Champion (1739–41). The essays of wit and humor that he published in these periodicals are comparable in quality to those of Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele in The Tatler (1709–11) and The Spectator (1711–12), his great models in this literary genre. It was, however, an entirely unexpected and improbable event of November 1740 that changed the direction of Fielding’s literary fortunes. This was the publication of Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, a hugely popular ﬁrst novel written entirely in letters by Samuel Richardson, whose professional credentials were those of a master printer. While conﬁned for debt in a bailiff’s sponging house (a half-way house to prison for those charged with debt), Fielding responded to this literary phenomenon by parodying Richardson’s novel in Shamela (April 1741). In a few months’ time he would offer readers his own, alternative conception of the art of ﬁction. Joseph Andrews (1742), by Fielding’s own deﬁnition in the preface was a new species of writing, “a comic Epic-Poem in Prose,” written in imitation of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Before the 1740s had run its course, these two great rivals would publish their masterpieces: Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48), the greatest, and the only, tragic novel of the century; and Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). The direction in which Fielding took the English novel would lead to Tobias Smollett and Charles Dickens, Thackeray and Kingsley Amis. Fielding’s last novel, Amelia (1751), is in a different, darker mode—one, as ever with him, entirely innovative. It tells the unconventional story not of a courtship, but of the troubled marriage of the principal characters, while at the same time offering the reader a kind of anatomy of evils in the constitution of England. In this respect Amelia may be considered the ﬁrst novel of social protest and reform in English. The compliment Shaw paid Fielding as a dramatist has its parallel in one paid him by the late Anthony Burgess, who, reviewing Fielding’s life in The Observer (29 October 1989), called him “the man who is, conceivably, England’s greatest novelist.” Fielding’s impressive achievements as playwright and novelist are matched by his accomplishments as a magistrate. As a dubious reward for his work in behalf of the Hanoverian establishment during the crisis of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–46 and as an apologist for the Pelham government in 1747–48, Fielding in the winter of 1748–49 was appointed to the commission of the peace for both the City and Liberty of Westminster and the County of Middlesex. He at once set about the business of reforming both the despised ofﬁce of the notoriously corrupt “trading justice” and the practices of an equally corrupt and ineffectual constabulary. Within a few months he was ready to submit to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke the draft of a bill presenting Parliament with cogent proposals for reorganizing the police. Though nothing came of this gesture, Fielding soon succeeded in gathering round him a band of honest and intrepid constables, known as the Bow Street Runners, chief among them the loyal ofﬁcer William Pentlow; they are acknowledged today as representing the ﬁrst

Introduction

xi

step toward the establishment of the modern metropolitan police. While Fielding was in this practical way exerting himself to preserve the public order, he was also applying the power of his intellect and his gifts as a writer to address the social problems of public licentiousness, violent crime, and terrible poverty. These are the subjects, respectively, of his treatises A Charge Delivered to the Grand Jury (1749), An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), and A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753). In his personal life—that is, in his relations with family, friends and enemies and in his mental intercourse with authors ancient and modern—Fielding reﬂected the life of his times in countless ways. On the one hand, he was by birth related on his father’s side to the earls of Denbigh and on his mother’s side to the Goulds of Somersetshire, a family of wealthy gentry and eminent lawyers. Through his father, General Edmund Fielding, he knew something of the army and its ways. He could converse with ease with noblemen and lawyers, libertines and clergymen, scholars and politicians, artists and wits. On the other hand, he would govern his “new Province of Writing” the better for having “sounded,” like Harry V, “the very bass string of humility”—for having conversed with prostitutes and prizeﬁghters and puppetshowmen, with actresses and actors, constables and bailiffs. At Eton College he made the most of the best classical education a boy of the time could have, and he improved that intellectual experience by further study at the University of Leiden in Holland; Fielding loved reading and loved books. PURPOSE AND PLAN This book makes essential information available to readers interested in Fielding’s life and works and to those who wish to view the world he inhabited from Fielding’s own personal perspective. Unless otherwise noted, the information provided throughout is drawn either from M. C. with R. R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, 2nd edition revised (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) or the introductions and commentary in the relevant volumes of the Wesleyan Edition of Fielding’s works. Proper names highlighted in bold type indicate that separate articles on those places and persons will be found in the sections headed “Residences,” “Family and Household,” and “Others in the Life.” Terms highlighted in bold type are deﬁned and discussed in the section “Themes and Topics.” The main body of the book consists of articles on those persons living or dead who touched Fielding’s life in signiﬁcant ways, however they may have done so—provided that the nature of their relationship to him could be adequately determined and might be of interest to readers. The “Family and Household” section chieﬂy focuses on persons of the paternal line (Fieldings and the earls of Denbigh) and maternal line (Goulds) who affected Fielding’s life; it includes as well certain household servants who ﬁgured in the Chancery custody case brought by Lady Sarah Gould against Fielding’s father, or who were part

xii

Introduction

of the story of his ﬁnal journey to Lisbon, Portugal. The “Others in the Life” section is comprehensive: it includes those contemporaries of any class or station whom Fielding knew and about whom he expressed an opinion worth the reader’s notice; and it includes those authors, living or dead, whose works Fielding read—provided they mattered enough to him that he recorded his opinion of them. Thanks to the meticulous scholarship of Frederick and Anne Ribble, it has been possible to locate Fielding’s every reference to every author included in their important catalog of his library. The section concerned with Fielding’s writing lists the following with brief descriptions of the contents: all the works in the established canon; all works probably by Fielding—that is, those works published anonymously or pseudonymously for which cogent evidence of his authorship has been adduced; all the letters; and a selection of the manuscripts. This section is followed by two others pertaining to Fielding’s literary productions. “Characters in the Plays and Fiction” lists the names of all the characters appearing in the comedies and works of ﬁction, together with brief descriptive remarks; included in this section is an index to the characters, keyed to the plays or prose ﬁction in which they appear, to enable the reader to locate them easily. The “Themes and Topics” section provides commentary on the principal recurrent subjects of Fielding’s literary works. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For the assistance they rendered in preparing this book, I thank my wife, Ruthe Rootes Battestin, whose research in my behalf greatly expedited the completion of the typescript; and my friend Frederick G. Ribble, whose groundbreaking scholarship in the analysis of Fielding’s library and his reading proved invaluable. Dr. Ribble also did me the great personal favor of scrutinizing the penultimate draft of this book with an eye that spared me the embarrassment of many errors and infelicities.

Abbreviations

AF

The Author’s Farce (Original Version), ed. C. B. Woods (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966).

Am

Amelia (1752 [i.e. 1751]), ed. M. C. Battestin (WE 1983).

CGT

The Covent-Garden Tragedy (1732), in Henley, X. 101–34.

Cross

The History of Henry Fielding, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918).

DLB

Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research).

DQE

Don Quixote in England (1734), in Henley, XI. 5–72.

Dudden

Henry Fielding: His Life, Works and Times, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).

E

Eurydice (1737), ed. B. A. Goldgar and H. Amory, in Miscellanies, Volume Two (WE 1993).

EH

Eurydice Hiss’d (1737), in Historical Register and Eurydice Hissed, ed. W. W. Appleton (London: Edward Arnold, 1967).

F

The Fathers: or, The Good-Natured Man (1778), in Henley, XII. 149– 233.

FH

The Female Husband and Other Writings, ed. C. E. Jones (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960).

GSO

The Grub-Street Opera, ed. E. V. Roberts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968).

Henley

W. E. Henley, ed. Henry Fielding Complete Works, 16 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1903; reprinted New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967).

HF

Henry Fielding

HR

Historical Register and Eurydice Hissed, ed. W. W. Appleton (London: Edward Arnold, 1967).

Abbreviations

xiv Hume

R. D. Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre 1728–1737 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

Hyde

Collection of Donald F. Hyde, in care of Viscountess Eccles.

IC

The Intriguing Chambermaid (1734), in Henley, X. 275–323.

JA

Joseph Andrews (1742), ed. M. C. Battestin (WE 1966/67).

JW

Jonathan Wild (1743), ed. B. A. Goldgar and H. Amory, in Miscellanies, Volume Three (WE 1997).

JWN

A Journey from This World to the Next (1743), ed. B. A. Goldgar and H. Amory, in Miscellanies, Volume Two (WE 1993).

Letter(s)

The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding, ed. M. C. Battestin and C. T. Probyn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

Life

M. C. with R. R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, 2nd ed. revised (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

Lot

The Lottery (1732), in Henley, VIII. 265–98.

LSM

Love in Several Masques (1728), in Henley, VII. 5–100.

LW

The Letter Writers (1731), in Henley, IX. 159–205.

MD

The Mock Doctor (1732), in Henley, X. 135–76.

MH

The Modern Husband (1732), in Henley, X. 5–100.

Mi

The Miser (1733), in Henley, X. 177–274.

MLT

Miss Lucy in Town (1742), in Henley, XII. 33–63.

New Essays

M. C. Battestin, New Essays by Henry Fielding: His Contributions to the Craftsman (1734–1739) and Other Early Journalism. With a Stylometric Analysis by M. G. Farringdon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989).

OD

The Old Debauchees (1732), in Henley, IX. 279–322.

OMTW

An Old Man Taught Wisdom: or, The Virgin Unmask’d (1735), in Henley, X. 325–51.

P

Pasquin, ed. OM Brack, W. K. Kupersmith, C. A. Zimansky (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1973).

Probyn

C. T. Probyn, The Sociable Humanist: The Life and Works of James Harris 1709–1780 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

Ribbles

F. G. and A. G. Ribble, Fielding’s Library: An Annotated Catalogue (Charlottesville: Publications of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1996).

RR

Rape upon Rape: or, The Justice Caught in His Own Trap (1730)— reissued later the same year as The Coffee-House Politician—in Henley, IX, 73–158.

Sh

Shamela (1741), in Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. M. C. Battestin (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1961).

TB

The Temple Beau (1730), in Henley, VIII. 101–90.

Abbreviations

xv

TDD

Tumble-Down Dick, or Phaeton in the Suds (1736), in Henley, XII. 5– 31.

TJ

Tom Jones (1749), ed. M. C. Battestin and F. Bowers (WE 1975).

TrT

The Tragedy of Tragedies, in Tom Thumb and the Tragedy of Tragedies, ed. L. J. Morrissey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970).

TT

Tom Thumb in Tom Thumb and The Tragedy of Tragedies, ed. L. J. Morrissey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970).

UG

The Universal Gallant (1735), in Henley, XI. 73–162.

WD

The Wedding Day (1743), ed. B. A. Goldgar and H. Amory, in Miscellanies, Volume Two (WE 1993).

WE

The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding, exec. ed. W. B. Coley, textual eds. F. Bowers and H. Amory (Oxford: Clarendon Press and Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press). Individual volumes of this edition are as follows:

Am

Amelia, ed. M. C. Battestin (1983).

CGJ

The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Office, ed. B. A. Goldgar (1988).

ECIR

An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings, ed. M. R. Zirker (1988).

JA

Joseph Andrews, ed. M. C. Battestin (1966/67).

JJ

The Jacobite’s Journal and Related Writings, ed. W. B. Coley (1975).

Misc 1

Miscellanies, Volume One, ed. H. K. Miller (1972).

Misc 2

Miscellanies, Volume Two, ed. B. A. Goldgar and H. Amory (1993).

Misc 3

Miscellanies, Volume Three, ed. B. A. Goldgar and H. Amory (1997).

TJ

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, 2 vols., ed. M. C. Battestin and F. Bowers (1974/1975); 2nd ed. rev. (Wesleyan University Press only).

TP

The True Patriot and Related Writings, ed. W. B. Coley (1987).

Chronology

1707 22 April

Fielding born at Sharpham Park, his maternal grandfather’s seat near Glastonbury, Somersetshire, to Edmund Fielding and Sarah Gould. Edmund, a nephew of the Earl of Denbigh, was a lieutenant colonel in the army; Sarah was the daughter of Sir Henry Gould, judge of the Queen’s Bench.

1708 16 July

HF’s sister Catharine born at Sharpham Park.

1709 3 October

His sister Ursula born at Sharpham Park.

1710 8 November

His sister Sarah, the future novelist, born at East Stour, Dorset, the family having moved there to a farm provided for them by a bequest from Sir Henry Gould, who died earlier this year.

1713 June

His sister Anne born at East Stour; she died in 1716.

1714 20 June

His sister Beatrice born at East Stour.

1715–16 September–February

The ﬁrst Jacobite rebellion.

1716 22 April

HF’s brother Edmund baptized at East Stour.

Chronology

xviii 1718 14 April

His mother dies and is buried in the churchyard of Christ Church, East Stour.

1719 January (?)

His father, in London, marries Ann Rapha, a Roman Catholic. She would bear Edmund six sons, among them John Fielding, who would become HF’s close friend and his partner, both in business and in the magistracy.

1719–24

HF educated at Eton College, where he made important friendships with George Lyttelton, William Pitt, and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, among others.

1721 10 February

Lady Sarah Gould, HF’s grandmother, ﬁles suit in Chancery to prevent HF’s father from selling the farm at East Stour and to acquire custody of her daughter’s children. On 28 May 1722 the court gave judgment in her favor on both counts: HF would spend his holidays with her at Salisbury, and his sisters remained at Mary Rookes’s boarding school in The Close.

April

As ﬁrst Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Walpole begins his twenty-one-year tenure as prime minister.

1725

After leaving Eton, HF lived for a time in a house his father rented for him at Upton Grey, Hampshire. In the autumn, however, he was at Lyme Regis, Dorset, where he attempted unsuccessfully to abduct his cousin, the heiress Sarah Andrew, a pretty girl of ﬁfteen.

1726 28 October

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels published in London.

1727 10 November

HF’s ﬁrst published works, a pair of poems written on the occasions of George II’s coronation and birthday (11 and 30 October, respectively), were published together on this date; no copy has survived.

1728 29 January

Gay’s Beggar’s Opera opens at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

30 January

HF’s satiric poem The Masquerade published.

16 February

HF’s ﬁrst comedy Love in Several Masques performed at Drury Lane; published 23 February and dedicated to his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Chronology

xix

16 March (N.S.)

HF enrolls at the University of Leiden, Holland, as a student of literature; he returns to England in the summer.

18 May

Pope’s Dunciad published.

20 July

“The Norfolk Lanthorn,” a popular ballad, probably by HF, satirizing the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, is published in The Craftsman.

3 August

HF’s ﬁrst prose essay, a humorous piece on “the Beneﬁt of Laughing,” published anonymously in Mist’s Weekly Journal.

1729 January

HF’s father marries his third wife, Eleanor Hill, a wealthy widow of Salisbury.

22 February (N.S.)

HF resumes his studies at Leiden. Sued for debts by his landlord, bookseller, and Italian tutor, he leaves Leiden in April and may have traveled on the Continent before returning to London.

1730 26 January

HF’s comedy The Temple Beau performed at Goodman’s Fields.

30 March

The Author’s Farce begins a run of forty-two performances at the New Theatre in the Haymarket.

24 April

Tom Thumb begins a run of forty-one performances at the Haymarket.

23 June

HF’s comedy Rape upon Rape: or The Justice Caught in His Own Trap performed at the Haymarket. Under the new title of The Coffee-House Politician, it was revived at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on 4 December.

1731 24 March

The Tragedy of Tragedies: or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great performed at the Haymarket, together with HF’s farce The Letter Writers: or A New Way to Keep a Wife at Home.

22 April

HF’s satirical ballad opera The Welsh Opera: or The Grey Mare the Better Horse performed at the Haymarket. Revised and expanded by HF as The Grub-Street Opera, it was to be performed on 11 June at the Haymarket but was withdrawn at the eleventh hour and never acted.

1732 1 January

HF reappears at Drury Lane with The Lottery, a farce. For the next eighteen months at Drury Lane he would be the most successful dramatist in London.

xx

Chronology

14 February

His dark “heroic” comedy The Modern Husband begins a successful run of fourteen nights. HF, having dedicated the published version of the play to Walpole, subsequently became the target of abuse from The Grub-Street Journal.

1 June

The Old Debauchees performed, together with The CoventGarden Tragedy.

23 June

First performance of The Mock Doctor: or The Dumb Lady Cur’d, adapted from Molie`re.

1733 17 February

The Miser, HF’s adaptation of comedies by Molie`re and Plautus, opens at Drury Lane.

6 April

HF’s burlesque ballad opera Deborah: or A Wife for You All, plays one night at Drury Lane.

May

Theophilus Cibber leads a mutiny of most of the principal actors at Drury Lane, taking them to the Little Haymarket Theatre. HF remains loyal to the management.

1734 15 January

The revised version of The Author’s Farce performed at Drury Lane, together with HF’s two-act comedy The Intriguing Chambermaid, adapted from the French of Regnard.

March

The management capitulates to the rebel actors, who return in triumph to Drury Lane. HF’s lucrative tenure as house playwright comes to an end, and he takes Don Quixote in England to the Haymarket. This month he begins contributing satiric essays to the opposition journal The Craftsman; his clandestine association with the paper continues until 1739.

5 April

Don Quixote in England performed at the Haymarket and subsequently published with a dedication to the Earl of Chesterﬁeld, leader of the opposition.

28 November

HF marries Charlotte Cradock in the church of St. Mary the Virgin, Charlcombe, near Bath.

1735 6 January

HF returns to Drury Lane with his popular farce An Old Man Taught Wisdom: or, The Virgin Unmask’d.

10 February

HF’s ﬁve-act comedy The Universal Gallant: or The Different Husbands is badly received.

1736 5 March

HF returns to the Little Haymarket Theatre as “the Great Mogul” at the head of his own company of actors. Pasquin, a satire with political coloring, begins its successful run.

Chronology

xxi

27 April

HF’s daughter Charlotte born.

29 April

Tumble-Down Dick: or Phaeton in the Suds opens at the Haymarket.

27 May

HF stages and puffs George Lillo’s tragedy Fatal Curiosity, for which he wrote the prologue.

1737 19 February

Eurydice: or The Devil Henpeck’d is “damned” when it opens at Drury Lane.

21 March

Having returned to the Haymarket with a new company, HF stages another popular comedy of social and political satire, The Historical Register for the Year 1736, together with the farce Eurydice Hiss’d: or A Word to the Wise.

25 March

HF is the probable author of the article published in the Daily Journal for this date and also separately printed, entitled Some Thoughts on the Present State of the Theatres, and the Consequences of an Act to destroy the Liberty of the Stage.

23 May

HF’s ﬁnal production at the Haymarket, marking the end of his theatrical career.

21 June

Precipitated by HF’s dramatic satires, the Theatrical Licensing Act receives the royal assent and becomes law; it would remain in force until 1968.

1 November

HF admitted to the Middle Temple and begins preparing to qualify as a barrister.

1738 13 May

HF as “Mum Budget” publishes in Common Sense an essay on the wisdom of remaining silent in Walpole’s England. The holograph of the essay is the only extant literary prose manuscript by HF.

1739 14 May

Completion of the sale of the family farm at East Stour, Dorset, by HF and his siblings.

19 October

War with Spain declared.

15 November

Under the pseudonym “Hercules Vinegar,” HF, assisted by James Ralph, begins writing The Champion, a journal published three times a week consisting of humorous and satirical comment on moral and social topics, and allied politically to the opposition. He would continue his active association with the paper to the end of 1740.

Chronology

xxii 1740 March–June

HF’s half-brother John Fielding, age nineteen, is blinded by the incompetence of a surgeon.

20 June

HF called early to the bar at the Middle Temple.

10 October

Publication of HF’s translation of Adlerfelt’s Military History of Charles XII, King of Sweden.

6 November

Publication of Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded.

28 November

HF’s father, Lieutenant General of the army and Colonel of the Regiment of Invalids based at Chelsea Royal Hospital, is committed for debts he could not pay to the Fleet Prison, where he would spend the rest of his life within “The Rules,” an area in the immediate neighborhood of the prison.

December

HF is the probable author of the antiministerial pamphlet, originally carried as a serial in The Champion, entitled An Address to the Electors of Great Britain.

1741 7 January

Publication of HF’s verse epistle to George Bubb Dodington, Of True Greatness.

15 January

HF, probably assisted by William Young, is the probable author of the short-lived magazine The History of Our Own Times, which began publication this day and ended with the fourth number (5 March).

22 January

Publication of HF’s mock-heroic poem, the Vernoniad, satirizing Walpole.

6–20 March

HF conﬁned for debt in a bailiff’s sponging house.

7 March

HF’s father, though imprisoned for debt, marries a fourth time, to Elizabeth Sparrye, a woman in her thirties said to be his servant.

2 April

Publication of An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, a parody of Richardson’s Pamela.

16 April

HF is the probable author of The Crisis: A Sermon, an antiministerial electioneering pamphlet.

18 June

HF’s father, aged sixty-one, dies in “The Rules” of the Fleet Prison and on 25 June is buried in the middle aisle of St. Bride’s Church in London.

8 September

HF writes James Harris of Salisbury, inaugurating his most important extant correspondence of a personal nature.

15 December

Publication of The Opposition: A Vision, HF’s satire of his former friends.

Chronology 1741–42

xxiii Henry, HF’s only son by Charlotte, is born.

1742 2–6 February

Walpole resigns as Prime Minister and is created Earl of Orford.

22 February

Publication of The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, the ﬁrst comic novel in English, inaugurating HF’s career as a novelist.

9 March

HF’s daughter Charlotte dies in her ﬁfth year and is buried at St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

2 April

Publication of HF’s A Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough.

6 May

HF’s farce Miss Lucy in Town produced at Drury Lane and published.

31 May

Publication of HF and William Young’s translation of Aristophanes’ Plutus, the God of Riches.

5 June

HF, unable to publish the Miscellanies because of his “Indisposition last Winter, and a Train of melancholy Accidents scarce to be parallell’d,” apologizes to the subscribers in the Daily Post.

1743

Some time this year HF’s daughter Henrietta Eleanor (called “Harriet”) was born; she married Colonel Montressor in August 1766 and died in December of that year.

16 February

Publication of Some Papers Proper to be Read before the R[oya]l Society, Concerning the Terrestrial Chrysipus, Golden-Foot or Guinea . . . Collected by Petrus Gualterus, HF’s satire of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and of the miser Peter Walter.

17 February

HF’s comedy The Wedding-Day performed at Drury Lane.

7 April

Publication of HF’s Miscellanies in three volumes, including poems and essays, The Wedding Day, A Journey from This World to the Next, and The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great.

1744 March

War with France declared.

13 July

Publication of the second edition of Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple, with a preface by HF.

14 November

Charlotte Fielding buried in St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Soon after, HF’s sister Sarah would move to Old Boswell Court to supervise the household; she would remain there until HF remarried in November 1747.

xxiv

Chronology

23 November

Publication of An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Hanover Rat, HF’s parody of Henry Baker’s treatise on the polype, written to satirize the government’s foreign policy.

December

The “Broad-Bottom” government is formed, in which Walpole’s prote´ge´ Henry Pelham, his brother the Duke of Newcastle, and Lord Hardwicke joined with the ChesterﬁeldCobham faction including HF’s friends and patrons Lyttelton, Dodington, the Duke of Bedford, and soon William Pitt as well.

1745 28 February

HF in the General Evening Post optimistically announces the imminent publication of his abortive two-volume work on criminal law, “An Institute of the Pleas of the Crown.”

2 July

Publication of The Charge to the Jury: or, The Sum of the Evidence, on the Trial of A.B.C.D. and E.F. All M.D. for the Death of one Robert at Orfud, a satire of the physicians who ministered to Walpole in his ﬁnal illness.

3 October

Publication of A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain, on the danger posed by the Jacobite rebellion, now a real and present danger.

7 October

Publication of The History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland.

12–15 October

Publication of A Dialogue between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender.

17 October

HF’s anti-Catholic comedy, The Debauchees: or, The Jesuit Caught, produced at Drury Lane—a revision of The Old Debauchees (1732).

5 November

The ﬁrst number of HF’s anti-Jacobitical periodical The True Patriot: and The History of Our Own Times, to be continued every Tuesday to no. 33 (17 June 1746).

1746 14 April

The Duke of Bedford appoints HF High Steward of the New Forest and of the Manor of Lyndhurst, Hampshire.

16 April

The defeat of the Jacobite rebels at the Battle of Culloden, ending the rebellion.

12 November

Publication of The Female Husband: or, The Surprising History of Mrs. Mary, alias Mr. George Hamilton.

1747 25 February

Publication of HF’s Ovid’s Art of Love Paraphrased, and Adapted to the Present Times.

Chronology

xxv

10 April

Publication of Sarah Fielding’s Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple, to which HF contributed the preface and Letters XL–XLIV.

23 June

Publication of A Dialogue between a Gentleman of London, Agent for two Court Candidates, and an Honest Alderman of the Country Party, an electioneering pamphlet written in behalf of the Pelham ministry.

27 November

With Lyttelton attending, HF marries his cook-maid Mary Daniel in the sixth month of her pregnancy; the wedding taking place at St. Benet, Paul’s Wharf, London.

1 December

Publication of volumes 1–2 of Richardson’s Clarissa.

5 December

The ﬁrst number of The Jacobite’s Journal, a periodical supporting the Pelham ministry, published every Saturday until no. 49 (5 November 1748).

24 December

Publication of A Proper Answer to a Late Scurrilous Libel, entitled, An Apology for the Conduct of a late celebrated Second-Rate Minister.

1748 21 January

Publication of Smollett’s Roderick Random.

25 February

HF’s son William is baptized at the church of St. Mary the Virgin, Twickenham; he died in 1820.

28 March

Under the name “Madame de la Nash,” HF, assisted by his wife and a puppet master, opens a “Breakfasting-Room” in Panton Street, near the Haymarket, and until 2 June stages satirical puppet shows featuring the antics of Punch and Joan.

28 April

Publication of volumes 3–4 of Richardson’s Clarissa.

30 July

Lord Chancellor Hardwicke signs the ﬁat appointing HF to the Commission of the Peace for Westminster, but HF would not begin functioning in that capacity until November.

15 October

HF writes Richardson, praising Clarissa.

18 October

The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, ending the War of the Austrian Succession.

25 October

HF takes the oath and pays the fees enabling him to act as justice of the peace for Westminster.

2 November

The ﬁrst signs of HF’s activities as a magistrate.

6 December

Publication of the ﬁnal volumes of Richardson’s Clarissa.

9 December

HF is established at Bow Street, Covent Garden, the house in which he will continue administering justice for ﬁve years.

xxvi 19 December

Chronology At the Duke of Bedford’s request, who has agreed to enable him to satisfy the property requirement for the magistracy of Middlesex County, HF resigns the patent of High Steward of the New Forest.

1749 6 January

HF’s daughter Mary Amelia is baptized at St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden; she died before the year was out and was buried there on 17 December.

13 January

Having qualiﬁed for the Middlesex magistracy and taken his oath, HF begins acting in that commission.

3 February

Publication of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Three further editions would be published this year—a total of 10,000 copies.

21 July

Publication of HF’s Charge delivered to the Grand Jury, HF having been chosen chairman of the Westminster Sessions in March. With a copy of this pamphlet sent this day to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, HF enclosed the draft of “a bill” he wrote proposing ways to reform the police of the metropolis.

18 November

Publication of A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez, written by HF to justify his own and the government’s part in the unpopular execution of a young man apprehended during riots in the Strand in July.

22 November– 8 December

In the hotly contested Westminster election HF as “court justice” busied himself preserving order and promoting the interests of the ministerial candidate, Viscount Trentham.

5 December

HF publishes a satirical broadsheet directed at the opposition’s incendiary and propagandist Paul Whitehead, entitled The Covent-Garden Journal, No. 1 . . . By Paul Wronghead.

1750 21 January

HF’s daughter Sophia baptized at St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden; she died sometime after 1754 and before December 1756.

January–February

HF begins organizing the Bow Street Runners into London’s ﬁrst modern police force.

19 February

HF, together with his half-brother John Fielding and certain other “Gentlemen,” announces the opening of the Universal Register Ofﬁce, a successful business venture.

5 July

HF’s eldest sister Catharine dies in her forty-second year and is buried on 9 July in St. Paul’s Church, Hammersmith, where she had been living with her sisters Ursula and Beatrice.

12 December

HF’s sister Ursula dies and is buried at St. Paul’s, Hammersmith.

Chronology

xxvii

1751 19 January

Publication of An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers.

21 February

Publication of HF’s Plan of the Universal Register Office.

24 February

HF’s sister Beatrice dies and is buried at St. Paul’s, Hammersmith.

25 February

Publication of Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle, containing a vicious attack on HF and his patron George Lyttelton.

30 July

John Fielding appointed to the Westminster magistracy.

19 December

Publication of Amelia, HF’s last novel.

1752 4 January

The ﬁrst number of The Covent-Garden Journal, a periodical of literary, social, and moral comment designed also to promote the Universal Register Ofﬁce and to publicize HF’s activities as magistrate; continued to No. 72 (25 November).

15 January

Publication of Smollett’s A Faithful Narrative of the base and inhuman Arts that were lately practised upon the Brain of Habbakuk Hilding, a vicious satire of HF.

13 April

Publication of Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder, with an introduction and conclusion by HF, who hoped the work would serve to discourage violent crime.

3 December

HF’s daughter Louisa baptized at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden; she died and was buried on 10 May with HF’s sisters at St. Paul’s, Hammersmith.

1753 29 January

Publication of A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor.

20 March

Publication of A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning, HF’s account of his reasons for believing her innocent of the charge of perjury.

1754 14 January

John Fielding qualiﬁes for the magistracy of Middlesex and in June moves into the house in Bow Street.

19 March

Publication of the revised version of Jonathan Wild.

June

Suffering for some considerable time from the gout and a “dropsy” (symptoms associated with cirrhosis of the liver) HF writes his will.

Chronology

xxviii 6 April

HF’s son Allen, named after HF’s patron Ralph Allen, is baptized at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. He would become an eminent clergyman, and through him the family line continued. He died in 1823, aged sixty-nine.

26 June

HF leaves London to begin the journey to Lisbon on The Queen of Portugal, accompanied by his wife and Harriet, his daughter by his ﬁrst wife, Margaret Collier, the family’s servant Isabella Ash, and William Aldrit, his servant and amanuensis.

7 August

They arrive at Lisbon, and soon take up lodgings in Junqueira, two miles west of the city.

1 October

Left behind at Ealing to care for the children, Mary Fielding’s mother, Elizabeth Daniel, commits suicide.

8 October

HF dies and is buried in the English Cemetery in Lisbon.

1755 10 February

The sale of HF’s library begins.

25 February

Publication of The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (the socalled Humphrys version) together with A Fragment of a Comment on L. Bolingbroke’s Essays.

1761

HF’s “Treatise on the Ofﬁce of Constable” published in John Fielding’s Extracts from such of the Penal Laws, as particularly relate to the Peace and Good Order of the Metropolis.

1 October

Justice John Fielding is knighted.

1762

Publication of The Works of Henry Fielding Esq; with the Life of the Author by Arthur Murphy. Published in two forms: 4 volumes quarto, 8 volumes octavo. The ﬁrst (though incomplete and imperfect) edition of HF’s works, with a frontispiece portrait of HF by Hogarth.

1778 30 November

HF’s lost comedy The Fathers: or, The Good-Natured Man performed at Drury Lane.

Residences

1707–10: SHARPHAM PARK, Glastonbury, Somersetshire—HF and his sisters Catharine (July 1708) and Ursula (October 1709) were born here in Sharpham House, the seat of HF’s maternal grandparents Sir Henry and Lady Sarah Gould, and they were baptized at St. Benedict’s Church. The house, designed early in the sixteenth century by Abbot Richard Bere, a distinguished humanist and friend of Erasmus, is in the Gothic style, like Squire Allworthy’s Paradise Hall in Tom Jones (I. iv); from the threshold of the house there is a clear view of the famous Tor across the Levels, and the grounds of the estate extended to that part of the abbey lands known as “Paradise”—one of the names for Glastonbury in local tradition. When Sir Henry died in 1710, Sharpham came into the possession of his eldest son Davidge Gould, HF’s uncle and lifelong friend. By the terms of his grandfather’s will, a sizable farm at East Stour, Dorset, was left to Sarah, HF’s mother, and her children; Edmund Fielding, her husband, was expressly excluded from ownership of the property. In 1710 the Fielding family moved to East Stour. 1710–39: EAST STOUR, Dorset—The farm at East Stour is situated in the pleasant Dorset countryside; it is contiguous with the parish church, Christ’s, where HF’s siblings Sarah (November 1710), Anne (June 1713), Beatrice (June 1714), and Edmund (April 1716) were baptized, and where, in the churchyard, his infant sister Anne (August 1716), his mother (April 1718), and his grandmother Lady Sarah Gould (June 1733) were buried. Gillingham, of which East Stour is a chapelry, is nearby, and Shaftesbury is about six miles away. After their mother died, their father left the children in the care of their great aunt, Lady Gould’s sister Mrs. Katherine Cottington, and took a residence in London, where in a matter of months he married a widow named Anne Rapha, a Roman Catholic with children of her own in convent schools abroad. By the time Edmund returned with her to East Stour in May 1719, the children, and

2

A Henry Fielding Companion

HF in particular, were upset and rebellious—an attitude encouraged by Mrs. Cottington. To prevent their father’s appropriating the rents of the farm and to rescue them from being brought up in a papist household, Lady Gould, who moved to Salisbury, Wiltshire, in 1720, brought an action in Chancery to obtain custody of the children. In 1722 the court found in her favor: the girls would continue at Mary Rookes’s boarding school in the cathedral Close, while their infant brother was looked after by Lady Gould and Mrs. Cottington; HF, who had entered Eton College in 1719, was ordered to spend his vacations with his grandmother. But the farm was held in trust for him and his siblings until young Edmund came of age in 1737, at which time they determined to sell the property. Until the sale became ﬁnal in May 1739, the farm at East Stour would be HF’s base in the country. 1719– : BLENHEIM STREET, London—When his father returned to town from East Stour with his new wife in August 1719, HF lived with them at Blenheim Street, St. James, until he was sent off to Eton College in October. Until May 1722, when the Lord Chancellor ordered that he should spend his vacations with his grandmother in Salisbury, Wiltshire, HF may have returned to his father’s house from time to time. 1719–24: ETON COLLEGE, Windsor, Berkshire—From October 1719 to 1724 HF was a schoolboy at Eton under Head Master Henry Bland. In April 1721 he eloped to his grandmother’s house in Salisbury, Wiltshire, but subsequently continued his studies at Eton. There he would make valuable friendships with George Lyttelton, William Pitt, and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams. 1720–24: SALISBURY, Wiltshire—HF’s grandmother lived in St. Martin’s Church Street, near St. Anne’s Gate of the cathedral Close, from 1720 until her death in 1733. HF spent his vacations from Eton College with her there, and he continued visiting the city from time to time thereafter. Some of the most important relationships of his life originated in Salisbury. There he met his beloved ﬁrst wife, Charlotte Cradock, and his close friend James Harris, who lived across the street from each other in houses on either side of St. Anne’s Gate, as well as his friends Dr. and Mrs. John Barker and the Collier and Hoadly families. Others, such as the surgeon Edward Goldwyre, the attorney Robert Stillingfleet, and the philosophical tallow chandler Thomas Chubb, are alluded to in HF’s novels. See also Milford Manor below. 1725–28: UPTON GREY, Hampshire—After HF left Eton College in 1724, his ofﬁcial residence, at least by the autumn of 1725, was a house his father rented for him in this small Hampshire village. The house, probably the one known today as the Village Farm House, is represented in comically morose terms in HF’s poem “A Description of U[pto]n G[rey]” (1728).

Residences

3

1728–29: LEIDEN, Holland—While a student of literature at the University of Leiden in the spring of 1728 and again in the spring of 1729, HF ﬁrst resided at a hotel called the Castle of Antwerp before moving to lodgings in the house of the shoemaker Jan Oson. In his absence in July 1730, an action for recovery of unpaid debts was brought against him in the university court by his landlord, his Italian tutor, and his booksellers. 1729–30(?): MILFORD MANOR, Wiltshire—There is a tradition that HF once lodged at Milford Manor, less than a mile’s walk from Lady Sarah Gould’s residence in Salisbury, Wiltshire; and a set of verses, addressed to “Clarissa” in HF’s hand and engraved in a window of the summer house there (the pane in question is now in the Salisbury Museum), would appear to conﬁrm that he did, though more likely at a time around 1729–30 than, as the tradition would have it, during the period when he was writing Tom Jones (see Life:94, 636 n. 92). 1730: DOVER STREET, Mayfair, London—Judging from the scene HF describes in his poem “To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole” (1730), he was living at that time in a garret room of a house on the east side of Dover Street that his father and stepmother leased to a peruke maker. From his window he looked down enviously on the procession of placemen and pensioners attending the prime minister’s levee at Arlington Street. 1734— : BATH, Somersetshire—HF frequently visited Bath from at least as early as 1734, when he and Charlotte Fielding were married by the Reverend Walter Robbins, a native of Salisbury, Wiltshire, and rector of St. Mary’s Church, Charlcombe, situated about two miles north of the city; they were residing then in St. James’s parish, Bath. It may be that they often stayed with Robbins when visiting the city: Robbins lived in St. James’s parish, in a house on Abbey Green, and at the time of HF’s letter from Bath to James Harris of 8 September 1741, he was staying there with Robbins (Letter 10). But for the most part it is not certainly known where HF and Charlotte lodged when they visited the city. In the autumn of 1743 they were renting a house at Twerton, across the river. There is also a tradition that, after Charlotte’s death, HF sometimes stayed with his sister Sarah Fielding at Widcome Lodge, Church Lane, and sometimes at Widcome House, the residence of Ralph Allen’s brother-inlaw Philip Bennet. 1735: BUCKINGHAM STREET, London—In February 1735, when HF’s play The Universal Gallant was staged at Drury Lane, he and Charlotte Fielding were staying with her mother, who was dying, at York Buildings, Buckingham Street.

4

A Henry Fielding Companion

1739—41: ESSEX STREET, London—From the time he returned to town from the country in August 1739 until he moved to Spring Garden, Charing Cross, London, HF and Charlotte Fielding lived in a substantial house his bookseller John Nourse had found for him in Essex Street (now No. 24), adjacent to the Middle Temple. (See Letter 6; N. Maslin 1983.) 1741–43: SPRING GARDEN, Charing Cross, London—Certainly not later than the winter of 1741–42—the burial records of St. Martin-in-the-Fields for 9 March 1742 indicate that the Fieldings were living there when their daughter Charlotte died—HF removed his family from Essex Street to Spring Garden, Charing Cross, a safe haven for debtors within the Verge of the Court. He would have thought seriously about such a move after being conﬁned for debt in a bailiff’s sponging house for a fortnight in March 1741. In Amelia (1751) the Booths took refuge in Spring Garden for the same reason. 1743: BROMPTON, near Knightsbridge—In February and March 1743 HF and Charlotte Fielding were living in lodgings at the Flask Inn, Brompton, in the western outskirts of London, a move perhaps prompted by Charlotte’s illness. Because Brompton was somewhat warmer and the air fresher there, it was considered one of the most salubrious places in England, particularly beneﬁcial to those suffering from consumption. (See Letters 15–16.) 1743: TWERTON, Somersetshire—(See 1734, Bath.) 1744–48: OLD BOSWELL COURT, London—In the autumn of 1744 (sometime before 20 December) HF had taken a comfortable house in Old Boswell Court, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Inns of Court. It was a neighborhood popular with prosperous lawyers, and after Charlotte Fielding’s death in November, he would live there for more than three years with his sister Sarah Fielding presiding over the household until embarrassing circumstances forced him to move the family to discreet lodgings in Twickenham. He continued to write to the Duke of Bedford’s agent from Old Boswell Court until March 1748. (See de Castro 1916.) 1748–49(?): TWICKENHAM, Middlesex—Having gotten his servant Mary Daniel with child, HF married her on 27 November 1747 and shortly thereafter, while retaining the house in Old Boswell Court, moved the family to a little wooden house in Back Lane (now Holly Road), Twickenham, where his son William was born, and baptized at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin on 25 February 1747. Like Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu before him, HF enjoyed this suburban retreat, situated on the Thames about ten miles from London. He assured James Harris in a letter of November 1749 that he had “laid out all [his] Money at present in purchasing a little Estate at Twickenham” (Letter 55); however, no record of such a purchase survives.

Residences

5

1748: PANTON STREET, London—In the spring of 1748 (from 25 March to 2 June) HF leased a commodious building (probably the old Tennis Court) in Panton Street near the Haymarket, where, under the name of Madame de la Nash, he and his wife, Mary Daniel Fielding, gave breakfast and entertained polite audiences with satiric puppet shows. 1748: BROWNLOW STREET, London—By 25 October 1748 HF and his family had come to town from Twickenham and temporarily taken a house in Brownlow Street, near Drury Lane, “where,” as his sister Ursula Fielding wrote Mrs. John Barker in a letter of that date, “he intends to administer Justice” (Letter 112). 1748: MEARD’S COURT, Soho—By 21 November 1748 HF, suffering from the gout, had moved to a house in Meard’s Court, Wardour Street, near St. Anne’s Church in Soho (Letter 42). 1748–54: BOW STREET, Covent Garden—By 9 December 1748 HF was at last established in the famous house in Bow Street, Covent Garden, formerly occupied by Sir Thomas DeVeil. Here he lived with his family when in town and continued administering justice until May 1754, when, in the ﬁnal stages of the disease that killed him, he left London for his house at Ealing. 1750–52: BARNES, Surrey—To escape the noxious air of Covent Garden, HF, when prosperous enough to afford it, always had a base in the suburbs to retire to; and a credible tradition has it that sometime in the early 1750s he lived at Barnes, Surrey, in Milbourne House, Barnes Green. The likeliest period for his tenure there would be from the summer of 1750 to the latter part of 1752; according to the rate books, he had moved to the rather grand estate at Fordhook, Ealing, sometime after 22 July 1752 and before 14 February 1753. (Maslin 1983 and Life:676 n. 142, 682 n. 338.) 1753–54: EALING, Middlesex—Certainly by February 1753 and possibly a few months earlier, HF had leased for a period of fourteen years Fordhook, a ﬁne house situated on forty-four acres at Ealing, about six miles west of London, to which he escaped when he could from “justice business” and the unwholesome air of Covent Garden. In May 1754 he left London for the last time; and in June his half-brother, John Fielding, assumed his place at Bow Street. It was from Fordhook on 26 June that HF departed with his family to begin the voyage to Lisbon. Left behind at Fordhook to look after Mary Fielding’s children, HF’s mother-in-law, Elizabeth Daniel, grew despondent and on 1 October committed suicide. After HF’s death the lease to the property was acquired by his friend John Ranby for the considerable sum of £800.

6

A Henry Fielding Companion

1754: LISBON, Portugal—Soon after arriving at Lisbon on 7 August, HF and his family moved to a small unfurnished house in Junqueira, two miles west of Lisbon. He died there on 8 October and was buried in the English Cemetery in Lisbon.

Family and Household

ALDRIT, William (d. 1800), for many years master of a boarding school at Fortnight, near Bath. According to obituaries in the Bath Herald and the Gentleman’s Magazine, Aldrit is said to have accompanied HF to Lisbon as his amanuensis in 1754. If, as seems likely, he is the “William” who acted as HF’s manservant at this time, he fell ill soon after he arrived at Lisbon on 7 August and returned to England a month later, prompting HF to write his brother John Fielding asking that he send a replacement. Aldrit is important for the part he may have played in preparing the manuscript drafts of HF’s posthumous work, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, whose alternative versions have perplexed editors. (See Keymer 1996a.) ASH, Isabella, or “Belle” as HF called her, was the family’s maidservant. She witnessed HF’s will shortly before accompanying him to Lisbon in 1754. BARBER, Frances, nursery maid in Edmund Fielding’s household at East Stour, Dorset, when HF, his sisters, and his brother were children. In 1721, once Edmund had remarried after the death of their mother, their grandmother Lady Sarah Gould brought an action in Chancery against him, suing (successfully as it proved) for custody of the children. Frances Barber’s testimony at the trial provides a rich source of information about conditions in the family at this time and about HF’s unruly behavior as a boy. BENTHAM, Marie. During HF’s childhood she was Edmund Fielding’s housekeeper at East Stour. To judge from the fact that in 1714 she was capable of lending Edmund the considerable sum of £600, she appears to have been much more than a menial member of the family. When HF’s father remarried in 1719, however, she lost her position, and in 1721 testiﬁed in Lady Sarah Gould’s behalf when HF’s grandmother successfully sued Edmund for custody

8

A Henry Fielding Companion

of the children, at which time Bentham added to his discomﬁture by winning an action against him to recover the debt he had incurred seven years earlier. BOOR, Richard, HF’s steward, managed the farm at Fordhook, Ealing. Before HF left for Lisbon, Boor witnessed his will. In Lisbon, HF came to suspect that he was cheating him by padding expenses (Letter 74). BURT, Joseph, Edmund Fielding’s servant. In the custody case brought against Edmund in Chancery in 1720 by HF’s grandmother, Lady Sarah Gould, Burt testiﬁed in behalf of HF’s father. In 1726 in St. James, London, he cited HF at the King’s Bench for physically assaulting him. COTTINGTON, Katherine (d. 1739), HF’s great-aunt, was the widow of Charles Cottington (d. 1698) of Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire, a gentleman of a distinguished and powerful Roman Catholic family. She was godmother to HF’s eldest sister, Catharine, who would inherit her estate. After the death of HF’s mother in 1718, Mrs. Cottington supervised the household at East Stour, Dorset; and after his father, Edmund Fielding, remarried the following year, she testiﬁed against him in the suit successfully brought by her sister, Lady Sarah Gould, to gain custody of the children. In 1720 she moved with HF’s sisters and infant brother to live with Lady Gould in Salisbury, where HF would spend his holidays from Eton. CRADOCK, Charlotte. See Fielding, Charlotte Cradock. DANIEL, Mary. See Fielding, Mary Daniel. DELABORDE, Anne, HF and his sisters’ French governess at East Stour. To judge from her dislike of Edmund Fielding’s second wife, whom she scorned as a “papist,” she was a Huguenot. Her presence in the family may help to account for HF’s later command of French, but she is chieﬂy important for the evidence she gave in Chancery against HF’s father in the action Lady Sarah Gould brought to gain custody of HF, his sisters, and his infant brother. Her detailed account of their stepmother’s harsh treatment of the children was particularly damning. DENBIGH and DESMOND, Earls of. Through his father, General Edmund Fielding, HF was connected to one of the noblest families in the kingdom, the Earls of Denbigh and Desmond, who claimed descent from the Hapsburgs of Germany. That claim, based on papers forged by Basil, the second Earl, was shown to be spurious at the beginning of the twentieth century (see Round 1901: 216ff.), but HF had no reason to doubt its authenticity. Nor did the historian Edward Gibbon, who in his Memoirs predicted that Tom Jones would “outlive the palace of the Escurial, and the imperial eagle of the house of Austria.” HF

Family and Household

9

proudly used a seal in which that eagle was displayed, and he was not above referring to Maria Theresa, in a letter to James Harris (5 October 1745), as “my Cousin of Hungary.” The title was conferred on William Feilding (1582–1643), the ﬁrst Earl of Denbigh, in 1622, owing chieﬂy to his marriage with the sister of George Villiers, the future Duke of Buckingham (and father of the second Duke, author of The Rehearsal [1672], a play that inﬂuenced HF’s later experiments in “selfreferential” comedy). HF descended from George (1616–65), Basil’s younger brother, who would add to the title of Denbigh those, in the Irish peerage, of Earl of Desmond, Lord Feilding of Lecaghe, and Viscount Callan of Ireland. By marriage to Bridget Stanhope of Suffolk, George had three daughters and six sons, the youngest of whom was Reverend Dr. John Fielding, HF’s grandfather, who became an eminent divine in the Church of England and was the ﬁrst of the family to settle in the West Country, in Dorset, where HF would spend his boyhood. John’s eldest brother, William (1640–85), inherited the titles, becoming third Earl of Denbigh and second of Desmond; he was the grandfather of the brilliant bluestocking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whom HF greatly admired and who would serve him well as friend and counselor. HF’s father was one of seven children born to John Fielding and Dorothy Cockayne. During HF’s lifetime his aristocratic relatives included Basil (1669?–1717), the fourth Earl of Denbigh and Desmond, and William (1697–1755), the ﬁfth Earl. There is a story, told by HF’s son, that the latter, who spelled the family name Feilding, once asked HF why it was “that you put the i before the e, writing it Fielding, while we put the e before the i, writing it Feilding?” HF is said to have replied, “I cannot tell, my Lord, except it be that my branch of the family were the ﬁrst that knew how to spell” (Nichols 1812:3:384). If this exchange actually happened, it was a brash quip, but it does not appear to have cost HF the friendship of his noble kinsman, who is in the list of subscribers to the Miscellanies (1743) as having ordered three sets on royal paper. FIELDING, Anne. See Fielding, Henry: siblings. FIELDING, Beatrice. See Fielding, Henry: siblings. FIELDING, Catharine. See Fielding, Henry: siblings. FIELDING, Charlotte Cradock (d. 1744), HF’s ﬁrst wife. Little is known of Charlotte or her family. With her sisters Mary Penelope (d. 1729) and Catherine, who for a time was her rival for HF’s attentions, she lived with her mother, Elizabeth, from 1714 to 1733 at Salisbury, in a substantial house adjacent to St. Anne’s Gate in the cathedral Close. Directly across the way was the handsome Palladian house of James Harris, now called Malmesbury House. As those who knew them attest, both girls were “pretty,” but Charlotte’s beauty was marred by a painful accident, remembered by HF’s cousin, Lady Bute, as

10

A Henry Fielding Companion

“a frightful overturn, which destroyed the gristle of her nose.” This injury, which the heroine suffers in Amelia (1751, II. i), was, as HF assured his readers elsewhere, “absolutely cured” by a “famous Surgeon” (probably Charlotte’s neighbor in The Close, HF’s friend Edward Goldwyre)—cured so skillfully indeed that, except for a small scar, her beauty was restored. Unfortunately, by neglecting to mention this happy result in the ﬁrst edition of his novel, HF invited the ridicule of critics who affected to admire the unique attractions of his noseless heroine. In 1734 her mother’s illness caused her to leave Salisbury for Bath. At Charlcombe nearby, HF and Charlotte were married that year on 28 November. Mrs. Cradock died in London three months later, in February 1735, leaving her entire estate to Charlotte, while for some unknown reason cutting her sister off with just a shilling. Catherine, having adopted the name of their deceased sister Mary, died under mysterious circumstances two months later at Codicote, Hertfordshire. Whatever worldly goods she had were granted to Charlotte as next of kin. Arthur Murphy, HF’s ﬁrst biographer, stated that Charlotte had brought HF a dowry of £1,500, a large sum, and these legacies would presumably have added to it; but as his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu remarked, such was HF’s carelessness with money that no amount of it would have been adequate to meet his expenses. Charlotte would bear him ﬁve children: Charlotte (1736–42), Henry (1742–50), Henrietta Eleanor, called Harriet (1743–66), and, less certainly, Penelope (d. 1740) and Catherine (d. 1743). She died at Bath in 1744—in HF’s arms, it is said. Her body was carried to London for burial beside her mother and daughters in the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields on 14 November. While she lived, Charlotte was to HF, as he declared in the preface to the Miscellanies (1743), “one from whom I draw all the solid Comfort of my Life”; he would keep her memory fresh in the heroines of his novels, Sophia Western and Amelia Booth. FIELDING, Edmund (1680–1741), General, HF’s father. Through his father, Reverend Dr. John Fielding, Edmund was related to the earls of Denbigh and Desmond. A distinguished soldier, he rose through the ranks of commissioned ofﬁcers, from ensign in 1696 at the age of sixteen to lieutenant general in 1739. As a young captain he was cited by the great Duke of Marlborough for gallantry at the Battle of Blenheim (1704); in 1719 he was made colonel of the newly created Regiment of Invalids, a regiment formed from the out-pensioners of Chelsea Royal Hospital—a command he held for the rest of his life; and during 1736–37 he served as military governor of the island of Jersey. He was, it appears, an amiable and charming man who was attractive to women. In 1706 Sarah Gould, daughter of the eminent judge Sir Henry Gould and his wife Sarah, was so much in love with him that she risked her parents’ displeasure by marrying Edmund without their consent in her twenty-third year. By her, Edmund had seven children (see Fielding, Henry: siblings)—the eldest being

Family and Household

11

HF, born 22 April 1707 at Sharpham Park, the Gould family seat at Glastonbury. Before his death in 1710 Sarah’s father purchased, for her and her children only (by the terms of the will Edmund was to “have nothing to do with it”), a substantial farm at East Stour, Dorset, where HF would spend his boyhood. The provision to exclude Edmund from all rights to this estate was prudent; for all his qualities, he was reckless with money and usually in debt. He was also incapable of living without a wife. When HF’s mother died in April 1718, Edmund soon married again—a certain Anne Rapha, a widow and a Roman Catholic whose daughters were being educated in a “monastery” abroad. Content to live with his new wife in London in the fashionable neighborhood of St. James’s, without the encumbrance of his children, he sent HF to Eton College and committed his sisters and infant brother to the care of their grandmother, Lady Gould, in Salisbury. In August 1720, having suffered heavy losses in the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, Edmund sold a large part of the property at East Stour that legally belonged exclusively to Sarah’s children. These injuries to her daughter’s memory and her grandchildren’s inheritance moved Lady Gould in February 1721 to take action against Edmund in Chancery, initiating what proved to be a successful suit to gain custody of the children. As the records of the trial plainly reveal, their mother’s death and the new regime established by their stepmother had been upsetting for them in the extreme, and the effects were especially apparent in the unruly behavior of HF, whose relationship with his father seems never to have been close. As Edmund’s eldest son and heir, he must have watched uneasily as his father sired six sons by his new wife. After her death in 1727 he was married soon again in 1729 to Eleanor Hill, a well-to-do widow of Salisbury. But Eleanor Fielding represented great expectations: she died in 1739 bequeathing all her worldly goods and estate to her husband or, in the event of his death, to his heirs and assigns. At the time his stepmother died, HF was being dunned by creditors and hounded by bailiffs; the terms of her will would have given him hope of a brighter future. But Edmund too was heavily in debt, probably as a result of the bankruptcy of his regimental agent. He was living in a house provided for him by his daughter Catharine Fielding contiguous to the Verge of the Court, a sanctuary for debtors. Besieged by his creditors, he was committed in November 1740 to the Fleet Prison. He remained in lodgings within the “Rules” of the prison until, eight months after his conﬁnement, he died on 18 June 1741 in his sixty-ﬁrst year—but not before marrying a fourth time: Elizabeth Sparrye, a spinster in her thirties who is said to have been his servant. She declared that he had died without having made a will and that his effects were not worth more than £5. His debts presumably must have been settled in time, for his widow lived on comfortably for nearly thirty years. Edmund’s carelessness with money ensured that HF received nothing. He did not easily forgive his father for what he regarded as a history of self-indulgence

12

A Henry Fielding Companion

and paternal irresponsibility nearly criminal. In April, a month after Edmund had taken a fourth wife and after his own conﬁnement for debt, HF (probably) published The Crisis: A Sermon, in which his anger burns: “The Power of Fatherhood is the Power of Preservation, not Destruction. Let him look to it, who squanders the Patrimony left him by his Ancestors, and entails Beggary upon his [Posterity].” HF’s enemies would not in the future let him forget how he had “impiously stigmatized [his father] in his Old Age and Confinement with opprobrious Language” (Old England, 25 November 1749). It is tempting, however, to see in HF’s curious choice of a hero for Amelia (1751), his last novel, an attempt to reconcile himself to Edmund’s memory. Captain Billy Booth, whom HF’s contemporaries recognized as a transparent reﬂection of himself, in many ways mirrors his father’s own life and character: a soldier brave and charming, but hurting his family by his fecklessness. (On this resemblance see the General Introduction to WE: xix). FIELDING, George Colonel (d. 1738), HF’s favorite uncle. A lieutenant colonel in the Royal Horse Guards and groom of the Bedchamber to Queen Anne and George I, he was fond of HF and of his brother Edmund’s other children by his ﬁrst marriage and meant to behave generously toward them by the terms of his will (Life:250–51). George Fielding, who lived at Windsor, may well be the patriotic “old Gentleman in Berkshire” with whom “Will Lovemeal” has dined in HF’s essay “On Eating” (1736). (New Essays: Appendix B.) FIELDING, Henry’s siblings. HF was the ﬁrstborn child of Edmund Fielding’s marriage to Sarah Gould (1682–1718) of Sharpham Park, Glastonbury. He had ﬁve sisters and a brother: Catharine (1708–50), called Kitty, was born at Sharpham Park on 16 July 1708 and moved with the family to East Stour, Dorset, in 1710. After her mother’s death in 1718 and her father’s remarriage, the Court of Chancery gave custody of the children to their grandmother Lady Sarah Gould, who, with her sister Katherine Cottington, lived at Salisbury. There from 1720 Catharine and her sisters lived, and were educated at Mary Rookes’s school in the cathedral Close. In 1739 HF, his sisters, and his brother Edmund sold the farm at East Stour and moved to London, where Catharine took a house in Princes Court, Westminster, contiguous to St. James’s Park and the Verge of the Court; her sisters no doubt shared the house with her. On the death of Mrs. Cottington, her godmother, in December 1739 Catharine inherited a substantial estate that enabled her to come to the ﬁnancial aid of both HF and her father: she provided her father with a house, also in Princes Court, until he was conﬁned for debt in November 1740; and in March 1741, by acting as security for HF’s debts, she rescued him from a bailiff’s sponging house. In October 1748 all “the sisterhood” were sharing a house in Duke Street, Westminster, near the House of Commons (see Letter 112). Catharine was sharing a house with Ursula and Beatrice at Turnham Green, a suburb near Hammersmith, Middlesex, when she

Family and Household

13

died on 5 July 1750, probably a victim of the typhoid epidemic raging that summer. She left everything to Ursula, the next oldest sister. That HF deeply loved Catherine appears from a passage in Amelia (1751, II. iv–v) in which Booth grieves for a beloved sister who has died of “a violent Fever”: “ ‘Upon my Soul, I cannot yet mention her Name without Tears. Never Brother and Sister had, I believe, a higher Friendship for each other.’ ” Ursula (1709–50), called Patty, was also born at Sharpham Park, on 3 October 1709, and was given the Christian name of Lady Ursula Feilding, wife of her great uncle Sir Charles Feilding (1643–1722), one of the most powerful men in Ireland. In outline, the circumstances of her life are indistinguishable from Catharine’s. To judge from her letter of 25 October 1748 to her friend Mrs. John Barker of Salisbury relating news of HF and “the sisterhood,” Ursula was a lively and delightful woman (Letter 112). She died at Turnham Green, apparently of the same epidemic that had claimed Catharine four months earlier, and like Catharine she was buried at St. Paul’s Church, Hammersmith, on 12 December 1750. Sarah (1710–68), called Sally. See separate entry. Anne (1713–16), died in infancy and was buried at Christ Church, East Stour, on 6 August 1716. Beatrice (1714–51), called Bea, was born at East Stour, Dorset, on 20 June 1714. In outline the circumstances of her life parallel those of Catharine and Ursula. She was a gifted musician. According to an account Mrs. Thrale had from Arthur Collier, she “had an exquisite hand upon the harpsichord, and was otherwise ﬁnely accomplished” (Thrale 1942: June 1777). She also played the ﬁddle, as Ursula remarks in her letter of 25 October 1748 (Letter 112). She may be the author of a sprightly letter written to James Harris from Salisbury on 1 April 1744 with details of a concert of music (Letter 111). She died at Turnham Green soon after her sisters Catherine and Ursula, and, like them, was buried at St. Paul’s, Hammersmith, on 24 February 1751. Edmund (1716–after 1755), was baptized at Christ Church, East Stour, on 22 April 1716; and after the custody case was determined in favor of his grandmother, moved with his sisters to Salisbury, where he was raised by Lady Gould and Katherine Cottington. In November 1733, at age seventeen, he was commissioned an ensign in his father’s Regiment of Invalids based at Chelsea Royal Hospital, a post he held until 1740. Under several later commands he served as ﬁrst lieutenant. He was in Scotland during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–46, and, soon after his marriage in 1753, was with the 39th Regiment of Foot in Madras. In The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755 [“Humphrys” version], 24 July 1754) HF relates an anecdote of his brother when he was stationed at Minorca about the year 1740. John (1721–80). See separate entry. FIELDING, Reverend Doctor John (c. 1650–98), HF’s grandfather. Although he died before HF was born, his grandfather—youngest of the ﬁve brothers of

14

A Henry Fielding Companion

the third Earl of Denbigh—was an important ﬁgure in his life for a number of reasons. He was an educated man who rose to considerable eminence in the church. Having matriculated at Queens College, Cambridge in 1668, he became Fellow in 1671, the year in which he was awarded the master of arts degree. His principles, like HF’s, were Whiggish in politics and latitudinarian in religion. For resisting the pro-Catholic measures of James II, he was appointed chaplain to King William upon the Revolution of 1689, the year in which he received the degree of doctor of divinity. He was the ﬁrst of his family to settle in the west of England. In 1675 he moved with his wife, Dorothy Cockayne, to Dorset as vicar of Puddletown, where HF’s father, Edmund Fielding, was born on 20 January 1680. John Fielding rose steadily in the church, developing strong ties to two places that provided a setting for HF’s early years. From 1677 he was a prebendary of Salisbury and held a number of lucrative livings, the last being that of Gillingham Major, which he held from 1682 to his death. The beautiful cathedral city of Salisbury, Wiltshire, would be the home of HF’s wife, Charlotte Cradock Fielding, and his close friend James Harris, and the residence of his grandmother Lady Sarah Gould from 1720 to her death in 1733. The vicarage of the parish of Gillingham Major, Dorset, incorporated the chapelry of East Stour, in which from 1710 HF lived as a boy; with his siblings he inherited the family farm and lived there from time to time until, in 1739, circumstances forced him to sell the property. In 1683 John Fielding was appointed archdeacon of Dorset, the bishops who recommended him for the ofﬁce declaring that he had the “Character of a vertuous good man” and was “an honor to the Church.” FIELDING, John (1689–1725), HF’s uncle. He served as secretary to the Duke of Portland, governor of Jamaica, 1722–26, where he died in 1725. He may well be the “Friend” whose anecdotes of the island and the Mosquito Indians provided HF with material for his essay on the subject in The Craftsman (11 November 1738). (See New Essays.) FIELDING, Sir John (1721–80), HF’s half-brother and magistrate. Third of the six sons of General Edmund Fielding and his second wife, Anne Rapha, John was born on 16 September 1721 and baptized at St. James’s Church, Piccadilly. Suffering from weakness of vision, he was rendered completely blind in his nineteenth year through the incompetence of the eminent surgeon James Wilkie, a jury awarding damages of £500. HF and “Jack,” as he called him, were extremely close, and after 1750, with the founding of the Universal Register Office, an ingenious business venture that HF devised and John managed, they began cooperating professionally. With his appointment to the Westminster magistracy in July 1751, he began assisting HF with the heavy burden of work at Bow Street, and in 1754, with his further appointment to the commission of peace for Middlesex, he was empowered to take HF’s place as “court justice.” He later published informative treatises on HF’s formation and development of

Family and Household

15

the ﬁrst metropolitan police force, an organization of constables known as the Bow Street Runners (see A Plan for Preventing Robberies within Twenty Miles of London, 1755, and An Account of the Original and Effects of a Police, 1758.) In 1751 he married Elizabeth Whittingham of Staffordshire. He was knighted in 1761. (For an account of his life, see R. Leslie-Melville 1934. There is an impressive portrait of him by Nathaniel Hone in the National Portrait Gallery, London.) FIELDING, Mary Daniel (1721–1802), HF’s second wife. After Charlotte Fielding’s death in 1744, HF lived at Old Boswell Court with his sister Sarah Fielding; his two small children, Henry and Harriet; and Charlotte’s cook-maid, Mary Daniel. Having gotten her with child, HF married Mary in the sixth month of her pregnancy; the wedding, with his friend George Lyttelton attending, took place on 27 November 1747 at the church of St. Benet’s, Paul’s Wharf. Although his enemies would mock HF for this indiscretion, he had done what few other gentlemen in his situation would have done and legalized the relationship. Mary deserved his affection and respect. Lady Stuart, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s granddaughter, later recorded the family’s impression of her as, though a plain woman, “an excellent creature,” a tender mother and a faithful housekeeper. She bore HF ﬁve children: William (1748–1820), Mary Amelia (January–December 1749), Sophia (1750–c. 55), Louisa (December 1752–May 1753), and Allen (1754–1823). William would become a lawyer and magistrate, following HF’s example by attending Eton College and the Middle Temple and becoming one of the principal justices of Westminster. Allen, who was named for HF’s patron, Ralph Allen, attended the Charterhouse School and Christ Church, Oxford, and would achieve eminence in the church near Canterbury. Mary lived with Allen until she died. It is through his offspring that HF’s family line has continued. FIELDING, Sarah (1710–68), novelist and classical scholar. HF’s favorite sister—she was called Sally—was the ﬁrst of his siblings to be born to Edmund and Sarah Fielding after the family moved from Glastonbury to the farm at East Stour, Dorset, in 1710; the register of Christ Church records her birth on 8 November of that year. When, soon after her mother’s death in 1718, Edmund remarried a Roman Catholic, the Court of Chancery granted her grandmother’s suit to obtain custody of the children. In 1720, while HF resumed his studies at Eton College, Sarah went with her sisters and infant brother to live with Lady Sarah Gould and their great aunt Katherine Cottington in Salisbury, where the girls were educated at Mary Rookes’s boarding school in the cathedral Close, being taught “to work and read and write and to talk French and Dance and be brought up as Gentlewomen.” It appears to have a happy enough experience—one she later drew on in writing The Governess: or, Little Female Academy (1749), the ﬁrst novel in English written speciﬁcally for children. To make up for the intellectual inadequacies of her formal education, Sarah later

16

A Henry Fielding Companion

taught herself the classical languages, mastering Greek well enough to produce a translation of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates (1762). After HF and his siblings sold the property at East Stour in 1739, Sarah no doubt moved to London with her three sisters—Catharine, Ursula, and Beatrice Fielding—to the comfortable house at Prince’s Court, Westminster, which Catharine’s recent inheritance enabled her to lease. Her relationship with her older brother remained very close. She appears to have begun her literary career by contributing to Joseph Andrews (1742) the letter from “Leonora to Horatio” (II. iv) and by writing the ﬁctional autobiography of Anne Boleyn that serves as the concluding section of A Journey from This World to the Next (1743). HF helped her with her ﬁrst novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), by correcting the manuscript and contributing a preface to the second edition. And when Charlotte Fielding, his wife, died in November of that year, Sarah moved with him and his two children to a house in Old Boswell Court, where she took Charlotte’s place supervising the household and worked on her second novel, a sequel to the ﬁrst entitled Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple (1747), for which HF again wrote a preface, as well as ﬁve of the letters (Letters 40–44). By the autumn of 1747 this cordial domestic arrangement would come to end, as HF, having gotten his cook-maid Mary Daniel with child, would marry her in November, in the sixth month of her pregnancy. One can well imagine Sarah’s dismay at this turn of events, but there is nothing to suggest that it caused a breach between her and her brother. Under the circumstances, however, she left him to rejoin “the sisterhood” in the house they were occupying in Duke Street, Westminster, where she continued writing ﬁction. In January 1749 she published Remarks on Clarissa, a tribute to the masterwork of Samuel Richardson, her brother’s great and jealous rival; in a letter to Richardson accompanying a complimentary copy of the pamphlet, she initiated a continuing correspondence that would cement their friendship. But the numerous complimentary allusions to HF and his writings that subsequently occur in her novels—in The Cry (1754), The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757), and The History of the Countess of Dellwyn (1759)—attest to her continuing affection for him, as does the concern she expressed for his reputation in letters to their friend James Harris upon learning that HF’s publisher, Andrew Millar, had hired Arthur Murphy to write an essay on HF’s life and genius that would accompany his Works of 1762 (Letters 108–9). Sarah, in ill health, moved to Bath sometime before HF left for Lisbon in 1754. She remained at Bath for the rest of her life. After her death on 9 April 1768, John Hoadly composed a memorial to her that may be seen at Abbey Church. She chose to be buried in the little church of St. Mary, Charlcombe, where in 1734 HF had married Charlotte Cradock. (For accounts of her life and work see London 1985, Letters: xviii–xliii, and Bree 1996.) FIELDING, Ursula. See Fielding, Henry: siblings.

Family and Household

17

GOULD, HF’s family. Throughout his life HF remained especially close to the Goulds, his mother’s family, who were substantial gentry of the West Country. His mother, Sarah (1682–1718), was the daughter of Sarah Davidge and Sir Henry Gould, who resided at Sharpham Park, a mile or so from Glastonbury, Somerset. Sharpham, HF’s birthplace, passed to the Gould family through Lady Sarah Gould, who inherited it from her father, Richard Davidge, a wealthy London merchant with considerable property in both Somerset and Dorset. Sir Henry (1643–1710) was among the most distinguished lawyers of his time. He began the family connection with the Middle Temple, being admitted there in 1660 and called to the bar in 1667. During the reign of William and Mary he rose rapidly in the profession: he was appointed bencher of the temple (1689), sergeant (1692), and king’s sergeant (1693). Although he and his wife opposed their daughter’s marriage to Edmund Fielding in 1706, Sir Henry, little more than a month before HF was born on 22 April 1707, was sufﬁciently reconciled with Sarah that he made a new will, leaving her £3,000 toward the purchase of an estate, which was to be for the sole use of herself and her children, Edmund being speciﬁcally excluded from all rights to the property. Accordingly, upon Sir Henry’s death in 1710, Sarah and her children—HF and his sisters Catharine and Ursula—moved with Edmund to the substantial farm at East Stour, Dorset, purchased in large part by the money from her father’s bequest. Until 1739, when they sold it, the farm remained after Sarah’s death the property of HF and his siblings. Besides Sir Henry Gould, HF’s grandfather and namesake, the following members of the family were inﬂuential in determining the course and circumstances of HF’s life: Lady Sarah Gould (c. 1654–1733), HF’s grandmother, sister to Katherine Cottington, his great-aunt. Having opposed her daughter’s marriage to Edmund Fielding in 1706, Lady Gould became incensed when, soon after Sarah’s death in 1718, he married again, this time a widow of the Roman Catholic faith whose inﬂuence on the children she feared would be pernicious. As a further affront to her family, Edmund, against the stipulations of Sir Henry’s will, began squandering the children’s estate by selling off a large part of the property at East Stour and appropriating the income of the farm. In February 1721, she entered a complaint against Edmund in Chancery, suing him to establish her right to custody of the children and to protect their right to what remained of the farm. In May 1722 the court found against Edmund on all counts. From 1720, when Lady Gould took a house in Salisbury, which she shared with Mrs. Cottington and HF’s younger brother, he had spent his holidays from Eton College with her, and his sisters were close by in Mary Rookes’s boarding school in the cathedral Close. The court’s decision made this arrangement permanent. That HF loved his grandmother seems clear. When she died in 1733, he had her body carried thirty miles from Salisbury to East Stour to be buried beside his mother. Davidge Gould (c. 1684–1765), HF’s uncle, Master of the Bench at the Middle Temple. On the death in 1710 of his father, Sir Henry Gould, he inherited the family estate at Sharpham Park, HF’s birthplace. His appointment as

18

A Henry Fielding Companion

bencher at the Middle Temple in 1734 enabled him to use his inﬂuence to expedite HF’s early admission to the bar in 1740. Their relationship remained cordial. Henry Gould (1711–94), Davidge Gould’s son and HF’s ﬁrst cousin. Like so many others in the family, he was a lawyer—indeed he became extremely distinguished in the profession, rising by degrees from king’s counsel (1754) to sergeant and Baron of the Exchequer (1761) to Judge of the Court of Common Pleas (1763). HF and Henry Gould were very close, and in 1748, upon a false report of his cousin’s death, HF wrote his obituary in The Jacobite’s Journal (20 August 1748), praising him for his great abilities and knowledge of the law. He advised the prosecution in the sensational case of the transvestite Mary Hamilton, the subject of HF’s The Female Husband (1746), and in 1745 he represented Elizabeth Canning in her defense against the charge of perjury. Reverend William Gould (b. 1714), Davidge Gould’s son and HF’s ﬁrst cousin. After attending the Free Grammar School at Taunton, Somersetshire (1725–32), of which James Upton was Head Master, he went to Exeter College, Oxford, where John Upton was a Fellow; he received his master of arts degree from Exeter in 1739. In 1747 he published with Andrew Millar An Account of English Ants—an “excellent Work” by an “ingenious Writer,” HF declared it to be in The Covent-Garden Journal (11 November 1752), where it inspired his rehearsal of an ironic dream vision in which philosophical ants, very much resembling the virtuosi of the Royal Society, attempt to account for a violent deluge that in the past had inundated their hill in a cow pasture (Life:374, 662 n. 181; Goldgar, CGJ: 368 n. 3.) LEWIS, Joseph, HF’s servant. In the court records of Lyme Regis, Dorset, relating to HF’s altercation in 1725 with Andrew Tucker, the guardian of his pretty cousin Sarah Andrew, Lewis is referred to as HF’s “servant or companion,” whose usual residence was St. James’s, London, where HF also resided when in town. In the romantic episode of HF’s failed attempt to abduct Sarah, Lewis appears to have played a less pusillanimous Partridge to HF’s ruder Tom Jones. On Tucker’s complaint he was brought before the mayor, charged with threatening bodily harm, and held on a bond of £80. Nothing more is known with certainty about Lewis; there was, however, an author of the same name who was HF’s contemporary (see Rizzo 1978: 84 n. 2).

Others in the Life

The list of subscribers to HF’s Miscellanies (1743) is reprinted, with commentary and index, in the Wesleyan Edition of vol. 3 (1997, ed. Goldgar and Amory), Appendix B. The individual entries in F. G. and A. G. Ribble, Fielding’s Library: An Annotated Catalogue (1997), provide an invaluable resource for tracking HF’s references to authors and their works.

ADDISON, Joseph (1672–1719), author. Except perhaps for the scene in A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. viii) where Addison is ridiculed, gently, for his pride as a literary critic, HF’s references to him are invariably complimentary, and they are extensive. In fact, except for Alexander Pope, no other modern author in the canon of HF’s writings is cited or quoted more frequently than Addison, the allusions adverting to a number of different works. For HF, as early as his unﬁnished burlesque imitation of Pope’s Dunciad (1729/ 30, III. 57–59), Addison was “immortal”: “Sense and Religion taught his Skilful Pen/The best of Criticks, and the best of Men.” With Sir Richard Steele, Addison was author of those periodicals—The Tatler (1709–11) and The Spectator (1711–12)—that served HF as models for his own journalism, a kinship especially noticeable in The Champion (1739–41) and The Covent-Garden Journal (1752), where, as he remarked of his two great predecessors, “wit hath been used . . . to propagate virtue and morality” (Champion, 3 January 1740). HF claimed that he followed the same examples in The True Patriot (19 November 1745) and The Jacobite’s Journal (25 June 1748), but in those periodicals the Whig bias against Tories and Jacobites more often recalls the political content of Addison’s Freeholder (1715–16), from which, indeed, HF in the Journal (6 August 1748) reprinted Addison’s “excellent Paper” of 26 March 1716. Earlier, in the contributions attributed to him in The Craftsman (see New Essays), HF drew on several of Addison’s works: The Freeholder (10 October 1730), Dialogues on Medals (5 April 1735), A Letter from Italy to Lord Halifax and The

20

A Henry Fielding Companion

Spectator (30 September 1738), and Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (30 October 1736)—a work that, in the preface to the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), HF exempts from his general condemnation of travel books as “a heap of dulness.” But with the exception of The Spectator, HF refers to no other work of Addison’s more frequently than Cato (1713). In Some Thoughts on the Present State of the Theatres (1737) Addison’s classical tragedy is said to ﬁre “the noble and necessary Spirit of Liberty,” and in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. xi) Parson Adams declares it to be one of only two plays “ﬁt for a Christian to read”— the other being Steele’s Conscious Lovers. HF, who usually depended on his memory when quoting authors, quotes passages from Cato in The Champion (8, 22 January 1740), Joseph Andrews (III. v), Tom Jones (1749, V. vii, XI. x), Amelia (VI. iv), and The Covent-Garden Journal (18 April 1752). (For a comprehensive listing of HF’s allusions to Addison and his works, see Ribbles, A4– 5, G78, S44, T4. On HF and Addison, see Oakleaf 1983. On the reputation of Addison and Steele, see McCrea 1990.) ADLERFELT, Gustaf (1671–1709), author of Histoire militaire de Charles XII, Roi de Sue`de (1739). On HF’s translation of this voluminous work see Works: Translations. AESCHYLUS (525/4–456 B.C.), Greek dramatist. Although a manuscript of Aeschylus, “transcribed with his own Hand,” is the “inseparable Companion” of Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews (1742, II. ii, xi–xii), there is little to suggest that HF had himself read that Greek dramatist. There are three references to Aeschylus in the notes to his and William Young’s translation of Aristophanes’ Plutus (1742), but Young was learned in Greek, while HF had a very imperfect knowledge of it—and Young was the original of Parson Adams. HF did, however, have copies not only of Aeschylus but of Euripides and Sophocles, in his library (Ribbles, A8, E12, S39–40). (For HF’s use of Aeschylus, see Mace 1996.) ALEXANDER the Great (356–323 B.C.), conqueror. Throughout his literary career HF returned to the contemporary conception of Alexander, and of Charles XII of Sweden, as the very type of false greatness: “To Philip’s Son behold the Columns rise,” he wrote in the “Epistle to Lyttleton” (1733), “While by his Arms, the World half ravag’d lies” (lines 86–87). HF’s references to Alexander in this sense are numerous; the Ribbles cite no fewer than forty-six instances in their note on HF’s copy of Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander (A41). But his use of the theme may be conveniently surveyed in the three volumes of the Miscellanies (1743)—most notably in his poem Of True Greatness; in the Lucianic “Dialogue between Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic”; in A Journey from This World to the Next (I. iv), where the narrator meets Alexander and Charles XII in the Palace of Death, and wonders at the absence from that place of the truly great Duke of Marlborough, who saved more lives than

Others in the Life

21

he lost; and in The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great, where Alexander serves as the type of HF’s eponymous villain (III. iv), whose favorite “Heroes” are, of course, Alexander and Charles XII (I. iii). (On Alexander as the type of false greatness in HF’s works, see Miller 1961: 398–402, and the introductions to WE Misc 2–3.) ALFRED the Great (849–899), King of Britain. In his important social tracts, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) and A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753), HF nostalgically recalls the reign of Alfred the Great as a period when the “antient Constitution” of England was established, ensuring both the liberty of the people and the peaceable order of society. In doing so, he was reviving the idealized image of Alfred promulgated in the 1730s in Bolingbroke’s A Dissertation on Parties, which made Alfred a totem of the so-called Patriot Opposition to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who was seen as overturning the balance of the constitution. In the Preface to the Enquiry HF asks, “What is become of the Constitutions of Alfred, which,” he continues somewhat hyperbolically, “the Reader will ﬁnd set forth at large in the following Treatise?” In section VI (“Of Laws relating to VAGABONDS”) of the Enquiry and section XVII of the Proposal, the laws of Alfred deﬁne for him a lost ideal. (See WE Enquiry: lxv– lxvii.) ALLEN, Hugh, HF’s creditor, whose action against him for debt resulted in his conﬁnement in a bailiff’s sponging house for a fortnight in March 1741, during which time he probably wrote Shamela. ALLEN, Ralph (1693–1764), of Bath, philanthropist and patron of letters. Of humble birth, Allen made a fortune by improving the postal system in England and Wales, and then purchased the quarries at Combe Down, the stone from which supplied the materials for the redevelopment of Bath by the architect John Wood the elder, who also designed Allen’s magniﬁcent Palladian house at Prior Park, Widcombe, nearby. There in 1741 HF’s friendship with Allen, one of his most generous patrons, probably began. He is warmly complimented in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. i, vi), A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. v), The Covent-Garden Journal (11 April 1752), and Tom Jones (1749), where HF makes clear that, together with his friend George Lyttelton, Allen served as a model for the benevolent Squire Allworthy (see the dedication, as well as other compliments in VIII. i and XIII.i). Amelia, HF’s last novel, is dedicated to Allen. HF also named his youngest son, Allen, after his benefactor, whom, in his will, he wished to serve as executor of his estate. Although Allen declined this responsibility, he continued after HF’s death generously to befriend his family. (On Allen, see Boyce 1967a and Erskine-Hill 1975: 204–40.) AMHURST, Nicholas (1697–1742), political writer. In December 1726 after a brief career as a satirist, Amhurst, using the pseudonym Caleb D’Anvers, began

22

A Henry Fielding Companion

editing The Craftsman. Sponsored by Lord Bolingbroke and William Pulteney, the leaders of the opposition to the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, the paper was the liveliest and most inﬂuential of the antiministerial journals and continued to be published weekly under Amhurst’s editorship until his death in 1742. Considerable evidence—circumstantial, internal, and stylometric— makes it highly probable that HF, after publishing in The Craftsman two antiWalpole satires—a ballad called “The Norfolk Lanthorn” (20 July 1728) and an essay comparing fox hunters and politicians (10 October 1730)—became a regular contributor to that journal from March 1734 until shortly before he began writing his own opposition paper, The Champion, in November 1739. In all, more than forty humorous and satiric essays appearing in The Craftsman during that period have been attributed to him, including a brace of articles (28 June 1735 and 28 May 1737) opposing the ministry’s attempts, eventually successful, to license the stage. Another of his papers (2 July 1737), which takes the form of a letter from Colley Cibber proposing that he be appointed censor of all plays, old as well as new, was considered so offensive that it was suppressed by the government, and both Amhurst and his printer were imprisoned. (On the question of HF’s contributions to The Craftsman, see New Essays; M. G. Farringdon and Morton 1990; and J. Farringdon 1996: 174–83. On the general subject of The Craftsman, see Varey 1982.) ANDREW, Sarah (1710–83), HF’s cousin. A pretty girl of ﬁfteen and heiress to a considerable fortune, Sarah was living with her uncle and guardian Andrew Tucker at Lyme Regis, Dorset, when HF fell in love with her during a visit there in the autumn of 1725. When Tucker, who intended to marry Sarah to his son John, forbade HF’s romantic overtures to her, HF, assisted by his servant and companion Joseph Lewis, attempted to abduct her on her way to church. The attempt failed, and HF, charged with an assault, ﬂed the town—not, however, before deﬁantly posting on 15 November 1725 a public notice declaring Tucker and his son to be “Clowns, and Cowards.” The following year Sarah was married to Ambrose Rhodes of Devon; her portrait was later painted with an inscription claiming (mistakenly) that she was the original of Sophia Western, heroine of Tom Jones (1749). ARGYLL, John Campbell (1680–1743), second Duke of. As brigadier general, Argyll (or Argyle, as HF spelled his name) served courageously under the Duke of Marlborough in several campaigns, notably at the bloody Battle of Malplaquet in 1709. He promoted the union between England and his native Scotland, and as commander of the forces in north Britain he was instrumental in suppressing the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. From 1738 he spoke eloquently in the House of Lords in behalf of the opposition and helped bring about Sir Robert Walpole’s fall from power in February 1742. In The Champion (29 January 1740) he is to valor what Lord Chesterfield is to wit and George Dodington to politeness. A year later in the poem Of True Greatness (January 1741) HF

Others in the Life

23

places Argyll in the company of “the brightest Characters” of the opposition— Chesterﬁeld, Dodington, William Pulteney, and George Lyttelton—praising him as “Supreme in all the Arts of Peace and War”; and in “An Essay on Conversation” he is represented as the personiﬁcation of bravery. By December 1741, however, in the allegory of The Opposition: A Vision, HF was writing for, not against, Walpole, and Argyll, together with his former patrons, is the target of his satire: he is depicted as the coachman driving the wagon of the malcontents. Argyll subscribed to a set of HF’s Miscellanies (1743) on ﬁne paper. ARIOSTO, Ludovico (1474–1533), Italian poet. In the preface to the second edition of Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744) HF cites Ariosto, author of Orlando Furioso (1532), as being typical of those epic poets who choose as the “action” of their narratives “a series of adventures.” That he read Orlando Furioso in the translation of Sir John Harrington (1591) is clear from his having tacitly used the tale of Jocundo (28: esp. 12–22) as the source of an episode in Amelia (1751, III. iii). In The Covent-Garden Journal (17 March 1752) he relates a different abridged version of the same story. (On HF and the romance tradition see Baker 1962 and Miller 1976.) ARISTOPHANES (c. 445–389 B.C.), Greek dramatist. Early in his career as a playwright HF came to regard Aristophanes, the greatest of the Greek comic dramatists, as his model. In the dedication to Don Quixote in England (1734), HF, as he began the period of his political satires for the opposition, cites Aristophanes as supremely exemplifying “the force of ridicule.” And when, three years later, his dramatic satires were about to precipitate the Theatrical Licensing Act, HF had a ready answer for the ministerial writer who insisted that it was Pasquin that ﬁrst introduced political satire to the stage. “Had you ever read Aristophanes,” he replied in Common Sense (21 May 1737), “you would know that the gravest Matters have been try’d in this Way.” In 1742 HF and William Young published a translation of Aristophanes’ Plutus, hoping that its reception would justify their doing others of the complete works. It did not. In dedicating the translation to Lord Talbot, HF, who saw himself during his heyday at the Little Haymarket Theatre as writing in the Aristophanic tradition of “the Old Comedy,” paid an eloquent tribute to the genius of the master. “He exerted that Genius in the Service of his Country. He attack’d and expos’d its Enemies and Betrayers with a Boldness and Integrity, which must endear his Memory to every True and Sincere Patriot.” In Tom Jones (1749, XIII. i) Aristophanes is at the head of a pantheon of comic writers inspired by “Genius.” Once into the period of his magistracy, however, HF’s moralistic bias caused him to regret that Aristophanes—together with Rabelais, another of the pantheon honored in Tom Jones—had used his talents irresponsibly, indeed with a design, as he declared in The Covent-Garden Journal (4 February 1752), “to ridicule all Sobriety,

24

A Henry Fielding Companion

Modesty, Decency, Virtue and Religion, out of the World.” (On HF and Aristophanes see Knight 1981.) ARISTOTLE (384–322 B.C.), Greek philosopher and literary critic. Scholars who have recently analyzed HF’s reading and the contents of his library have wondered at his knowledge of Aristotle and his commentators at a time when the tradition of Aristotelian scholasticism had been thoroughly discredited by the new empiricist philosophy of Francis Bacon and John Locke. The sale catalogue of HF’s library lists seventeenth-century editions of Aristotle’s works as well as individual editions of his Politics and Rhetoric, in Greek and Latin (Ribbles A23–25), and no fewer than fourteen of the commentaries published in the sixteenth century (A26–39). It is not surprising that HF in a period of literary history characterized by neoclassical formalism should be thoroughly acquainted with the Poetics. In the famous preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), for example, HF’s brief anatomy of the “constituent Parts” of the “comic EpicPoem in Prose” invokes the conventional neo-Aristotelian categories of “Fable, Action, Characters, Sentiments, and Diction,” while insisting that this new species of writing is deﬁcient only in the single particular of “Metre”; and the theory of the comic he develops in the preface—where “Mirth and Laughter” are represented as “wholesome Physic for the Mind,” conducive “to purge away Spleen, Melancholy and ill Affections”—adapts Aristotle’s theory of catharsis (the effect of tragedy in purging the passions of pity and fear) to a different genre. What is surprising, however, is the degree of esteem in which HF held not only the Poetics but also Aristotle’s Politics, Rhetoric, and Nicomachean Ethics—“the merit of all which,” he declared in The Covent-Garden Journal (11 November 1752), “I think hath not yet been equalled.” He is by no means uncritical in such estimates of Aristotle’s achievement, going on in the same essay to dismiss his “Treatise on the Soul” as “incomprehensible Nonsense.” What HF particularly admired was the wisdom of Aristotle’s moral and political thought. In An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751, sec. XI) he is said to have “understood Human Nature” better even than Michel Montaigne; and in Amelia (1751, IV. v) he and Cicero are “those great mental Physicians.” It is quite possible that HF’s deep appreciation of Aristotle, so unusual in the period, was owing at least in part to the close friendship that developed between him and James Harris after 1741, the year that HF initiated with Harris one of the rare personal correspondences of his life; for Harris, the author of Hermes (1751), was perhaps the century’s greatest champion of that unfashionable philosopher. (On the subject of HF’s interest in Aristotle, see, besides Ribbles: xvii and n.25, Amory 1973:134–35; Mace 1996:112–13; Ribble 1981; Hodges 1984; and Jacques 1992.) ARNALL, William (c. 1710–41?), political writer, who, under the name of the Elizabethan statesman Sir Francis Walsingham, conducted the ministerial journal

Others in the Life

25

The Free Britain until, in June 1735, he clubbed together with James Pitt, Ralph Courteville, and others who began promoting Sir Robert Walpole’s policies in the newly established Daily Gazetteer. Arnall was a target of HF’s satire in The Craftsman during 1734–35, and in The Historical Register (1737) he is hit again as “William Goosequill,” whose “heavy” and voluminous “political papers” are offered at auction. BACON, Sir Francis (1561–1626), ﬁrst Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, philosopher and essayist. From his marshaling the English forces of literature and philosophy under the generalship of Bacon and John Locke in the Paper War against Grub-Street in The Covent-Garden Journal (4 January 1752) one might surmise that HF was well read in Bacon and that he appreciated the important implications of the new empiricism he represented. As Professor Goldgar points out (WE:19 n. 3), however, this compliment to the two philosophers was probably for the beneﬁt of HF’s publisher, Andrew Millar, who used the Journal to advertise editions of the works of both Bacon and Locke. To judge from the few references elsewhere in his writings, HF knew Bacon chieﬂy in The Advancement of Learning (1605). Two passages in this work particularly delighted him. In one, Bacon advises us “to shelter [our] Vices under those Virtues which seem nearest a-kin to them” (Champion, 20 November 1739)—a passage to which HF also refers in The Craftsman (17 June 1738), The Champion (26 January 1740), and The Covent-Garden Journal (16 June 1752). In the other passage Bacon comments on the wisdom of the Proverbs of Solomon—a passage to which HF alludes in a footnote to The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731, II. x), The Craftsman (16 September 1738), and in the chapter “Of Proverbs” in the original edition of Jonathan Wild (1743, II. xii), where he also parodies Bacon’s comments. Elsewhere HF refers to only two other passages from Bacon, both from The Advancement of Learning. In his correspondence with James Harris in 1742 he quotes at length a passage illustrating his belief that “the Sublime” in writing may be achieved as well by the “Prose-Writer” as by the poet; in the other, he cites Bacon’s opinion that “Wit and Judgement are the same” (Letters 14 and 18). (On the relation between Bacon’s empiricism and the rise of the novel, see Mayer 1997.) BAKER, Henry (1698–1774), Fellow of the Royal Society, translator, journalist, naturalist. With the Reverend James Miller, Baker translated the Select Comedies of Molie`re, which, when the ﬁrst two volumes appeared in 1732, HF puffed in the dedication to The Mock Doctor, his version of Molie`re’s Le Me´decin malgre´ lui. With Daniel Defoe in 1728, Baker, under the pseudonym of Henry Stonecastle, Esq., founded The Universal Spectator, to which HF in 1736–37 contributed humorous essays on eating and physignomy (see Battestin 1986). Baker is also the author of An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Polype (1743), which HF parodies in An Attempt towards a Natural History of

26

A Henry Fielding Companion

the Hanover Rat (1744), a political satire directed against John Lord Carteret’s policy of using English funds to subsidize 16,000 Hanoverian troops. BAKER, Samuel (1712?–78), bookseller, whose shop HF regularly frequented in the 1750s, and perhaps earlier. In 1755 Baker sold HF’s library at auction, the sales catalog of which comprises the principal source of our knowledge of his reading. (See Amory 1973 and Ribbles.) BANKS, John (c. 1653–1706), playwright. The author of heroic tragedies that provided HF with a rich trove of bombast to burlesque in The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731). The notes of “H. Scriblerus Secundus” identify ten such passages from The Unhappy Favourite: or The Earl of Essex (1682), eight from Vertue Betray’d: or Anna Bullen (1682), ten from Cyrus the Great (1696), and seven from The Albion Queens (1704—published ﬁrst in 1684 as The Island Queens). BARKER, Dr. John (1708–49), distinguished physician of Salisbury. He wrote treatises on the epidemic fever of 1740–42 (1742) and on the agreement of ancient and modern physicians (1748); he was appointed Chief Physician of the army in 1748, when he contracted a fatal illness in Flanders. Barker, who subscribed to HF’s Miscellanies (1743), was a close friend of HF and James Harris; from London in October 1745 he joined HF in writing Harris news of the progress of the Jacobite rebellion (Letter 25). BARKER, Mrs. John, wife of Dr. John Barker. Like her husband a friend of the Fieldings, she subscribed to Sarah Fielding’s Familiar Letters (1747) and in October 1748 was the recipient of an interesting letter from Ursula Fielding containing news of her brother and sisters (Letter 112). BARROW, Isaac (1630–77), Cambridge theologian and mathematician, who, together with Archbishop John Tillotson, was a leader of the latitudinarian movement in the Church of England. Barrow’s inﬂuence has been traced in Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) (see Battestin 1959, and the notes to WE), and it is especially noticeable in The Covent-Garden Journal, where HF calls Barrow his “favourite” divine (11 April 1752). In Amelia (1751, VI. vii), HF’s heroine has read “the Divinity of the great and learned Dr. Barrow,” and her husband, Captain Booth, is rescued from inﬁdelity by reading his sermons on the Apostles’ Creed (XII. v). (On Barrow’s importance to the moral and religious theme of that novel, see Battestin 1974a. For a discussion of Barrow and his importance in the period, and a selection of his sermons, see Simon 1967:212–28, 301–510.) BATHURST, Peter (1687–1768), of Clarendon Park, Wiltshire, brother of the great earl and HF’s friend, at whose house he “had lived for victuals”—so, at least, Horace Walpole would have it in relating to George Montagu an uncomplimentary anecdote involving HF and Bathurst’s son Peter (see Walpole’s letter

Others in the Life

27

of 18 May 1749, in Life:468). HF appears to have been well acquainted with the family. Reporting the trial of Mary Blandy in the “Covent-Garden” section of The Covent-Garden Journal (28 March 1752), he compliments Peter’s nephew, Henry Bathurst, the prosecutor, on “a most eloquent and masterly Speech” to the court. Henry Bathurst (1714–94), son of the earl, was admitted to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1736, was appointed Lord Chancellor in 1771, and succeeded as second Earl in 1775. Both Peter and Henry subscribed to HF’s Miscellanies (1743). BAYLE, Pierre (1647–1706), French skeptical philosopher and author of Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696), a work consisting chieﬂy of biographical articles on ﬁgures from ancient and modern history, with commentary that subjects philosophic and religious dogma to searching criticism. HF owned a copy of the revised sixth edition of 1734; in that year, in the revised version of The Author’s Farce (II. iv), he refers to the proposals for printing the English translation, A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical (1734–41). As “Pasquin” defending the propriety of his political satires in Common Sense (21 May 1737), he cites the authority of Bayle, “a great Writer” who “represents Ridicule as a kind of Fiery Trial, by which Truth is most certainly discovered from Imposture.” Elsewhere he recalls less contentious observations by Bayle in The Champion (14 and 28 February 1740) and Plutus (1742, I. ii n.). In both Tom Jones (1749, IV. xiii) and Amelia (1751, XII. iii) he cites Bayle’s remark that it is vanity, not desire, that moves women to prefer men famous for their valor. BEAUMONT, Francis (1584–1616) and FLETCHER, John (1579–1625), playwrights. In The Covent-Garden Journal (21 March 1752) HF included Beaumont and Fletcher in the “Quadrumvirate” of wits who ruled “the literary Government” in the reign of James I—the others being Shakespeare and Ben Johnson. In a similar context in the preface to Plutus (1742) he had included Fletcher but not Beaumont. It is worth noting that among the scores of tragedies burlesqued in The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) there is none by Beaumont and Fletcher and just one by Fletcher alone, The Bloody Brother (II. v, n.*). In The Covent-Garden Journal (7 March 1752) HF considers that the damning of Fletcher’s farce The Little French Lawyer by the audience at Drury Lane was proof of their inability to appreciate true humor. But such instances of faint praise suggest that he did not consider either Fletcher or Beaumont, or both in collaboration, dramatists of the ﬁrst rank. His opinion of their true merit is perhaps best gauged in the Journal for 22 February 1752, where, in discussing how even the greatest dramatists occasionally stoop to pandering to the “absurd Taste” of the town, he remarks: “Beaumont and Fletcher often contented themselves with two Scenes of Wit, and ﬁlled the rest with Dulness from the same Motive.” BEDFORD, John Russell (1710–71), fourth Duke of Bedford, one of the most powerful men in England, was for some years associated with HF’s friends in

28

A Henry Fielding Companion

opposition, ﬁrst against Robert Walpole and then, after the prime minister’s resignation in 1742, against the Hanoverian policies of John Lord Carteret. When the Broad-Bottom coalition was formed in 1744, he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, and in February 1748 he replaced Lord Chesterfield as secretary of state for the Southern Department, an ofﬁce he held until 1751; in The Jacobite’s Journal (30 January and 20 February 1748) HF warmly applauded both appointments. Bedford was also Lord Justice in 1745, 1748, and 1750, and in 1746 he was appointed warden of the New Forest, Hampshire. In these ofﬁces he was well placed to promote HF’s interests. The favors Bedford bestowed on HF began as early as 1743, when his name appears among the subscribers to the Miscellanies. But the “princely Benefactions” to which HF refers in the dedication to Tom Jones (1749) were far more substantial. In April 1746 Bedford appointed him High Steward of the New Forest, and, as his correspondence with the duke and his agent Robert Butcher makes clear, HF was indebted to Bedford for making possible his appointments to the commissions of the peace both for the City and Liberty of Westminster (1748) and, more especially, for the county of Middlesex (1749). He enabled HF to qualify for the latter appointment by leasing to him gratis properties worth £100. Bedford having thus established HF at Bow Street as “Court Justice” and principal magistrate of the metropolitan area, HF in return exerted himself in supporting the duke’s interests, as is well documented in his activities on behalf of Bedford’s brother-in-law, Lord Trentham, in the turbulent and highly controversial parliamentary by-election for Westminster in November–December 1749 (see Battestin with Battestin 1977–78; Life:485–93). BELLAMY, Georgiane (or George Anne) (1728–88), actress. HF’s admiration for this gifted, and beautiful, Irish actress was little short of rapturous. She joined David Garrick at Drury Lane for the season of 1750–51, which opened with the rival theaters in competing productions of Romeo and Juliet. With Garrick and Bellamy in the title roles at Drury Lane and Spranger Barry playing opposite Susannah Arne Cibber at Covent Garden, the play ran continuously at both houses from 28 September to 11 October 1750. In Amelia (1751, V. viii) HF gave his readers an idea of the great “Consternation” Mrs. James felt on news of her husband’s involvement in a duel by evoking the examples of both actresses in the scene (III. ii) where Juliet responds to the news that Romeo has killed her cousin Tybalt in a duel. By the time he began writing The CoventGarden Journal, his compliments to Bellamy had become effusive. In the number for 11 January 1752 his persona, Sir Alexander Drawcansir, can hardly contain himself in praising her: “Not only one of the best Actresses, but one of the ﬁnest Women of her Age. ‘I think,’ said he, smiling, ‘if I had the same Trial of my Virtue which Scipio once had, and Miss Bellamy was the Object, I should act in the same Manner; but I fear I should do it with more Reluctance.’ ” Later (15 February 1752) her “Perfections” as Belinda in Nicholas Rowe’s Fair Penitent elicit the tribute of a set of “Bad Verses,” and a perpetrator of indecent

Others in the Life

29

prints promises to exhibit the “Face and Neck” of Sir Alexander’s “Favourite” in depicting Venus. BELLEGARDE, Abbe´ Jean Baptiste Morvan de (1648–1734). In discussing the nature of “the Ridiculous” at the beginning and end of his career as a novelist, HF invoked the authority of the “Treatise on this Subject” by the Abbe´ Bellegarde, author of Re´flexions sur le ridicule, et sur les moyens de l’e´viter (1696). In the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742) he complains that although Bellegarde “shews us many Species of it,” he fails to “trace it to its Fountain.” When he resumed the subject a decade later in The Covent-Garden Journal (18 and 25 July 1752), he was more complimentary, praising “the judicious Abbe´ Bellegarde” and earnestly recommending his “excellent Lessons on the Ridiculous.” BENNET, Philip (d. 1761), of Widcombe, near Bath. Ralph Allen’s brotherin-law and neighbor, Bennet was lord of the manor of Widcombe and lived in the splendid Palladian mansion called Widcombe House. According to the historian of Bath, he befriended HF, as well as his sister Sarah Fielding, welcoming him as his guest when he visited Bath and from time to time lending him money. He is also said to have kept up “a considerable correspondence” with HF, but no trace of it survives. (See Peach 1891:226–27.) BENNET, Thomas. In February 1734/35 at Shaftesbury, Dorset, HF, it was alleged, assaulted a person of this name who brought an action against him in the King’s Bench and proceeded to injure him with his creditors. In January 1735/36 HF in turn employed the Salisbury attorney Robert Stillingfleet to bring an action for slander against Bennet, who was ordered to pay £500 in damages. This, however, would be the precise sum Bennet then demanded of HF in Easter Term of 1736/37, charging him with a second assault, again at Shaftesbury. No record of a judgment in the case has come to light. It may not be accidental, however, that a “Tom Bennet” is among the country clowns felled by Molly Seagrim in the battle in the churchyard in Tom Jones (1749, IV. viii). BENTLEY, Richard (1662–1742), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, classical scholar and editor. Although recognized today as one of the great classical scholars, Bentley in his own time was regarded in literary circles as the very type of the meddlesome pedant. Having criticized Jonathan Swift’s patron, Sir William Temple, who had written an essay preferring the Ancients to the Moderns in which he praised the spurious Epistles of Phalaris, Bentley was ridiculed for this and other scholarly offenses by Swift in The Battle of the Books (1697) and Alexander Pope in the Dunciad (1742, IV. 201ff.). In the same satiric vein HF at times paired him with “the great Professor [Pieter] Burman [sic]” of the University of Leiden, as in the remarks of “H. Scriblerus Secundus” in the

30

A Henry Fielding Companion

preface and notes to The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) or the learned commentary on the mock-epic Vernoniad (1741, n. 25). His favorite targets were Bentley’s ponderous and presumptuous editions of Horace (1711) and of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1732). Concluding a copious comment on a simile in the Vernoniad (n. 54), HF’s editorial persona expresses his admiration for the learned scholiast, observing “that if Dr. Bentley had never given us his comment on Milton, it is more than possible few of us would have understood that poet in the same surprisingly ﬁne manner with that great critic”; and a few pages later he disputes Bentley’s emendation of “Signum” for “Lignum” in a line of Horace (n. 65). HF owned a copy of Bentley’s Horace (Ribbles, H35), with its 450 pages of commentary, and he referred to it often in jest. Parodying Bentley’s manner in The Champion (31 May 1740) he produces a note to the motto that is half a page long in Latin. He seems particularly to have relished Bentley’s zeal in arguing that in Epistle II. i. 6, the word facta (“deeds”) should be emended to fata (“the Fates”): In The Champion (27 November 1739) he is apprehensive that “Dr. Bentley’s Ingentia Fata” will be produced against his own reading of a line from Horace; and in Amelia (1751, X. i) Dr. Harrison wonders what life for the learned Mrs. Atkinson would be like if she had married Bentley, who “ ‘would have quarreled, I am convinced, with any Wife in the World, in behalf of one of his Corrections. I don’t suppose he would have given up his Ingentia Fata to an Angel.” (On this subject, see Goldgar 1997. On HF’s allusions to Bentley see Mace 1996:49, 109. On Bentley and editing, see Walsh 1997.) BIRCH, Reverend Thomas (1705–66), Fellow of the Royal Society, Rector of St. Margaret Pattens, Eastcheap, and a proliﬁc historian and biographer. From at least 1747 Birch and HF were close friends and often dined together (see Birch’s Latin Diary and HF’s Letter 69). On the occasion of Birch’s candidacy for the post of Secretary of the Royal Society HF, who owned copies of two of Birch’s works, including his Life of Archbishop John Tillotson (Ribbles B26– 27), recommended his friend in The Covent-Garden Journal (21 January 1752) as “a Gentleman of great Merit in the learned World.” On deposit at the British Library, Birch’s correspondence with Philip Yorke, son of Lord Hardwicke, is a valuable source of gossip concerning HF and his literary and political activities. BIRT, Richard (d. 1766), attorney of Lymington, Hampshire. As his subscription to the Miscellanies (1743) suggests, Birt had been acquainted with HF for some time before April 1746, when the Duke of Bedford appointed HF High Steward of the New Forest and Birt became his deputy. He is probably the Lymington lawyer complimented in Tom Jones (1749; XVIII. vi) when Partridge, having spent three years in his service, characterizes him as “a very good Sort of a Man, . . . one of the merriest Gentlemen in England.” As the High Steward’s deputy, Birt was at the center of the most fully documented case of

Others in the Life

31

HF’s career as a lawyer: the acrimonious dispute between James Perkins, a powerful landholder, and the king over rights to part of the royal forest (see Letters 32–36, 43, 46). BLAND, Dr. Henry (d. 1746), Head Master and later Provost of Eton College. A Whig in politics and latitudinarian in religion, Bland had been Sir Robert Walpole’s schoolfellow at Eton and was appointed Head Master by him in 1720, the year after HF matriculated as a boy of twelve. Though HF remembered Eton chieﬂy for the birchings he suffered there, Bland was known as an able and amiable head, under whose direction the school ﬂourished. Horace Walpole recounts an anecdote concerning the part Bland played in bringing to light an intriguing episode from HF’s adolescent years. Once, when HF returned to school after the holidays without having done his homework, Bland promised to remit the punishment if he told how he had spent his time: HF confessed that he had been writing a comedy with his father and other members of his family as the characters. If in fact this potentially important piece of HF’s juvenilia ever existed outside the anecdote, no copy of it survives. BLANDY, Mary (d. 1752), parricide. On 3 March 1752 at Oxford, Mary Blandy was convicted of poisoning her father, a wealthy attorney, in order to gain his estate and be free to marry her lover, William Henry Cranstoun, an ofﬁcer in the marines who was already married to another woman. She was hanged on 6 April; Cranstoun, her accomplice, escaped to France under an assumed name and died there later that same year. In the Court of Censorial Enquiry in The Covent-Garden Journal (8 February 1752) HF sharply rebuked a print seller who had advertised a picture of Blandy using language that prejudiced her case before it went to trial. After her conviction HF, using the persona of the benevolent correspondent “Axylus,” devoted a leader to reﬂecting on the case, putting the blame chieﬂy on “that damned Villain Cranston,” who had incited her to commit the crime (10 March 1752). In the “Covent-Garden” section of the paper (28 March) he compliments the prosecutor, his friend Henry Bathurst, on “a most eloquent and masterly Speech” to the court. The case of Mary Blandy is included in HF’s Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder (1752). (For contemporary reactions to Blandy’s case see Goldgar’s notes to CGJ:134–37 nn.) BLUNT, Elizabeth, a fashionable stabler in the Haymarket, who in 1740 sued HF for having hired “divers Coaches, Chariots, Chaizes, Horses, Mares and Geldings” that he could not pay for. BODENS, Charles, captain in the Coldstream Guards and Gentleman Usher Quarter Waiter to George II. In 1732 Bodens, in order to use his inﬂuence to get the play staged at Drury Lane, agreed to pose as the author of James Miller’s comedy The Modish Couple, for which HF wrote an epilogue. Bodens’s

32

A Henry Fielding Companion

associates, however, the fun-loving dukes of Richmond and Montagu, circulated a rumor that the play was actually written by the Prince of Wales and the courtier Lord Hervey, a hoax that so thoroughly politicized Miller’s comedy it was driven from the stage by the clamor of opposing factions. In Joseph Andrews (1742); III. vi) the riotous scene of the play’s ﬁrst night is engraved on the hero’s cudgel, and in Pasquin (1736) the play itself is the particular favorite of Queen Ignorance. (On the hoax concerning the authorship of the play see Winton 1985.) BOLINGBROKE, Henry St. John (1678–1751), ﬁrst Viscount, statesman, political writer, and freethinker. Secretary of State in the Tory government during the last years of Queen Anne, Bolingbroke, whose sympathy with the Jacobite cause was known, ﬂed to France at the rebellion of 1715. He returned to England in 1725 and the following year with William Pulteney founded The Craftsman, the principal organ of the opposition against the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. In 1733–34 in a series of lead articles in this journal, he published A Dissertation on Parties, which, together with his later treatise The Idea of a Patriot King (1749), articulated the political ideal of a disinterested patriotism that became the program of antiministerial writers for years to come. It strongly inﬂuenced HF’s patron George Lyttelton in his Persian Letters (1735), and it colors HF’s own contributions to The Craftsman (1734–39). In 1749–51 these same idealistic principles inform the political writing of another of HF’s patrons, George Bubb Dodington, who had resigned from the Pelham government to establish a new opposition party; it is Dodington’s program that HF has Dr. Harrison urge against the cynicism of the noble lord in Amelia (XI. ii). Although it can therefore be said that HF subscribed to the political principles Bolingbroke openly advocated, he was aware that behind the pose of selﬂess patriotism lay the fact of Bolingbroke’s Jacobitism, which HF despised. In 1752, moreover, he warned readers of The Covent-Garden Journal (9 June 1752) of the pernicious consequences to society if the religious skepticism of Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and Use of History should become fashionable. One of HF’s last acts as a writer was, in his unﬁnished Fragment of a Comment on L. Bolingbroke’s Essays, to publish an “antidote” to the poison of inﬁdelity that he found in Bolingbroke’s posthumously published Works (1754). (For discussion of Bolingbroke’s politics in relation to HF, see McCrea 1981 and Cleary 1984. On Bolingbroke’s role in the opposition to Walpole during HF’s dramatic period, see Pettit 1997. Also relevant are Kramnick 1968 and Varey 1984.) BOOTH, Barton (1681–1733), actor. With Colley Cibber and Robert Wilks, Booth, who excelled in tragedy, was one of the triumvirate who managed the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane when HF’s ﬁrst play, Love in Several Masques, was produced in 1728. In The Covent-Garden Journal (4 and 22 February 1752) HF remarks on the harmful effect the triumvirate had on the quality and char-

Others in the Life

33

acter of performances at Drury Lane. In Joseph Andrews (1742, Ill. x) Booth’s acting is praised by the player, but in “To Celia” in the Miscellanies (1743) the poet, strangely, depreciates his talent—perhaps because the triumvirate had rejected HF’s early comedy The Temple Beau (1730). In A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. viii) Booth and his great predecessor Thomas Betterton dispute the emphasis of a line from Othello; and in Tom Jones (1749, IV. i) HF relates an anecdote of Booth in the part of Pyrrhus in Ambrose Philips’s The Distrest Mother (1712). BOWYER, William the younger (1699–1777), printer. Bowyer printed volume 3 of the Miscellanies (1743), comprising Jonathan Wild, and consisting of 1,000 copies in ordinary paper and 250 in royal paper. (See Maslen and Lancaster 1991:3104.) BOYSE, Samuel (1708–49), poet. HF was particularly fond of Boyse’s Deity (1740), a poem on the attributes of God done vaguely in the manner of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. Reviewing it in The Champion (12 February 1740), HF promised that it would “afford a serious Mind a very elevated Entertainment” and quoted a passage in which Boyse attains “the Sublime.” In Tom Jones (1749, VII. i) he rescued the poem from “Oblivion” by quoting the same “noble” passage. BREWSTER, Dr. Thomas (b. 1705), physician of Bath. In a poem “Written Extempore in the Pump-Room” at Bath to Jane Huband, the future wife of his friend Robert Henley, HF calls Brewster “the Glory of his Art,” and in “An Essay on Conversation” he compliments his “ingenious” friend on his translation of Persius’s satires. Both the poem and the essay are included in HF’s Miscellanies (1743), to which Brewster subscribed. In Tom Jones (XVII. iv) Brewster and another physician of Bath, Edward Harrington, attend the philosopher Square in his ﬁnal illness. BROADHEAD, Henry (d. 1754), brewer and magistrate. Soon after his appointments to the magistracy, HF took a leading part in the successful prosecution of Broadhead, one of the infamous trading justices of the metropolis, for using his powers to extort money from prosecutors and accused alike. Broadhead is the likely model for Justice Thrasher of Amelia (1751). BROGDEN, Joshua, HF’s clerk at Bow Street. HF thought so highly of Brogden that in 1749 he wrote Lord Chancellor Hardwicke nominating him for the magistracies of both Westminster and Middlesex (Letter 53). Although Hardwicke meant to grant this request, Brogden’s candidacy was contemptuously rejected by the commissioners, who observed that he was “no better formerly that an Hackney Clerk” to HF’s predecessor at Bow Street, Sir Thomas DeVeil, whose maid he had married. HF, however, never wavered in his opinion of

34

A Henry Fielding Companion

Brogden, whom he praised in the introduction to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) for his good character and devotion to duty. As HF’s clerk Brogden served as amanuensis in HF’s reports of his activities as magistrate in The Covent-Garden Journal (1752). BROUGHTON, John (1705–89), pugilist. Broughton was champion of England for twenty years until, in April 1751, he was beaten by John Slack. HF refers to this famous bout in Amelia (1751; XII. vi). In the same year the legislature closed Broughton’s Amphitheatre in Oxford Road, the scene of bloody combats of all kinds—boxing, cudgel playing, battles at broadsword. In Tom Jones (1749; XII. v) HF compares the ﬁstﬁght between his hero and a footman to the spectacles staged at the Amphitheatre, and in a footnote he reprints Broughton’s proposal to open a boxing “Academy” for gentlemen in the Haymarket. (On HF and boxing, see Johnson 1996.) BUCKINGHAM, George Villiers (1628–87), second Duke of. Author of The Rehearsal (1671), a play HF pronounced “inimitable” in The True Patriot (11– 18 February 1746). In this classic burlesque of heroic tragedy, Buckingham employed the “reﬂexive” or “self-referential” device (to use the terms of recent criticism) of having characters representing the author and his critics comment on the play while sharing the stage with actors who are supposedly rehearsing it. This device was adopted by HF in several of his most successful satires, including The Author’s Farce (1730), Pasquin (1736), and The Historical Register for 1736 (1737). In 1752 he chose to write The Covent-Garden Journal under the pseudonym of Sir Alexander Drawcansir, the swaggering hero of Buckingham’s play. BURMANN, Pieter (1668–1744), classical scholar. During 1728 and 1729 when HF was enrolled at the University of Leiden as a student of literature, Burmann was professor of history, eloquence, and Greek. He was reputed to be an excellent teacher, giving his lectures in Latin, as was customary; and his numerous editions of classical authors spread his fame throughout Europe. HF owned three of these works: Burmann’s editions of Petronius Arbiter (1709), Quintilian (1720), and Valerius Flaccus (1724) (Ribbles P11, Q1, V1). Together with Richard Bentley, Burmann represented for HF the very type of the pedant; facetious allusions to his scholarship occur in The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), The Champion (25 December 1739), and the notes to the Vernoniad (1741). (On HF’s attitude toward Burmann, see Mace 1996:40, 46, 49, and Goldgar 1997.) BURNET, Gilbert (1643–1715), Bishop of Salisbury and historian. Latitudinarian in religion and Whig in politics, Burnet’s historical writings were highly esteemed by HF, who, in giving an account of his heroine’s reading in the

Others in the Life

35

original edition of Amelia (1751, VI. vii), declared him to be “almost the only English Historian that is likely to be known to Posterity, by whom he will be most certainly ranked amongst the greatest Writers of Antiquity.” Among other works Burnet wrote The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, 3 vols. (1679–1714), and the posthumously published History of My Own Time, 2 vols. (1723–34), edited by his son Sir Thomas Burnet. This last work HF particularly admired. In 1741 and again in 1745, respectively, he borrowed the title for his own short-lived magazine, The History of Our Own Times, and his anti-Jacobite periodical, The True Patriot: and The History of Our Own Times; and at the end of his life, in preferring the Greek historians to romance writers in the preface to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), he wished that Homer had been transformed into the Bishop Burnet of his own country, regretting that he had not written “a true history of his own times in humble prose” instead of the Iliad and Odyssey. HF owned several of Burnet’s works (Ribbles B56–60). BURNET, Sir Thomas (1694–1753), distinguished lawyer and son of Bishop Gilbert Burnet, whose posthumous History of His Own Time he edited. HF’s “ever honoured and beloved friend,” as he remembered him in The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755). The two men had much in common. Like HF, Burnet had attended the University of Leiden, made the tour of Europe, and studied law at the Middle Temple; what is more, besides their similar views on politics and religion, Burnet was a witty and clubbable man who in his youth had sown his wild oats as a member of the Mohocks, a notorious gang of rakes and revelers. The period of their friendship probably began in the summer of 1741, when HF wrote James Harris that only the company of Burnet and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams had rescued him from “the dulness” of Bath (Letter 10). BUTCHER, Robert, agent to the Duke of Bedford. Bedford appointed HF High Steward of the New Forest in 1746 and in 1748–49, on condition that he resign the stewardship, Bedford enabled HF to satisfy the property qualiﬁcation for the Middlesex magistracy. From March 1748 to June 1751 HF’s extant correspondence with the duke concerning both of these ofﬁces was usually conducted through Butcher as intermediary (whom, despite their long acquaintance, HF invariably addresses as “Richard”). BUTLER, Samuel (1613–80), author of Hudibras (1663–78), a burlesque poem satirizing the Puritan party in the Civil War and written in ludicrous tetrameter couplets, a verse form that came to be called hudibrastics. Butler, who was for HF the very type of the neglected genius, was one of his favorite authors. HF’s earliest extant work, The Masquerade (1728), is written in hudibrastics, and throughout his career he often cited, or quoted from, Butler’s classic poem. (For references see Ribbles, B65. On Butler, see Wasserman 1976.)

36

A Henry Fielding Companion

CADELL, Thomas (1742–1802), bookseller. Having been apprenticed to Andrew Millar in 1758, Cadell became his partner in 1765 and in 1767 took over the business entirely, continuing Millar’s practice of publishing the works of good writers. In 1778 he published HF’s “lost” comedy, The Fathers: or The Good-Natured Man, paying HF’s widow and sons William and Allen £100 for the copy. CADOSA, Samuel, a notorious fence. Cadosa’s store of stolen goods ﬁlled an entire warehouse. It was in examining him in February 1750 before a crowded and illustrious audience at Bow Street that HF became aware of the true enormity of the part played by receivers of stolen goods in promoting robbery in the metropolis, the trafﬁc in this plunder even extending across the sea to Rotterdam. He addresses this problem in An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (1751; Section V). CAESAR, Gaius Julius (100–44 B.C.), Roman author, conqueror, dictator. With Alexander the Great, Caesar was chieﬂy useful to HF as an egregious example of false greatness, a theme continually sounded by critics of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. In this context Caesar and Alexander are paired throughout the three volumes of HF’s Miscellanies (1743). In Of True Greatness (lines 63– 110) their cruelty and insatiable ambition are contrasted with HF’s hero, the Duke of Marlborough; and in “An Essay on Nothing” they are preeminent among “that heroic Band, who have plundered, and massacred so many Millions.” In The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great HF calls them equally “the Destroyers of Mankind,” but he ﬁnds that Caesar’s political ambitions, in particular, parallel those of Walpole: Caesar “with wonderful Greatness of Mind destroyed the Liberties of his Country, and [got] all the Power into his own Hands” (I. i); he “came into the World to usurp the Dominion, and abolish the Constitution of his own Country” (IV. xvi). (On HF’s attitude toward Caesar, see Mace 1996:120–24 and Miller 1961:399–401.) CANNING, Elizabeth (c. 1735–73). A simple servant girl of eighteen, Elizabeth Canning lived with her mother in the City of London. On the night of 1 January 1753 as she returned home from a visit to her aunt, she vanished; she reappeared four weeks later, cold and dirty and starving, her clothes in rags. She claimed to have been abducted by footpads who dragged her ten miles to a brothel at Enﬁeld Wash, where she was abused by one Mary Squires, an old gypsy woman, who threatened her with worse treatment if she refused to “go their Way.” Canning’s story quickly became the talk of London, and on 8 February, HF, who had examined her at Bow Street and was convinced she was telling the truth, committed Mary Squires and the mistress of the brothel, Susannah Wells, to prison on the evidence of Virtue Hall, one of the prostitutes. Before the end of the month they were found guilty; Squires was sentenced to hang, Mother Wells to be branded on the thumb and imprisoned for six months.

Others in the Life

37

It was a popular judgment, but at the trial the defense had produced witnesses who swore that at the time of the alleged crime, Squires was a hundred miles away, peddling handkerchiefs in Dorset. Her cause was taken up by the Lord Mayor, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, and by HF’s enemy Dr. John Hill, who in The London Daily Advertiser (9 March) accused HF of bullying the chief witness against her into giving false evidence. Angered by this slander, HF once again narrowly examined Canning and remained convinced of her credibility. On 20 March he publicly championed the girl’s cause and defended his own conduct in the pamphlet, A True State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning. The case continued to polarize public opinion for more than a year, but in due course Squires was pardoned, and Canning, convicted of perjury, was transported to America. Through it all HF never wavered in his belief in her innocence. (On EC as a work of literature, see Wilner 1991. For accounts of this sensational case, see de la Torre 1945 and Enquiry [WE Zirker]. A modern ﬁctionalized version of it is Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair [Cambridge, MA: Bentley, 1981].) CARELESS, Elizabeth (Betty) (d. 1752). A notorious courtesan, Betty Careless kept a brothel in Covent Garden during the 1730s. In Amelia (I. vi) HF recalls seeing her in bed with a rake at a bagnio (“remember, Critic, it was in my Youth”), her sluttish behavior belying the innocence and modesty of her appearance. She ended her life miserably in the parish poorhouse (see the obituary in The Covent-Garden Journal, 28 April 1752). CAREY, Henry (1687?–1743), playwright and poet, author of the well-known ballad “Sally in Our Alley.” Carey was no doubt a friend of HF, who adapted two of his songs for his own Grub-Street Opera (1731). It seems likely that HF was the “Mr. Fielding” who subscribed to Carey’s Six Cantatas, published in 1732 (Ribbles: xl, lix n. 108). As manager of the Little Theatre in the Haymarket during 1736–37, HF staged several of Carey’s plays. On 3 May 1736 he paired two of Carey’s pieces—the mock-tragedy, Chrononhotonthologos, and The Honest Yorkshireman—with his own Tragedy of Tragedies; and in May 1737 he introduced to the public Carey’s popular burlesque opera, The Dragon of Wantley. One of the best of HF’s contributions to The Craftsman, a facetious essay in vindication of laughter published on April Fool’s Day 1738, was inspired by his seeing the editor, Nicholas Amhurst, laugh at a performance of the play. In his analysis of the list of subscribers to HF’s Miscellanies (1743), which includes a “Mr. Carey,” Dr. Amory rejects the possibility that Henry Carey is meant, giving as his reason that he was “too poor to patronize Fielding”; instead he proposes one “Squire Carey” for this honor, for whom, however, there is no evidence at all of any association with HF (see Misc 3:317). CAROLINE (1683–1737), Queen of George II. HF satirizes the royal couple in The Grub-Street Opera (1731), representing them as the Welshman Sir Owen

38

A Henry Fielding Companion

Apshinken and his lady, who rules the household and is “a zealous advocate for the church”—both attributes being popularly associated with the queen. The subtitle of the original version of the play, The Welsh Opera: or The Grey Mare the Better Horse, alludes to Caroline’s reputation for dominating her husband. She cannot have been much offended by this good-humored satire, however. In 1732 and 1733 at Drury Lane, the entire royal family attended performances of HF’s plays, The Modern Husband and The Miser; and when the new season opened at Drury Lane in September 1733, it was at Caroline’s command that The Mock Doctor was chosen as afterpiece to Buckingham’s Rehearsal. The queen’s patronage, however, did not deter HF from having the author in his “damned” farce Eurydice (1737) inquire, “How could Hell be better represented than by supposing the People under Petticoat-Government?” CARTE, Thomas (1686–1754), editor and historian. Late in 1747 Carte, a nonjuring clergyman, published the ﬁrst volume of his General History of England (1747–55), a work immediately criticized for its Jacobite bias. Beginning with The Jacobite’s Journal for 30 January 1748, HF in his “Proceedings of the Court of Criticism” kept up a series of attacks on the book that in tone and attitude waver between ridicule and ire. In the Journal for 20 February he devotes most of the “Proceedings” to a stern critique of the General History, focusing in particular on Carte’s claim that at Paris in 1716, one Christopher Lovell had been cured of “the king’s evil” by the touch of the Old Pretender. For this, HF convicted him “of a very high Offence: no less than that of perverting History, and applying it to the sordid and paltry Use of a Party” and sentenced his book to be “grubbed.” In the number for 27 February, he ironically dubs Carte a “learned and facetious Novelist,” author of a “great Romance.” CARTERET, John Lord (1690–1763), later Earl Granville (1744), statesman. During the 1730s the opposition to Robert Walpole was led principally by two men, William Pulteney in the Commons and Carteret in the Lords. Although HF’s close ties to the “Patriot” cause after 1734 were ﬁxed elsewhere, with Chesterfield and the Cobham faction, he nonetheless admired Carteret, who was an educated man well versed in languages both ancient and modern (one of the few Englishmen, indeed, who could converse with George II in his own language). In 1741 HF found a place for him in Of True Greatness (l. 259): “Greatness with Learning deck’d in Carteret we see.” When Walpole was at last forced to resign in February 1742, the true motives of his adversaries at once became obvious: the king immediately appointed Granville secretary of state, and in July Pulteney was elevated to the House of Lords as earl of Bath. HF’s writings of this period contain incidental hits at hypocritical “Patriots” who sold their honor for a place at court. The theme is already obvious in The Opposition: A Vision (15 December 1741), and after February HF introduced it into much of what he wrote until publication of the Miscellanies (1743). In a note to Plutus, God of Riches (15 May 1742, II. v)

Others in the Life

39

he declared bitterly and with emphasis: “TO MAKE USE OF POPULAR INTEREST, AND THE CHARACTER OF PATRIOTISM, IN ORDER TO BETRAY ONE’S COUNTRY, is perhaps the most ﬂagitious of all Crimes.” In a passage added to the second edition of Joseph Andrews (10 June 1742, II. x), Fanny, after Adams has rescued her from a would-be rapist, suspects the parson “had used her as some very honest Men have used their Country; and had rescued her out of the Hands of one Riﬂer, in order to riﬂe her himself.” In A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. vii) Midas at the gates of Elysium contemptuously rebuffs the shade of a former Patriot who had accepted a place at court; and in Jonathan Wild (1743, IV. iii) “the Grave Man,” having observed Jonathan Wild’s ousting of his fellow criminal Roger Johnson as ruler of “the Prigs” in Newgate, advises the debtors that “It is better to shake the Plunder off than to exchange the Plunderer.” If in February 1742 Carteret was in, HF’s friends—George Lyttelton, William Pitt, George Dodington, Chesterﬁeld—were very deﬁnitely out. Forming a new opposition, they targeted Carteret in particular, deploring the unpopular policy, adopted in July 1742, whereby British funds were used to subsidize 16,000 Hanoverian troops serving in the Pragmatic army; and after March 1744, they held Carteret responsible for the ruinous conduct of the war with France. Carteret nevertheless remained the king’s favorite, and in October 1744 he was created Earl Granville. HF, who for more than a year had not involved himself in “pollitricks,” as he liked to say, now served his friends’ cause by publishing on 23 November 1744 a satire on Granville’s pro-Hanoverian policies, entitled An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Hanover Rat. As an amusing coincidence, Granville resigned as secretary of state the next day, leaving the way open for the formation under Henry Pelham of the so-called Broad-Bottom government, with snug places for all HF’s friends except Pitt, whom the king hated. Granville would taste one more brief moment of power, when, on 10 February 1745, the king reinstated him as secretary of state, with the Earl of Bath (Pulteney) as First Lord of the Treasury, thus forming “the forty-eighthour ministry.” Four days later the Broad-Bottoms had returned, bringing Pitt with them. In The True Patriot (11–18 February 1745), HF celebrated by ridiculing Granville and Bath as two mock-heroes in a medley of passages drawn from Macbeth, Buckingham’s Rehearsal, and his own Tragedy of Tragedies, the theme of all being “the Instability of Human Greatness.” CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, Miguel de (1547–1616), Spanish author of Don Quixote (1605–15). For HF, from the very beginning of his career, Cervantes was one of the towering ﬁgures of literature—one of “that great Triumvirate, Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift,” masters all of “Wit and Humour,” who had endeavored “to expose and extirpate those Follies and Vices which chieﬂy prevailed in their several Countries” (Covent-Garden Journal 4 February 1752). HF paid Cervantes the compliment of imitation in his play Don Quixote in England (1734), which he had drafted while at Leiden in 1728, and most es-

40

A Henry Fielding Companion

pecially in Joseph Andrews (1742), the ﬁrst of his novels, “Written,” as the title page declares, “in Imitation of The Manner of CERVANTES, Author of Don Quixote.” If his admiration for Don Quixote was not quite uncritical (see his review of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote in The Covent-Garden Journal, 24 March 1752), yet HF regarded the work as a masterpiece—nothing less, indeed, than “the History of the World in general” (Joseph Andrews [III. i]) and the model of that “new species of writing” he had himself introduced into England. (On Don Quixote and HF, see the following: Goldberg 1969, Staves 1972, Reed 1981, Welsh 1981, Gilman 1986, Paulson 1997, and McCrea 1998. On Cervantes’ relation to modern ﬁction, see Johnson 1990.) CHANDLER, Richard (d. 1744), one of the partnership of booksellers who published HF’s periodical The Champion (1739–41). CHAPPELLE, Henry (d. 1764), one of the booksellers who published HF’s Champion (1739–41). When the partners met in June 1741 to auction off (curiously, against HF’s wishes) the two-volume reprint of the issues of that journal from 15 November 1739 to 19 June 1740, Chappelle was highest bidder at £110. He also had a share in publishing several other of HF’s writings in 1741: Of True Greatness, the Vernoniad, and The Crisis. Later he was among the members of the trade who published HF’s anti-Jacobite periodical, The True Patriot (1745–46). CHARKE, Charlotte (1713–c. 1760), actress, transvestite, and author of the autobiographical Narrative of her life (1775). She was the estranged daughter of Colley Cibber. Along with the no less notorious Eliza Haywood, who joined the troupe in 1737, Charke was one of HF’s company of actors at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. During the seasons of 1736 and 1737, she played a number of memorable roles: as Lord Place in Pasquin she amused, and shocked, audiences by mimicking her father’s mannerisms—a trick that was so successful she repeated it the following year in The Historical Register, opening the play with an hilarious burlesque of Cibber’s New Year’s ode. She was also applauded in the part of Agnes, the cruel stepmother in George Lillo’s tragedy, Fatal Curiosity, which had its debut on HF’s stage in 1736. (On Charke, see Nussbaum 1987 and Baruth 1998.) CHARLES XII (1682–1718), king of Sweden. HF spent a year translating Gustaf Adlerfelt’s Military History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1740), a work of three volumes, and he read attentively, in the original French, Voltaire’s Histoire de Charles XII. Few of his contemporaries can have been so well informed about this great conqueror, but HF’s knowledge of the man served only to conﬁrm the popular idea of Charles as an ambitious sociopath who sought fame by slaughtering thousands. In this he was for HF, as for Alexander Pope in the Essay on Man (1733–34, IV. 220), the modern counterpart of “Mac-

Others in the Life

41

edonia’s madman,” Alexander the Great. In A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. iv), the shades of these two conquerors ﬂank the Emperor’s throne in the Palace of Death, where they serve as foils to the magnanimity of HF’s hero, the Duke of Marlborough. In Jonathan Wild (1743, I. iii) the illiterate villain in his youth loves to hear of their exploits. In A Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough (1742) HF grants that Charles was a “great” soldier; in Tom Jones (1749, VIII. i) his victory over the Russian army at Narva is an example of “the Marvellous” as historic fact. Remembering Charles’s prowess as a soldier, Major Bath in Amelia (1751, III, ix) exclaims: “ ‘D——n me, I admire the King of Sweden of all the Men in the World.’ ” For HF and most of his contemporaries, however, Charles XII was the very type of false “greatness”—a scourge of mankind, no longer, thankfully, living to murder more thousands: “Charles, who their bowels from vast empires tore, / Now sleeps, and plagues the northern world no more” (Vernoniad [1741]). In The Champion (3 May 1740) HF calls him “the last hero . . . who hath infested, or, I hope, will infest the earth.” CHESTERFIELD, Phillip Dormer Stanhope (1694–1773), fourth Earl of, statesman and wit. HF’s mutually beneﬁcial relationship with this brilliant nobleman began soon after Chesterﬁeld joined the opposition after losing his place in Robert Walpole’s ministry for opposing the Excise Bill of 1733. In 1734— having lost his lucrative position as house playwright at Drury Lane by unwisely supporting the management in a dispute with the actors—HF was in need of money and looked to the opposition for patronage. Moving to the Haymarket Theatre, he added scenes to Don Quixote in England satirizing electoral corruption and, in the version published on the eve of the general election, dedicated the play to Chesterﬁeld, champion of “the cause of liberty” and “true patriotism.” For the next thirteen years at least, relations between HF and his great patron could not have been more cordial. HF’s Pasquin (1736) gave Chesterﬁeld the title for his opposition journal Common Sense, where, in the introductory number (5 February 1737), he compliments HF as “an ingenious Dramatick Author”; and in the House of Lords later that year Chesterﬁeld, though in a losing cause, eloquently opposed passage of the Theatrical Licensing Act, which HF’s political satires had precipitated. Compliments to Chesterﬁeld, praising in particular his wit and greatness of mind, recur frequently thereafter in HF’s writings, notably in The Champion (27 November 1739, 29 January 1740), Of True Greatness (1741), “Of Good-Nature” and “An Essay on Conversation” (Miscellanies, 1743), The True Patriot (5 November 1745), and Letter 41, which HF contributed to his sister Sarah Fielding’s Familiar Letters (1747). Of such compliments none is more elegantly turned, or more revealing of the relationship between the two men, than this from Joseph Andrews (1742; III. i): “I could name a Peer [HF writes] no less elevated by Nature than by Fortune, who whilst he wears the noblest Ensigns of Honour on his Person, bears the truest Stamp of Dignity on his Mind, adorned with Greatness, enriched with Knowledge, and

42

A Henry Fielding Companion

embellished with Genius. I have seen this Man relieve with Generosity, while he hath conversed with Freedom, and be to the same Person a Patron and a Companion.” After 1747, however, references to Chesterﬁeld cease in HF’s writings, owing perhaps to Chesterﬁeld’s “Mistake,” as HF called it (Letter 39), in proposing him for the Middlesex magistracy in June 1747 but neglecting to enable him to meet the property qualiﬁcation for that commission, and owing perhaps as well to Chesterﬁeld, in February 1748, having resigned his place in the Pelham government, which HF was supporting. CHETWOOD, William Rufus (d. 1766), bookseller, author, prompter. Chetwood is best remembered for his useful General History of the Stage (1749), but it was in his capacity as prompter at the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, a position he held from about 1722 to 1742, that HF would ﬁrst have known him. HF appears to have been particularly fond of Chetwood. On 3 May 1732 the company at Drury Lane staged for his beneﬁt a magniﬁcent production of The Tragedy of Tragedies, an occasion for which HF wrote a new introduction, and in 1737 HF gave Chetwood a part in the opening scene of his ill-fated farce, Eurydice. But nothing more surely attests to HF’s affection for the man than the fact of his having put down money to subscribe to Chetwood’s Voyages of the adventurers Captain Richard Falconer (1752) and William Vaughan (1754), a gesture comprising two of the four or ﬁve works for which he ever subscribed. CHEYNE, Dr. George (1671–1743), physician and author. A pious physician of Bath and close friend of Samuel Richardson, Cheyne was author of several badly written treatises on diet and religion. HF thought him a ﬁgure of fun. In The Champion (17 May 1740), Colley Cibber is narrowly saved from being convicted on a charge of murdering the English language when a critic intervenes to point out to the court that “more violence” had been done to it by “a very great and eminent physician” who has left it “an expiring lump, without the least appearance of sense.” As proof of the allegation he quotes an unintelligible passage from Cheyne’s Philosophical Conjectures (1740). In The Champion for 12 June, a “tid bit” from the same work and another from Cheyne’s Essay on Regimen (1740) illustrate the “mysteries”—comprehensible only to adepts—of philosophy and physic, respectively. In A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. iv) HF appears to mock Cheyne’s theories on diet, as he certainly does in Tom Jones (1749, XI, viii), where he reminds the reader that “the learned Dr. Cheney” calls “drinking Punch pouring liquid Fire down your Throat”—a reference to Cheyne’s Essay of Health and Long Life (1724). In The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755, entry of 14 July 1754) HF facetiously claims not to have found in “either Cheney, Arbuthnot, or in any other modern writer on regimen” any caution against the emaciating effects of a diet of selfconsuming pride. CHILD, Sir Josiah (1630–99), economic theorist. Child’s New Discourse on Trade—of which HF owned a copy of the fourth edition (c. 1740)—was an

Others in the Life

43

important source for his proposals for providing for the poor. In An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (1751) HF engages in a kind of dialogue with “this truly wise and great Man,” objecting to Child’s view that the wages of laborers should not be retrenched in order to lower the price of goods (section IV). Later, however, in A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753), he appears to endorse Child’s argument that workhouses for the poor should be larger, accommodating people from a wider jurisdiction than that of the individual parishes (WE: 259). CHUBB, Thomas (1679–1747), tallow chandler of Salisbury and philosopher. A clever if unlearned man, Chubb was the author of deistical tracts in which he argued for natural revelation and the moral “self-sufﬁciency” of man against divine revelation and the doctrine of grace—for instance, A Discourse concerning Reason, with Regard to Religion and Divine Revelation (1731), The True Gospel of Jesus Christ Asserted (1738), and Chubb’s “Farewell to his Readers” in The Ground and Foundation of Morality Considered (1745). HF’s biographers have sometimes too categorically claimed that Chubb was the model for the deist philosopher Thomas Square in Tom Jones. As far as his personal characteristics are concerned, Chubb did not at all resemble Square. Whereas HF represents Square as “deeply read in the Antients,” Chubb was illiterate in the classical languages; whereas Square is “a comely Man” and attractive to women, Chubb was short and portly, “despicable and mean” in appearance and reputed to be homosexual; whereas Square converts to Christianity on his deathbed, Chubb died suddenly and without having renounced his heterodox views. HF’s intent in the novel was not merely to hold up one single individual to ridicule, but to discredit deists and freethinkers in general. Nevertheless, just as the satire of Wilson’s “Rule of Right-men” in Joseph Andrews (III. iii) owes much to HF’s association with his freethinking friends James Ralph and Thomas Cooke, so Square’s favorite phrases—“the unalterable Rule of Right” and “the eternal Fitness of Things”—echo Chubb’s, whom HF would have known at Salisbury. (For a detailed discussion of Chubb in relation to Square’s deism, see TJ, WE notes to III. iii.) CIBBER, Colley (1671–1757), comedian, playwright, manager (until 1733) of the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, and from 1730 Poet Laureate. Cibber gave HF his start as a dramatist, producing his ﬁrst play at Drury Lane in 1728 and acting the part of Rattle, for which HF praised him in the preface to the published version. But Cibber rejected HF’s next piece and was thereupon satirized as Marplay in The Author’s Farce (1730), staged to great applause at the Little Haymarket Theatre. The success of HF’s plays there during 1730–31, including Tom Thumb and The Tragedy of Tragedies, no doubt helped to heal the breach, for HF soon returned to Drury Lane, where, during the ﬁrst six months of 1732, Cibber produced ﬁve of his comedies, and he wrote epilogues for both The Modern Husband (1732) and The Miser (1733). In 1733, relations between the two again worsened when Cibber sold his share of the patent of the theater to

44

A Henry Fielding Companion

John Highmore. His son, Theophilus Cibber, angered that his father had sold what he considered to be his “birthright,” led a successful rebellion of the actors that had the effect of driving HF from his lucrative position as house playwright at Drury Lane and back to the Little Haymarket. From this time on, Cibber (as well as his son) would remain a standing target for HF’s ridicule. His attempt as playwright and manager to promote “genteel” comedy at the expense of the “low” humor of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; his presumption as manager in “altering” Shakespeare’s King John; his wretched odes as Poet Laureate; his political association with Robert Walpole, the prime minister—all are hit in HF’s satires of 1734–37: he is Marplay Senior and Sir Farcical Comic in the revised version of The Author’s Farce (1734) and Ground-Ivy in The Historical Register (1737); and, among his satires of Cibber in The Craftsman during this period, HF, hilariously impersonating the Poet Laureate after the passage of the Theatrical Licensing Act, has him propose himself to the government as Censor of Old Plays (2 July 1737). In the early numbers of The Champion there are incidental hits at Cibber, but it was the publication of the autobiographical Apology for his life in April 1740 that prompted HF to renew his jesting in earnest. Cibber there contemptuously alludes to him as “a broken wit” whose indecent satires had caused a justly incensed legislature to censor the stage. HF retaliated with a vengeance, ridiculing Cibber’s poems, plays, and politics, scofﬁng at his vanity, and hauling him before the Court of Censorial Inquiry on the charge of murdering the English language. And in 1741–42, after leaving The Champion, he continued in this vein in the Vernoniad, Shamela, The Opposition: A Vision, Plutus, and Joseph Andrews. Indeed, HF was still mocking Cibber at the end of his life, in The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755). (On Fielding’s relations with Cibber, see Nichols 1922; on Cibber see Koon 1985 and Ashley 1989.) CIBBER, Susannah Arne (1714–66), actress, daughter of the composer Thomas Arne and the unhappily married wife of Theophilus Cibber. At Drury Lane she played the part of Lady Charlotte Gaywit in HF’s The Modern Husband (1732), but she was chieﬂy admired for her excellence in tragic roles. In Amelia (1751, V. viii) HF alludes to her celebrated performance as Juliet. Compliments to her occur in The Jacobite’s Journal (6, 13 February 1748), Tom Jones (1749, IX, i), and The Covent-Garden Journal (11 January 1752). CIBBER, Theophilus (1703–58), actor and theatrical manager; Colley Cibber’s disreputable son and husband to Susannah Arne Cibber. A gifted comedian, Cibber at Drury Lane in 1732 and 1733 had important parts in every production of HF’s plays: Lord Grizzle in the revival of The Tragedy of Tragedies, Jack Stocks in The Lottery, Captain Bellamant in The Modern Husband, Lovegirlo in The Covent-Garden Tragedy, the lecherous priest Father Martin in The Old Debauchees, and the canny servants Gregory and Ramilies in HF’s versions of Molie`re’s The Mock Doctor and The Miser. In May 1733, however,

Others in the Life

45

in an act that in a few months put an end to HF’s lucrative tenure as house playwright, Cibber, angered that his father had sold his share of the patent of the theater to John Highmore, led a rebellion of the company at Drury Lane, taking most of the principal actors with him to the Haymarket. For this offense HF, before being forced to trade places at the Haymarket with the victorious rebels, satirized Cibber and his father as Marplay Junior and Senior in the revised version of The Author’s Farce (January 1734). The following year, after declaring a truce in his “war” with the Cibbers (as it was called), he rejoined the company at Drury Lane, where Theophilus Cibber played the part of Captain Spark in the disastrous production of The Universal Gallant. After this disappointment HF formed his own company and moved once again to the Haymarket, where in The Historical Register (1737) he resumed hostilities: Theophilus is mocked as Shakespeare’s blustering Pistol (his signature role as a comedian), who rants about being “Prime Minister Theatrical” while his father, as GroundIvy, attempts to foist adulterated Shakespeare on the town. In The Champion (1739–41) HF continued his jibes at “that Face-making Puppy young Cibber,” as the Player calls him in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. x). In 1740 there also appeared an anonymous satirical pamphlet sometimes attributed to HF, called An Apology for the Life of Mr. T[heophilus] C[ibber], Comedian—the title trading on that of Colley Cibber’s notorious autobiography; this piece, however, is not now generally accepted as HF’s work. HF lost few opportunities of having fun at Theophilus Cibber’s expense, but he did not have the last laugh. In the spring of 1748 Cibber took sweet revenge: on 28 April, as HF under the name of “Madame de la Nash” presided over his satirical puppet show in Panton Street, Cibber at Covent Garden staged a revival of the original version of The Author’s Farce, mimicking HF in the role of Harry Luckless, author of the “Operatical Puppet-Shew, call’d The Pleasures of the Town” which comprises the third act. CICERO, Marcus Tullius (106–43 B.C.), Roman orator and philosopher. Like every other educated man of his time HF was well acquainted with the writings of Cicero. His library contained Denys Lambin’s excellent edition of Cicero’s complete works (1566) as well as Regnier Desmarais’ French translation of De divinatione (1711) and William Melmoth’s translation of the Letters (1753); and as the selection of references in the Ribbles’ catalog (C29) suggests, he thought of Cicero in a variety of contexts, but especially as the philosopher of an enlightened stoicism. Written on the occasion of his favorite daughter’s death, HF’s “Of the Remedy of Afﬂiction for the Loss of Our Friends” (Miscellanies, 1743) opens by sounding a theme of philosophical consolation taken from Seneca and Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (III. i. 1)—“that exalted divine Philosophy” which consists of “acquiring solid lasting Habits of Virtue, and ingrafting them into our Character.” In this essay, as later in Amelia (1751, IV. v), Cicero is a “mental Physician” who skillfully ministers to those troubled by unruly passions. In Tom Jones (1749, VIII. xv) HF’s hero appears to paraphrase the

46

A Henry Fielding Companion

Tusculan Disputations (I. xiv. 32) when he rejects the misanthropy of the Man of the Hill, saying: “ ‘As an excellent Writer observes, nothing should be esteemed as characteristical of a Species, but what is to be found among the best and most perfect Individuals of that Species.’ ” It is a sentiment that, in most moods, HF himself shared with Shaftesbury and the latitudinarian divines; and, referring to De officiis, he concluded his last work—an attack on the Essays of the freethinker Bolingbroke (1755)—by alluding to the “pattern” of “perfect goodness” Cicero has given us in his writings. HF was careful to qualify such praise. In Tom Jones (V. ii) his representation of Square, the deist philosopher, exposes the fatuity of his complacent neostoicism. Having counseled Jones, who has suffered a broken arm, that pain is contemptible and “below the Consideration of a wise Man”—a notion he “has extracted out of the Second Book of Tully’s Tusculan Questions, and from the Great Lord Shaftesbury”—Square is unequal to the test when he inadvertently bites his tongue. Later he comes to see the inadequacy of his philosophy and, on his deathbed, converts to Christianity, having found the “Light of Reason” alone “so faint and glimmering” that even Plato and Cicero could not be certain of “a future State” (XVIII. iv). (On HF’s attitude toward Cicero, see Miller 1961: 67, 257; and Mace 1996: 113–15.) CLARENDON, Edward Hyde (1609–74), ﬁrst Earl of, statesman and historian. By his daughter’s marriage to the Duke of York (later James II), he was grandfather of both Queen Mary and Queen Anne. HF, who owned a copy of Clarendon’s remarkable History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, 6 vols., 1732 (Ribbles, C33), had presumably read the work earlier (it was originally published 1702–4), as he was aware of its contents as early as his unﬁnished burlesque of the Dunciad (1729/30). In Joseph Andrews (1742, III. i) Clarendon is paired with Laurence Echard as a biased Tory historian, and in Tom Jones (1749, VIII. i) HF ridicules him for relating as fact a story of the ghost of the ﬁrst Duke of Buckingham’s father appearing to warn the duke of danger shortly before he was assassinated. Other passages from Clarendon’s History are recalled in The Champion (6 and 18 December 1739), A Dialogue between a Gentleman of London, Agent for Two Court Candidates, and an Honest Alderman of the Country Party (1747), and The Jacobite’s Journal (24 September and 15 October 1748). CLARKE, Samuel (1675–1729), for the last twenty years of his life rector of St. James’s, Piccadilly, where HF’s father worshiped and ﬁve of HF’s halfbrothers were baptized. Interpreter of Newton, mentor of Benjamin Hoadly, friend of Queen Caroline, Clarke was a leader of the rationalist, latitudinarian divines. In The Champion (22 January 1740) and The Covent-Garden Journal (14 January 1752) HF placed him in the company of his favorite theologians: John Tillotson, Robert South, and Isaac Barrow. Discussing his hero’s dangerous inclination toward deism in Amelia (I. iii)—“though he did not abso-

Others in the Life

47

lutely deny the Existence of a God; yet he entirely denied his Providence”— HF cites Clarke’s observation in A Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706) that such a belief inevitably terminates in atheism. Clarke’s quarrel with the deist Anthony Collins, who denied the freedom of the will, is also relevant to HF’s representation of the paralyzing effects on his hero of this belief in moral determinism. (See Battestin 1974a.) CLELAND, John (1709–89), miscellaneous writer and author of the erotic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill (1749). As his reviews of A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez (1749) and Amelia (1751) make clear, Cleland admired HF as both a novelist and a magistrate—a fact the more remarkable considering he believed that it was “by way of answer” to his own pamphlet, The Case of the Unfortunate Penlez, that HF had written his defense of the government’s handling of the riots that resulted in the execution of Bosavern Penlez. Reviewing both pamphlets in the Monthly Review (November 1749), Cleland declared that HF’s “name would be alone sufﬁcient to recommend the piece.” (For a discussion of Cleland’s pamphlet in relation to HF’s, see Lonsdale 1979.) In reviewing Amelia for the Monthly Review (December 1751), though he worried that HF’s candor in treating scenes of low life would offend the fastidious, Cleland commended his virtuous purpose in the novel and his artful conduct of the narrative. HF’s decision to take up the story of his heroine after her marriage—at the point where other novelists end their stories—was for Cleland “the boldest stroke that has yet been attempted in this species of writing.” (On Cleland, see Epstein 1974, 1985.) CLIVE, Catherine Raftor (1711–85), actress. Kitty Clive had a pleasant singing voice and excelled in comedy. Indeed, in Tom Jones (1749, IX. i) and Amelia (1751, I. vi) HF represents her as the very standard of excellence in her art, declaring her to be to acting what Shakespeare is to poetry and William Hogarth to painting. As a dramatist in the 1730s he claimed to have been the ﬁrst to recognize her talent. In the preface to The Mock Doctor (1732), in which she played Dorcas, he lauds her as one of “the rising Glories of the Theatre”; and he dedicated to her The Intriguing Chambermaid (1734), a play he expressly wrote with her in mind and in which, as Lettice, she played the title role. Her other parts in HF’s comedies and farces of the heyday years of 1732–33 at Drury Lane include Chloe in The Lottery, Kissinda in The Covent-Garden Tragedy, Lappet in The Miser, Deborah in the mock-opera of that title HF wrote for her, Harriot in the revised version of The Author’s Farce, and Lucy in The Virgin Unmask’d. In Miss Lucy in Town (1743), the sequel to The Virgin Unmask’d, she again played the principal role; she would not, however, oblige HF by taking the part of the bawd Mrs. Useful in The Wedding Day (1743). Even as her popularity waned in the 1740s, HF repeatedly complimented her in the most extravagant terms. In The Covent-Garden Journal (8 February 1752), he declares her to be in comedy “the greatest Actress the World ever saw.”

48

A Henry Fielding Companion

COBHAM, Sir Richard Temple (1675–1749), viscount. After he was dismissed from the colonelcy of his regiment for opposing Robert Walpole’s Excise Bill of 1733, Lord Cobham became the center of a new opposition. In the summer of 1735 at Stowe, his magniﬁcent estate in Buckinghamshire, he gathered around himself a circle of bright and politically ambitious young men, all related to him by blood or marriage. These included his nephew and HF’s former schoolfellow at Eton College, George Lyttelton, as well as William Pitt, George and Richard Grenville, and Gilbert West—a coterie who, under the leadership of the Earl of Chesterfield became known as the “Boy Patriots” or “Cobham’s Cubs.” To their number in 1739 was added George Bubb Dodington, who was also related to Cobham through his maternal grandmother. From as early as 1734 this would be the group who determined HF’s political loyalties to the end of his life. They account for his antiministerial satires in Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register (1737), The Craftsman (1734–39) and The Champion (1739–40); and after 1744, when they combined with the so-called Old Whigs from Walpole’s former ministry to form the Broad-Bottom government under Henry Pelham, his brother the Duke of Newcastle, and the Duke of Bedford. They account for HF’s metamorphosis into the establishment’s principal propagandist in The True Patriot (1745–46), The Jacobite’s Journal (1747–48), and other political writings of his later years. Cobham subscribed to the Miscellanies (1743), and in Tom Jones (1749, XI. ix) HF paid a handsome compliment to Stowe, the most famous of all the great country estates. COCK, Christopher (d. 1748), auctioneer, whose rooms, located after 1737 in the Great Piazza, Covent Garden, were a fashionable resort. In The Historical Register (1737) the auction scene is presided over by one Christopher Hen, and in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. vi) the artisan who fashioned the hero’s cudgel was prevented by want of room from depicting on it “an Auction-Room, where Mr. Cock would have appeared aloft in his Pulpit, trumpeting forth the Praises of a China Bason; and with Astonishment wondering that Nobody bids more for that fine, that superb—.” COGAN, Francis (“Count”), bookseller at Temple Bar. He was one of the partners in The Champion (1739–41). In the number for 24 June 1740, HF places him at the head of the “three honest Booksellers” who directed the ﬁnancial affairs of the paper. COKE, Sir Edward (1552–1634), judge and authority on the law. For HF, who in preparing for the bar pored over his voluminous commentaries and reports, Coke was a “great Writer,” a “great Lawyer,” and a “great Man” (Charge delivered to the Grand Jury [1749] and Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers [1751], section VI). In a letter to James Harris of 24 November 1744 he refers to Coke as the very standard of his profession, being to a lawyer what Socrates is to a philosopher and Marlborough to a soldier.

Others in the Life

49

Indeed, references to Coke as a paragon of the law begin even before HF began his legal studies in earnest—in, for example, The Temple Beau (1730, V. xi), The Author’s Farce (1730, Air xiii), The Miser (1733, II. iv), and Don Quixote in England (1734, II. xiv)—and they continue to the end of his life. COLEMAN, Charles. Under HF’s patron the Duke of Bedford, Coleman was deputy surveyor and receiver of the rents of the New Forest, Hampshire. In 1748 HF, in his capacity as High Steward of the forest, suspected Coleman of acting against the king’s interest in a dispute in which the powerful landowner James Perkins claimed rights to the timber and deer in a certain parcel of the forest (see Letters 32–36, 43). HF’s suspicions were later justiﬁed when Coleman and two other forest ofﬁcers were accused of falsifying estimates of repairs to the royal lodges and of exploiting the king’s timber for their personal proﬁt. COLLIER, Arthur (1707–77), LL.D., of Salisbury. Dr. Collier was a lawyer at Doctors’ Commons, the ecclesistical court, where he was known as “an ingenious, but unsteady and eccentric man.” After Lady Sarah Gould, their grandmother, moved to Salisbury in 1720 HF and his sisters became close friends of Arthur and his sisters Jane Collier and Margaret Collier. Collier subscribed to HF’s Miscellanies (1743) and tutored Sarah Fielding in Latin and Greek. In 1745, however, HF’s friendship with him was strained to the breaking point as a result of Collier’s being sued by a number of creditors for debts amounting to £1,500. HF and their mutual friend James Harris became Collier’s security for one of these debts amounting to £400 (though it was understood that Harris alone, a wealthy man, would be responsible for paying the full amount should Collier default). Acting as Collier’s lawyer in the case, HF contrived to postpone the day of reckoning, and in the end Collier was somehow saved from debtors’ prison. HF, however, remembered this affair bitterly, convinced that Collier had used him ungratefully. From Lisbon at the end of his life he wrote to his brother John Fielding that he was sending home half-chests of onions to his friends, among them Collier, “whose very Name I hate.” (See Letters 26, 29–30, 75.) COLLIER, Jane (d. 1754/55), author. Sister of Arthur and Margaret Collier, Jane was Sarah Fielding’s close friend—and a close friend as well of HF and his rival novelist, Samuel Richardson. She was in her own right an author of wit and spirit. Her Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting was published in 1753, and she collaborated with Sarah Fielding in the curious allegorical work The Cry, published in 1754 shortly before HF sailed for Lisbon—a book in which he would have found a number of cordial allusions to his novels. Though HF came heartily to dislike her brother and sister, he remained fond of Jane Collier to the very end. On the eve of his ﬁnal journey, he made her a present of a vellum-bound copy of his favorite Horace, in the inscription declaring his “high Esteem for an Understanding more than Female, mixed with virtues al-

50

A Henry Fielding Companion

most more than human” (the book is in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley). COLLIER, Margaret (1717–94). Like her brother Arthur and her sister Jane Collier, Margaret was a native of Salisbury and, for a time, a close friend of HF. In 1745, after his ﬁrst wife had died, she appears to have joined his sister Sarah Fielding in taking care of his household, her role being that of governess to his daughter Harriet. In that capacity, after witnessing his will, she accompanied HF and his second wife to Lisbon in 1754, where, however, she incurred his displeasure by ﬂirting with the chaplain of the English factory. He came to regard her as meddlesome and ungrateful—as indeed “the most artful, wicked B— in the world” (Letter 75). As a consequence of this unpleasantness, his brother John Fielding appears to have turned Margaret out of the family after HF’s death; she spent the last forty years of her life on the Isle of Wight. From Ryde on 3 October 1755 she wrote to Samuel Richardson complaining of her unhappy situation and of the bitter irony that, because it was so inferior to HF’s other works, her neighbors had taken her to be the author of The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. CONGREVE, William (1670–1729), poet and dramatist. To judge from the frequency with which HF refers to him, or indeed quotes from memory passages from the plays, Congreve was his favorite comic dramatist after Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. In the preface to his ﬁrst play, Love in Several Masques (1728), he mentions Congreve and William Wycherley as the proven authors in a genre he hoped to succeed in; and he often paired the two as supreme in comedies of wit: as in his unﬁnished burlesque of the Dunciad (1729/30), The Author’s Farce (1730, III), and in the revision of that play (1734, I. vi), where Marplay Junior (Theophilus Cibber) assures Witmore that there are no such “wit-traps” in his plays as he will ﬁnd in Congreve and Wycherley. In Tom Jones (1749, XIV. i), though Sir John Vanbrugh replaces Wycherley in the pairing, Congreve remains as one of two modern playwrights who “copied Nature.” In The CoventGarden Journal (3 March 1752) it is Congreve who in a famous passage serves as the standard of “Wit” that Robert South surpasses in his sermons; and in an essay on wit and humor in the same journal (18 July 1752) HF quotes at some length from Congreve’s letter to John Dennis “Concerning Humor in Comedy”—a copy of which HF had in his library (Ribbles, D14). (For a study of social changes affecting the development of drama in the period from Congreve to HF, see Loftis 1959. On Congreve, see Love 1974 and Thomas 1992.) COOKE, Thomas (c. 1702–56), miscellaneous writer. For a considerable time Cooke was an important ﬁgure in HF’s life. He is remembered today chieﬂy as the translator of Hesiod (1728) and Plautus (1746), the latter being one of only four or ﬁve works to which HF subscribed, a favor Cooke returned by subscribing to HF’s Miscellanies (1743). Cooke’s literary interests went beyond the

Others in the Life

51

classics. He was himself a poet of sorts; he was a journalist who wrote on a variety of topics while supporting either political party, and (to use the term loosely) he was a deist philosopher who recommended replacing religion with a form of stoicism whose principal imperative was “the Rule of Right.” His relations with HF were not always amicable. In November and December 1730 he was probably the author of two pieces satirizing the recent selection of a poet laureate. The ﬁrst, a farce entitled The Battle of the Poets, was introduced without HF’s permission into the Haymarket production of Tom Thumb, an act provoking him to publish an angry disclaimer of authorship. The second, a verse satire entitled The Candidates for the Bays, includes HF among its targets. Twenty years later, in a poem celebrating Folly published in The Craftsman (7 April 1750), Cooke would subject HF’s character and works to similar abuse. These satires are the earliest and last traceable indications of HF’s relationship with Cooke, and they are surprising when one considers how close the two men were during a period lasting from 1732 well into the 1740s. In 1732, soon after HF had established himself at Drury Lane and declared his admiration for Sir Robert Walpole in the dedication to his comedy The Modern Husband, Cooke began publishing the proministerial periodical The Comedian, in which he defended HF and his plays against the attacks of The Grub-Street Journal, and in the number for August 1732 he published two pieces by a “Friend” who was probably HF—one an essay chastising “Party-writers” who vilify the ministry, the other a verse epistle to the painter John Ellys, a member of a circle of rakes and wits to which HF and Cooke also belonged. This was probably the “Club frequented by Men of great Abilities” whose conversation, as recalled by Wilson in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. iii), “rolled on the deepest Points of Philosophy.” The brand of deism HF heard at these meetings, and which he later ridiculed in Wilson’s narrative, was a mixture of the ethical systems of his friend James Ralph and Cooke, but it takes its name from Cooke’s concept of “the Rule of Right”—a philosophy he set forth in a series of articles in The Comedian and in the separate treatise A Demonstration of the Will of God by the Light of Nature (1733). In itself HF’s ridicule of Cooke’s deism might well have caused the rift that eventually occurred between them, for Cooke was an irritable and unforgiving man. In 1744, two years after the publication of Joseph Andrews, however, Dr. Charles Burney found HF and Cooke together as members of a “club of wits” presided over by Jonathan Tyers, “Master” of the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall. (See Life:esp. 153–60.) COOPER, Mary (ﬂ. 1743–61), bookseller, widow of Thomas Cooper, whose shop was located at the Globe in Paternoster Row. As may be inferred from the ledgers of the printer William Strahan, she worked during 1745–47 in cooperation with HF’s principal publisher Andrew Millar, publishing under her own imprint HF’s less prestigious works of this period for which Strahan charged Millar. With the exception of The Debauchees: or, The Jesuit Caught (1745), published by John Watts, her name appears in the imprint of all HF’s

52

A Henry Fielding Companion

publications from the satiric Charge to the Jury on the death of Robert Walpole (July 1745) to the periodical The Jacobite’s Journal (December 1747–November 1748)—the latter, like its predecessor The True Patriot (November 1745–June 1746), being published by her in partnership with Millar and others. COOPER, Thomas (ﬂ. 1733–43), bookseller, whose shop was located at the Globe in Paternoster Row, was “the most important of all the later generation of trade publishers.” Though publisher of Sir Robert Walpole’s organ, The Daily Gazetteer—for which reason HF dubbed him “Publisher-General to the Ministerial-Society”—Cooper nevertheless was chosen by the partners to distribute HF’s antiministerial periodical, The Champion; his name alone appears in the imprint for the ﬁrst twenty numbers (15 November–29 December 1739). Less surprising, he also published HF’s anonymous satire of his former party, The Opposition: A Vision (December 1741). At his death the business was carried on unchanged by his widow, Mary Cooper. (See Treadwell 1982:111.) CORBETT, Charles (1710–52), bookseller, whose shop was located “at Addison’s Head against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleetstreet.” With No. 21 (1 January 1740), Corbett took over publication of The Champion from Thomas Cooper; his name alone appears in the imprint of the journal until, with No. 64 (10 April 1740), it changed from a morning to an evening paper published by Josiah Graham. In January 1741 Corbett also published HF’s poems, Of True Greatness and the Vernoniad, as well as the short-lived magazine, The History of Our Own Times, which HF probably edited. What is more, during this troubled period of HF’s life, Corbett was not only his publisher but his friend. When in early March 1741 HF was arrested for debt and conﬁned in a bailiff’s sponging house, Corbett offered himself as security for the debt. Some years later he also had a hand in publishing HF’s Jacobite’s Journal (1747–48). CORNEILLE, Pierre (1606–84), French dramatist, poet, critic. HF, who owned an edition of Corneille’s dramatic works in French—including the three “Discours” on the dramatic poem, on tragedy, and on the three unities—mentions him only twice, both instances occurring in The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731). In the preface by “H. Scriblerus Secundus” Corneille’s Sophonisbe (1663) is compared to the tragedies on the same subject by Mairet, Nathaniel Lee, and James Thomson—the last resembling it in giving the heroine “no other Passion but the Love of her Country”; in the note (a) on the opening line of HF’s play (“Sure, such a Day as this was never seen!”), Corneille’s dictum that the action of a tragedy must take place in the course of “some very remarkable Day” is shown to have been constructed by English tragedians as meaning “a ﬁne Summer’s Day.” COURTEVILLE, Ralph (d. 1772), political writer and organist at St. James’s Church, Piccadilly. Under the name of “R. Freeman” he was author ﬁrst of the

Others in the Life

53

pro–Walpole Daily Courant and then for The Daily Gazetteer, which the ministry established in June 1735 by bringing together under one masthead several of its more effective propagandists. In 1735 and 1738 HF ridiculed Courteville in several numbers of The Craftsman, and during his editorship of The Champion (1739–41) Courteville became his most annoying adversary. In the number for 16 October 1740 HF published a mock advertisement proposing the publication by subscription of an autobiographical work entitled, “An Apology for the Life, Actions, and Writings of RALPH FREEMAN, alias, COURT-EVIL, Esq; . . . WRITTEN by HIMSELF.” Courteville would be known thereafter in the opposition press by this “alias.” COVENTRY, Francis (d. 1759), clergyman. Coventry’s novel The History of Pompey the Little: or, The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog (1751) is perhaps the most delightful and sophisticated of all imitations of HF’s manner, and in the dedication to the so called “third” edition (1752) he paid HF a handsome tribute. HF, according to the Ribbles (C52), almost certainly had two copies of this work, one of them presumably a presentation copy. Coventry is also usually credited (if that is the word for such a jejune composition) with the laudatory Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Mr. Fielding (1751), but the attribution is doubtful considering the difference in quality between the novel and the essay, which the Monthly Review accurately dismissed as “a mere catchpenny job.” (On Coventry and his relation to HF, see the excellent Oxford English Novels edition of Pompey the Little [Day 1974]; see also Olshin 1970. For a facsimile of the Essay on HF’s “new species of writing” attributed to Coventry, see McKillop 1962.) CROMWELL, Oliver (1599–1658), soldier, politician, Lord Protector. It might be said that in his ambivalence toward Cromwell, HF himself held the antithetical views of him expressed by the biased historians whom he ridicules in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. i)—Edward Clarendon and Laurence Echard for the Tories, Paul de Rapin and Bulstrode Whitelocke for the Whigs, who, depending on their politics, represent “the same Man as a Rogue, to whom others give a great and honest Character.” HF rarely alludes to Cromwell, one of the most controversial ﬁgures in English history, but when he does, it is either to scorn or to praise him. In an essay on fortune in The Champion (6 December 1739) Cromwell’s rise to greatness, as depicted by Clarendon and Echard, owes more to “the wonderful effects of chance” than to any virtue of his own, and in this he is meant to invite comparison with that of the “Great Man” himself, Sir Robert Walpole. Here Cromwell is a “usurper” at the head of “a set of scoundrels and cowards.” In A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. ix) he is “a stern-looking Spirit” who has “narrowly escaped the Bottomless Pit.” But in the chapter on “Matters Political” in Amelia (1751, XI. ii)—in which HF has Dr. Harrison advocate the political idealism adopted by his friend George Bubb Dodington, who had recently resigned from the Pelham ministry

54

A Henry Fielding Companion

to form a new opposition—Cromwell is praised for surrounding himself with followers who were men of virtue and ability rather than mere sycophants. By so doing, Harrison declares, he “carried the Reputation of England higher than it ever was at any other time.” CUMBERLAND, William Augustus (1726–65), Duke of, youngest son of George II. Cumberland distinguished himself against the French at the battles of Dettingen (1743) and Fontenoy (1745), and in April 1746 he put an end to the Jacobite uprising by defeating the rebel forces at Culloden. His severity in treating the rebel clansmen earned him the nickname Billy the Butcher, but HF never mentions him except in the most laudatory terms. After the victory at Culloden, HF in two numbers of The True Patriot (22–29 April and 29 April–6 May 1746) praised “the Glorious Duke of CUMBERLAND, that Fulmen Belli” and contrasted his bravery in battle with the cowardice of his rival, Charles Edward Stuart. And when he resumed writing Tom Jones after the rebellion, HF had his hero join a company of soldiers marching north to join “the glorious Duke of Cumberland” against the rebels (VII. xi). Other compliments to him occur in Ovid’s Art of Love Paraphrased (1747) and An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (1751; section II), where Cumberland is ranked with Edward, Henry, and Marlborough as the greatest of British generals. CURLL, Edmund (1675–1747), bookseller. The most notorious bookseller of his time, Curll shamelessly trafﬁcked in scandal and pornography—practices that on more than one occasion landed him in jail or in the pillory, a punishment, HF remarked in The Covent-Garden Journal (27 June 1752), that he managed to turn to his advantage; during the hour he stood on the scaffold, he proclaimed “his Goods to all that past that Way.” For his abuse of Alexander Pope he is immortalized in the Dunciad (1728–29, Book II). In both versions of The Author’s Farce (1730 and 1734) he is ﬁgured as Bookweight in Acts I–II and as Curry in the puppet show. In The Champion (1 March 1740) HF satirizes him for misrepresenting works by hackney writers in his employ as the productions of Pope and other good authors; and in the same journal (5 August 1740) HF accuses him of pirating several numbers of The Champion. Shamela’s favorite reading includes the lewd book, Venus in the Cloister: or, The Nun in Her Smock, for publishing which Curll was prosecuted. And in the original edition of Jonathan Wild (1743, II, xi) HF facetiously supposes that Curll is the publisher of Joe Miller’s Jests. (On Curll, see Strauss 1970.) DACIER, Anne Lefe`vre (1654–1720), French classical scholar and wife of Andre´ Dacier (1651–1722), whom HF in Tom Jones (1749, XI. i) ranks with Rene´ Le Bossu as the greatest of modern critics. She was one of the editors of the Delphin edition of the classics, and, after translating Anacreon (1681), Plautus (1683), Aristophanes (1684), and Terence (1688) into French, she produced her highly respected versions of the Iliad (1699) and Odyssey (1708). In her

Others in the Life

55

book Des causes de la corruption du gouˆt (1714) she attacked Antoine Houdar de La Motte for treating Homer irreverently in his abridgment of the lliad, to which criticism La Motte replied in kind. HF greatly admired Dacier and her works. In A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. viii) he introduces her sitting on Homer’s lap, and in producing (with William Young) his own translation of Aristophanes’ Plutus (1742), he was careful in the preface and notes to compare his version with hers. In Amelia (1751) Mrs. Bennet/Atkinson cites Dacier as proof of the “great Absurdity . . . of excluding Women from Learning” (VI. vii); but Dr. Harrison, while granting that her example shows that women are capable of mastering the classical languages, questions “the Utility of Learning in a young Lady’s Education,” slyly proving the point by alluding to Dacier’s quarrel with La Motte over the merits of Homer and imagining what life in the family would be like had the two critics been married to each other (see X. i and notes in WE). Other references to Mme. Dacier occur in The Champion (4 December 1739), Tom Jones (1749, VII, xii), and The Covent-Garden Journal (8 February, 21 October 1752). DALTON, John (1709–63), poet and divine. He and his brother Richard Dalton were friends of HF. In The True Patriot (28 January 1746) Parson Adams recommends to HF’s readers Dalton’s monitory sermon “on the Subject of educating Youth, lately preached . . . at the University of Oxford.” Dalton was one of the favored few to receive prepublication copies of the ﬁrst two volumes of Tom Jones, of which, Thomas Birch reported to Philip Yorke in a letter of 15 October 1748, he was “loud in his Commendations.” DALTON, Richard (1715–91), Librarian to the Prince of Wales and Keeper of the Royal Drawings and Medals. Like his brother John Dalton he was a friend of HF, who in The Covent-Garden Journal (10 March 1752) warmly commends the recent publication of Dalton’s architectural engravings of the antiquities of Greece and Egypt. DEARDS (or DEARD), William (d. 1716), fashionable jeweler, toyman, and pawnbroker; his shop was located opposite St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet Street in 1740 and later, by 1744, in the Strand. References to Deards, who traded in elegant vanities and charged those to whom he lent money unconscionable rates of interest, occur early in HF’s writings. In The Temple Beau (1730, IV. vi) and The Miser (1732, II. i) allusions to him are neutral, and in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. vi) he is the skilled “Artiﬁcer” whose workmen made the hero’s cudgel. In 1739, however, HF had brought a suit against Deards at the King’s Bench for some grievance (the nature of it is unknown but was probably ﬁnancial). Thereafter he is usually the target of HF’s sarcasm. In a note to the Vernoniad (1741) Deards is a tradesman of the sort who, “as we read in Scripture were driven out of the Temple,” and in Ovid’s Art of Love Paraphrased (1747) he is represented as one who, though willing to take “your Note” if you had no

56

A Henry Fielding Companion

ready money, would later teach you to “repent having learnt to write your Name.” Deards is doubtless the “eminent” or “celebrated” toyman whose grasping practices are satirized in A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. i) and Tom Jones (1749, XII. iv). See also Jonathan Wild (1743, II. iii, III. vi) and The Covent-Garden Journal (4 January 1752). DEFOE, Daniel (c. 1661–1731), novelist and miscellaneous writer. HF nowhere mentions Defoe by name, but he had certainly read Robinson Crusoe (1719) and at least two, perhaps three, of his many works that were published either anonymously or under a pseudonym. He twice used Robinson Crusoe as an example of ﬁction masquerading as true history. Introducing his series “Some Extracts Out of the Voyages of Mr. Job Vinegar” in The Champion (20 March 1740), he refers to Crusoe as a “grave” travel writer who is therefore less to his purpose than “the facetious Captain Gulliver”; and in The Jacobite’s Journal (27 February 1748) he assures “the learned and facetious Novelist” Thomas Carte, Jacobite author of the General History of England, that by publishing the subsequent parts of his work piecemeal, in the manner of the penny chapbook romances, he would enjoy “as universal a Sale, as the inimitable Adventures of Robinson Crusoe formerly had throughout this Kingdom.” In Tom Jones (1749), VIII. v) a copy of Defoe’s novel is among the “curious Books” in Partridge’s little library. In the Preface to the Miscellanies (1743) HF appears to refer to Defoe’s anonymous biography of Jonathan Wild (1725) when he protests that in writing his ﬁctive version of Wild’s life he did not intend “to enter the Lists with that excellent Historian, who from authentic Papers and Records, &c. hath already given so satisfactory an Account of the Life and Actions” of his hero. In Tom Jones (1749, VIII. i) he remarks that the story of the ghost of the ﬁrst Duke of Buckingham’s father was less suited for inclusion in “so solemn a Work” as Clarendon’s “History of the Rebellion” than it would be if published together with Defoe’s “True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veale.” And in HF’s monitory pamphlet Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder (1752), two of the examples (XVIII–XIX) are adapted from Secrets of the Invisible World Disclos’d: or, An Universal History of Apparitions (1729), a work Defoe wrote using the pseudonym of Andrew Moreton—a copy of which was in HF’s library (Ribbles, D10). (For a discussion of the difference between HF’s “realism of assessment” and the “formal realism” of Defoe and Samuel Richardson, see Watt 1957.) DEMOSTHENES (384–322 B.C). Greek orator. HF acknowledged that Demosthenes was a “great Orator,” as he called him in A Charge delivered to the Grand Jury (1749) when quoting “a most beautiful Passage” from Against Aristogeiton. Indeed, with considerable help from his friend James Harris, HF cobbled together a translation from the Greek of Demosthenes’ “First Olynthiac,” which he published in volume 1 of the Miscellanies (1743). His motive

Others in the Life

57

for troubling himself with this uncongenial task is obscure. Perhaps it began as an exercise of his schooldays at Eton College, where, like his friend William Pitt, whom he compliments in Tom Jones (1749, XIV. i) as the greatest orator of his own time, he would presumably have read “the Writings of Demosthenes and Cicero.” Or perhaps, as the Spanish continued to harass British shipping in the late 1730s, HF intended the piece, as H. K. Miller suggests, to serve the opposition’s cause by drumming up public sentiment against Sir Robert Walpole’s paciﬁc policies, Demosthenes having been adopted by the opposition as “the very type of the ardent patriot” (Miller 1961: 362–64). But if HF in the 1730s saw Demosthenes as a patriot, the reverse is true of the depiction of him in both the Vernoniad (1741, n. 47) and Plutus (1742, p. 38 n.), where HF recounts from Plutarch the story of the great orator’s being bribed to suppress a speech he intended to make against incurring the risk of war. DENNIS, John (1657–1734), playwright, critic, miscellaneous writer. As a critic Dennis was ridiculed by Alexander Pope as humorless and irascible, an inﬂexible devotee of the rules (see, for example, An Essay on Criticism [1711], lines 270–72, 585–87). HF’s opinion of him was much the same and is best summed up in The Covent-Garden Journal (9 June 1752), where he refers to him as “Dennis, of acutely austere Memory.” But it is to The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) that one should turn to appreciate the grounds of HF’s criticism of Dennis. In the preface by “H. Scriblerus Secundus,” he is made to object to HF’s play as insufﬁciently “Great and Sublime”; and in a dozen or so of the notes to the text, Dennis’s criticism is represented as hidebound and priggish. In Act III, scene ii—in a note (d) recalling Pope’s anecdote about him in the Dunciad Variorum (1729)—Dennis is made to quote himself, exclaiming, “The Man who writ this wretched Pun . . . would have picked your Pocket.” Scriblerus, in his comment, turns this intemperate remark against him by quoting a punning passage from Dennis’s own tragedy Liberty Asserted (1704), which indeed Scriblerus in his notes cites ﬁve times for such infelicities. In an essay on wit and humor in The Covent-Garden Journal (18 July 1752) Dennis is mentioned in HF’s writings for the last time, but only as the recipient of William Congreve’s “Essay Concerning Humour in Comedy.” DESFONTAINES, Pierre Franc¸ios Guyot (1685–1745), abbott, French translator of Joseph Andrews (1742). He rendered HF’s ﬁrst novel into French, publishing the work in 1743 as written “par une dame angloise.” The preface to the second edition (Amsterdam, 1744), which takes the form of a letter written from the author to a friend at Montpellier, was the ﬁrst—and one of the most astute— of the many critical appraisals of Joseph Andrews. In it Desfontaines praises I’honneˆtete´ of HF’s images and style, his skill at dramatic dialogue, and his ability to create memorable characters, Parson Adams in particular. Anticipating what would be a common criticism of HF’s ﬁction as “low,” he also emphasized the moral intent of HF’s art, becoming the ﬁrst critic, for instance—and for two

58

A Henry Fielding Companion

centuries the only one—to detect behind the hilarity of the novel’s opening scenes HF’s redaction of the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, a popular subject in Christian art. DEVEIL, Sir Thomas (c. 1684–1746), magistrate. He served for ﬁfteen years as principal magistrate of the metropolis, preceding HF as “court justice” at Bow Street, Covent Garden—the ofﬁcer upon whom the government chieﬂy relied to preserve public order and protect its own interests. Exploiting the opportunities for corruption that the despised job of a “trading justice” offered, DeVeil boasted he made £1,000 a year. In the introduction to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) HF declared he had reformed this corrupt practice of his predecessor and, by acting honestly and humanely, “reduced an income of about 500l. a year of the dirtiest money upon earth, to little more than 300l.,” a substantial part of which went to his clerk (formerly also DeVeil’s), Joshua Brogden. DODD, Ann (ﬂ. 1739–50s), bookseller, whose shop was located at the Peacock, without Temple-Bar. She published HF’s Shamela (1741), and, with Mary Cooper and others, was one of the partners in The True Patriot (1745–46). Her name alone appears in the imprint of The Covent-Garden Journal (1752), but it is likely that she acted in that venture only as Andrew Millar’s “mercury,” the agent who sold the papers. (See Treadwell, DLB, 1995:154.) DODINGTON, George Bubb (1691–1762), politician and, in letters, a patron of James Thomson, Edward Young, James Ralph, and HF, among others. Dodington’s palatial estate at Eastbury, Dorset (which HF compliments in Tom Jones [XI. ix]), was an easy journey from HF’s farm at East Stour, and it is clear from the preface to Of True Greatness (January 1741), a poem HF dedicated to Dodington, that they were acquainted “several Years” earlier. Dodington’s patronage of HF—and his associate James Ralph—appears to have begun with the founding of The Champion in 1739, when, after ﬁfteen years as Commissioner of the Treasury in Sir Robert Walpole’s ministry, Dodington resigned in order to join his relations (and HF’s friends) George Lyttelton and William Pitt in opposition: this, at least, is the point of a transparent allegory in the ministerial paper The Daily Gazetteer (13 May 1741)—a plausible claim in view of HF’s compliments to his friend in both The Champion (29 January 1740) and Of True Greatness, and a claim supported as well by Ralph’s continuing thereafter to serve Dodington’s political ambitions in various publications. Dodington would ever be for HF the paragon of “true greatness”: As late as 1751 Dr. Harrison, his spokesman in Amelia, declares him to be “one of the greatest Men this Country ever produced” (XI. ii). Indeed, given the antithesis of Dodington and Walpole as types for HF of true and false “greatness,” respectively, it is tempting to suppose that he owed the idea for Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), a work that originated as a satire of Walpole, to his

Others in the Life

59

association with Dodington. It can be said at least that Dodington enjoyed the novel so immoderately that he once read it aloud in its entirety to a pair of elderly ladies (Life:278–81). W. B. Coley, moreover, editor of The True Patriot, has cogently argued that Dodington was HF’s sponsor in that journal (see the Introduction to WE). And it is clear from the improbable idealism of Dr. Harrison’s political views in Amelia (XI. ii)—views explicitly associated with Dodington, who drew them from Bolingbroke—that HF’s indebtedness to his patron continued. (On Dodington’s politics, see Carswell and Dralle 1965.) DOUGLAS, Jenny “Mother” (d. 1761), bawd. In 1739 she took over the notorious bagnio in Covent Garden kept by “Betty” Careless and soon gained a reputation as “Empress o’er all the bawds around” (Covent-Garden [1756]). In May 1748, when HF as “Madame de la Nash” staged a version of The CoventGarden Tragedy at his puppet show in Panton Street, Punch himself, “at the particular Request of Mrs. Puppet Duggleass,” played the part of Mother Punchbowl. Her brothel is a favorite resort of the rakes mocking Dr. Harrison’s letter against adultery in Amelia (1751, X. ii); and when, in The Covent-Garden Journal (1 August 1752), HF replied to readers who mistakenly supposed him to be the author of a paper protesting against passage of the Disorderly Houses Act, he imagined the report had made him “the reigning Toast of all the Ladies” in her employ. DRYDEN, John (1631–1700), poet, dramatist, critic. HF appreciated Dryden’s greatness as a poet. There is, indeed, a passing reference to that effect in his poem Of True Greatness (1741, line 128), and in a metaphorical history of the progress of wit in England in The Covent-Garden Journal (21 March 1752) Dryden is “King” of the period of the Restoration. From time to time in his writings, HF quotes brief passages from the poems he had got by heart. He quotes, for example, from Absalom and Achitophel (1681) in The Champion (7 June 1740) and in Amelia (1751, VI. ii) and from MacFlecknoe (1682) in The Covent-Garden Journal (21 January 1752). It is also clear from the preface and notes to The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) that he had read with interest Dryden’s criticism in “Of Heroic Plays” and the “Essay of Dramatic Poesy.” All of these works are included in the edition of Dryden’s Dramatick Works, 6 vols., which HF had in his library (Ribbles, D24). Much more impressive, however, is HF’s command of what appears to be the entire corpus of Dryden’s plays. In his burlesque of heroic tragedy in The Tragedy of Tragedies, a dozen works by Dryden contribute to the fun—especially The Conquest of Granada (1670–71), Aureng-Zebe (1675), Don Sebastian (1689), Cleomenes (1692), and All for Love (1677). Passages from the last, in the blank verse that HF preferred to rhymed, are later quoted by him in less frivolous contexts: as in The Champion (24 May 1740), Joseph Andrews (1742, II. xiii), and The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755, July [21]). In Amelia (1751, VIII. viii), when he wishes to convey Colonel James’s illicit passion for

60

A Henry Fielding Companion

the heroine, he recalls a line spoken by Cortez in The Indian Emperor (1665, III. ii); and as a lawyer himself, he was particularly delighted at the complaint of Judge Gripus in Amphitryon (1690, V. i) that fresh evidence in a case serves only to make it more puzzling—see The Champion (15 March 1740) and The Covent-Garden Journal (13 June 1752). However much he might ﬁnd Dryden’s tragedies amenable to burlesque, he did not by any means hold them in contempt. Twice—in The Author’s Farce (1730, III) and in Pasguin (1736, IV. i)— HF cites “Shakespeare, [Ben] Jonson, Dryden, [Nathaniel] Lee and [Nicholas] Rowe” as dramatists never to be emulated by the likes of Don Tragedio, and as those preferred by Common Sense to the nonsensical fare available on the contemporary stage. ECHARD or EACHARD, Laurence (1670?–1730), archdeacon of Stow, historian. Among other works, Echard wrote The Roman History (1695–98) and The History of England (1707–18)—of which a copy of the third edition was in HF’s library (Ribbles, E1). HF on occasion could cite the latter as an authority—in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751, section II), for example, where he discusses the introduction of drunkenness into Britain by the Danes; and in The Covent-Garden Journal (28 October 1752), where he describes the punishment, according to the laws of Canute, of a married woman who has committed adultery. Usually, however, he considered Echard’s History of England unreliable because it was vitiated by the author’s Tory bias, a charge owing to Echard’s inclusion in his account of the Civil War the story of Oliver Cromwell’s having made a pact with the devil before the Battle of Worcester. In Jonathan Wild (1743, I. ix) HF, without mentioning Echard, has the shade of Cromwell categorically deny the story. As early as his unﬁnished burlesque of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1729/30), a poem satirizing the Tory literary establishment, Echard’s history is praised by Dulness for its lack of “Truth” (l. 5–6). In Joseph Andrews (1742, III. i), in a passage criticizing historians for allowing political bias to color their accounts of persons and events, HF pairs the Whigs’ Paul de Rapin and Bulstrode Whitelocke against the Tories’ Clarendon and Echard. Both the latter had earlier served him in The Champion (6 December 1739) when he wished to make Cromwell a ﬁgure anticipating Sir Robert Walpole in his reluctance to go to war and his abuse of power. As for Echard’s Roman History, HF shared his friend Nathaniel Hooke’s opinion, expressed in the preface to Hooke’s work of the same title (vol. 1, 1738; vol. 2, 1745), that it was an “unsatisfactory” performance, useful only “for school-boys.” In Jonathan Wild (I. ix) the spirit of the great Roman historian Livy commends Hooke’s work, but gives “a Bounce” when Echard’s is mentioned. In Tom Jones (1749, VI. ii) Mrs. Western’s having read the book shows her to be a superﬁcial scholar, and the same inference applies to Partridge, who has read only half of it, “the second Volume of Echard’s Roman History” being among the fragments of “curious Books” in his collection (VIII. v).

Others in the Life

61

ELLYS, John (1701–57), a painter of portraits after the manner of his mentor, Sir Godfrey Kneller. Ellys—together with HF’s other friends James Ralph and William Hogarth—championed the cause of a native English school of painting. He nevertheless acquired for Sir Robert Walpole the famous collection of pictures at Houghton. As a reward for this service, Walpole appointed him Keeper of the Lions at the Tower, a sinecure to which HF playfully alludes in The Covent-Garden Journal (29 August 1752). Since Ellys owned stock in Drury Lane, and after the death of the patentee Robert Wilks in 1732 acted as his widow’s deputy in managing the theater, HF would have known him from the start of his career as playwright. Their friendship is best illustrated by the verse “Epistle to Mr. Ellys the Painter,” which HF (for he is the likely author) published in The Comedian, No. 5 (August 1732)—a periodical edited by another close friend of this time, Thomas Cooke. ESSEX, John (ﬂ. 1710–50), the most celebrated dancing master of his time; he is depicted in plate 1 of William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753). Essex was the author of several works on his subject, including A Treatise of Chorography (1710), The Young Ladies Conduct: or, Rules for Education (1722), and The Dancing-Master: or, The Whole Art and Mystery of Dancing Explained (2nd ed., 1731). HF on occasion—as in Tom Jones (XIV. i) and implicitly in A Journey from This World to the Next (I. xxv)—could ridicule Essex’s enthusiasm in representing dancing as more fundamental to a genteel education than any other art or science, yet he was himself, though a large man, a skilled dancer who took pride in opening the ball at Bath by nicely treading a minuet (Letter 14). He entirely agreed with John Locke that, to qualify as a gentleman, one had to correct the awkwardness of the body by submitting to the discipline of the dancing master (see Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693], sec. 67). Commenting on Sergeant Atkinson’s clumsiness in Amelia (1751, V. ii), HF paid Essex his due shortly after his death: Tho’ I do not entirely agree with the late learned Mr. Essex the celebrated DancingMaster’s Opinion, that Dancing is the Rudiment of polite Education, as he would, I apprehend, exclude every other Art and Science; yet is it certain, that Persons whose Feet have never been under the Hands of the Professors of that Art, are apt to discover this Want in their Education in every Motion, nay, even when they stand or sit still. They seem indeed to be over-burthened with Limbs, which they know not how to use, as if when Nature hath ﬁnished her Work, the Dancing-Master still is necessary to put it in Motion.

(For a discussion of HF’s view of the importance of good breeding, in which Essex and dancing have a part, see Rawson 1972: 3–34.) EYRE, Giles (1673–1740), of the Middle Temple, King’s Sergeant at Law. Though little is known about HF’s friendship with the eminent Wiltshire family of Eyre, it was clearly very close—clear not only from the fact that three mem-

62

A Henry Fielding Companion

bers of the family subscribed to the Miscellanies (1743), but from the warmth of his eulogy in The Champion (28 February 1740, “Home News”) as Eyre lay dying: [His] Loss will be heartily lamented by all who had the Happiness of his Acquaintance, or the Misfortune to want an Advocate, in which Character his Abilities were as eminent as his Integrity, in all the Actions of his Life. In short, he was truely worthy of Admiration, as a Lawyer and of Love as a Man, and one of those few, on whom we can indulge our Appetite of Commendation without the Danger of a Lie.

Another of HF’s friends, Thomas Burnet, succeeded Eyre as King’s Sergeant at Law in May 1740. FARINELLI, Carlo Broschi (1705–82) (although not his given name, he was called Farinelli); Italian castrato. Like most of his literary contemporaries, including Joseph Addison, John Gay and Alexander Pope, HF considered Italian opera an inferior and effeminate form of entertainment. It is one of “the Pleasures of the Town” ridiculed in The Author’s Farce (1730). His satire of this foreign import was provoked above all by the fact that the most popular male singers had been emasculated. In The Craftsman (15 July 1738) no place is said to be more suitable as a “Tescuarium” for castrating the army than the Opera House; and in Joseph Andrews (1742, I. ix) Mrs. Slipslop hates the sight of “a Sett of Mophrodites . . . singing in an Opera.” Farinelli, most acclaimed of all the castrati, is referred to in Pasquin (1736, II. i) as “Faribelly, the strange man-woman”; he is satirized in Eurydice (1737) in the character of Orpheus, or Signior Orpheo, and in The Historical Register (1737, II. i) as “Farinello,” in whom the ladies ﬁnd “almost everything one could wish.” (On Farinelli and the subject in general, see Heriot 1956.) FARQUHAR, George (1678–1707), dramatist. HF’s opinion of Farquhar as a writer of comedy is best seen toward the end of Amelia (1751, X. v), when his long-suffering heroine, worried over the lateness of her husband, seeks to relieve her mind by reading “one of the excellent Farquhar’s Comedies.” HF found Farquhar’s style of comedy so congenial that at the beginning of his own career as playwright, the resemblance of the opening scenes of The Author’s Farce (1730) seemed so close to that in Farquhar’s Love in a Bottle (1698)—where Lyrick argues with his landlady and publisher—that he was accused of plagiarism by the author of The Candidates for the Bays (1730). In his ill-fated farce Eurydice (1737) he appears to have borrowed the name of his Irishman, Maccahone, from a character in Farquhar’s The Stage-Coach (1704). Indeed, characters and dialogue from a number of Farquhar’s plays often occurred to HF as situations in his own writings prompted. He was particularly amused by the character of Sergeant Kite in The Recruiting Officer (1706): to “H. Scriblerus Secundus” in the preface to The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), Kite’s notion that a recruit six feet tall was born to be “a Great Man” is as silly as John Dennis’s

Others in the Life

63

(alleged) criticism that Tom Thumb is an improbable hero merely because he is “no higher than a Span”; and when, in a letter to James Harris (24 September 1742), HF argues for the superiority of prose to poetry, Kite measuring the worth of a soldier by his length seems no more absurd than the theorists of the couplet form, who sacriﬁce “a noble Sentiment” for the sake of meeting arbitrary requirements of meter and rhyme (Letter 14). The Beaux Stratagem (1707) furnished an analogy to the heroine’s mother in Amelia (III. iii), “who was the Lady Bountiful” of Wiltshire, and furnished another to a factotum on board the ship that carried HF to Lisbon, who “had as many ofﬁces as Scrub in the play” (Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 1755, 26 June). In both An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (section III) and Amelia (V. iii), HF recalls lines spoken by Archer in the same play. As much as HF admired Farquhar, however, he did not think him infallible. Having recently attended a Drury Lane production of Farquhar’s The Constant Couple: or, A Trip to the Jubilee (1700), HF in the “Court of Criticism” in The Jacobite’s Journal (6 February 1748) delivered his judgment: “That the whole Play of the Trip to the Jubilee is a wretched Performance, and ought to be banish’d from the Stage.” (On Farquhar, see Rothstein 1967 and Bull 1998.) FE´NELON, Franc¸ois de Salignac de la Mothe (1651–1715), archbishop of Cambrai and author of Les Avantures de Te´le´maque fils d’Ulysse (1699), a popular prose epic having as its theme the education of a prince, that is, of Telemachus, son of Odysseus. In the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742) HF distinguished the inferior genre of romance from the comic Epic-Poem in Prose, the new species of writing he was introducing, by reference to Fe´nelon’s Telemachus, which “appears to me of the Epic Kind, as well as the Odyssey of Homer,” for “it is much fairer and more reasonable to give it a Name common with that Species from which it differs only in a single Instance [i.e., by being written in prose rather than verse], than to confound it with those which it resembles in no other.” Later in Joseph Andrews (III. i) he preferred, as mirrors of “Truth,” the best works of prose ﬁction to the partial narratives of biased historians. At the end of his life, however, in the preface to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), HF reversed this judgment while citing the same two models: “But, in reality, the Odyssey, the Telemachus, and all of that kind, are to the voyage-writing I here intend, what romance is to true history, the former being the confounder and corrupter of the latter.” FIGG, James (d. 1734), prizeﬁghter. In his trade card, designed by William Hogarth, Figg represented himself as a “Master of ye Noble Science of Defence” who taught “Gentlemen ye use of ye small backsword & Quarter staff at home & abroad.” At the amphitheater adjoining his house in Oxford Street, he staged bouts at broadsword and gave lessons in self-defense. (Phillips 1964: 226–27.) He was known to Hogarth, as well as to HF’s friend John Ellys, who painted a portrait of him as a gladiator, to which HF alludes in his verse “Epistle

64

A Henry Fielding Companion

to Mr. Ellys the Painter” (1732). In one of his early contributions to The Craftsman (23 March 1734), an essay on screens, HF, who often attended these bloody contests, writes of the “Practice of ﬁghting with Targets, or Bucklers,” which, he continues, “I have often seen . . . used, at Mr. Fig’s Amphitheatre, with great Success.” It is curious, however, that in his later references Figg appears to be alive and active long after the accepted date of his death. He alludes to Figg in his burlesque of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire (line 126 and note) calling him “a celebrated Prize-ﬁghter”; but that piece, though published in the Miscellanies (1743), was sketched out before he was twenty. In a facetious essay in The Champion (29 January 1740), proposing a plan to educate gentlemen in the art of being impudent, he recommends they attend just three schools: a French school, a dancing school, “and that celebrated school of Mr. James Figg, where [the pupil] will meet with the best and properest, company.” Similarly in A Journey from This World to the Next, (1743, I. xiii) Julian the Apostate, in his incarnation as a Roman fop, needed instruction from only two masters: “one Saltator [a dancing master] . . . and one Ficus [a ﬁg], whose Business it was to shew me the cleanest way (as he called it) of cutting off a Man’s Head.” (On HF and boxing, see Johnson 1996.) FLEETWOOD, Charles (d. 1747), theatrical manager. In January 1734 Fleetwood took over the management of the Drury Lane Theatre from John Highmore and the widow of Robert Wilks, for whom HF’s friend John Ellys was acting as deputy—losers in their struggle with the actors who had mutinied under the leadership of Theophilus Cibber. With the defeat of the patentees, whose cause he had supported, HF was compelled to take Don Quixote in England to the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. In 1735, however, Fleetwood, in his ﬁrst full season as manager, welcomed HF back to Drury Lane to stage a pair of new plays: the popular afterpiece The Virgin Unmask’d and the ﬁve-act comedy, The Universal Gallant, which failed badly. This disappointment prompted HF to form “the Great Mogul’s” company of comedians and to return to the Haymarket. Yet Fleetwood had not lost hope that HF might repeat under his own management his successes of 1732–33 at Drury Lane. In 1737 he enticed him back to the Old House by offering him the extraordinary favor of a beneﬁt on the ﬁrst, and as it proved only, night of his “damned” farce Eurydice—after which disappointment HF continued at the Haymarket. In 1742–43, ﬁve years after the Theatrical Licensing Act had forced HF from the stage, Fleetwood would produce the last of his new plays to appear during his lifetime. The musical farce Miss Lucy in Town (1742) was for a while moderately successful; The Wedding Day (1743) survived for just six performances. Both were published in HF’s Miscellanies (1743), to which Fleetwood subscribed for twenty copies. FLETCHER, John. See Beaumont, Francis.

Others in the Life

65

FOOTE, Samuel (1720–77), playwright and mimic. In order to circumvent the provisions of the Theatrical Licensing Act, which forbade dramatic performances except at Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Royal Opera House, Foote in 1747 hit on the device of “giving tea” at the Little Haymarket Theatre while diverting customers with his talents as a mimic—hanging up the “pictures” of his victims, as he called it. Among these were HF’s friends the actors David Garrick and James Quin, and his predecessor at Bow Street, the justice Sir Thomas DeVeil. In the spring of 1748, HF followed Foote’s lead by opening a “Breakfasting-Room” at Panton Street under the name of Madame de la Nash and entertaining his customers with a satirical puppet show. Having in The Jacobite’s Journal (6 February 1748) attacked Foote’s mimicry as one of the more vicious follies of the age, he proceeded to subject “Mr. Puppet Fut” to the rough justice of Punch and Joan. To this indignity Foote retaliated by “taking off” HF on stage at the Haymarket and publishing in the Daily Advertiser (23 April 1748) a facetious obituary of the author of Joseph Andrews. But HF would have the last laugh. At the “Court of Criticism” in The Jacobite’s Journal (30 April) he arraigned Foote on a charge of character assassination, and on 9 May at the theater in Panton Street he staged a revival of his bawdy burlesque, The Covent-Garden Tragedy, with “Mr. Puppet Fut” in the role of the bully Captain Bilkum, who would suffer Punch’s chastisement. (On Foote, see Trefman 1971 and Chatten 1980.) FRANCIS, Ann (d. 1758), keeper of the Nag’s Head inn at Ryde. On their journey to Lisbon, HF and his family lodged for a time at Mrs. Francis’s inn on the Isle of Wight while waiting for a favorable wind. In his Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, posthumously published in 1755 in two distinct versions, she is represented in the harshest light, HF criticizing her for what he considered her inhospitableness and excessive charges. In one version she is identiﬁed by name as “Mrs. Francis”; in the other she is called “Mrs. Humphrys”—the names now serving to distinguish these alternative versions. GARRICK, David (1717–79), actor, playwright, theatrical manager. Garrick’s close friendship with HF began soon after he made his sensational debut as Richard III at Goodman’s Fields in October 1741. His popular afterpiece, Lethe: or, Aesop in the Shades (1740), in which he introduced the principal characters from The Virgin Unmask’d, may have prompted HF to write his own sequel to the play, Miss Lucy in Town, staged at Drury Lane in May 1742. Indeed, since in the preface to the Miscellanies (1743) HF states he had only “a very small Share” in writing the farce, it is possible Garrick collaborated with him in the production. It was to please Garrick in his ﬁrst full season at Drury Lane that HF rescued from oblivion his early comedy, The Wedding Day, revising it for production in February 1743; Garrick played the part of Millamour. From the Miscellanies, to which Garrick subscribed, to The Covent-Garden Journal

66

A Henry Fielding Companion

(1752), HF’s writings abound with extravagant compliments to the man he considered “in Tragedy to be the greatest Genius the World hath ever produced” (Tom Jones [1749], VII. i). When in 1747 Garrick, with James Lacy, acquired the patent of Drury Lane and formed a brilliant company of actors that included Susannah Arne Cibber, the best tragic actress of her day, and “Kitty” Clive, who excelled at comedy, HF would ﬁnd a place for all three in Tom Jones (IX. I), celebrating them together as “judicious” interpreters of the great dramatists. And throughout the run of The Covent-Garden Journal (1752) HF would champion Garrick’s cause in his rivalry with John Rich of Covent Garden. Long after HF’s death Garrick returned these favors. In 1775 it was he who identiﬁed the “tattered” manuscript of The Fathers: or The Good-Natur’d Man as HF’s lost comedy, and when the play was eventually staged by Sheridan in November–December 1778, he contributed both the prologue and epilogue—tributes to his departed friend that would be the last of Garrick’s many contributions to the theater. He died on 20 January 1779. (On HF and Garrick, see Woods 1962 and Hassall 1979. On Garrick and the contemporary theater, see Nichol 1980.) GASCOYNE, Sir Crisp (1700–1761), Lord Mayor of London, 1752–53. Together with Dr. John Hill, Gascoyne was HF’s principal adversary in the controversial case of Elizabeth Canning. In February 1753 he presided at the trial of Mary Squires and Susannah Wells, who were convicted of complicity in the abduction of Canning and were sentenced, Squires to be hanged and Wells to be branded on the thumb and imprisoned for six months. Gascoyne, however, was shaken by testimony from witnesses who swore that Squires was a hundred miles away in Dorset at the time Canning claimed she was being held against her will in Enﬁeld, near London. He reexamined the prostitute Virtue Hall, who had supported Canning’s story before HF at Bow Street; she now recanted, claiming that HF had bullied her into giving false evidence. In March, Gascoyne had Canning arrested on a charge of perjury, an act that prompted HF to defend the girl in his pamphlet A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning, to which Hill published a reply. In May the king pardoned Squires, and in June the grand jury presented Canning for perjury; she was convicted the following year and transported to America. In July 1754, while HF was en route to Lisbon and unable to defend himself, Gascoyne libeled him in An Address to the Liverymen of London, declaring, falsely, that he had deliberately withheld from the court certain “certiﬁcates” supporting Squires’s alibi. To the end, HF remained convinced of Canning’s innocence. GAY, John (1685–1732), playwright and poet. HF’s debut as a dramatist was the production of Love in Several Masques that opened at Drury Lane on 16 February 1728, competing for an audience, in vain, with The Beggar’s Opera, which was having a spectacular run at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. As HF remarked in the preface to the published version of his comedy, Gay’s play engrossed “the whole Talk and Admiration of the Town.” Indeed it introduced a new genre,

Others in the Life

67

the ballad opera, to the English stage; and with Buckingham’s Rehearsal, it would be an important inﬂuence on HF’s development of a new species of musical: self-reﬂexive comedy. Moreover, in both The Beggar’s Opera and its sequel, Polly, which was suppressed by the government in 1729, Gay’s use of emblematic characters and situations to ridicule Sir Robert Walpole and his courtiers also anticipated the devices of HF’s own political satires. Years later, in a futile attempt to dissuade the legislature from passing the Theatrical Licensing Act, HF contributed an ironic essay to The Craftsman (28 May 1737) acknowledging this kinship with Gay: he imagines how convenient for the ministry the proposed powers vested in the Lord Chamberlain would be, allowing him to prohibit “such obnoxious Performances as the Beggar’s Opera, Pasquin, the historical Register, and other Pieces of the like Kind.” Still, on second thought, was there any need for such an act of Parliament when the suppression of Gay’s Polly had shown how ready the Lord Chamberlain was to exercise powers of censorship he did not lawfully possess? At the very time he was thus mocking the ministry in The Craftsman, HF was also preparing to bring Walpole on stage in a satiric drama that would make Gay amends for the sad fate of his sequel to The Beggar’s Opera. Advertised for performance at the Haymarket on 31 May 1737 was: “MACHEATH turn’d PYRATE: or POLLY in INDIA. An Opera. Very much taken, if not improv’d from the famous Sequel of the late celebrated Mr. Gay, with a new Prologue proper to the Occasion.” HF’s intended tribute to Gay was stopped by the intervention of the proprietor of his theater. With a single exception—his early unﬁnished burlesque of Pope’s Dunciad (1929/30), in which Gay is ridiculed along with the other Scriblerians—HF in his writings invariably expressed his “Admiration” for the author of The Beggar’s Opera and its sequel. (On HF’s relation to Gay in the tradition of burlesque drama, see Clinton-Baddeley 1952:51–65 and Lewis 1987. For a critical comparison of The Beggar’s Opera and JW, see Preston 1966. On Gay and the contemporary theater, see Winton 1993.) GEORGE II (1683–1760), King of England. In his political views HF was a Whig. From ﬁrst to last he missed no opportunity to denounce the absolutist principles of the Stuarts and the most radical of their followers, the Jacobites, or to champion the cause of constitutional monarchy and the Hanoverian establishment. In November 1727, he began his literary career by publishing The Coronation: A Poem. And an Ode on the Birthday, a pair of poems, now lost, that presumably celebrate George II’s succession to the throne and his birthday. And in the unﬁnished burlesque of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad that he drafted for his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s amusement in 1729/30, he satirized the Tory opposition as foes not only to the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, the king’s favorite, but to the king himself and the entire royal family, whom, in an awkward strategy of praise, he has the Goddess of Dulness laud, one by one, through a passage of twenty-ﬁve lines. For a time during his years as playwright and theatrical manager at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, HF

68

A Henry Fielding Companion

was not above ridiculing the king and his relationship with Queen Caroline and the Prince of Wales—in The Grub-Street Opera (1731), for example, and in his production of such plays as The Rehearsal of Kings (1737). But when the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–46 brought home to the nation the critical importance of the choice between George II and the Pretender, HF emerged as the principal propagandist for the Hanoverian establishment. In The True Patriot (29 April– 6 May 1746) he celebrated the Duke of Cumberland’s victory at Culloden by praising the king and his family, offering to them his “little Salver of Incense,” as he called it. And when he returned to writing Tom Jones after the danger had passed, he had his hero volunteer to join the duke’s soldiers as they marched against the rebels. GILLIVER, Lawton (ﬂ. 1728–41), bookseller, whose shop from 1728 was located at Westminster Hall. He was one of the partners in HF’s Champion (1739–43). GLOVER, Richard (1712–85), poet and Patriot politician. For a time in the late 1730s Glover was the hero of the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister. Thanks to George Lyttelton’s puff of his ponderous epic poem Leonidas (1737) in Common Sense (9 April 1737), Glover was hailed as the poet of the Patriot cause. As a member of the corporation of the City of London, whose interests he celebrated in his poem London: or, The Progress of Commerce (1739), Glover opposed, with some success, every ministerial candidate for ofﬁce. In a dream vision in his opposition journal The Champion (13 December 1739), HF has Glover, hand in hand with his friend Lyttelton, reach the summit of Parnassus, where they are welcomed by Alexander Pope. In A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. viii) the author upon entering Elysium meets “the famous Leonidas of Sparta,” who is pleased to hear of “the Honours which had been done him by a celebrated Poet [Glover] of our Nation.” GOLDWYRE, Edward (1707–74), surgeon. The neighbor in The Close at Salisbury of James Harris and HF’s wife Charlotte Fielding, Goldwyre is probably the “famous Surgeon” to whom HF refers in The Covent-Garden Journal (11 January 1752) as having “absolutely cured” the injury to her nose that Amelia suffered by the overturning of a chaise (II. i)—the same injury Charlotte had suffered before her marriage (see Amelia WE: 66 n. 1, 68 n. 1). From Bath on 24 September 1742, HF wrote playfully to “acquaint” Harris with a piece of news he would certainly have known: “that Mr Goldwyre a Surgeon of a City called Salisbury is lately married to one Miss Harris a young Lady of &”—the bride in question being the daughter of Harris’s neighbor William Harris (see Letter 14). Goldwyre subscribed to HF’s Miscellanies (1743). GRAHAM, Josiah (ﬂ. 1737–57), bookseller, whose shop was located under the Inner Temple Gate, opposite Chancery Lane, in Fleet Street. Graham replaced

Others in the Life

69

Charles Corbett as publisher of The Champion when, with No. 64 (10 April 1740), HF’s journal changed from a morning to an evening paper. Published in this number, Graham’s account of the reasons for the change sheds light on the struggles the journal had establishing itself against the opposition of rival papers and the depredations of pirates. GRANVILLE. See CARTERET, John Lord. GROTIUS, Hugo (1583–1645), Dutch statesman and jurist. Grotius and his follower, Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94), were leading authorities in the development of a theory of the “laws of nature” (jus naturale): laws rooted in the rational nature of man, who is seen as fundamentally a social being. In his library HF had a copy of Grotius’s most famous work, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, edited by Jean Barbeyrac (Amsterdam, 1720), as well as Pufendorf’s Law of Nature and Nations (1729), also edited by Barbeyrac (Ribbles, G77 and P48). HF ﬁrst invoked Grotius in The Jacobite’s Journal (19 December 1747), where the Jacobite persona dismisses as “damnable” his acknowledgment “That a Prince may be resisted should he attempt to destroy any Part of his Subjects.” Together Grotius and Pufendorf serve in The Covent-Garden Journal (8 February and 16 May 1752) to support HF’s arguments in favor of liberality and the right, from nature, of the needy poor to be relieved by the superﬂuities of the rich. HALE, Sir Matthew (1609–76), chief justice of the King’s Bench. Hale—“that excellent Chief-Justice,” as HF called him in his Charge delivered to the Grand Jury (1749)—was a great lawyer who was also learned in science and theology. He was perhaps a more important source of HF’s thinking about the common law than anyone but Sir Edward Coke. In drafting his abortive Institute of the Pleas of the Crown during the early 1740s, HF made extensive use of Hale’s History of the Pleas of the Crown (1736), a work that was in his library (Ribbles, H3) and on which he drew repeatedly in his legal tracts: A Charge delivered to the Grand Jury (1749), A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez (1749), An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (1751), and the posthumously published Treatise on the Office of Constable (1761). Hale’s Discourse Touching Provision for the Poor, originally published in 1683, was missing from HF’s library at the time of the auction, but it strongly inﬂuenced his own Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753). In the introduction and notes to the Enquiry (WE) M. R. Zirker discusses Hale’s importance to HF in detail; the Ribbles (H2–3) list HF’s numerous references to his works. However much HF admired Hale as an authority on the law, he understandably regretted his implementation of the laws against witchcraft passed in the reign of James I and not repealed by act of Parliament until 1736. Hale presided over the trial of witches in 1665 and expressed his belief in witchcraft in his Meditation concerning the Mercy of God, in Preserving Us from the Power and

70

A Henry Fielding Companion

Malice of Evil Angels (1693). HF, who scoffed at such superstitiousness and welcomed the act of 1736, returned to the subject in his writings—in, for example, The Craftsman (21 February 1736) and Tom Jones (1749, VIII. x, XII. xii), where the Jacobite Partridge ﬁrmly believes in witches. In The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755, entries for 25 and 27 July 1754) HF twice refers to Hale’s belief in them, while assuring his readers that he himself is “as free from superstition as any man breathing, and never did believe in witches, notwithstanding all the excellent arguments of my Lord Chief Justice Hale in their favour, and long before they were put down by act of parliament.” HAMILTON, Mary, lesbian and transvestite. Posing as a physician and calling herself Dr. Charles (or George) Hamilton, she duped a young woman of Wells, Somersetshire, into marrying her and carried off the deception for two months before she was discovered. She was arrested in September 1746 at Glastonbury, HF’s birthplace and the home of his uncle, Davidge Gould. His cousin, Henry Gould, assisted in the prosecution. This sensational affair is the subject of HF’s sixpenny pamphlet, The Female Husband, published anonymously on 12 November. (On Hamilton and HF’s authorship of FH, see Baker 1959b. For an interpretation of the work, see Castle 1995.) HANBURY WILLIAMS, Sir Charles (1708–59), diplomat. Like George Lyttelton, he was HF’s schoolfellow at Eton College and a good friend. During Sir Robert Walpole’s tenure as prime minister, he held the inﬂuential post of paymaster of the marine forces; later, he served as envoy to Dresden and St. Petersburg. He was also the author of facetious verse in which HF occasionally ﬁgures. In June 1745 Hanbury Williams was responsible for giving HF his grandest case as a lawyer, employing HF to defend him in a suit brought against the subscribers to the Italian opera by the ﬁve directors who wished to recoup the excessive expenses caused by their own extravagance. Submitted in August 1745, HF’s answer to the directors’ complaint survives and though the outcome is not known, his experience in the affair is reﬂected in The True Patriot (31 December 1745), where he satirizes the directors for their “depraved Levity of Mind” at a time when the nation was threatened by the Jacobite rebellion. Besides employing HF as his attorney, Hanbury Williams assisted him ﬁnancially in other ways—by subscribing to the Miscellanies (1743), for example, but chieﬂy by lending him money from time to time. The closeness of their relationship is perhaps best seen in one of the last acts of HF’s life. Before departing for Lisbon in 1754, he left with Hanbury Williams the manuscript of his comedy The Fathers: or, The Good-Natur’d Man, hoping that if a producer could be found for it, the proceeds would help his family pay his debts. Hanbury Williams, however, was himself about to sail to the Continent to return to his diplomatic duties at Dresden, and the manuscript did not serve HF’s purpose until 1778, when, after it was found by chance among his friend’s papers, The Fathers was staged by Richard Brinsley Sheridan at Drury Lane.

Others in the Life

71

HANDEL, George Frideric (1685–1759), composer. In April 1733 HF changed the title of his short-lived ballad opera A Wife for You All by calling it Deborah, apparently intending to burlesque Handel’s oratorio of that name then playing at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. If that was his intention (the play had but one performance and was never published) he meant no serious disrespect to the composer. It is clear as early as The Champion (10 June 1740) that HF delighted in “the enchanting harmony” of Handel’s music, whom he called “that great man.” No doubt encouraged by James Harris, a connoisseur of music and Handel’s friend and patron, HF continued to compliment him in his writings. In The True Patriot (5 November 1745) Handel is to music what Shakespeare is to the drama and Sir Edward Coke to the law. In Letter XL, which he contributed to Sarah Fielding’s Familiar Letters (1747), HF took Handel’s side against the opera party who sought to discourage audiences from patronizing his oratorios, a spiteful antagonism to which he also alludes in Tom Jones (1749, IV. v). In the same chapter of that novel, Sophia is said to be “a perfect Mistress of Music” who “would never willingly have played any but Handel’s.” In Amelia (1751, IV. ix) the heroine, who like Sophia is also “a great Lover of Music, and particularly of Mr. Handel’s Compositions,” is thrilled at the opportunity to attend one of his oratorios. (On Handel, see Deutsch 1955 and Lang 1966.)

HARDWICKE, Philip Yorke (1690–1764), ﬁrst earl of, and Lord Chancellor (1737–56). HF’s acquaintance with Hardwicke probably began around 1740, the year HF was admitted to the bar at the Middle Temple. The earliest of his many compliments to the Lord Chancellor occurs in The Champion (9 September 1740), where HF rejoices that “our Law thrives under a Hardwick.” His cordial relationship with the man who was at the head of his profession may well be owing to his friendship with James Harris, a relative of Hardwicke to whom he dedicated Hermes. This, at any rate, is an inference to be drawn from HF’s letter (Letter 14: 24 September 1742) thanking Harris for transmitting to him for possible inclusion in the Miscellanies (1743) a verse epistle HF had addressed to “the Chancelor” some time ago. “The Chancelor,” HF protested, had “over-valued” the work by “so long preserving” it. Soon after the formation of the Broad-Bottom government in 1744—when Sir Robert Walpole’s “Old Whigs” (Henry Pelham, his brother the Duke of Newcastle and Hardwicke) joined forces with HF’s friends in opposition (George Lyttelton, Chesterfield, and George Dodington)—HF began alluding to the Lord Chancellor frequently in his writings, and always in the most complimentary terms. Of several compliments to Hardwicke in The True Patriot, HF saved the warmest for last: he is “that great and glorious Man, who is at the Head of our Law, and whose Goodness of Heart is no less conspicuous than those great Parts, which, both in the Character of a Statesman and a Lawyer, are at once the Honour and the Protection of his Country” (17 June 1746). There is more in the same vein in The Jacobite’s Journal (1747–48); and in Tom Jones (1749; IV. vi) Hardwicke’s

72

A Henry Fielding Companion

unfailing wisdom on the Bench becomes a ﬁgure for that “active Principle” of conscience that guides the hero. In July 1749 (Letter 53), not long after HF had entered the magistracy, he sent Hardwicke a copy of his Charge to the Westminster grand jury, enclosing for the Lord Chancellor’s perusal his “Draught of a Bill for the better preventing Street Robberies” (Hardwicke, as was his custom, referred this excellent plan to the ofﬁce of Newcastle, the secretary of state, where it remained buried among the duke’s miscellaneous papers until recently: see Life, Appendix 1). In 1750, acting on Hardwicke’s orders, HF directed a series of successful raids against the gaming houses near the Strand; when the keepers of the houses entered into a conspiracy to murder Hardwicke in revenge, HF and his detectives thwarted their “Hellish Purpose” (Letter 62). It was merely one instance among hundreds typifying the social disorders that HF analyzed in the important tract, An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (January 1751), which he dedicated to Hardwicke. HARRIS, James (1709–80) of Salisbury, perhaps HF’s closest friend, was a wealthy and well-connected man whose mother was the daughter of the second Earl of Shaftesbury and whose son would be raised to the peerage as the ﬁrst Earl of Malmesbury. He was learned in the classical languages, a lover of music and patron of Handel, and the author of several edifying works, most notably Hermes: or, A Philosophical Enquiry concerning Universal Grammar (1751), which HF, though he could not actually fathom its depths, nevertheless “highly approved” and recommended in The Covent-Garden Journal (14 March 1752). HF spent much of his youth at Salisbury, where until 1733 his grandmother lived and cared for his sisters and brother, and where he courted his beloved ﬁrst wife, Charlotte Cradock Fielding, Harris’s neighbor in the cathedral Close. The esteem in which he held Harris was such that in September 1741, overcoming the aversion he had to letter writing, he wrote from Bath inviting his friend to enter into one of the rare correspondences of a personal nature he ever engaged in. This correspondence, together with that of Harris with Fielding’s sister Sarah Fielding, is preserved among the papers of Harris’s descendant, the sixth earl of Malmesbury. (For a complete list of the letters, with summaries of the contents, see the section, “Letters.”) Harris returned HF’s affection. One sign of this is the patience with which he suffered HF’s frequent excuses for not repaying money he lent him. Other gestures were still more friendly: Harris dedicated to HF his “History of Nobody,” a humorous piece that elicited a reply from HF in the same facetious vein (Letter 18); he carefully corrected HF’s lame translation of Demosthenes’ First Olynthiac for inclusion in the Miscellanies of 1743 (a favor he later also accorded Sarah in her translation of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates); he contributed a lively antiJacobitical leader to HF’s True Patriot (No. 10, 7 January 1746); and after HF’s death he intended to publish a memorial to him, entitled “An Essay on the Life and Genius of Henry Fielding Esqr.” (1758), which, though never ﬁn-

Others in the Life

73

ished, contains invaluable anecdotes and ﬁrsthand impressions of HF’s wit and essential character (see Probyn: Appendix III). For his part, HF in Amelia (1751), whose heroine is modeled on his wife, Charlotte, made her a native of Salisbury and gave her the family name of Harris. The bond between the two friends is best judged from HF’s reply to Harris’s letter consoling him on Charlotte’s death in 1744: “Nothing,” HF begins, “could afford me greater Consolation at this Time than so kind a Letter from the Man whom I esteem most of any person in this World” (Letter 23). (For an authoritative account of Harris’s life and works, see Probyn.) HATCHETT, William (ﬂ. 1730–50), playwright. Little is known about Hatchett, but HF regarded him sympathetically as a playwright, like himself, who dared to satirize Sir Robert Walpole and the establishment and suffered for it. In May 1731, HF and the ill-fated company at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket chose to pair his own brazen political satire, The Welsh Opera, with Hatchett’s The Fall of Mortimer, in which the prime minister is ridiculed in the title role. The ministry reacted by suppressing the play and issuing warrants for the arrest of the actors. Six years would pass before Hatchett and HF next collaborated in ridiculing Walpole on stage, but in the interval, Hatchett paid him the compliment of collaborating with Eliza Haywood in producing a musical version of Tom Thumb, entitled The Opera of Operas, staged at the Haymarket in 1733 with a score by Thomas Arne. In March 1737, HF opened a new season as manager of “the Great Mogul’s Company of English Comedians” at the Haymarket by staging A Rehearsal of Kings, inviting his friend Aaron Hill to contribute a prologue and epilogue—a favor that Hill, who had read the play and was appalled at its abuse of Walpole and the king, prudently declined (see Letter 3). Hill mistakenly supposed that HF had written A Rehearsal of Kings, which lasted just three nights before disappearing forever from the stage; the actual author appears to have been Hatchett, who later claimed it as his own (see Lockwood 1989). However disappointed HF may have been at the short run of Hatchett’s play, he would nevertheless grant him an extraordinary favor: on 25 April, during the highly successful run of his own pair of political satires, The Historical Register and Eurydice Hiss’d, he would again be seen openly to embrace the author of The Fall of Mortimer, so obnoxious to Walpole, this time by allowing him the proceeds of the house. As he reﬂected on the ministry’s passage of the Licensing Act that shut his theater down, HF in The Craftsman (28 May and 2 July) would recall the similar fate of Hatchett’s play. HATSELL, Henry (d. 1772), called Harry, lawyer and libertine. The son of Sir Henry Hatsell, a judge, he was himself a prominent member of the Middle Temple, where he was bencher (1755), reader (1763), and treasurer (1768). He was, however, better known as a consummate hedonist. With HF, Edward Moore, and Thomas Cooke he belonged to a club of wits, established by Jonathan Tyers, that had been meeting weekly at the Royal Oak Tavern in Lambeth

74

A Henry Fielding Companion

some time before Charles Burney came to London in 1744. In his Memoirs Burney describes him as “equally witty, corpulent, sensual and proﬂigate, with Falstaff.” When in 1765 the madcap priest Leonard Howard published his Miscellaneous Pieces, he included an appendix consisting of “The Letters, &c. of that well known facetious Gentleman, HENRY HATSELL, Esq.” With other members of Tyers’s circle, Hatsell was a subscriber to HF’s Miscellanies (1743). HAYWOOD, Eliza (1693?–1756), novelist and actress. Like Alexander Pope in the Dunciad (1729, II, lines 149–58), HF satirized her in The Author’s Farce (1730, III), where she is “Mrs. Novel” in the puppet show—a joke that did not deter her from collaborating with William Hatchett in producing The Opera of Operas (1733), a musical version of Tom Thumb. In 1737 she joined HF’s “Company of English Comedians” in his ﬁnal season at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, which opened in March with Hatchett’s Rehearsal of Kings. In the popular double bill featuring HF’s political satires, The Historical Register and Eurydice Hiss’d, she played the parts, respectively, of Mrs. Screen and the author’s Muse, and on 23 May was awarded the proceeds of a beneﬁt. That she had no very grateful appreciation of HF in this, his ﬁnal season in the theater, is clear, however, from her gratuitous interpolation into her novel The History of Betsy Thoughtless (1751) of a passage treating him and his theater—or “scandal-shop,” as she called it—with contempt. (On Haywood, see Schoﬁeld 1985 and Ballaster 1992. On her relations with HF, see Elwood 1973.) HAYWOOD (also Heywood or Hayward), “Mother” (d. 1743), bawd. In a note to his burlesque version of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire (Miscellanies, 1743) HF refers to her as “a useful Woman in the Parish of Covent-Garden”; and in Joseph Andrews (1742, III, iii) she is well known to Wilson in his days as a rake. As he had done with Elizabeth “Mother” Needham’s brothel in The CoventGarden Tragedy (1732), HF in Miss Lucy in Town (1742) places the bawd “Mother Haycock” in a setting that, according to one knowing member of the audience, “exactly” duplicated “the Plan” of “Mother” Haywood’s establishment in Charles Street. At the time of her death she was reputed to be worth £10,000 (Gentleman’s Magazine, 13 [December 1743], 668). HEIDEGGER, John James (1659?–1749), called “Count,” Master of the Revels to George II. Heidegger was a Swiss immigrant who, though said to be the ugliest man in England, so ingratiated himself with polite society by promoting masquerades and other fashionable entertainments that in 1713 he became manager of the Royal Opera House in the Haymarket, over which he presided until his death in 1749. In Tom Jones (1749, XIII. vii), the hero begins his affair with Lady Bellaston at a masquerade held at the Opera House, “that Temple, where Heydegger, the great Arbiter Deliciarum, the great High-Priest of Pleasure presides.” It is there, too, that the Noble Lord in Amelia (1751, X. ii) hopes he can seduce the heroine. Despite the libertinism of his youth, HF always regarded

Others in the Life

75

masquerades as a cover for licentiousness and, hence, pernicious in their effects on society—a judgment supported in 1729 by the grand jury of Middlesex, who presented Heidegger as “the principal promoter of vice and immorality” in the metropolis. HF’s earliest satire, The Masquerade (1728), is dedicated to Heidegger, who is also ridiculed as “Count Ugly” in The Author’s Farce (revised version, 1734). HENLEY, Anthony (d. 1748), libertine and politician. Henley, whose seat was The Grange, Hampshire, was the eldest son and heir of Sir Anthony Henley, to whom Garth dedicated The Dispensary (1699). He was a member of Parliament for Southampton until he lost his place opposing Sir Robert Walpole over the Excise Bill of 1733. He was far more securely one of the circle of dissolute, freethinking wits that centered around Thomas Cooke—a group that included HF. William Hogarth is thought to have depicted Henley as the leering little man who stands with the notorious Colonel Charteris at the door of Elizabeth “Mother” Needham’s brothel in plate 1 of the Harlot’s Progress (1732). With his brother Robert Henley, he subscribed to HF’s Miscellanies (1743). HENLEY, John “Orator” (1692–1756), journalist and preacher. One of the most colorful of his contemporaries, HF and Henley kept up a (for the most part) jocular antagonism for the better part of two decades. An eccentric priest and “Zany,” as Alexander Pope called him in the Dunciad (1729, III. 202), Henley left the church in 1726 and set up an “Oratory” in Newport Market before moving in 1729 to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, near Clare Market. On Sundays and Wednesdays he preached in an absurdly eloquent style on a variety of topics, charging a shilling admission. His pulpit, or “Tub,” was elegantly covered with velvet adorned with ﬂeurs-de-lis. In 1730, as author of The Hyp-Doctor, he joined the legion of ministerial journalists who defended Sir Robert Walpole’s policies, continuing as editor of the paper until 1741. HF began the sparring in March 1730 by introducing Henley into Act III of The Author’s Farce as the “puppet” Dr. Orator; Henley replied at once from his tub at the Oratory. And when HF in May added Tom Thumb to the bill, Henley detected an analogy between HF’s diminutive hero and Walpole, the “Great Man” himself (Life:86, 88). With Henley’s genius for self-promotion in mind, HF in The Champion (29 January 1740) advised those interested in mastering the art of impudence to “frequent the oratory” on Sundays. There are other passing hits at Henley in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. vi) and in the “Proceedings of the Court of Criticism” in The Jacobite’s Journal (16 January and 30 April 1748). In his capacity as author of The Hyp-Doctor, Henley, in the numbers for 8– 15 and 15–22 June 1731, attacked HF and the players at the Little Haymarket for their insolence in staging William Hatchett’s political satire The Fall of Mortimer and in attempting to stage HF’s The Grub-Street Opera, which he had prudently withdrawn before the scheduled opening on 11 June (see Life:118–

76

A Henry Fielding Companion

19). From time to time thereafter, HF alluded contemptuously to Henley as an antagonist of little consequence—as in the dream vision in The Champion (13 December 1739), where “a certain person calling himself a hyp-doctor” is “invisible” among the journalists attempting in vain to rub the dirt off Walpole’s coat; and again in The Champion (14 February 1740), where, in a passage ridiculing the ministerial writers who have been hired “to club their wits” to produce The Daily Gazetteer, Henley’s journal is hardly worth noticing, though HF’s persona has “heard it whispered as a secret, that there hath been published for these three or four years [in fact for ten years] a certain piece of paper, entitled the Hyp-doctor, treating, as the newspapers inform us, on political subjects.” Considering that the relationship between HF and Henley for some twenty years is known to us only in such exchanges of ridicule and mutual derision, it is surprising that when news of HF’s death reached London in the autumn of 1754, his only eulogy, as far as is known, was delivered by the “Orator” from his tub in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (Life:605–6). (On Henley, see Midgley 1973.) HENLEY, Robert (1708?–72), ﬁrst Earl of Northington and Lord Chancellor. As a young man he much resembled his brother Anthony Henley in his dissolute ways, and he was also, like his brother, a friend of Thomas Cooke, for whom he wrote the prologue to Cooke’s play The Mourning Nuptials (1739). In his burlesque of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire, HF praises Henley’s eloquence as a barrister, and HF’s poem to Jane Huband, “Written Extempore in the Pump Room at Bath in 1742,” celebrates the beauty of the woman whom Henley would marry the following year. Both poems were published in HF’s Miscellanies (1743), to which Henley, as well as his brother, subscribed. This early in his career as a lawyer, Henley, with his chum Charles Pratt (whose honors would later exactly mirror his own), rode the western circuit with HF in search of briefs. Ironically, in 1748 it was HF in his humble capacity as High Steward of the New Forest who found himself in a position to put some business in the way of these two future lords chancellor by employing them in the dispute between the king and James Perkins (on this see Birt, Richard and Coleman, Charles). HERODOTUS (c. 484–425 B.C.) Greek historian. Called by Cicero “the father of history,” Herodotus is the author of Historia, a copy of which, in the edition by Thomas Gale (1679), HF had in his library (Ribbles, H16). HF from time to time recalls passages from this work, as in the anecdotes concerning the mute son of Croesus in Joseph Andrews (1742, I. viii), the armament of Xerxes in Tom Jones (1749, VIII. i), and the avarice of Alcmaeon the Athenian in The Covent-Garden Journal (4 November 1752). In the preface to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755)—in a surprising reversal of the priorities he expressed in Joseph Andrews (III. i), where a great novelist such as Cervantes, who gave

Others in the Life

77

us “the History of the World in general,” is preferred to politically biased historians—HF at the end of his life declared that he “still read[s] Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, with more amusement and more satisfaction” than he read Homer. HERVEY, John (1696–1743), Baron Hervey of Ickworth. A favorite of Queen Caroline and of the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, he was appointed Vice-Chamberlain in 1730 and Lord Privy Seal in 1740. Hervey was the model for the effeminate “Sporus” of Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1734). HF had earlier ridiculed him as John the Groom in The Grub-Street Opera (1731); and after Conyers Middleton made Hervey the subject of the fulsome dedication to his Life of Cicero (1740), HF resumed the satire, alluding to Hervey as Miss Fanny in the dedication to Shamela (1741) and as Beau Didapper in Joseph Andrews (1742, IV. ix). (On HF and Hervey, see Battestin 1963. On Hervey, see Halsband 1973.) HIGHMORE, John (ﬂ. 1730–47), theatrical manager manque´. Highmore, described by Hume as “a court socialite,” was in 1732 a young man of considerable wealth, but of no experience in the theater beyond that of acting the parts of Lothario and Hotspur in amateur productions. He was nevertheless ambitious of living the theatrical life. In July 1732, when the ﬁrst season of HF’s triumphant return to Drury Lane had ended, Highmore paid £2,500 to purchase half of Barton Booth’s one-third share of the patent. Thus began the dissolution of the formidable triumvirate of Booth, Robert Wilks, and Colley Cibber that had governed the Theatre Royal for more than twenty years. Wilks died before the year was out, leaving his share to his widow, who appointed HF’s friend John Ellys, a painter, as her deputy. In March 1733 Cibber sold his share to Highmore, thereby enraging his son Theophilus Cibber, to whom he had promised it. And in May of that year, Booth died, leaving the remainder of his share to his widow, who sold it to Henry Giffard, master of Goodman’s Fields. Giffard left the management of Drury Lane entirely to Highmore, who now owned a half-interest in the theater, and Ellys acting for Mrs. Wilks—none of whom had the knowledge or experience necessary for the business. To complete what for HF was a catastrophic scenario, Theophilus Cibber vented his disappointment and anger by leading a mutiny of the theater’s best actors and taking them to the Little Haymarket. Only Kitty Clive remained loyal to Highmore and Ellys—and HF, too, stood fast, risking ruin if young Cibber’s faction won the contest—which, in January 1734, it did. Charles Fleetwood purchased Highmore’s half-interest, as well as Mrs. Wilks’s third, for £3,750. The actors returned to Drury Lane, and HF, who had not improved the awkwardness of his situation by mocking the Cibbers in the revision of The Author’s Farce staged earlier that month, took his new play, Don Quixote in England, to the Little Haymarket. (See Hume, 1988: 141–85.)

78

A Henry Fielding Companion

HILL, Aaron (1683–1750), playwright, poet, essayist. For a brief period during the 1730s—dating perhaps from 1732, when both had plays produced at Drury Lane—HF and Hill were on friendly terms. Indeed, to judge from the extraordinarily cordial tone of Hill’s letter to Edmund Fielding in May 1737, the friendship extended to HF’s father as well. HF was indebted to Hill for hailing Pasquin in the pages of The Prompter (2 April 1736) as the ﬁrst step in what Hill had long been advocating: a thorough reformation of contemporary theater from its mindless preoccupation with dancing and dumb show. In February 1737, as he prepared to launch a new season at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, HF invited Hill to provide a prologue and epilogue for William Hatchett’s political satire A Rehearsal of Kings. Hill, however, had read the copy and was shocked at the impudence of the satire, and he prudently declined the favor with a warning to HF that by producing such stuff he was courting “a mortiﬁcation” (see Letter 3). By the end of that season HF would have reason to regret ignoring Hill’s advice as the staging of such satires at the Haymarket provoked Parliament into passing the Licensing Act that put an end to his career as dramatist. No further evidence remains of the friendship between them, but it must have cooled considerably by April 1741, when HF in Shamela not only mocked Samuel Richardson’s popular ﬁrst novel, Pamela (1740), but in Parson Tickletext’s foolish enthusiasm for the book hilariously parodied Hill’s fulsome letters of praise that Richardson had preﬁxed to the second edition. HILL, Dr. John (1714–75), miscellaneous writer and virtuoso. A vain and foppish man who began his career as an apothecary, Hill was one of the most remarkable ﬁgures of his day. As an author he was proliﬁc and versatile, writing on virtually any subject (from the art of acting to the history of fossils and the science of botany) and in virtually every literary genre (essays, novels, plays, operas). Before the two met, he was one of HF’s greatest admirers. In 1751 he used the pages of his paper, The London Daily Advertiser, to puff the Universal Register Office, a business venture begun by HF with the assistance of his halfbrother John Fielding, and in his novels The Adventures of Mr. Loveill (1750) and of Mr. George Edwards, a Creole (1751) he paid HF the compliment, however feebly executed, of imitating his manner in Tom Jones. Indeed, in his History of a Woman of Quality (1751) Hill declared HF to be “one of the greatest Genius’s in his Way, that this, or perhaps any Age or Nation have produced.” Almost from the moment the two ﬁrst met, however, this cordiality changed to spite. On 28 December 1751 Hill went to HF in the latter’s capacity as magistrate to report that he had been robbed by a pair of highwaymen. HF, who was about to launch The Covent-Garden Journal, took this opportunity to propose that he and Hill engage in a good-humored “Paper War” designed to stimulate sales. What began in a playful spirit, however, lapsed almost immediately into bitter recrimination. From lauding HF’s “almost creative Pen,” Hill, in his columns as “The Inspector” and as arbiter of taste at the Bedford Coffee House, turned to mocking HF’s new novel, Amelia (1751); and in May the enmity

Others in the Life

79

deepened when HF, as magistrate and as “Sir Alexander Drawcansir” of The Covent-Garden Journal, publicly sided with Mountfort Browne, who at Ranelagh had kicked, caned, and dewigged Hill for insulting him. Hill retaliated by publishing in August, anonymously, a scurrilous attack on HF and his friend Christopher Smart entitled The Impertinent, provoking them in turn to make Hill the subject of a new Dunciad—a plan Smart executed under the title of The Hilliad, published in February 1753. In November 1752 Hill’s ire was further roused when HF, in the ﬁnal numbers of The Covent-Garden Journal, ridiculed him as “the Trumpeter” of “the Ninnies” who were taking the side of John Rich at Covent Garden against his friend David Garrick at Drury Lane. To this humorous rebuke Hill replied with furious invective in a series of leaders in The London Daily Advertiser. He would have a ﬁnal opportunity for abuse in March 1753, when in The Story of Elizabeth Canning Considered he answered HF’s pamphlet defending the girl against those she had accused of abducting her. (On Hill, see Rousseau 1982.) HOADLY, Benjamin (1676–1761), bishop successively of Bangor (1716–21), Hereford (1721–23), Salisbury (1723–34), and Winchester (1734–61). Hoadly was the preeminent contemporary champion of low church principles and the Whig establishment. For HF, who knew him and his sons Benjamin Hoadly and John Hoadly personally, he represented “true greatness” in religion, as he declared in both his poem of that name (1741) and Tom Jones (1749; II. vii), where he refers admiringly to Hoadly’s “great Reputation” in divinity. Indeed, the latitudinarian theology of Hoadly—and of his great predecessors Isaac Barrow, Samuel Clarke, and Archbishop John Tillotson—informs HF’s mature thought in religious matters. In Joseph Andrews (1742; I. xvii) Parson Adams vigorously defends Hoadly against both his high church adversaries and the Methodist George Whitefield, whose Calvinist doctrines HF regarded as pernicious. In a passage central to an understanding of HF’s religious position, Adams subscribes to the doctrines advocated by Hoadly in two of his most controversial works. In his sermon The Nature of the Kingdom, or the Church, of Christ (1717) Hoadly precipitated the so-called Bangorian controversy by arguing that religion was a matter of sincerity, not of external forms of worship, and that the church of Christ, whose kingdom was not of this world, was the whole community of believers; in his treatise A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (1735) he offered a rationalist, mystery-dispelling analysis of the eucharist, which, if his argument had been accepted, would have removed the grounds that justify the Sacramental Test Act. Parson Adams warmly commends this work as “a Book . . . written with the Pen of an Angel, and calculated to restore the true Use of Christianity, and of that Sacred Institution.” (In Shamela, 1741, HF had made the same point more obliquely by including among the heroine’s favorite reading works by two of Hoadly’s enemies, Whiteﬁeld and Thomas Bowyer.) In concluding the gypsy episode in Tom Jones (XII. xii), which serves as an ironic par-

80

A Henry Fielding Companion

able of the “Happiness” of a society governed according to Jacobite principles of absolutism, the narrator’s closing comments on the dangers of such a system draw on another of Hoadly’s most inﬂuential sermons, The Happiness of the Present Establishment, and the Unhappiness of Absolute Monarchy (1708). HOADLY, Dr. Benjamin (1706–57), physician and playwright. Son of Bishop Benjamin Hoadly, Dr. Hoadly was a friend of HF and in the subscription list to the Miscellanies (1743) is down for three sets on “royal” paper. In Volume 1 of that collection, HF pays him a compliment in his burlesque of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire, and in The Covent-Garden Journal (18 July 1752) he alludes favorably to Hoadly’s comedy, The Suspicious Husband (1947). HOADLY, Reverend John (1711–76). Hoadly, who enjoyed writing verse and comedies, was by profession ﬁrst a lawyer and then a clergyman, who on his father Bishop Benjamin Hoadly’s translation to the see in 1734 was appointed chancellor of Winchester. Like his brother Benjamin Hoadly, he subscribed to HF’s Miscellanies (1743); but a far more impressive example of their friendship is HF’s indebtedness to him for the idea of constructing Pasquin (1736) around contrasting rehearsals of a comedy and a tragedy. In 1731 John Rich, manager of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, staged two performances of Hoadly’s play entitled The Contrast: A Tragi-Comical Rehearsal of Two Modern Plays: Match upon Match; or No Match at All, and the Tragedy of Epaminodas. Hoadly suppressed the work at the instance of his father, and it was never published. Years later Rich, recognizing the similarity between the schemes of Hoadly’s play and Pasquin, accused HF of plagiarism—to which HF replied by ironically dedicating Tumble-Down Dick (1737) to Rich, taking the opportunity to acknowledge in public the debt to his friend he had otherwise “always own’d.” John Hoadly was close to Sarah Fielding as well and on her death in 1768 composed the memorial to her in Bath Abbey. HOBBES, Thomas (1588–1679), philosopher. Hobbes, author of The Leviathan (1651), was reviled by most of his contemporaries as a thoroughgoing materialist who argued that there was no absolute basis for morality and who deﬁned man as a rapacious creature motivated entirely by self-interest. In his earliest reference to Hobbes, occurring in the unﬁnished burlesque of the Dunciad (1729/30, III. 45–46), HF is aware of the pernicious inﬂuence of his philosophy, but appears to attribute the problem to a misreading of the philosopher’s intentions: “Hobbes (not understood) delights the Fool / And Blockheads dare Religion ridicule.” But Witmore in The Author’s Farce (1730, II. ix) is no fool, and he attributes the moral cynicism of The Leviathan to its author, who thinks “of moral good and evil, that there are no such things.” In “An Essay on Nothing” (Miscellanies, 1743) HF ﬁnds an appropriate niche for “The Great Mr.

Others in the Life

81

Hobbes”—who, having denied the existence of the soul, is seen as “an Enemy to that immaterial Substance”—placing him in section III of the essay: “Of the Dignity of NOTHING; and an Endeavour to prove, that it is the End as well as Beginning of all Things.” For HF, Hobbes and “that charming Fellow” Bernard Mandeville, as Miss Mathews calls him in Amelia (1751, III. v), were preeminent among a “set” of “political philosophers” who represented human nature as “depraved and totally bad” and who have “endeavoured to ridicule and extirpate all our expectations of any future state in another life” (Champion, 22 January 1740). In Tom Jones (1749) he would counter this poison by afﬁrming the opposite doctrines. In the chapter “Of Love” (VI. i) he speaks of those “Philosophers” who denied that there were “such things as Virtue or Goodness really existing in Human Nature, and who deduced our best Actions from Pride,” and reasons that the advocate of such a dark and cynical view, having searched his own mind and found “no Ray of Divinity, nor any thing virtuous, or good, or lovely, or loving, very fairly, honestly, and logically concludes, that no such things exist in the whole Creation.” At the end of the novel, the freethinking philosopher Square, having seen the error of his ways, converts to Christianity on his deathbed. HF, who more than any other of his contemporaries thought about the causes and nature of laughter, was also intrigued by Hobbes’s deﬁnition of it in The Leviathan (pt. I, ch, 6): “Sudden glory, is the passion which maketh those grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves” (Oakeshott [n.d.]: 36). HF more than once cited this passage—as in Common Sense (21 May 1737): “Mr. Hobbes will tell you that Laughter is a Sign of Contempt”; in his letter to James Harris of 29 September 1741, referring to the ostentatious laugh of a girl: “I soon resolved with Mr Hobbs, that it was the Effect of Pride, and she desired no more than to acquaint me with her Contempt”; and in “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men” (Miscellanies, 1743): “Mr. Hobbes tells us that Laughter arises from Pride, which is far from being a good-natured Passion.” (On Hobbes’s contemporary reputation, see Mintz 1962.) HODGES, Sir James (ﬂ. 1730–58), bookseller, whose shop was located at the Looking-Glass on London Bridge. He was one of the partners who published HF’s journal, The Champion (1739–40). He was knighted in 1758. HOEY, James (d. 1775), Dublin bookseller. Drawing on HF’s leaders and other material from The Covent-Garden Journal (1752), he began publishing a periodical by that name in Dublin on 23 January 1752, with HF’s name on the title page. In the number for 27 April, he also advertised HF’s Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder for publication the next day.

82

A Henry Fielding Companion

HOGARTH, William (1697–1764), painter. HF’s close friendship with Hogarth, the preeminent artist of mid-Georgian England, probably began about 1731, when Hogarth supplied the frontispiece for the “reading” version of the Tragedy of Tragedies. Some thirty years later it was Hogarth who, from memory, provided as frontispiece for the so-called Murphy edition of HF’s Works (1762) the only authorized contemporary portrait of him. The nature of their friendship, and their sense of the compatibility of their practice as artists of the comic in their different media, are perhaps best seen, on the one hand, in HF’s handsome compliment to “the Ingenious Hogarth” when illustrating in the Preface to Joseph Andrews (1742) the distinction between “the Work of a Comic History-Painter” and “those Performances which the Italians call Caricatura”; and, on the other hand, in Hogarth’s graphic demonstration of this same distinction in his print, Characters and Caricaturas (1743), in which, while explicitly referring the viewer to HF’s preface for “a farthar [sic] Explanation of the Difference,” he playfully depicts himself and HF vis-a`-vis, their faces contorted with laughter (see Battestin 1983a). HF often declared his admiration for Hogarth as an artist who employed his great skill in the service of morality. In The Champion (10 June 1740) he praised Hogarth “as one of the most useful Satyrists any Age hath produced”: In his excellent Works you see the delusive Scene exposed with all the Force of Humour, and, on casting your Eyes on another Picture, you behold the dreadful and fatal Consequence. I almost dare afﬁrm that those two Works of his, which he calls the Rake’s and the Harlot’s Progress, are calculated more to serve the Cause of Virtue, and for the Preservation of Mankind, than all the Folio’s of Morality which have been ever written; and a sober Family should no more be without them, than without the Whole Duty of Man in their House.

In Tom Jones (1749), rather than attempting to describe the physical appearance of his characters—Bridget Allworthy (I. xi), Mrs. Partridge (II. iii), and Thwackum (III. vi)—he refers the reader to ﬁgures in speciﬁc prints by Hogarth. And in Amelia (1751. III. xii), the wise clergyman Dr. Harrison has furnished his house with Hogarth’s prints, whom he regards as “a moral Satirist.” It seems likely that in 1751, the two friends consciously chose to combine their separate talents in order to alarm the public about the dangers of drunkenness, HF addressing these evils in his Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (1751) and Hogarth in his print Gin Lane. (On HF, Hogarth, and the reciprocal contemporary relationship between the arts of painting and ﬁction, see Baum 1934, Moore 1948, Coley 1963, Shesgreen 1972, Paulson 1979, Sheehan 1979, de Voogd 1981, and Cantrell 1995. On Hogarth, see Uglow 1997.) HOMER (ﬂ. somewhere in the period 1050–700 B.C.), Greek epic poet. HF regarded Homer as one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived—one, indeed, “who, of all others, saw farthest into human Nature” (Tom Jones, 1749, IV. xiii). HF’s allusions to him are numerous (see Ribbles, H27). As he introduced

Others in the Life

83

his new species of writing in the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), HF claimed descent for his “comic Epic-Poem in Prose” from Homer’s lost work the Marqites, “which Aristotle tells us, bore the same relation to Comedy which his lliad bears to Tragedy.” In Book III, Chapter ii, of the novel, the scholarly Parson Adams develops this remark, delivering to Mr. Wilson a critical disquisition on the beauties of the lliad, Homer’s “noblest Work.” For the entertainment of the “Classical Reader,” HF tells us in the preface, he has provided mock-heroic descriptions of his hero’s cudgel and his battle with the dogs; in Tom Jones (IV. viii) Molly Seagrim’s violent altercation with her neighbors is presented in an entire chapter headed, “A Battle sung by the Muse in the Homerican Stile, and which none but the classical Reader can taste.” (We are told— misleadingly, since HF’s actual model in the work was Virgil’s Aeneid—that the mock-epic satire, the Vernoniad [1741], is a translation of a lost work by Homer.) In the preface to Sarah Fielding’s ﬁrst novel, The Adventures of David Simple (2nd ed., 1744), HF declared the Odyssey to be the original of all such episodic romances. And the insights into human nature to be found in the greatest of such ﬁctions, as he says of Don Quixote in Joseph Andrews (III. i), then seemed preferable to the distorted representations of character and events to be found in the works of biased historians. By the end of his life, however, HF had become doubtful of the good to be gained from romance writers. “I must confess,” he wrote in the preface to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), “I should have honoured and loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in humble prose, than those noble poems that have so justly collected the praise of all ages; for though I read these with more admiration and astonishment, I still read Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, with more amusement and more satisfaction.” (On HF and Homer, see Vander Motten 1988 and Stovel 1989.)

HOOKE, Nathaniel (d. 1763), historian. HF’s acquaintance with Hooke may have begun with their involvement in the controversy provoked by the publication in March 1742 of the Duchess of Marlborough’s memoirs, in which she justiﬁed her conduct at the expense of Queen Mary, Queen Anne, Lord Oxford, and many others of high and low degree. Hooke served as the duchess’s ghost in writing this work, for which he received the extraordinary gratuity of £5,000. When the memoirs were attacked by an anonymous author, HF rose to defend it in his pamphlet, A Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough. But Hooke is best remembered as the author of The Roman History, published in four volumes over many years (vol. 1, 1738; vol. 2, 1745; the ﬁnal two posthumously). In A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. ix), HF has the historian Livy praise this work, “which he said was preferable to all others”; in Tom Jones (1749, XV. iv), Lady Bellaston has read Hooke’s account of the rape of the Sabine women in his ﬁrst volume.

A Henry Fielding Companion

84

HORACE (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 B.C.), Roman poet. Horace was perhaps HF’s favorite classical author. Allusions to and quotations from him are more numerous in HF’s writings than those concerning any other author. Counting the mottoes to his leaders and separate works, the Ribbles identiﬁed “at least 85” taken from Horace, and references to him in the corpus of HF’s writings were so many they could adduce only a selection (H34). Inscribing a copy of Horace’s works, which he presented as a gift to his friend Jane Collier, HF called him “the best of all the Roman Poets” (Ribbles H38). Elsewhere Horace is “my Friend,” “my great Master” (Covent-Garden Journal [22 August 1752] and A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor [1753], Section LIV). The latter admission is revealing, for, though HF as a young man jilted by a lover could take revenge, as he put it in the preface to the Miscellanies (1743), by modernizing one of Juvenal’s harshest satires, his usual manner is Horatian, and best described by Alexander Pope in the Essay on Criticism (1711, lines 653–56): Horace still charms with graceful negligence, And without Method talks us into Sense, Will like a Friend familiarly convey The truest Notions in the easiest way.

Or, as he wrote in The Covent-Garden Journal (4 February 1752), paraphrasing lines from the Satires (I. i. 24–25, and I. x. 14–15) that served as axioms of the comic method he practiced: “For why (as Horace says) should not any one promulgate Truth with a Smile on his Countenance? Ridicule, indeed, as he again intimates, is commonly a stronger and better Method of attacking Vice, than the severer kind of Satire.” Among the ancients, Horace, author of the Ars Poetica, was one of the trio of “noble Critics” (Tom Jones, XI. l.)—the others being Aristotle and Longinus—whose authority HF often invokes in his own literary criticism. HUNTER, William (1718–83), surgeon. The earliest sign of HF’s friendship with Hunter may be the two letters from “Benevolus” in The Covent-Garden Journal (12 and 23 May 1752), in which the writer recommends the plan of the Society of Navy Surgeons to advance medical knowledge. Certainly by the time HF left for Lisbon in 1754, the two were on the best of terms. In The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) HF calls Hunter, who had tapped his belly of ten quarts of water before his departure, “my friend . . . the great surgeon and anatomist of Covent Garden”; and when the ship was delayed by contrary winds at Tor Bay, Hunter would be one of the friends to whom HF dispatched a present of a half-hogshead of Devon cider (Letter 74). In 1778, long after HF’s death, Sir John Fielding appealed to Hunter to “indulge your benevolent feelings & your Sentiments of Friendship” for his brother by doing all he could to insure that a performance of HF’s comedy The Fathers: or, The Good-Natured Man, staged for the beneﬁt of his widow and sons, would be well attended.

Others in the Life

85

JAMES, Dr. Robert (1705–76), physician. He was the inventor of a celebrated powder for the treatment of fevers and the author of A Medicinal Dictionary (1743–45), to which HF refers in The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755, July [14]). HF’s opinion of James and his speciﬁc is clear from a passage in the ﬁrst edition of Amelia (1751, VIII. ix) where he recommends “that Powder, for the Invention of which, my worthy and ingenious Friend Dr. James would, in almost any Country but this, have received public Honours and Rewards.” JOHNSON, Dr. Samuel (1709–84), man of letters. Although it is possible that Johnson may have met, or at least observed, HF on other occasions, as far as documentary evidence attests, the two met just once. On 12 March 1750, HF signed a recognizance certifying that Johnson appeared before him at Bow Street to post a bond of £20 guaranteeing the good behavior of the wife of an amanuensis who was assisting him with his great Dictionary. Before the month was out Johnson in Rambler, No. 4 (31 March), would publish his famous attack on novelists, such as the author of Tom Jones, who in their works “confound the Colours of Right and Wrong.” There may not, of course, be any causal connection between the two events, but it is difﬁcult to account for the inveteracy of Johnson’s animus toward HF. It is true that HF in Jonathan Wild (1743, III. vi) and Tom Jones (1749, XIII. v) ridicules, without naming them, writers who, as Johnson had done in The Gentleman’s Magazine from 1741–43, present as authentic speeches in Parliament they have never heard; and it is also true that, again in Tom Jones (VII. i), HF had extolled authors who, like himself, “are admitted behind the Scenes of this great Theatre of Nature” while the compilers of “Dictionaries” are shut out. But these are slight hits, aimed at nameless targets. Intellectually the two had much in common. Like Johnson, for example, HF subscribed to the neoclassical canons of criticism that, with regard to the imitation of nature, recommend universals rather than particulars. Hence HF declares in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. i), “I describe not Men but Manners; not an Individual, but a Species”; and in Rasselas (1759, ch. 10) Johnson has Imiac advise the poet not “to number the Streaks of the Tulip.” Yet with one important exception, Johnson preferred the prurient circumstantialities of Samuel Richardson’s ﬁction to HF’s witty generalizing. The former, he declared, “knew how a watch was made,” whereas the latter could merely “tell the hour by looking at the dial-plate.” To Boswell he insisted he had never read Joseph Andrews; and, echoing Malvolio’s slur on Feste in Twelfth Night, he called the author of Tom Jones “a barren rascal.” Soon after the publication of An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (January 1751) Johnson in Rambler No. 114 (20 April) disputed HF’s view that crime was increasing because of the incompetence of those who execute the laws, insisting instead that the inhumanity of the laws themselves was to blame. Johnson’s criticisms of HF would appear to owe more to a temperamental antipathy between the two men than to any other cause: he was a deeply moral, deeply Christian man who,

86

A Henry Fielding Companion

as the allusion to Shakespeare’s Feste suggests, scorned what might seem HF’s high clownishness in treating the foibles—most particularly the sexual foibles— of human nature. When, in Amelia (1751), HF at last dropped the mask of comedy to treat such themes soberly, Johnson warmly approved: he read the novel through at a sitting and pronounced Amelia “the most pleasing heroine of all the romances.” And in his review of Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote in The Gentleman’s Magazine (22 [1752]: 146) he relented in his usual disapproval of HF’s character by commending his warm and disinterested praise of the novel. (On Johnson’s view of HF, see Moore 1951, Watt 1957: 260–89, and Hunt 1976.)

JONSON, Ben (1572–1637), playwright and poet. When proposing examples of the best dramatists in English, HF usually cites Jonson together with William Shakespeare and some others, such as Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John Dryden, William Wycherley, William Congreve, Nathaniel Lee or Nicholas Rowe; these others are interchangeable, serving to ﬁll out a line. Shakespeare and Jonson are always there, the essential pair. In the preface to Plutus (1742) HF, who during his career as dramatist saw himself as reviving the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, observes that Jonson, “of all our English Poets, seems chieﬂy to have studied and imitated Aristophanes.” To readers whose “Palates are vitiated with the theatrical Diet” provided by Colley Cibber and the feeble successors of Wycherley, he recommends “a Play or two” of Jonson’s to prepare themselves for the “Simplicity” of Aristophanes’ style—a style invigorating his comedies with “good Sense, manly Wit, just Satire, and true Humour.” In one particular respect HF, who from the start of his career as an author sought to understand the nature and causes of laughter, felt a kinship with Jonson, “who,” as he declared in the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), “of all Men understood the Ridiculous the best.” Having traced the Ridiculous to its source in affectation stemming from either vanity or hypocrisy, he saw that Jonson “hath chieﬂy used the hypocritical Affectation”—a remark perhaps illuminated by a note to the text of Plutus (pp. 5–6), where he observes that in two of Jonson’s best plays exploring the passion of avarice “he introduces every Man pursuing Riches, on the pretence of doing good to others, or the Public, and disclaiming all selﬁsh Views.” HF also found Jonson helpful in illustrating related aspect of the Ridiculous. In The Covent-Garden Journal (18 July 1752) he quotes at length the Induction to Every Man out of his Humour (1599) to support the deﬁnition of “Humour” as “a violent Impulse of the Mind, determining it to some one peculiar Point, by which a Man becomes ridiculously distinguished from all other Men.” Much earlier, in The Champion (15 March 1740), he had arrived at a similar notion of the source of the Ridiculous, once again turning to Jonson, this time to Bartholomew Fair (1614), for an explanation: “No character is oftener represented on the stage of the world than that

Others in the Life

87

of Justice Overdo in the nest of fools; men often become ridiculous or odious by overacting even a laudable part.” JURIN, Dr. James (1684–1747), physician. In March 1745 Jurin, together with other eminent physicians, attended the former Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, in his ﬁnal illness. He attempted in vain to cure Walpole, who was suffering the agonies of kidney stones, by dosing him with a speciﬁc of his own concoction to which he gave the awesome denomination lixivium lithontripticum. When HF’s friend the eminent surgeon John Ranby published a Narrative charging Jurin and his colleagues with incompetence, a heated controversy erupted in which HF sided with Ranby, publishing in July a satirical pamphlet, The Charge to the Jury: or, The Sum of the Evidence, on the Trial of A.B.C.D. and E.F. all M.D. for the Death of one Robert at Orfud. Jurin thus found a place in the satiric campaign HF conducted against the medical establishment from Tom Thumb (1730) and the Mock Doctor (1732) to Amelia (1751). JUVENAL (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) (c. A.D. 60–c. 130), Roman satirist. Although HF often quotes “that excellent Poet” Juvenal (Covent-Garden Journal, 4 January 1752), Horace’s easy grace and urbanity suited him far better than Juvenal’s tone of harsh indignation—except on one particular occasion: in the preface to the Miscellanies (1743) he tells us that, as a young man not yet twenty, he took “the Revenge” of “an injured Lover” and modernized Juvenal’s Sixth Satire, a diatribe against women. Wilson in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. iii), having been poxed by an unfaithful mistress, similarly “railed” at the sex “in as gross Language as Juvenal himself formerly reviled them in.” KENRICK, William (1725?–79), miscellaneous writer. Though he had praised the author of Tom Jones in the short-lived journal, The Kapelion, or Poetical Ordinary (1750), giving HF the place of honor in a pantheon of humorists including Cervantes, Paul Scarron, Jonathan Swift, and Sir Richard Steele, Kenrick drew HF’s ire in February 1752, when, in a satirical entertainment called Fun, he attempted to ridicule him on stage. The play was suppressed by the Lord Mayor, however, apparently at HF’s instance—the episode adding point to HF’s attack on slanderers in The Covent-Garden Journal (18 February 1752). KNAPTON, John (1696–1770) and Paul (1703–55), booksellers, whose shop was located at the Crown, St. Paul’s Churchyard. The brothers took over their father’s business upon his death in 1736. They were partners with John Nourse, Andrew Millar, and James Hodges in the publication of HF’s translation of Gustaf Adlerfelt’s Histoire militaire de Charles XII, Roi de Sue`de (1740). (On the Knaptons, see D. W. Nichol DLB 1995:154.)

88

A Henry Fielding Companion

LACY, James (d. 1774), actor and theatrical manager. Lacy’s association with HF began as early as 1731 at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket when he played the Ghost of Gaffer Thumb in The Tragedy of Tragedies and Rakel in The Letter Writers. Though he did have the important part of Witmore in the revised version of The Author’s Farce at Drury Lane in 1734, this was at a time when the company there had been depleted by the rebellion of the actors. It was chieﬂy as a member of HF’s troupe at the Haymarket in 1736–37 that Lacy’s friendship with him was cemented. He played Fustian in Pasquin and again in Tumble-Down Dick in 1736, and in 1737 he was Sourwit the critic in both The Historical Register and Eurydice Hiss’d. He also contributed in a small way to HF’s program of political plays at the Haymarket when a farce of his entitled Fame (now lost) was performed for his beneﬁt as an afterpiece to Pasquin in May 1736. Lacy was among the subscribers to HF’s Miscellanies (1743); and after April 1747, when Lacy and David Garrick became joint patentees of the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, HF returned that favor many times over by losing few opportunities, most notably in The Covent-Garden Journal (1752), to champion his friends’ interests in their rivalry with John Rich at Covent Garden. LA PLACE, Pierre-Antoine de (1707–93), French translator; author of the ﬁrst translation of Tom Jones (1749), entitled Histoire de Tom Jones, ou l’enfant trouve´, published anonymously in February 1750, with two further editions by January 1751. In order to accommodate the novel to the French taste and doubtless to spare himself some weeks of trouble, La Place compressed the narrative at will and excised not only the prefatory chapters to each book, but “toute espe`ce de Digressions, de Dissertations, ou de Traite´ de Morale.” Handsomely illustrated by Gravelot, this mutilated version of the novel had “a vast run” in France—as a correspondent assured Samuel Richardson, who pressed him for conﬁrmation of a report current in London that the novel had been suppressed by the authorities as an immoral work—and it served as the basis of the Italian translation of 1756–57. The rumor Richardson heard had only a slight basis in fact: the arreˆt du conseil (the ofﬁcial order to stop publication) of 24 February 1750 was directed not against Tom Jones but against La Place’s bookseller, Jacques Rollin, who had published the work without license. Rollin appears to have made his apologies and paid the ﬁne, for the arreˆt was never enforced. Indeed HF’s novel succeeded in France as only the most celebrated works of English ﬁction had done. (See TJ WE 2 vols. 1974: I. lii–liii; and B. P. Jones 1961.) LAROON, Captain Marcellus (1679–1772), artist. According to J. T. Smith, author of Nollekens and His Times, Laroon and his companions in revelry frequently attended HF’s court at Bow Street, HF declaring them to be the “most troublesome and difﬁcult to manage of all my Bow-street visitors.” Laroon’s lively drawing, Night Walkers before a Justice (also known as A Frenchman at Bow Street), very probably depicts one of these occasions, showing HF, with

Others in the Life

89

his clerk Joshua Brogden, in the course of examining an offender in a courtroom crowded with watchmen and spectators. If this is the subject of the drawing, it is one of only three pictures of HF drawn by professional artists during his lifetime, the others being William Hogarth’s comical sketch of HF and himself in Characters & Caricaturas, and a drawing of him in proﬁle attributed to Joshua Reynolds. (See Life:ix–x.) LEAKE, James (d. 1764), bookseller at Bath. He married Samuel Richardson’s sister Elizabeth in 1732. Leake’s bookshop, which he opened in 1722, was a favorite resort of the literary company at Bath. HF appears to have made it his daytime headquarters when visiting the city. His letter to James Harris of 29 September 1741 was written at a table in Leake’s shop, and in a letter of 24 September 1742 he informed Harris that he had heard William Warburton harangue the company there “near two Hours” (see Letters 12 and 14). LE BOSSU, Rene´ (1631–80), French literary critic. His Traite´ du poe¨me e´pique (1675), a neoclassical anatomy of the epic poem, was the most inﬂuential work of criticism on this, considered to be the highest of all the literary kinds. In the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), HF began his career as a novelist by claiming that the new species of writing he was founding belonged to this genre. He called his novel “a comic Epic-Poem in Prose.” HF had the highest regard for Le Bossu as a critic. In Tom Jones (1749, XI. i), while castigating the generality of critics as incompetent and merely censorious, he singles out a handful of “noble” exceptions to the rule: Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus among the Ancients and among the Moderns only Andre´ Dacier and Le Bossu. In The Covent-Garden Journal (4 January 1752) he again places Le Bossu—this time alone among the Moderns—in the company of this same august triumvirate of Ancients. LEE, Nathaniel (c. 1649–92), playwright. Twice in HF’s works Lee improbably appears in the company of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Dryden, and Nicholas Rowe as an example of excellence in the drama (Author’s Farce [1730, III] and Pasquin [1736, IV. i]). In the ten years from 1674 to 1683 Lee produced a dozen plays, all but one in the high heroic mode. Of these, HF—or rather his persona, “H. Scriblerus Secundus”—quotes from eight in the notes to his hilarious burlesque, The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731): from Nero (1674), Sophonisba (1675), Gloriana (1676), Oedipus (1678—a collaboration with Dryden), Mithridates (1678), Caesar Borgia (1679), Lucius Junius Brutus (1680), and The Duke of Guise (1682—with Dryden). As the notes to Hillhouse’s edition suggest, other echoes from these plays, as well as from the blank verse tragedy The Rival Queens (1677), pass unnoticed by Scriblerus. Lee’s Theodosius (1680), also slighted by Scriblerus and his author in The Tragedy of Tragedies, is remembered later in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. x), where the Player quotes a dozen lines of the hero Varanes’s protestation of love for Athenais. It is also

90

A Henry Fielding Companion

quoted in Tom Jones (1749, VI. xii), where the narrator enjoys an inﬂated metaphor of “the gigantic Poet” Lee. HF surely expresses his true verdict on the poet’s qualities in the preface to Sarah Fielding’s Familiar Letters (1747), where he fears that without a reformation of taste, the stage will soon be given over to “the Fustian of Lee and Rowe.” LENNOX, Charlotte Ramsay (1720–1804), novelist. Although a copy of her ﬁrst novel, The Life of Harriet Stuart (1751), was also in HF’s library (Ribbles, L12), his friendship with Charlotte Lennox probably began soon after his publisher, Andrew Millar, brought out The Female Quixote (13 March 1752), which HF reviewed at length and very favorably in The Covent-Garden Journal (24 March 1752), preferring it, indeed, to Cervantes’ masterpiece with respect to its structural coherence and observation of the rules of probability. Reviewing the book in The Gentleman’s Magazine (22 [1752], 146), Samuel Johnson, who wrote the dedication and contributed a chapter to the novel, was pleased to notice that HF’s praise was entirely disinterested: “Mr. Fielding, however emulous of Cervantes, and jealous of a rival” had given this favorable verdict “though he has no connection with the author.” Later it was Lennox who, when the “dropsy” that killed him resisted other remedies, reminded HF of Bishop Berkeley’s extravagant recommendation in Siris (1744) of “the virtues of tarwater”—a remedy that proved as ineffectual as all the others he tried. In the introduction to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), remembering her intended kindness as well as her lack of patronage, he called her “the inimitable and shamefully distress’d author of the Female Quixote.” (On Lennox, see Small 1935.) LESAGE, Alain-Rene´ (1668–1747), novelist. HF regarded LeSage’s picaresque novel Gil Blas (1715–35) as among the very few works of ﬁction—all of them by foreign authors—worthy of comparison with his own new species of writing. In the important theoretical essay that introduces Book III of Joseph Andrews (1742) he insists that as faithful representations of human nature, the masterpieces of prose romance are preferable to the narratives of biased historians. To prove his case, he cites two works in particular: Cervantes’ Don Quixote and “the true History of Gil Blas,” whose author he styles “the inimitable Biographer.” (On HF and Lesage, see Goldberg 1969.) LILLO, George (1693–1739), playwright. A city jeweler by trade and a dissenter in religion, Lillo was the author of the popular domestic tragedy, The London Merchant: or, The History of George Barnwell (1731). In 1736, after both of the principal theaters rejected Fatal Curiosity, Lillo’s new play in the same genre, HF at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket eagerly accepted it for production. He provided the prologue, puffed the play in the press, and in general applied all his talents and resources toward ensuring its success. Introduced late that season, it had a modest run of seven performances. But when HF

Others in the Life

91

brought it on again the following year, pairing it with his own Historical Register, it ran for twelve nights, with Lillo being granted the extraordinary favor of four beneﬁts. HF’s admiration for Lillo’s genius and the depth of his affection for him personally are clear from the obituary in The Champion (26 February 1740), where he is said to be “the best Tragick Poet of his Age” and “one of the best of Men.” HF’s ﬁnal tribute to his friend may well be the character of Heartfree in Jonathan Wild—like Lillo an honest, goodnatured man whose trade is that of a city jeweler. LIVY (Titus Livius) (59 B.C.–A.D. 17), Roman historian. Livy’s Historia, his great narrative of the history of Rome, begins with the legendary founding of the nation by Aeneas and, in 142 books (of which 45 are extant), brings the story down to A.D. 9 in the reign of Augustus. HF, who regarded Livy as “the greatest of all the Roman Historians” (True Patriot, 12 November 1745), drew on him frequently, and always respectfully, in his writings. One quality he admired about Livy’s conduct of narrative was his scrupulous re-creation of the context of an event. “Before he recounts any Action,” HF observes in The True Patriot (24 December 1745), Livy “gives us so just a Detail of all the Circumstances that preceded and produced it, that it requires no extraordinary Penetration in his Reader to foresee the future Consequence.” LOCKE, John (1632–1704), philosopher. As set forth in his works—An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Two Treatises of Government (1690), Some Thoughts on Education (1693), and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695)—Locke’s thoughts on politics, education, and religion correspond so closely with HF’s own that his inﬂuence appears to have been deep and pervasive, as indeed it was generally in the century. Locke, the great apologist for the Revolution Settlement of 1689, maintained against the Stuart doctrines of absolutism and the king’s rule by divine right the principles of a limited, constitutional monarchy. In religion, he was the enemy of mystery and enthusiasm, insisting that reason must be the test of revelation. These same attitudes underlie HF’s own advocacy of Whiggism in politics and of latitudinarianism in religion. In his remarks on education HF also resembles Locke, who would subordinate learning to the improvement of morals, who denounced the barbarism of birching, and who recommended that our natural awkwardness be corrected by the dancing master. He anticipated HF’s views, as expressed, for example, in his characterization of the brutal pedagogue Thwackum in Tom Jones (1749), in Amelia’s method of educating her children (1751, IV. iii), and in the narrator’s observations on Atkinson’s clumsiness in the same novel (V. ii). In an important sense, HF’s concern in his ﬁction to purify the moral vocabulary by deﬁning through action, character, and irony the true meaning of such terms as goodness, greatness, prudence, and honor is very much a part of a didactic program that derives from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book

92

A Henry Fielding Companion

III, which treats of “the Abuse of Words”: HF more than once explicitly recalls Locke in this context, in, for example, The Champion (17 January and 27 March 1740), Plutus (1742, p. 56n.), and, especially, in introducing his “Modern Glossary” in The Covent-Garden Journal (14 January 1752). (See Hatﬁeld 1968: 40–53.) HF emphatically disagreed with Locke’s notion in the Essay that wit and judgment are antithetical faculties. His own view was that wit (or invention) and judgment are necessarily the correlative attributes of creative genius (Tom Jones [1749], IX. i]). On this subject, as he remarked to James Harris in 1743, he sided with Francis Bacon against Locke (Letter 18). But Locke—“this truly great man,” as he calls him in the Fragment of a Comment on Lord Bolingbroke’s Essays (1755)—otherwise remained for him the sanest of thinkers. In the “Paper War” he brieﬂy waged in The Covent-Garden Journal (1752) against the legions of hackney authors and illiterate critics, HF made sure to enlist just two English philosophers on his side: Bacon the founder and Locke the greatest exponent of the new empiricism. (On HF in relation to the philosophers of the period, see Harrison 1975. On Locke’s inﬂuence on the literature of the period, see MacLean 1936, Weinsheimer 1984, and Walker 1994. On Locke’s philosophical inﬂuence in the period, see Yolton 1956.) LONGINUS (A.D. ﬁrst or second century), Greek critic. The Peri hypsous (“On the Sublime”), an anonymous work of the ﬁrst or second century analyzing the qualities that make for sublimity in writing, was once erroneously ascribed to the Greek rhetorician Cassius Longinus. Boileau’s French version, entitled Traite´ du Sublime, ou du Merveilleux dans le Discours (1674), gave it wide currency, and Longinus took his place with Aristotle and Horace as one of the three great literary critics of antiquity. In Tom Jones (1749, XI. i) HF thus places him in the company “of those noble Critics, to whose Labours the learned World are so greatly indebted.” He is found as well among the Greek “VETERANS” whom HF in The Covent-Garden Journal (4 January 1752) enlists against the legions of Grub-Street in “the Paper War.” Later in the Journal (4 February 1752), when attempting to deﬁne the elusive quality of “Taste,” HF points to “that inimitable Critic” Longinus, “who of all Men seems most exquisitely to have possessed it.” As for practical criticism, HF in Tom Jones (XII. xiii) chose to distinguish his narrative manner from that of more circumstantial historians, who tediously record the most inconsequential events, by invoking “the Rule of Longinus” and ﬂying past those periods of his hero’s life in which nothing happens. In The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731)—as in Tom Jones (IV. ii) when, introducing his heroine, he gives the reader “A short Hint of what we can do in the Sublime”—HF could enjoy mocking those writers of tragedy and romance who, without genius, strained at sublimity. He knew true grandeur in writing from mere bombast, however, and he enjoyed it. In an interesting letter to James Harris of 24 September 1742 he argues for the superiority of blank verse, and

Others in the Life

93

prose, to the rhymed couplet in communicating “a noble Sentiment, or a noble Expression”: I apprehend it will be readily admitted that every sort of Stile except the Sublime may be reached by Prose: And what if even this may not only be atchieved [sic] by the ProseWriter; but it should be found that the Dignity & Majesty of Prose should be superiour to that of Verse. Will yo pardon me if I think Paradise lost is writ in Prose [?]

To clinch the point, he quotes at length a sublime passage from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (Letter 14). This same quality, which he found as well in the prose of Longinus, accounts for HF’s remark in The Covent-Garden Journal (11 January 1752) that the only poets among the critics of antiquity were Horace and Longinus: “of the latter of whom, tho’ he was no Poet, Mr. [Alexander] Pope ﬁnely says, ‘Thee, great Longinus, all the Nine inspire, / And bless their Critic with a Poet’s Fire.’ ” LUCAN (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus) (A.D. 39–65), Roman epic poet. Lucan’s De Bello Civili, an unﬁnished epic on the war between Caesar and Pompey, was known to HF and his contemporaries as the Pharsalia. Though he had read Nicholas Rowe’s verse translation of the poem (1718), HF’s frequent allusions to the Pharsalia are to the original Latin: as in The Champion (24 January and 15 March 1740), the Vernoniad (1741, n. 53), Plutus (1742, p. ix), Jonathan Wild (1743, IV. xvi), The True Patriot (15–22 April 1746), and The CoventGarden Journal (18 November 1752), where as the motto for the leader he quotes the Latin verses from Pharsalia (V. 125–26)—in English: “Caesar could no longer endure a superior, nor Pompey an equal”—which in Amelia (1751, V. iii) had earlier served to illustrate “the ambitious Temper of Beauty.” That HF had read the original with care is clear from the chapter in that novel (VIII. v) in which Booth, conversing with an illiterate author who has confused Lucan with HF’s favorite, the Greek satirist Lucian, offers a corrected reading of Pharsalia (II. 387–88), a reading later preferred by the Loeb Library translator J. D. Duff in 1928. Booth’s judgment of Lucan’s powers as an epic poet no doubt reﬂect HF’s own opinion: “ ‘Why, surely,’ cries Booth, ‘if he is not to be placed in the ﬁrst Rank, with Homer, and Virgil, and Milton—I think clearly, he is at the Head of the second; before either Statius, or Silius Italicus.’ ” LUCIAN of Samosata (c. 120–after 180), Greek satirist. Although he early adopted at times Lucian’s manner, as in the scenes in the underworld in The Author’s Farce (1730) and A Journey from This World to the Next (1743), HF’s explicit praise of the Greek satirist is ﬁrst found in his obituary of Jonathan Swift in The True Patriot (5 November 1745), where he credits the author of Gulliver’s Travels with possessing “the Talents of a Lucian, a Rabelais, and a Cervantes”—the four appearing again together in the pantheon of comic authors celebrated in Tom Jones (1749, XIII. i). Later HF would narrow this exalted company of wits to “the great Triumvirate”—Swift, Lucian, and Cervantes—

94

A Henry Fielding Companion

whom he admired not only because they possessed great talents but because they used their talents “to expose and extirpate” vice and folly (Covent-Garden Journal, 4 February 1752). Just as HF and William Young had in 1742 optimistically projected an unwanted translation of the comedies of Aristophanes, so ten years later they entertained plans for publishing by subscription a translation of Lucian’s works, “with Notes Historical, Critical, and Explanatory.” HF would have been well prepared for such an undertaking; he had in his library no fewer than nine editions and translations of Lucian. In Amelia (VIII. v), published in December 1751, he devoted a long passage to Booth’s proclaiming Lucian’s greatness and the inadequacy of the existing versions. Six months later, in a series of advertisements in The Covent-Garden Journal, he tested the extent of the public’s interest in the work he and Young were projecting and, in the number for 30 June 1752, devoted an essay to the merits of their author. Lucian, he declared, “may be almost called the Father of true Humour”—a writer, indeed, very nearly inimitable, with whom only “the immortal Swift” deserved comparison. How, then, could there be a successful translation of such a nonpareil? “To say Truth,” HF continued, with a confession that ought to have interested his critics more than it has done, “no Man seems so likely to translate an Author well, as he who hath formed his Stile upon that very Author.” (On HF and Lucian, see Lind 1936, Miller 1961: 365–419, and Paulson 1967: 133–41. On Lucian’s inﬂuence in general, see Robinson 1979 and Branham 1989.) LYTTELTON, George (1709–73) of Hagley Park, Worcestershire, later ﬁrst Baron Lyttelton. Himself an author of some contemporary fame—including such works as Letters from a Persian in England (1735), Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul (1747), and Dialogues of the Dead (1760)— Lyttelton is perhaps best remembered today as the friend of Alexander Pope and the patron of James Thomson and HF. Indeed, except perhaps for James Harris, he was HF’s closest friend. They were at Eton College together in the early 1720s, and their friendship is clearly evident in 1733 in HF’s verse, “Epistle to Mr. Lyttleton.” In 1735 Lyttelton entered Parliament and, with his relation and fellow Etonian William Pitt, became a leader of the so-called Boy Patriots who harassed Sir Robert Walpole in opposition throughout the last seven years of his ministry. During this period HF in his political satires supported Lyttelton’s cause, and in two of his most ambitious verse essays—Of True Greatness (1741) and “Liberty” (published in the Miscellanies [1743] and dedicated to Lyttelton)—paid his friend handsome compliments. When the Broad-Bottom government was formed in 1744, Lyttelton was appointed to the Treasury, and in 1748, as HF was ﬁnishing Tom Jones, Lyttelton was said to have employed him to edit The Jacobite’s Journal as the ministry’s principal organ. In the Journal (16 July 1748) HF praised his friend as “almost the only Patron which the Muses at present can boast of among the Great.”

Others in the Life

95

Indeed in dedicating Tom Jones to him, HF acknowledged not only that he had undertaken his masterpiece at Lyttelton’s urging but that, as he put it, “I partly owe to you my Existence during great Part of the Time which I have employed in composing it.” The character of the benevolent Squire Allworthy, he continued, was “copied” from Lyttelton and their mutual friend Ralph Allen. Regrettably, HF’s cheerful letter (29 August 1749) congratulating Lyttelton on the occasion of his marriage remains the only extant personal memorial of their friendship (Letter 54), their other correspondence having been burned by the Victorian wife of Lyttelton’s descendant who considered the friendship an embarrassment to the family. (On Lyttelton, see Davis 1939). MACHIAVELLI, Niccolo` di Bernardo dei (1469–1527), Florentine statesman and author of II Principe (1513). For HF, Machiavelli was “the greatest of Politicians” (Jacobite’s Journal, 8 October 1748), and he refers to him in this context throughout his career, from The Modern Husband (1732, III. iii) to The Covent-Garden Journal (18 January, 21 March 1752). In The Craftsman (5 October 1734) HF’s ironic commentary on Horatio Walpole’s foreign policy takes the form of a letter written from the underworld by “N. Machiavel.” A copy of Machiavelli’s Works (1720) was in HF’s library (Ribbles, M1). (On HF’s possible use of Machiavelli in JW, see Shea 1957.) MACKLIN, Charles (1697–1797), actor. HF’s long, amusing friendship with Macklin probably began as early as the distressing episode of the actors’ rebellion of 1733–34, when, like HF, Macklin sided with the management at Drury Lane and, when that cause was lost, moved to the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. In January 1734 at Drury Lane, he acted the part of Colonel Bluff in HF’s Intriguing Chambermaid, and in April at the Haymarket he was Squire Badger in Don Quixote in England. The following year he returned with HF to Drury Lane, where he played Wormwood, the lawyer, in The Virgin Unmask’d. As an actor, Macklin was best known for his excellence as Shylock, a role that would have prepared him well for the part of Zorobabel the stock-jobber in HF’s Miss Lucy in Town (1742). For HF’s comedy The Wedding Day (1743) he not only acted the part of Stedfast, but wrote and delivered the prologue, in which he prudently advised HF to disarm his critics by giving up the stage to write more novels like Joseph Andrews. HF, indeed, had started this banter in that novel (III. x), where the Player, referring to Macklin’s legendary homeliness, calls him “that ill-looked Dog.” Macklin would later pay HF the compliment of playing him in his two-act entertainment Pasquin Turn’d Drawcansir (1752), a role in which he playfully celebrated HF’s efforts as magistrate and author of The Covent-Garden Journal to extirpate the follies of the town. In The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) the succulence of the John Dory prompted HF to compliment a pair of his epicurean actor friends, James Quin and Charles Macklin.

96

A Henry Fielding Companion

MADDOX, Issac (1697–1759), Bishop of Worcester. HF’s cordial relations with this good man began in 1751 as a result of their common interest in combatting the destructive evil of gin-drinking among the poor. In that year, Maddox’s widely acclaimed sermon on the subject, The Expediency of preventive Wisdom—together with HF’s powerful arguments in An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers and William Hogarth’s famous print Gin Lane—inﬂuenced the passage of the Gin Act, a measure that in a few years is said to have reduced the annual consumption of gin in England from 11 million to 2 million gallons. In April 1752, concerned now at a serious increase in violent crime, HF produced a pamphlet entitled, Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder. He calculated this curious little book, of which 3,000 copies were published, to instill fear into the simple audience that it was intended for. He dedicated it to Maddox, who had liked the plan of it and encouraged him to publish. In The Covent-Garden Journal (10 March 1752) HF characterized the bishop as “a true Labourer in the Vineyard,” to whose “great Care and Diligence” the public were indebted for the recent act that had already “very considerably lessened the pernicious Practice of Gin-drinking.” MALLET, David (1705–65), poet and playwright. In 1740 Mallet’s fellow Scot and HF’s publisher, Andrew Millar, brought out an edition of Sir Francis Bacon’s works that included Mallet’s life of the author, dedicated to the Earl of Chesterfield, leader of the opposition to Robert Walpole. For a time in the early 1740s HF and Mallet were clearly on friendly terms. As the narrator of Joseph Andrews (1742, III. vi) begins to recount his hero’s mock-epic battle with the dogs that have mistaken Parson Adams for a hare, he invokes the Muse who has “carefully guided the Judgment, whilst thou hast exalted the nervous manly Style of thy Mallet”; and a little later (III. x), the Poet, whose blame is praise, condemns “such horrible Stuff” as Mallet’s tragedy Eurydice (1731). Mallet would repay such ﬂattery by subscribing to HF’s Miscellanies (1743). The friendship, however, soon cooled. In any event, it did not survive what HF considered to be Mallet’s pernicious decision to publish his friend Bolingbroke’s posthumous works in March 1754, shortly before HF’s departure for Lisbon. The works, which were to HF a farrago of blasphemy and irreligion, prompted him to begin a scathing “Comment” which he never ﬁnished. MANDEVILLE, Bernard (1670–1733), philosopher. With Hobbes, Mandeville was among those “political philosophers,” as HF called them in The Champion (22 January 1740), who represented human nature as “depraved, and totally bad.” In his essay “Of Love” in Tom Jones (1749, VI. i), he has these two chieﬂy in mind when he denounces “that modern Doctrine, by which certain Philosophers, among many other wonderful Discoveries, pretend to have found out, that there is no such Passion in the human Breast.” In The Fable of the

Others in the Life

97

Bees (1714–34) Mandeville attempted to refute Shaftesbury’s optimistic view of human nature, insisting to the contrary that all our actions, even ostensibly benevolent ones, are motivated by vanity and self-interest—a doctrine that endears him to “lago” in The Covent-Garden Journal (14 March 1752). In Amelia (1751, III. v) HF explicitly rejects this cynical view when he has his hero interrupt Miss Mathews, who has commended “that charming Fellow Mandevil”: “Pardon me, Madam,” Booth replies, “I hope you do not agree with Mandevil neither, who hath represented human Nature in a Picture of the highest Deformity. He hath left out of his System the best Passion which the Mind can possess, and attempts to derive the Effects or Energies of that Passion, from the base Impulses of Pride or Fear. Whereas, it is as certain that Love exists in the Mind of Man, as that its opposite Hatred doth.” Yet Booth himself, for most of the novel, holds with Mandeville the morally debilitating view that our actions are entirely determined by whichever passion happens to be uppermost. (On HF’s view of Mandeville, see Smith 1961 and Harrison 1975. On Mandeville’s contemporary reputation, see Stafford 1997.) MANLEY, Delarivie`re (1671–1724), novelist. For HF, the work that deﬁned Manley as a ﬁction writer was the scandalous roman a` clef, Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes. From the New Atalantis (1709). As this novel had earlier found a place in the library of Leonora in Addison’s Spectator (12 April 1711), so it is also a favorite of several of HF’s frivolous young women: Miss Triﬂe in The Champion (26 April 1740), Shamela (1741, Letter 12), and Mrs. Fitzpatrick (Tom Jones, 1749, XI. viii). In Joseph Andews (1742, III. i) HF has Manley in mind—and no doubt Eliza Haywood as well—when he contrasts the true ﬁctional “Histories” of Miguel de Cervantes, Alain-Rene´ LeSage, Paul Scarron and Marivaux with the unnatural productions of “the modern Novel and Atalantis Writers.” (On Manley’s literary career, see McDowell 1998; on her novels, see Ballaster 1992 and Gonda 1996; on her plays, see Clark 1986.) MARIVAUX, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de (1688–1763), playwright and novelist. In distinguishing between the unnatural productions of romance writers and the authors of true ﬁctional “Histories,” HF in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. i) places Marivaux’s two novels—La Vie de Marianne (1731–41) and Le Paysan parvenu (1735–36)—among those of his great Continental predecessors Miguel de Cervantes, Alain-Rene´ LeSage, and Paul Scarron. And in Tom Jones (1749, XIII.i) Marivaux is one of only eight comic authors whom HF names as having been inspired by genius, the others being Aristophanes, Lucian, Cervantes, Rabelais, Molie`re, Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. Appropriately, when William Warburton in his edition of Alexander Pope’s Works (1753, IV. 169) wished to pay HF the highest compliment, he paired him with Marivaux as the two writers who, by “enriching” the new genre of prose ﬁction

98

A Henry Fielding Companion

“with the best part of the Comic art, may be said to have brought it to its perfection.” (On HF and Marivaux, see Green 1935, Powers 1962, Goldberg 1969, and Hartwig 1972.) MARLBOROUGH, Charles Spencer (1706–58), third Duke of. Grandson of the great Duke of Marlborough, he inherited the title in 1733 and soon thereafter joined his brother-in-law, the Duke of Bedford and HF’s fellow Etonians, George Lyttelton and Pitt, who were forming under the leadership of Chesterfield to oppose the Walpole ministry. In 1735 HF, in “Distress” for want of money, dedicated the published version of his unsuccessful comedy, The Universal Gallant, to Marlborough, who was known for his generosity. This is also the virtue that earned the duke a place in HF’s poem “Of Good-Nature,” published in the Miscellanies (1743), to which he subscribed for ﬁve sets on royal paper, and his wife the duchess for another. MARLBOROUGH, John Churchill (1650–1722), ﬁrst Duke of; the victorious commander of the British forces against France, 1702–11. In frequent references to the controversial hero of the Whigs from the dedication of The Universal Gallant (1735) to the introduction of The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), HF, whose father had served gallantly under Marlborough at Blenheim and whose mother’s family was related to the Churchills by marriage, was adulatory. In A Proper Answer to a late Scurrilous Libel (1747) he summed up his feelings by admiring “the unparalell’d [sic] Successes of our Arms, under the Conduct of the Great, the Protestant, the Whig duke of Marlborough.” Marlborough’s grandson, the third Duke, and his widow, the duchess Dowager, were both patrons of HF. MARLBOROUGH, Sarah (1660–1744), Duchess of. Although her grandson, the third Duke, was HF’s patron, and even though it is perhaps signiﬁcant that in May 1737 she made a point of attending a performance of The Historical Register, another of HF’s satires of Sir Robert Walpole whom she hated, there are no clear signs of her patronage of HF until the spring of 1742, when he published A Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough. HF wrote this pamphlet to defend the octogenarian duchess against the aspersions of one of the more spiteful attacks provoked by the publication of Nathaniel Hooke’s Account of her conduct during the reigns of Queen Mary and Queen Anne. From HF’s characterization of her in the Vindication—where he assures the reader that to those “who have acknowledged themselves to be her Inferiours” the duchess is all “Affability and Condescension”—it is plain that he knew her personally. From passages in The Craftsman (28 June 1735) and A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. iv), it is apparent that he had visited Blenheim, though he may have done so at the invitation of her grandson. In his poem “To a Friend on the Choice of a Wife” (Miscellanies [1743]) and

Others in the Life

99

in Tom Jones (1749, IV. ii), he also found opportunities to compliment her four famously beautiful daughters. MARTYN, Benjamin (1699–1763), miscellaneous writer. Martyn was an associate of James Harris’s ﬁrst cousin, the fourth Earl of Shaftesbury, who engaged him to write the life of the ﬁrst Earl. He probably was known to HF as early as 1730 when his tragedy Timoleon had a successful run at Drury Lane. In a scene from that production, which HF later recalls in Joseph Andrews (1742, I. viii), the actor Roger Bridgewater in the role of Timophanes stands “a very Statue of Surprize,” transﬁxed by the sudden appearance of his father’s ghost. In The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731, II. v), in lines that follow Grizzle’s celebrated ejaculation, “Oh! Huncamunca, Huncamunca oh,” HF parodied a passage from Martyn’s play: “Those heaving Breasts, / They beat Alarms to Joy.” Martyn subscribed to HF’s Miscellanies (1743), where, in A Journey from This World to the Next (I. viii), he would have found the shade of Shakespeare “shaking his Sides” over the monument in his honor recently erected at Westminster Abbey owing in part to Martyn’s efforts. (See Probyn: 61 and n.; and Keymer 1998.) MIDDLETON, Conyers (1683–1750), Cambridge divine and librarian. Immediately after Middleton’s Life of Cicero was published in February 1741 (and delivered to more than 1,800 subscribers) it became the target of HF’s ridicule— chieﬂy for two reasons: Middleton had dedicated the work to Sir Robert Walpole’s creature, Lord Hervey; and in the preface he had condescendingly disparaged a rival biography by HF’s friend and patron George Lyttelton, Observations on the Life of Cicero (1731), the second edition of which was issued in April 1741. In that same month appeared Shamela, HF’s hilarious parody of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). Middleton, together with Colley Cibber, is implicit in the name HF gave to the “author” of the work, “Conny Keyber,” and the dedication to “Lord Fanny” exquisitely burlesques Middleton’s own to the effeminate Hervey. HF resumed this sport in Joseph Andrews (1742), where he congratulates his Muse for having had “no Hand in that Dedication, and Preface, or the Translations which thou wouldst willingly have struck out of the Life of Cicero” (III. vi); and in the contemptuous characterization of Beau Didapper, for whom Hervey was the model, he paraphrased a passage from Middleton’s dedication (IV. ix). In time, however, HF’s attitude toward Middleton appears to have mellowed. He concluded the preface to An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) by quoting “a ﬁne Observation” from the Life of Cicero. MILLAR, Andrew (1706–68), HF’s principal publisher. Soon after he arrived in London from Edinburgh, Millar began a long and prosperous career as a bookseller by purchasing the rights to a number of important works, including

100

A Henry Fielding Companion

The Seasons (1726–30) and Liberty (1735–36) by his fellow Scot, James Thomson. Tradition has it that Thomson urged HF to submit to Millar the manuscript of his ﬁrst novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), which on the advice of his wife he purchased for the generous sum of £183.11s. Millar had a reputation for such fair dealing; indeed, his liberality to his authors was such that, according to Dr. Samuel Johnson, “he raised the price of literature.” From this beginning Millar went on to publish most of HF’s important works, including Tom Jones (1749) and Amelia (1751), for which he paid, respectively, £600 and £800, later supplementing these sums by further payments. Even when Millar’s name is missing from the imprints of other, lesser works—such as HF’s political writings, which were distributed by Mary Cooper, and The Covent-Garden Journal (1752), which appeared under the name of Ann Dodd—it is clear that Millar was chieﬂy responsible for publishing them. But the relationship between HF and his bookseller extended well beyond the business of book-making. They were the best of friends. On his last voyage HF remembered Millar, among others, with gifts: from Devon he dispatched a half hogshead of cider, and from Lisbon the same quantity of calcavella wine and a half chest of onions. A modest enough gesture, to be sure, since at the time of his death HF owed his friend the immense sum of £1,892. Millar would continue his beneﬁcence to HF’s widow and his children, and in 1762 he would bring out the ﬁrst collection of HF’s works—a handsome set of volumes with frontispiece by William Hogarth and a pioneering (though unsatisfactory) critical biography by Arthur Murphy. MILLER, Reverend James (1706–44), poet and playwright. HF and Miller were, if not friends, at least acquaintances—a relationship best seen in their inclination to laugh at one another in print. Miller twice alludes to HF in his verse satires: in Harlequin-Horace: or, The Art of Modern Poetry (1730) he cites as an instance of ignoring the rule of “heavy Probability” the hilarious scene in Tom Thumb (1730) of the cow swallowing the hero; and in Seasonable Reproof (1735) he ridicules HF’s notorious improvidence with money. He certainly knew HF during the theatrical seasons of 1731–32 and 1734–35 when they both had comedies produced at Drury Lane. For the staging of Miller’s The Modish Couple (1732)—which he pretended to have been written by Captain Charles Bodens, the facetious crony of the prankster dukes of Montagu and Richmond—HF contributed the Epilogue. HF enjoyed this joke upon the Town’s credulity: he made The Modish Couple the favorite play of Queen Ignorance in Pasquin (1736, V. i), and in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. vi) the riotous scene that greeted the play’s opening night would have been carved into the hero’s cudgel if there had been room for it. In that same season of 1732, in the preface to The Mock Doctor, HF “puffed” the recent edition of Molie`re’s Select Comedies translated by Miller in collaboration with Henry Baker. In January 1735, Miller’s The Man of Taste and HF’s Universal Gallant were in rehearsal together at Drury Lane. And later in The Champion (21 February 1740)

Others in the Life

101

HF re-created for his readers the ﬁrst-night damnation of Miller’s farce An Hospital for Fools (1739). MILLER, Sanderson (1717–80), amateur architect. A close friend of HF’s patron George Lyttelton, Miller was a pioneer of the Gothic revival in England in the late 1740s. At Hagley Park, Lyttelton’s estate in Worcester, he erected a miniature “ruined” castle and a rotunda; he was preparing to build a house in the same Gothic manner until Lyttelton’s second wife disapproved. It may well be that in Tom Jones (1749, I. iv) the “Gothick Stile” of Allworthy’s house is meant, in part at least, as a compliment to Miller, at whose house in Warwickshire HF read from his novel, in manuscript, to a company that included William Pitt and Lyttelton, Allworthy’s original, to whom Tom Jones is dedicated. MILLS, William (d. 1750), actor. HF was especially fond of “Honest Billy Mills,” whose father had played the part of Wisemore in his ﬁrst play, Love in Several Masques (1728). Mills appeared in supporting roles in a number of HF’s plays produced at Drury Lane in 1732: he was Gaywit in The Modern Husband; Clermont in The Miser; and in The Tragedy of Tragedies he played the Ghost of Gaffer Thumb, the kind of role (he also regularly played Banquo) for which HF remembers him in Joseph Andrews (1742, I. viii). In 1735 he played Gaylove in The Universal Gallant. Mills was a good man, but his acting was merely competent. In The Jacobite’s Journal (23 April 1748) “pufﬁng” a beneﬁt performance for Mills at Drury Lane, HF describes him as being “at all times a very safe Actor.” There are further compliments to him in Tom Jones (1749), where his “honest Face” is said to disqualify him for the part of lago (VII. i), and Partridge reveals his lack of taste by preferring Mills’s over-the-top performance as Claudius to David Garrick’s Hamlet (XVI. v). (See Ferguson 1964.) MILTON, John (1608–74), poet. HF’s admiration for the poet of Paradise Lost (1667) was unbounded. In A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. viii) the shades of Shakespeare and Milton call each other “Brother.” In Jonathan Wild (1743, I. x) the narrator, thinking of the best of the human race, thinks of Newton, Shakespeare, and Milton, whose labors have beneﬁted “the World in general.” In the preface to Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744) HF declares Virgil and Milton to be “the only pure lmitators” of Homer’s lliad. And as his own creative powers matured in the period of the composition of Tom Jones, HF expressed his appreciation of Milton in language still more absolute in its praise. In The True Patriot (5 November 1745) Paradise Lost is “the best Poem which perhaps [the World] hath ever seen”; in The Jacobite’s Journal (23 January 1748) it is “the noblest Effort perhaps of human Genius”; in The CoventGarden Journal (7 March 1752) it remains “the ﬁnest Poem in our Language.” One important reason for HF’s enthusiasm for Paradise Lost is that Milton chose—in HF’s view wisely—to write the poem in blank verse, eschewing the

102

A Henry Fielding Companion

approved verse form of his time, the heroic couplet, which John Dryden would use for his Aeneid and Alexander Pope for his lliad. As early as his unﬁnished burlesque of the Dunciad (1729/30, I. 167–70), HF preferred “Milton’s Strength,” chiding Pope for sacriﬁcing “Sense and Wit” in his obedience to the God of Rhyme. In his interesting letter to James Harris of 24 September 1742 he argues for the superiority of blank verse to rhymed couplets, and claims a close kinship between the former and his own medium of prose: My Muse is a free born Briton & disdains the Fetters of Rhyme. . . . What beautiful Expressions are to be found in the antient Prose-Writers which would not have yielded to Numbers. . . . I apprehend [he continues] it will be readily admitted that every sort of Stile except the Sublime may be reached by Prose: And what if even this may not only be atchieved by the Prose-Writer; but it should be found that the Dignity & Majesty of Prose should be superiour to that of Verse. Will yo pardon me if I think Paradise lost is writ in Prose[?] (Letter 14)

HF, himself a master of prose, saw in the author of Paradise Lost a kindred spirit; “the Divine Language of Milton,” as he called it in The Jacobite’s Journal (2 July 1748), spoke to him as the corseted couplets of even “the best Versiﬁer” could not. In Tom Jones (1749), his own epic in prose, HF in the plan of his novel remembered Milton’s. As his hero is turned out of “Paradise Hall” to wander unfamiliar roads, the narrator recalls the close of Paradise Lost: “The World, as Milton phrases it, lay all before him; and Jones, no more than Adam, had any Man to whom he might resort for Comfort and Assistance” (VII. ii). Among the comforts Jones does ﬁnd, however, are the beauty of the creation and of Milton’s poem. Having left Gloucester to walk the Malvern hills in the moonlight, Jones delights in “the Beauty of the Moon,” repeating “some Passages from Milton, who hath certainly excelled all other Poets in his Description of the heavenly Luminaries” (VII. ix). MISAUBIN, Dr. John (d. 1734), quack. A French physician who practiced medicine in London. Misaubin’s trumpeting the virtues of his pills, together with his broken English and arrogant manner, made him the butt of ridicule. William Hogarth, for example, satirized him in Plate V of The Harlot’s Progress (1732). HF’s The Mock Doctor of the same year is ironically dedicated to Misaubin, who, though others might call him “an illiterate Empirick,” deserves the warmest praise for inventing “that Little Pill,” an “invaluable Remedy, to which so many owe their Health, their Pleasure, nay the very Preservation of their Being.” In the play itself, Gregory is made to impersonate Misaubin when he poses as a French physician, urging Dorcas to “taka de Peel; me sal give you de litle Peel dat sal cure you.” Misaubin’s incompetence and vanity are also mocked in Tom Jones (1749, V. vii and XIII. ii). MITCHELL, Joseph (1684–1738), miscellaneous writer. A minor Scots author, Mitchell in the 1730s was known as “Walpole’s Poet.” In The Sine-Cure (1729),

Others in the Life

103

to which HF facetiously alludes in verses addressed “To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole” (1730), Mitchell petitioned the Prime Minister to appoint him governor of Duck Island in St. James’s Park. In his Epistle to the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole, concerning Poets, Poverty, Promises, Places, & (1735) Mitchell, by placing HF in the company of other contemporary versiﬁers who sang the Minister’s praises, points to a passing phase of HF’s shifting political loyalties. Years later, in an essay illustrating the subjective element in taste and humor, HF in The Covent-Garden Journal (7 March 1752) recalls a performance of Mitchell’s supposedly comic opera The Highland-Fair (1731) when the author mistook for an uproar of approbation the audience’s “unanimous exploding Laugh” of disbelief and derision. MOLIE´RE, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de (1622–73), French dramatist. HF greatly admired Molie`re. He twice paid him the compliment of adapting his plays for the English stage, and both times with great success: The Mock Doctor: or, The dumb Lady Cur’d (1732), derived from Molie`re’s Le Me´decin malgre´ lui, became the standard of its kind, the light farce; The Miser (1733), based on L’Avare, was HF’s most successful “regular” comedy. Indeed, to one contemporary critic HF was no less than “England’s Moliere!” (The Connoisseur 1735). On more than one occasion HF placed Molie`re in his personal pantheon of authors who excelled in “Wit and Humour.” In Tom Jones (1749, XIII.i) Molie`re is one of only three comic dramatists—the others being Aristophanes and Shakespeare—who were inspired by “Genius.” In The Covent-Garden Journal (4 January 1752) HF ranks him with the critic Rene´ Le Bossu as preeminent among modern French authors; a month later (4 February) he pairs him again with Shakespeare—the two dramatists who, with the “great Triumvirate, Lucian, [Miguel de] Cervantes, and [Jonathan] Swift.” endeavored by ridicule “to expose and extirpate those Follies and Vices which chieﬂy prevailed in their several Countries.” MOLLOY, Charles (d. 1767), political writer. One of the principal writers for the opposition in its efforts to unseat the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. When Nathaniel Mist ﬂed the country after the government suppressed Mist’s Weekly Journal in 1728, Molloy succeeded him as author of the paper, changing the name to Fog’s Weekly Journal. In 1729/30 HF included him as “Fog” among the anti-ministerial authors he satirized in his unﬁnished burlesque of the Dunciad, written in accord with the political sympathies of his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In the future, however, Molloy and HF would usually ﬁnd themselves on the same side in the Country Party’s campaign against Walpole. Mist published HF’s ﬁrst essay as a political humorist in Mist’s Weekly Journal (3 August 1728), Molloy would publish his second in Fog’s Weekly Journal (25 July 1730). In 1737, when HF’s patrons George Lyttelton and Chesterfield launched a new anti-ministerial journal called Common Sense—the title taken from the character in HF’s Pasquin (1736)—Molloy was employed as editor.

104

A Henry Fielding Companion

In that capacity he published two of HF’s essays: one, his defense of dramatic satire, written under the transparent pseudonym “Pasquin” and published on 21 May 1737 as Parliament met to pass the Theatrical Licensing Act; the other, published a year later (13 May 1738), took the form of a letter from “Mum Budget” on the wisdom of keeping silent in Walpole’s England. (The latter, found among papers seized from the printer by Walpole’s agents, is the only extant literary prose manuscript of HF’s.) Relations between Molloy and HF appear to have remained cordial: in Common Sense (9 May 1741) he devoted an entire leader to recommending HF’s electioneering pamphlet, The Crisis: A Sermon. MONTAGU, John (1688?–1749), second Duke of. A courtier who enjoyed various sinecures and distinctions, Montagu was a member of Sir Robert Walpole’s cabinet, and then Master of the Ordnance in Henry Pelham’s ministry. As Master of the Ordnance, he was responsible for staging the ambitious, but ill-fated, display of ﬁreworks meant to celebrate the end of the war with France in 1749. Erected in Green Park by the Cavaliere Servandoni in the form of a gigantic baroque “Cracker Castle,” the machine devised for the occasion caught ﬁre, and HF, as magistrate, was called on to restrain the infuriated architect who threatened to draw his sword against Montagu’s agent. Montagu is chieﬂy memorable for the magniﬁcent practical jokes that he cracked with the assistance of his inseparable companion, HF’s patron the Duke of Richmond. Theirs was the scheme of politicizing the Reverend James Miller’s comedy The Modish Couple (1732), for which HF wrote the Epilogue, by attributing the play to their decidedly unliterary hanger-on Captain Bodens—a ruse that resulted in a riot on opening night. In 1749 they perpetrated the sublimest hoax of the century. On a bet they succeeded in packing the Little Theatre in the Haymarket with a gullible audience who came to see the “Bottle Conjurer” squeeze himself into a quart bottle; in their disappointment the spectators tore down the house. Writing of Montagu in 1740, his mother-in-law the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough complained that “All his talents lie in things only natural in boys of ﬁfteen years old, and he is about two and ﬁfty; to get people into his garden and wet them with squirts, and to invite people to his country houses, and put things into their beds to make them itch, and twenty such pretty fancies as these.” One such guest was Montesquieu, whom Montagu entertained by playing on him the trick HF’s “roasting” squire plays on Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. vii), inviting him to seat himself with dignity on a throne whose seat was a blanket concealing a tub of cold water. MONTAGU, Lady Mary Wortley (1689–1762). A celebrated bluestocking, Lady Mary was HF’s second cousin (her grandfather, William, third Earl of Denbigh, was HF’s great uncle, the elder brother of his grandfather the Reverend John Fielding); she was his close friend. An astute critic whose judgment he valued, it is clear from HF’s grateful letters to her that Lady Mary read with

Others in the Life

105

approval at least two of his comedies, Love in Several Masques (1728) and The Modern Husband (in its original form, 1730). It seems probable, indeed, that she was responsible for giving HF his start in the theater by using her considerable inﬂuence to gain him a hearing with Colley Cibber and Robert Wilks at Drury Lane, where Love in Several Masques, his ﬁrst play, was staged in February 1728. Lady Mary’s “accurate Judgment,” to use HF’s phrase in dedicating this play to her, seems to have redeemed for him a character he usually thought unnatural—the learned female: “You are capable of instructing the Pedant, and are at once a living Confutation of those morose Schoolmen who wou’d conﬁne Knowledge to the Male Part of the Species, and a shining Instance of all those Perfections and softer Graces which Nature has conﬁn’d to the Female.” She would always be for him “sparkling W[or]tley,” unrivaled for her wit. How close HF was to her personally is clear from his verse “Epistle” to George Lyttelton (1733), an angry attack on Alexander Pope for his rude characterization of Lady Mary as Sappho in his Imitation of Horace’s Satires (II.i). It is also clear from the burlesque cantos HF wrote for her in imitation of Pope’s Dunciad (1729/30) that in these early years he had thoroughly adopted Lady Mary’s political views, favoring Sir Robert Walpole and his courtiers against the opposition represented by the party of Bolingbroke and the Scriblerians Pope, Jonathan Swift and John Gay. (On Lady Mary’s opinion of HF’s novels, see Halsband 1966; on Lady Mary, see Halsband 1956; for her correspondence, see Halsband 1965–67.) MONTAIGNE, Michel Eyquem de (1533–92), French essayist. HF greatly admired Montaigne, declaring in his Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (1751, Section XI) that he understood human nature better than anyone but Aristotle. He read the Essays (1580) both in the original French (see Letter 12) and in Charles Cotton’s translation (see The Champion, 31 May 1740), a copy of which he owned (Ribbles, M26). Numerous references to Montaigne occur in HF’s work from The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731, II. viii, n.[k]) to The Covent-Garden Journal (24 March 1752). When he established the Universal Register Office in 1750, HF’s intent was to realize an idea he found in an essay by Montaigne: the idea of an agency that would promote the happiness of society by serving as a clearing house for all those who had services to offer and those who required such services. MOORE, Edward (1712–57), playwright and poet. From at least the early 1740s, when they were members of a club of wits that met under the auspices of Jonathan Tyers, HF and Moore were close. Like another of HF’s literary friends, the jeweler George Lillo, Moore, a linen-draper, was in trade. But he was also, like Lillo, an author whose writings HF admired—the best known of which was Fables for the Female Sex (1744). In The Jacobite’s Journal HF twice “puffed” Moore’s productions. In the number for 19 March 1748 he defended his friend’s comedy, The Foundling, against a faction of critics (later, in

106

A Henry Fielding Companion

Tom Jones [1749, XIII. xi], he would allude to the rioting that occurred at the opening of the play, which drove Sophia from the theater). When in The Trial of Selim the Persian (1748) Moore ridiculed George Lyttelton’s detractors in a bid for his patronage, HF in the Journal for 16 July not only approved the satire but recommended its author to the public, “since I am convinced, that the Goodness of his Heart is, at least, equal to that of his Head.” HF’s affection for Moore is evident from the letter he wrote to Lyttelton in August 1749, hoping to secure his patron’s inﬂuence in procuring for his friend—“a Man whom I love,” HF calls him—the post of Deputy Licenser of the Stage; for Moore’s impecuniousness, and the opposition of her parents, stood in the way of his marrying Jenny Hamilton, “a young Woman of the most apparent worth” (Letter 54). As it happened, the position in question had already been spoken for; but HF at least would accomplish his purpose when Lyttelton assisted at the marriage in May of the following year. MULLART, William (ﬂ. 1730–49), actor. The principal actor at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket during the company’s ill-fated season of 1731, Mullart and his wife played King Arthur and Queen Dollalolla in The Tragedy of Tragedies and Jack Commons and Mrs. Softly in The Letter Writers; they were also to perform as Robin the butler (the ﬁgure of Sir Robert Walpole the Prime Minister) and Susan the cook in the The Grub-Street Opera, which was suppressed before it opened. The following year the Mullarts went with HF to Drury Lane and from 1732 to 1734 appeared, for the most part, in less important roles. In 1732 Mullart played a hackney coachman in The Lottery, Lord Richly’s porter in The Modern Husband, one of Sir Jasper’s servants in The Mock Doctor, and he and his wife were Captain Bilkum and Stormandra in the single performance of The Covent-Garden Tragedy. In 1733 they appeared as Charles Bubbleboy and Wheedle in The Miser. In January 1734, with the Drury Lane company depleted by the mutiny of most of the principal actors, they took the parts of Rakeit and Mrs. Highman in The Intriguing Chambermaid and of Luckless and his landlady Mrs. Moneywood in the revised version of The Author’s Farce. When the rebel actors returned in March to Drury Lane in triumph, Mullart followed HF to the Little Haymarket, where he was Sancho in Don Quixote in England; it would be the last of his roles for HF. MURPHY, Arthur (1727–1805), playwright, journalist and HF’s ﬁrst biographer. In a letter of 6 July 1754 to Philip Yorke, Thomas Birch reported that HF’s “last Request” to Andrew Millar, his publisher, “was to take all Care, when he should hear of his Death, to prevent his Life from being undertaken by any of the Grubstreet Writers, who are so ready & ofﬁcious on such Occasions” (Life:585). Millar would honor this request for ﬁve years before he formed plans to bring out an edition of HF’s works, which would appear in due course in 1762 in two forms (eight volumes octavo and four volumes quarto in ﬁne paper), with a portrait of HF by William Hogarth as frontispiece. Such an

Others in the Life

107

edition required an introductory essay on the author and his literary achievement, and, as Millar was aware, just such an essay, written by HF’s friend James Harris with the close cooperation of his sister Sarah Fielding, was already available. As early as February 1758 Harris had completed a draft of the piece, which he entitled “An Essay on the Life and Genius of Henry Fielding, Esqr” (see Probyn: Appendix III). It is invaluable for the impressions it conveys of HF’s personality by a man who knew him all his adult life. But, as Millar saw, it was much too short to stand at the head of the pompous edition he had in mind. Instead, without informing either Harris or Sarah, he turned to Murphy, a professional writer with editorial experience. In May 1759 Millar published proposals for an edition of the works, with “an Essay on the Life and Genius of the Author. By ARTHUR MURPHY, of Lincoln’s Inn, Esq.” Murphy would be paid £100 for writing the essay and for revising and annotating the works—though, except for incorporating HF’s revisions to Amelia as well as to a selection of leaders from The Covent-Garden Journal, his editorial labors were desultory at best. As Sarah complained to Harris upon reading a copy of the essay before publication, Murphy “knew little or nothing” of her brother (Letter 108). He probably began his acquaintance with HF about the time he assumed the editorship of The Crafstman in October 1752, renaming it The Gray’s Inn Journal and transforming it from a political paper into one of social and literary comment on the model of HF’s Covent-Garden Journal. Murphy greatly admired the author of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. In several numbers of the new journal, as well as in the prefatory letter to Christopher Smart’s satire of Dr. John Hill, the Hilliad (1753), Murphy extolled HF’s genius. In writing his life, however, he would depend on information furnished by Millar and HF’s brother John Fielding—and in some passages (as even the title of the piece suggests) on hints he took from Harris’s “Essay,” which Millar had in his possession. Despite Millar’s announcement of the edition nearly three years earlier, Sarah at Bath and Harris in Salisbury learned of his decision to substitute Murphy’s for Harris’s essay early in March 1762, a matter of weeks before the edition was published. On reading a copy, Sarah was appalled: “You never saw such a shocking Creature as it had made of my Brother,” she complained to Harris, “and not only of him but of his Father too” (Letter 108). Murphy appears to have deleted the most offensive passages before publication. Certainly the references to Edmund Fielding in his essay, dated 25 March 1762, are tame enough. But the impression he conveyed of her brother’s intemperateness and improvidence, though true enough, cannot have pleased her. If not for the reasons that shocked her, Murphy’s essay is without doubt a woefully inadequate assessment of HF’s life and genius. It would remain, nevertheless, the principal source for generations of his biographers. (On Murphy, see Spector 1979.) NASH, Richard “Beau” (1674–1761), master of ceremonies at Bath. In the ﬁrst decade of the century, Nash, an amiable gamester and beau, established

108

A Henry Fielding Companion

himself at Bath as master of ceremonies in the Guildhall ballroom and Pump Room and, indeed, as arbiter of all affairs pertaining to polite society at the resort. HF, who regularly visited Bath, found him amusing. In the dedication to Shamela (1741) he recalls Nash’s escorting the effeminate Lord Hervey into the ballroom, and in Tom Jones (1749, XI, iv) he has Mrs. Fitzpatrick report verbatim (“I assure you, I repeat his Words”) Nash’s speech admonishing her to reject the attentions of the fortune-hunting Irishman whom, disregarding his advice, she married, to her regret. In 1748, remembering, as the puppetmaster tells Tom Jones (XII. v), that “the Quality at Bath” had “wanted mightily to bring Punch again upon the Stage,” HF for a season presented his own satirical puppet show under the name “Madame de la Nash.” But he particularly enjoyed Nash’s affectation in calling himself “King of Bath.” When in November 1743 his friend James Harris failed to pick up a fan dropped by Lady Margaret Brown, leader of the party of opera lovers who opposed his favorite Handel, HF wrote from Bath demanding that he attend the next ball, his invitation taking the form of a mock-writ of latitat issued by the “King” himself, the “Great Snash” (Letter 19; see also 18, n. 16). (On Nash, see Connely 1955.) NEEDHAM, Elizabeth “Mother” (d. 1731?), bawd. Keeper of a notorious bagnio in St. James, she died as a result of injuries received at the hands of a mob as she stood exposed in the pillory. In plate 1 of William Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress (1732) she is shown welcoming Kate Hackabout to London, and she served HF as the model for Mother Punchbowl in The Covent-Garden Tragedy (1732). In his youth, HF, by his own admission, was also acquainted with the brothels of Covent Garden—knowledge that served him well in Miss Lucy in Town (1742), in which the set recalls the interior of Mother Haywood’s bagnio. See also Betty Careless; Jenny Douglas. NEWCASTLE, Thomas Pelham-Holles (1693–1768), ﬁrst duke of. Newcastle was secretary of state under Sir Robert Walpole, while HF was (for the most part) supporting the opposition, and also under his brother Henry Pelham when these “Old Whigs” joined with HF’s friends George Lyttelton, Lord Chesterfield, and George Dodington to form the Broad-Bottom government in 1744. Although HF greatly admired Pelham, he clearly disliked his brother. In The Grub-Street Opera (1731), a satirical ballad opera representing George II’s government as an unruly household, Newcastle appears as Thomas the gardener. But even after 1744—when, as a writer for the Pelhamites and in his capacity as “court justice,” HF’s welfare depended on Newcastle’s goodwill—he rarely mentions the duke in his published works, and when he does, the allusions, though veiled, are clearly ironic. In the introductory chapter to Tom Jones (1749) HF’s reference to “the best Cook which the present Age, or perhaps that of Heliogabalus, hath produced” squints at Newcastle’s French chef “Cloe¨,” famous for serving up indecently lavish dinners; and in the introduction to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) HF recalls his “great patron’s” mistreatment of him as he labored in ill health to establish an efﬁcient police force.

Others in the Life

109

Although Newcastle was among the subscribers to the Miscellanies (1743), later, during the period of HF’s magistracy, the duke treated him with disdain, an attitude that may owe something to HF’s association with the Duke of Bedford, Newcastle’s bitter rival. In any case the record of Newcastle’s treatment of HF is clear: the “bill” to reform the police that HF submitted to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke in July 1749 was discarded by Newcastle, who in 1751 also ignored HF’s recommendation that the honest constable William Pentlow be appointed keeper of New Prison, Clerkenwell (in the event, the Middlesex justices chose Pentlow over the duke’s own candidate, an illiterate man whom they declared unﬁt for the post). The strained nature of HF’s relations with Newcastle is clearly reﬂected in HF’s letters of April 1753 replying to the duke’s repeated “Commands” to produce evidence in the case of Elizabeth Canning that he did not have (Letters 70–71). NOURSE, John (1705–80), HF’s bookseller, whose shop was located at “the Lamb without Temple Bar.” While HF prepared for the bar, Nourse supplied him with the law books he needed—copies, for instance, of Sir Anthony Fitzherbert’s Natura Brevium and Sir Edward Coke’s and Sir George Croke’s Reports. When in July 1739 HF moved from East Stour to town, Nourse did him the favor of ﬁnding him a house in Essex Street, near the Middle Temple. (See Letters 4–6.) He was also the principal English publisher of classical authors, whose “best Works,” HF assured readers of The Champion (21 October 1740), in which Nourse was one of the partners, might be purchased at his shop, “he being a Person very intimate with the said Ancients.” In 1739 it was Nourse who commissioned HF to undertake his translation of Gustaf Adlerfelt’s Histoire militaire de Charles XII, Roi de Sue`de, a work of three volumes that he wrote while editing The Champion. That experience possibly provides an autobiographical context for Wilson’s in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. iii), who, to keep from starving, “fell to translating with all my Might” and “in half a Year I almost writ myself blind.” (On Nourse, see Feather, 1981.) ODELL, Thomas (1691–1749), playwright, theatrical manager, and from 1738 Deputy Licenser of Plays. In October 1729 performances began at Odell’s new theater in Goodman’s Fields, situated in London’s East End. The company consisted of unproved actors who plied their trade before an audience chieﬂy made up of an obstreperous rabble of clerks and apprentices. In a matter of months the theater had become so obnoxious to the citizens of Whitechapel that the Lord Mayor moved to close it down. Nevertheless, since Colley Cibber, who had staged HF’s ﬁrst play at Drury Lane in 1728, was not interested in staging another, it was to Odell that HF carried The Temple Beau (1730), the second play he wrote and the ﬁrst new play to be produced at Goodman’s Fields. Here his remarkable career as dramatist began in earnest. OGLETHORPE, General James Edward (1696–1785), Jacobite and founder of Savannah, Georgia. A member for the opposition in the Parliamentary Com-

110

A Henry Fielding Companion

mittee of 1751 that was formed at the king’s request to consider methods of improving law enforcement, Oglethorpe was HF’s surreptitious enemy. He deplored HF’s advocacy of an increase in “the Civil Power” and his use of troops to maintain order as a magistrate. Oglethorpe was the clandestine sponsor of The True Briton, a blatant organ of Jacobite principles conducted by the impecunious hack George Osborne from his place of conﬁnement in Fleet Prison. From 1751 to 1753 Osborne, at Oglethorpe’s bidding, denounced as “pernicious” HF’s proposals for suppressing crime and providing for the poor. OLDFIELD, Anne (1683–1730), actress. HF greatly admired this gifted actress. Although exhausted on ﬁnishing her part as Lady Townly in The Provoked Husband (1728), a performance immortalized by Colley Cibber’s compliment that she had “outdone her usual outdoing,” she nevertheless consented to lend her talents to the part of Lady Matchless in HF’s Love in Several Masques (1728), a ﬁrst play by a new playwright not yet twenty-one years old. In the preface to the published version of his comedy he warmly acknowledged the favor she had done him. Later, in the preface to The Wedding Day, which, though ﬁrst staged in 1743, was conceived and for the most part written in 1730, HF revealed that he had created the part of Charlotte with Mrs. Oldﬁeld in mind. She died, however, before he could ﬁnish it. OLDMIXON, John (1673–1742), journalist and historian. Commended by Alexander Pope for his dullness in both versions of the Dunciad (A. II. 199–202; B, II. 283–90), Oldmixon had an unhappy reputation as a “laborious” poet, an injudicious critic, and a “virulent Party-writer for hire.” Written from a Whig bias, his voluminous histories include The Secret History of Europe (1712–5), the Critical History of England (1724–26), and The History of England from the time of the Stuarts until the reign of George I (1729–35). In HF’s Art of Love Paraphrased (1747) Oldmixon serves as a type of the tedious, long-winded hackney author, and in Tom Jones (1749, V.i) HF chooses him to illustrate the sort of author who goes, as Pope has it, “Sleepless himself to give his Readers Sleep.” Inquiring in The Covent-Garden Journal (11 January 1752) whether taste and learning are really necessary in a critic, HF asks, “If I delight in a Slice of Bullock’s Liver or of Oldmixon, why shall I be conﬁned to Turtle or to [Jonathan] Swift?” And in the number for 29 February he parodies Oldmixon’s manner of historical writing. (See Rogers 1970.) OLIVER, Reverend John (d. 1750), HF’s tutor. From 1707 to his death in 1750, Parson Oliver was curate of St. Mary’s, Motcombe, the neighboring village to East Stour, Dorset, where the Fieldings had their farm. He was HF’s tutor as a boy, visiting him two or three times a week to teach him Latin. Later, when as an adult HF came to write Shamela (1741), he would express his opinion of his mentor’s worth in giving the name “J. Oliver” to the sensible clergyman who disabuses Parson Tickletext as to the true character of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.

Others in the Life

111

OTWAY, THOMAS (1651–85), playwright. In The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), his burlesque of heroic drama, HF echoes from time to time Otway’s rhymed tragedy Don Carlos (1676), and he found irresistible Otway’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1679): Huncamunca calls out, “O, Tom Thumb! Tom Thumb! wherefore art thou Tom Thumb?” (II. iii and n. (g))—a hint taken, Scriblerus assures us, from Otway’s “Oh! Marius, Marius; wherefore art thou Marius?” HF understandably much preferred Otway’s blank verse tragedies, The Orphan: or The Unhappy Marriage (1680) and Venice Preserv’d (1682). In Joseph Andrews (1742, III. x) the Player pairs Otway with Shakespeare as his standard of excellence in the drama, and to make his point quotes an expressive line from The Orphan; in Tom Jones (1749, VIII. x and XI. v) both the narrator and Mrs. Fitzpatrick invoke Chamont’s description of a witch from the same play to give us a “Picture” of the ancient crones who keep house for the Man of the Hill and Mr. Fitzpatrick, respectively; and “Axylus” in The Covent-Garden Journal (10 March 1752) quotes a line from The Orphan that seems to capture the plight of the parricide Mary Blandy. HF mentions Venice Preserv’d only once (Tom Jones, VIII. ii), but that is when thoughts of Sophia inspire his hero to recite Jaffeir’s romantic apostrophe to woman. These two blank verse tragedies deﬁned Otway’s genius for HF. In Tom Jones (XI. i), when he wished to match for excellence a tragic and a comic dramatist from the early and late periods of the previous century, he chose Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Otway and William Wycherley. OVID (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 B.C.–A.D. 18), Roman poet. HF read Ovid as a schoolboy at Eton College, and apt quotations from Ovid’s works are scattered throughout his writings. In 1737 his farce, Eurydice, or The Devil Henpeck’d, adapted from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Metamorphoses, was “damn’d” on opening night. And in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. vi) the mock-heroic account of the hero’s battle with the hunting dogs burlesques the story of Actaeon. In 1747 HF—who in Tom Jones (1749, IV. v) calls Ovid “a great Master of the Passion of Love”—published Ovid’s Art of Love Paraphrased, and Adapted to the Present Time, a prose version of the Ars Amatoria that he had begun “many Years ago.” In the preface he hints that he ﬂoated this piece in the hope that its reception might warrant the production of a whole series of such adaptations of the Latin poets. It did not. PELHAM, Henry (1695?–1754), prime minister. In 1744 the Broad-Bottom government was formed when the “Old Whigs” of Sir Robert Walpole’s late ministry–including Pelham, his brother the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Chancellor Hardwicke—joined forces with HF’s friends and patrons who had remained in opposition, among them George Lyttelton, Chesterfield, and George Dodington. As First Lord of the Treasury, Pelham, who as Walpole’s prote´ge´ was well schooled in the art of politics, assumed the Great Man’s mantle as prime minister. His relationship with HF took time to develop. Pelham had been one of the sponsors of the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, which put an end

112

A Henry Fielding Companion

to HF’s career as playwright, and even during the period of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, when HF emerged as the new government’s principal propagandist, he appears to have been ignored by Pelham, whose “utmost Indifference to all Writers” HF sourly remarked in The True Patriot (28 January–4 February 1746). Pelham’s patronage of HF had certainly begun, however, by the time the prime minister surprised the opposition by calling a general election for the summer of 1747, a year sooner than was necessary under the Septennial Act. Alerted to this strategy beforehand, HF pulled a trick of his own, publishing under the guise of an opposition writer a clever and effective defense of the Pelham ministry entitled A Dialogue between a Gentleman of London, Agent for two Court Candidates, and an Honest Alderman of the Country Party; Pelham was delighted. When HF next appeared in print, in A Proper Answer to a late Scurrilous Libel (December 1747), he would laud Pelham as “this truly great Man”: “He hath indeed a Mind which no Difﬁculties can conquer, nor any Power corrupt”—a panegyric strain HF continued in The Jacobite’s Journal, where he lauds Pelham as not only “one of the greatest Men now alive” (2 July 1748), but also “one of the best and worthiest Men in this Nation” (24 September 1748). Throughout the Journal HF exerted himself in defending Pelham’s policies, most especially the controversial initiative (opposed by Newcastle) that led to what many considered the inglorious Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle that ended the war with France. It is clear from a passage in Tom Jones (XI. ix) that sometime before that novel was published in February 1749 HF had enjoyed Pelham’s hospitality at Esher Place, his estate in Surrey. In An Enquiry concerning the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (January 1751) HF devoted a section to the grave inadequacy of the laws pertaining to the poor and offered, if he found proper encouragement, to draw up a plan to enable them to ﬁnd useful employment. Encouraged by Pelham, to whom he would dedicate the work, HF undertook this project and in January 1753 published his Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor, one of the most interesting of his social tracts—not least in what it reveals about the humane conservatism of HF’s thought. Just once in the period from 1747 to the end of his life—in the chapter on “Political Matters” in Amelia (XI. ii)—does HF appear to criticize the prime minister for perpetuating the self-interested political policies of his mentor Walpole; but this is the briefest aberration from the pattern of HF’s complimentary references to Pelham and can be explained by the inﬂuence of his powerful patrons Dodington and (perhaps) Bedford, both of whom had recently resigned from the government and gone into opposition. In the introduction to the posthumous Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) HF recalled sadly “that memorable day [6 March 1754] when the public lost Mr. Pelham.” (On Pelham’s inﬂuence on HF, see McCrea 1983. On the Pelham government, see Owen 1957.) PEMBROKE, Henry Herbert (1693–1751), ninth Earl of Pembroke was one of the great “building earls” of the century (see Lees-Milne 1962: Chap. 2). At

Others in the Life

113

his seat at Wilton just three miles from Salisbury, he and Roger Morris erected a splendid Palladian bridge (1737) while William Kent naturalized the gardens. Like his friend James Harris, who in Three Treatises (1744) celebrated the “Beauties” of Pembroke’s house and grounds and objects of art, HF greatly admired Wilton and in Tom Jones (1749, XI. ix) names it, together with the great houses of Henry Pelham, Lord Cobham, George Dodington, and Ralph Allen, as examples of “the wondrous Power of Art in improving Nature.” PENLEZ, Bosavern (d. 1749), condemned prisoner. For several nights early in the hot July of 1749, a mob of sailors, angered that their mates had been bilked at a brothel, set about pulling down bawdy houses in the Strand and burning the contents in the street. Among others who joined in the looting of the houses was Penlez, a young wigmaker from Devon, who was apprehended by the watch as he tried to ﬂee with a quantity of linen and lace. In September, on testimony given by the keepers of the brothel before Lord Chief justice Willes at the Old Bailey, Penlez and another man were convicted on the Riot Act, which HF in his capacity as magistrate had at the time invoked in order to restore order. Considering the infamous character of their accusers and sympathizing with the motives of the sailors who had caused the trouble, the jury recommended mercy, and the public at large strongly opposed the sentences of capital punishment. Indeed, the king himself urged Justice Willes to accept the jury’s recommendation of clemency. Willes nevertheless insisted that at least one of the condemned men must be hanged as an example. Consequently Penlez, who had added burglary to rioting, was alone to suffer. It was owing to HF’s representation of this circumstance to the Privy Council that, as he put it, “the Distinction between an Object of Mercy, and an Object of Justice at last prevailed.” Penlez was hanged at Tyburn before an angry throng of spectators, including several thousand sailors. For his part in the Penlez affair—which in November became an inﬂammatory issue in the Westminter by-election, in which the Duke of Bedford’s brother-in-law, Viscount Trentham, stood against Sir George Vandeput—HF was viliﬁed in the opposition press. In defense of his own actions and the conduct of the ministry in the events that led to the execution, HF published A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez (1749). And to ensure the election of Trentham, he exerted himself in preserving order at the hustings and in publishing a number of electioneering broadsides. (For a discussion of BP as a literary work, see Wilner 1991.) PENTLOW, William, constable. From the beginning of his magistracy HF was concerned about the mounting incidence of violent crimes in the metropolis. In July 1749 he submitted to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke in the form of a “bill” to be presented to Parliament, a detailed set of proposals for reforming the police (see Life: Appendix 1). Although nothing came of this initiative, HF continued to explore ways, within his limited powers, of improving the effectiveness of law enforcement. In the winter of 1749–50 he organized parties of constables—

114

A Henry Fielding Companion

led by Saunders Welch, head constable of the Holborn Division—and sent them on a series of raids against the known haunts of a large gang of street robbers and housebreakers who were terrorizing the populace. The best of these ofﬁcers was William Pentlow, who risked his life in capturing Thomas Lewis (alias “Captain Flash”), one of the most vicious members of the gang. Recommending Pentlow for the reward, HF declared that “the Public are in the highest Degree obliged [to him] for his Vigilance, Activity and Bravery in this Discharge of his Duty as a Peace Ofﬁcer.” It was in the course of examining Lewis that HF discovered the extent of the problem posed by such fences as Samuel Cadosa, an enterprising receiver of stolen goods whose illegal trade extended to the Continent. HF’s experience of such matters would be reﬂected not only in his Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), but also in the early chapters of his novel Amelia (1751). One of the defects of the penal system that HF addressed in Amelia was the extortionate practices of corrupt prison keepers. In an effort toward correcting this problem, HF turned to Pentlow. When in 1751 the keepership of New Prison, Clerkenwell, became vacant, he recommended Pentlow for the post, binding himself in the amount of £100 to enable him to qualify. It is an impressive measure of Pentlow’s qualities that the Middlesex justices awarded him the position in preference to the Duke of Newcastle’s candidate, whom they judged “unﬁt” for the ofﬁce. Pentlow could not live on the annual stipend of £30 that the keepership paid, however. He supplemented his income by continuing to serve as the most active member of HF’s band of constables, who, as the Bow-Street Runners, marked the beginning of London’s modern police force. (On HF and the Bow Street Runners, see Pringle 1955, Babington 1969, and Low 1985.) PHILIPS, Ambrose (1674–1749), poet and playwright. HF’s Covent-Garden Tragedy (1732) burlesques Philips’s The Distrest Mother (1712), one of the most popular of pseudoclassical tragedies in the repertory. In Philips’s play the heroine of the title is Andromache, who, a prisoner of the Greeks after the fall of Troy, mourns her dead husband, Hector, and fears for the safety of her son, Astyanax. In HF’s travesty it is the bawd Mother Punchbowl who laments the decline in her trade “in this degen’rate Age.” (See Lewis 1975–76). PHILLIPS, Edward (ﬂ. 1730–39), playwright. Phillips, who attended Trinity College, Cambridge, was author of a pair of farces, produced by John Rich at Covent Garden, that ridiculed both HF’s discomﬁture and his success as a dramatist. In May 1733 HF’s triumphant seasons as house playwright at Drury Lane came to an end when Theophilus Cibber led a mutiny of the actors against the manager, John Highmore, that closed down the theater. That summer Phillips turned the misfortunes of Rich’s rivals into a ballad opera, The Stage Mutineers: or, A Play-House to be Lett, in which HF is brought on stage in the character of the “conﬁdent” and “self-opinionated” Crambo, author of the house. Rich

Others in the Life

115

and Phillips no doubt enjoyed HF’s troubles all the more owing to his having been the apparent source of an allegation, published in The Grub-Street Journal (26 April 1733), that they had pirated a play written by his friend James Ralph. The last laugh, however, would be HF’s. When Rich, in an effort to capitalize on the great vogue of Pasquin (1736), encouraged Phillips to scribble a farce called Marforio, in which HF and his champion Aaron Hill were ludicrously impersonated on stage, the play survived for a single performance and was never published. (See Milhous and Hume 1988.) In dedicating Tumble-Down Dick (1736) to Rich, HF did not miss the opportunity to gloat over the damning of Phillips’s farce. PHILLIPS, Teresia Constantia (1709–65), courtesan. In April 1748 the notorious courtesan “Con” Phillips began publishing an Apology for her conduct with the purpose not only of justifying her own disreputable behavior, but of vilifying those she believed had wronged her and of blackmailing her former lovers, among whom was the Earl of Chesterfield. In the following month HF at his puppet theater in Panton Street staged a version of The Covent-Garden Tragedy, the setting for which is a brothel, and included among the cast of whores “Mrs. Puppet Fllips” as Stormandra. Installments of the Apology continued to be published with impunity, and it is probably this work in particular that HF had in mind when, as chairman of the Westminster sessions, he published his Charge delivered to the Grand Jury in July 1749, urging the jurors to punish such libels to the full extent of the law. Certainly Con Phillips and her ghost, Paul Whitehead, were convinced that the Apology was HF’s target: in September they brought that work to a close with ﬁve pages of invective directed at him. HF retaliated in Amelia (1751, I. vi) by allotting to “Con” Phillips the climactic place in a catalog of wicked women drawn from the annals of ancient and modern history. (On Phillips, Charlotte Charke, and other “scandalous” women authors, see Nussbaum 1987.) PITT, James (1679–1763), political writer. Under the pseudonym Francis Osborne (alluding to the miscellaneous writer of the seventeenth century) Pitt conducted The London Journal, a ministerial periodical, until in 1735 he combined his talent for polemics with those of William Arnall and Ralph Courteville in promoting Sir Robert Walpole’s interests in The Daily Gazetteer. Because of his humorless way of berating the prime minister’s enemies, Pitt became known in the opposition press as the scold, “Mother” Osborne—a jest HF hugely enjoyed. However strenuously Pitt might protest his virility, HF in The Craftsman (3 August 1734) settled the question once and for all by demonstrating, through all the formal proofs of experience and logic, that Walpole’s man was in fact an old woman. Thereafter HF continued to ridicule “Mother” Osborne in several numbers that he contributed to that journal in 1734–38—even featuring “Francis Osborne” as the principal character in the “Specimen” of a political play he published in The Craftsman (23 December 1738). This was not the ﬁrst time

116

A Henry Fielding Companion

HF had recognized dramatic potential in Pitt’s scolding manner of defending the minister. As Nicholas Amhurst reveals in The Craftsman (24 April 1736), the actress who played Miss Stitch in Act II of HF’s Pasquin (1736) made Pitt “the Butt of the whole Town, for above forty Nights together, upon the publick Stage.” PITT, William (1708–78), later ﬁrst Earl of Chatham. With George Lyttelton and Charles Hanbury Williams, Pitt was a schoolfellow of HF’s at Eton College, and, like them, he was a friend. With Lyttelton he was one of the “Boy Patriots” who, under the aegis of Lord Cobham to whom he was related by marriage, clubbed together in the mid-1730s to launch a powerful new opposition that in time would bring down the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. HF in his political writings was associated with this party from 1734 to 1741 and again from 1746, after the forming of the so-called Broad-Bottom government of which they were a part. When Pitt’s political fortunes were in doubt during the shifting power plays that led to the formation of this ministry, HF championed his cause in The True Patriot (24 December 1745, 7 January 1746). In February 1746 Pitt would be appointed Paymaster General of the Forces and joined his friends in power. As Tom Jones neared completion in 1748, Pitt and Lyttelton were among the company at Radway Grange, the house of Sanderson Miller, when HF read from the manuscript; and with Lyttelton he helped to raise the public’s expectations of the novel by recommending it about town before publication. In his turn, HF in Book XIV, chapter i, of the novel would compare Pitt’s powers as an orator to those of Demosthenes and Cicero. (On Pitt, see Black 1992.) PLATO (c. 429–347 B.C.), Greek philosopher. Although HF was in no strict sense a philosopher, he found in Plato certain basic ideas of morality, aesthetics, and politics that were congenial to him. He had in his library the important editions of his works by Estienne (1578) and Ficino (1602), and allusions to Plato and Socrates recur in his writings from Love in Several Masques (1728) to the posthumous Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) (Ribbles, P24–25). Indeed, as he put it in the preface to the Miscellanies (1743), Socrates represented for him “the true Sublime in Human Nature,” in whose character mingled the usually antithetic qualities of the good and the great. Replying in November 1744 to James Harris’s letter of condolence on the occasion of his wife Charlotte Fielding’s death, HF drew an analogy between the several arts of life: Plato, whom he calls “my Godlike Master,” is to philosophy what Homer and Virgil are to poetry. “I have often asked myself,” he told his friend, “How would Socrates have acted on this Occasion?”—for Plato’s mentor represented for HF a “Pattern” of conduct under trial comparable to that set by the Duke of Marlborough for a soldier and by Sir Edward Coke for a lawyer (see Letter 23). Although HF understood the weakness of human nature too well to approve the deism of the philosopher Square in Tom Jones (1749), whose wholly inef-

Others in the Life

117

ﬁcacious system of morality is based on notions of “the natural Beauty of Virtue” (III. iii), yet in other contexts this platonic assumption underlines HF’s treatment of character in the novels, where physical beauty or coarseness reﬂects the soul within. In the dedication to Tom Jones, with his heroine Sophia in mind, whose name is Plato’s word for the highest wisdom, HF declares that such an example is “a Kind of Picture, in which Virtue becomes as it were an Object of Sight, and strikes us with an Idea of that Loveliness, which Plato asserts [Phaedrus, 250] there is in her naked Charms.” And in Amelia (1751, IX. ix) HF compliments his friend Jonathan Tyers, master of the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, by declaring “the Truth of an Observation which I have read in some Ethic Writer, That a truly elegant Taste is generally accompanied with an Excellency of Heart; or in other Words, that true Virtue is, indeed, nothing else but true Taste.” Filtered no doubt through the writings of Shaftesbury, the platonic concept of the reciprocity of aesthetics and morality, of the beautiful and the good, colors HF’s practice of characterization; and in other ways, too, as a comic novelist he found Plato useful. The Myth of Er in The Republic furnished a scheme for structuring the search for happiness in A Journey from This World to the Next (1743); and, as he wrote to James Harris in the same year, the episode of Socrates’ jesting in the Phaedo, 60, conﬁrmed his view that wit and philosophy were not at all incompatible (see Letter 18). When, toward the end of his life, he considered how best to reform the grounds of order in the polity, he cited in the preface to the Enquiry (1751) the ideal of “Harmony” he found in the Phaedo, and in Amelia (XI. ii) that of a nation governed by “Men of Merit,” an ideal dismissed by Dr. Harrison’s noble interlocutor as the “Chimerical System of Plato’s Commonwealth.” PLAUTUS, Titus Maccius (c. 254–184 B.C.), Roman dramatist. Although not in general a major inﬂuence on HF’s comedies, Plautus, together with Molie`re, provided a model for HF’s most successful ﬁve-act comedy. As the title page of the published version declares, The Miser (1733) was “Taken” from Plautus’s Aulularia and Molie`re’s L’Avare. The further fact that Thomas Cooke’s edition of Plautus (1746) is one of only four or ﬁve works to which HF ever subscribed no doubt owes more to his early friendship with the editor than to any unusual enthusiasm for the author. PLUTARCH (c. A.D. 46–c. 121), Greek biographer and moralist. Plutarch was among HF’s favorite writers, and in his library he is represented by separate editions of the complete works, the Parallel Lives, and the Moralia, the last being in English (Ribbles, P31–33). In an essay on wit and humor in The Covent-Garden Journal (4 February 1752) HF recommends “the Writings of so excellent, so entertaining, and so voluminous an Author as Plutarch” for the “Comfort and Utility” he will afford an attentive reader; and he pays him what for HF would have been the consummate tribute: “I have not read even Lucian himself with more Delight than I have Plutarch.”

118

A Henry Fielding Companion

To judge from the infrequency of HF’s allusions to him during his career as a dramatist, Plutarch did not become an important resource for him until he turned out of necessity to writing essays and novels for a living. In The Craftsman (13 May 1738), in an ironic piece ridiculing Sir Robert Walpole’s reluctance to declare war against Spain, he explicitly adopts Plutarch’s method of drawing “Parallels . . . pairing the most illustrious of the Romans and Britons,” who, in circumstances similar to those facing England in 1738, showed spirit and resolve in the face of an enemy. In essays in The Champion (1739–40) and his later journalism HF often draws on Plutarch’s Lives and Moralia for illustrative anecdotes. And he opens his earliest novels, Joseph Andrews (1742) and Jonathan Wild (1743), by likening himself to the “Biographers” Plutarch and Cornelius Nepos, authors of “Lives” in which “the true Beauty of Virtue, and Deformity of Vice” are represented to the reader “as it were in a Picture.” Indeed, as W.J. Farrell has shown, the “mock-heroic form” of the latter work, the full title of which is The History of the Life of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great, is achieved in part by the ironic parallels HF draws between the life of the rogue Wild and Plutarch’s “Life” of Alexander the Great (see Farrell 1966). In Tom Jones (1749, XVII. ii) HF, after relating a touching scene between Allworthy and Mrs. Miller, calls attention to a narrative strategy he has learned from “Plutarch, one of the best of our Brother Historians”: the use of “minute Circumstances” that “may appear trivial” but to a perceptive reader offer important insights into character. POPE, Alexander (1688–1744), poet. HF’s opinion of Pope was notably ambivalent. Before he came to know him personally, he despised what he considered to be the poet’s pride and malevolence in publicly abusing in his satires those he disliked. In HF’s verse epistle “To John Hayes, Esq.” (Miscellanies, 1743, but written earlier) Pope is almost certainly Codrus, the name HF gave him in his burlesque of the Dunciad (1729/30), the malignant poet “Who nothing knows of Humankind, but III: / Conﬁning all his Knowledge, and his Art, / To this, that each Man is corrupt at Heart” (lines 4–6). In the earlier poem he wrote to his own and Pope’s friend George Lyttelton (1733), a manuscript found among the papers of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, HF vented his contempt of Pope’s “malicious Soul,” who in the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace (1733) had attempted to “assassinate” the good name of his cousin (“From furious Sappho scarce a milder Fate, / P[o]x’d by her Love, or libell’d by her Hate.”); yet in the same poem he is objective enough to declare the “Worth” of the author of Windsor Forest, Eloisa to Abelard, and The Rape of the Lock. Even much later in Tom Jones (1749), after he had come to value Pope’s acquaintance, HF could acknowledge that Pope was “a great Poet” and yet deplore the rudeness of the famous couplet in which Pope praised Ralph Allen for doing good by stealth while impertinently alluding to his humble birth (see dedication and VIII. I). But whatever his opinion of Pope’s character, HF seldom balked at declaring his brilliance as a poet. Pope was for him “the

Others in the Life

119

greatest Poet of his Time,” whose “Works will be coeval with the Language in which they are writ” (Champion, 27 November 1739). It is amusing to note, however, that HF could not resist declaring to his friend James Harris his conviction that prose, the medium of which he was himself master, was in most respects preferable to Pope’s verse form, the couplet, which (he remarks, quoting Butler’s Hudibras) obliges the author to write one line “for Sense,” the other “for Rhime” (see Letter 14). The softening of HF’s attitude toward Pope as a person may be dated from the late autumn of 1741, when he was almost certainly entertained at Ralph Allen’s newly built Palladian mansion Prior Park while Pope and William Warburton were Allen’s guests. HF’s writings of the following year glow with the warmest compliments to Pope. In Joseph Andrews (III. vi) HF’s footman hero recalls “ ’Squire Pope, the great Poet” celebrating Allen’s benevolence at the dinner table; in the Preface to Plutus HF, referring to the Essay on Man, credits its author with having “taught me a System of Philosophy in English Numbers, whose Sweetness is scarce inferior to that of Theocritus himself”; and in A Journey from This World to the Next (I. viii) Homer himself becomes the instrument of praise: he “asked much after Mr. Pope, and said he was very desirous of seeing him: for that he had read his Iliad in his Translation with almost as much delight, as he believed he had given others in the Original.” For his part Pope, in the great poem he completed at Prior Park during his visit, paid HF a single, but handsome, compliment. In the opening lines of the Dunciad, Book IV (1742), Pope not only praised the Earl of Chesterfield for his speech in the House of Lords opposing the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737. By declaring that satiric drama alone had kept the comic Muse alive, he also implicitly declared his approbation of Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register (1737): There sunk Thalia, nerveless, cold, and dead, Had not her sister Satyr held her head: Nor cou’dst thou, CHESTERFIELD! a tear refuse, Thou wep’st, and with thee wept each gentle Muse.

(On HF’s opinion of Pope and his works, see Sackett 1959.) POTTER, John, builder. In 1720 Potter, who had been a carpenter and scene painter for the Royal Opera House, constructed the Little Theatre in the Haymarket across the way. It was the smallest of the London theaters, cheaply built and cheaply equipped. Potter was not, in the usual sense, the manager of the theater, but instead rented it out on an ad hoc basis chieﬂy, during the ﬁrst eight years, to jugglers, musicians, and traveling troupes of French comedians. After the popular success of The Beggar’s Opera at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1728, however, Potter’s clients began to include those whose interests were in more legitimate theater, such as freelance actors and authors whose plays had been rejected elsewhere. Free from the conservative constraints of the established

120

A Henry Fielding Companion

houses, the Little Haymarket became the venue for staging a variety of irregular and experimental plays, often with impudent satirical content. HF’s ﬁrst two regular comedies having failed to take with audiences at Drury Lane and Goodman’s Fields, respectively, he began experimenting instead with new forms of drama—the ballad opera, farce, burlesque—and in 1730–31 at Potter’s theater staged such plays as The Author’s Farce and Tom Thumb to great applause. From that fresh beginning, HF would become London’s most proliﬁc and successful dramatist of the decade. After seasons at Drury Lane in 1732–34 and 1735, he returned to Potter’s theater in 1736–37 as the “Great Mogul” at the head of his own company of comedians, achieving, however, such success with his political satires Pasquin and The Historical Register that he provoked the government to silence him by passing the Theatrical Licensing Act. It was Potter, who, to oblige the authorities, on 31 May 1737 signaled the end of HF’s career as dramatist by preventing him from staging a political “opera” based on Gay’s suppressed play Polly. (See Hume 1985.) PRATT, Charles (1713–94), later ﬁrst Earl Camden. A fellow Etonian who was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1738, Pratt—like Robert Henley his close companion—was a good friend of HF and in the early 1740s the convivial trio of attorneys rode the western circuit together in search of clients. From this low beginning Pratt, also like Henley, would rise to become Lord Chancellor. But in 1748 these two future luminaries of the law would be indebted to HF, in his capacity as High Steward of the New Forest, for ﬁnding them work as advocates for the king in a dispute over ownership of certain forest land. See also Birt, Richard; Coleman, Charles. PRIOR, Matthew (1664–1721), poet. Early and late HF regarded Prior as a poet of the ﬁrst order. In his unﬁnished burlesque of the Dunciad (1729/30, II. 109–14) he stated that Prior is to poetry as William Congreve, Sir Isaac Newton, and Joseph Addison are, respectively, to drama, mathematics, and criticism—their recent deaths marking the end of “Wit and Learning”; and in The Covent-Garden Journal (3 March 1752) Prior takes his place in a short list of good writers, including Jonathan Swift, Addison, Alexander Pope, and John Dryden. In his edition of HF’s Miscellanies, Volume One, Miller, tracing the themes and phrases of the love poetry, found Prior to be HF’s chief model among English poets, though he is nowhere mentioned by name in that collection. HF certainly knew and enjoyed Prior’s poetry, but he quotes from him infrequently. His favorite among Prior’s poems appears to have been “Paolo Purganti and His Wife: An Honest, but a Simple Pair” (1708), which he quotes from or alludes to in Tom Jones (1749, X. x), Amelia (IV. ii and XII. ii), and The Covent-Garden Journal (1 August 1752). PULTENEY, William (1684–1764), ﬁrst Earl of Bath. During Sir Robert Walpole’s long tenure as prime minister, Pulteney was leader of the opposition

Others in the Life

121

in the House of Commons. With Lord Bolingbroke in 1726 he founded The Craftsman, the principal organ of the antiministerial party, assigning the editorial duties to Nicholas Amhurst. From 1734, when his friends and patrons—George Lyttelton, William Pitt, and the Earl of Chesterfield—joined the opposition, HF would support their cause by regularly contributing humorous political pieces to The Craftsman under various pseudonyms, until in 1739–40 he conducted his own journal, The Champion, for the same purpose. There is little evidence, however, that he saw much to admire in Pulteney. On the contrary, before he began writing for The Craftsman and after he withdrew from The Champion in 1741, HF’s allusions to Pulteney are generally scornful. In the political satire of The Grub-Street Opera (1730) Pulteney is ﬁgured as William the coachman, and in HF’s verse Epistle to Lyttelton (1733) he contemptuously contrasts the constructive achievements of General Wade, the government’s mild paciﬁer of Scotland after the Jacobite rebellion of 1715–16, with the empty antiministerial fulminations of Pulteney and Bolingbroke. Late in 1741, as Walpole was about to be turned out of ofﬁce, Pulteney was among the minister’s adversaries whom HF in The Opposition: A Vision characterizes as mere opportunists, a perception Pulteney would justify in July 1742 when, after having publicly denounced Walpole for two decades as the corrupt leviathan of state, he deserted the patriot cause and, accepting the offer of a peerage, followed the Great Man into the House of Lords as Earl of Bath. To every one of HF’s principal works of 1742 he would add passages of sarcasm against the selfserving hypocrites of his former party, chief among them being Pulteney and Carteret, Lord Granville. See the second edition of Joseph Andrews (II. iv, x), Plutus (p. 57 n.), A Journey from This World to the Next (I. vi, xxiii), and Jonathan Wild (IV. iii), in which, inverting the usual satiric tenor of the novel’s political allegory, Pulteney replaces Walpole in the guise of the unscrupulous “Great Man.” In February 1746, when Lyttelton and HF’s other friends in politics succeeded in forcing the king to remove his favorites Bath and Granville from power, HF in The True Patriot (11–18 February) triumphantly ridiculed the two mock-heroes in one of his most hilarious satires—its subject, “the Instability of Greatness.”

QUIN, James (1693–1766), actor. Quin was the leading actor between the retirement of Barton Booth and the emergence of David Garrick. He appeared in only one of HF’s plays, as Mondish in The Universal Gallant (1735), but HF was especially fond of him. In The Champion (9 September 1740) HF made an admirable performance of Hamlet at Drury Lane the occasion of a paper praising Quin, whom he hoped would replace Theophilus Cibber as manager at Drury Lane. Other complimentary allusions to him occur in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. x), The Jacobite’s Journal (6 February 1748), and The Covent-Garden Journal (31 March 1752). Admiring the delectable qualities of the John Dory in the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755),

122

A Henry Fielding Companion

HF playfully credits “Sir Epicure Quin,” whose “distinguishing tooth hath been so justly celebrated,” with having ﬁrst discovered the superiority of that ﬁsh above all others. QUINTILIAN, Marcus Fabius (born c. A.D. 30–35), Roman rhetorician. HF had in his library the works of Quintilian in the highly regarded edition of Pieter Burmann (1720), whose lectures he presumably attended during the time he was a student at the University of Leiden. HF, however, appears to have made little practical use of Quintilian in his own writings, unless perhaps in Tom Jones (1749, IX. i), where he argues that invention and judgment, far from being incompatible as John Locke and Joseph Addison had stated, are together the deﬁning faculties of genius. He concurred in the general view of Quintilian as a critic who belonged in the company of Aristotle and Horace (Jacobite’s Journal, 23 January 1748, and Covent-Garden Journal, 4 January 1752). His opinion of the Institutio Oratoria is clear in The Jacobite’s Journal (30 April 1748): “The Precepts of Quintilian, in his truly excellent Institutions, are rather calculated to breed learned Men, and expert Orators, than sound and good Members of the Commonwealth in private Stations.” RABELAIS, Franc¸ois (1489?–1553), French physician and satirist. HF never alludes in speciﬁc ways to Rabelais’ Gargantua (1534) and Pantagruel (1532/ 33); indeed, he mentions him only ﬁve times in all his writings. With one important exception toward the end of his career, whenever HF does refer to Rabelais it is to place him in the company of the greatest comic geniuses, Ancient and Modern. In The Craftsman (20 December 1735) the three writers who set the standard for humor are Cervantes, Rabelais, and Jonathan Swift; and in his obituary for the latter in The True Patriot (5 November 1745), Swift perhaps HF’s favorite author among the Moderns, is said to have “possessed the Talents of a Lucian, a Rabelais, and a Cervantes,” but to have exceeded them all. In Tom Jones (1749, XIII. i) Rabelais again appears in a short list of comic geniuses that includes, besides the three authors already mentioned, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Molie`re, and Marivaux; and in Amelia (1751, VIII. v) Booth declares him to be the “Master” of Swift, who nevertheless surpassed his mentor in humor. Not two months after the publication of this, his last novel, however, HF, a magistrate concerned about the potential of indecent writers for harming public morality, radically changed his previously declared opinions of both Rabelais and his favorite, Aristophanes. In The Covent-Garden Journal (4 February 1752) he denounced both for using their talents for comedy irresponsibly. Among “those great Masters who have sent their Satires . . . laughing into the World” he names “that great Triumvirate, Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift” as well as Shakespeare and Molie`re; but Rabelais and Aristophanes, who appeared in this august company in Tom Jones, are now pointedly ostracized:

Others in the Life

123

There are some . . . who tho’ not void of these Talents have made so wretched a Use of them, that had the Consecration of their Labours been committed to the Hands of the Hangman, no good Man would have regretted their Loss: Nor am I afraid to mention Rabelais, and Aristophanes himself in this Number. For if I may speak my Opinion freely of these two last Writers, and of their Works, their Design appears to me to have been to ridicule all Sobriety, Modesty, Decency, Virtue and Religion, out of the World.

RAFTOR. See Clive, Catherine. RALPH, James (c. 1705–62), writer of miscellaneous works—verse, plays, criticism, but chieﬂy political commentary. Though born in England, Ralph spent most of his early years in Philadelphia, where, working as a merchant’s clerk, he was befriended by Benjamin Franklin, whom he accompanied to England in 1724. In England he attempted to make his way by writing, among other insipid productions, a feeble satire against Alexander Pope, for which he was duly chastized in The Dunciad Variorum (1729). But however dull his writings, Ralph was a lively conversationalist whose literary tastes and freethinking HF found congenial in these early years. Ralph’s The Touch-Stone (1728)—an ironic survey of the diversions of the town—may well have inﬂuenced HF’s decision to begin experimenting in the irregular dramatic forms of burlesque and travesty that, in The Author’s Farce and Tom Thumb, brought him in 1730 his ﬁrst taste of success as a playwright; and in 1731 HF in The Grub-Street Opera freely incorporated several songs from Ralph’s The Fashionable Lady (1730). Ralph’s prologue for HF’s ﬁve-act comedy The Temple Beau (1730) is the ﬁrst clear sign of their friendship, which appears to have extended for a time to HF’s ﬂirtation with the freethinking of both Ralph and Thomas Cooke. This was a period in his intellectual development that he would later ridicule in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. iii) in the story of Wilson’s disenchantment with the club of deists or “Rule of Right-men.” In 1736–37, Ralph was HF’s associate in the two highly successful but ill-fated seasons at the Little Haymarket Theatre when HF’s political satires precipitated the Theatrical Licensing Act that ended his career as dramatist. They were associated again as coeditors of the satiric opposition journal The Champion (1739–40), Ralph contributing the more earnest political articles, and it is likely that as the defeat of the Jacobite rebels was imminent and HF tired of conducting The True Patriot (1745–46) singlehanded, Ralph joined him in that paper in a similar capacity. Although the friends found themselves on opposite political sides during HF’s editorship of The Jacobite’s Journal (1748)—Ralph in The Remembrancer attacking HF and the Pelham government—they would come together once more in 1751, brieﬂy at least, to support the political ambitions of their common patron, George Bubb Dodington (see Amelia WE:xxxvii–xxxix and notes to XI. ii). (On HF’s association with Ralph, see Hughes 1922–23 and Shipley 1963a.) RANBY, John (1703–73), surgeon. One of HF’s closest friends, Ranby was the most distinguished member of his profession. He was appointed Sergeant

124

A Henry Fielding Companion

Surgeon to the king in 1740 and Principal Sergeant Surgeon in 1742; in 1745 he was named governor of the newly created Company of Surgeons. In that year an acrimonious controversy over the cause of Sir Robert Walpole’s death erupted when Ranby, who had correctly diagnosed the case, published a Narrative of the illness in which he accused Dr. James Jurin, the attending physician, and others of incompetency. In his satire of the affair, The Charge to the Jury: or, The Sum of the Evidence, on the Trial of A.B.C.D. and E.F. All M.D. for the Death of one Robert at Orfud (1745), HF ridiculed Ranby’s adversaries, and in Tom Jones (1749, II, ix) he resumed the fun at the physicians’ expense as Dr. Y and Dr. Z dispute the cause of Captain Bliﬁl’s demise. More than once HF, without naming him, introduces Ranby into his novels. In Tom Jones he disregards an obvious anachronism by having Ranby attend both the Man of the Hill’s father (VIII. xiii) and Mr. Fitzpatrick, whose recovery saves Tom from hanging (XVII. ix). In Amelia (V. v) it is again Ranby, introduced by the narrator in the ﬁrst edition as “the most eminent Surgeon in the Kingdom, or perhaps in the World,” who cures Colonel Bath of the wound he received from the hero in a duel. Ranby generously repaid these compliments: he ministered to HF in the months before he departed for Lisbon, and after HF died leaving heavy burdens of debt, Ranby relieved the family by paying £800 to assume the lease on the house at Fordhook. RAPIN (or Rapin-Thoyras), Paul de (1661–1725), French historian. Rapin was a Huguenot who came to England with William of Orange in 1688. His History of England, published in 1724–27, was translated into English by Nicholas Tindal (1725–31); HF’s copy was the second edition of 1732 (Ribbles, R4). In his criticism of politically biased historians in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. i) HF pairs Rapin and Bulstrode Whitelocke as Whigs against the Tories Clarendon and Laurence Echard. No doubt because, rather than in spite, of its Whig bias, Rapin’s was the history HF appears to have relied on. In A Journey from This World to the Next (1743) it is the source for two chapters relating Julian the Apostate’s incarnations as a statesman (I. xx) and an alderman (I. xxiii). On the occasion of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 HF in A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain cites Rapin, again with Whitelocke, as a source for his account of the massacre of Protestants by Irish Catholics in 1641; and he cites it elsewhere in A Charge delivered to the Grand Jury (1749), An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751, preface and section VI), and The Covent-Garden Journal (28 October 1752). Rapin’s History is among the favorite books of Mrs. Western in Tom Jones (1749, VI. ii), a lady of Whiggish principles who “had lived about the Court.” RAYNER, E., bookseller. An obscure and unscrupulous ﬁgure, Rayner is associated with a number of antiministerial publications. In 1731 he was responsible for publishing what might be termed unauthorized Ur-versions of HF’s Grub-Street Opera. On 26 June, a fortnight after HF had withdrawn the play

Others in the Life

125

from production, Rayner published a version of it in its unrevised form, entitled The Welsh Opera: or, The Grey Mare the better Horse (the proverbial subtitle referring to Queen Caroline’s dominance over her husband). In an anonymous notice in the Daily Post (28 June) HF (for he is surely the author) denounced Rayner as a “notorious Paper Pyrate.” In August the actors who had gone to the trouble of rehearsing the play, which was never staged, arranged surreptitiously with Rayner to publish a version of it, again unauthorized, entitled The Genuine Grub-Street Opera. (See Morrissey 1973: 13.) REGNARD, Jean-Franc¸ois (1655–1709), French dramatist. As the title page of the published version states, HF’s two-act afterpiece, The Intriguing Chambermaid, was adapted from Regnard’s Le Retour impre´vu (1700). RICH, John (1692–1761), theatrical manager and pantomimist. As manager of the theater at Lincoln’s Inn Fields from 1714 to 1732, and thereafter of the new theater at Covent Garden, Rich was hugely inﬂuential in determining the character of the stage in the ﬁrst half of the century. He was chieﬂy responsible for the vogue of pantomimes in which, under the name of Lun, he played the part of Harlequin, astonishing audiences with spectacular tricks and special effects. In 1730–31 HF and Rich were for a while together at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Rich staged The Coffee-House Politician and HF contributed the epilogue for Lewis Theobald’s Orestes. But Rich rejected HF’s subsequent overtures, and indeed encouraged the hackney playwright Edward Phillips to ridicule him on stage in The Stage Mutineers (1733) and Marforio (1736). For his part, HF from the beginning of his career as dramatist repeatedly satirized Rich for corrupting the taste of the town. He is the “puppet” Monsieur Pantomime in The Author’s Farce (1730, III), and in Tumble-Down Dick (1736), the published version of which HF ironically dedicated to him, he is brought on stage as Machine, who arrogantly presides over the rehearsal of the inane Ovidian entertainment he has devised. In The Champion (3 May 1740) and Joseph Andrews (1742, I. vii), HF, like Alexander Pope in the Dunciad (III. 231–64), scores Rich’s harlequinades, which “subvert the Order of Nature” and “metamorphose and distort the human Senses”; and in Tom Jones (1749, V. i) he facetiously credits Rich’s entertainments—which, the better to set off Harlequin’s absurd highjinks, were divided into two parts, “the Serious” and “the Comic”—with having served as the inspiration for the contrast he intends between the dullness of the “initial Essays” to each book and the humor of the narrative. After 1747, when his friends David Garrick and James Lacy took over the management of Drury Lane, HF was their constant champion in the rivalry between that theater and Rich’s Covent Garden: see especially The Covent-Garden Journal (1752). RICHARDSON, Samuel (1689–1761), printer and novelist. The professional rivalry and personal relations between HF and Richardson are among the more

126

A Henry Fielding Companion

remarkable features of the period in which the modern novel took form. After Richardson’s ﬁrst novel, Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded, was published to popular acclaim in November 1740, HF, who at the time seems not to have known the identity of the author, parodied the work in Shamela (April 1741), and he kept up the ridicule in Joseph Andrews (February 1742), in which he offered his own, alternative conception of the art of the novel, taking Cervantes’ Don Quixote as his model. It may well be that HF’s attitude toward Richardson was complicated by the loyalties of his favorite sister, Sarah Fielding, to both his own and Richardson’s antithetical models of ﬁction. If in the preface he wrote for Sarah’s ﬁrst novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), he felt able to claim the work as an example of the comic prose epic, the new species of writing he had deﬁned in the preface to Joseph Andrews, he would ﬁnd her choice of Richardson’s epistolary mode for her next novel, Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple (1747), a kind of defection to the enemy. While in the preface to that work he praised Sarah’s performance, he nevertheless found it necessary to fault the form it was written in. “Sure no one,” he asserts, “will contend, that the epistolary Style is in general the most proper to a Novelist, or that it hath been used by the best Writers of this Kind.” However unwittingly, Sarah—who loved her brother and admired his work yet cherished Richardson’s friendship and admired his work no less—added an intimate personal dimension to the jealousy between the two rivals. Richardson never forgave HF for Joseph Andrews, a work he regarded as a “lewd and ungenerous engraftment” on Pamela. HF, however, in 1748 more than once extended the hand of friendship to Richardson. He immediately recognized the brilliance of Richardson’s masterpiece, Clarissa, which from December 1747 to December 1748 was published in three installments totaling seven volumes. In two numbers of The Jacobite’s Journal (2 January, 5 March 1748) HF cordially recommended the book to the public, and in the autumn, after reading an advance copy of Richardson’s ﬁfth volume containing the moving account of the heroine’s rape, he wrote to the author to express at length his admiration for what he had achieved. The letter, dated 15 October, is one of the most extraordinary tributes ever paid by one great writer to another— “Rivals,” as HF put it, “for that coy Mistress Fame” (Letter 41). When he wrote this letter, HF was nearing the completion of his own masterpiece, Tom Jones, published in February 1749, and however much he appreciated the tremendous emotive power of Richardson’s narrative, he could not resist inviting his readers to compare his own heroine and his rival’s, who are caught in similar circumstances but comport themselves according to very different standards of conduct. Thus Sophia declares to Lady Bellaston, “ ‘I will never run away with any Man’ ” (XV. iii); and, having promised her aunt she will not “see or converse” with anyone without her consent, she will not, like Clarissa, engage in a clandestine correspondence with her lover (XVI. v). By the end of his life, moreover—Richardson on the evidence of his continued

Others in the Life

127

denigration of HF’s character and art (even to his sister) having spurned his overtures of friendship—HF in the preface to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) treated his rival’s theory and practice of ﬁction with contempt. (Among many books and articles treating the literary and personal relationship between HF and Richardson the following are especially helpful: McKillop 1931 and 1956: 98–146, Kermode 1950, Watt 1957: 260–89, Park 1966, Eaves and Kimpel 1971: 292–306. Also relevant is Keymer 1992.) RICHMOND, Charles Lennox (1701–50), second Duke of. HF’s association with Richmond began as early as 1731 when, as part of a hoax perpetrated by the duke and his inseparable companion, the Duke of Montagu, he wrote a facetious epilogue to the clamorous Drury Lane production of The Modish Couple, a comedy actually written by James Miller but imposed on the town as the work of the dukes’ chum, Captain Charles Bodens. In dedicating his comedy The Miser to Richmond, HF in 1733 took the opportunity warmly to acknowledge the duke’s “Countenance” toward him. Despite the distance in rank that separated them (Richmond was a grandson of Charles II by his mistress), HF and the duke would remain good friends. Richmond indeed epitomized for HF that benevolent disposition he celebrated in his poem “of Good-Nature” (Miscellanies 1743), which he dedicated to the duke. On his appointment to the magistracy, HF in 1749 became actively involved in Richmond’s efforts to suppress the brutal gangs of smugglers who infested the southern coast near his estate at Goodwood in West Sussex (see Life: 465–66, and Letter 51). ROBBINS, Reverend Walter (c. 1692–1762), schoolmaster. A native of Salisbury, Robbins was a learned man with degrees from both Cambridge and Oxford. He was master of the King Edward VI Grammar School in Bath, the leading classical school in Somersetshire, and rector of St. Mary the Virgin in the nearby village of Charlcombe. In that church he married HF and Charlotte Cradock Fielding on 28 November 1734. That his relationship with the Fieldings was cordial is suggested by the fact that they lodged with him at Bath. It was from his house on Abbey Green that HF ﬁrst wrote to James Harris, initiating his most important extant correspondence (Letter 10). ROBERTS, James (1669?–1754), printer and publisher’s agent, whose shop was situated “near the Oxford Arms, in Warwick-Lane.” Roberts, one of the leading members of the London book trade, enjoys the distinction of having published under his imprint HF’s ﬁrst works, The Coronation and An Ode on the Birthday, a pair of poems on the occasions of George II’s coronation and his birthday published together on 10 November 1727, but now lost. With Ann Dodd he also published in this way HF’s earliest extant work, The Masquerade: A Poem, issued on 30 January 1728. Roberts acted as publishing agent for John Watts as well, who owned the copyrights to the plays, issuing under his own imprint The Author’s Farce (1730), Tom Thumb (1730), The Tragedy of Trag-

128

A Henry Fielding Companion

edies (1731), The Letter Writers (1731), and The Historical Register and Eurydice Hiss’d (1737). The prose pamphlets A Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough (1742), and Some Papers Proper to be Read before the R[oya]l Society (1743) also bear Roberts’s imprint, but in these publications he was presumably acting for Andrew Millar, who owned the copyright to the former and who reprinted the latter in HF’s Miscellanies (1743). (On Roberts, see Treadwell, DLB 1995:154.) ROBINSON, William (c. 1712–after 1758), attorney and occasional writer. A friend of HF and an imitator of his style, Robinson contributed a number of articles to The Champion, the ﬁrst of these appearing in No. 63 (8 April 1740). He made a specialty of satirical dream visions, which he wrote under the pseudonyms of Morpheus and Somnus. Well after HF had dissociated himself from that journal Robinson published in The Champion (29 June 1742) a witty essay inspired by HF and William Young’s translation of Aristophanes’ Plutus (1742); and the following year his name appears in the list of subscribers to the Miscellanies (1743). (On Robinson, see Ribble 1990.) ROCHESTER, John Wilmot (1647–80), second Earl of; poet and libertine. At the opening of “An Essay on Nothing” (Miscellanies, 1743) HF alludes to Rochester’s poem “Upon Nothing,” calling the author “a hardy Wit in the Reign of Charles II” who alone before him had “dared” to write on the same subject. The epithet seems apt; it ﬁts Rochester’s reputation not only as the author of lewd love lyrics and biting satires, but as the most notorious libertine among the courtiers who crowded around “the Merry Monarch.” When in Shamela (1741, Letter VI) Booby surprises the heroine reading the Methodist George Whitefield’s autobiography, he supposes that the book must be Rochester’s poems. And near the end of Tom Jones (1749, XVIII. xii), perhaps with Plato’s notion in mind that even the wickedest of men would love Virtue if they ever beheld her truly, Jones convinces Sophia of his future constancy by showing her her image in the mirror. Her beauty, he declares, “would ﬁx a Dorimant, a Lord Rochester”—Dorimant being the dissolute hero of Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), a character modeled on Rochester. Otherwise—except for alluding in Tom Jones (IV. ii) to a “rude” poem incorrectly attributed to Rochester— HF’s references to him are all to two or three favorite lines from “A Satyr against Reason and Mankind”; see The Champion (15 December 1739 and 15 April 1740), “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men” (Miscellanies, 1743), The Jacobite’s Journal (17 September 1748), and Tom Jones (VII. ix). HF had in his library Gilbert Burnet’s account of Rochester’s life and deathbed conversion (Ribbles, B60). ROOKES, Mary (ﬂ. 1720–62), schoolmistress. The keeper of a boarding school in the cathedral Close at Salisbury, from 1720 she supervised the education of HF’s sisters: Catharine, Ursula, Sarah, and Beatrice Fielding. According to

Others in the Life

129

the Fieldings’ housekeeper, Frances Barber, the girls there were “to be educated and to learn to work and read and write and to talk French and Dance and be brought up as Gentlewomen” (Letters: xxiii). Sarah Fielding’s third novel, The Governess: or, Little Female Academy (1749), the ﬁrst novel in English written for children, is based on her experiences—happy ones it appears—at Mary Rookes’s school. That Mrs. Rookes took a friendly personal interest in Sarah and her brother is suggested by the fact that she was a subscriber to both HF’s Miscellanies (1743) and Sarah’s Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple (1744) as well as her translation of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates (1762). ROWE, Nicholas (1674–1718), poet laureate, dramatist, editor of William Shakespeare, and translator of Lucan. HF’s opinion of Rowe as a dramatist was ambivalent. In both The Author’s Farce (1730, III) and Pasquin (1736, (IV, i) he includes Rowe among the ﬁve best English playwrights, the others being Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Dryden, and Nathaniel Lee. In Tom Jones (1749, IX. i), however, alluding to Jane Shore (1714), he ridicules Rowe’s belief, declared on the title page, that he had successfully imitated Shakespeare’s “Style”; and in a letter he contributed to Sarah Fielding’s Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple (1747, Letter XL) he dismissed the rhetorical mannerisms of Rowe and Lee as mere “Fustian.” It is this quality, no doubt, that accounts for the lines in The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731, II. i) burlesquing Rowe’s Tamerlane (1702). Of all Rowe’s tragedies HF appears to have admired most The Fair Penitent (1703), particularly the characterization of Lothario, whom Nightingale quotes in Tom Jones (1749, XIV. iv), and Calista, with whom Miss Mathews identiﬁes in Amelia (1751, III. ix, IV. ii). In Amelia (VIII. v) Booth also knows Rowe’s famous translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia (1718) well enough to dispute his rendering of the Latin. RUSSEL, Richard (c. 1686–1753?), journalist. A Jacobite clergyman who lost his living in 1716 for refusing to swear allegiance to George I, Russel kept a boarding house near Westminster School for the sons of other nonjurors. Under the name of Bavius, he was the principal author of The Grub-Street Journal (1730–37), a literary paper with a strong antiministerial bias. In 1732 Russel and his colleagues hounded HF during the period of his prominence as house dramatist at Drury Lane, the attacks chieﬂy motivated by HF’s having signaled his political inclinations by dedicating The Modern Husband to the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. To the systematic disparagement of his plays—The Modern Husband, The Covent-Garden Tragedy, The Old Debauchees, and The Mock Doctor—the authors of the journal added the viliﬁcation of HF’s character, at last moving him to publish in The Daily Post (3 July 1732) under the name of Philalethes (“lover of truth”) a letter defending himself against Russel’s aspersions, to whom he contemptuously refers as “a Nonjuring Parson.” (On Russel, see Goldgar 1977.)

130

A Henry Fielding Companion

SCARRON, Paul (1610–60), French poet, dramatist and novelist. When deﬁning the new species of writing he was introducing to English readers, HF in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. i) looked to the Continent for models of prose ﬁction that met the criterion of being true imitations of nature. Among these were Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Alain-Rene´ LeSage’s Gil Blas, Marivaux’s Le Paisan parvenu and La Vie de Marianne, and Scarron’s Le Roman comique (1651– 57)—the lively comic history of a troupe of traveling comedians. Two months earlier, in The Opposition: A Vision (December 1741), he made his only other reference to “the comical Romance of Scarron,” invoking it as the standard of works that are “extremely farcical and ridiculous.” (For Scarron’s inﬂuence on HF, see Baker 1959a, Goldberg 1969, and the Introduction to Boyce 1967b). SCRIBLERUS CLUB. The most famous fraternity of wits in this, or perhaps any other, period of literary history, the Scriblerus Club was formed in the last year of Queen Anne’s reign (1714) and though the club seldom met regularly thereafter, its three principal members—Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay—remained close friends, united in promoting the original purpose of the group. Their aim was, by employing their talent of ridicule, to reform the taste of the town in literature and criticism, to expose what they regarded as the follies of the “virtuosi” of the Royal Society, and generally to espouse conservative Tory interests in politics and religion. As the instrument of their satire, they invented the learned dunce Martinus Scriblerus, editor of The Dunciad Variorum (1729), whose hilarious scholarly lucubrations darkened the text. As a conﬁrmed Whig and latitudinarian, HF scorned the political and religious agendas of the Scriblerians, an attitude that informs his satire of them in the unﬁnished burlesque of the Dunciad he wrote in 1729–30 under the inﬂuence of his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He could not help recognizing the brilliance of their wit and literary achievements, however, and in every other respect he entirely sympathized with their satiric program. As he began his career as a writer in 1727–28, the Scriblerians had recently provided him with three extraordinary models for his own satires in different genres: Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels had appeared in 1726, Pope’s Dunciad in 1728 (with the Dunciad Variorum in 1729), and Gay’s Beggar’s Opera in 1728, its sensational run at Lincoln’s Inn Fields eclipsing the opening of HF’s Love in Several Masques at Drury Lane. All three writers would inﬂuence HF’s practice. The title page of his ﬁrst satire, The Masquerade (1728), declared the author to be “Lemuel Gulliver, Poet Laureat to the King of Lilliput”; and during 1730 and 1731 no fewer than six of his “irregular” plays—The Author’s Farce, Tom Thumb, The Tragedy of Tragedies, The Letter Writers, The Welsh Opera and The Grub-Street Opera—were published under the pseudonym of Scriblerus Secundus, three of these being inspired by the success of Gay’s ballad opera. The “reading version” of The Tragedy of Tragedies, with its preface and learned commentary by “H. Scriblerus Secundus,” not only imitated the Scriblerian form but in its burlesque of the fustian of heroic tragedy followed the satiric model of Pope’s Peri Bath-

Others in the Life

131

ous (1728). Such later works of HF’s as the mock-epic Vernoniad (1741), with its ludicrous scholarly annotations, and Some Papers Proper to be Read before the Royal Society, Concerning the Terrestrial Chrysipus, Golden-Foot or Guinea (1743), a parody of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, are also indebted to the satiric program of the Scriblerus group and the mock-forms they favored. (On the Scriblerus Club, see Kerby-Miller 1950 and Bruckman 1997.) SEEDO, Mr., musician. Little is known about the life and career of Seedo, except that he was a German musician who, after working in London for a time, left in 1736 to become director of the royal band in Potsdam. He was associated with HF for four years, as musical director ﬁrst at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in 1731 and then, from 1732 to 1734, at Drury Lane. In this capacity he composed overtures for the Drury Lane production of The Tragedy of Tragedies in 1732 and for The Intriguing Chambermaid in 1734, and he provided settings for the airs in such ballad operas as The Grub-Street Opera, The Lottery and The Mock-Doctor. (See Roberts 1966.) SENECA, Lucius Annaeus (c. 4 B.C.–A.D. 65), Roman philosopher and dramatist. HF held the moral thought of Seneca in high esteem, and when seeking examples of the wisest of philosophers paired him, variously, with Aristotle (Champion, 5 January 1740), Plato (Joseph Andrews, 1742, II. xvi), and Cicero, who represented a similar brand of humane stoicism (Of True Greatness, 1741, line 117; and Covent-Garden Journal, 3 March 1752). At the beginning of his essay “Of the Remedy of Afﬂiction for the Loss of Our Friends” (Miscellanies, 1743), a consolatory discourse written in the tradition of Christian stoicism on the occasion of his daughter’s death, HF best expresses what Senecan philosophy meant to him: When Seneca tells us, that Virtue is sufﬁcient to subdue all our Passions, he means no other (as he explains it in many Parts of his Works) than that exalted divine Philosophy, which consisted not in vain Pomp, or useless Curiosity, nor even in the Search of more proﬁtable Knowledge, but in acquiring solid lasting Habits of Virtue, and ingrafting them into our Character.

In November 1744, in a letter to his friend James Harris, who had offered his condolences on the death of his wife, HF similarly deﬁned “true Philosophy” as consisting “in Habit only”—though in this context he credits Harris, rather than Seneca, with having taught him this lesson (Letter 23). Throughout his career HF, when thinking of the passions and the need to control them, usually invoked Seneca. In Joseph Andrews (III. xi) Parson Adams, endeavoring to console Joseph who is anxious about Fanny’s safety, quotes Seneca on “the Folly of Grief”; in Tom Jones (1749, VI. ix) Parson Supple, attempting to subdue Western’s anger, quotes Seneca, “who hath, indeed, so well handled this Passion, that none but a very angry Man can read him without great Pleasure

132

A Henry Fielding Companion

and Proﬁt”; in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) HF quotes Seneca on the importance of practicing moderation in the pursuit of pleasure (section I) and of restraining a compassionate disposition to treat felons leniently by a rational consideration of the punishment justice demands (sections X–XI). In The Covent-Garden Journal (4 February 1752), putting the case of a man “overloaded with Prosperity or Adversity,” he asks: “Who is there so very wise, or so very foolish, that, if he was a Master of Seneca and Plutarch, could not ﬁnd great Matter of Comfort and Utility from their Doctrines?” HF, who was extraordinarily well read in the drama, both ancient and modern, was also familiar with the tragedies of Seneca. He quotes from the Phaedra in The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731, II viii, n. (k)) and from Hercules Oetaeus in The True Patriot (18–25 February 1746), a passage warning against the abuse of power by such ill-designing courtiers as Carteret, Lord Granville. SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713), third Earl of; philosopher. HF’s attitude toward the deist philosopher whom he called in Tom Jones (1749, XIII. xii) “the elegant Lord Shaftsbury”—author of Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), of which HF owned a copy of the 1737–38 edition—was in an important sense ambivalent. On the one hand he read the Characteristicks with pleasure and often quoted or paraphrased favorite passages from it, especially from the lighter and more literary parts of the Letter Concerning Enthusiasm and An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour. There was much, too, in Shaftesbury’s complacent view of human nature and the deity that HF found congenial; indeed, it seemed to Sir John Hawkins, Samuel Johnson’s biographer, that HF’s morality was nothing more than “that of Lord Shaftesbury vulgarised” (Johnson’s Works [1787], 1:214–15). In an important leader in The Champion (27 March 1740) deﬁning the concept of “good nature,” which is fundamental to his moral philosophy, HF quotes with approval Shaftesbury’s attractive description of the deity: “I know not so great, so glorious, so lovely an idea of the benevolent Creator of the universe, as that which is afﬁxed to Him by the noble author whom we have so often quoted, and shall quote. He is (says he) the best-natured being in the universe.” When HF in A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. xix) has Julian the Apostate in his incarnation as a beggar praise Shaftesbury as “a very great English Philosopher,” it is possible the compliment is sincerely meant—though the extravagance of the compliment may well have been for the beneﬁt of HF’s friend James Harris, who was the philosopher’s nephew and a ﬁrst cousin of his son, the fourth earl. In the 1730s HF had moved in a circle of deists and freethinkers that included his friends James Ralph and Thomas Cooke. That he had outgrown this ﬂattering philosophy by the 1740s is clear enough, however, from the ridicule of Wilson’s “Rule-of-Right men” in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. iii), and in Tom Jones (1749) the deist Square—whose doctrines of “the natural Beauty

Others in the Life

133

of Virtue” and “the eternal Fitness of Things” owe much to “the Great Lord Shaftesbury” (V. ii)—is made to see the folly of his philosophy and to convert to Christianity on his deathbed. In the period of his magistracy, not merely a sense of the folly of the deists but a conviction of their pernicious inﬂuence on society came to characterize HF’s writings. In Amelia (1751) the hero, whose skepticism has a debilitating effect on his moral conduct, has his doubts at last dispelled when he reads Isaac Barrow’s sermons on the Apostles’ Creed while waiting in a sponging house to be imprisoned for debt (XII. v); and Dr. Harrison sides with John “Estimate” Brown, who in April 1751 had attacked Shaftesbury’s famous axiom, adopted by the freethinkers, that ridicule was the surest test of truth, even of the truth of religion: “ ‘No Man is fonder of true Wit and Humour than myself,’ ” Harrison assures Booth; “ ‘but to profane sacred Things with Jest and Scofﬁng is a sure Sign of a weak and wicked Mind’ ” (X. iv). On similar grounds HF declared in The Covent-Garden Journal (4 February 1752) that he would gladly deliver the works of Aristophanes and Rabelais, earlier two of his favorite comic authors, to be burned by the common hangman, “their Design . . . very plainly [having been] to ridicule all Sobriety, Modesty, Decency, Virtue and Religion, out of the World.” In 1754, though struggling against the illness that killed him, HF attacked the Essays of Bolingbroke for these same reasons, tracing the spread of irreligion and skepticism to the author of the Characteristicks: “My lord Shaftesbury hath been blamed for saying, ‘That ridicule is one of those principal lights or natural mediums by which things are to be viewed, in order to a thorough recognition: for truth, it is supposed, may bear all lights.’ Perhaps there may be some justice in this censure, as truth may by such a trial be subjected to misrepresentation, and become a more easy prey to the malice of its enemies.” (On HF and Shaftesbury, see Harrison 1975, Shroff 1978, and Butler 1985. On Shaftesbury generally, see Brett 1951, Grean 1967, and Klein 1994.) SHAKESPEARE, William (1564–1616), poet and playwright. For HF Shakespeare was, as he put it in Amelia (1751, VI. v), “the greatest Genius the World hath ever produced.” The Ribbles in preparing their entry for Shakespeare in the annotated catalog of HF’s library noted 130 references to him and his works in HF’s writings, all of them complimentary; and J. Paul Hunter has shown that although there is no citation of any passage in Shakespeare in the Scriblerian notes to the text of The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), subliminal allusions to the tragedies abound in the play, comprising a standard against which the fustian of his imitators may be measured. As Alexander Pope in the Essay on Criticism (1711) declared Nature and Homer to be the same, so HF in his novels at times evokes whole scenes and characters from Shakespeare’s plays when representing the speech and actions of his own characters who ﬁnd themselves in parallel situations. In Tom Jones (1749, VI. xiii, XII. iii), for example, exchanges between Sophia and Honour and between Tom and Partridge echo those between Juliet and the Nurse (Romeo and Juliet, (III. ii) and between Hal and Falstaff

134

A Henry Fielding Companion

(1 Henry IV, V. i), respectively; and in Amelia Shakespeare’s classic dramatization of jealousy in Othello supplied HF with hints for the representation of that passion in his own hero. (On HF and Shakespeare, see Ribbles, S19; Hunter 1975:22–46; Lindboe 1982; Palmer 1971; Folkenﬂik 1974. On Shakespeare on the stage and in the novel in the period, see Smith 1928 and Noyes 1953.) HF’s interest in Shakespeare is seen as well in two related targets of his criticism and ridicule: the vanity and impertinence of his editors and the quibbling of actors over the placement of an emphasis in his blank verse. HF owned at least three of the principal editions of the period—Lewis Theobald’s edition of 1733, to which HF subscribed; William Warburton’s edition of 1747; and Sir Thomas Hanmer’s edition of 1748—but for the most part he found them all obtuse in misreading the sense of the text and presumptuous in meddling with it. Thus at the opening of Book X of Tom Jones he addresses his reader: It is impossible we should know what Sort of Person thou wilt be: For, perhaps, thou may’st be as learned in Human Nature as Shakespeare himself was, and, perhaps, thou may’st be no wiser than some of his Editors. Now lest this latter should be the Case, we think proper, before we go any farther together, to give thee a few wholesome Admonitions; that thou may’st not as grosly misunderstand and misrepresent us, as some of the said Editors have misunderstood and misrepresented their Author.

As the fact of his subscription to Theobald’s edition may suggest, HF at ﬁrst preferred that edition to Pope’s of 1725 (see “Epistle to Lyttleton” [1733], II. 124–31); but in 1742–43 he was of a different opinion. In the preface to his translation of Aristophanes’ Plutus, he castigates Theobald’s censoriousness, and in A Journey from This World to the Next (I. viii), he ridicules his pedantry. There is more of the same in The True Patriot (11–18 February 1746). In the passage from Tom Jones quoted above it is Warburton’s arrogant way of asserting the validity of his questionable readings and of treating his predecessors with contempt that HF chieﬂy has in mind, as he does again in the ludicrous commentary on the famous soliloquy from Hamlet contributed to The CoventGarden Journal (18 April 1752) by an anonymous author (actually HF himself) who has heard “that there are not less than 200 Editions of [Shakespeare], with Commentaries, Notes, Observations, &. now preparing for the Press.” As for the vanity of actors who insist on their own way of speaking Shakespeare’s verse, HF was more amused than incensed. When in A Journey from This World to the Next (I. viii) the shades of the celebrated tragedians Thomas Betterton and Barton Booth dispute an accent in a line from Othello and judgment is referred to the Bard himself, Shakespeare replies: “This I know, could I have dreamt so much Nonsense would have been talked, and writ about it, I would have blotted it out of my Works.” (On the editing of Shakespeare in the period, see Walsh 1997.) SMART, Christopher (1722–71), poet and essayist. A poet equally capable at religious verse and witty satire, Smart in the early 1750s was also a well-known

Others in the Life

135

ﬁgure in the day-to-day literary life of London, contributing articles to The Student, editing The Midwife: or, The Old Woman’s Magazine, and staging a regular entertainment called “The Old Woman’s Oratory.” The ﬁrst sign of the close friendship that developed between HF and this gifted young writer who was ﬁfteen years his junior occurs, appropriately, in Smart’s dedication to The Horatian Canons of Friendship (June 1750), where he compliments “the incomparable Mr. Justice Fielding”; and the following year in The Midwife he included the author of Tom Jones in the company of Lucian, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Butler, and Erasmus when naming the brightest constellation of wits. Late in 1752 responding to Dr. John Hill’s scurrilous attack on them both in The Impertinent, Smart referred to HF as “a particular Friend of mine,” and the two considered exacting their retribution by writing imitations of the Dunciad, with Hill as Prince of Dullness. HF conﬁned his ridicule of Hill to the pages of The Covent-Garden Journal (18 and 25 November 1752), while Smart published his poem The Hilliad in February 1753, with a preface by their common friend Arthur Murphy containing a handsome tribute to HF. After HF’s death, Smart would publish his own tribute to his friend in the form of an epitaph in verse. (On Smart, see Sherbo 1967.) SMOLLETT, Tobias George (1721–71), physician and man of letters. In the 1740s HF and Smollett invented the English comic novel, as Joseph Andrews (1742) was followed in 1748 by Roderick Random and in 1749 by Tom Jones. In doing so, both writers looked to the Continent for their models—to Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Alain-Rene´ LeSage’s Gil Blas, works to which HF pays tribute in Joseph Andrews (III. i) and Smollett in the preface to Roderick Random. Yet the difference in their temperaments determined what they made of these model. HF’s comic narratives are suffused with a benevolent spirit, and the delight he takes in rhetorical artiﬁce dissolves the villainy or violence of the scenes he depicts into laughter; Smollett’s narratives, on the other hand, are colored throughout by an almost Swiftian indignation at cruelty and injustice. This fundamental difference in tone and style is readily apparent if one recalls the comedy of two episodes in Joseph Andrews—the episodes of Parson Adams’s manuscript of Aeschylus being mistaken by a country justice for a book of ciphers in a plot against the government (II. xi) and of Joseph’s mock-heroic battle with the dogs (III. vi)—and compares them with Smollett’s dark versions of these scenes in Roderick Random (Chapters 30 and 3, respectively). Despite such differences, though, there remains a distant kinship between the two novelists, a kinship sufﬁciently recognizable for no less discriminating a reader than Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to have believed, on ﬁrst reading Roderick Random, that HF, her cousin, had written it. This temperamental difference between HF and Smollett is discernible in the rivalry—on Smollett’s side expressing itself in a virulent enmity—that arose between them soon after the publication of Tom Jones. Smollett, after depreciating HF’s novel in a private letter to Alexander Carlyle of 1 October 1749,

136

A Henry Fielding Companion

went on publicly to vilify HF, his wife Mary Fielding, and his patron George Lyttelton in one infamous passage in Peregrine Pickle (1751), and in another he implicitly criticized HF’s authorial intrusions into his story as “paultry shifts” calculated to pad out his book (see Chapters 102 and 105). HF reacted mildly enough to these insults. In Amelia (1751, VIII. v), without naming either Smollett or his novel, he has a hackney author in a sponging house declare how easy it is to succeed at “Romance Writing” if one interlards it “with a little Scandal, a little Abuse on some living Characters.” A fortnight after the publication of that novel, as he began writing The Covent-Garden Journal (7 January 1752), he brieﬂy experimented with a humorous feature entitled “The Journal of the present [Paper] War” that was designed to increase circulation. Included in the routed army of Grub Street productions are “Peeragrin Puckle” and “Rodorick Random.” A week later in response to this tame ridicule Smollett (for he is almost certainly the author of the pamphlet) published A Faithful Narrative of the Base and Inhuman Arts That were lately practised upon the Brain of Habbakuk Hilding, Justice, Dealer, and Chapman, a vicious attack on HF—on his character, his relationship with Lyttelton, his conduct as magistrate, the quality of his ﬁction—accusing him of, among other things, having plagiarized the characters of Partridge in Tom Jones and Miss Mathews in Amelia from the characters of Strap and Miss Williams in Roderick Random. After HF’s death, Smollett himself saw at last that he had gone too far in these attacks. He purged the second edition of Peregrine Pickle (1758) of the slander of HF and Lyttelton. Indeed, he went far beyond this merely negative gesture of atonement for the injury he had done HF. He was too good a critic, and at heart too generous a man, not ﬁnally to acknowledge HF’s towering achievement as a novelist. In the Continuation (1761, 4: 127) of his Complete History of England, Smollett in a single handsome sentence paid HF the highest compliment of all—the tribute of one great writer to another, his rival: “The genius of Cervantes was transfused into the novels of Fielding, who painted the characters, and ridiculed the follies of life with equal strength, humour, and propriety.” (On the relationship between HF and Smollett, see Knapp 1949:128– 33, Bouce´ 1976, Preston 1982, Rawson 1987, and Richetti 1987, 1990.) SOCRATES. See Plato. SOPHOCLES (c. 496–406 B.C.), Greek dramatist. In Joseph Andrews (III. ii) Parson Adams pauses in the midst of a critical discourse on the beauties of Homer’s Iliad to compare the speech of Tecmessa in Sophocles’ Ajax with Andromache’s “dissuasive Speech” to Hector, of which it is, in his judgment, a poor imitation. “And yet,” Adams continues, “Sophocles was the greatest Genius who ever wrote Tragedy.” It is possible, of course, that HF, who modeled Parson Adams on his learned friend William Young, was expressing in this passage Young’s opinion of Sophocles rather than his own. Similarly, it is im-

Others in the Life

137

possible to tell with certainty whether the allusions to Sophocles and to Oedipus Tyrannus in the translation of Aristophanes’ Plutus (1742, pp. 3n., 5n., 50n., 65n.) are HF’s or Young’s, who collaborated with him in that work. The note to the chapter “Of Hats” in Jonathan Wild (1743, II. vi), however, is certainly by HF, who alludes to a character in Sophocles’ Ajax who was master of the art of “cheating in Hats.” And in Joseph Andrews (IV. xv) the allusion is plain enough as the hero and his beloved Fanny, awaiting news as to whether they are brother and sister, are said to feel “perhaps little less Anxiety in this Interval than Oedipus himself whilst his Fate was revealing.” The situation in Tom Jones (XVIII. ii), where it appears that Jones has unwittingly committed incest with his mother, is, of course, exactly Oedipus’s case, but here HF leaves the parallel implicit. (On the Oedipus theme in HF, see Park 1975.) SOUTH, Robert (1634–1716), divine. Few other things reveal the openness of HF’s mind more genially than his enthusiastic appreciation of the sermons of South, who—unlike other divines he admired: Isaac Barrow, John Tillotson, Samuel Clarke, and Benjamin Hoadly—was a Tory in politics and in religion an outspoken advocate of high church orthodoxy. Although Barrow may have been, as he declared, his “favourite” and Hoadly his example of “true greatness” among the clergy, South was without doubt the divine whose works he most enjoyed reading. The Ribbles cite no fewer than thirty-four references to South and his works in HF’s writings, beginning with The Mock-Doctor (1732) and continuing through The Champion (1739–40), Shamela (1741), Jonathan Wild (1743), The Jacobite’s Journal (e.g., the number for 11 June 1748, where he is quoted as “a learned and witty English Divine”), Amelia (1751), The CoventGarden Journal (1752), and The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755). In The Covent-Garden Journal (3 March 1752), referring to the wit and humor exerted by Jonathan Swift and South on subjects of the highest importance, HF gave his opinion that “In the Sermons of the latter, there is perhaps more Wit than in the Comedies of [William] Congreve.” (On South see Sutherland 1960 and Simon 1967, 1:229–74.) SPENSER, Edmund (c. 1552–99), poet. Although HF rarely refers to Spenser in his writings, it is clear that he read him, and read him with pleasure. In The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731, I. i, n.) he has the pedant Scriblerus adduce a passage from The Faerie Queene to prove that there were giants in Arthur’s Britain, and in his “Epistle to Lyttleton” (1733, lines 118–21) he ﬁnds in the impersonator “false Florimell” of Book III, Canto viii, an apt simile for Alexander Pope’s deviousness. In his journals HF twice favorably reviewed Spenserian imitations by members of George Lyttelton’s circle. In The Champion (13 December 1739), he judged Gilbert West’s A Canto of the Fairy Queen to be so skillful an imitation that he could nearly persuade himself “ ’twas really a Fragment of that happy Genius, whom I never yet read but with Love and

138

A Henry Fielding Companion

Admiration”; and in The Jacobite’s Journal (4 June 1748) he declared that James Thomson’s Castle of Indolence “truly breathes the Spirit of that Author which it professes to imitate.” SQUIRES, Mary, gypsy. See Canning, Elizabeth. STEELE, Sir Richard (1672–1729), playwright and essayist. In The Tatler (1709–11) and The Spectator (1711–12), Steele, together with Joseph Addison, provided HF with models for his own periodicals, especially for The Champion (1739–40) and The Covent-Garden Journal (1752). In these writers, HF declared in The Champion (3 January 1740), “wit hath been used to propagate virtue and morality.” He found Steele’s manner rather more congenial than his colleague’s. Not only was Steele, as HF called him in The Daily Post (31 July 1732), “one of the ﬁnest Writers of the last Age”; he was, as he appears in The Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. viii), “a very merry Spirit” in comparison with Addison’s digniﬁed formality. HF was particularly delighted at Steele’s clever stroke of borrowing from Jonathan Swift the satiric persona of Isaac Bickerstaff, who acted as “Censor” of the age: “our most dear Predecessor . . . of facetious Memory,” HF called him when establishing his “Court of Criticism” in The Jacobite’s Journal (9 January 1748). This was also a feature of The Champion and The Covent-Garden Journal, appearing in those journals as the “Court of Censorial Enquiry.” HF was well acquainted with Steele’s “humane” or “sentimental” comedies, The Tender Husband (1705) and The Conscious Lovers (1722), but he did not easily relate to their tone of genteel moralizing, so different from the playful didacticism of The Tatler. In Joseph Andrews (1742, III. xi), indeed, Parson Adams declares his opinion that just one comedy is “ ‘ﬁt for a Christian to read,’ ” and that is The Conscious Lovers, in which he has found “some things almost solemn enough for a Sermon.” (On Steele, see Winton 1964, 1970. On the changing reputation of Steele and Addison, see McCrea [1990].) STILLINGFLEET, Robert, attorney. Although residing at Salisbury, Stillingﬂeet was of an eminent family of Cranborne, Dorset, whose most distinguished member was Edward Stillingﬂeet (1635–99), Bishop of Worcester and a prominent latitudinarian. (A copy of the Life and Character of the bishop, attributed to Timothy Goodwin, was in HF’s library [Ribbles, G10].) Stillingﬂeet was HF’s solicitor on a number of occasions. In 1733 he administered the estate of HF’s grandmother, Lady Sarah Gould, who died intestate; in 1736 he represented HF in the successful action he brought against Thomas Bennet for slandering him to his Dorchester creditors; and in 1737, when Bennet in turn sued HF for assaulting him at Shaftesbury, it was Stillingﬂeet who defended him. In 1738 he acted as the family’s agent in the sale of the farm at East Stour. Far from being the original of Dowling, the unscrupulous attorney in Tom Jones, as one tradition had it (see Cross, 2: 167–68; Dudden, 2:650), Stillingﬂeet was instead

Others in the Life

139

very probably the exemplary Salisbury attorney whom Partridge extols as “ ‘one of the best Gentlemen that ever I knew’ ”—praise that Allworthy seconds, calling him “ ‘a very worthy Man . . . and an Honour to his Profession’ ” (XVIII. vi). STRAHAN, William (1715–85), master printer. After 1742, when the bookseller Andrew Millar, a fellow Scot who was Strahan’s best client, purchased the rights to Joseph Andrews and subsequently became HF’s principal publisher, Strahan printed most of his works. These included the following, with the dates in Strahan’s ledger in parentheses (British Library: Add. MSS. 48800): 1743: 3rd ed. of Joseph Andrews (20 February—4th and 5th eds., June 1748 and April 1751) and Miscellanies vol. 1 (April). 1745: The three anti-Jacobite pamphlets A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain (October—also 2nd ed.), The History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland (October), and A Dialogue between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender (October). 1747: The electioneering pamphlet A Dialogue between a Gentleman of London, Agent for Two Court Candidates, and an Honest Alderman of the Country Party (June and July) and A Proper Answer to a late Scurrilous Libel (December—2nd ed., January 1748); Strahan’s imprint also appears on the ﬁrst number of The Jacobite’s Journal (5 December), but only on the ﬁrst number. 1749: Tom Jones—all four editions (January, February, March, September)—A Charge delivered to the Grand Jury (July), and A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez (September [probably error for October]—2nd ed., November). 1751: An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (January—2nd ed., February) and Amelia (December—aborted 2nd ed., January 1752). 1752: Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder (April). 1753: Proposals for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (January). 1755: The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (January—2nd ed. also January). 1762: Fielding’s Works (vol. 1 of the quarto edition, vols. 1–2 of the octavo edition).

(On Strahan, see Naiman DLB 1995: 154, and Hernlund 1967.) STUART, Charles Edward (1720–88), eldest son of James Francis Edward Stuart, Pretender to the throne. In July 1745 Charles, the so-called Young Pretender, landed in Scotland from France in an attempt to depose George II. Gathering support from the Highland clans, he enjoyed a series of victories over the king’s forces, driving deep into England until he reached Derby, Staffordshire, on 4 December. By then, however, the Duke of Cumberland’s army was deploying on Meriden Common, preventing any farther advance of the rebels toward London, and Charles began his long, disastrous retreat back to Scotland. His Highlanders were slaughtered by Cumberland at Culloden in April 1746 while Charles escaped to France.

140

A Henry Fielding Companion

These events of the rebellion of 1745–46 are the theme of HF’s anti-Jacobite publications A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain, the History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland, and A Dialogue between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender, all three pamphlets written and published in October 1745, and of his periodical The True Patriot (5 November 1745–17 June 1746). When HF resumed writing Tom Jones after the danger was over, he adjusted the time scheme of the novel so that his hero could join Cumberland’s soldiers in November 1745 as they marched northward against the rebels (VII. xi) and his heroine could be mistaken for Jenny Cameron, Charles’s mistress (XI. ii). In The True Patriot (29 April–6 May 1746) HF scornfully contrasted the valor of Cumberland at Culloden with what he regarded as the pusillanimous conduct of the Young Pretender. SWIFT, Jonathan (1667–1745), author and Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Just once in the many scores of allusions he made to Swift and his writings did HF—no doubt in order to please his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who disliked Swift’s politics—mildly ridicule him. As Ochistes in HF’s unﬁnished burlesque of the Dunciad (1729–30) he is represented as a devotee of “Scorn, his tut’lar Goddess.” Otherwise, from the beginning to the end of his career, HF consistently lauded—and at times imitated—the author whom he regarded as “the greatest Master of Humour who ever wrote” (Amelia, 1751, VIII. v). He wrote his earliest extant poem The Masquerade (1728), a satire written in Swift’s favorite meter of hudibrastics, under the name of “Lemuel Gulliver, Poet Laureat to the King of Lilliput”; and, declaring his allegiance to the satiric program of the Scriblerus Club, he published all his “irregular” plays of 1730–31 under the pseudonym of Scriblerus Secundus, or in the case of The Tragedy of Tragedies, H. Scriblerus Secundus. Glumdalca, the giantess whom Thumb captures in that play, is borrowed from Gulliver’s second voyage. It is pleasant to mention in passing that Swift enjoyed HF’s foolery: in her Memoirs (3 [1751], 155) Mrs. Pilkington recalled Swift’s saying he had laughed only twice in his life—once at the trick of a mountebank’s Merry Andrew; the other “at the Circumstance of Tom Thumb’s killing the Ghost. The Dean,” she continued, “had a high Opinion of Mr. Fielding’s Wit.” HF’s high opinion of Swift’s wit is clear enough from the number of times he paid him the compliment of imitation. In The Champion (1740) the satiric series “Extracts from the Voyages of Mr. Job Vinegar” surveys the follies of British society in the manner of Gulliver’s Travels (see Sackett 1958); in Jonathan Wild (1743, II. vi) the political allegory of the chapter “Of Hats” recalls Swift’s ridicule of the high and low heel parties in Lilliput. And in several numbers of The Covent-Garden Journal HF mimics Swift’s ironic strategies. The feature on the “Paper War” between the forces of Grub Street and the champions of literature and criticism ancient and modern recalls The Battle of the Books (4–14 January 1752); in the leader for 28 January Swift’s Argument

Others in the Life

141

against Abolishing Christianity is HF’s model in ridiculing the irreligion of the Robin Hood Society; and in the number for 8 February he offers his own version of A Modest Proposal to express his dismay at the wretched condition of the poor. In the Journal for 4 February 1752 HF more explicitly declared his great admiration for Swift, including him, together with Lucian and Cervantes, as one of “that great Triumvirate” who used their talents of “Wit and Humour, to expose and extirpate those Follies and Vices which chieﬂy prevailed in their several Countries.” Nowhere, however, did HF express these sentiments more eloquently than in the obituary he wrote for Swift, published in the ﬁrst number of The True Patriot (5 November 1745): A few Days since died in Ireland, Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin. A Genius who deserves to be ranked among the ﬁrst whom the World ever saw. He possessed the Talents of a Lucian, a Rabelais, and a Cervantes, and in his Works exceeded them all. He employed his Wit to the noblest Purposes, in ridiculing as well Superstition in Religion as Inﬁdelity, and the several Errors and Immoralities which sprung up from time to time in his Age; and lastly, in the Defence of his Country, against several pernicious Schemes of wicked Politicians. Nor was he only a Genius and a Patriot; he was in private Life a good and charitable Man, and frequently lent Sums of Money without interest to the Poor and Industrious; by which means many Families were preserved from Destruction. The Loss of so excellent a Person would have been more to be lamented, had not a Disease that affected his Understanding, long since deprived him of the Enjoyment of Life, and his Country of the Beneﬁt of his great Talents; But we hope this short and hasty Character will not be the last Piece of Gratitude paid by his Cotemporaries to such eminent Merit.

(On HF and Swift, see Goldgar 1982, 1988; Reilly 1985; and Thorson 1986.) TALBOT, William (1710–82), later earl. Son of the late Lord Chancellor whom HF, recently admitted to the bar, called “that truly Great and Amiable Person,” Talbot was a patron of letters and a supporter of the “new opposition” that had formed after the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole in February 1742. HF dedicated to Talbot the translation of Aristophanes’ Plutus, which he, in collaboration with his learned friend William Young, published in May of that year. Talbot in return is said to have made them a present of ﬁve guineas—“Aristophanic gold,” as Young called it. He also subscribed to HF’s Miscellanies (1743), two sets on royal paper. TAYLOR, Giles (d. 1752), attorney of Lyons Inn, London. During 1740–42 Taylor—“an eminent Attorney, of great Business, and fair Character,” according to the notice of his death in The General Advertiser (27 November 1752)— represented HF on a number of occasions, either defending him against creditors such as John Kempson, a druggist, and Elizabeth Blunt, a fashionable stabler, or in another instance acting in HF’s behalf to recover a debt of £199 owed him

142

A Henry Fielding Companion

by one Randolph Seagrim. In Hilary Term 1741 it was Taylor who successfully brought an action on behalf of Edmund Fielding against the eminent surgeon James Wilkie, whom a jury of gentlemen judged guilty of negligence and incompetence in the blinding of HF’s half-brother John Fielding. Taylor was a subscriber to HF’s Miscellanies (1743). TAYLOR, Peter (1714–77), silversmith, later member of Parliament (1765–66, 1774–77). Sometime before April 1750, when the ledgers of HF’s bankers reveal that Taylor was his accountant, the two were on friendly terms. Taylor lived at the corner of Cecil Street and the Strand, across the way from the Universal Register Office, and may well have been one of the “Society of Gentlemen” who conducted that business, which HF and his half-brother John Fielding established in February 1750. In The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755, July 23) HF paid his friend a playful compliment, and from Lisbon he sent him a gift of onions. TEMPLE, John (1680–1752), younger brother of Henry Temple, ﬁrst Viscount Palmerston. Through marriage with his cousin Elizabeth, granddaughter of the distinguished statesman and author Sir William Temple, he acquired the estate at Moor Park, Surrey. He is probably the “Mr. John Temple” who, in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. vi), has made the “roasting” squire a present of the hunting dog “Fairmaid”—a bitch “bred up in his House, and fed at his own Table.” TERENCE (Publius Terentius Afer) (c. 190–c. 159 A.D.), Roman dramatist. Reviewing his friend Edward Moore’s play The Foundling in The Jacobite’s Journal (19 March 1748), HF defends Moore’s practice in this “grave” comedy by invoking the example of Terence, “an Author whom we shall always mention here with the utmost Respect.” In The Covent-Garden Journal (4 January 1752) Terence is one of only six Roman “VETERANS” whom HF enlists in his “Paper War” with the legions of Grub Street. HF was, of course, like most other schoolboys of the time, well acquainted with Terence’s plays. In Tom Jones (1749) he has the former pedagogue Partridge quote lines from the comedies that he has culled from Latin primers. More impressive, HF himself recalls in The Champion (10 June 1740) what he regarded as a particularly ﬁne sentiment from the Adelphi, and another brief passage from the same play serves him as a comment on a line from Juvenal’s Sixth Satire (Miscellanies 1743, note to lines 282–83). HF was especially moved by the famous sentiment of Chremes in Heuton Timorumenos (“The Self-Tormentor”), 77: “Homo sum; Humani nihil a me alienum puto”—which in The Covent-Garden Journal (25 February 1752) he translates: “I am a Man myself; and have an Interest in the Concerns of all other Men.” In Tom Jones (1749, XV. viii) the narrator quotes the Latin when explaining the pleasure Jones derives from his own benevolence, and in Amelia (1751, X. ix) the heroine repeats Dr. Harrison’s translation: “I am a Man myself,

Others in the Life

143

and my Heart is interested in whatever can befal the rest of Mankind. That is,” she remarks, “the Sentiment of a good Man, and whoever thinks otherwise is a bad one.” THEOBALD, Lewis (1688–1744), editor, translator, playwright. As far as the evidence of his writings suggests, HF’s relationship with Theobald, whom Alexander Pope had crowned Prince of Dulness in the ﬁrst edition of the Dunciad (1728), began with the ridicule of Theobald as Don Tragedio in The Author’s Farce (1730, III) and of his bombast tragedy The Persian Princess (1708) in The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731). After a brief interval of cordiality in the 1730s, the relationship ended in the harsh sarcasm directed in the preface to Plutus (1742) at Theobald’s incompetence as a translator of Aristophanes, and, in A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. viii) and The True Patriot (11–18 February 1746), at his arrogance and pedantry as an editor of Shakespeare. If public mockery of a play implies the satirist’s contempt for the author and, conversely, if public praise of a play signals the writer’s respect for the author, then it is possible to date the change in HF’s attitude toward Theobald to within a fortnight. There are no fewer than nine ludicrous allusions to The Persian Princess in The Tragedy of Tragedies, which was ﬁrst performed and published on 24 March 1731; yet by 3 April, when Theobald’s opera Orestes was performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, HF had composed a humorous epilogue for it, exhorting the ladies of the audience: “Once in an Age, at least, your Smiles dispense / To English Sounds, and Tragedy that’s Sense.” It may not be merely coincidental that HF’s brief friendship with Theobald began at a time when he was seeking Sir Robert Walpole’s patronage and associating with literary ﬁgures, such as Thomas Cooke, who supported the prime minister. Orestes was dedicated to Walpole, who had recently promoted Theobald’s candidacy for the poet laureateship. HF’s unaccustomed access of prosperity during 1732–33, when he dazzled London as house playwright at Drury Lane, may also account for the extraordinary fact of his subscriptions to Theobald’s Shakespeare (1733) and Cooke’s long-delayed translation of Plautus (1746)—these two works representing two of the four or ﬁve books to which he ever put down cash in advance as a subscriber. More certain evidence of this radical improvement in his relationship with Theobald is found in HF’s “Epistle to Lyttleton” (lines 124–31), written in 1733. Earlier, in his poem of 1730 to “The Nymphs of New S[aru]m,” HF had echoed Pope’s verdict that Theobald was the epitome of dullness; now, however, it is Pope whose character as a man and as editor of Shakespeare suffers in the comparison: Why, when thou lashest Tibbald’s lifeless Lays, Dost thou not give the Solid Critick Praise? His Name with Shakespeare’s shall to Ages Soar When thou shalt jingle in our Ears no more

144

A Henry Fielding Companion Shakespeare by him restor’d again we see Recover’d of the Wounds he bore from thee. And sure much brighter must his Merit shine Who gives us Sha[kes]peare’s Works, than his who thine.

Except perhaps for the facetious epilogue to Orestes, this praise is the only explicit compliment HF ever paid Theobald. In 1736 in Tumble-Down Dick he alludes satirically to Theobald’s pantomime afterpiece The Rape of Proserpine (1727)—and after John Rich staged Theobald’s operatic pantomime Orpheus and Eurydice in February 1740, HF repeatedly roasted it in The Champion (e.g., 21 February, 24 May); to complete the ridicule he included it in Shamela’s little library of books that reveal her to be without taste, morals, or sound religion (1741, Letter XII). As late as 1752 HF’s jabs at Theobald’s popular pantomimes and at his incompetence as an editor of Shakespeare enliven the pages of The Covent-Garden Journal (see the Index to the Wesleyan edition). (Also relevant are Woods 1949 and Mace 1987.) THEODORE I (1686–1756), King of Corsica—i.e., Theodore Stephen, Baron von Neuhof a German adventurer who, leading a group of Corsican patriots ﬁghting against Genoese rule, had himself crowned king in 1736. Expelled by the Genoese, he ﬂed to England, where he was imprisoned for debt. He was eventually released and supported by benefactors for the rest of his life. HF was much amused at the audacity of this pretender. In a letter to The Daily Advertiser (19 February 1737) he represented his own theatrical company at the Little Haymarket as “late Servants to their Majesties KOULI KAN and THEODORE”; and in The Historical Register for 1736 (1737), where the political scene is set in Corsica, he has the politicians wonder when “King Theodore” will return. In Joseph Andrews (1742, III. iv) Parson Adams wonders whether Wilson’s lost son might be “the late famous King Theodore.” Other references occur in The Champion (4 March, 19 April, 14, 19 June 1740.) THOMPSON, Thomas (c. 1700–63), physician. A fashionable physician whose clients included the Prince of Wales, Sir Francis Dashwood, and HF’s friend George Bubb Dodington, Thompson was also a highly controversial ﬁgure. In 1746 virtually the entire membership of the College of Physicians, whose methods he had publicly disparaged, united in an attempt to destroy his reputation by accusing him of causing the death of Thomas Winnington by his bungling. HF, however, was convinced that Thompson, who had written a Treatise on the disease (Ribbles, T16), had cured him of a painful attack of the gout in December 1749. Although he could not persuade James Harris’s brother Thomas to submit to Thompson’s treatment for the same malady (Letter 56), HF remained the doctor’s loyal champion for some time to come. In the ﬁrst edition of Amelia (1751, V. ii) he included an entire chapter, “Containing a Brace of Doctors, and much physical Matter,” whose chief purpose is to praise Thompson and to

Others in the Life

145

ridicule his many enemies among the apothecaries and physicians. In this version of the novel Mrs. Bennet (later Mrs. Atkinson) on three occasions delivers “many vast Eulogiums” on Thompson, whom she calls “the true Machaon, of whom Homer speaks so greatly.” That HF, when defending the novel in The Covent-Garden Journal (25, 28 January 1752), included members of the medical establishment among its critics suggests that he paid a price for taking Thompson’s part against them. Later, in the “Covent-Garden” section of the Journal (21 April), he expressed his pleasure on learning that Thompson, supported by a large party of “Gentlemen of Fashion,” had won “considerable Damages” in an action for slander he had brought against an apothecary. Considering the extravagance of these compliments, HF’s omission of any mention of Thompson in his account of the doctors who treated him in the months before he sailed to Lisbon suggests that their relationship had soured, a supposition encouraged by the revised second edition of Amelia (1762), from which every trace of Thompson was removed. (On Thompson, see Day 1979.)

THOMSON, James (1700–1748), poet. Relations between Thomson and HF may well have been strained at ﬁrst. In his burlesque of heroic drama in The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) HF mocks no fewer than thirteen passages from Thomson’s Sophonisba (1730), including the immortal line, “Oh! Sophonisba, Sophonisba, oh!” However Thomson may have taken such ridicule, it did not prevent the very cordial relationship that in time developed between them, encouraged perhaps by George Lyttelton, their common friend and patron. HF’s “Liberty,” which ﬁrst appeared in the Miscellanies of 1743, is addressed to Lyttelton and echoes Thomson’s more famous poem by that title (1735–36)— a work written in the blank verse that HF, despite the esteem in which he held Alexander Pope, preferred to the couplet form (see Letter 14, where Thomson’s “Autumn” [1730] is quoted to that purpose). Indeed, an anecdote of the period attributes to Thomson’s friendly ofﬁces HF’s important connection with Andrew Millar, Thomson’s fellow Scot and his publisher. It was on Thomson’s advice, the story goes, that HF submitted the manuscript of Joseph Andrews (1742) to Millar, who would go on to publish most of his major works. Thomson and HF were certainly on friendly terms by 1745, when, in the ﬁrst number of The True Patriot (5 November 1745), the anonymous author of the paper coyly asked his readers to guess his identity: the list of eight “emvowelled” names he proposes concludes with “Mr. L[yttelto]n, Mr. F[ieldin]g, Mr. T[homso]n, or indeed any other Person who hath ever distinguished himself in the Republic of Letters.” But it was in The Jacobite’s Journal (4 June 1748), shortly before the poet’s death in August of that year, that HF paid Thomson his ﬁnest tribute: in a review of Thomson’s Spenserian poem The Castle of Indolence (May 1748)—the ﬁrst appreciation of the work to appear in print—HF declared, “This is a noble allegorical Poem, and truly breathes the Spirit of that Author which it professes to imitate”; after

146

A Henry Fielding Companion

reviewing the poem’s particular qualities, he concludes by thanking Thomson “for his excellent Composition.” (On Thomson, see Sambrook 1991.) THORNTON, Bonnell (1724–68), poet and journalist. Traditionally (to use Goldgar’s appropriate word of caution) Thornton is thought to have been HF’s most scurrilous antagonist during his editorship of The Covent-Garden Journal (1752). Sponsored by Phillip D’Halluin, manager of the Public Register Ofﬁce, a rival business to the Fieldings’ Universal Register Office, Thornton, under the name of Mrs. Roxana Termagant, began publishing the weekly pamphlet Have At You All: or, The Drury-Lane Journal—a periodical founded chieﬂy, it would appear, for the purpose of ridiculing HF and everything about him: his character, his personal life, his conduct as a magistrate, his literary productions. Although, as Goldgar has reason to believe, Thornton himself may not have been the author of the worst of this abuse, as editor of the paper he clearly condoned it. For the three months of its publication (16 January to 9 April 1752) he conducted a running satiric commentary not only on the various sections of The Covent-Garden Journal, but also on HF’s recently published novel, Amelia (1751). Every feature of the novel is scored: the “lowness” of its scenes and dialogue, the noselessness of its heroine, the way it had been “puffed” by the publisher Andrew Millar. In his ﬁfth number Thornton concluded a facetious history of romance writing in England with a gross burlesque of HF’s style and characters, entitled “A New CHAPTER in AMELIA.” For the most part HF dealt with this foolishness by ignoring it, though in The Covent-Garden Journal (1 February 1752) it is tempting to detect an ambiguity when, apparently referring to Eliza Haywood’s History of Betsy Thoughtless in the “Court of Censorial Enquiry,” HF threatens to bring on “The Trial of B—T—, on the Statute of Dulness.” In November 1752, as HF was about to bring his paper to a close, Thornton—now as “Priscilla Termagant,” a relative of Roxana—returned to hound him in a new periodical, The Spring-Garden Journal, which, mercifully, expired after one month. (See Brown 1955 and Goldgar, ed. CGJ WE:xlix–li.) THUCYDIDES (c. 460–c. 400 B.C.), Greek historian. HF did not cite Thucydides in any important way until quite late in his career, but from 1748 on, his allusions to the greatest of the Greek historians are frequent, substantial, and enthusiastic. In Tom Jones (1749, XIV. i) Thucydides is to Greek history writing what Homer is to the epic and Aristotle to philosophy. And in Amelia (1751) Dr. Harrison, having earlier paraphrased from the History of the Peloponnesian War a passage from Pericles’ speech to the Athenians (III. x), quotes another passage from that work by “my favourite Greek Historian” (IV. iii). In this, he was certainly speaking for his author, who in The Covent-Garden Journal (4 January 1752), enlists Thucydides as the only historian among the Greek “VETERANS” who oppose the legions of Grub Street in the “Paper War” that HF was playfully conducting against his rival journalists. HF’s quotations from the History occur elsewhere during these years in An Enquiry into the Causes of the

Others in the Life

147

Late Increase of Robbers (1751, Section X), The Covent-Garden Journal (1 February and 15 August 1752), the introduction to A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753), and The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755, July 21). In the preface to this last work, HF indicates a radical reordering of his literary priorities from the period of Joseph Andrews (1742, III. i), when he now declares his preference of “true history” to “romance”: for my part, I must confess I should have honoured and loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in humble prose, than those noble poems that have so justly collected the praise of all ages; for though I read these with more admiration and astonishment, I still read Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, with more amusement and more satisfaction.

TILLOTSON, John (1630–94), Archbishop of Canterbury. Together with other Cambridge divines of the rationalist, latitudinarian party within the Church of England—Isaac Barrow, Samuel Clarke, and Benjamin Hoadly—Tillotson served to deﬁne HF’s religious principles after what appears to have been a brief period in the 1730s when he ﬂirted with the deism of his freethinking friends, James Ralph and Thomas Cooke. The ﬁrst clear sign of this change came in The Champion (22 January 1740), where HF attacks the atheism of such “political philosophers” as Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville, referring the reader to Tillotson and Clarke for proof of “the immortality of the soul, and the certainty of a future state.” In The Covent-Garden Journal (14 January 1752) HF coyly hopes for “a good Commentator to explain certain hard Words which frequently occur in the Works of Barrow, Tillotson, Clarke, and others of this Kind”—words such as “Heaven, Hell, Judgment, Righteousness, Sin, &c.” And in A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753, Section XXVII), in order to make the point that religion alone is capable of correcting a bad mind, he quotes at length from a sermon by “the excellent Archbishop Tillotson . . . this great Preacher.” Because of his “natural and easy” style, Tillotson’s sermons were indeed widely admired by HF’s contemporaries. To mention only the most impressive example, John Dryden, often called the father of modern English prose, owned that he had formed his style on that of Tillotson. HF alludes to the sermons in this sense in The Champion (15 March 1740), Joseph Andrews (1742, I. xvi), and Tom Jones (1749, III. ix). (On Tillotson, see Simon 1967, 1: 274–300.) TINDAL, Matthew (1653?–1733), deist. Tindal’s book Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730) had a major impact on the deist movement at a time when HF appears to have been drawn to it, inﬂuenced by his friends James Ralph and Thomas Cooke. By the time he wrote The Champion, however, he was convinced not merely of the inadequacy of Tindal’s arguments for selfsufﬁciency but of their potentially pernicious consequences for the social order. In an essay on “good-nature” in The Champion (27 March 1740) he remarks

148

A Henry Fielding Companion

that even that benevolent disposition does not forbid avenging an injury. Against Tindal he argues that Christianity, which enjoins us to forgive our enemies, “consequently . . . is not as old as the creation, nor is revelation useless with regard to morality, if it had taught us no more than this excellent doctrine.” Later, in The Covent-Garden Journal (9 June 1752), Tindal, with Bolingbroke, is cited as an author animating “the Pert” with “a strong impulse to subvert the Religion of his Country.” (On the number and range of books of controversy in HF’s library—the catalog of which does not, however, include a copy of Tindal’s book—see Ribbles: xxiv–xxvii.) TOLAND, John (1670–1722), deist. Like Tindal, Toland was among the more inﬂuential—and indeed infamous—freethinkers of the period. His book Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) provoked a spate of outraged replies from the orthodox. In Joseph Andrews (1742, I. xvii) the worldly Parson Barnabas exclaims that should George Whitefield’s Methodism succeed in returning the church to the simplicity of primitive Christianity, the change would do more “Mischief” than “the Principles of Toland, Woolston, and all the Free-Thinkers.” HF owned a copy of the 1702 edition of Christianity Not Mysterious (Ribbles, T22) and of Toland’s Miscellaneous Works (1747, T24). The latter he had read earlier in the original issue of 1726, as is clear from the passage in A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. ix) alluding to Toland’s correspondence with Leibniz (see Misc 2:44, n. 1). (On Toland, see Sullivan 1982.) TRAPP, Dr. Joseph (1679–1747), Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Trapp ﬁgures in HF’s works chieﬂy as the translator of Virgil’s Aeneid (1718–20) and as the complacent apologist for the clergy against the strictures of the Methodist George Whitefield. In The Craftsman (7 January 1738) HF is the likely author of a political exegesis of the Aeneid who ﬁnds Trapp’s blank verse translation “Flat and ambiguous”—a judgment in which Virgil himself concurs in A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. viii), declaring the translation to be “a curious Piece indeed!” But it was Trapp’s smug defense of the self-indulgence of the clergy that more often provoked HF’s ridicule. Replying in 1739 to Whiteﬁeld’s criticism of the worldliness and hedonism of the clergy, Trapp, a high churchman, preached a series of sermons, The Nature, Folly, Sin, and Danger of being Righteous over-much, taking his text from Ecclesiastes 7:16; Whiteﬁeld answered in, among other works, An Explanatory Sermon on that Mistaken Text, Be not Righteous over-much. Whiteﬁeld’s criticism of the luxury of the clergy would be the single tenet of the great Methodist’s program with which HF, like Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews (1742, I. xvii), concurred. Deﬁning the characters of the true and false clergyman in The Champion (5 April 1740), he regrets that some of the clergy do not receive Christ’s injunction to poverty “in a strict, literal, practical sense: but, without being righteous over-much, we may, I think, conclude, that if the clergy are not to abandon all they have to their ministry, neither are they to get immense estates by it: and I would recommend

Others in the Life

149

it to the consideration of those who do, whether they do not make a trade of divinity?” In Shamela (1741, Letter IX) HF has the debauched priest Arthur Williams preach a specious sermon on Trapp’s text, and in Tom Jones (1749, XVIII. iv) Thwackum admonishes Allworthy that his “Objection to Pluralities is being righteous over-much.” TRENTHAM, Granville Leveson-Gower (1721–1803), viscount. Brother-inlaw of HF’s patron the Duke of Bedford, Trentham in the autumn of 1749 was ministerial candidate in the furiously contested parliamentary election for Westminster, running against Sir George Vandeput for the opposition. As “court justice” HF took an active part in promoting Trentham’s cause. When the opposition sought to embarrass the government over the case of Bosavern Penlez, who was hanged on 18 October for his part in the mob’s actions against brothels in July, HF attempted to justify the execution in his pamphlet, A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez. Subsidized by Bedford, he ﬂooded the town with electioneering broadsheets, the most notable of which was a satire of the assiduous Tory hack Paul Whitehead, entitled: “The Covent-Garden JOURNAL No. 1. To be publish’d Once every Month during the present WESTMINSTER ELECTION. By PAUL WRONGHEAD, of the Fleet, Esq.” The election was so hotly, and improperly, contested that a scrutiny of the votes was required before Trentham was ofﬁcially declared member for Westminster on 15 May 1750, at which time HF obeyed Bedford’s “Commands” and attended in person to keep the peace. (For a full account of these events see Battestin with Battestin 1977–78.) TYERS, Jonathan (d. 1767), proprietor of Vauxhall gardens. From 1732 to his death in 1767 HF’s good friend Jonathan Tyers was master of the SpringGardens, Vauxhall. In Amelia (1751, IX. ix), when his heroine visits this fashionable resort, HF interrupts the narrative to pay Tyers a compliment: To delineate the particular Beauties of these Gardens, would, indeed, require as much Pains and as much Paper too, as to rehearse all the good Actions of their Master; whose Life proves the Truth of an Observation which I have read in some Ethic Writer, that a truly elegant Taste is generally accompanied with an Excellency of Heart; or in other Words, that true Virtue is, indeed, nothing else but true Taste.

By contemporary accounts, Tyers had made Vauxhall into a resort “of the most rational, elegant, and innocent Kind.” Besides the gardens themselves, the grounds, as William Hogarth had advised, were adorned with elegant buildings furnished with paintings and statues. Perhaps it was Hogarth, their common friend, who ﬁrst introduced HF to Tyers. In any event, as the Memoirs of Charles Burney reveal, HF had been close to Tyers since at least the early 1740s, when he belonged to a “club of wits,” which, with Tyers presiding as host, met weekly

150

A Henry Fielding Companion

at a tavern in Southwark to enjoy good food and conversation. Other members included Edward Moore, Thomas Cooke, and Henry Hatsell. UPTON, James (1670–1749), scholar and schoolmaster. A graduate of Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge, he was from 1704 to his death at age eighty headmaster of the Free Grammar School at Taunton, Somersetshire. He and his son John Upton were good friends of HF and his uncle Davidge Gould, whose son William Gould was educated at the school. HF surely meant to compliment the Uptons, father and son both, when in Tom Jones (1749, VIII. xi), the Man of the Hill reveals that, having “gone through the School at Taunton,” he “thence removed to Exeter College in Oxford.” John Upton, after attending his father’s school, became a Fellow of Exeter. UPTON, Canon John (1707–60), classical scholar and editor. After attending his father James Upton’s school at Taunton, John Upton went up to Oxford, becoming a Fellow of Exeter College in 1728, his academic experiences thus exactly anticipating those of the Man of the Hill in Tom Jones (1749, VIII. xi). He was appointed chaplain to Lord Hardwicke (1734) and prebendary of Rochester (1737). As a scholar he was best known for his rescension of Arrian’s Epictetus (1739–41), two books on Spenser (1747, 1758), and Critical Observations on Shakespeare (1746)—the last, having been abused by Warburton, is perhaps obliquely commended by HF in Tom Jones (X. i). The Fieldings’ friendship with the Uptons is attested both by Ursula Fielding in her letter to a Salisbury acquaintance of 25 October 1748 expressing concern over a nearfatal illness suffered by “poor Upton” (Letter 112) and by John Upton himself, who on 28 December 1751 wrote James Harris about the failure of “Our friend’s Amelia.” VAILLANT, Paul the younger (ﬂ. 1730–1802), bookseller, whose shop was located over against Bedford Street in the Strand; one of the proprietors of HF’s The Champion (1739–43). VANBRUGH, Sir John (1664–1726), playwright. HF began his career as a dramatist in 1728 by following a very hard act at Drury Lane, where The Provok’d Husband—Colley Cibber’s revision of Vanbrugh’s unﬁnished comedy A Journey to London—had played to great applause for twenty-eight nights. His own play, Love in Several Masques, in which Cibber played the part of Rattle, left the stage forever after just four performances, and the experience rankled. He admired the comedies of Vanbrugh, who with William Congreve, as he remarked in Tom Jones (1749, XIV. i), had “copied Nature” faithfully. In his works HF recalls Cibber’s triumph as Lord Foppington in The Relapse (Champion, 6 December 1739, and Covent-Garden Journal, 25 April 1752), and Constant’s threatening Lady Brute’s husband with his sword in The Provok’d Wife (Tom Jones [1749], V. v); and from The False Friend he quotes Don John’s

Others in the Life

151

couplet on the fragility of friendship when a woman interferes (Amelia [1751], VIII. viii). But he always deplored the success Cibber derived from the emasculation of A Journey to London, excising Vanbrugh’s “low” scenes in favor of a more “genteel” comedy. As he remarked in the preface to Plutus (1742), Cibber had substituted mere “Pleasantry” for true humor. He makes the same point in Tom Jones (XII. v), this time, however, adding the further charge of moral decadence: the puppet master, intent on edifying his audience, chooses to perform only “the ﬁne and serious Part of The Provok’d Husband” purged of “any low Wit or Humour, or Jests”—with the result that the maid is discovered on stage with the Merry Andrew in ﬂagrante delicto, emulating the example of Lady Townly in the play. (On Vanbrugh, see Bull 1998.) VANDEPUT, Sir George (c. 1717–84). The candidate for the anticourt party, Vandeput opposed Lord Trentham, brother-in-law of HF’s patron, the Duke of Bedford, in the bitterly contested parliamentary election for Westminster in 1749. In his capacity as “court justice” HF exerted himself in behalf of Trentham during the election, enforcing the peace at the hustings and acting as surrogate host for Bedford at the treats provided for Trentham’s electors at taverns and alehouses. He was also the probable author of certain electioneering handbills, as well as the broadsheet Covent-Garden Journal, in which Vandeput, whose family had moved to England from Holland two centuries earlier, is ridiculed as a nonentity and a foreigner. (For a full account, see Battestin with Battestin 1977–78.) VEALE, Captain Richard (1686?–1756), mariner. A seafaring man of fortysix years’ experience whose judgment in dangerous circumstances was respected by fellow mariners, Veale was captain of The Queen of Portugal, the ship that carried HF and his family to Lisbon in the summer of 1754. Without naming him, HF drew his character vividly in The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), depicting him as a man blustering and imperious who incongruously combined this roughness of manner with an affectation of gallantry (27 June). Even so, HF thought him “one of the best-natur’d fellows alive” (24 July). Once at Lisbon, however, HF represented Veale to his brother John Fielding in a darker light, as a scoundrel and a madman. Veale’s second wife having died shortly before he left England, he persuaded the Fieldings’ servant, Isabella Ash, to follow him to England, enticing her with a promise of marriage (Letter 75), a promise he does not appear to have kept. (On Veale, see Keymer 1996b: Appendix II.) VERNON, Edward (1684–1757), admiral. In 1740 Vernon became a national hero when, with only six ships, he captured the Spanish base at Porto Bello, Panama. With such a small force, however, he was unable to repeat this success, and when a combination of bureaucratic procrastination and contrary winds prevented reinforcements from reaching him expeditiously, the opposition repre-

152

A Henry Fielding Companion

sented him as a martyr to the Prime Minister’s incompetent paciﬁst policies. HF exploits this situation in his mock-epic satire of Sir Robert Walpole, the Vernoniad (1741). Vernon subscribed to HF’s Miscellanies (1743), a set on royal paper. VIRGIL (Publius Virgilius Maro) (70–19 B.C.), Roman poet. HF owned three editions of Virgil’s works as well as the translation by John Dryden (Ribbles, V10–13). Not surprisingly, Booth in Amelia (1751, VIII. v) places Virgil “in the ﬁrst Rank” of poets, in the company of Homer and John Milton. HF’s Vernoniad (1741) parodies the ﬁrst part of the Aeneid, and in The CoventGarden Journal (28 January 1752) HF, defending Amelia against the attacks of his critics, declares that Virgil’s epic was “the noble Model” he followed in composing the novel. Attempts to trace HF’s use of the Aeneid in Amelia have been made by Powers (1956) and Johnson (1961): chapter 9. VOLTAIRE, Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet de (1694–1778), French dramatist, historian, moralist. HF knew at least three works of “the excellent Voltaire,” as, in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. i), he called the author of Letters Concerning the English Nation. As we know from this one reference, he read the Letters in the translation by John Lockman (1733): HF’s paraphrase of a passage from Letter XVIII (“Of Tragedy”), where Voltaire writes of “the Stilts of the ﬁgurative Style” of English heroic drama, echoes Lockman’s phrasing. He also read Voltaire’s tragedy Brutus (1730) in the original, contrasting it in the preface to The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) to Thomas Otway’s Caius Marius. The work of Voltaire that he knew best, however, was L’Histoire de Charles XII. Roi de Sue`de, 2 vols. (1731), to which he refers as early as 1732, when in the prolegomena to the published version of The Covent-Garden Tragedy he mocks an imaginary beau who has read “several pages” of the work in an English translation. HF himself read Voltaire’s Histoire in the original, referring to it frequently in the notes to his translation of Gustaf Adlerfelt’s Military History of Charles XII. King of Sweden (1740) and elsewhere (see Ribbles, V14). He also had in his library a copy of Voltaire’s Le Sie`cle de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (1752). WALES, Frederick Louis (1707–51), prince of. In 1737, having quarreled with his father George II, Frederick became the patron of the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole and the improbable embodiment of Bolingbroke’s ideal of the patriot king. After the fall of Walpole in 1742, he aligned himself with the new administration headed by William Pulteney, now Earl of Bath, and John Carteret; but with the formation of the Broad-Bottom government in 1744–45, drifted again to the opposition. In 1731 HF ridiculed the prince as the philandering Master Owen Apshinken in The Grub-Street Opera. Later, when George Dodington, HF’s friend and patron, left the Pelham government with the intention of forming a new opposition with the Prince of Wales as ﬁgurehead, the prince would be in a sense behind the curious chapter, “Matters Political,” in

Others in the Life

153

Amelia (1751, XI. ii). His name heads the list of subscribers (ﬁfteen sets on royal paper) to HF’s Miscellanies (1743), where he may be ﬁgured in the idealistic depiction of the “King Spirit” in A Journey from This World to the Next (I. v). WALLER, Thomas, bookseller, whose shop was located in the Temple Cloisters. Waller published HF and William Young’s translation of Aristophanes’ Plutus (1742), and in The Jacobite’s Journal (27 February 1748) HF puffed William Guthrie’s General History of England, “now publishing by Mr. Waller.” WALPOLE, Horatio (1678–1757), later Baron of Wolterton, diplomatist. Younger brother of the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, he represented Great Britain as minister plenipotentiary at Paris and The Hague, assiduously seconding his brother’s paciﬁst policies during the twenty years of his ministry, for which he was ironically known to the opposition as “the balance-master of Europe.” In The Grub-Street Opera (1731, II. iv) William the coachman (a ﬁgure for William Pulteney) accuses Robin the butler (Walpole) of bilking his master “to feed the great swollen belly of that fat-gutted brother of yours.” HF’s ridicule of Horatio Walpole is a constant theme of his contributions to The Craftsman during the period 1734–37 (e.g., the numbers for 5 October 1734, 28 June 1735, 21 February 1736, and 28 May 1737). In the last-mentioned article HF gloats that in The Historical Register, in the character of the Second Politician who knows nothing of “foreign Affairs,” he had “made Him the Laughing-stock of crouded Audiences, for several Weeks together.” Later, in an allegory of bearbaiting in The Champion (1 April 1740), Horatio Walpole is to Robert as the “dancing bear” to his brother, the “great bear.” WALPOLE, Sir Robert (1676–1745), from 1742 ﬁrst Earl of Orford. Prime minister for more than twenty years (from 1720 to 1742), Sir Robert Walpole was the most powerful ﬁgure in England. The course of HF’s relationship with this “Great Man” (as he was sarcastically known to his political enemies) is bewilderingly inconsistent—HF’s attitude in his published work shifting more than once from ridicule of Walpole (at times merely playful, but often bitterly abusive) to admiration and praise. At the start of his literary career, HF had strong personal reasons to court the prime minister’s patronage. Walpole was an Etonian known to favor “Old Boys,” and HF had well-placed relatives at court, among them the Earl of Denbigh and his brother, Charles Feilding—and most especially, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, HF’s cousin and Walpole’s good friend. HF’s earliest published work—the lost poems on the coronation and birthday of George II (1727)—announced his political allegiance plainly enough, and they were followed in 1728 by the production of his ﬁrst play, Love in Several Masques, at the establishment’s theater at Drury Lane, an improbable stroke of luck for a twenty-year-old neophyte and almost certainly owing to the sponsorship of

154

A Henry Fielding Companion

Lady Mary, to whom HF dedicated the work. In 1729 his unﬁnished burlesque of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, discovered not long ago among Lady Mary’s papers, reﬂects her own political views by ardently praising Walpole while satirizing the entire phalanx of opposition writers. In 1730, in his humorous, begging verse epistle, “To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole,” HF, calling himself “Your Bard,” angles for a “Sinecure.” It is clear that he sought Walpole’s patronage during this early period, but perhaps equally clear that these overtures were less generously received than he wished. Although there is strong evidence suggesting that HF indulged in some anonymous literary high jinks at Walpole’s expense as early as the summer of 1728, especially in publishing the popular satirical ballad, “The Norfolk Lanthorn,” in The Craftsman, it is not until the summer of 1730, when HF satirized the minister in both that paper and Fog’s Weekly Journal, and in his comedy Rape upon Rape obliquely attacked his practice of screening himself and his friends from prosecution—that HF ﬁrst moved deliberately toward the opposition. The following year in The Grub-Street Opera his ridicule not only of Walpole but of the Royal Family caused the production at the Haymarket Theatre in June to be suppressed. Yet from this obvious expression of the minister’s displeasure HF, unlike most of the company at the Haymarket, emerged next season not merely unscathed but triumphant. For the seasons of 1731 to 1733 he was house playwright at Drury Lane, and in February 1732 he staged there the most ambitious of his “heroic” comedies, The Modern Husband, dedicating the work to Walpole in the most fulsome language. For two years, until the actors’ rebellion against the management cost him his comfortable position at Drury Lane, HF’s plays are for the most part free of political matter, and his champions in a campaign of viliﬁcation mounted against him in the Tory paper The Grub-Street Journal are his friends in Walpole’s camp—Thomas Cooke in The Comedian and James Ralph in The Weekly Register. Not until March 1734—when he began contributing regularly to The Craftsman (as strong circumstantial and internal evidence suggests) and on the eve of the general election dedicated the politically charged play, Don Quixote in England, to the Earl of Chesterfield—did HF abandon hope of Walpole’s patronage and turn to the opposition. For the next seven years he continued to serve Walpole’s adversaries either covertly in articles in The Craftsman and Common Sense or openly in the popular political satires he staged at the Little Haymarket Theatre in 1736 and 1737, one of which, The Historical Register, so inﬂamed the ministry that it moved swiftly to pass into law the Theatrical Licensing Act. This act having put an end to HF’s lucrative career as theatrical manager and playwright, he entered the Middle Temple in November 1737 to begin preparing for the bar. His humorous political pieces continued appearing in the opposition press under a variety of pseudonyms, and when in November 1739 he again came before the public in the transparent guise of “Hercules Vinegar,” author of The Champion, he, together with his colleague Ralph, openly supported the opposition’s cause against Walpole. Even after resigning from that journal early

Others in the Life

155

in 1741, he continued in this antiministerial vein for several months in a number of separate publications: Of True Greatness (January), the Vernoniad (January), The Crisis (April), as well as in the satirical allusions to Walpole and his creature Lord Hervey in Shamela (April). This, however, is as far as the trail of HF’s literary annoyance of the prime minister takes us. After April, even as the campaigning for the general election intensiﬁed the political paper wars, HF published nothing for eight months, and when he appeared again in December, it was as the (anonymous) author of The Opposition: A Vision, a pamphlet that represents a complete reversal of his political loyalties. His former friends are here ridiculed as self-interested hypocrites whose ambition to seize the government is frustrated by Britain’s true champion, Sir Robert Walpole—“a fat Gentleman who,” as the narrator observes, “appeared to have one of the pleasantest best-natured Countenances I had ever beheld.” What can have brought about this surprising volte-face? The answer, hinted at plainly enough in The Opposition, is that HF was seriously in need of money, and, his former patrons failing him, he had looked to Walpole for relief. The prime minister, whose fast-fading political fortunes might beneﬁt from the talents of such a writer as HF, answered his call. It is clear from HF’s remarks in the preface to Of True Greatness that Walpole’s agents had for more than a year been tempting him to desert the opposition. Indeed, that he had accepted money from Walpole is clear from HF’s own admission in The Champion (4 October 1740) that the minister had paid him “to stop the Publication of a Book”—the most likely candidate for that dubious distinction being The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great, eventually published in the Miscellanies more than a year after its brilliant satire of the “Great Man” could do him harm. A certain sign of improved relations between the two men is the fact of Walpole’s twenty-guinea subscription to that collection. Another sign, from HF’s letter to James Harris in March 1742 (Letter 13), is his declaring himself unable to “join the general Joy” at what then appeared to be the certain prospect of Walpole’s impeachment and disgrace. Only twice more, after the Miscellanies ﬁnally appeared in April 1743, did HF refer to Walpole in print. In The Charge to the Jury (1745), written in behalf of his friend John Ranby, he roasted the physicians who attended Walpole on his deathbed, plying him with specious remedies. And as his own life neared its end, he paused in The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) to remember his former adversary, who had become for him “one of the best of men and of ministers.” (For reading relevant to HF’s relations with Walpole, see Loftis 1963, Goldgar 1976, Cleary 1984, Beasley 1981, McCrea 1981, Thomson 1993, and Life.) WALTER, Peter (1664?–1746), moneylender and land steward. Walter, who was a member of Parliament for Bridport (1715–27) and Winchester (1728–34), lived at Stalbridge Park, Dorset, a few miles west of the Fielding farm at East Stour. By his grasping practices he acquired great riches and much property,

156

A Henry Fielding Companion

to which HF refers ironically in The Champion (31 May 1740). At the time of his death, he was reported to have been worth the enormous sum of £300,000. An enduring tradition—for which, however, there is no hard evidence—has it that when HF by his improvidence was forced to sell the farm in 1738, it was Walter who bought it. This appears to have been the belief even of HF’s close friend Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, who in 1743 facetiously made the unhappy bargain the subject of a poem, “A Dialogue between Peter Walters & Henry Fielding” (later published as “Peter and My Lord Quidam”). Extant records of the sale show, however, that the property was acquired by one Thomas Hayter. Yet HF, who like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift regarded Walter as the very type of avarice, satirized him during the early 1740s so frequently and with such contempt that it is reasonable to suppose he had some personal grievance to repay. In Joseph Andrews (1742) Walter is the original of Peter Pounce, Lady Booby’s steward, who lends money “at the moderate Premiums of ﬁfty per Cent. or a little more” (I. x); as Pounce he also makes a cameo appearance in Jonathan Wild (1743, II. vii). Elsewhere in the Miscellanies he is hit in “An Epigram on one who invited many Gentlemen to a small Dinner,” in “An Essay on Conversation,” in “Some Papers Proper to be Read before the R[oya]l Society”—of which, his name Latinized, he is the author Petrus Gualterus, collector of the “Terrestrial Chrysipus, Golden-Foot or Guinea”—and in A Journey from This World to the Next (I. i, vii), where he is ﬁgured as a “Miserable old Spirit” of vast wealth and no charity whom Minos turns away from the gates of Elysium. (On Walter, see Erskine-Hill 1975: 103–31.) WARBURTON, William (1698–1779), later Bishop of Gloucester. Among many other works, Warburton was best known to HF as the author of The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated (1738–41) and Julian (1750), and as the editor of Shakespeare (1747) and Alexander Pope (1751). In The Champion (31 May 1740) HF mocked Warburton’s tortured speculations on the hidden meanings of a text. Late the next year, however, Warburton joined Pope at Prior Park as Ralph Allen’s guest. Thus began a close relationship with HF’s patron that was cemented in 1745 when Warburton married Allen’s niece. From this time on, HF’s public references to this erudite but arrogant divine were either openly complimentary or, if critical of him, guardedly so. What he actually thought of Warburton is clear from the character of him he gave to James Harris in a letter from Bath of 24 September 1742 (Letter 14): We have here the great Warburton, Who resides at Mr Allen’s but sometimes visits [James] Leake’s [bookshop] where he harangued yest[er]day near two Hours: His Reading & Memory seem both very extraordinary, & his Knowledge of Things seems as extensive as [William] Young’s of Words. As to ye rest, Pride, Arrogance, Self Sufﬁciency and some other such Ecclesiastical Qualities compose his Character.

HF would later obliquely express his impatience with Warburton’s impudence as editor of Shakespeare in Tom Jones (1749, X. i) and The Covent-Garden

Others in the Life

157

Journal (18 April 1752), but his overt allusions are all complimentary. In the Miscellanies (1743) he twice found occasion—in a footnote to his burlesque of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire and in A Journey from This World to the Next (I. v)— to praise Warburton’s “most masterly Stile” and “profoundest Knowledge of Antiquity” in the Divine Legation of Moses. When proposing, in the ﬁrst number of The True Patriot (5 November 1745), that readers guess the identity of the author, HF includes Warburton among the eight gifted writers who are the likely candidates; and invoking the Muse of Learning in Tom Jones (XIII. i), he asks that she lend him “awhile that Key to all thy Treasures, which to thy Warburton thou hast entrusted.” For his part, Warburton in the notes to his edition of Pope’s Works (1751) cited HF and Marivaux as the two masters of the novel. WARD, Joshua “Spot” (1685–1761), empiric. A fashionable quack doctor, Ward claimed that his “Pill and Drop” were universal nostrums; they were in fact virulent preparations of antimony and arsenic that killed more than they cured. From the time he began practicing, he was the target of ridicule. HF found the mysterious but supposedly infallible properties of the Pill and Drop an amusing metaphor for the effects of Sir Robert Walpole’s foreign policy (Craftsman, 5 October 1734), or of ridicule (Common Sense, 21 May 1737), or of self-interest (Tom Jones [1749], VIII. ix), or of the good news brought to Amelia of Booth’s imminent release from the sponging house (Amelia [1751], VIII. ix). Other facetious allusions to Ward and his cure occur in The Champion (28 February and 26 August 1740) and A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. iii), where, in the underworld, the Lady Maladie Alamode inquires after “the Pill and Drop.” At the end of HF’s life, however, Ward was among a distinguished company of doctors whom he consulted, and in the introduction to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) he is mentioned with gratitude. WARNER, Reverend Ferdinando (1703–68). On 30 January 1748, in the Church of England calendar a holy day commemorating the martyrdom of Charles I, Warner preached a sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral before the Lord Mayor and aldermen. This annually was the occasion for political sermons that were sympathetic to the Stuarts, but Warner’s theme was pro-Hanoverian. In the “Court of Criticism” in The Jacobite’s Journal (26 March 1748) HF warmly commended him for exhorting the congregation to remain loyal to George II. Warner may also be the author of a pseudonymous contribution to the Journal (23 April 1748) proposing a scheme for “maintaining the Widows and Children of inferiour and distress’d Clergymen,” a cause to which HF himself subsequently devoted several more numbers (18, 25 June and 2, 9 July 1748). HF would return to this theme in Tom Jones (1749, IV. xiv)—in a footnote commenting on the fact that Sophia’s maid, Honour, was the granddaughter of a poor clergyman—and also implicitly in Amelia (1751, IV. ix), where Mrs. Bennet is the widow of a clergyman who has left her “in very indifferent Circumstances.” In 1752 Warner published under his own name A Scheme of a Fund

158

A Henry Fielding Companion

for the better Maintenance of the Widows and Children of the Clergy, again, perhaps, inspiring HF to resume the subject in The Covent-Garden Journal (6 June 1752). WARTON, Reverend Joseph (1722–1800), scholar and man of letters. Warton, one of the best of the “new poets” of the middle decades of the eighteenth century who experimented with the freer forms that HF preferred, published The Enthusiast: or, The Lover of Nature in 1744 and later, in An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756), would go on to prefer the “sublimity” of Shakespeare, Spenser, and John Milton to the “wit and sense” of the Augustans. In October 1746 Warton and a friend were twice cordially entertained by HF and his sister Sarah Fielding, the men sitting up conversing until the small hours of the morning after Sarah had retired. The cheerful scene that Warton describes in a letter to his brother Thomas of 29 October affords a rare glimpse of HF and Sarah together at Old Boswell Court. Warton attributed the hospitality shown him on these occasions to HF’s respect for his father, Thomas Warton the elder (c. 1688–1745), who, after leaving Oxford in 1723 where he had been Professor of Poetry, spent the last twenty years of his life as vicar of Basingstoke, Hampshire. (On the Wartons, see Vance 1983.) WASEY, Dr. William (1691–1757), physician. A distinguished physician who would become president of the Royal College, Wasey in 1735 attended HF’s mother-in-law, Elizabeth Cradock, in her ﬁnal illness, and he witnessed her will, in which she left everything to HF’s wife, Charlotte Fielding, cutting off her sister, Catherine, with just a shilling. In his burlesque of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire (line 353), published in the Miscellanies (1743), to which Wasey subscribed, HF includes him in a short list of fashionable physicians. WATTS, Reverend George (ﬂ. 1733–46), Preacher of the Society of Lincoln’s Inn. In his letter to James Harris from Bath, 24 September 1742 (Letter 14), HF writes cordially of Watts, a friend of Harris whom he recently met. He speaks of him as “inﬁnitely the most agreeable Companion I know in this Place,” pointedly contrasting his amiable qualities with the pride and arrogance of William Warburton. HF may have been introduced to Watts by their common friend Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, who was also at Bath at this time and who liked Watts equally well. Writing to Henry Fox in November 1742, he declares, “I . . . admire him of all Men of the Cloth that I ever met with.” WATTS, John (d. 1763), bookseller. A well-known theatrical publisher, Watts published twenty-three of HF’s plays (including the two versions of The Author’s Farce [1730, 1750] and The Old Debauchees [1732, 1745]). Six of these twenty-three, however, were issued under the imprint of James Roberts, who acted occasionally in this way for Watts: The Author’s Farce (1730), Tom Thumb (1730), The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), The Letter Writers (1731),

Others in the Life

159

and The Historical Register and Eurydice Hiss’d (published together in 1737). The only plays of HF’s that Watts did not have a hand in publishing were The Grub-Street Opera (1731 [1755]), Miss Lucy in Town (1742), The Wedding Day (1743), Eurydice (1743), and The Fathers (1778). From time to time after the passage of the Licensing Act in 1737 ended HF’s theatrical career, Watts also issued “nonce collections” of nineteen of the twenty-three plays, excluding Tom Thumb and Eurydice Hiss’d and the altered versions of The Author’s Farce and Old Debauchees. (For a succinct and graphic account of these publications, see Amory 1987b: 29–31.) Dated 4 April 1732, the original publication agreement between HF and Watts for “the despairing Debauchees” (published as The Old Debauchees) and “the Covent-Garden-Tragedy,” by which HF acknowledged receipt of 20 guineas, is in the Donald F. Hyde Collection, in care of Viscountess Eccles. For references to Watts in HF’s works, see Eurydice Hiss’d, where a spectator (“Third Gentleman”) who witnessed the damning of the farce reports, “And John Watts / Who was this Morning eager for the Copy, / Slunk hasty from the Pit, and shook his Head,” and the verses “J[oh]n W[at]ts at a Play” (Miscellanies [1743]). WELCH, Saunders (1711–84), peace ofﬁcer. After prospering in London as a grocer, Welch became High Constable for the Holborn Division. Despite his humble birth, Sir John Hawkins’s daughter remembered him as being, “in person, mind, and manners, most perfectly a gentleman,” and one of Samuel Johnson’s “best and dearest friends.” The bond between HF and Welch formed soon after HF’s appointments to the magistracies of Westminster and Middlesex. Welch played an important part in suppressing the riots of July 1749, performing a service that led HF in A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez to praise him as “one of the best Ofﬁcers who was ever concerned in the Execution of Justice, and to whose Care, Integrity and Bravery the Public hath . . . the highest Obligations.” He served HF faithfully, acting at the head of his new-model police force, the Bow Street Runners, and assisted by the intrepid ofﬁcer William Pentlow. In the year of HF’s death Welch dedicated to him a small book, Observations on the Office of Constable, intended to further the reforms he had initiated. In December 1753 HF wrote Lord Chancellor Hardwicke recommending Welch for the magistracy of Westminster and Middlesex, hoping to ensure that between them Welch and John Fielding would succeed him in the important work of court justice at Bow Street; it was not until March 1755, however, that Welch’s appointments as justice were approved. By the end of his life, the professional association between HF and Welch—a man, he declared in The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755, 26 June), “whom I never think or speak of but with love and esteem”—had deepened into the closest friendship. Welch accompanied the Fieldings on their voyage as far as Gravesend, and HF would remember him with gifts of cider from Devon and of onions from Lisbon. After HF’s death, Welch acted as his widow’s friend and protector. (On Welch as a police ofﬁcer, see “Janus” 1965.)

160

A Henry Fielding Companion

WEST, Gilbert (1703–56), poet. Like George Lyttelton and William Pitt, West, who was Lord Cobham’s nephew, was one of the circle of “boy patriots” who in 1734 joined in opposition to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. In The Champion (13 December 1739) HF in a brief notice praised West’s imitation of Edmund Spenser, A Canto of the Fairy Queen: “Were it not for the superior Harmony of [West’s] Versiﬁcation . . . and the Correctness of his Language, I could, without Difﬁculty, persuade myself, ’twas really a Fragment of that happy Genius, whom I never yet read but with Love and Admiration.” Lyttelton’s Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul (1747)—that “excellent Treatise,” HF called it in The Jacobite’s Journal (20 February 1748)—takes the form of a letter to West. WHITEFIELD, Reverend George (1714–70), evangelist. Under the leadership of the great evangelists Whiteﬁeld and John Wesley (1703–91), the Methodist movement gained momentum in the late 1730s, appealing chieﬂy to the lower classes. HF was among the earliest and most inveterate of its opponents, and though he glanced from time to time at Wesley, his principal target was Whiteﬁeld, whose uncompromising advocacy of Calvinist doctrine represented for him a “pernicious” threat to the social order. One feature of Whiteﬁeld’s program of reform, however, did appeal to him. In his sermons Whiteﬁeld denounced “the indolent, earthly-minded, pleasuretaking clergy of the church of England” and stressed the need to “restore the church to its primitive dignity.” In 1739 this criticism was dismissed as mere zealotry by Joseph Trapp in a series of sermons, The Nature, Folly, Sin, and Danger of Being Righteous Over-much, the scriptural phrase (Ecclesiastes 7:16) expressing an attitude of self-serving complacency shared in HF’s ﬁction by such contemptible priests as Arthur Williams in Shamela (1741, Letter IX), Barnabas in Joseph Andrews (1742, I. xvii), and Thwackum in Tom Jones (1749, XVIII. iv). In Joseph Andrews Parson Adams speaks for his author in rebuking Barnabas on this one issue: Sir . . . if Mr. Whitfield had carried his Doctrine no farther than you mention, I should have remained, as I once was, his Well-Wisher. I am myself as great an Enemy to the Luxury and Splendour of the Clergy as he can be. I do not, more than he, by the ﬂourishing Estate of the Church, understand the Palaces, Equipages, Dress, Furniture, rich Dainties, and vast Fortunes of her Ministers. Surely those things, which savour so strongly of this World, become not the Servants of one who professed his Kingdom was not of it.

Whiteﬁeld’s deeper purpose, however, was theological. He considered (with some justice) that the low church latitudinarianism of the leading divines of the Church of England was a betrayal of the Calvinistic tenor of the ThirtyNine Articles. To the multitudes who heard him in the ﬁelds around London, he denounced as mere morality the religion of HF’s favorite authorities: Isaac Barrow, John Tillotson, Samuel Clarke, Benjamin Hoadly. They preached

Others in the Life

161

that sincerity and the performance of good works were more important to salvation than the doctrines of grace and of justiﬁcation by faith alone. From HF’s point of view, Whiteﬁeld, more than any other contemporary theologian, was the enemy, whose charismatic Calvinism, by stressing man’s depravity and emphasizing faith over good works, made religion a convenient mask for hypocrisy. The popular representation of the great Methodist’s message was: “So you say you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you may live the life of devils” (Whiteﬁeld’s Works [1771–72], V. 135). This was, of course, a gross distortion. True faith, Whiteﬁeld insisted, renewed the spirit and bore fruit in good works. But HF appears to have accepted it uncritically. Repeatedly, Whiteﬁeld and his “Sect” are targets of his sharpest satire. In Joseph Andrews (I. xvii), in a passage that summarizes HF’s religious thought more clearly than any other in his writings, Parson Adams again speaks for his author: When [Whiteﬁeld] began to call Nonsense and Enthusiasm to his Aid, and to set up the detestable Doctrine of Faith against good Works, I was his Friend no longer; for surely, that Doctrine was coined in Hell, and one would think none but the Devil himself could have the Conﬁdence to preach it. For can any thing be more derogatory to the Honour of God, than for Men to imagine that the All-wise Being will hereafter say to the Good and Virtuous, Notwithstanding the Purity of thy Life, notwithstanding that constant Rule of Virtue and Goodness in which you walked upon Earth, still as thou did’st not believe every thing in the true Orthodox manner, thy want of Faith shall condemn thee? Or on the other side, can any Doctrine have a more pernicious Inﬂuence on Society than a Persuasion, that it will be a good Plea for the Villain at the last day; Lord, it is true I never obeyed one of thy Commandments, yet punish me not, for I believe them all?” “I suppose, Sir” said the Bookseller, “your Sermons are of a different Kind.” “Ay, Sir,” said Adams, “the contrary, I thank Heaven, is inculcated in almost every Page, or I should belye my own Opinion, which hath always been, that a virtuous and good Turk, or Heathen, are more acceptable in the sight of their Creator, than a vicious and wicked Christian, tho’ his Faith was as perfectly Orthodox as St. Paul’s himself.”

HF’s satiric attacks on Whiteﬁeld and the Methodists may have begun as early as an anonymous contribution to The Craftsman (8 September 1739; New Essays: 493–505). He is mocked in the Lucianic dream vision in The Champion (24 May 1740), Miss Lucy in Town (1742), and The True Patriot (1–8 April 1746). In The Female Husband (1746) Mary Hamilton is initiated into lesbianism by a Methodist; in Tom Jones (1749) Captain Bliﬁl is “not a little suspected of an Inclination to Methodism” (I. x); his villainous son turns “Methodist, in hopes of marrying a very rich Widow of that Sect” (XVIII. xiii); and the reader is assured that the honest master of the Bell Inn, though Whiteﬁeld’s brother, “is absolutely untainted with the pernicious Principles of Methodism” (VIII. viii). In Amelia (1751, I. iv) Booth in Newgate has his pocket picked by a Methodist. (On Whiteﬁeld, see Pollock 1972 and Lambert 1994.) WHITEHEAD, Paul (1710–74), author. A virulent satirist allied to the Tory opposition to Sir Robert Walpole and Henry Pelham, Whitehead and HF

162

A Henry Fielding Companion

collided in the events surrounding the violently contested parliamentary election for Westminster in the autumn of 1749, when Whitehead acted as leader of the antiministerial mobs at the hustings and as propagandist for the George Vandeput faction, and HF, as court justice, exerted himself in keeping the peace and promoting the cause of the ministry’s candidate, Lord Trentham. In September, shortly before the electioneering began, Whitehead, as “Con” Phillips’s ghost, had concluded her Apology with a vicious attack on HF’s character. Although HF may not have known who was responsible for this libel, he could not help being aware of Whitehead’s role as Tory incendiary in the election. In December he ridiculed him as “Paul Wronghead,” author of inane arguments in favor of Vandeput published in a satirical broadsheet called The Covent-Garden Journal. For his part, Whitehead impugned HF’s biased conduct in the election in The Case of the Hon. Alexander Murray (1751), an angry vindication of the Jacobite martyr who had been punished by Parliament for improperly attempting to secure Vandeput’s election. WILD, Jonathan (1682?–1725), gangster. The most notorious criminal of his day, Wild was both the head of a gang of thieves and the receiver of their stolen goods. He enforced discipline among the gang members by impeaching those who deﬁed his authority and collecting the reward. When he was hanged on 24 May 1725, the mob celebrated by hurling brickbats and other missiles at the scaffold, a scene HF appears to have witnessed and recalled in The Craftsman (5 June 1736; New Essays: 152). The historic Wild—or rather the infamous ﬁgure he became in the popular imagination—was the inspiration for HF’s novel, The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great (1743, revised 1754), as he was for the character of Peachum in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728). But it was never HF’s intent to write an authentic biography of Wild, as Daniel Defoe had done. Long before 1740 Wild had become the ironic type of the “Great Man”—a ﬁgure most particularly of the Great Man himself, the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. Scholars continue to debate the hypothesis that HF originally drafted the novel as a satire of Walpole during the period of his authorship of The Champion (1739–40) and that he was paid to suppress it. However that may be, the work was not published until April 1743, more than a year after Walpole had been removed from power, when it appeared as Volume 3 of the Miscellanies. By then HF would have had no wish to target Walpole alone, who indeed had subscribed generously to the collection. In the preface HF explicitly cautions the reader against making any such application of the satire: “Roguery, and not a Rogue, is my Subject; and as I have been so far from endeavouring to particularize any Individual, that I have with my utmost Art avoided it; so will any such Application be unfair in my Reader, especially if he knows much of the Great World, since he must then be acquainted, I believe, with more than one on whom he can ﬁx the Resemblance.” Such disclaimers notwithstanding, the identiﬁcation of Walpole with Wild had

Others in the Life

163

been a commonplace of political writing for more than a decade. Very few of HF’s ﬁrst readers could have failed to make the connection. (On Wild, see Howson 1970. On the question of HF’s use of Wild in the novel, see, among other sources, Irwin 1941; Life:280–82; and Misc 3 WE.) WILKS, Robert (1665?–1732), actor and theatrical manager. With Colley Cibber and Barton Booth, Wilks was one of the triumvirate who jealously governed the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane from 1720 to 1732. Reluctant though they usually were to accept the work of untried playwrights for production, they nevertheless were enough impressed with HF’s talent to produce his ﬁrst play, Love in Several Masques, in February 1728, with Cibber in the part of Rattle and Wilks as Merital. In the preface to the published version, HF could not “sufﬁciently acknowledge their civil and kind Behaviour” to him. The comedy proved a disappointment, however, closing after just four nights, and the managers would not soon again risk staging another of his plays. HF had to carry The Temple Beau to Goodman’s Fields in 1730, and The Wedding Day, for which he had written the part of Millamour with Wilks speciﬁcally in mind, would not be produced until 1743. HF expressed his resentment at these rebuffs in The Author’s Farce (1730) at the Little Haymarket Theatre, in which Cibber and Wilks are ridiculed, with some bitterness, in the characters of Marplay and his parrot Sparkish, who will accept no play for production if “the Author has no Interest.” In less than two years, however, HF would return in triumph to Drury Lane, and Cibber and Wilks would appear together in what is HF’s best regular comedy, The Modern Husband—Cibber as Lord Richly, Wilks as Mr. Bellamant. Wilks also spoke the prologue, with Cibber providing the epilogue. Wilks died before that season ﬁnished, leaving his third of the patent of the theater to his wife, who enlisted HF’s friend John Ellys to act as her deputy. In later years HF recalled how Wilks had shone in “the gayer Characters” of comedy (Jacobite’s Journal, 23 April 1748). In Tom Jones (1749, IV. i) he relates an amusing anecdote from the past concerning the “Brother Manager[s]” Wilks and Booth. In the Covent-Garden Journal (4 February 1752; see also 22 February) he reﬂected more seriously on the depressing consequences for the Drury Lane Theatre of the triumvirate’s “discountenancing, and keeping back any Actor of apparent Genius.” WILLIAMS, Sir Charles Hanbury. See Hanbury Williams, Sir Charles. WILLIAMSON, Reverend Dr. John (c. 1713–63), Fellow of the Royal Society. Williamson, a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and doctor of divinity, was chaplain to the British Factory at Lisbon during HF’s time there. For his skill in mathematics he had been elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1749. He was, HF wrote to his brother John Fielding, “every Way the cleverest Fellow I ever saw, and . . . my chief Companion” (Letter 75). Margaret Collier, who accompanied the Fieldings to Lisbon as governess of HF’s daughter Harriet,

164

A Henry Fielding Companion

was no less Williamson’s admirer and set her cap to have him for a husband. Her unseemly behavior (as it appeared to HF) infuriated him, and would lead to Margaret’s expulsion from the family. When HF died on 8 October 1754, Williamson would have attended at the English cemetery to perform the burial service. (See Hampton 1965: 20, 60, and de Castro 1915: 251.) WILLOUGHBY, Richard (c. 1703–62), Justice of Peace. Willoughby was of a family of that name residing at West Knoyle, Wiltshire, a village not far from the Fieldings’ farm at East Stour, Dorset. He was a friend of HF, who in Tom Jones (1749, VIII. xi) has Partridge recall a time when a horse thief was carried before “Justice Willoughby of Noyle, a very worthy good Gentleman.” Willoughby, who preferred the town to the country, sold the estate after inheriting it in 1731. He was living in London at Southampton Buildings in 1727 when he was responsible for apprehending Henry Fisher, the murderer of Widdrington Darby, a notorious case that HF cites in Tom Jones (VIII. i) as exemplifying for a novelist a degree of wickedness beyond the rule of “Probability.” He was a subscriber to HF’s Miscellanies (1743). WINNINGTON, Thomas (1696–1746), politician. A courtier who held important places in the ministries of Sir Robert Walpole and Henry Pelham, Winnington appears to have been on friendly terms with HF, though nothing much is known of their relationship. He subscribed to a set of the Miscellanies (1743) on royal paper. Horace Walpole relates an anecdote concerning HF and Winnington that occurred after the publication of Joseph Andrews (1742): it seems that when HF approached Winnington for a loan of £500, the latter replied he would lend him that sum “upon any Body’s Life that you will write” (Coley, 1966: 169). After Winnington’s death, there appeared an anonymous pamphlet purporting to be his authentic memoirs, entitled An Apology for the Conduct of a Late Celebrated Second-Rate Minister (1747), which represented virtually every minister of the century to date, including Walpole and Pelham, as Jacobites in disguise, dedicated to pursuing policies so ruinous that the nation would wish to expel their German kings and restore the Stuarts to the throne. HF replied immediately with A Proper Answer to this “Scurrilous Libel.” WOFFINGTON, Margaret “Peg” (1714?–60), actress. Among her ﬁrst roles at Drury Lane was the part of Charlotte in HF’s The Wedding Day (1743). In that year her name appears as a subscriber to the Miscellanies, where, in “Juvenal’s Sixth Satire Modernized in Burlesque Verse” (line 93), HF alludes to her and “Kitty” Clive acting in men’s clothes. In The Jacobite’s Journal (6 February 1748) the two are linked again as actresses who “copy Nature.” They are less amicably joined in The Covent-Garden Journal (22 February 1752), where HF, without naming them, recalls a shrill altercation between the two vying for “Pre-eminence.” (On Wofﬁngton and the contemporary theater, see Dunbar 1968.)

Others in the Life

165

WOOD, Peter, brothelkeeper. Wood, keeper of the Star, a notorious brothel in the Strand, was at the center of the rioting in July 1749 that resulted in the execution of Bosavern Penlez. It was the questionable testimony of Wood, his wife, and his servant, who accused Penlez of taking part in the riot and looting the house, that condemned him. Two years later in an unrelated incident, Saunders Welch, acting on a warrant from HF, searched the brothel and found evidence enabling HF to commit Wood, his wife, and ﬁve prostitutes to Bridewell, the house of correction. WOODFALL, George, bookseller, whose shop was located “at the King’s Arms, near Craig’s Court, Charing Cross.” The son of Henry Woodfall the elder, he was a partner in the publication of The True Patriot (1745–46) and Jacobite’s Journal (1747–48), in Ovid’s Art of Love Paraphrased (1747), and in The Public Advertiser—the last mentioned being the name adopted on 1 December 1752 by the paper that for eighteen years had been The General Advertiser. HF owned shares in the paper, in which he published notices relating to his war against crime; it also served as a continuing vehicle for the business of the Universal Register Office. WOODFALL, Henry, the elder (ﬂ. 1724–47), printer, whose establishment was located without Temple Bar. A friend of Alexander Pope, who is said to have set him up in business, he printed the ﬁrst and second editions of Joseph Andrews (1742), the proposals for HF’s Miscellanies (June 1742), and probably Volume 2 of the Miscellanies (1743). WOODWARD, Henry (1714–77), comedian. Woodward joined David Garrick at Drury Lane in 1748, where he continued as principal comedian for ten years. In the “Journal of the Paper War” in The Covent-Garden Journal (11 January 1752), HF’s persona “highly” commends his acting. In November of that year HF took sides with Woodward and Garrick when “War,” as he calls it in the Journal (18 November), broke out between the rival theaters, with Dr. John Hill, as “The Inspector” in The London Daily Advertiser, intervening as the champion of John Rich at Covent Garden. With Woodward playing Harlequin, Garrick had introduced scenes into the pantomime Harlequin Ranger that mocked an entertainment of wire dancing and the antics of strange animals at Rich’s theater. When a party friendly to Rich went to Drury Lane to damn Garrick’s play, one of their number—a “Gentleman” named Richard Fitzpatrick—threw an apple at Woodward, who answered the affront with sarcasm. HF became involved in the affair when Fitzpatrick threatened to sue the comedian, Woodward and his witnesses swearing afﬁdavits before HF at Bow Street denying he intended any insult. The spat engendered the usual litter of pamphlets, among them A Letter from Henry Woodward, Comedian . . . to Dr. John Hill (2 December), which was mistakenly attributed to HF, or to HF in collaboration with Garrick. (See Rizzo 1985: 344 n. 19.) HF had entered the fray in the ﬁnal

166

A Henry Fielding Companion

two numbers of the Journal (18 and 25 November), ridiculing Hill as “the Trumpeter” of “the Ninnies” who opposed Garrick. It was a playful riposte that Hill countered with appalling invective. But HF and his friends had a ﬁnal, hilarious ﬂing at their antagonist on stage at Drury Lane. For Woodward’s beneﬁt on 20 March 1753 Garrick revived HF’s Mock Doctor, with Woodward appearing in the title role impersonating Hill, the “new” mock-doctor, to perfection—his foppish dress, his smirk, his waddle of a walk. For the occasion Christopher Smart composed a prologue for Woodward to speak that exquisitely pointed up the satire, but the Lord Chamberlain quashed it. (See Rizzo 1974.) Woodward was among HF’s friends who attended the auction of his library in 1755. WYCHERLEY, William (1641–1715), playwright and poet. To judge from the number of references to them in HF’s writings, Wycherley was less often in HF’s thoughts than William Congreve. But from the beginning of his literary career, HF ranked him with the greatest dramatists in English. In the burlesque of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1729/30, II. 221) he is linked to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Congreve as having set the standard for excellence in comedy. In The Author’s Farce (1730, III. i) in a similar context Wycherley and Congreve are again his models. And in Tom Jones (1749, IX. i), although Thomas Otway replaces Congreve in the short list of dramatists who are capable of “the nicest Strokes . . . of Nature,” Wycherley remains. More interesting than such general applause is the speciﬁc, but qualiﬁed, compliment HF pays him in the preface to Plutus (1742), while commending the simplicity of Aristophanes’ language. Although he acknowledges Wycherley to be the inventor and master of the witty, conceited dialogue that served to deﬁne the comedies of an earlier generation, he regrets that the model he left has proved in his followers inimitable and sterile: “The most dangerous and fatal Enemies we are to dread, are those whom this very Simplicity may offend; the Admirers of that pretty, dapper, brisk, smart, pert Dialogue, which hath lately ﬂourished on our Stage. This,” he continues, “was ﬁrst introduced with inﬁnite Wit by Wycherley, and continued with still less and less by his Successors, till it is at last degenerated into such sort of Pleasantry” as may be found in Colley Cibber’s Provok’d Husband. Like Pope, to whom Wycherley rashly submitted his verse for criticism, HF found that the very gift of conceited phrasing that enlivens Wycherley’s comedies made his poems unreadable. Wycherley, he observes in The Champion (20 November 1739), “one of the best of our comic Writers, left the Drama, where he had acquired so great and so just an Applause, to write some of the worst Poems that any Age hath produced.” (On Wycherley, see McCarthy 1979.) XENOPHON (c. 430–after 355 B.C.), Greek historian and philosophical essayist. Xenophon is one of the trio of Greek historians whom HF, in the preface to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), prefers to Homer: “Though I read [the Iliad and Odyssey] with more admiration and astonishment, I still read

Others in the Life

167

Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon with more amusement and satisfaction.” A copy of Xenophon’s Opera (1625), in Greek and Latin, was in HF’s library (Ribbles, X1); and presumably he would have known the Anabasis, an account of the disastrous expedition of Cyrus against his brother Ataxerxes, and the Hellenica, which takes up the history of the Peloponnesian War at the point where Thucydides concludes. This, however, is only a plausible conjecture, since, though HF praises Xenophon as a historian, he refers just once (if at all) to a speciﬁc historical work of the author: in The Crisis (1741), which is probably, if not certainly, by HF, the author quotes Xenophon stating that “whoever sells himself for Hire” is called a prostitute; but the work in question has not been identiﬁed. Like his sister Sarah Fielding, who with James Harris’s assistance translated the work, HF did know and value Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates. This at least seems a reasonable inference from HF’s remark to Harris in a letter of 24 November 1744 replying to his friend’s condolences on the death of his wife Charlotte Fielding: In a Word, you ﬁrst awakened an Idea in me that true Philosophy consisted in Habit only, without cultivating which in our own Minds, we should no more become Philosophers by reading the Pages of Plato and Xenophon, than great Poets by perusing the Works of Homer and Virgil. (Letter 23)

YONGE, Sir William (1693–1755), politician. Yonge, who entered Parliament as Sir Robert Walpole rose to power, made himself useful to the prime minister in the House of Commons, where he delivered speeches consisting chieﬂy of eloquently expressed platitudes. As a reward for his obsequiousness, he enjoyed several lucrative posts in the government, but it was as Secretary of State for War, promoting the minister’s paciﬁst policies at a time when Spanish depredations against English ships had aroused public sentiment for war, that he became a target of HF’s satire. In articles published simultaneously in The Craftsman and Common Sense on 13 May 1738, HF characterized Yonge as Walpole’s unprincipled parasite, whose empty eloquence served his master well. In The Champion (7 June 1740) HF derives Yonge’s Christian name from “violin, which might typify some nonsensical, talkative fellow, who abounded much in sound; or might allude to some one who might not improperly be played upon with a good stick”; and in the Vernoniad (1741) he is “little Billy,” Walpole’s favorite sycophant. YOUNG, Reverend Edward (1683–1765), poet. HF’s earliest references to Young’s writings occur in the annotations of “H. Scriblerus Secundus” to The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), where there are a dozen references to passages of bombast and fustian in the poet’s tragedies, Busiris (1719) and The Revenge (1721), as well as one ironic allusion to “all the Beauties” of Young’s ode Imperium Pelagi: A Naval Lyrick (1730). This ridicule of a poem, as distinct from a play, by Young is unique in HF’s works, who otherwise expressed his

168

A Henry Fielding Companion

admiration of Young’s poetical genius, often indeed paying him the ultimate compliment of comparison with Alexander Pope—as in the Miscellanies (1743) (see “The Queen of Beauty” and “An Essay on Conversation”). The compliments begin as early as the “Epistle to Lyttleton” (1733) and continue in The Champion (17 July, 6 September 1740); in Of True Greatness (1741), where Young is the Muses’ “Darling”; in Jonathan Wild (1743, III, ii), where HF quotes from Night Thoughts, I (1742) by “the excellent Poet”; in The CoventGarden Journal (17 March 1752), where Pope is said to have included “the ingenious Dr. Young” in the small circle of his favorite writers, and where, later in the Journal (22 August), HF, referring to Young by the same laudatory epithet, quotes from his Love of Fame, the Universal Passion, Satire 1 (1725). (On Young, see Bliss 1969.) YOUNG, Reverend William (1689–57). The traditional account of Young, followed in the Wesleyan edition of Joseph Andrews and elsewhere, is incorrect with respect to the place and date of his birth and details of his education. The biographical information given here has been emended according to new information made available to me by Dr. Ribble, whose important article on Young is forthcoming. Young was a native of Gillingham, Dorset, a town just a short distance from the Fieldings’ farm at East Stour. He was appointed curate of East and West Stour in 1730, and in 1732 was made master of the Gillingham Free School. His close and lasting friendship with HF, whose farm adjoined the church at East Stour, probably dates from this period, but since it is now known that Young’s family was living in Gillingham all the while the Fieldings resided nearby, it is entirely possible they were acquainted much earlier. Although Young so little appreciated the compliment that he threatened to knock a man down who mentioned it to him, he was HF’s model for the learned, good-natured Parson Abraham Adams in Joseph Andrews (1742), the most delightful character in all his ﬁction. So close was the resemblance that James Harris, who knew Young well, could declare in his memoir of HF that “no character was ever more truly exhibited.” Appropriately, Young served as witness when HF assigned the copyright of the novel to Andrew Millar in April 1742. Late in 1740 Young followed HF to London and thereafter assisted him in various literary projects. As Lockwood suggests, he probably contributed the erudite reviews in HF’s short-lived magazine The History of Our Own Times (1741), and they collaborated in a translation of Aristophanes’ Plutus (1742). Young is the likely author of a letter from “Abraham Adams” appearing in HF’s Jacobite’s Journal (9 July 1748), and in 1752 he appears to have assisted in The Covent-Garden Journal by culling from the newspapers items interesting or ludicrous enough for HF’s comments. This was also the year in which the two friends proposed to translate the works of Lucian, a project HF puffed in vain in the Journal (30 June 1752), declaring in reference to Young’s part in the work that he would have “the universal Concurrence of those learned Men

Others in the Life

169

of this Age to whom he is known that no Man now alive is better versed in that Language in which the Wit of Lucian lies as yet concealed.” Although nothing came of this proposal, Young more than justiﬁed this compliment to his competence in the classical languages by revising Ainsworth’s Latin Dictionary (1752) and correcting Hederich’s Greek Lexicon (1755). During these years Young was also active in his calling as a clergyman. In 1743 his fame as the original of Parson Adams resulted in his appointment as chaplain to the army hospitals in Flanders, where, shortly after the British victory at Dettingen, he was for a time detained by the French after wandering absentmindedly into the enemy’s camp. After peace was declared, he was recommended by HF’s friend John Ranby for a place at Chelsea Royal Hospital, where he passed the rest of his life. He was survived by his son, William, also a clergyman, and by his widow, Grace. YOUNGE, Edward (1689–1773), of Little Durnford, Wiltshire. A friend of HF and James Harris, who, while residing in The Close at Salisbury, held the manor of Great Durnford nearby. In his letters to Harris in the autumn of 1743, HF refers facetiously to Younge. In Letter 18 he wonders whether “Dulness” might not be found in the valley of Little Durnford (or “Dunceford”), and in Letter 19, which takes the form of a mock-“Process” at law summoning Harris to Bath, Younge is represented as Richard “Beau” Nash’s “Vice-Snash,” too illiterate to sign his name. He subscribed to HF’s Miscellanies (1743).

Works by Fielding

JOURNALISM The Champion: or British Mercury (No. 1:15 November 1739–No. 63: 8 April 1740). By Capt. Hercules Vinegar. Continued from No. 64: 10 April 1740 until 1743 as The Champion: or, Evening Advertiser, though HF’s participation in the paper ceased about the end of 1740. In partnership with his friend James Ralph, HF founded this lively periodical of comment on literary, social, and moral subjects, their target in politics being the corrupt administration of the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. For an account of the journal’s conception and complex history of publication, as well as HF’s part in it, see Life:257–89. Most of the essays and a selection of the news items from 15 November 1739 to 19 June 1740 were reprinted (against HF’s wishes) under the title, The Champion: Containing a Series of Papers, Humourous, Moral, Political and Critical, 2 vols. (1741). Until the publication of the Wesleyan Edition, the fullest selection of essays generally available is in Henley, vol. 15. For a collection of The Voyages of Mr. Job Vinegar, HF’s series of papers in imitation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels published in The Champion, see Sackett (1958). The fullest run of the original numbers is at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The Covent-Garden Journal (No. 1: 4 January–No. 72: 25 November 1752). By Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great Britain. The last of HF’s periodicals and the only one in which he could afford to ignore politics to concentrate on more congenial subjects—morality, social satire, literary criticism. In a department of the journal HF also kept the public informed of cases that came before him in his capacity as Bow Street magistrate. (WE, Goldgar)

172

A Henry Fielding Companion

The Jacobite’s Journal (No. 1: 5 December 1747–No. 49: 5 November 1748). By John Trott-Plaid, Esq. Writing not long after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–46 had failed to overthrow the Hanoverian monarchy, HF, who acted as chief propagandist for the administration of Henry Pelham, ironically adopted this persona in order to ridicule the Tory opposition as being closet Jacobites. In No. 17 (26 March 1748), however, he “pull[ed] off the Masque” and continued promoting the government’s interests in his own voice, having found “no Kind of Humour so liable to be mistaken” as “Irony.” Although his concerns in the journal are chieﬂy political, he gives considerable space as well to social and literary commentary, as, for example, in his favorable reviews of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (2 January and 5 March 1748). (WE, Coley) The True Patriot: and the History of Our Own Times (No. 1: 5 November 1745– No. 33: 17 June 1746). HF undertook this periodical at the height of the Jacobite rebellion under Charles Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender,” his purpose being to rouse the nation in defense of the Hanoverian monarchy and the government of Henry Pelham. He brought the journal to a close soon after the defeat of the rebels in April 1746. (WE, Coley) In addition to the four periodicals listed above, for which HF was chieﬂy or wholly responsible as editor and author, he also contributed at least two pseudonymous essays to Charles Molloy’s journal, Common Sense: • Letter from “Pasquin” defending the public utility of satire on the stage and protesting the imminent passage of the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, in Common Sense, No. 16 (21 May 1737). Reprinted in New Essays: Appendix B. • Letter from “Mum Budget” on the wisdom of silence, in Common Sense, No. 67 (13 May 1738). Written a year after HF’s dramatic satires had provoked the Walpole government to silence him by passing the Theatrical Licensing Act, the manuscript of this witty essay is in the Public Record Ofﬁce; it is the only holograph copy of a work of literary prose by HF. See Battestins 1980; reprinted in New Essays: Appendix B.

Listed in “Works Probably by Fielding: Journalism,” are more than ﬁfty other anonymous or pseudonymous articles that have been cogently attributed to him. LEGAL AND SOCIAL WORKS A Charge delivered to the Grand Jury, at the Sessions of the Peace held for the City and Liberty of Westminster, &c. on Thursday the 29th of June, 1749. (Publ. A. Millar, 21 July 1749.) Soon after his appointments to the magistracy in October 1748 (for Westminster) and January 1749 (for Middlesex County), HF was elected chairman of the Westminster Sessions and in that capacity addressed the grand jury in June 1749. The Charge is his ﬁrst publication after the appearance of Tom Jones in February of this year, and it is the ﬁrst of several important works he

Works by Fielding

173

would subsequently publish on social problems. He here exhorts the members of the jury strictly to enforce the laws against public immorality: “This Fury after licentious and luxurious Pleasures” which had become, in his opinion, “the Characteristic of the present Age.” (WE ECIR, Zirker) A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning, Who hath sworn that she was robbed and almost starved to Death by a Gang of Gipsies and other Villains in January last, for which one Mary Squires now lies under Sentence of Death. (Publ. A. Millar, 20 March 1753.) Elizabeth Canning, a servant girl of eighteen, claimed to have been abducted and held against her will in an outlying suburb of London for four weeks before she made her escape. HF, who as magistrate had examined the girl and those she accused, remained convinced of her innocence despite evidence that she had perjured herself. His was the ﬁrst of many pamphlets to be published on this sensational case, which remained a topic of heated controversy for many months. (WE ECIR, Zirker) An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers, &c. with some Proposals for Remedying this growing Evil. In which the Present Reigning Vices are impartially exposed; and the Laws that relate to the Provision for the Poor, and to the Punishment of Felons are largely and freely examined. (Publ. A. Millar, 19 January 1751.) Dedicated to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, this is the most important and—with regard to what it reveals about HF’s social thought—most illuminating of his social tracts. Convinced that the “Constitution” of England was being undermined by luxury seeping down from the great, who were above the laws, to infect the lower classes, HF identiﬁes the symptoms of this social disease—among them, drunkenness and the popularity of masquerades and gaming—and proposes reforms in the penal laws that would facilitate the apprehension and punishment of malefactors. (WE, Zirker; Life: 512–21) Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder. Containing, above thirty Cases, in which this dreadful Crime has been brought to Light, in the most extraordinary and miraculous Manner; collected from various authors, antient and modern. (Publ. A. Millar, 13 April 1752.) HF wrote only the introduction and conclusion to this monitory pamphlet aimed at a young and impressionable readership. He dedicated it to Isaac Maddox, bishop of Worcester, who had recently preached an inﬂuential sermon on the evils of gin drinking, in which he praised HF for taking up the same theme in his Enquiry. (WE ECIR, Zirker) A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor, for Amending their Morals, and for Rendering them useful Members of the Society. (Publ. A. Millar, 29 January 1753.) This fascinating if quixotic work, which

174

A Henry Fielding Companion

like the Enquiry reveals so much about the humane conservatism of HF’s social thought, proposes the erection of a vast county workhouse in which the poor would be decently housed, learn a useful trade and be paid for their labor, and be instructed in their religious duty to society. The aim of the Proposal is nothing less than the rehabilitation of an entire class of people—at present idle, useless, demoralized. HF dedicated the work to the prime minister, Henry Pelham, but it came to nothing. (WE ECIR, Zirker) “A Treatise on the Ofﬁce of Constable,” published posthumously in Sir John Fielding’s Extracts from such of the Penal Laws, as particularly relate to the Peace and Good Order of this Metropolis (1761). As a magistrate HF was concerned with organizing an effective police force of constables who understood their responsibilities under the law when preserving the peace and apprehending criminals. The treatise, assembled by his brother from notes HF left behind at his death, reﬂects these concerns. In part it closely resembles his account in the Enquiry (1751), section VII, of the laws pertaining to making arrests and raising hue and cry. For a transcript of HF’s earlier plan to reform the watch and constabulary, which on 21 July 1749 he submitted without result to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke in the form of a “Bill” to be put before Parliament, see Life: Appendix 1. A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez, Who suffered on Account of the late Riot in the Strand. In which the Law regarding these Offences, and the Statute of George the First commonly called the Riot Act, are fully considered. (Publ. A. Millar, 18 November 1749.) As magistrate, HF and his constables had been active in July in quelling a series of dangerous riots directed against brothels in the Strand. On the eve of the Westminster parliamentary by-election, in which the court candidate was brother-in-law to HF’s patron, the Duke of Bedford, HF published this defense of the government’s unpopular decision to hang a young man, Bosavern Penlez, who had taken advantage of the riots to take part in the looting of a brothel. (WE ECIR, Zirker; Battestin with Battestin 1977–78) MISCELLANIES (1743) Published by HF by subscription in 3 volumes on 7 April 1743 and distributed by A. Millar, who later this month issued a so-called second edition, this is a collection of various works by HF, including poetry, prose essays, a translation, plays, and two important works of prose ﬁction. For commentary see under those headings in this section. • Volume 1 contains a list of subscribers (see Appendix to WE, vol. 3); a preface; poems, the most important of which are “Of True Greatness,” “Of Good-Nature,” “Liberty,” “To a Friend on the Choice of a Wife,” “To John Hayes, Esq.,” and “Part of Juvenal’s

Works by Fielding

175

Sixth Satire Modernized in Burlesque Verse”; prose, including “Essay on Conversation,” “Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” “Essay on Nothing,” “Some Papers Proper to be Read before the R[oya]l Society,” “Of the Remedy of Afﬂiction for the Loss of Our Friends,” “A Dialogue between Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic”; a play, “Interlude between Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, and Mercury”; and a translation, “The First Olynthiac of Demosthenes.” (WE, Miller; see also Miller 1961) • Volume 2 contains the prose ﬁction, A Journey from This World to the Next; and the plays, Eurydice and The Wedding-Day. (WE, Goldgar and Amory) • Volume 3 contains the prose ﬁction, The History of the Life of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. (WE, Goldgar and Amory)

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE The Charge to the Jury: or, The Sum of the Evidence, on the Trial of A.B.C.D. and E.F. All M.D. For the Death of One Robert at Orfud, at a Special Commission of Oyer and Terminer held at Justice-College, in W[arwi]ck Lane, before Sir Asculapius Dosem, Dr. Timberhead, and Others their Fellows, Justices, &c. (Publ. M. Cooper, 2 July 1745.) Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford and formerly as prime minister the most powerful man in England, died in March of this year. In this satiric pamphlet, HF takes the side of his friend, the eminent surgeon John Ranby, who had sparked a pamphlet war by publicly accusing the physicians who attended Walpole in his ﬁnal illness of incompetence. (Jarvis 1946) A Dialogue between a Gentleman of London, Agent for two Court Candidates, and an Honest Alderman of the Country Party. Wherein the Grievances under which the Nation at present groans are fairly and impartially laid open and considered. Earnestly address’d to the Electors of Great-Britain. (Publ. M. Cooper, 23 June 1747.) With its mischievous title calculated to mislead the opposition (or “Country Party”) into believing it supported their cause, this pamphlet, the most skillful of all HF’s serious political writings, was written in behalf of his friends in the Pelham administration on the eve of the general election—an election called by the government a year early to take the opposition by surprise. (WE JJ, Coley) A Dialogue between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender. (Publ. M. Cooper, 12–15 October 1745.) In this, the last of three anti-Jacobitical pamphlets that issued from HF’s pen in less than a fortnight on the occasion of the rebellion of 1745, the devil himself dismisses the attempt of his agents, the pope and Charles Edward Stuart, to subjugate such a brave and freedom-loving nation as England: “None of your wild Projects for me.” (WE TP, Coley) “An Essay on Conversation” (in Miscellanies, vol. 1 [1743]). An analysis of the rules of social intercourse in its widest sense: “True Good-Breeding con-

176

A Henry Fielding Companion

sists in contributing, with our utmost Power, to the Satisfaction and Happiness of all about us.” (WE, Miller) “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men” (in Miscellanies, vol. 1 [1743]). A monitory analysis of the nature and varieties of hypocrisy in particular, the hypocrite being, in HF’s moral system, the most malignant and dangerous of villains. (WE, Miller) The Female Husband: or, The Surprising History of Mrs. Mary, alias Mr. George Hamilton, Who was convicted of having married a Young Woman of Wells and lived with her as her Husband. Taken from her own Mouth since her Conﬁnement. (Publ. M. Cooper, 12 November 1746.) The germ of this strange and disturbing work of ﬁction was a scandal that had recently come to the light in HF’s native Somersetshire. At Glastonbury in September, Mary Hamilton, a lesbian transvestite, was arrested for having duped a young woman of Wells into marrying her. (FH; for a critical discussion of the work, see Castle 1995) “A Fragment of a Comment on L. Bolingbroke’s Essays” (published with The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon [1755]). In March 1754, the Works of the notorious freethinker Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, were posthumously published, including eighty-one “Minutes of Essays” designed to promote the spread of atheism. Before his death HF, who held these poisonous effusions in contempt, attempted to answer them with ridicule; he got no farther than the ﬁrst of the eighty-one fragments. (Henley, vol. 16) A Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough: Both with regard to the Account lately Published by Her Grace, and to Her Character in general; against the base and malicious Invectives contained in a late scurrilous Pamphlet, entitled Remarks on the Account, &c. In a Letter to the Noble Author of those Remarks. (Though published by J. Roberts on 2 April 1742, HF assigned the copyright to this pamphlet, as well as to Joseph Andrews and the farce Miss Lucy in Town, to A. Millar on 13 April.) In March 1742 Sarah, the octogenarian Duchess of Marlborough, published a highly self-serving Account of her conduct during the reigns of Queen Mary and Queen Anne. This work, written by HF’s friend Nathaniel Hooke, at once became the target of numerous unfriendly replies, one of which (whose anonymous author HF believed he knew) became in turn HF’s target in this vigorous defense of the widow of his hero, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. For the circumstances, see Harris 1982, and Life:343–45. (Henley, vol. 15) The History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland. (Publ. M. Cooper, 7 October 1745.) One of three anti-Jacobitical tracts HF wrote in less than a fortnight during the crisis of the rebellion, this purports to be the personal account of a ﬁctitious Highlander, James Macpherson, who, having at

Works by Fielding

177

ﬁrst eagerly rallied to the Pretender’s cause, had seen the error of his ways and defected. (WE TP, Coley) The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. (Publ. A. Millar, 25 February 1755.) HF’s own account—from his departure from Fordhook, Ealing, on 26 June 1754 to his arrival on 7 August—of his futile attempt to recover his health by leaving England for the more salubrious climate of Lisbon; he died there at Junqueira on 8 October. (For a detailed account of the journey and related circumstances, see Life:584–606.) The Journal, together with “A Fragment of a Comment” on Bolingbroke’s Essays, was published posthumously in two distinct versions the following year. The “Francis version” (so-called after Ann Francis, the innkeeper at Ryde, Isle of Wight, whom HF harshly satirized by name) is no doubt more faithful to the original manuscript; however, it appears to have been temporarily withheld from publication in favor of the so-called “Humphrys version,” the name under which the identity of Mrs. Francis is hidden in a revision of the original. On the vexed question of the authority of the two versions, see Amory 1999. (Keymer 1996b) “Of the Remedy of Afﬂiction for the Loss of Our Friends” (in Miscellanies, vol. 1 [1743]). An essay in the tradition of the Christian-stoic consolatio, very likely written in an attempt to control the grief HF felt on the death of his daughter Charlotte in March 1742. (WE, Miller) The Opposition: A Vision. (Publ. T. Cooper, 15 December 1741.) As Parliament met to decide whether to continue Sir Robert Walpole in power, HF published this surprising allegory in which he satirizes his former party as place-hungry hypocrites while representing his former enemy, the prime minister, as the wise and benevolent driver of the coach of state. (Henley, vol. 14) Preface to Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple, 2nd edition. (Publ. A. Millar, 13 July 1744.) HF praises his sister’s “vast Penetration into human Nature” and places her novel in the tradition of the comic-epic in prose, the new genre he had introduced and deﬁned in Joseph Andrews. HF also “revised and corrected” the novel for this edition. (On HF’s revisions of David Simple, see Huntings 1957; for critical editions of the novel see Kelsall 1969 and Sabor 1998.) Preface to, as well as Letters XL–XLIV of, Sarah Fielding’s Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple, and Some Others. (Publ. A. Millar, 10 April 1747.) His sister having in this novel abandoned HF’s model for that of his rival Samuel Richardson, the preface is chieﬂy interesting for HF’s theoretical critique of the epistolary form of narrative. The ﬁve letters, not at all in Richardson’s manner, consist of remarks on a range of contemporary topics. (Henley, vol. 16)

178

A Henry Fielding Companion

A Proper Answer to a Late Scurrilous Libel, entitled, An Apology for the Conduct of a late celebrated Second-rate Minister. (Publ. M. Cooper, 24 December 1747.) The work that HF angrily answers in this, the last of his political pamphlets, purports to be written by the late Thomas Winnington—a prominent Whig and member of the government under Robert Walpole and his successors—as an apology for his life in politics. The true author, a mischievous writer opposed to Henry Pelham’s government, has “Winnington” reveal that not only he, but virtually every other minister of the century, was secretly a Jacobite bent on policies so ruinous for England that the nation would act to expel their German kings and restore the Stuarts to the throne. (WE JJ, Coley) A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain. In which the Certain Consequences of the Present Rebellion, are fully demonstrated. (Publ. M. Cooper, 3 October 1745.) The ﬁrst of three anti-Jacobitical pamphlets HF wrote this month in an effort to rally the nation against the rebels. (WE TP, Coley) Some Papers proper to be Read before the R[oya]l Society, Concerning the Terrestrial Chrysipus, Golden-Foot or Guinea; an Insect, or Vegetable, resembling the Polypus, which hath this surprising Property, That being cut into several Pieces, each Piece becomes a perfect Animal, or Vegetable, as complete as that of which it was originally only a Part. Collected by Petrus Gualterus, but not Published till after his Death. (Publ. J. Roberts, 16 February 1743; reprinted in HF’s Miscellanies, vol. 1.) A parody of a paper by the Swiss naturalist Abraham Trembley on the freshwater “Polypus” published in the Philosophical Transactions, the organ of the Royal Society. Besides satirizing what he, together with such other authors as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, considered to be the foolish preoccupations of contemporary scientists, HF’s other targets are the notorious collector of guineas, the miser Peter Walter (still very much alive), and the ministry’s funding the Hanoverian troops of George II’s army—the latter being a policy attacked by HF’s friends in opposition. (WE, Miller)

PLAYS The authoritative account of HF’s career as playwright and theatrical manager is R. D. Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre 1728–1737 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). An excellent critical appreciation is A. J. Rivero, The Plays of Henry Fielding: A Critical Study of His Dramatic Career (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989). The Author’s Farce: and the Pleasures of the Town. Written by Scriblerus Secundus. (First performed: Haymarket, 30 March 1730; published by J.

Works by Fielding

179

Roberts, 31 March.) The ﬁrst of HF’s great hits as the author of “irregular” plays. Disappointed at the reception of his ﬁve-act comedies Love in Several Masques and The Temple Beau, and scorned by Colley Cibber and Robert Wilks, managers at Drury Lane, HF ridicules them as Marplay and Sparkish in Act 2, and in Act 3 has his surrogate, Harry Luckless, present the Town with a satirical version of what it prefers to serious drama: a “Puppet Show,” in which actors representing real-life dunces from a variety of popular entertainments play the puppets, satirizing such Town favorites as Edmund Curll (Curry the bookseller), Senesino the castrato (Signior Opera), Lewis Theobald (Don Tragedio), John Henley (Dr. Orator), John Rich (Monsieur Pantomime), Eliza Haywood (Mrs. Novel), and Cibber again (Sir Farcical Comic). A new version of the play—in which, among other revisions, Theophilus Cibber as Marplay, Jr., replaces Wilks as the target of HF’s ridicule, and in Act 3 a short scene in the puppet show mocks “Count” John James Heidegger (Count Ugly) and his masquerades—was ﬁrst performed at Drury Lane, 15 January 1734. It was not published, however, until 1750. (AF, Woods: original version, with revisions of 1734 summarized in Appendix A and tunes to the airs provided in Appendix C.) The Coffee-House Politician: or, The Justice Caught in his own Trap. A Comedy. Written by Mr. Fielding. (First perf. Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 4 December 1730; publ. J. Watts, 4 December.) Initially advertised as The City Politician (Daily Post, 28 November 1730), this is the new title given to Rape upon Rape (see below) when revived in the winter of 1730, ﬁrst by the Haymarket actors for a single unauthorized performance (30 November) and then (4 December) by John Rich, with HF’s cooperation, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was withdrawn after four performances and never again staged. (CHP, Henley) The Covent-Garden Tragedy. (Perf. Drury Lane, 1 June 1732; publ. J. Watts, 24 June.) An uproarious burlesque, in blank verse, of Ambrose Philips’s pseudoclassical tragedy The Distrest Mother, HF’s play transforms Homer’s Andromache into the bawd Mother Punchbowl, a character meant to recall the late notorious Elizabeth “Mother” Needham, as the other actors and the set recall the whores and bully-boys of the Rose Tavern, a well-known brothel near the theater. Withdrawn after a single performance, The Covent-Garden Tragedy, together with HF’s other plays of this period and their author, was repeatedly denounced as indecent by the writers of The Grub-Street Journal—attacks that HF at ﬁrst answered in an amusing parody of the Journal’s critics preﬁxed to the published version of the play. Stung, however, by the unremitting slurs of these enemies, he was at last provoked into a serious defense of his work and character in a long letter to the Daily Post (31 July) published under the name “Philalethes” (Lover of Truth). The play had a brief revival at the National Theatre, London, in 1968. (CGT, Henley)

180

A Henry Fielding Companion

The Debauchees: or, The Jesuit Caught. A Comedy. (First perf. Drury Lane, 17 October 1745; publ. J. Watts, October.) Staged at the time of the Jacobite rebellion for its anti-Catholic satire, this was a much abridged revival of HF’s farce The Old Debauchees (see below), which had a run of twenty-ﬁve performances when ﬁrst performed in 1732. Deborah: or, A Wife for You All. (Perf. Drury Lane, 6 April 1733.) Performed just once, as an afterpiece to HF’s The Miser on the occasion of his favorite “Kitty” Raftor’s (Catherine Clive) beneﬁt night, this ballad opera was never published and may have been suppressed. Originally advertised by its subtitle only, HF renamed it in allusion (no doubt) to Handel’s oratorio Deborah, performed on 17 March at the king’s command. Don Quixote in England. (First perf. Haymarket, 5 April 1734; publ. J. Watts, 17 April.) HF transformed this unpromising play, originally drafted while he was a student at Leiden in 1728, into an engaging ballad opera in three acts that includes two of his best songs, “The Roast Beef of Old England” and “The Dusky Night rides down the Sky.” Although he intended it for production at Drury Lane, circumstances associated with the dispute between the actors and managers there caused him to stage it instead at the Haymarket. To capitalize on public interest in the general election (the play was published on the day the writs for the election were issued), HF added scenes contrasting Don Quixote’s unworldliness with the venality of electors and politicians—a theme, together with his dedication of the work to the Earl of Chesterfield, that signals HF’s new commitment to the cause of the opposition to Walpole. (DQE, Henley) Eurydice, or The Devil Henpeck’d. (Only perf. Drury Lane, 19 February 1737; publ. as Eurydice, a Farce: As it was d—mned at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in HF’s Miscellanies, vol. 2, 1743.) Another of HF’s burlesques of the fashionable Italian opera, this Lucianic farce, staged as an afterpiece to Joseph Addison’s Cato, uses the mythical ﬁgures Orpheus and Eurydice as vehicles for topical satire. It was “damned” on an evening of riotous behavior by the audience. (WE, Goldgar and Amory) Eurydice Hiss’d: or, A Word to the Wise. (First perf. Haymarket, 13 April 1737; publ. J. Roberts, 12 May, together with The Historical Register for 1736.) Inspired by the damning of Eurydice in February, this popular farce ran as afterpiece to The Historical Register. In it HF, in the character of Pillage, curiously equates himself with his political enemy, the prime minister, making the damning of his farce analogous to the defeat of Robert Walpole’s unpopular Excise Bill. (HR, Appleton) The Fathers: or, The Good-Natur’d Man. (First perf. Drury Lane, 30 November 1778; publ. T. Cadell, 12 December.) Written (probably) in 1735 but

Works by Fielding

181

rejected for production by John Rich at Covent Garden, The GoodNatur’d Man, as it was originally entitled, is the last ﬁve-act comedy HF wrote. The manuscript, lost after HF’s death among the papers of his friend Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, was later found by David Garrick, who wrote a prologue and epilogue for its production at Drury Lane under Sheridan’s management, the proceeds going to beneﬁt HF’s widow. Boncour, the “good-natured” man of the title, exempliﬁes one of the principal virtues of HF’s ethical system. (F, Henley) The Genuine Grub-Street Opera. (Never perf.; publ. E. Rayner 18 August 1731.) An unauthorized publication, probably based on an actor’s copy of the suppressed Grub-Street Opera (below). The Good-Natur’d Man. See The Fathers. The Grub-Street Opera. Written by Scriblerus Secundus. (Never perf.; publ. A. Millar in HF’s Dramatic Works (1755—under the false imprint “J. Roberts 1731.” In this revision of The Welsh Opera HF more than doubled the number of songs (from thirty-one to sixty-ﬁve, among them the popular favorite “The Roast Beef of Old England”), producing what one authority considers to have been potentially the most delightful of all the ballad operas of the decade following John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (GSO: 75). Announced on 10 June 1731 for performance at the Haymarket the following day, the play was abruptly suppressed, apparently by HF himself. The most likely explanation is the brazen political satire of the plot, which, in representing the foibles of a Welsh family, metaphorically ridicules both political parties and, with less tolerable impudence, the Royal Family itself (see Life:112–23). On the complex history of publication, see Morrissey 1973: 18–21. See also The Welsh Opera and The Genuine Grub-Street Opera. (GSO, Roberts) The Historical Register for the Year 1736. (First perf. Haymarket, 21 March 1737; publ. J. Roberts, 12 May, together with Eurydice Hiss’d.) The success of this play—a transparently personal kind of satire that, with its predecessor Pasquin, HF modeled on the “old comedy” of Aristophanes—provoked the government to pass the Theatrical Licensing Act in June of this year. In mimicry of the historical survey published annually under the same title, Medley the author rehearses his actors in a “revue” of the principal theatrical and political follies of the year 1736. HF’s targets include Colley Cibber (as Ground-Ivy), poet laureate and “alterer” of Shakespeare; his son Theophilus Cibber (Pistol); the castrato Farinelli and the auctioneer Christopher Cock (Mr. Hen)—and, most dangerously as it proved, the foreign and domestic policies of Sir Robert Walpole (Quidam) and his brother Horatio Walpole. Answering attacks in the ministerial organ The Daily Gazetteer, HF dedicated the published version of the play “To the Public,” warning of the dangers of ministerial corruption. (HR, Appleton)

182

A Henry Fielding Companion

The Intriguing Chambermaid. (First perf. Drury Lane, 15 January 1734; publ. J. Watts, January.) HF adapted this popular farce from Jean-Franc¸ois Regnard’s Le retour impre´vu (1700) as a vehicle for the talents, which included a ﬁne singing voice, of his favorite comic actress, Catherine “Kitty” Clive, to whom he dedicated the play. This and the revised version of The Author’s Farce made up a double bill meant to serve the cause of John Highmore, manager of Drury Lane, in the so-called actors’ rebellion of 1733–34. (IC, Henley) The Letter-Writers: or, A New Way to Keep a Wife at Home. A Farce. Written by Scriblerus Secundus. (First perf. Haymarket, 24 March 1731; publ. J. Roberts, 24 March.) HF took the idea for the plot of this three-act “farce”—that is, the use of threatening letters to keep the wives at home—from the terrifying practice of certain contemporary villains who attempted to extort money from wealthy victims. (LW, Henley) The Lottery. A Farce. (First perf. Drury Lane, 1 January 1732; publ. J. Watts, 7 January.) His ﬁrst play after moving to Drury Lane from the Haymarket upon the suppression of The Grub-Street Opera, HF wrote this immensely popular ballad opera in collaboration with the composer Mr. Seedo, also a refugee from the Haymarket ﬁasco. The subject was one of the favorite targets of his ridicule, the state lotteries, which involved “adventurers” of every class in a fever of speculation, the odds being manipulated against them by unscrupulous ticket mongers. (Lot, Henley) Love in Several Masques. A Comedy. (First perf. Drury Lane, 16 February 1728; publ. J. Watts, 23 February.) The ﬁrst of HF’s plays, this is a regular ﬁve-act comedy of intrigue written in the tradition of humane comedy made popular since the turn of the century by such playwrights as Richard Steele and Colley Cibber. Cibber, as the principal manager of the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, not only accepted the play for production—an extraordinary favor considering HF’s youth and inexperience— but also acted the part of Rattle, the fop, while his fellow manager, Robert Wilks, played Merital. HF dedicated the work to his brilliant cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had read the manuscript and may have been instrumental in getting Cibber to stage it. Competing with the hugely successful ﬁrst run of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, HF’s comedy had only four performances. (LSM, Henley) The Miser. A Comedy Taken from Plautus and Molie`re. (First perf. Drury Lane, 17 February 1733; publ. J. Watts, 13 March.) Freely based on Molie`re’s L’Avare—HF’s setting is London, Molie`re’s Harpagon becomes the avaricious Lovegold, and in general the French original is expertly transformed into a hilarious comedy of social intrigue. The Miser was by far the most successful of all HF’s mainpieces. It had an initial run of

Works by Fielding

183

twenty-three performances and was regularly revived throughout the century. HF dedicated the play to the benevolent courtier, the Duke of Richmond, thus beginning his long and friendly association with a nobleman he greatly admired. (Mi, Henley) Miss Lucy in Town. A Sequel to The Virgin Unmasqued. A Farce with Songs. (First perf. Drury Lane, 6 May 1742; publ. A. Millar, 6 May.) HF’s only attempt to resume writing for the stage after the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 put an end to his career as dramatist, this (brieﬂy) popular afterpiece was possibly a collaboration between HF and his friend David Garrick. It featured HF’s favorite actress, Catherine “Kitty” Clive, as the newly wed country girl who comes to London with her footman husband, innocently taking rooms in the brothel of Mother Haycock (a character transparently based on the notorious madam, “Mother” Haywood), who attempts to sell Lucy’s favors to her clients. In A Letter to a Noble Lord (December 1742)—an anonymous pamphlet addressed to the Duke of Grafton, Lord Chamberlain, and Licenser of the stage—HF’s farce was attacked for its lasciviousness, as well as for its ridicule of Methodism and the Italian opera. It subsequently disappeared from the stage. (MLT, Henley) The Mock Doctor: or, The Dumb Lady Cur’d. A Comedy. Done from Molie`re. (First perf. Drury Lane, 23 June 1732, and in revised version 16 November; publ. J. Watts, 11 July, revised version c. November.) HF’s adaptation of Molie`re’s Le Me´decin malgre´ lui, to which he added songs for his favorite actress, Kitty Raftor (later Catherine Clive), was an immediate success and remained for a century the standard of its kind, the light farce. The published version is ironically dedicated to the expatriate Frenchman, Dr. John Misaubin, celebrated quack. (MD, Henley) The Modern Husband. A Comedy. (First perf. Drury Lane, 14 February 1732; publ. J. Watts, 21 February.) Written shortly after Rape upon Rape in the summer of 1730 and submitted to his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu for her comments, The Modern Husband was, like its predecessor, another, if darker, experiment in a new species of comedy invented by HF and which, to use his own epithet for it in the prologue to Rape upon Rape, we may call “heroic” comedy—“heroic,” that is, in its earnest manner and its daring exposure of modern vice and corruption. Anticipating the plot of the 1993 ﬁlm Indecent Proposal by more than two centuries, HF’s theme is the willing cooperation of Mr. and Mrs. Modern in her adulterous affair with the “great Rogue,” Lord Richly. Although the character of Richly seems originally to have been meant as an implicit satire of Sir Robert Walpole, when the comedy was at last performed and published more than a year later, HF dedicated it to

184

A Henry Fielding Companion

that “Great Man” in a remarkably fulsome manner. The Modern Husband had a successful run of fourteen nights; subjected, however, to severe criticism by the authors of The Grub-Street Journal, it disappeared from the stage until 1995, when it was revived at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, London. (MH, Henley) The Old Debauchees. A Comedy. (First perf. Drury Lane, 1 June 1732; publ. J. Watts, 13 June.) Originally entitled “The despairing Debauchees” (as appears from the copyright assignment), this “Farce,” as HF called it, was combined with The Covent-Garden Tragedy for an evening’s bawdy and irreverent entertainment. HF’s anti-Catholic bias is nowhere more apparent than in this play, which was inspired by the sensational case of Father Girard, a Jesuit recently tried at Aix for having debauched a young woman under his spiritual care. Although the authors of The Grub-Street Journal condemned the two plays for lewdness and impiety, The Old Debauchees had a moderately successful run, and at the time of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was revived in an abridged version, The Debauchees: or, The Jesuit Caught (see above). (OD, Henley) An Old Man Taught Wisdom: or, The Virgin Unmask’d. A Farce. (First perf. Drury Lane, 6 January 1735; publ. J. Watts, 19 February.) HF designed this ballad opera (better known by its subtitle) as another vehicle for Catherine “Kitty” Clive, who—as Lucy, a pert country heiress who spurns the fatuous cousins her father intends for her and marries the footman she loves—charmed audiences with her singing and her gifts as a comic actress. One of HF’s most popular plays, it remained in the repertory throughout the century. In 1742 its success prompted him to write a less fortunate sequel, Miss Lucy in Town (see above). (OMTW, Henley) Pasquin. A Dramatic Satire on the Times: Being the Rehearsal of Two Plays, viz. A Comedy call’d, The Election; and a Tragedy call’d, The Life and Death of Common Sense. (First perf. Haymarket, 5 March 1736; publ. J. Watts, 8 April.) A “rehearsal” play in the tradition of the Duke of Buckingham’s popular burlesque of Dryden’s heroic tragedies (1672), Pasquin features Trapwit’s “Comedy”—an even-handed satire of corrupt electioneering by both Robert Walpole’s court party and the opposition—and Fustian’s “Tragedy,” in blank verse, depicting the murder of Common Sense by the followers of Queen Ignorance, namely, Law, Physick, and the priest Firebrand. The play was lauded in The Prompter (2 April) by Aaron Hill, who approved HF’s radical experimentation with the forms of dramatic satire, while in The Grub-Street Journal (22 April) “Marforio” accused HF of cynicism in his political satire and of ridiculing the institution of the priesthhod in the character of Firebrand. Hill’s favorable verdict was also the public’s: Pasquin was the greatest

Works by Fielding

185

hit of the decade, enjoying more than sixty performances before the season ended. (P, Brack, Kupersmith, Zimansky) Rape upon Rape: or, The Justice Caught in his own Trap. A Comedy. (First perf. Haymarket, 23 June 1730; publ. J. Watts, 23 June.) Inspired perhaps by a recent scandal in which a notorious libertine and courtier, Colonel Francis Charteris, received the king’s pardon after being convicted of raping his maidservant, Rape upon Rape is the ﬁrst of HF’s two attempts this year (the other being The Modern Husband) to introduce a new species of “heroic” comedy. In the prologue he alerted his audience to its seriously didactic purpose: “The Heroick Muse who sings Tonight, / Through these neglected Tracks attempts her Flight: / Vice cloath’d with Pow’r, she combats with her Pen, / And fearless, dares the Lyon in his Den.” In the autumn HF renamed the play The Coffee-House Politician (see above), a reference to Politick, a character obsessed by the political news of the day; but the chief target of his satire is Justice Squeezum, a type of those lewd and corrupt instruments of power who seemed beyond the law. Under its different titles HF’s comedy was performed thirteen times this year and then disappeared from the stage until it was revived in 1983 by the Soho Rep Company of New York. In 1967 it was adapted by Bernard Miles as the successful musical, Lock Up Your Daughters, score by Lionel Bart; a ﬁlm version followed in 1969. (CHP, Henley) The Temple Beau. A Comedy. (First perf. Goodman’s Fields, 26 January 1730; publ. J. Watts, 2 February.) The second play by HF to be staged, The Temple Beau is another “regular” ﬁve-act comedy of intrigue, conceived and possibly written during his return visit to the Continent in 1729. The title character is Wilding, a young rake who, to extract money for his debauches from his rich father, poses as a serious student of law at the Temple. After the unimpressive showing of Love in Several Masques, neither Drury Lane nor Lincoln’s Inn Fields would have it, and HF was obliged to resort to the theater recently constructed by Thomas Odell in Goodman’s Fields, situated in London’s East End, where the actors were inexperienced and the audience consisted chieﬂy of obstreperous clerks and apprentices. It was here that HF’s career as a dramatist began in earnest. The prologue, written by James Ralph, also marks the beginning of HF’s friendship with the man who later collaborated with him in managing the Little Haymarket Theatre and in editing The Champion. The play was fairly successful by the standards of the day: it had an initial run of nine consecutive performances, providing HF with three beneﬁts, and it was revived from time to time thereafter. (TB, Henley) Tom Thumb. A Tragedy. (First perf. Haymarket, 24 April 1730; publ. J. Roberts, 25 April. First perf. with new prologue and epilogue, 1 May, with additions, 6 May; 2nd ed. publ. incorporating these additions and

186

A Henry Fielding Companion

revisions, and with a preface by “Scriblerus Secundus,” 6 June.) The ﬁrst version of the play that, as The Tragedy of Tragedies (see below), became the most enduringly popular of all HF’s dramatic productions, Tom Thumb is a hilarious burlesque of English heroic drama. Added late in the season on 24 April as an afterpiece to The Author’s Farce, it enjoyed an initial run of forty-one performances and was published in several editions. Played by a petite actress, the diminutive hero of British legend struts the stage as champion of King Arthur, as well as the object of the affections of Queen Dollalolla and Princess Huncamunca and of the enmity of the marplot Lord Grizzle. HF’s dialogue echoes the bombast of more than forty tragedies from John Fletcher and Shakespeare to John Dryden and James Thomson. (TT, Morrissey) The Tragedy of Tragedies: or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great. With the Annotations of H. Scriblerus Secundus. (First perf. Haymarket, 24 March 1731; publ. J. Roberts, 24 March.) Besides doubling the length of the original Tom Thumb (see above) by such devices as adding the character of the captive queen Glumdalca, HF enlarged the range of the play’s humor by adding a mock-scholarly preface and annotations that both identify the speciﬁc sources of the burlesque and satirize the pedantry of critics. It thus became a “reading,” as well as an “acting,” play. HF’s fondness for The Tragedy of Tragedies is suggested by the fact that the published version is the only one of his works published in his lifetime to include a frontispiece. This, depicting the jealous confrontation of Glumdalca and Huncamunca in Act II, scene vii, marks the beginning of his continuing friendship with the artist William Hogarth. This enlarged and improved redaction of Tom Thumb ensured the play’s popularity, which prompted musical versions by Eliza Haywood and William Hatchett (The Opera of Operas, 1733) and by Kane O’Hara (Tom Thumb, a Burletta, 1780). (TrT) Tumble-Down Dick: or, Phaeton in the Suds. A Dramatick Entertainment of Walking, in Serious and Foolish Characters: Interlarded with Burlesque, Grotesque, Comick Interludes, call’d, Harlequin a Pick-Pocket. Being (’tis hop’d) the last Entertainment that will ever be exhibited on any Stage. Invented by the Ingenious Monsieur Sans Esprit. The Musick compos’d by the Harmonious Signior Warblerini. And the Scenes painted by the Prodigious Mynheer Van Bottom-Flat. (First perf. Haymarket, 29 April 1736; publ. J. Watts, 29 April.) Provoked by a “New Pantomime Entertainment” at Drury Lane called The Fall of Phaeton: or, Harlequin a Captive, HF wrote this play as a burlesque of the pantomime entertainments made popular by John Rich, manager at Covent Garden Theatre, who customarily played the role of Harlequin under the stage name of Lun; it is to Rich as “Lun” that HF ironically dedicated the published version of the play. (TDD, Henley)

Works by Fielding

187

The Universal Gallant: or, The Different Husbands. A Comedy. (First perf. Drury Lane, 10 February 1735; publ. J. Watts, 19 February.) Although not staged until February 1735, HF had written The Universal Gallant more than a year earlier. Another ﬁve-act mainpiece in the vein of serious social satire he had explored with some success in The Modem Husband, the play opened to a calamitous reception and barely survived to the third night, when HF received a meager beneﬁt. In an “Advertisement” to the published version, he complained bitterly that the play had been deliberately damned. In his review in The Prompter (18 February), however, William Popple insisted that an impartial audience had suffered HF’s dullness patiently until, by the third act, they could bear it no more. HF dedicated the play to Charles Spencer, third Duke of Marlborough, grandson of the great hero of the Whigs whose memory HF ever extolled. Another indication of HF’s political inclinations during this period, Spencer was among the so-called “boy patriots” who were forming at this time to oppose Robert Walpole. (UG, Henley) The Virgin Unmask’d. See An Old Man Taught Wisdom. The Wedding-Day. A Comedy. (First perf. Drury Lane, 17 February 1743; publ. A. Millar, 24 February. Reprinted in Miscellanies, vol. 2, 1743.) In the preface to the Miscellanies, HF reveals that this ﬁve-act comedy of intrigue, the last play he would stage, was only the third “Dramatic Performance” he ever attempted, a remark that places its composition sometime shortly before that of The Temple Beau (1730). Undaunted by criticisms of the lewdness of Miss Lucy in Town (1742), he here produced another play whose principal comic character, the bawd Mrs. Useful, drew the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship. Only David Garrick’s performance as the good-natured rake Millamour enabled this “bad new Play,” as one viewer called it, to run six nights, giving HF two small beneﬁts. (WE, Goldgar and Amory) The Welsh Opera: or, The Grey Mare the Better Horse. (First perf. Haymarket, 22 April 1731; publ. E. Rayner, 26 June.) Unauthorized publication of the play HF subsequently revised and retitled The Grub-Street Opera (see above). (For excerpts see GSO, Roberts: Appendix.) POETRY Most of HF’s verse is collected in his Miscellanies, vol. 1, 1743. The poems cited below are from this collection, and therefore included in the Wesleyan Edition, are marked (Misc 1). For commentary, see Miller (1961). “A Description of U[pto]n G[rey], (alias New Hog’s Norton) in Com. Hants. Written to a young Lady in the Year 1728.” Soon after he left Eton College, HF for some years resided, nominally at least, in the village of

188

A Henry Fielding Companion

Upton Grey, Hampshire, in a house (probably known today as the Village Farm House) that his father rented there. That he did so reluctantly appears both from the months he absented himself from it, preferring the attractions of such places as Lyme Regis, and from the sarcasms of this poem. (Misc 1). “The Dusky Night rides down the Sky.” A hunting song, among the most popular of HF’s lyrics; from Don Quixote in England (1734; II. v, Air viii: There was a Jovial Beggar, &c.). Epilogue to Charles Johnson’s tragedy, Cælia: or, The Perjur’d Lover. (First perf. Drury Lane, 11 December 1732; publ. 15 December.) (Henley, vol. 15) Epilogue to James Miller’s comedy, The Modish Couple. (First perf. Drury Lane, 10 January 1732; publ. 14 January.) Though actually written by Miller, the Town believed the play to have been written by the unlikely author Captain Charles Bodens, courtier and crony of the dukes of Richmond and Montagu. HF shrewdly foretold in his epilogue that Captain Bodens would require more courage in facing his audience than he ever did in the ﬁeld; the play indeed sank amid a clamor of catcalls and cheers from rival political factions. This riotous event is the ﬁrst of the “Histories” engraved on Joseph Andrews’s cudgel, and the play itself is the favorite of Queen Ignorance in Pasquin. On the authorship, see Winton (1985). (FH) Epilogue to Lewis Theobald’s “Dramatic Opera” Orestes. (First perf. Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 3 April 1731; publ. 10 April.) Although Theobald, Alexander Pope’s Prince of Dulness, usually appears in HF’s works as a subject of ridicule, this epilogue, contributed to a play dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole, marks a brief period of friendship between the two authors and appears also to signal HF’s courting of the minister’s patronage. (FH) “An Epistle to Mr Lyttleton [sic] occasioned by two Lines in Mr Pope’s Paraphrase on the ﬁrst Satire of the 2d Book of Horace.” Professor Isobel Grundy discovered the manuscripts of this poem and HF’s unﬁnished burlesque of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (see below: “—O to look oer the old Records of Time”) among the papers of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She has edited and published the poems (Grundy 1972). Incensed at Pope’s insult to Lady Mary in his imitation of The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace (published 15 February 1733)—“From furious Sappho scarce a milder Fate, / P[o]x’d by her Love, or libell’d by her Hate”—HF wrote this verse epistle to George Lyttelton, who was Pope’s friend as well as his own, to defend his cousin’s character and express his anger at the great poet’s ungentlemanly behavior. In a passage praising General George Wade, the government’s mild paciﬁer

Works by Fielding

189

of Scotland, HF also makes clear that, for the time being at least, he preferred his cousin’s politics to those of the leaders of the opposition, William Pulteney and Lord Bolingbroke. “Liberty. To George Lyttleton [sic], Esq.” HF’s poem on Liberty—an ideal appropriated by the opposition to their own cause in contrast to the allegedly corrupt and oppressive practices of Robert Walpole’s government—is one of many partisan political works written on this topic during the 1730s. In particular it echoes passages in James Thomson’s Liberty (1735–36), Thomson, like HF, being both a friend and prote´ge´ of Lyttelton. Notwithstanding HF’s political motives in writing the poem, however, the concept would remain an important theme in his writings. (Misc 1) The Masquerade, a Poem. Inscribed to C[oun]t H[ei]d[eg]g[e]r. By Lemuel Gulliver, Poet Laureat to the King of Lilliput. (Publ. J. Roberts and A. Dodd, 30 January 1728; reissued by A. Millar in 1755 as an appendix to the authorized edition of The Grub-Street Opera.) The earliest of HF’s extant works to be published, this rollicking poem in hudibrastics (the verse form popularized by Samuel Butler in Hudibras) is aimed at the fashionable Venetian balls that HF always satirized as licentious entertainment. He dedicated it, ironically, to the notorious John James Heidegger, principal promoter of these masquerades. (FH) “Of Good-Nature. To his Grace the Duke of Richmond.” This poem, addressed to HF’s patron and friend the benevolent Duke of Richmond, deﬁnes a fundamental concept in HF’s moral thought: Good-Nature, “the glorious Lust of doing Good.” (Misc 1) “—O to look oer the old Records of Time.” Probably in the latter half of 1729, HF wrote more than 600 lines of a spirited verse satire he never ﬁnished. These verses, together with the “Epistle to Mr. Lyttleton” (above), were discovered among the papers of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. A burlesque of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, the ﬁrst two versions of which were published in 1728 and 1729, the poem conforms throughout to Lady Mary’s Whig principles. HF’s targets, besides the Tory Scriblerians—Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Bolingbroke—include the editors of the two most virulent opposition journals, Nicholas Amhurst of The Craftsman and Charles Molloy of Fog’s Weekly Journal, and John Rich, whose recent attempt to stage Gay’s Polly, an antiministerial sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, had been suppressed. In contrast, HF lauds Sir Robert Walpole and the Hanoverians, and among men of letters the late champion of Whig principles, Joseph Addison. (Grundy 1972) Of True Greatness. An Epistle to The Right Honourable George Dodington, Esq. (Publ. C. Corbett, 7 January 1741; reprinted in Miscellanies, Vol.

190

A Henry Fielding Companion

1, 1743.) This poem, addressed to HF’s friend and patron George Bubb Dodington, contrasts true greatness with false—the latter a satiric political theme associated chieﬂy with the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Though a curious choice, Dodington would always be for HF the very paragon of true greatness. Besides satirizing Walpole and lauding Dodington, who had recently deserted the minister’s party to join the opposition, the poem compliments several of HF’s heroes of this period, among them the dukes of Marlborough and Argyll, the Earl of Chesterfield, Lyttelton, the poet Edward Young, and the politically powerful latitudinarian divine, Bishop Benjamin Hoadly. HF’s most memorable anatomy of the concept of greatness is his ironic novel, The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great. (Misc 1) “Part of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire Modernized in Burlesque Verse.” This paraphrase of Juvenal’s notorious diatribe against women may be HF’s earliest extant work. In the Preface to the Miscellanies, he says it “was originally sketched out before I was Twenty, and was all the Revenge taken by an injured Lover.” (Misc 1) “Plain Truth. By Henry Fielding, Esq.” In A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes by Several Hands 5 (1758): 302–5. A lighthearted set of tetrameter couplets celebrating the beauty of a certain Betty Dalston at Bath. (Henley, vol. 12) Prologue to George Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity. (First perf. Haymarket, 27 May 1736; publ. April 1737.) As manager of the Little Haymarket Theatre, HF not only accepted Lillo’s tragedy for production when the other theaters had rejected it; he praised it anonymously in the Daily Advertiser and wrote this prologue for it, preferring Lillo’s domestic drama to the bombast and improbabilities of heroic tragedy. For these circumstances see Life:204–7; and Hume: Appendix IV. (FH, mistitled “Epilogue.”) “The Roast Beef of Old England.” Written by HF in 1731 for the abortive production of The Grub-Street Opera (III. iv, Air xlv: The King’s Old Courtier), this famous patriotic song was ﬁrst heard by audiences three years later when it was included in the Haymarket production of Don Quixote in England (I. vi, Air v). With additional lyrics contributed by Richard Leveridge, it was sung before and after any new play, and even between the acts, by audiences throughout the century. (See Roberts 1964; and Life:113–14) “To a Friend on the Choice of a Wife.” After cataloging in quasi-Juvenalian fashion the wrong reasons for marrying a woman, HF—perhaps with Charlotte Fielding, his beloved ﬁrst wife in mind—concludes the poem with his conception of the perfect wife. She is pretty yet modest, tender yet passionate, no wit or bluestocking but a woman of plain good sense and true to the vow that once included submission to her husband: “If

Works by Fielding

191

Fortune gives thee such a Wife to meet, / Earth cannot make thy Blessing more complete.” (Misc 1) “To John Hayes, Esq.” In this brief but interesting, poem—probably addressed to a fellow lawyer of the Middle Temple—HF explores a favorite theme: the conﬂicting passions that make knowledge of the characters of men so difﬁcult to achieve. In this he differs from Alexander Pope (probably the “Codrus” of the poem), who in the Epistle to Cobham and the Essay on Man expressed the view that each man is governed by a “Ruling Passion,” which, once discovered, reveals his essential character. (Misc 1) “To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole (Now Earl of Orford) Written in the Year 1730” and “To the same, Anno 1731.” In this pair of witty poems HF, in the character of an indigent poet, playfully solicits the prime minister’s patronage, as he would do soon again, more seriously, in the fulsome dedication to The Modern Husband (1732). (Misc 1) [GREEK] The Vernon-iad. Done into English, from the Original Greek of Homer. Lately found at Constantinople. With Notes in usum, &c. Book the First. (Publ. C. Corbet, 22 January 1741.) In this mock-epic (a burlesque not in fact of Homer but of Virgil’s Aeneid) HF satirizes Sir Robert Walpole as Mammon, agent of Satan, blaming the prime minister for mismanagement of the war with Spain. Admiral Edward Vernon, hero of the opposition and ostensibly of the poem, is never mentioned in the work, but he provided the occasion for it. After Vernon’s victory over the Spanish at Porto Bello in 1740, contrary winds prevented the dispatch of reinforcements he needed to secure the West Indies, a delay the opposition preferred to attribute to Walpole’s jealousy and incompetence. HF used the mock scholarship of the notes not only to reinforce the political satire but also to ridicule such favorite targets as Colley Cibber and the pawnbroker William Deards, as well as to compliment his friend William Hogarth. (Henley, vol. 15) PROSE FICTION Amelia. By Henry Fielding, Esq. 4 vols. Publ. A. Millar, 19 December 1751 (imprint 1752); 2nd ed., revised, in HF’s Works (1762). HF’s last novel, Amelia is very different in tone and thematic intent from his comic masterpieces, Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). Begun soon after he began his magistracy, this work, as he declared in the dedication to his patron Ralph Allen, was “sincerely designed to promote the Cause of Virtue, and to expose some of the most glaring Evils, as well public as private, which at present infest the Country.” In keeping with this darker purpose, the novel opens in the crowded courtroom of the venal Justice Thrasher, who commits Amelia’s husband, Captain Booth, to

192

A Henry Fielding Companion

Newgate Prison, in which setting the ﬁrst quarter of the narrative takes place. Throughout the novel HF exposes such public evils as a corrupt penal system and the inadequacy and injustice of the laws meant to preserve the nation’s “Constitution.” Amelia may thus be seen as the ﬁrst novel of social protest and reform in English. But it is also the sentimental story of its long-suffering heroine’s marriage to Booth, a goodnatured libertine who, though he loves his wife, is too weak to resist the blandishments of Miss Mathews or the temptations of the gaming table. In this respect, as both his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and his rival Samuel Richardson remarked, the story may be seen to have an autobiographical dimension, resembling the course of HF’s relationship with his beloved ﬁrst wife, Charlotte Fielding. Thanks, however, to Amelia’s constancy, Booth’s conversion to Christianity, and the timely intervention of their friend, the clergyman Dr. Harrison, a ruinous ending to the story is narrowly averted and the couple’s happiness ensured. (WE, Battestin) [Jonathan Wild] The History of the Life of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. In Miscellanies, vol. 3, published by subscription, sold by A. Millar, 7 April 1743; “New Edition,” revised, publ. A. Millar, 19 March 1754. A rare (for Fielding) experiment in the darker ironic manner of Jonathan Swift, this witty work has been called a “moral fable” or “apologue” rather than a novel. Its eponymous “hero,” whose villainy the sympathetic narrator celebrates as “Greatness,” is the notorious criminal who was hanged in 1725. Although scholarly opinion differs as to the date of composition, it is likely, since Jonathan Wild had long been a ﬁgure in the opposition press for “the Great Man,” Sir Robert Walpole, that HF began the work as a satire of the prime minister as early as 1740 and set it aside. This indeed may well be the work that Walpole, by HF’s own admission, paid him to suppress (The Champion, 4 October 1740). Although passages in the work were certainly written during 1742, it is unlikely that after the success of Joseph Andrews and the resignation of Walpole early that year, HF would then have thought this theme timely or that he would have abandoned the “new species of writing” he had so recently invented. In any case, the novel as published in 1743 is much more than a satire narrowly directed at one corrupt politician. “Roguery, and not a Rogue, is my Subject,” HF declared in his preface, and in the story of Wild’s persecution of the Heartfrees he explored the larger theme of the antipathy between “Greatness” and “Goodness,” a theme plainer still in the revised version of the novel published in 1754. (Misc 3, Goldgar and Amory) [Joseph Andrews] The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote. 2 vols. Publ. A. Millar, 22 February

Works by Fielding

193

1742; 2nd ed., revised, 10 June 1742; 3rd ed. (the ﬁrst edition to carry HF’s name on the title page), illustrated by J. Hulett, 21–28 March 1743; 4th ed., revised, 29 October 1749 (imprint 1748); 5th ed., 19 December 1751. Reacting to the popularity of Samuel Richardson’s ﬁrst novel Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded (1740), HF in Joseph Andrews offered his own alternative conception of the art of ﬁction: the “comic Epic-Poem in Prose” as he called it in his famous preface. Richardson’s beleaguered servant girl tells in letters, and in titillating detail, the story of her master’s unsuccessful attempts to seduce her—a potentially tragic story that ends, however, in the heroine’s marriage and elevation to the gentry. In contrast, HF’s “omniscient” narrator relates the hilarious adventures of Pamela’s equally chaste brother (or so it appears), a footman who, for resisting the blandishments of Lady Booby (widow of Pamela’s husband’s uncle), is dismissed from her service, taking the open road westward from London in the company of his mentor, Parson Adams. Joseph Andrews may fairly be called the ﬁrst comic novel in English. With the example of Cervantes in mind, HF’s scope is panoramic, revealing in a variety of characters what he termed the “true Ridiculous” in human nature. Underlying the comedy, however, is the moral HF recommends through his central characters, who—like their biblical namesakes Joseph, who declined the advances of Mrs. Potiphar, and Abraham, whose faith was proved by good works—act out the virtues of chastity and charity. In the good-natured, pugnacious Parson Adams, whose knowledge of the world derives from the classics and the Bible, HF created one of the most memorable characters in ﬁction. (WE, Battestin) A Journey from This World to the Next. In Miscellanies, vol. 2, published by subscription, sold by A. Millar (7 April 1743). The Journey, which appeared with Jonathan Wild in the Miscellanies of 1743, is HF’s strangest experiment in the genre of prose ﬁction. Conceived on the model of his favorite Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, its basic plot device of the spirit-author’s adventures in the afterlife was inspired by Plato’s Myth of Er in the Republic. Although coherence may be found in the recurrence of HF’s favorite theme contrasting false greatness with goodness, the work is divided into three unequal segments, each set in the afterlife but given to a different narrator. In the opening chapters the spiritauthor, who resembles HF himself, relates his adventures on the way to Elysium and his experiences there. Among the shades he encounters is Julian the Apostate, who for sixteen chapters relates, according to the doctrine of metempsychosis, the series of his numerous incarnations during the course of 1,200 years—as fop and fool, beggar and king, poet and dancing master, and so on. In the ﬁnal part, which most scholars plausibly attribute to HF’s sister Sarah Fielding, the shade of Anna

194

A Henry Fielding Companion

Boleyn relates the story of her life. This eccentric narrative provided HF with ample opportunities for topical satire and moral commentary. In the opinion of Edward Gibbon, indeed, what he gave us in the Journey was nothing less than “the history of human nature.” (Misc 2, Goldgar and Amory) [Shamela] An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. In which, the many notorious Falshoods and Misrepresentations of a Book called Pamela, are exposed and refuted; and all the matchless Arts of that young Politician, set in a true and just Light. Together with A full Account of all that passed between her and Parson Arthur Williams; whose Character is represented in a manner something different from that which he bears in Pamela. The whole being exact Copies of authentick Papers delivered to the Editor. Necessary to be had in all Families. By Mr. Conny Keyber. Publ. A. Dodd, 2 April 1741; 2nd ed., 3 November 1741. This little book, a hilarious parody of Samuel Richardson’s hugely popular epistolary novel, Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded (1740), marked a turning point in the development of the modern novel, for it prepared the way for Joseph Andrews (1742) and hence for the rival tradition of comic ﬁction evolving through Tobias George Smollett to Thackeray and Dickens. Richardson’s redoubtable young servant maid, who withstands her master’s inept attempts on her chastity until she brings him at last to his knees in marriage, is here exposed as an artful minx who uses her “Vartue” to rise in the world; “Mr. B’s” real name is revealed to be “Booby”; and by mimicking the titillating particularity of Pamela’s letters, who describes her trials to her mother “in the present tense,” HF mocks Richardson’s narrative method. HF, who appears not to have known the identity of the “editor” of Pamela’s letters, considered Richardson’s popular novel as symptomatic of a general debasement in public taste and morality. Among his other targets are Conyers Middleton and Colley Cibber (who combine in the pseudonymous author “Conny Keyber”), the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole and his creature Lord Hervey, the stern Methodist George Whitefield and his complacent adversary the Reverend Joseph Trapp. [Tom Jones] The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. 6 vols. Publ. A. Millar, c. 3 February 1749; 2nd ed., 28 February 1749; 3rd ed., 4 vols., c. 12 April 1749; 4th ed., revised, 11 December 1749 (imprint 1750). The “new Province of Writing” that HF founded in Joseph Andrews (1742) culminated seven years later in his masterpiece—so eagerly received by its ﬁrst readers that four editions totaling 10,000 copies were called for in less than a year. In a thousand lively pages, HF’s genial, “omniscient” narrator relates the misadventures of his amiable hero’s nearly disastrous progress from reckless immaturity to union with the beautiful Sophia Western, whose Christian name signiﬁes wisdom. Along the way the reader enjoys a panoramic view of mid-Georgian England in three distinct stages: from Glastonbury in Somerset, Tom’s birthplace as well as

Works by Fielding

195

his author’s, along open roads that lead circuitously to London, the metropolis. The journey itself takes place at a critical moment in British history: the autumn of 1745, when the Jacobite rebels were advancing deep into the heart of England. HF peoples the landscape with characters from every rank and degree of society: Tom’s foster father, the benevolent Squire Allworthy, and his neighbor, Sophie’s father, the irrepressible Squire Western, hare-hunting Jacobite; their sisters, Bridget Allworthy, an amorous prude, and Mrs. Western, learned in politics; Black George the gamekeeper and his willing daughter, Molly; Tom’s tutors, the bigoted clergyman Thwackum and Square, the deist philosopher; Tom’s comical sidekick, Partridge the barber, and Sophie’s maid Mrs. Honour; the Mayfair demirep Lady Bellaston and the libertine Lord Fellamar; and many more—innkeepers and coachmen, lawyers and soldiers, gypsies and puppet masters. Although HF in Tom Jones thus vividly evokes a particular time and place, his true subject, he declares in the opening chapter, is nothing less than “HUMAN NATURE”; and his story, to borrow the compliment he paid Cervantes, is “the History of the World in general.” In theme and form Tom Jones, which HF called his own “great Creation” (X. i), is the very model and expression of a worldview that he inherited from the Christian humanist tradition, according to which providence and prudence (in the sense of practical wisdom) were the analogous attributes of the macrocosm and microcosm. These complementary motifs are rendered in the story of Tom’s pursuit of Sophia and in the wonderful architecture of the work’s formal design, in which, through the method of the omniscient narrator and a careful symmetry of structure, HF’s form acquires an ontological signiﬁcance, implying the similar attributes of the universe as he, together with his recent contemporaries Newton and Alexander Pope, understood it. Tom Jones the foundling is a kind of Everyman, whose story recalls that of John Milton’s Adam. Victimized by the malevolent marplot Bliﬁl, his half-brother, and by his own impulsive nature, Tom is expelled from “Paradise Hall,” commits (it appears) the crime of Oedipus, and ﬁnds himself at last condemned to hang for murder. In prison—a place symbolic of his moral bondage to passion—Tom sees at last the folly of his indiscretions and learns the lesson of prudence, the virtue HF elsewhere calls “the ART OF LIFE” (Amelia, I. i). The prison doors miraculously open, his crimes are “undone,” and his true identity is discovered; his marriage with Sophie follows inevitably. (WE, Battestin and Bowers) PUPPET THEATER HF’s ﬁnal theatrical venture occurred during the spring of 1748 at Panton Street, Haymarket, where, under the name of Madame de le Nash (an allusion probably to Richard “Beau” Nash, the celebrated arbiter of manners at Bath,

196

A Henry Fielding Companion

where such entertainments were in vogue), he presided over a satirical puppet show. To evade the strictures of the Theatrical Licensing Act, the shows, which ridiculed many of the same “Comical Humours of the Town” that he was also targeting in Tom Jones, took place in a “large Breakfasting-Room for the Nobility and Gentry,” where for the price of a cup of tea customers were diverted by the rough antics of Punch and Joan. While it lasted (from 28 March to 2 June) this foolery delighted the polite audiences it was intended for, but it also made HF himself the target of ridicule—notably by Theophilus Cibber at Covent Garden, where on opening night he mockingly revived The Author’s Farce and took the part of HF’s surrogate Harry Luckless presiding over the “Puppet Show”; and by Samuel Foote, who took to mimicking HF at the Little Haymarket Theatre, for which Punch in turn ﬁrst hanged “Mr. Puppet Fut” and later, in a puppet show revival of The Covent-Garden Tragedy, kicked him off stage. From this time on, HF to his enemies—especially to the writers of the Opposition journal Old England—would be the author of a puppet show. (See Battestin 1966 and Life:434–39.)

TRANSLATIONS [Adlerfelt] The Military History of Charles XII. King of Sweden. Written by the express Order of his Majesty, by Gustavus Adlerfeld, Chamberlain to the King. To which is added, An exact Account of the Battle of Pultowa, with a Journal of the King’s Retreat to Bender. Translated into English. 3 vols. Publ. J. and P. Knapton, J. Hodges, A. Millar, and J. Nourse, 10 October 1740. Following the French version of C.M.E. Adlerfelt rather than the original Swedish, HF undertook the arduous task of translating this lengthy work at a period when he and his family were in dire need of money. His authorship is clear from his written acknowledgment of £45 received from Nourse on 10 March [1740] “in Part of Payment for the Translation”; it has been conﬁrmed recently by the computerassisted “cusum” method of authorship attribution (see J. Farringdon 1996: chap. 5). In HF’s writings of the period Charles XII, together with Alexander the Great, is invariably the type of false “greatness” and ruthless tyranny. [Aristophanes] Plutus, the God of Riches. A Comedy. Translated from the Original Greek of Aristophanes, with Large Notes Explanatory and Critical. By Henry Fielding, Esq; and the Revd. Mr. Young. Publ. T. Waller, 31 May 1742. With the assistance of his learned friend William Young, who had recently achieved fame as the original of Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews, HF produced this translation as a “Specimen” of an abortive edition of all eleven comedies of Aristophanes, whose biting satires had served HF as a model for his own. In dedicating the work to William, Lord Talbot, HF made clear his political allegiance to the

Works by Fielding

197

opposition. In the preface, HF ridicules Lewis Theobald’s translation of the same work and pays his new-found friend Alexander Pope an extraordinary compliment: “The inimitable Author of the Essay on Man [he declares] taught me a System of Philosophy in English Numbers, whose Sweetness is scarce inferior to that of Theocritus himself.” (Preface alone in Henley, vol. 16) [Demosthenes] “The First Olynthiac of Demosthenes.” In Miscellanies, vol. 1, published by subscription, 7 April 1743. Shortly before publication, HF submitted this puzzling exercise to his friend James Harris for correction, thanking him in a letter of 14 March “for the Trouble you have given yourself on my incorrect and lame Translation” (Letter 16). He was probably prompted to write the piece in the late 1730s, when the opposition often forced an analogy between Demosthenes’ urging the Athenians to act against Philip of Macedonia and the Patriots’ efforts to rouse the nation to reject Sir Robert Walpole’s paciﬁc foreign policy and to declare war against Philip of Spain. (Misc 1; see also Miller 1961: 337–64) Ovid’s Art of Love Paraphrased, and Adapted to the Present Time. With Notes. And a most Correct Edition of the Original. Book 1. Publ. M. Cooper, A. Dodd, and G. Woodfall, 25 February 1747. A burlesque prose rendering of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Book 1, with the Latin text on the opposite pages. In the preface HF states that he began the work “many Years ago” and was prompted to take it up again by the opportunity it provided to celebrate “the Glorious Duke of Cumberland,” commander in chief of the British forces against France. In 1759 the work was reprinted in Dublin under the title, The Lover’s Assistant, or New Year’s Gift; being a New Art of Love (Jones 1961). UNIVERSAL REGISTER OFFICE The idea for this ingenious and successful enterprise, which opened for business on 19 February 1750, was probably HF’s, who wrote the Plan of it published a year later on 21 February 1751 and subsequently reprinted many times. He owned considerable stock in the business, which was managed by his halfbrother, John Fielding, in partnership with others. His inspiration for the URO came from Montaigne (Essays 1. 34), who imagined an agency that would promote the happiness of society by serving as a clearinghouse, bringing together all those who had services to offer and all who required such services. By registering their names at the ofﬁce for a small fee, servants would ﬁnd masters, schoolmasters schools, borrowers lenders, travelers conveyances; those with houses to sell or to let, or with goods of any kind to dispose of, could all be satisﬁed. HF’s desire to have his own vehicle for advertising this useful commercial enterprise was an important motive in his undertaking The CoventGarden Journal in 1752. (WE, Goldgar [with CGJ])

Works Probably by Fielding

The following writings—published anonymously or pseudonymously and never acknowledged by HF as his own work—have been attributed to him by either his contemporaries or present-day scholars or both. In the evolutionary process of deﬁning the Fielding canon, these works do not yet enjoy the same unquestioned status as, say, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), listed in the preceding section. As the references accompanying each item indicate, however, these attributions are based on impressive circumstantial evidence; and often, indeed, as with thirty-ﬁve of the forty-one essays published in The Craftsman during the period 1734 to 1739, this evidence has been conﬁrmed by computer-assisted stylometric analysis. The case for HF’s authorship of these essays is set forth at length in Battestin, New Essays by Henry Fielding: His Contributions to the Craftsman (1734–1739) and Other Early Journalism, with a Stylometric Analysis by Michael G. Farringdon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), cited below as New Essays. This citation followed by “Appendix A” indicates that the evidence for the attribution is somewhat less certain; “Appendix B” contains the texts of nine additional pieces that have been attributed to HF elsewhere. The items in this section are listed in chronological order under each heading. JOURNALISM Letter on the beneﬁt of laughing, in Mist’s Weekly Journal, No. 172 (3 August 1728). The author, a physician, proposes laughter as a cure for all diseases of the mind and body. (Battestin 1983b; New Essays: Appendix B. The attribution of this essay to HF has been privately conﬁrmed by J. Farringdon using the computer-assisted “cusum” method.) Letter from “Tho. Squint,” in Fog’s Weekly Journal, No. 96 (25 July 1730). The author, a physiognomist, has discovered Sir Robert Walpole’s

200

A Henry Fielding Companion

villainous character in his countenance. (Battestin 1983b; New Essays: Appendix B) Letter from “Harry Hunter,” in The Craftsman, No. 223 (10 October 1730). A comparison between hunters and politicians ridiculing Sir Robert Walpole. (Battestin 1983b; New Essays: Appendix B) Letter from “Mr. Wm. Hint, Candle-Snuffer,” in Daily Post (21 June 1732) and London Evening Post (20–22 June 1732). A defense of HF’s CoventGarden Tragedy against the authors of The Grub-Street Journal. (Burling 1986) Letter from “Philalethes [Lover of Truth],” in Daily Post (31 July 1732). HF’s indignant defense of his own character and of his plays The CoventGarden Tragedy, The Old Debauchees, and The Mock Doctor against attacks by the authors of The Grub-Street Journal. (Life:140–43) “Observations on Government, the Liberty of the Press, Newspapers, Partys, and Party-Writer [sic],” in Thomas Cooke’s Comedian, No. 5 (August 1732): 32–36. HF’s authorship of this uncharacteristically earnest essay admonishing opposition writers against abusing the liberty of the press in their attacks on Sir Robert Walpole was deduced independently by Lockwood and Battestin—and indirectly by J. B. Shipley as well; however, the case for the attribution has not yet been made in print. (Life: 153–54, 641 n. 221) Letter from “Septennius,” in The Craftsman, No. 402 (16 March 1734). This essay marks the beginning of a six-year period in which HF, more or less regularly, contributed political satires to The Craftsman, the principal organ of the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole. Writing on the eve of the parliamentary elections of April 1734, HF poses as a ministerial tool, ironically advocating continuance of the Septennial Act of 1714 by which unpopular governments could remain in power for seven rather than three years. (New Essays) Letter on “screens,” in The Craftsman, No. 403 (23 March 1734). A satire on Sir Robert Walpole’s practice of protecting (or “screening”) his corrupt friends from prosecution and of shielding his own corrupt measures behind the unimpeachable authority of the king. (New Essays) Letter proving that “Francis Osborne” is an old woman, in The Craftsman, No. 422 (3 August 1734). James Pitt, the ministerial author of the London Journal, wrote under the pseudonym of the seventeenth-century author Francis Osborne. For the shrillness of his attacks on the opposition his adversaries dubbed him “Mother Osborne.” (New Essays) Letter chastising “Mother Osborne” and “Squire Walsingham,” in The Craftsman, No. 423 (10 August 1734). The ridicule of James Pitt as “Mother Osborne” is expanded to include William Arnall, who wrote the min-

Works Probably by Fielding

201

isterial paper The Free Briton under the name of the Elizabethan statesman Sir Francis Walsingham. (New Essays) Letter from “N. Machiavel” ironically admiring Sir Robert Walpole’s foreign policy, in The Craftsman, No. 431 (5 October 1734). Writing from the underworld, Nicolo` Machiavelli, whom HF elsewhere praised as “the greatest of Politicians,” marvels at the bungling of the brothers Robert and Horatio Walpole, England’s ambassador abroad. (New Essays) Letter inspired by Joseph Addison’s Dialogues upon Medals, in The Craftsman, No. 457 (5 April 1735). A facetious proposal that, in imitation of the Ancients, Sir Robert Walpole’s supporters strike medals commemorating the dubious achievements of the ministry. (New Essays: Appendix A) Letter presenting the fantasy of a Great Man’s public confession, in The Craftsman, No. 460 (26 April 1735). In a manner anticipating HF’s treatment of the theme of false greatness in Jonathan Wild, Cardinal Coscia, who had recently been condemned for corruption, is imagined on the scaffold confessing to crimes that parallel those of Sir Robert Walpole. (New Essays: Appendix A) Letter on “strollers,” in The Craftsman, No. 469 (28 June 1735). Taking occasion from the recent abortive attempt of the legislature to restrict the number of playhouses and regulate the conduct of the actors, or “strollers,” this essay satirizes Horatio Walpole. England’s chief ambassador abroad and the instrument of his brother Sir Robert Walpole’s unpopular foreign policies. (New Essays) Letter on living dead men and the founding of the Daily Gazetteer, in The Craftsman, No. 471 (12 July 1735). On 30 June the Daily Gazetteer was launched, “clubbing” together the dull “wits” of such ministerial journalists as William Arnall, James Pitt, and Ralph Courteville. This satire marks the beginning of HF’s long satiric duel with the paper. (New Essays). Letter from “Jack Ramble” on the founding of the Daily Gazetteer by Sir Robert Walpole and Nicholas Paxton, in The Craftsman, No. 474 (2 August 1735). Adopting as pseudonymn the name of the hero of his comedy Rape upon Rape, HF reports an imagined meeting in a West Country inn between the prime minister and his agent Paxton. As solicitor to the Treasury, Paxton organized and ﬁnanced Walpole’s propagandists, arranging for the Daily Gazetteer to be distributed gratis throughout the country. (New Essays) Letter to “Caleb D’Anvers” celebrating The Craftsman’s tenth year of publication, in The Craftsman, No. 494 (20 December 1735). Founded by Bolingbroke and William Pulteney as the principal organ of the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole’s ministry, The Craftsman began publication in

202

A Henry Fielding Companion

December 1726 under the editorship of Nicholas Amhurst (“Caleb D’Anvers”). (New Essays) Letter from “Rachel Foresight” on the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, in The Craftsman, No. 503 (21 February 1736). Adopting the persona of a Lancashire witch, HF wrote this humorous essay as the bill to repeal the socalled Witchcraft Act of 1604 that was making its way through Parliament. He regarded the subject as an amusing demonstration of the gullibility and superstition of men and often alludes to it in his later writings. (New Essays) Letter from “T. T.” proposing a device for ventilating Parliament, in The Craftsman, No. 506 (13 March 1736). Like his favorite Jonathan Swift, HF enjoyed impersonating “projectors” or “virtuosi” who propose farfetched schemes for curing the ills of society, in this instance for pumping much-needed fresh air into the houses of Parliament. (New Essays) Letter on the state of tragedy and Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity, in Daily Advertiser (25 May 1736). As manager of the Little Haymarket Theatre, HF staged George Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity, wrote the prologue for it, and warmly recommended it to the public. The critical remarks on tragedy in this letter are on a subject rarely addressed elsewhere in HF’s writings. (Hume: Appendix 4; Life:204–5) Letter from “A Moderate Man” protesting the imminent execution of Mother Gin, in The Craftsman, No. 518 (5 June 1736). Though in his later capacity as magistrate HF would deplore the ruinous effects of gin drinking among the poor, he here ridicules the ministry’s scheme to control drunkenness among the lower classes by raising taxes on spirituous liquors. Attitudes toward the Gin Act of 1736 were highly politicized, and protestors rioted against it. (New Essays) Letter (in two parts) from “Will. Lovemeal” on eating, in The Universal Spectator, Nos. 410–11 (14, 21 August 1736). (Battestin 1986; New Essays: Appendix B) Letter presenting a dream vision of England ruined by Walpole, in The Craftsman, No. 533 (18 September 1736). An indictment of Sir Robert Walpole’s domestic policies that, among other causes, had fomented civil disorder during the summer. (New Essays) Letter from “Philo-Tonsor” in defense of barbers, in The Craftsman, No. 539 (30 October 1736). (New Essays) Letter from “Ned Friendly” on the untruthfulness of newswriters, in The Craftsman, No. 546 (18 December 1736). A recurrent theme in HF’s writings. (New Essays)

Works Probably by Fielding

203

Letter proposing a scheme for prohibiting the use of all liquors except water and for laying a tax on urine, in The Craftsman, No. 565 (30 April 1737). A satire of the government’s policies of taxation. (Cleary 1984: 114; New Essays: Appendix A) Letter from “R. Dudley” proposing to amend the tax on urine or, if that should fail, to substitute an impost on water, in The Craftsman, No. 567 (14 May 1737). In this companion piece to No. 565 HF adopts for a pseudonym the name of an earlier ambitious prime minister who shared, Sir Robert Walpole’s Christian name, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and a favorite of Queen Elizabeth. (New Essays: Appendix A) Letter on the Bill to license the stage, in The Craftsman, No. 569 (28 May 1737). HF here protests against the bill that his own popular political satires had provoked. The Theatrical Licensing Act of June 1737 would close HF’s theater and put an end to his career as dramatist. (New Essays. For an authoritative account of the Licensing Act, which changed the course of HF’s professional life, see Liesenfeld 1984.) Letter presenting an allegorical dream vision of the death by corruption of the body politic, in The Craftsman, No. 571 (11 June 1737). (New Essays: Appendix A) Letter from “C.C.P.L.” (i.e., Colley Cibber, Poet Laureate) proposing his appointment as censor of old plays, in The Craftsman, No. 574 (2 July 1737). As actor, playwright, and until 1733 autocratic manager of the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, Colley Cibber dominated the theatrical scene for many years; and in 1730 the court, despite his incompetence as a writer of verse, appointed him Poet Laureate. HF, who had recently ridiculed Cibber in The Historical Register, here makes him the vehicle of a satire aimed at the Theatrical Licensing Act—a satire the ministry found so offensive that it suppressed this issue of The Craftsman and prosecuted Nicholas Amhurst and the printer for libel. (New Essays) Letter from “Proteus Dimplecheek” proposing the establishment of a physiognomist’s academy, in The Universal Spectator, No. 470 (8 October 1737). (Battestin 1986; New Essays: Appendix B) Letter on the methods of nations in acquiring wealth, in The Craftsman, No. 588 (15 October 1737). A satire of Sir Robert Walpole as conﬁdence trickster. (New Essays: Appendix A) Letter from “Philomath” proposing a scheme to replace the bench of bishops with puppets, in The Craftsman, No. 588 (15 October 1737). Perhaps remembering that the Lords Spiritual had helped speed passage of the Licensing Act in the House of Lords, HF’s proposal represents the bishops as mere tools of the ministry. (New Essays)

204

A Henry Fielding Companion

Letter on the ideal government of the ancient Egyptians, in The Craftsman, No. 589 (22 October 1737). The supposedly ideal polity of ancient Egypt contrasts with the corrupt ministry of Sir Robert Walpole; a similar contrast underlies the political purpose of the episode of gypsies in Tom Jones (XII. xii). (New Essays) Letter from “Anglo-Germanicus” relating a dream encounter with the ghost of the Turkish minister, in The Craftsman, No. 591 (5 November 1737). The crimes against the state for which the Turkish minister was condemned are practiced with impunity in England by his counterpart Sir Robert Walpole. (New Essays) Letter from “A.B” offering a political exegesis of the Aeneid, in The Craftsman, No. 600 (7 January 1738). The commentary of the German scholiast Belchandwheezius reveals that Virgil, in the character of Ripheus, anticipated the corrupt practices of Sir Robert Walpole. (New Essays) Letter comprising a historical survey of political satire in children’s plays, in The Craftsman, No. 604 (4 February 1738). Further ridicule of the Theatrical Licensing Act. (New Essays: Appendix A) Letter from “Democritus” in vindication of laughter, in The Craftsman, No. 612 (1 April 1738). Together with his letter on the therapeutic beneﬁt of laughing in Mist’s Weekly Journal (3 August 1728), his earliest treatment of the subject, this essay emphasizing the didactic utility of satire and humor is part of HF’s continuing interest in the theory of comic laughter. (New Essays. The attribution of this essay to HF was conﬁrmed by J. Farringdon using the computer-assisted “cusum” method of authorship attribution: Farringdon 1996: 175–83.) Letter (in two parts) on the laws pertaining to libel and the liberty of the press, in The Craftsman, Nos. 613, 615 (8, 22 April 1738). A serious discussion of the subject written as HF began his studies as a student of law at the Middle Temple. (New Essays: Appendix A) Letter praising Cardinal Fleury of France as the paragon of prime ministers, in The Craftsman, No. 614 (15 April 1738). The admirable Fleury presented in contrast to Sir Robert Walpole. (New Essays: Appendix A) Letter from “Constans” advocating war with Spain, in The Craftsman, No. 618 (13 May 1738). Writing at a time when Spanish attacks on British ships had raised a public outcry that eventually led to the so-called War of Jenkins Ear, HF here satirizes the paciﬁcist policies of Sir Robert Walpole and Sir William Yonge, Secretary at War. (New Essays) Letter on signposts, in The Craftsman, No. 623 (17 June 1738). Sir Robert Walpole’s pusillanimous foreign policy affronts the brave spirit of the British people, everywhere emblazoned on the signs of innkeepers. (New Essays)

Works Probably by Fielding

205

Letter on the characters of ministers, in The Craftsman, No. 624 (24 June 1738). (New Essays) Letter on the afﬁnity between the legal and military professions, with a patriotic proposal concerning the latter, in The Craftsman, No. 627 (15 July 1738). In keeping with opposition complaints against the ministry’s policy of maintaining a standing army at home to intimidate the populace while it passively suffered Spanish depredations against British shipping to continue unopposed, HF ironically proposes a compromise that would harmonize Sir Robert Walpole’s aggressive domestic ambitions with his pusillanimous foreign policy: he would swell the ranks of the army at home by ﬁlling every civil ofﬁce with soldiers but render the soldiers harmless by castration. (New Essays) Letter from “A. Briton” on proverbs and politics, in The Craftsman, No. 636 (16 September 1738). (New Essays) Letter on the mottoes of signposts, in The Craftsman, No. 638 (30 September 1738). The author (HF) affects to correct an oversight of the author (also HF) of the recent letter on the iconography of signposts (No. 623), who neglected to consider in his essay the importance of the inscriptions on them. (New Essays) Letter on the customs and polity of the Mosquito Indians, in The Craftsman, No. 644 (11 November 1738). This essay, contrasting the superior morality and political customs of these noble savages to the corrupt manners and institutions of England under Sir Robert Walpole, adopts a satiric strategy employed earlier in No. 589. (New Essays) Letter from “T. P.” presenting a specimen of a political play, in The Craftsman, No. 650 (23 December 1738). After a plainly autobiographical complaint that the passage of the Theatrical Licensing Act had “thrown away” ten years of his life as a playwright, HF offers a “Specimen” of a political play ridiculing Sir Robert Walpole and the authors of the Daily Gazetteer (in particular James Pitt as “Francis Osborne”) for their hypocritical behavior in regard to the dissenters’ petition for repeal of the Test Act. (New Essays) Letter from “Pharmacopola” on the political implications of botany, in The Craftsman, No. 686 (1 September 1739). (New Essays: Appendix A) Letter from a Methodist proposing the establishment of a court of equity, in The Craftsman, No. 687 (8 September 1739). Although HF approved the Methodists’ complaints against the worldliness of the clergy of the Church of England, he was otherwise openly, and relentlessly, critical of the “Sect” and its founders, especially the ﬁery Calvinist George Whitefield. This essay is the ﬁrst of HF’s many satires on the subject. (New Essays: Appendix A)

206

A Henry Fielding Companion

Letters on ministerial whisperers and on talkativeness and intemperance, in Common Sense, No. 137 (15 September 1739). (Battestin with Battestin 1980:137–38) Leader on the ease of writing badly, in The Champion (December 1740) known only as reprinted in the Dublin Evening Post (30 December 1740–3 January 1741). (Shipley 1963b) The History of Our Own Times. By a Society of Gentleman. (Publ. C. Corbett, four numbers only: No. 1 [1–15 January 1741], No. 2 [15–30 January], No. 3 [30 January–12 February], No. 4 [5 March]). Besides assuming general editorial responsibilities for this short-lived magazine, HF probably wrote the introductory essay, the essay on shame, and the vision of the golden tree in Nos. 1–3. (Lockwood 1984, 1985) Letter defending the curative efﬁcacy of the Glastonbury waters, in the General Advertiser (8 October 1751). These waters were bottled and distributed in London by HF’s Universal Register Office. (Battestin 1980) POETRY [The Coronation. A Poem. And an Ode on the Birth-Day. “By Mr. Fielding.”] (Publ. B. Creake, sold by J. Roberts, 10 November 1727.) No copy of this work, which is almost certainly HF’s ﬁrst publication, has been found. It is known only through contemporary advertisements. Written presumably on the occasions of George II’s coronation (11 October 1727) and birthday (30 October) and published under HF’s name, the poems are more likely to have been bids for patronage than satires, as is sometimes supposed. HF’s most powerful connections were courtiers. His “Hapsburg” (or so he believed) relations—the ﬁfth, Earl of Denbigh and the earl’s brother Charles Feilding, Gentleman Usher of Queen Caroline’s Privy Chamber—were favored at court; and HF’s cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a friend of Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister. (Foxon 1975:F119; Life:57–58; Lockwood 1993; Ribble 1998) “The Norfolk Lanthorn,” in The Craftsman, No. 107 (20 July 1728). A satirical ballad ridiculing this ostentatious ﬁxture that hung in the hall of Sir Robert Walpole’s house. (Battestin 1983b; New Essays: Appendix B) “An Epistle to Mr. Ellys the Painter,” in Thomas Cooke’s The Comedian, No. V (August 1732): 36–38. A poem of sixty-two lines complimenting HF’s friend John Ellys, whose “Sketch” of “Dorinda” keeps her image before him. (Although HF’s authorship of the poem has not yet been demonstrated in print, it has been attributed to him, independently, by Shipley 1968:322; Battestin Life:153–54, 161; and privately by T. Lockwood.)

Works Probably by Fielding

207

PROSE These writings consist of separate publications—pamphlets, broadsides, and others. Some Thoughts on the present State of the Theatres, and the Consequences of an Act to destroy the Liberty of the Stage [1737]. Reprinted in the Daily Journal (25 March 1737). Prompted by an abortive bill introduced into the House of Commons “for the more Effectual Punishing Rogues and Vagabonds”—a class of people including actors in the legal jargon of the day—HF, playwright and manager of the Little Haymarket Theatre, wrote this essay in defense of the liberty of the stage and the usefulness of the theater in promoting public morality. (Lockwood 1980; Amory 1987b: no. 16; New Essays: Appendix B) An Address to the Electors of Great Britain. (Publ. Drummond and Co., Edinburgh, December 1740.) HF’s authorship of this antiministerial pamphlet has been disputed, but it is probably his work (Coley 1957 and Cleary 1975). Published in Scotland well before the general election to which it refers and doubtless without his consent, it reprints thirteen anonymous leaders that ran in HF’s The Champion throughout November 1740. The Crisis: A Sermon, on Revel. XIV. 9, 10, 11. Necessary to be preached in all the Churches in England, Wales, and Berwick upon Tweed, at or before the next General Election. Humbly inscribed to the Right Reverend the Bench of Bishops. By a Lover of his Country. (Publ. A. Dodd, E. Nutt, and H. Chappelle, 16 April 1741.) This antiministerial homily, published as the nation prepared for a general election, served the interests of HF’s patrons Lyttelton and Dodington. Most, but not all (e.g., Cleary 1984: 149–50), authorities accept HF’s authorship of the piece, an opinion founded on a contemporary report that the printer of the pamphlet attributed it to him. (Wells 1912; Jensen 1916; Life:297, 657 n. 57) An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Hanover Rat. Dedicated to T***m. M[ortime]r, M.D. and S[ecretar]y to the Royal Society. (Publ. M. Cooper, 23 November 1744.) A parody of Henry Baker’s Attempt towards a Natural History of the Polype (1743), this satire ridicules the policies of the king’s favorite minister, Lord Granville, whom HF’s friends in opposition blamed for setbacks in the war with France and, most particularly, for using English funds to subsidize Hanoverian troops. (Jensen 1936; Coley 1994; Ribbles B3) Ten Queries submitted to every Sober, Honest, and Disinterested Elector for the City and Liberty of Westminster. [24 November 1749] A handbill supporting the candidacy of Granville Leveson-Gower, Viscount Trentham, brother-in-law of HF’s patron the Duke of Bedford in the

208

A Henry Fielding Companion

parliamentary by-election for Westminster. Printed by W. Strahan, 10,000 copies were distributed. (Battestin with Battestin 1977–78: 161– 65) The Covent-Garden Journal. No. 1. To be publish’d Once every Month, during the present Westminster Election. By Paul Wronghead, of the Fleet, Esq. [5 December 1749] A satirical broadsheet conceived and in part written by HF in support of the Duke of Bedford’s brother-in-law in the Westminster by-election; printed by R. Francklin, 13,000 copies were distributed. The supposed author to whom HF facetiously attributes the piece is Paul Whitehead, principal propagandist for the party opposing Bedford’s candidate. (Battestin with Battestin 1977–78: 166–74; Life:491– 93; for the view that HF was not the author, see Coley 1962.)

Letters

The complete extant correspondence of HF—and also of his sister, the novelist and classicist Sarah Fielding—has been edited, with commentary, by M. C. Battestin and C. T. Probyn, The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). An Appendix to this volume includes six further letters by other members of the Fielding family: sisters Beatrice and Ursula, their famous half-brother John, and HF’s sons William and Allen. These six letters all bear on the circumstances and interests of HF and Sarah. For example, Letter 113 (John Fielding to the Duke of Bedford, Bow Street, 28 March 1755) expresses John’s embarrassment on ﬁnding that his brother, recently deceased, had neglected his ﬁnancial obligations to the duke; Letter 116 (Reverend Allen Fielding to Reverend Thomas Rackett, St. Stephen’s, Hackington, near Canterbury, 27 January 1802) treats matters concerning HF’s biography; and Letters 114 (Sir John Fielding to Albany Wallis, Bow Street, 16 December 1775) and 115 (William Fielding to David Garrick [London, November 1778]) concern the discovery and posthumous production of HF’s lost comedy, The Fathers: or, The Good-Natur’d Man. The collection of HF’s correspondence comprises just seventy-seven letters (seventy by him, the remainder by his correspondents)—the two principal sources being, for the decade 1741–51, the family archives of the Earl of Malmesbury, descendant of HF’s closest friend, James Harris; and, for the years 1748–51, the papers of his patron, the fourth Duke of Bedford relating to HF’s appointments to the magistracy and his activities in that capacity and in his brief tenure as High Steward of the New Forest, Hampshire. The Malmesbury archives are also the principal source of the extant correspondence of Sarah Fielding, comprising twenty-two of the thirty-three letters. Of these, eight reveal the circumstances in which Harris began writing his unﬁnished but valuable, “Essay on the Life and Genius of Henry Fielding, Esqr.,” a work he abandoned on learning that Andrew Millar, HF’s publisher, had commissioned Arthur Murphy to write an essay (of the identical title) to serve as introduction to the 1762

210

A Henry Fielding Companion

edition of HF’s Works. In Sarah’s correspondence these are Letters 87–92, written to Harris from Bathwick during the period July–October 1758, and Letters 108–9, written from Walcott, near Bath, in March 1762. Harris’s important “Essay” on HF may be found in Probyn:Appendix III. In the following summary, HF’s correspondence is listed under the names of the correspondent, the order of correspondents being determined chronologically according to the date of the ﬁrst letter under the name; the numbering of the letters is that of the Battestin/Probyn edition. To Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Letter 1 (n.p., n.d. [London, September 1727?]). Sending “a Copy of the Play” (Love in Several Masques?) for her criticism. Letter 2 (n.p., n.d. [London, 4 September 1730?]). Sending a copy of The Modern Husband. From Aaron Hill Letter 3 (28 February 1736 [1737]). Declining HF’s invitation to write a prologue and epilogue for the political satire A Rehearsal of Kings. To John Nourse Letter 4 (6 March 1737 [1738]). Ordering law books. Letter 5 (East Stour, 7 March 1738 [1739]). Ordering a law book. Letter 6 (9 July 1739). Asking JN to ﬁnd him a house to rent near the Middle Temple, where HF was preparing for the bar. Letter 9 (20 April 1741). Asking JN to deliver copies of Of True Greatness and the Vernoniad to the publisher Henry Chappelle. To and from Davidge Gould Letter 7 (Basingstoke, 15 July 1740). Asking his uncle to forward to him at the Dorchester Assizes a certain urgently needed “Conveyance.” Letter 8 (Sharpham Park, 23 July 1740). DG replies that he has sent the “Deeds” to HF at Dorchester, as requested. To and from James Harris Letter 10 (Bath, 8 September 1741). Inviting JH at Salisbury to enter into an “epistolary Correspondence”—an exceptional gesture of friendship on HF’s part, since letter writing is “an Exercise” he “detest[s].” He writes of love and lust, and of the dullness of Bath, from which he ﬁnds relief in the company of his friends Thomas Burnet and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams. He lodges with the Reverend Walter Robbins at Abbey Green, Robbins being the clergymen who married HF and Charlotte Cradock Fielding in 1734. Letter 11 (Salisbury, 17 September 1741). JH cordially accepts HF’s offer of correspondence.

Letters

211

Letter 12 (Bath, 29 September 1741). In James Leake’s famous bookshop, HF’s reﬂections on the nature of laughter are interrupted by news of the sudden death of his friend Hanbury Williams’s mother. Letter 13 (London, 27 March 1742). Dejected by his wife’s illness—a state of mind deepened by the recent death of his daughter Charlotte and by the poverty that caused him to move his family to Spring Garden, Charing Cross, where, within the Verge of the Court, he was safe from creditors—HF cannot rejoice with JH at news he sends of an opposition majority on the “Committee of Secrecy” appointed to investigate the conduct of Sir Robert Walpole, who had been forced to resign as prime minister in February. Letter 14 (Bath, 24 September 1742). HF, in the process of compiling his Miscellanies, explains his preference for prose over verse. Among others in Bath, he mentions a new acquaintance, the Reverend George Watts, whose company he prefers to that of Ralph Allen’s prote´ge´, “the great [William] Warburton.” Letter 15 (Brompton, 27 February 1742 [1743]). Asking JH “to correct” his translation of Demosthenes’ First Olynthiac for inclusion in the Miscellanies. Letter 16 (Brompton, 14 March 1742 [1743]). Thanking JH for correcting his “lame Translation.” Letter 17 (Twiverton [Twerton, near Bath], 6 September 1743). Informing JH of Charlotte Fielding’s recovery from “a very dangerous Illness.” Letter 18 [Twerton, September or October 1743?]. Acknowledging receipt of JH’s “History of Nobody,” which JH dedicated to him (see Probyn: Appendix II). HF praises true wit and playfully extends JH’s ironic history, claiming to have seen a bust of “Nobody” resembling Richard “Beau” Nash in the collection of Jerry Peirce, surgeon of Bath and connoisseur of art. Letter 19 (Twiverton [Twerton], 14 November 1743). Conveying a mock legal “Process” summoning JH at Salisbury to appear before the “Great Snash” (HF’s name for Richard “Beau” Nash) at Bath in time for the next ball in order to answer “a Plea of Gallantry,” JH not having picked up a fan dropped by Lady Margaret Brown, leader of the party of opera lovers who opposed his favorite, Handel. Letter 20 (Twiverton [Twerton], 24 November 1743). Informing JH of the requirements for admission to Bath hospital. Letter 21 (Bagshot, 15 January 1743 [1744]). On his way from Bath to London in the company of their friend the Reverend William Young, HF informs JH that the patient he recommended has been admitted to the

212

A Henry Fielding Companion

hospital and assures him as well of the excellent character of the woman JH plans to marry. Letter 22 (Bath, 10 October 1744). Having taken lodgings at Bath because of Charlotte’s Fieldings’s ill health, HF accepts JH’s offer of a loan. Letter 23 (London, 24 November 1744). Reﬂecting on the consolations of philosophy on the occasion of Charlotte Fielding’s death. Letter 24 (Boswell Court, 13 July 1745). Congratulating JH on his marriage. Letter 25 (Essex House, 5 October 1745). Writing optimistically that the Jacobite rebels will be defeated, thereby improving England’s fortunes in the War of the Austrian Succession. Includes a note from Dr. John Barker advising JH that HF’s History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland will be published the “beginning of next Week” (i.e., Monday, October 7). Letter 26 (London, 5 November 1745). Enclosing a copy of The True Patriot, which began publication this day, and informing JH of the progress of the lawsuit in which HF represented their friend Dr. Arthur Collier. Letter 27 (Boswell Court, 2 January 1745 [1746]). Suffering from the gout, HF thanks JH for his contribution to The True Patriot [No. 10 (7 January)]. Letter 28 (Boswell Court, 11 January 1745 [1746]). Concerning JH’s contribution to The True Patriot. Letter 29 (London, 30 January 1745 [1746]). Concerning the Dr. Arthur Collier lawsuit. Letter 30 (London, 13 May 1746). Congratulating JH on the birth of a son and heir, with further news of the unpromising progress of the Dr. Arthur Collier suit. Letter 31 (Boswell Court, 19 February 1746 [1747]). Asking for a loan of £50. Letter 40 (London, 15 October 1748). Excusing himself from paying a debt and complaining of the gout. Letter 55 (London, [18?] November 1749). Enclosing a copy of A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez, published on 18 November, HF explains he cannot repay a debt because he has “laid out all my Money at present in purchasing a little Estate at Twickenham” No evidence of such a purchase has been found. Letter 56 (London, 16 January 1749 [1750]). Thanking JH for a gift of bacon and asking him to urge his brother Thomas, who suffers from the gout, to use “my Doctor” [Thomas Thompson]. Letter 61 (London, 22 September 1750). Postponing repayment of a debt. Letter 67 (Salisbury, 21 December 1751). JH, having sent HF a copy of Hermes, asks in return for a copy of Amelia. Letter 68 (Bow Street, 23 December 1751). Sending JH a copy of his “damned

Letters

213

Book” Amelia, and congratulating him on Hermes, which is “among the best Books in our Language.” From Richard Birt Letter 32 (Lymington [Hampshire], 3 February 1747 [1748]). This letter, together with letters 33–36, represents the most fully documented case of HF’s career as a lawyer. RB, an attorney who acted as HF’s deputy in his capacity as High Steward of the New Forest under the wardenship of the Duke of Bedford informs him of a turbulent dispute precipitated by James Perkins, who, laying claim to part of the royal forest, harassed the king’s woodsmen and killed the deer. Birt further accuses Charles Coleman (see heading below), deputy surveyor of the forest and receiver of rents, of being in league with Perkins. Coleman in 1751 was indeed indicted for corruption and for exploiting the king’s timber for his personal proﬁt. Letter 33 (Winchester, 2 March 1747 [1748]). RB, who has gathered much evidence supporting the king’s right to the disputed land, regrets that the case against Perkins has been dropped. To Robert Butcher (See also under Duke of Bedford.) Letter 34 (Boswell Court, 8 March 1747 [1748]). (HF never mastered the name of Butcher, whom he invariably addresses as Richard.) RB was agent to the Duke of Bedford, warden of the New Forest, under whom HF served as High Steward. Charles Coleman having come to town to present his side of the Perkins case to Bedford, HF expects a visit from RB, Coleman, and John Sharpe, Solicitor to the Treasury, in the morning. Letter 35 (Boswell Court, 8 March 1747 [1748]). A note assuring RB he awaits him and John Sharpe at home. Letter 36 (Twickenham, 3 April 1748). Enclosing for Bedford’s attention a letter from Richard Birt “concerning an Affair of a very extraordinary Kind” (presumably further developments in the Perkins case) and promising to attend the duke on 7 April if the gout permits. Sometime before his new wife, Mary Daniel, gave birth to their son, William, in February, HF had moved from Boswell Court to a rented house in Twickenham. Letter 37 (Twickenham, 5 May 1748). Requesting “a very small Favour” from Bedford—probably the duke’s recommending him to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke for appointment to the magistracy of Westminster; Hardwicke signed the ﬁat for this commission on 30 July. Letter 38 (Twickenham, 4 July 1748). The gout preventing him from coming to town, HF writes to thank Bedford and RB for favors. Letter 39 (Twickenham, 23 September 1748). The gout preventing HF from executing his duties as High Steward of the New Forest, he hopes Bedford will grant him audience before removing him from that ofﬁce. RB

214

A Henry Fielding Companion

has not understood that HF’s recent appointment was to the magistracy of Westminster and not to the more important commission for Middlesex County, for which a property qualiﬁcation was necessary. Although the Earl of Chesterfield had put him into the latter commission in June 1747, HF could not qualify for it. Letter 42 (Meard’s Court, 21 November 1748). As he is crippled with the gout, HF asks that RB come to him to discuss “something very particular.” Letter 44 ([Bow Street], 12 December 1748). HF will call on RB on a matter “of great Importance” to himself—probably his request that Bedford enable him to satisfy the property qualiﬁcation for the Middlesex magistracy. Letter 46 (Bow Street, 16 December 1748). Explains the impossibility of answering Charles Coleman’s queries (Letter 43) concerning the collection of rents in the New Forest. HF anxiously hopes Bedford will enable him to meet the property qualiﬁcation. Letter 48 ([Bow Street], 19 December 1748). Enclosing his resignation of the patent of High Steward of the New Forest. Letter 52 (Bow Street, 18 July 1749). Requesting information about the properties leased him by Bedford. Letter 60 (Bow Street, 29 May 1750). At HF’s request, Bedford had recommended him, in vain, for appointment as judge of the Marshalsea Court (see Letters 58–59 under Bedford below); HF thanks RB for his support. Letter 64 (Bow Street, 7 May 1751). Asking RB to convey to Bedford a request for an important but unknown, favor—perhaps the favor, which Bedford granted, of appointing HF’s half-brother, John Fielding, to the Westminster magistracy. Letter 65 (Bow Street, 13 June 1751). A note asking RB to deliver to Bedford a letter concerning public business. Letter 66 (Bow Street, 18 June 1751). Regretting that a legal technicality prevents him from executing Bedford’s wishes; and, no doubt with his brother John Fielding in mind, reminding Bedford to send his list of commissions of the peace for Westminster to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke To Samuel Richardson Letter 41 ([Brownlow Street], 15 October 1748). Although in Shamela and Joseph Andrews HF had ridiculed SR’s ﬁrst novel, Pamela (1740), he at once recognized the brilliance of SR’s masterpiece Clarissa, and in The Jacobite’s Journal (2 January, 5 March 1748) he recommended the early volumes to the public. It is perhaps a sign of the (temporarily) improved relations between these two great rivals that HF was among the readers favored with a prepublication copy of volume 5, containing

Letters

215

the moving story of Clarissa’s rape. Having read it through, HF wrote this famous letter warmly praising SR’s achievement. From Charles Coleman Letter 43 (Lyndhurst [Hampshire], 9 December 1748). As receiver of the rents of the New Forest, CC asks HF, as High Steward, how legally to collect the rents. On Coleman and his questionable practices, see Letters 32–33 (see Richard Birt) and Letters 34–35, and 46, in which HF replies to this letter (see Robert Butcher). To the Duke of Bedford (See also Robert Butcher). Letter 45 (Bow Street, 13 December 1748). Asking the duke to enable him to meet the property qualiﬁcation for the Middlesex magistracy by leasing him houses worth £100. Letter 47 ([Bow Street], 19 December 1748). Thanking the duke for constituting him a magistrate, and resigning the patent by which, in April 1746, the duke as warden had appointed him High Steward of the New Forest. Letter 50 (Bow Street, 3 July 1749). After a weekend in the country HF returned to town to ﬁnd that a mob of sailors and their sympathizers had been demolishing and looting brothels in the Strand. He paused in his efforts to control these disorders to ask the duke to appoint him Solicitor to the Excise. Nothing came of the request. Letter 51 (Bow Street, 3 July 1749). The riots referred to in Letter 50 threatened to worsen that evening as thousands of armed sailors prepared to continue assaulting the brothels. HF, who had only ﬁfty troops at his disposal, asks for reinforcements to keep the peace. For HF’s own account of these events, which resulted in the arrest and unpopular execution of a young man, see A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez. Letter 57 (Bow Street, 14 May 1750). A scrutiny of the votes cast in the bitterly contested Westminster election having conﬁrmed the victory of Bedford’s brother-in-law, Viscount Trentham, the duke feared violent disturbances when the result was announced on 15 May. In a note HF assures him that he will attempt to keep the peace. For a full account of the election and HF’s part in it, see Battestin with Battestin 1977–78 and Life:485–93. Letter 58 ([Bow Street], 24 May 1750). Asking the duke to recommend him for appointment as judge of the Marshalsea Court, a post in the gift of another of HF’s patrons, Charles Spencer, third Duke of Marlborough. Letter 59 (London, 29 May 1750). Believing the duke’s recommendation had ensured his appointment to the Marshalsea Court, HF writes “in a Rapture of Gratitude.” Marlborough, however, had already promised the judgeship to a candidate recommended by Henry Pelham, the prime minister. See also Letter 60 under Robert Butcher.

216

A Henry Fielding Companion

To the Duke of Richmond Letter 49 (Bow Street, 8 April 1749). The Duke of Richmond, HF’s patron and friend, was active in suppressing the gangs of smugglers who infested the southern coast near his estate at Goodwood, West Sussex. HF writes to advise him of legal difﬁculties preventing him from personally examining a smuggler imprisoned in Newgate, out of his jurisdiction. See Stewart 1971 and Life:465–67. To Lord Chancellor Hardwicke (See also Hutton Perkins.) Letter 53 (Bow Street, 21 July 1749). Enclosing a copy of his Charge delivered to the Grand Jury (published this day), as well as the draft of his “Bill for the better preventing Street Robberies,” HF recommends his clerk Joshua Brogden for the magistracy of Westminster and Middlesex. Hardwicke meant to grant this request, but in the event Brogden was deemed unsuitable. Letter 72 ([Bow Street], 6 December 1753). Recommending Saunders Welch for the magistracy of Westminster and Middlesex. To George Lyttelton Letter 54 (Bow Street, 29 August 1749). Congratulating his friend and patron on his recent marriage, HF reﬂects on the virtue of benevolence and urges Lyttelton to use his inﬂuence to have his friend Edward Moore appointed Deputy Examiner of Plays. The post, however, had already been ﬁlled. To Hutton Perkins (See also Lord Chancellor Hardwicke.) Letter 62 (Bow Street, 25 November 1750). Under orders from Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, HF in the spring had conducted highly successful raids against illegal gaming houses, whose keepers, using bribery and intimidation to avoid prosecution, were behind a plot to murder the Lord Chancellor. HF wishes to meet with HP, Hardwicke’s secretary, to discuss the “Hellish Purpose” of the villains. (Life:502–3, 511) To the Duke of Newcastle Letter 63 (Bow Street, 15 January 1750 [1751]). Recommending William Pentlow, the best and bravest of his constables, to be keeper of New Prison, Clerkenwell. Letter 70 (Ealing, 14 April 1753). HF, his health deteriorating, had leased a house in Ealing, six miles west of town. He replies to the duke’s inquiry concerning afﬁdavits in the controversial case of Elizabeth Canning. For HF’s account of this affair, see A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning. Letter 71 (Ealing, 27 April 1753). Assuring the duke that he has tried in vain to comply with his “Commands” to produce the afﬁdavits in the Eliza-

Letters

217

beth Canning case, the documents in question being in possession of the pro-Canning faction opposed to her adversary, Sir Crisp Gascoygne, the Lord Mayor. To the Reverend Thomas Birch Letter 69 ([Bow Street], 18 May 1752). A note inviting TB to dinner on 25 May. To John Fielding Letter 73 (On board The Queen of Portugal, off Ryde, Isle of Wight, 12 July 1754). Hoping to recover his health, HF on 26 June 1754 set out for Lisbon aboard the Queen of Portugal, whose captain was Richard Veale. He was accompanied by his wife, Mary Fielding, his eldest daughter Harriet, Margaret Collier (a friend of the family and Harriet’s governess), and a pair of servants, Isabella Ash and William Aldrit, a “footman” who also served as HF’s amanuensis. HF’s half-brother John, who succeeded him as magistrate at Bow Street, was also responsible for looking after HF’s troubled family and affairs at Ealing. The letter reports that the voyagers are safely moored off Ryde. For HF’s own account, see The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon; also Life:576–605. Letter 74 ([On board The Queen of Portugal], Tor Bay, Devon, 22 July 1754). Dispatching presents of cider to friends and inquiring about the reliability of his steward Richard Boor in conducting the business of the farm at Ealing. Letter 75 ([Junqueira, near Lisbon, c. 10–14 September 1754]). A long, petulant account of HF’s arrival in Lisbon. Topics include the state of his own and the family’s health; the character of Captain Richard Veale, whose promise to marry the servant Isabella Ash has tempted her to return with him to England; the family’s ﬁnancial difﬁculties and their moving to cheaper lodgings in Junqueira, thanks to the friendly ofﬁces of the merchant John Stubbs; Mary Fielding’s wish to return to England; HF’s anger at Margaret Collier’s ﬂirtation with John Williamson, chaplain of the English factory; William Aldrit’s defection, leaving HF without an amanuensis; his replacing the loss of the family’s servants with “a black Slave and his Wife”; presents of onions and wine for friends. Letter 76 ([Junqueira, near Lisbon, c. 20 September 1754). Part of a letter relating an amusing family quarrel over which of two parrots—intended for gifts to Harriet Fielding, HF’s daughter by Charlotte Fielding, and to Sophia Fielding, his daughter by Mary Fielding–is the better bird. Letter 77 ([Junqueira, near Lisbon, late September 1754]). Fragment of a letter: until the arrival of HF’s new amanuensis, JF must await an account of “new wonders.”

Manuscripts

Except for the collection of HF’s correspondence with James Harris preserved among the private papers of the Earl of Malmesbury, and except for the letters and other documents relating to HF’s mutually beneﬁcial association with his patron the fourth Duke of Bedford (the Bedford papers are at two locations: those concerning HF’s stewardship of the New Forest are now at the Hampshire Record Ofﬁce, Winchester, whereas those concerning his appointments to the magistracy and other instances of the duke’s patronage remain at the Bedford Estates Ofﬁce, London), few examples of HF’s holograph manuscripts survive. For an account of HF’s manuscripts, see P. Boumelha, “Henry Fielding,” in Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. 3, part 1, comp. M. M. Smith with P. Boumelha (London and New York: Mansell, 1986), 355–57. For details as to the location of all HF’s letters, see Letters. Only three manuscripts of HF’s literary works are known. Holograph copies of two poems (“An Epistle to Mr Lyttleton [sic: George Lyttelton]” [1733] and an unﬁnished burlesque of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad [“—O to look oer the old Records of Time,” c. 1729/30]) are among the papers of his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, at Sandon Hall, Stafford (Harrowby MSS. Trust; see Grundy 1972). The manuscript of an essay on the wisdom of silence that HF contributed to Common Sense (13 May 1738) under the pseudonym “Mum Budget” is at the Public Record Ofﬁce, London (see Battestin with Battestin 1980). For the location of Fielding’s scattered and fragmentary legal manuscripts, see Amory (1968). For a diplomatic transcript of the known fragments of HF’s lost work, “An Institute of the Pleas of the Crown,” see Amory (1987a). For an account of the fragments in the Hyde Collection on which this transcript is based, as well as of other incidental Fielding manuscripts in that collection, see Amory (1967). Also relevant are Amory (1987b) and Doherty (1985), the latter pertaining to a fragment of a Fielding memorandum book. Although not in HF’s hand, there exists among the miscellaneous papers of the Duke of Newcastle

220

A Henry Fielding Companion

in the British Library a fair copy of HF’s plan to reform the metropolitan police; this is the “Draught of a Bill for the better preventing Street Robberies &c.” that HF submitted to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke in July 1749. (See Letter 53; for a transcript of the Bill, see Life: Appendix 1.) Miscellaneous manuscripts, including receipts, copyright assignments, and HF’s will, include the following: HF’s public challenge denouncing Andrew Tucker and his son as “Clowns, and Cowards,” 15 November 1725. (Lyme Regis, Dorset) Earliest extant example of HF’s autograph. (Life: Plate 8 and pp. 50–51) Receipt to John Watts for 20 gns. for the copyright to “the despairing Debauchees” [i.e., The Old Debauchees] and The Covent-Garden Tragedy, 4 April 1732. (Hyde) Receipt to John Nourse for £45 in part payment for translating Gustaf Adlerfelt’s Military History of Charles XII, 10 March 1739 [1740]. (Yale) Assignment to Andrew Millar of the copyright to Joseph Andrews (£183.11s.), A Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough (5 gns.), and Miss Lucy in Town (10 gns.), 13 April 1742. (Forster Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum, London) Receipt to Andrew Millar for £600, promising to assign the copyright to Tom Jones, 11 June 1748. (Morgan Library, New York) Assignment to Andrew Millar of the copyright to Tom Jones, 25 March 1749. (Morgan Library) HF’s holograph will, c. June 1754; proved 14 November 1754. (Public Record Ofﬁce; Cross 3:22–23)

Themes and Topics

ADULTERY. Though HF was something of a rake in his youth, he appears even then to have honored the institution of marriage, drawing a line between fornication and adultery. As early as 1732 in The Modern Husband he made the shameless adulteries of Mr. and Mrs. Modern the subject of his darkest comedy. And in Joseph Andrews (1742, I. xvii), when Mrs. Tow-wouse erupts in a volley of oaths and insults on ﬁnding Betty the chambermaid in bed with her husband, HF brings the chapter to a close with a sobering observation on “a Catastrophe, common enough, and comical enough too, perhaps in modern History, yet often fatal to the Repose and Well-being of Families, and the Subject of many Tragedies, both in Life and on the Stage.” A decade later, during the period of his magistracy, HF took up the subject in earnest. In Amelia (1751) Booth bitterly regrets his inﬁdelity with Fanny Mathews, the cause of pain to the wife he dearly loves; and when Colonel James’s plans to seduce Amelia are exposed—plans in which his own complaisant wife cooperates—Dr. Harrison writes him a letter on the evils of adultery that might serve as a small dissertation on the subject (IX. v, X. ii). A dissertation on the subject is very much what HF offered readers of The CoventGarden Journal (21, 28 October 1752), where he devoted two entire leaders to reviewing the laws and severe punishments devised in antiquity to control adultery, “this atrocious Vice,” and to regretting the levity with which his own countrymen regarded it—a point more succinctly anticipated in the number for 14 January 1752, where he gave the “modern” deﬁnition of gallantry as “Fornication and Adultery.” As a magistrate, when a poor man came before him seeking to take out a warrant against his wife’s paramour, HF publicly deplored the fact that he was powerless to oblige him, “ADULTERY BEING NO CRIME BY THE LAWS OF ENGLAND” (Covent-Garden Journal, 5 May 1752). CHARITY. First plainly apparent in leaders he wrote for The Champion (1739– 40), HF’s moral and religious thought is securely placed within the tradition of

222

A Henry Fielding Companion

Christian humanism. It is “humanist” in the nourishment it draws from the classical philosophers of Greece and Rome, among them notably Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Seneca; it is Christian in that it acknowledges the higher wisdom revealed in the New Testament, measuring and interpreting the philosophers in the light of the teachings of Christ and the Apostles. In this way the moral virtues of the ancients, such as liberality (humanitas) and temperance (temperantia), though cherished and retained, are subsumed within the Christian virtues of charity and chastity. The distinction is succinctly expressed by two of HF’s favorite divines, Archbishop John Tillotson and Bishop Benjamin Hoadly, who reduce the essential virtues of the good man or woman to two: charity with respect to others and chastity (representative of the temperate discipline of the passions) with respect to ourselves. Thus Tillotson offered as the two comprehensive rules of morality: That we govern our passions by reason, and moderate our selves in the use of sensual delights, so as not to transgress the rules of temperance and chastity; that we demean our selves towards others, and converse with them with justice and ﬁdelity, with kindness and charity. These are the sum of the divine laws, and the heads of our duty towards our selves and others.

Bishop Hoadly is still more succinct, summing up true religion as “Virtue and Integrity, as to Ourselves, and Charity and Beneﬁcence to Others.” All the amiable characters of HF’s plays and novels are inherently compassionate and generous; they are endowed with the quality he calls good-nature. But this benevolent disposition was not enough in itself; it must manifest itself in deeds, in the relief of the distressed and the promotion of their happiness. In The Champion (5 April 1740) HF offered his own interpretation of a famous passage in 1 Corinthians, declaring that the word agape, “which some versions render charity, is better rendered by others love.” He further insists, however, that this is above all an active virtue, not conﬁned to our wishes merely, but our actions, under which head I shall introduce liberality. . . . By this virtue, which is generally called charity itself (and perhaps it is the chief part of it), is not meant the ostentatious giving a penny to a beggar in the street . . . as if charity was change for sixpence, but the relieving the wants and sufferings of one another to the utmost of our abilities. It is to be limited by our power, I say, only.

The central movement of Joseph Andrews (1742) sounds a series of changes on the theme of charity, beginning at Book I, Chapter xii, with a version of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and ending at Book III, Chapter xiii, where Parson Adams and the miser Peter Pounce, riding together in a coach toward Booby Hall, engage in a dialogue on the meaning of charity: Adams maintains that Riches without Charity were nothing worth; for that they were only a Blessing to him who made them a Blessing to others. “You and I,” said Peter, “have different Notions of Charity. I own, as it is generally used, I do not like the Word, nor do I think

Themes and Topics

223

it becomes one of us Gentlemen; it is a mean Parson-like Quality; tho’ I would not infer many Parsons have it neither.” “Sir,” said Adams, “my Deﬁnition of Charity is a generous Disposition to relieve the Distressed.” “There is something in that Deﬁnition,” answered Peter, “which I like well enough; it is, as you say, a Disposition—and does not so much consist in the Act as in the Disposition to do it.”

In Tom Jones (1749, II. v) Allworthy similarly enters into “a Discourse on Charity” with Captain Bliﬁl, attempting, with no more success than Adams had with Pounce, to disabuse him of the notion “that the Word Charity, in Scripture, no where means Beneﬁcence, or Generosity.” All the good men of HF’s ﬁction—Parson Adams and Squire Allworthy, Heartfree in Jonathan Wild (1743) and Dr. Harrison in Amelia (1751)—translate their goodness of heart into deeds. HF’s is above all a social morality aimed at improving the public welfare; but in his view, charity has as well profound implications for the individual who practices it. The maxim of St. James, “Faith without works is dead,” was a text repeated in countless sermons by the latitudinarian divines whom HF admired. “The great and solemn Audit to come,” declared Hoadly, “turns all upon Charity.” In Joseph Andrews (I. xvii), the novel in which this theme is emphasized, Parson Adams attacks the Pauline theology of the great Methodist evangelist George Whitefield, denouncing “ ‘the detestable Doctrine of Faith against good Works’ ”—a doctrine not only “ ‘pernicious’ ” in its “ ‘Inﬂuence on Society,’ ” but also false in its representation of what will be required for salvation. At the last day, Adams insists, we will be judged by our deeds alone: his own opinion “ ‘hath always been, that a virtuous and good Turk, or Heathen, are more acceptable in the sight of their Creator, than a vicious and wicked Christian, tho’ his Faith was as perfectly Orthodox as St. Paul’s himself.’ ” (On the importance of charity and benevolence in HF’s thought and as a theme in his ﬁction, particularly in Joseph Andrews, see Battestin 1959: Chap. 2, 5; Harrison 1975; and Shroff 1978.) CHASTITY. On the importance of the virtue of chastity in the Christian humanist tradition, see charity. HF was not himself remarkable for sexual continence. He was in fact something of a libertine, by his own admission frequenting brothels in his youth and writing letters to women chieﬂy for the purpose of satisfying his “Lust” (see, respectively, Amelia [1751], I. vi; and his letter to James Harris, 8 September 1741 [Letter 10]. Even in later life, as his friend James Harris recalled, HF’s “Passions . . . were vehement in every kind,” and “easily passing into excess” (“Essay on the Life and Genius” of HF, in Probyn: Appendix III). The sexual weakness of his heroes Tom Jones and Billy Booth was their author’s own characteristic as well. Like Jones and Booth, however, HF was not a shameless rake. As an author, indeed, he was, as Professor Sherburn saw long ago, “fundamentally a moralist”

224

A Henry Fielding Companion

(Sherburn 1956: 1). His was an age of the so-called double standard, when, as Sarah Fielding’s Miss Boden says in The History of Ophelia (1760), chastity “was even made the Subject of Ridicule in such Men as were possessed of it”— an observation true today, certainly, as one reads of the militantly inviolable virtue of Joseph Andrews as he rehearses with Lady Booby (as well as Mrs. Slipslop and Betty the Chambermaid) the exemplary chastity of his biblical namesake who famously withstood the blandishments of Mrs. Potiphar (Genesis 39: 7–20). The chastity of HF’s hero is such a prominent theme in Joseph Andrews only because it mocks the “Virtue” of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, whose brother Joseph thinks he is. Needless to say, the author of Tom Jones did not seriously undertake his ﬁrst novel in defense of male chastity. It would be a mistake, however, to undervalue the importance of chastity— even male chastity—in HF’s morality. “This Character of Male-Chastity,” he declares in the opening chapter of Joseph Andrews, is “doubtless as desirable and becoming in one Part of the human Species, as in the other.” Adultery, he writes later in the same novel (I. xvii), is “a Catastrophe, common enough, and comical enough too, perhaps in modern History, yet often fatal to the Repose and Well-being of Families, and the Subject of many Tragedies, both in Life and on the Stage.” Even Tom Jones, who succumbs to temptations as often as Joseph Andrews resists them, must acquire the virtue of prudence, learning to discipline his passions, before he is accepted as a ﬁt husband for Sophia. And the nearly tragic complications of Booth’s adultery pose a grave problem in Amelia. Indeed, HF felt so strongly about the evil of adultery that he devoted two numbers of The Covent-Garden Journal (21 and 28 October 1752) to urging the enactment of a law against it. Twenty years earlier, he had similarly criticized the loose marital standards of the day in his dark comedy, The Modern Husband (1732). But his views regarding male chastity are perhaps best represented in The Wedding-Day—one of his earliest comedies, though not acted until 1743— when Heartfort upbraids Millamour for his incontinence with women and deﬁnes his own attitude toward the double standard: My Practice perhaps is not equal to my Theory; but I pretend to sin with as little Mischief as I can to others: and this I can lay my Hand on my Heart and afﬁrm, that I never seduced a young Woman to her own Ruin, nor a married one to the Misery of her Husband. . . . Custom may lead a Man into many Errors, but it justiﬁes none; nor are any of its Laws more absurd and unjust, than those relating to the Commerce between the Sexes: For what can be more ridiculous than to make it infamous for a Woman to grant what is honourable for us to solicit, nay, to ensnare and almost to compel them, into; to make a Whore a scandalous, a Whoremaster a reputable Appellation? Whereas, in reality, there is no more mischievous Character than a public Debaucher of Women. (V. iii)

HF may thus excuse weakness in sexual matters, but he does not justify it. As Tom Jones denies Nightingale’s insinuation that there is nothing to choose between his own sexual escapades and the latter’s debauching of Nancy Miller, he certainly speaks for his author

Themes and Topics

225

“Lookee, Mr. Nightingale . . . I am no canting Hypocrite, nor do I pretend to the Gift of Chastity, more than my Neighbours. I have been guilty with Women, I own it; but am not conscious that I have ever injured any—nor would I to procure Pleasure to myself, be knowingly the Cause of Misery to any human Being.”

Chastity, or the lack of it, in sexual relations is, however, only the most salient manifestation of this theme in HF’s works. The virtue in question has a more fundamental meaning, to which Tillotson refers when he deﬁnes the head of our duty to ourselves: “That we govern our passions by reason, and moderate our selves in the use of sensual delights, so as not to transgress the rules of temperance and chastity.” Chastity is merely one aspect of the temperate ordering of all the passions, which is, as HF puts it in The Champion (2 February 1740), the fulﬁllment of “that glorious precept vince teipsum”: The conquest of one’s self is justly preferred by wise men to that of armies and kingdoms. This is that courage which is so ardently recommended in our religion, and which, however passive it may be in regard to others, is extremely active with respect to one’s self. Whoever carefully surveys his own mind, will ﬁnd sufﬁcient enemies to combat within; an army of obstinate passions that will hold him in tight play, will often force his reason to retreat; and if they are at length subdued, it will not be without much labour and resolution.

The conquest of the passions is a duty Tom Jones must learn. In Amelia, where Booth, at the eleventh hour, is disabused of a deterministic belief that the passions are ungovernable, the theme is darkly disturbing. For HF, too, whose passions were “vehement in every kind,” the precept vince teipsum would have been particularly hard to master. (On the concept of chastity in HF’s works, see Battestin 1959:113–18 and Weinbrot 1970.) CLERGY. From the beginning to the end of HF’s career as an author, there is no more recurrent subject in his writings than the character and condition of the clergy. At ﬁrst glance his preoccupation with this theme is puzzling, for he was not a pious man or even, for that matter, in any conventional sense of the epithet particularly religious. Indeed, during the 1730s, the years he spent in London as playwright and libertine, he appears to have ﬂirted with a brand of deism espoused by his friends James Ralph and Thomas Cooke, the latter being at the center of what is remembered in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. iii) as the silly circle of “Rule of Right-men” whom Wilson at ﬁrst joins and soon despises. The clergy depicted in HF’s comedies of this period are all ridiculous or contemptible or both. There is Murdertext, the Presbyterian minister in The Author’s Farce (1730, III), who hates puppet shows and lusts after Mrs. Novel; there is the foolish Parson who makes a cameo appearance in The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731, II. ix), simply described in the list of dramatis personae as being “Of the Side of the Church”; there is Puzzletext in The Grub-Street Opera (1731), Sir Owen Apshinken’s worldly chaplain and the darling of his lady; there is

226

A Henry Fielding Companion

Father Martin, the villainous priest of The Old Debauchees (1732) and his sinister counterpart in Pasquin (1736), Firebrand, the favorite of Queen Ignorance in the tragedy of the death of Common Sense. Contempt of the clergy was indeed so widespread in this period that it elicited a number of treatises by reverend authors—among them, John Eachard (1670), Lancelot Addison (1709), Thomas Stackhouse (1722), and John Hildrop (1739)—all of whom attempted to analyze its causes. In his plays, HF’s characterization of parsons and priests contributed to the general atmosphere of irreverent obloquy. In the period between his forced retirement from the stage in 1737 and his reappearance as author of The Champion in 1739, however, a radical change occurred in HF’s attitude toward religion and the clergy. His ﬂirtation with deism was over. Intellectually, he had found a secure place within the tradition of low church latitudinarianism represented by such rationalist divines as Isaac Barrow, John Tillotson, Samuel Clarke, and Benjamin Hoadly. He would continue, of course, to satirize those rotten members of the priesthood who brought their order as a whole into disrepute. The portraits of such priests exhibited in his ﬁction are numerous. In Shamela (1741) one ﬁnds the gullible Parson Tickletext and the lewd hypocrite Arthur Williams. In Joseph Andrews there are Parsons Barnabas and Trulliber and more. In A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. vii) a pluralist is locked out of Elysium for lacking charity, and in Jonathan Wild (1743, IV. i) the punch-swilling ordinary of Newgate preaches the damnation of all who lie outside the pale of the church. In Tom Jones (1749) Parson Supple, obsequious and pedantic, neglects the duties of his ofﬁce in order to keep his place at Squire Western’s table, and Thwackum is worst of all—bigoted, sadistic, cupidinous. In Amelia (1751, IX. viii) a proud young cleric disputes with Dr. Harrison the plain meaning of a scriptural injunction to charity. Such scornful, relentless ridicule of priests who disgrace their calling may seem not only to continue the satiric program of the plays but to extend and darken it. In this later period, however, such criticism serves the more positive, constructive purpose of reform. HF now was convinced of the crucial importance of the Christian religion, and of those who represented it, to the moral health and political order of society. The earliest and most elaborate document in HF’s program to check the contempt of the priesthood is his “Apology for the Clergy,” a series of four essays published in The Champion in the spring of 1740 (29 March and 5, 12, 19 April). In these essays, written with a design to explain and correct the problem, HF delineates the characters of the true and false priest, providing in discursive form what he would dramatize graphically in the ﬁgures of his ﬁction. Although they are outnumbered by their vicious or incompetent counterparts, the good priests of the novels become, in what they do and say, HF’s spokesmen. In Shamela Parson Oliver, to whom HF gives the name of the curate who taught him Latin as a child, disabuses Tickletext as to the true characters of Samuel Richardson’s heroine and her paramour Williams. In Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams, HF’s most memorable character, whom he

Themes and Topics

227

modeled after his friend, the Reverend William Young, personiﬁes the ideas of good-nature and charity; and at the end of Tom Jones, when Adams replaces Thwackum as chaplain at Paradise Hall, his presence there seems to ensure the future happiness of Tom and Sophia and of their future children. And in Amelia, ﬁnally, HF presents Dr. Harrison as his representative in all matters: moral, religious, literary, and political. Personally, too, HF in these later years could number among his friends several clergymen—in addition to Young—whose bright companionship he greatly enjoyed. There was the Reverend George Watts of Lincoln’s Inn, who was, he wrote to James Harris, “inﬁnitely the most agreeable Companion” he knew at Bath in 1742, and “a Parson of a very different Turn” from the arrogant future bishop, William Warburton (Letter 14). There was also his close friend the Reverend Thomas Birch, an author of scholarly works of some distinction and a cordial man who admired HF as both author and magistrate. And at Lisbon in his ﬁnal days, his “chief Companion” would be the Reverend John Williamson, Fellow of the Royal Society and chaplain of the English factory, who was, HF wrote to his brother, “every Way the cleverest Fellow I ever saw” (Letter 75). (On the character and condition of the clergy in HF’s works and the importance of this theme in his plays and ﬁction, see Battestin 1959: 130–36.) COMIC PROSE EPIC. Introducing an entirely new “Species” of writing in the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), HF dissociated his work from the despised genre of novel and romance writing by claiming for it a place within the highest of all the literary kinds: the epic. In the Poetics, he reminds his readers, Aristotle had stated that Homer’s Margites, a lost satirical epic having a fool (margos) as hero, “bore the same relation to Comedy which his lliad bears to Tragedy.” No less an authority than Aristotle having allowed room for the comic within the epic genre, HF then proceeds to play the Stagirite to his own Homer. In the preface and the introductory essays to the books of the novel, he offers a sort of Poetics of the kind of ﬁction he himself invented. Like Joseph Addison anatomizing Paradise Lost in The Spectator papers (1712), he insists that in every respect but one, this new species of narrative satisﬁes all the requirements “which the Critic [Aristotle] enumerates in the constituent Parts of an Epic Poem . . . such as Fable, Action, Characters, Sentiments, and Diction,” except that it is not written in “Metre.” That this deﬁciency would have mattered not at all to HF is evident in the important letter he wrote to James Harris later this same year (24 September 1742), in which he argues that a good writer of prose actually has the advantage of the poet: not only can “the Sublime” be achieved in prose as well as poetry, but, he insists, stretching the point to the limit, “the Dignity & Majesty of Prose” is “superiour to that of Verse.” Satirizing Alexander Pope at the very beginning of his career, HF in his burlesque of the Dunciad (1729/30) had argued that blank verse was superior to rhyme as a vehicle for conveying the sense of an

228

A Henry Fielding Companion

author. To Harris he goes a step farther, claiming kinship with John Milton, the greatest of epic poets in his own language: “Will yo pardon me if I think Paradise lost is writ in Prose [?]” To return to the preface: Since the epic may be comic and may be written in prose, a work such as Fe´nelon’s Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (1699), a popular prose ﬁction having as its theme the education of a prince, should be considered as being “of the Epic Kind.” “Indeed,” HF continues, “it is much fairer and more reasonable to give it a Name common with that Species from which it differs only in a single Instance, than to confound it with those it resembles in no other. Such are those voluminous Works commonly called Romances . . . which contain, as I apprehend, very little Instruction or Entertainment.” And so HF claims for Joseph Andrews the generic name, “a comic Epic-Poem in Prose.” And he goes on to deﬁne what he means by the kind of comedy the reader may expect to ﬁnd in the work. It will not be mere “Burlesque,” or what in painting the Italians call “Caricatura,” but will copy Nature, “from the just Imitation of which, will ﬂow all the Pleasure we can this way convey to a sensible Reader.” The laughter comedy causes will serve a function, analogous to the catharsis Aristotle experienced in tragedy, by purging, not pity and fear, but “Spleen, Melancholy and ill Affections.” And the subject of HF’s comedy will be “the Ridiculous” in human nature, which has its source in affectation manifesting itself in vanity or hypocrisy, its motive being the didactic one of improving the manners and morals of men and women by raising laughter at their follies. In the prefatory chapters to the individual books of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones (1749), HF continued his analysis of the nature of this new species of ﬁction writing. Particularly important for this reason is the opening chapter of Book III of Joseph Andrews, in which he distinguishes the histories written by politically biased historians, whom he calls mere “Topographers or Chorographers,” from the ﬁction of his great model Cervantes, who gave us in Don Quixote the true and timeless “History of the World in general.” HF continues by recalling for us the classical tradition in which he wrote—a tradition that found reality not in the shifting particularity of things, as is true of the novels of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, but in the essences that underlie things and deﬁne their nature. And these essences, since HF’s subject is the characters of men and women, are moral: I declare here once for all, I describe not Men, but Manners; not an Individual, but a Species. Perhaps it will be answered, Are not the Characters then taken from Life? To which I answer in the Afﬁrmative; nay, I believe I might aver, that I have writ little more than I have seen. The Lawyer is not only alive, but hath been so these 4000 Years, and I hope G—will indulge his Life as many yet to come. He hath not indeed conﬁned himself to one Profession, one Religion, or one Country; but when the ﬁrst mean selﬁsh Creature appeared on the human Stage, who made Self the Centre of the whole Creation; would give himself no Pain, incur no Danger, advance no Money to assist, or preserve his Fellow-Creatures, then was our Lawyer born; and whilst such a Person as I have described, exists on Earth, so long shall he remain upon it.

Themes and Topics

229

(On HF, the comic epic and romance tradition, see Thornbury 1931; Baker 1959a 1979; Simon 1968; Goldberg 1969; Miller 1976; and Lynch 1986. For a discussion of HF’s prefatory chapters in Tom Jones, see Johnson, 1961: 83–94, and Chibka 1990. For discussions of the techniques of HF’s ﬁction, see Sacks 1964; Alter 1968; and Hunter 1975.) DEISM. Deism took root in the latter half of the seventeenth century and spread steadily during HF’s lifetime and after, though it never became as pervasive in England as in France. (Indeed, as John Brewer notes in The Pleasures of the Imagination [1997], at more than 50,000 titles, sermons, and other religious writings remained throughout the century the most important literary forms in England [171–72]). Although deists as a group sought to base religion solely on the grounds of reason and natural law, rejecting the authority of divine revelation, they may be separated into two principal schools: the school of moral sentiment, whose chief spokesman was the Earl of Shaftesbury, and the intellectualist school descended from the Cambridge Platonists through Samuel Clarke, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb, and others. (See Humphreys 1947.) Square in Tom Jones (1749) may be said to epitomize both schools. His “favourite Phrase . . . the natural Beauty of Virtue” and his belief that “Vice was a Deviation from our Nature in the same Manner as Deformity of Body is” (III. iii) may be traced ultimately to Shaftesbury, whose inﬂuential work the Characteristicks he knows by heart (V. ii). On the other hand, Square’s method of measuring “all Actions by the unalterable Rule of Right and the eternal Fitness of Things” derives from the intellectualists, who believed that morality could be made into a rational science as systematic and infallible as Euclidian geometry. In such works as A Discourse concerning Reason with regard to Religion and Divine Revelation (1731) and The Ground and Foundation of Morality Considered (1745), Chubb, whom HF knew in Salisbury, is typical of this brand of deism and in some respects seems to have served HF as the model for Square. HF’s attitude toward deism changed markedly over the years. In Joseph Andrews (1742, III. iii) Wilson’s account of his ﬂirtation with the club of “Rule of Right-men” no doubt reﬂects HF’s own interest during the 1730s in the freethinking ruminations of his friends James Ralph and Thomas Cooke; in its simplest form, this deistic bent is evident in Pasquin (1736, V) in the confrontation between Queen Common Sense, who worships “the Sun,” and her murderer, the self-serving, hypocritical priest Firebrand. For a time HF found deism appealing; it is, after all, a ﬂattering philosophy of human self-sufﬁciency, in many ways resembling the latitudinarianism he later wholeheartedly embraced. Remembering this episode of his youth, Wilson remarks, “ ‘I began now to esteem myself a Being of a higher Order than I had ever before conceived, and was the more charmed with this Rule of Right, as I really found in my own Nature nothing repugnant to it. I held in utter Contempt all Persons who wanted any other Inducement to Virtue besides her intrinsick Beauty and Excellence.’ ”

230

A Henry Fielding Companion

When Wilson witnesses the treachery and deceit of his fellow club members, however, he sees the inadequacy of this pleasant philosophy as a guide to moral conduct and takes leave of the society. By the time he undertook The Champion (1739–40) HF too had become disenchanted with the deists, who are, for example, implicitly included in his attack on the “political philosophers” Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville in the number for 22 January 1740, where he applies the sermons of Archbishop John Tillotson and Samuel Clarke as “antidotes” against this poison. In Tom Jones (XVIII. iv) Square, though a more amiable man by far than the unspeakable divine Thwackum, shakes off “The Pride of Philosophy” and converts to Christianity on his deathbed. In Amelia (1751, I. iii) Booth while in Newgate temporarily ﬁnds a congenial companion in Robinson, whom the narrator characterizes as “a Freethinker, that is to say, a Deist, or, perhaps, an Atheist; for tho’ he did not absolutely deny the Existence of a God; yet he entirely denied his Providence: A Doctrine which, if it is not downright Atheism, hath a direct Tendency towards it; and, as Dr. Clarke observes, may soon be driven into it.” Booth, though “in his Heart an extreme Well-wisher to Religion,” labors through most of the novel under a morally paralyzing belief that he shares with David Hume and Mandeville: that our actions are entirely determined by whichever passion happens to be uppermost. Like Square, however, Booth by the end of the novel acknowledges his error and converts to Christianity, the happy effect of his having read Isaac Barrow’s sermons on the Apostles’ Creed while conﬁned in a bailiff’s sponging house (XII. v). HF continued to attack what he considered to be the pernicious inﬂuence of deism and freethinking to the end of his life, as in his satires of the Robin Hood Society in The CoventGarden Journal (28 January and 1 February 1752) and his attempt to explode Bolingbroke in the Fragment of a Comment published posthumously with The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755). (For an essay relevant to the subject but inaccurate in detail, see Paulson 1995. On deism and the deists in this period, see Stephens 1876 and Yolton 1990.) EDUCATIONAL THEORY. There was no more important subject for HF than education: the education of children and youth of both sexes, the education of those in authority to apprehend the needs of society, the education of his readership in general to recognize erroneous assumptions about morality and religion. A fundamental impulse of his more serious writings is didactic—serious being a term that applies as well to his comedies and satires as to his legal tracts. “The satirist,” he advised in The Champion (27 March 1740), “is to be regarded as our physician, not our enemy.” In his novels and poems—and in essays such as that including “A modern Glossary” in The Covent-Garden Journal (14 January 1752)—he acted on John Locke’s warning in Book III of An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) that the abuse of words was

Themes and Topics

231

destructive of the moral, as well as the intellectual, order of society: HF’s attempt to purge the moral vocabulary of debased usages of such key terms as goodness and greatness, prudence and virtue, love and honor is an important part of this didactic program. Consider how, in “An Essay on Conversation” (Miscellanies, 1743), he instructs the reader, by precept and example, as to the proper meaning of “Good-Breeding”; few more perceptive, and more useful, works than this essay have been written on the subject of social intercourse. HF’s legal tracts were addressed particularly to those in positions of inﬂuence: A Charge delivered to the Grand Jury (1749), An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), and A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753). They were written from a desire both to inform his readers of the gravity of such endemic disorders of the polity as the spreading licentiousness of the people and the twin cancers of crime and poverty and also to propose the means to ameliorate these problems. Believing in the essential goodness of human nature, as in most moods he did, HF was the more certain that sound educational practice was necessary to strengthen inclinations until they became habits of virtue. In Amelia (IX. v) Dr. Harrison echoes HF’s favorite divine, Isaac Barrow, when he counsels the heroine, “The Nature of Man is far from being in itself Evil: It abounds with Benevolence, Charity and Pity, coveting Praise and Honour, and shunning Shame and Disgrace. Bad Education, bad Habits, and bad Customs, debauch our Nature, and drive it Headlong as it were into Vice.” In his works HF often complains of the negligence of the gentry in educating their children: their daughters arrive at womanhood well schooled in vanities and in distrust of the opposite sex but hardly able to read and write (see Joseph Andrews [1742, IV. vii] and Covent-Garden Journal [25 July 1752]); their sons reach adulthood with little learning, but knowing well all the diversions of country and town, and if they have made the tour of Europe, having only acquired there more sophisticated vices and a contempt for their own country (see Joseph Andrews [III. vii] and Covent-Garden Journal [25 July 1752]). HF in each of his novels tried to implement the didactic maxim he announced in the opening paragraphs of Joseph Andrews: It is a trite but true Observation, that Examples work more forcibly on the Mind than Precepts: And if this be just in what is odious and blameable, it is more strongly so in what is amiable and praise-worthy. Here Emulation most effectually operates upon us, and inspires our Imitation in an irresistible manner.

The writer’s function therefore is, by publishing the examples of good men and women, “to spread their History farther, and to present the amiable Pictures to those who have not the Happiness of knowing the Originals; and so, by communicating such valuable Patterns to the World, he may perhaps do a more extensive Service to Mankind than the Person whose Life originally afforded the Pattern.” Comical and fallible as they often are, HF’s “amiable” characters—

232

A Henry Fielding Companion

Parson Adams and Joseph Andrews, Squire Allworthy and Tom Jones and Sophie Western, Dr. Harrison and Amelia Booth—were created to serve, as he put it in the dedication of his masterpiece, “the Cause of Religion and Virtue.” In each of the novels, moreover, HF speciﬁcally addresses theories of educating the young. In Joseph Andrews (III. v), Joseph and the learned schoolmaster Parson Adams debate the comparative advantages and disadvantages of a private versus a public education. In Tom Jones, Allworthy, who like Adams favors private tutoring, engages Square, a deist philosopher, and Thwackum, a bigoted and brutal priest, in what the narrator calls a “singular Plan of Education”—one, it develops, that has no effect whatever in improving the morals of the villain Bliﬁl or of changing the character of Jones for better or for worse. HF leaves it to the reader to discover “the Fault” in Allworthy’s plan, but the fault had been found for us earlier by Joseph Andrews in his debate with Adams: “ ‘I remember when I was in the Stable, if a young Horse was vicious in his Nature, no Correction would make him otherwise; I take it to be equally the same among Men: if a Boy be of a mischievous wicked Inclination, no School, tho’ ever so private, will ever make him good; on the contrary, if he be of a righteous Temper, you may trust him to London, or where-ever else you please, he will be in no danger of being corrupted.’ ” But it is in his last novel that HF, in the example set by Amelia, offers practical advice on the proper education of youth. Commenting on Amelia’s instructing her son in the knowledge of God’s love, the narrator observes: This admirable Woman never let a Day pass, without instructing her Children in some Lesson of Religion and Morality. By which Means, she had in their tender Minds so strongly annexed the Ideas of Fear and Shame to every Idea of Evil of which they were susceptible, that it must require great Pains and Length of Habit to separate them. Tho’ she was the tenderest of Mothers, she never suffered any Symptom of Malevolence to shew itself in their most triﬂing Actions without Discouragement, without Rebuke; and if it broke forth with any Rancour, without Punishment. In which she had such Success, that not the least Marks of Pride, Envy, Malice, or Spite discovered itself in any of their little Words or Deeds. (IV. iii)

Earlier, in The Jacobite’s Journal (30 April 1748), HF asserted that order in society depends on a system of education that subordinates the acquisition of learning to the improvement of morals—“such a System of Education as may serve for all good Purposes, and which may so cultivate the Human Mind, that every Seed of Good in Human Nature may be reared up to full Perfection and Maturity; while all which is of evil Tendency is weeded out, and, as it were, pluck’d by the Roots from the youthful Disposition, before it spreads, and is strengthened by Time.” Assuming that the passions, not reason, govern human behavior, the system HF advocates and Amelia practices resembles that recommended by Locke in Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) and it is even closer to that of John Tillotson in his sermons “Of the Education of Children.” Nearer the period in which HF composed Amelia, several other works

Themes and Topics

233

on the subject similarly stress the importance of early instruction in the principles of virtue and religion, using associational psychology and the doctrine of the passions to explain how the moral character is formed: see, for example, David Fordyce, Dialogues concerning Education (1745–48); James Forrester, Dialogues on the Passions, Habits, and Affections peculiar to Children (1748); and William Willets, Christian Education of Children (1750). In its representation of the different educational backgrounds of HF’s heroine and her learned friend Mrs. Bennet/Atkinson, Amelia also offers the fullest dramatization of what may seem to the twentieth-century reader his questionable views on the kind of education suitable for women. Amelia (VI. vii) has equipped her mind with a knowledge of those subjects, and only those, that were generally thought appropriate for a woman: belles lettres in the vernacular, divinity, and the history of her own country—to which she adds an understanding of French and a love of good music. Mrs. Bennet/Atkinson, on the other hand, prides herself on her knowledge of the classical languages, particularly Latin—a kind of learning HF and most of his contemporaries thought unnatural to women, and as Dr. Harrison mischievously suggests, a probable cause of disorder and dissension in families (X. i, iv). (For discussions of HF’s thoughts on education, see Miller 1961: 215–28; Kropf 1974: 113–20; and Am: 167 n. 1, 255–56 n. 1. For a guide to the subject of women’s education in the period, see Schnorrenberg 1976. Although in French, an excellent study of HF’s views on the education of women in the context of the thought of his time is Leduc 1999.) FREETHINKING. See Deism. GOOD-NATURE.“Good-nature” is the distinguishing characteristic of all HF’s moral men: Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews (1742), Heartfree in Jonathan Wild (1743), Squire Allworthy and Tom Jones (1749), Captain Booth and Dr. Harrison in Amelia (1751). As HF uses it, the term signiﬁes those benevolent, social affections that lead us to empathic involvement in the concerns of others and which therefore prompt us to charitable actions. In his poem “Of GoodNature,” published in Volume 1 of the Miscellanies (1743), HF calls this virtue “the glorious Lust of doing Good.” In “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” also in the Miscellanies, he is more speciﬁc: “Good-Nature is that benevolent and amiable Temper of Mind which disposes us to feel the Misfortunes, and enjoy the Happiness of others; and consequently pushes us on to promote the latter, and prevent the former; and that without any abstract Contemplation on the Beauty of Virtue, and without the Allurements or Terrors of Religion.” The distinction HF draws in this passage is well illustrated in Tom Jones, where the deist philosopher Square, who as an imperative for moral action relies (in vain) on “the natural Beauty of Virtue,” and the harsh priest Thwackum, who no doubt with equal success trusts in “the divine Power of

234

A Henry Fielding Companion

Grace,” are offered to the reader “as the Objects of Derision” because they have both “utterly discarded all natural Goodness of Heart” (III. iii–iv). The concept of “Good-Nature” originated in the latter years of the seventeenth century in the teachings of the latitudinarian divines whom HF admired. Reacting in particular against three uncongenial intellectual systems—the cynical moral relativism of Thomas Hobbes; the stoic ideal of a rational, dispassionate self-sufﬁciency; and the Calvinistic tenor of certain of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, which enjoined belief in the doctrine of natural depravity and justiﬁcation by faith only—latitudinarian divines such as Isaac Barrow and Archbishop John Tillotson formulated in effect a religion ﬂattering to human nature: a religion, that is, of practical morality by which a sincere man or woman might earn salvation by the exercise of those compassionate and benevolent feelings that were natural to them—though, regrettably, too often suppressed and corrupted by bad education and bad custom. In Amelia (IX. v) Dr. Harrison sums up this optimistic theology as he gently reproves the heroine, whose recent unhappy experiences with men have led her for the moment to condemn the entire sex: “Fie, Child. . . . Do not make a Conclusion so much to the Dishonour of the great Creator. The Nature of Man is far from being in itself Evil: It abounds with Benevolence, Charity and Pity, coveting Praise and Honour, and shunning Shame and Disgrace. Bad Education, bad Habits, and bad Customs, debauch our Nature, and drive it Headlong as it were into Vice.”

(For discussions of the concept of Good-Nature in HF, and of its genesis in the theories of the latitudinarian divines, see Battestin 1959: 14–19, 54–63, 65– 81; and Miller 1961: 54–88. On the importance of benevolence in HF’s moral thought, see Harrison 1975. On its importance in the novels of the period, see Sheriff 1982.) GREATNESS. Basic to HF’s moral vocabulary is the distinction he draws in the preface to the Miscellanies (1743) among three characters: “the Great, the Good, and the Great and Good.” The last is that rarest of specimens, a Socrates or a Brutus—what he calls “the true Sublime in Human Nature.” The good man is deﬁned by the qualities of compassion and benevolence that are discussed in this section under the headings GOOD-NATURE and CHARITY. The good man may lack wit or courage, which win our admiration, but his goodness compels our love. It was, however, the debasement of the idea of greatness— the sense in which a term of highest approbation was regularly attached to those who were merely ambitious and powerful—that chieﬂy concerned HF, as well as many of his contemporaries, for whom the “Great Man” was that “Leviathan,” Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister. This sort of “greatness” HF likens to “the False Sublime in Poetry; whose Bombast is, by the ignorant and ill-judging Vulgar, often mistaken for solid Wit and Eloquence, whilst it is in Effect the very Reverse.”

Themes and Topics

235

HF had incidentally exploited this reversal of meaning in his early days as a dramatist by embodying it, as it were, in the diminutive hero of The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), Tom Thumb the Great. The character of Lord Richly in The Modern Husband (1732) is a much darker portrayal of “the Great Man.” And ironic allusions to Walpole’s “greatness” are common in HF’s journalism of the years preceding his removal from ofﬁce in 1742. As Professor Goldgar observes, however, the theme of “Greatness” is especially notable in HF’s works as the unifying theme of the Miscellanies (1743). To it HF devotes the verse epistle “Of True Greatness,” originally published in January 1741 and dedicated to George Bubb Dodington, who for HF would remain, curiously, “one of the greatest Men this Country ever produced” (Amelia, 1751, XI. ii). In the poem, examples of false greatness in various walks of life are contrasted with examples of the genuine kind selected, for the most part, from among HF’s friends and patrons: the Duke of Argyll, Bishop Benjamin Hoadly, Lord Chesterfield, and George Lyttelton; and the prototypical exhibits of false greatness, the conquerors Alexander and Caesar, are contrasted with the victorious Duke of Marlborough, the grandfather and late husband of two other patrons: “Whose Conquests, cheap at all the Blood they cost, / Sav’d Millions by each noble Life they lost” (lines 101–2). The theme of greatness culminates in Volume 3 of the Miscellanies in The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great, in which HF, adopting a favorite narrative strategy of Jonathan Swift, writes in praise of the vice he means to excoriate: Jonathan Wild, the supreme villain, is meant to seem admirable, while his victim, Heartfree, the good man, is sneered at as a simpleton and weakling. (On the concept of greatness in HF’s works, see Miller 1961:42–54; and Misc 3: xix–xxii and passim. On HF and the terms of morality, see Hatﬁeld 1968.) HONOR. From the beginning of his career as a writer, HF was concerned to purify the moral vocabulary by ridiculing contemporary usage of such fundamental ethical concepts as greatness and honor. In The Temple Beau (1730, II. xii) Valentine laughs at Veromil for questioning whether he can, “with honour,” employ deceitful means to gain a new mistress: “Ha, ha, ha! you and I had strange notions of that word when we used to read the moralists at Oxford; but our honour here is as different from that as our dress. In short, it forbids us to receive injuries, but not to do them.” In Joseph Andrews (1742, III. vi) Joseph is puzzled that “the Desire of Honour” doesn’t prompt men to acts of charity. In Jonathan Wild (1743, I. xiii) the villain Jonathan Wild reasons at some length that “Honour” has nothing to do with goodness or virtue: “A Man of Honour is he that is called a Man of Honour; and while he is so called, he so remains, and no longer.” Later, HF came to target the pernicious notion, especially current among ofﬁcers of the army, that a man of “honour” was one who was prepared to avenge an insult by killing the offender. In deﬁance of the precepts of morality and religion, honour, HF declared in his “Modern Glossary,” had become synonymous with dueling (Covent-Garden Journal, 14 Jan-

236

A Henry Fielding Companion

uary 1752). In his novels of this later period he dramatized this evil custom, taking up the cause that Sir Richard Steele in particular had championed in The Tatler (June–July 1709) and The Spectator (June 1711) as well as in The Conscious Lovers (1722). In Tom Jones (1749, VII. xiii–xiv) HF’s hero ﬁnds it difﬁcult to reconcile with the precepts of his religion the lieutenant’s insistence that he avenge the injury Northerton has done him by challenging him to a duel. In Amelia (1751) the character of Major Bath is the culmination of this theme in HF’s writings. (On HF and the terms of morality, see Hatﬁeld 1968.) JACOBITES. The name (derived from Jacobus, Latin for James) was given to those who remained loyal to the Catholic king, James II (1633–1701), after his expulsion from the throne of England in 1688, or to his son James Francis Edward Stuart (1688–1766), who was known to the Hanoverian party as the Old Pretender and to the Jacobites as James III. The Jacobites were associated with the political doctrines of the divine right of kings and absolutism, doctrines articulated by Robert Filmer in Patriarcha (1680). These principles were attacked by John Locke in his ﬁrst Treatise of Civil Government (1690), published soon after the so-called Glorious Revolution had established a constitutional monarchy under the Protestant sovereigns William and Mary in 1689. The clergy who refused to take the oath of allegiance to William, and later to the Hanoverian kings, came to be called “nonjurors” and were forced to relinquish their beneﬁces. After the death in 1714 of Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs, an unsuccessful rebellion opposing the Hanoverian succession took place in Scotland in 1715–16 under James Stuart. This was the occasion of Joseph Addison’s periodical The Freeholder (1715–16), which later became HF’s model for his own anti-Jacobitical journals, The True Patriot (1745–46) and The Jacobite’s Journal (1747–48). Thirty years after the failure of the Rebellion of 1715–16, a second, and far more dangerous, rebellion under Charles Edward Stuart (1720–88), the Young Pretender, broke out in Scotland in August 1745. The rebels advanced steadily into the heart of England, reaching Derby, Staffordshire, early in December before beginning the retreat back to Scotland. In support of the Hanoverian establishment, HF within a fortnight in October published three pamphlets—A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain, The History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland, and A Dialogue between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender—and on 5 November he launched The True Patriot, which he continued weekly until 17 June 1746, two months after the defeat of the rebels at Culloden in April. When he resumed writing Tom Jones after the danger had passed, he altered the time scheme of the novel so that his hero could join the Duke of Cumberland’s forces marching north against the rebels in November 1745 (VII. xi); and on her journey to London from Coventry, Sophia is mistaken

Themes and Topics

237

by the landlord at an inn for Jenny Cameron, the Young Pretender’s mistress (XI. ii). HF seems also to have intended the episode of the gypsies and their king (XII. xii) to be a parable of the Jacobites’ delusion of ﬁnding happiness under an absolute monarch. Although the suppression of the rebellion marked the end of any serious threat to the Hanoverian establishment, pro-Jacobite sentiment remained high in certain parts of the kingdom, high enough so that when HF set up as propagandist for the Henry Pelham ministry in 1747, he was able in The Jacobite’s Journal to use the hated label against the Tory opposition. (On HF’s political thought and activities, see McCrea 1981; Cleary 1984; and WE, Coley TP, and JJ. Also relevant are Battestin 1967; Carlton 1987, 1988; Campbell 1990; and Stevenson 1994, 1997.) LATITUDINARIANS. Originating with the rationalist divines of Cambridge University in the seventeenth century, a school of liberal theology grew to become the dominant party within the Church of England. Because they allowed considerable freedom in the forms of worship, these divines came to be called “Men of Latitude.” In them—and particularly in Isaac Barrow and John Tillotson of the seventeenth century and their successors Samuel Clarke and Benjamin Hoadly of his own time—HF found a congenial philosophy of morality and religion that, to a Calvinist such as the Methodist George Whitefield, seemed virtually indistinguishable from deism. The early latitudinarians were prominent in the late seventeenth-century reaction against the cynical moral relativism of Thomas Hobbes, the strict rationalism of the neo-Stoics, and the antinomian tendencies of Calvinism. Developing an optimistic (and considering the Calvinistic tenor of certain of the Thirty-Nine Articles, an unorthodox) interpretation of human nature, they formulated, in effect, a religion of practical morality by which a sincere man or woman might earn salvation through the exercise of benevolence. They denounced the notion of Hobbes in the Leviathan—a notion later echoed by Bernard Mandeville—that humankind is driven entirely by motives of self-interest and in a state of nature would be perpetually at war with one another. Against the Stoic ideal of dispassionate detachment, they emphasized the tender passions that motivate charitable actions. And within the church they were engaged in promulgating an extreme form of arminianism, “the classic example,” as R. N. Stromberg observed, “of a Chritianity stressing God too little and Man too much” (Stromberg 1954: 110). Basic to the latitudinarian position was a belief in the essential goodness of human nature—a belief, central to HF’s concept of “good-nature,” in the naturalness of the social affections that incline us to compassion and benevolence. In this complacent view of human nature, they differed, however, from the deists—and especially from Shaftesbury, whose views R. S. Crane has shown they anticipated, for they made an active charity the condition of salvation. In Joseph Andrews (1742, I. xvii) Parson Adams’s denunciation of Whiteﬁeld’s

238

A Henry Fielding Companion

Calvinism and his defense of Bishop Hoadly’s mystery-dispelling interpretation of the eucharist represents the most succinct articulation of HF’s sympathy with liberal latitudinarian theology. (The seminal article on the latitudinarians’ anticipation of Shaftesbury’s philosophy of moral sentiment and benevolism is Crane 1934. Crane’s interpretation was subsequently, and repeatedly, challenged by Greene—(for example, 1977), but Greene’s characterization of eighteenth-century Anglicanism as uniformly Augustinian is demonstrably incorrect: see DeBruyn 1981, Scholtz, 1988–89, and Nash 1992. On the relevant religious background, see Stromberg 1954 and Battestin 1959: 14–22.) LOTTERIES. From 1694 to 1826 state lotteries were held at intervals to raise money for such purposes as the construction of Westminster Bridge and the establishment of the British Museum. Draws were usually held in the autumn at Guild Hall, the hall of the corporation of the City of London. The lottery system, which encouraged gambling even among the poor and led to proﬁteering by unscrupulous ticket mongers, was a favorite target of HF’s satires, his earliest treatment of the subject being his ballad-opera The Lottery (1732). In The Craftsman (15 October 1737) HF, writing as the virtuoso “Philomath,” earnestly proposes that his scheme to replace the Bench of Bishops with puppets be ﬁnanced by a lottery, thus allowing stockjobbers and ticket mongers to ﬂeece the “Adventurers” further. He took up the subject again in The Champion (29 December 1739 and 3 January 1740), where he published an illiterate letter from a Somersetshire rustic who expects to win £10,000 in the lottery and “give measter varning.” In Joseph Andrews (1742, III. iii) Wilson, languishing in prison for debt, trusts in vain to Fortune, buying a lottery ticket with his few remaining guineas; he is saved from ruin only by the charity of his future wife. The gullibility of working-class adventurers and the gouging practices of the ticket mongers are themes in HF’s farce Miss Lucy in Town (1742) and Tom Jones (II. i). Even HF recognized, however, that whatever might be the abuses of the lottery system, it remained a useful means of funding worthy public projects. In A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753, Arguments, Paragraph XI) he suggests that the cost of establishing a county workhouse be met by this method. MARRIAGE. Marriage—the proper and improper reasons for entering into it, the nature of the relationship of husband to wife and wife to husband—is a major theme of HF’s plays and novels, and it is a subject for serious reﬂection in one of his most eloquent poems. In conversation with Dr. Bliﬁl in Tom Jones (1749, I. xii), Allworthy speaks HF’s own thoughts on the subject: “I have always thought Love the only Foundation of Happiness in a married State; as it can only produce that high and tender Friendship, which should always be the Cement of this Union; and, in my Opinion, all those Marriages which are contracted from other

Themes and Topics

239

Motives, are greatly criminal; they are a Profanation of a most holy Ceremony, and generally end in Disquiet and Misery: For surely we may call it a Profanation, to convert this most sacred Institution into a wicked Sacriﬁce to Lust, or Avarice: And what better can be said of those Matches to which Men are induced merely by the Consideration of a beautiful Person, or a great Fortune!”

Earlier, in the verse epistle “To a Friend on the Choice of a Wife” (Miscellanies, 1743), HF considered the conditions that, from the husband’s point of view at least, made for lasting happiness in a marriage: But thou, whose honest Thoughts the Choice intend Of a Companion, and a softer Friend; A tender Heart, which while thy Soul it shares, Augments thy Joys, and lessens all thy Cares. One, who by thee while tenderly carest, Shall steal that God-like Transport to thy Breast, The Joy to ﬁnd you make another blest. Thee in thy Choice let other Maxims move, They wed for baser Passions; thou for Love. (lines 47–55)

In his beloved ﬁrst wife, Charlotte Cradock Fielding—“one, he declared in the preface to the Miscellanies, “from whom I draw all the solid Comfort of my Life”—HF had found just such a companion and friend, whose image he preserved after her death in the characters of Sophia Western and Amelia Booth, both of them women who match the ideal pattern he sketched for his friend at the end of the poem: May she then prove, who to thy Lot befall, Beauteous to thee, agreeable to all. Nor Wit, nor Learning proudly may she boast; No low-bred Girl, nor Gay fantastic Toast: Her tender Soul, Good-nature must adorn, And Vice and Meanness be alone her Scorn. Fond of thy Person, may her Bosom glow With Passions thou hast taught her ﬁrst to know. A warm Partaker of the genial Bed, Thither by Fondness, not by Lewdness led. Superior Judgment may she own thy Lot; Humbly advise, but contradict thee not. Thine to all other Company prefer; May all thy Troubles ﬁnd Relief from her. If Fortune gives thee such a Wife to meet, Earth cannot make thy Blessing more complete. (lines 252–67)

In Amelia, his last novel, HF dramatized at length the blessing such a woman proved to be for such a wayward husband as he was himself. His subject, he announced at the start, would be “the various Accidents which befel a very worthy Couple, after their uniting in the State of Matrimony” (I. i). Recognized by John Cleland, who reviewed the book in The Monthly Review (5 [1751],

240

A Henry Fielding Companion

510–15), as “the boldest stroke that has yet been attempted in this species of writing,” HF’s choice of subject attests to the sincerity of his concern for the institution he regarded as the most important a man or woman can enter into. When he turned to the subject of matrimony in his writings, however, it was most often to offer monitory advice about—or in his plays and novels, pictures of—the unhappy fate awaiting those who married, or were forced to marry, for the wrong reasons. In The Covent-Garden Journal (14 January 1752) this is the “modern” marriage he deﬁnes in the glossary as “a Kind of Trafﬁc carried on between the two Sexes, in which both are constantly endeavouring to cheat each other, and both are commonly Losers in the End.” The marriages of Bridget Allworthy and Captain Bliﬁl in Tom Jones and of Colonel James and Jenny Bath in Amelia are two examples. In their greatest works, HF in the comedy of Tom Jones and Samuel Richardson in the tragedy of Clarissa (1747–48) depict daughters at the mercy of parents who regard them as chattel to be bartered for the aggrandizement of their families, a common attitude of the time that made the state of matrimony into what HF calls “legal Prostitution for Hire” (Tom Jones, XVI. viii). His friend William Hogarth represented it graphically in the series Marriage a` la Mode (1745). HF was particularly appalled at another and quite literal way in which marriage as a form of prostitution had recently manifested itself: Mr. Modern in The Modern Husband (1732) and Captain Trent in Amelia are both guilty of prostituting their wives for money—as does the gypsy in Tom Jones (XII. xii) who connives with his wife to entrap Partridge in her own adultery. This last important aspect of what might well be called HF’s campaign to reform public attitudes toward the institution of marriage is discussed above under the article Adultery. (For discussions of HF’s thinking on the institution of marriage, see Williams 1973; Miller 1961: 103–13; Smallwood 1989: 54–63, 140–43, 152–57; and Gautier 1995.) MASQUERADES. This fashionable diversion, presided over by the notorious “Count” John James Heidegger, was attacked by critics who felt that few institutions quite so effectually served to corrupt the public morality. The nature of this diversion, imported from Venice, is clear from an article on the subject in The Craftsman (10 January 1747), in which the writer asks: “Would any parent wish his child to frequent an entertainment which consists of a large number of persons of both sexes in masks and antick dresses, where the principal conversation consists in abusive raillery and obscene discourse convey’d in whispers, with a continuance of musick and dancing to assist the designs of young fellows in their amours there, and where they have a variety of viands to heat them? All which are favourable instruments of debauchery.” As early as 1726 masquerades had become so scandalous that a royal proclamation was issued against them; yet in 1729, little more than a year after George II came to the throne,

Themes and Topics

241

a grand jury presented Heidegger, his Master of the Revels, as “the principal promoter of vice and immorality.” HF’s earliest extant work was the verse satire The Masquerade (1728), which he dedicated ironically to “C[OUN]T H[EI]D[EG]G[E]R,” and he continued his attacks throughout his career in, for example, The Champion (19 February 1740) and Miss Lucy in Town (1742), and in his legal tracts A Charge delivered to the Grand Jury (1749) and An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751, Section I), where he inveighed against the houses where these entertainments took place as “Temples of Drunkenness, Lewdness, and all Kind of Debauchery.” In Tom Jones (1749, XIII. vi–vii) Lady Bellaston begins her affair with Jones by luring him to a masquerade at the Opera House in the Haymarket, “where Heydegger, the great Arbiter Deliciarum, the great HighPriest of Pleasure presides.” In Amelia (1751, X. i–vi) Colonel James similarly intends to create an opportunity to debauch the heroine by enticing her and Booth to a masquerade. (For a discussion of Am in relation to the general topos of the masquerade in this period, see Castle 1986: 177–252.) METHODISM. The Methodist movement began in the late 1730s under the leadership of the great evangelists, John Wesley and George Whitefield— though it was Whiteﬁeld, an inﬂexible Calvinist, who mattered more to HF. The purpose of the movement was to reform the Church of England—both the worldliness of the clergy and the rationalist, Pelagian tendencies of the latitudinarian divines. From the ﬁrst HF distrusted Methodism and repeatedly attacked the ﬁery, Calvinistic bias of Whiteﬁeld. An essay ridiculing the new “Sect” in The Craftsman (8 September 1739) is probably by HF, and there are incidental allusions to Whiteﬁeld in The Champion (5 April and 24 May 1740). HF’s speciﬁc objections to Whiteﬁeld are given by Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews (1742, I. xvii), who, although sympathetic to Whiteﬁeld’s criticism of the clergy, vehemently objects to his calling “Nonsense and Enthusiasm to his Aid” and preaching the “pernicious” doctrine of faith and grace alone, without regard to good works. The latitudinarian divines whom HF admired—Isaac Barrow, John Tillotson, and Benjamin Hoadly, for example—stressed an opposite doctrine, denouncing emotionalism and mystery in religion and making salvation conditional on an active charity. Whereas Whiteﬁeld condemned Tillotson and his followers for disregarding the Calvinistic tenor of the Thirty-Nine Articles and for transforming Christianity into a mere moral sytem virtually indistinguishable from deism or the Stoicism of Cicero or Seneca, HF in turn decried the antinomian implications of Whiteﬁeld’s theology. Echoed by Parson Adams, the popular rendering of Whiteﬁeld’s position was, “So you say you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you may live the life of devils.” HF’s satiric campaign against Whiteﬁeld and the Methodists was well under way by the time he wrote Shamela (1741), where the heroine, encouraged by her reading of Whiteﬁeld’s autobiography, rationalizes her frequent fornication.

242

A Henry Fielding Companion

HF, indeed, more than once suggests that the enthusiastical behavior of the Methodists was often a convenient cover for sexual license. In The Female Husband (1746), for example, the lesbian Mary Hamilton is said to have been ﬁrst corrupted by a recent convert to Methodism. In Amelia (1751, I. iv) the Methodist Cooper preaches the “cant” doctrine of grace versus works and ends by picking Booth’s pocket. In Tom Jones (1749, I. x) Bliﬁl’s father is “not a little suspected of an Inclination to Methodism,” and at the end of the novel his villainous son hopes to make his fortune by marrying “a very rich Widow of that Sect” (XVIII. xiii). On his journey, indeed, Jones stops in Gloucester at the Bell Inn, whose landlord is Whiteﬁeld’s brother, though, HF assures the reader, a man “absolutely untainted with the pernicious Principles of Methodism, or of any other heretical Sect” (VIII. viii). (For a discussion of the subject, see Battestin 1959:22–25, 81–84.) OPERA. From the beginning of his literary career, HF may be said to have conducted a campaign against the Italian opera. It was motivated by a strong moral and aesthetic antipathy he shared with his predecessors Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and many others who would have agreed with Samuel Johnson’s characterization of opera as “an exotick and irrational entertainment.” In the “puppet show” in The Author’s Farce (1730, III), “Signor Opera” mimics the popular castrato Senesino. In 1733 the formation of the socalled Nobility Opera in opposition to Handel and his oratorios was keenly felt by HF, who greatly admired Handel and feared that what he regarded as an effete and unseemly form of entertainment would draw audiences away from the theaters to the Opera House in the Haymarket. In dedicating The Intriguing Chambermaid (1734) to Catherine “Kitty” Clive, he denounced “the Folly, Injustice, and Barbarity of the Town,” who “sacriﬁce our own native Entertainments to a wanton affected Fondness for foreign Musick; . . . when our Nobility seem eagerly to rival each other, in distinguishing themselves in favour of Italian Theatres, and in neglect of our own.” In Pasquin (1736), II. i) he ridiculed the infatuation of the women with Farinelli as Miss Mayoress eagerly looks forward to a trip to London: “then we shall see Faribelly, the strange Man-Women.” In his “damned” ballad opera Eurydice of the following year, HF had the singer Michael Stoppelaer in the role of Orpheus parody Farinelli, and in The Historical Register, Act II opens with a company of fashionable women gossiping about the castrato’s sexual charms: “Who can miss an opera while Farinello stays?” By 1742 Farinelli had left London, his lucrative place in the hearts of the fair ﬁlled by the new favorite, Amorevoli. In Miss Lucy in Town the tenor John Beard mocked him in the role of Signior Cantileno while “Kitty” Clive as Lucy took off the popular diva, The Muscovita; and the rake Lord Bawble, who loves every wife but his own, proves to be one of the Directors of the “Nobility Opera.” This last stroke was particularly impudent since only three of the ﬁve directors of the subscription for the opera—the Duke of Rutland, the Earl of Holderness,

Themes and Topics

243

and Viscount Middleton—were lords, one of whom is said to have complained to the Lord Chamberlain about HF’s characterization of him as Bawble. When in June 1744 the directors, who had spent the enormous sum of £17,000 on the season of 1742–43, tried to recoup their losses by suing the subscribers, HF became personally, and professionally, involved in the imbroglio that ensued. In June 1745 he was employed by his friend Sir Charles Hanbury Williams to represent the subscribers, among whom were the dukes of Bedford, Marlborough, Montagu, and Newcastle; the Earls of Bath (Pulteney) and Chesterfield, Henry Pelham and Horace Walpole. When in the late autumn of 1745 HF undertook the authorship of The True Patriot as the Jacobite rebellion raged in the north, he proceeded to use that periodical as a vehicle for denouncing the continuing popularity of the opera—an entertainment associated with things Catholic, foreign, and effeminate—as unpatriotic. Responding in The True Patriot (31 December 1745) to a “letter” in broken English from “Signior Cantilena [sic],” a near relation no doubt of the romantic castrato of Miss Lucy in Town, HF satirized the directors of the opera—scorning them not only for their wanton extravagance but, in view of the grave crisis of the rebellion, for “the most depraved Levity of Mind”; this theme can be heard throughout the run of the paper. Later, it is notable that the heroines of Tom Jones (1749, IV. v) and Amelia (1751, IV. ix), both of whom are music lovers, side with Handel and his oratorios against his noble detractors. THE PASSIONS. An important theme in HF’s writings is the passions—their nature, function, and potency. The subject was as old as philosophy itself, but HF’s fascination with it owes much to an awareness of his own passionate temperament. Temperance, of all the virtues, would have been the most difﬁcult for him to practice, for, as his friend James Harris remembered, “his Passions were vehement, and easily passing into excess” (Probyn: Appendix III: 305). As a young man HF seems to have felt himself to be at the mercy of his passions—his reason, for all the Stoic philosophy he had read, powerless to check his desires, his will too feeble to exercise control. This is a theme often heard in his ﬁrst plays. “Of what Use is Reason then?” asks Heartfort in The Wedding-Day (V. iv), who answers the question with a striking image that conjures up the literal predicament of all “the good-natured Libertines” of HF’s ﬁction (to use Sophie Western’s phrase) from Wilson in Joseph Andrews (1742) to Tom Jones (1749) and Billy Booth (1751): “Why, of the Use that a Window is to a Man in Prison, to let him see the Horrours he is conﬁned in; but lends him no Assistance to his Escape.” It is also Jack Ramble’s predicament in Rape upon Rape (1730, IV. iii): ’Tis as I have acted in all affairs of life; my thoughts have ever succeeded my actions: the consequence hath caused me to reﬂect when it was too late. I never reasoned on what I should do, but what I had done; as if my reason had her eyes behind, and could only see backwards.

244

A Henry Fielding Companion

Ramble’s simile inverts the traditional emblem of prudence, that foresighted virtue that Tom Jones must, with difﬁculty, acquire. Given a philosophical turn in Amelia, the predicament of Ramble and Heartfort is also the core of Booth’s belief in the doctrine of necessity: the doctrine “that every Man acted merely from the Force of that Passion which was uppermost in his Mind, and could do no otherwise” (I. iii). Although, as Harris observed, HF’s passions were “vehement in every Kind,” the passion he felt most powerfully was sexual desire— “this all-subduing Tyrant,” he calls it in Amelia (VI. i), “to whose Poison and Infatuation the best of Minds are so liable”—because lust is so nearly allied to the best feelings human nature is capable of: love, the root of good-nature and benevolence. Perhaps the better to understand his own mercurial temperament, HF turned to the theory of the passions, a contemporary adaptation of the ancient humoral pathology of Hippocrates. Alexander Pope in An Essay on Man (1733–34, II. iii) had popularized the notion of a single “master” or “ruling” passion, which, if discovered, revealed the essential character of a person. In “To John Hayes, Esq.” (Miscellanies, 1743, but written earlier), HF’s own brief anatomy of the subject in verse, he scornfully rejects Pope’s theory as too simplistic: “Had Nature Actions to one Source conﬁn’d, / Ev’n blundering Codrus might have known mankind” (lines 27–28). HF, here at least, preferred to represent human nature as a composition of conﬂicting humors, noticing, How Passions blended on each other ﬁx, How Vice with Virtues, Faults with Graces mix; How Passions opposite, as sour to sweet, Shall in one Bosom at one Moment meet. With various Luck for Victory contend, And now shall carry, and now lose their End. (lines 17–22)

Like Pope, however, HF usually extended this concept to interpret the actions of men as stemming from the impulses of a single predominant passion, a doctrine logically conducive to determinism. The narrator of A Journey from This World to the Next (1743, I. vi) thus depicts the prenatal preparation of the spirits in Elysium. Each is made to drink from two vials: the “PATHETIC POTION,” containing the various humors, and the “NOUSPHORIC DECOCTION,” source of the rational faculties. The potion is represented as “a Mixture of all the Passions, but in no exact Proportion, so that sometimes one predominates and sometimes another; nay, often in the hurry of making up, one particular Ingredient is as we were informed left out.” Only through the acknowledgment of “some unacquired, original Distinction, in the Nature or Soul of one Man, from that of another,” as HF observed in his “Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men” (Miscellanies), can we account for the markedly different inclinations to good or evil among children, let us say, of the same background and education. This idea is dramatized in the novels in the contrasting characters of Tom Jones and Bliﬁl, Amelia and her sister Betty. HF was only too well aware that such

Themes and Topics

245

a theory as this could lead to the dangerous doctrine of fatalism. Resembling this doctrine in Amelia (XII. v) is Booth’s belief that since men acted “entirely from their Passions, their Actions could have neither Merit nor Demerit”—a fatalistic belief that accounts for his own moral paralysis, and which, it appears, HF himself may once have entertained. The classical solution to this problem is the one HF recommends in The Champion (2 February 1740): “that glorious precept vince teipsum,” the ability of the individual by reason and the will, to direct and order the passions. Booth, of course, is well aware of this precept; his problem is not ignorance but a conviction he shares with the philosopher David Hume: that reason is the slave of the passions. HF tried, not very convincingly, to solve the problem for his readers at the end of the novel by having Booth embrace Christianity, because, as Dr. Harrison reasons, “ ‘If Men act, as I believe they do, from their Passions, it would be fair to conclude that Religion to be true which applies immediately to the strongest of these Passions, Hope and Fear” (XII. v). (For discussions of HF’s views on the passions, see Battestin 1959:58–60, and 1974a; Miller 1961:215–28.) PROVIDENCE. A commonplace of the period in which the modern novel ﬁrst took form was the belief that divine providence, not fortune or chance, was the agency that disposed and governed all contingencies. At the end of Tom Jones (XVIII. vii) Squire Allworthy marvels at the “wonderful Means” by which mysteries have been dispelled and justice has triumphed. “Good Heavens!” he exclaims. “Well! the Lord disposeth all Things.” In Amelia (VIII. iv) the heroine has understood the lesson Parson Adams taught in Joseph Andrews (1742, III. xi): with the idea of providence in mind, she acknowledges “that Divine Will and Pleasure, without whose Permission at least, no Human Accident can happen.” In his capacity as magistrate, HF in 1752 appealed to this belief in divine intervention in human affairs by publishing 3,000 copies of a little book calculated to discourage acts of violence in the young and impressionable, entitled Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder. (For discussions of the concept of providence and its importance to an understanding of HF and eighteenth-century literature in general, see Williams 1968, and 1971; Battestin 1974b: chap. 5, 7; Knight 1979; Fortuna 1980; Damrosch 1985.) PRUDENCE. The idea of prudence, hardly found at all elsewhere in HF’s works, is the dominant ethical theme of Tom Jones (1749), where it is an ambiguous concept, shifting in connotation from pejorative to positive according to the context, which HF carefully controls. The positive sense in which HF wishes the reader to understand the concept is to be found in the moral philosophy of Aristotle and Cicero, among others. In this tradition, two kinds of wisdom were distinguished: sophia, or speculative

246

A Henry Fielding Companion

wisdom, and prudentia, or practical wisdom. Prudentia, the chief of the cardinal virtues, is the rational ability to distinguish between goods real and only apparent, and by the proper use of the faculties of memory, judgment, and foresight, to estimate the future consequences of present actions and events. This is the ars vivendi, “the Art of Life,” as HF has it in the opening chapter of Amelia; put another way, it is, as Squire Allworthy declares, “the Duty which we owe to ourselves” (XVIII. x). And so, in the penultimate paragraph of the novel, Tom Jones is said to be a ﬁt partner for Sophia only because he has “by Reﬂexion on his past Follies, acquired a Discretion and Prudence very uncommon in one of his lively Parts.” The pejorative sense in which the word is more often used in the novel is the result of what was in HF’s day a comparatively recent reinterpretation of prudentia by authors of bromidic conduct books addressed chieﬂy to a middle-class audience of shopkeepers and schoolboys. In the process its counterfeit and shadow came to be taken for the thing itself. Self-discipline, discretion, and foresight came to be valued for mercenary reasons—not as the way to selfknowledge and virtuous conduct, but as the surest means of prospering in the world. In this sense the word is often on the lips of a Robinson Crusoe or a Pamela, and is well suited to be the trademark of an insurance company. This is the modern understanding of prudence, signifying a certain self-protective caution and mean-spirited sense of expediency, and this is the sense of the word as HF applies it to Bridget Allworthy (I. ii), Deborah Wilkins (I. v, vi), Jenny Jones (I. ix), Mrs. Seagrim (IV. viii), Mrs. Western (VI. xiv), Partridge (VIII. ix), Mrs. Honour (X. ix), and Lady Bellaston (XIII. iii, XV. iv). In a far darker sense, prudence is also the mock virtue of the villain Bliﬁl—the false wisdom of this world, a self-interested cunning that seeks to counterfeit the true wisdom of which Aristotle and Cicero wrote. Why should HF tease his reader by using the word in ways that are so contradictory? Perhaps because by doing so he requires the reader to exercise, quite literally, his or her own prudential faculties—to distinguish between the true wisdom Tom Jones must acquire and the worldly wisdom that characterizes Bridget Allworthy and Lady Bellaston among others, and Bliﬁl above all. The reader, too, is in a way thus implicated in the hero’s awkward progress toward the acquisition of prudence. (For discussions of the theme of prudence in Tom Jones, see Hutchens 1965: chap. 5; Hatﬁeld 1968: chap. 5; Battestin 1974b: chap. 6; and Ribble 1981.) THE RIDICULOUS. HF not only wrote comedy—comedy of every kind, whether plays or essays or novels—he was also interested intellectually in determining the nature of laughter itself and in the constructive uses that comedy might serve. In this sense—though others, such as Lord Chesterfield (see Common Sense, 3 and 10 September 1737) had touched on the subject—HF might fairly be considered the ﬁrst serious theorist of comic laughter in English. In his debut as a prose humorist—an essay on “the Beneﬁt of Laughing” published

Themes and Topics

247

in Mist’s Weekly Journal (3 August 1728)—he posed as a doctor of mirth who has discovered the therapeutic properties of laughter, a cure for “all Diseases incident to the Mind and Body of Man.” A decade later in an essay published in The Craftsman on April Fool’s Day 1738, he returned to the subject as “Democritus,” the laughing philosopher, who writes “in Vindication of Laughter”; complementing the theme of the earlier essay, laughter is said now to serve a moral, as well as a medicinal, purpose by correcting folly and vice. In The Champion HF subsequently made incidental attempts to locate the source of what he would call in the famous preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), “the Ridiculous”: in the leader for 20 November 1739 he ﬁnds much ridiculous behavior to arise from a common vice, hypocrisy; and in the number for 15 April 1740 he states that “Vanity is the true Source of Ridicule.” In the autumn of 1741, at a time shortly before the publication of Joseph Andrews when he was also preparing material for the Miscellanies (1743), HF made his ﬁrst serious attempt to anatomize laughter in a letter to his friend James Harris of 29 September 1741; a number of the insights and examples that he expresses here would later ﬁnd a place in “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men.” All of these preliminary reﬂections on the nature and function of laughter culminated in his remarks on the subject in the preface to Joseph Andrews, and particularly in the deﬁnition he gives there of “the Ridiculous.” As Aristotle had considered the function of tragedy to be a catharsis, a purging of the emotions of pity and fear, so HF (now restating less facetiously the doctrine of his early essay on “the Beneﬁt of Laughing”) ﬁnds in the effects of comedy a catharsis of a different nature: Mirth and Laughter . . . are probably more wholesome Physic for the Mind, and conduce better to purge away Spleen, Melancholy and ill Affections, than is generally imagined. Nay, I will appeal to common Observation, whether the same Companies are not found more full of Good-Humour and Benevolence, after they have been sweeten’d for two or three Hours with Entertainments of this kind, than when soured by a Tragedy or a grave Lecture.

As had been the case in the essay “in Vindication of Laughter” in The Craftsman, this therapeutic function of comedy is complemented in the preface by HF’s insistence on the moral utility of the Ridiculous, whose source, he ﬁnds, is affectation as manifested in those related forms of self-love, vanity, and hypocrisy. Seeking kindred spirits in the sister arts to illustrate his meaning, he cites Ben Jonson in the drama, “who of all Men understood the Ridiculous the best”; and in painting, his friend William Hogarth—a “Comic History-Painter,” HF calls him, who in his Rake’s and Harlot’s Progress understood the distinction between “the Comic” and what the Italians call mere “Caricatura.” Toward the end of his career HF considered the subject of the ridiculous anew in a pair of leaders in The Covent-Garden Journal. There, citing the induction to Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour, he attributes the ridic-

248

A Henry Fielding Companion

ulous to the triumph of “Humour” over “good Breeding”—humour being deﬁned as “a violent Impulse of the Mind, determining it to some one peculiar Point, by which a Man becomes distinguished from all other Men” (18 July 1752); and, he continued, one of the chief reasons for such ridiculous behavior is the neglect of proper methods of education (25 July 1752). (On HF’s theory of comedy, see Coley 1959 and Tave 1960.)

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

The plays and works of ﬁction are listed in alphabetical order under each heading. For the plays, the characters are listed in alphabetical order under each title. For the ﬁction, the characters are listed under each title in two sections (Principal Characters and Others) in order of their ﬁrst appearance in the work. An alphabetical index of the names of all the characters, keyed to the works in which they appear, is found in the next section.

IN THE PLAYS The Author’s Farce: and The Pleasures of the Town (1730) BANTAMITE (Gonsalvo): Luckless’s former tutor who at the denouement interrupts the puppet show, bringing news that Luckless is Henry I, King of Bantam. BLOTPAGE: A bad poet, one of the hack writers in Bookweight’s employ. BOOKSELLER: A character in the puppet show. BOOKWEIGHT: An unscrupulous bookseller who keeps a stable of hack authors—possibly representing the notorious Edmund Curll (see also Curry). CAT: When a quartet of poets fails to compose an epilogue to his play, Luckless gives the part to a cat, with excellent results. CHARON: Infernal boatman of mythology who in the puppet show ferries the dead to the Court of the Goddess of Nonsense in the underworld. CHEAT’EM, MRS.: A player at quadrille in the puppet show. CONSTABLE: A character from real life in the puppet show. CURRY: A bookseller, in the puppet show—again, like Bookweight in the farce, resembling Edmund Curll.

250

A Henry Fielding Companion

DASH: A hack writer in Bookweight’s employ, specializing in title pages. DIRECTOR: In the revised version of 1734, a character in the puppet show representing a corrupt ofﬁcial of the Charitable Corporation, whose scandalous misconduct had recently been discovered. FARCICAL COMIC, SIR: Representing Colley Cibber in the puppet show. (See also Marplay.) GLASSRING, MRS.: A player at quadrille in the puppet show. HARRIOT: Mrs. Moneywood’s daughter, in love with Luckless. At the denouement, Punch reveals that she is his sister; by marrying Luckless, she becomes Harriot, Queen of Bantam. (In the revised version of 1734 the part was played by Catherine “Kitty” Clive.) INDEX: Another hack in Bookweight’s employ, specializing in furnishing mottoes. JACK: Luckless’s servant. KINGCALL, LADY: A player at quadrille in the puppet show. LUCKLESS (Harry): An impecunious author and master of the puppet show, in love with Harriot. They marry at the denouement after his good fortune in succeeding to the throne of Bantam as Henry I. MARPLAY: A “comedian” and arrogant theatrical manager—representing Colley Cibber, the most powerful of the “triumvirate” of managers at Drury Lane. (See also Sir Farcical Comic.) MARPLAY, JR.: In the revised version of the play (1734) this character, representing Colley Cibber’s son Theophilus—himself a comedian and leader of the actors’ rebellion against the management of HF’s theater, Drury Lane— replaces Sparkish in a much expanded role played by Charles Macklin. MONEYWOOD, MRS.: Harriot’s mother and Luckless’s landlady, impatient for her rent but in love with him. At the denouement Punch reveals that she is also his mother and the Queen of Old Brentford. MURDERTEXT: In the puppet show a dour Presbyterian parson from real life who lusts after Mrs. Novel. NONSENSE, GODDESS OF: Ruler of that region in the puppet show, in love with Signior Opera. NOVEL, MRS.: A ﬁgure in the puppet show, in love with Signior Opera— probably representing the actress and romance writer Eliza Haywood, recently also satirized in Alexander Pope’s Dunciad. OPERA, SIGNIOR: In the puppet show a ﬁgure satiric of Italian opera, in love with Mrs. Novel—perhaps representing the popular castrato, Francesco Senesino. ORATOR, DR.: A ﬁgure in the puppet show representing John Henley, the zany former priest and ministerial journalist who, at his “oratory,” entertained the public with ludicrous lectures on various topics.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

251

PANTOMIME, MONSIEUR: Representing John Rich, manager of the theater at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and famous as Harlequin in numerous pantomime entertainments. POET: In the puppet show, an unsuccessful writer whose fate resembles Luckless’s. PUNCH and JOAN: Principals in the puppet show. At the denouement, Punch reveals that he is the son of Mrs. Moneywood, Queen of Old Brentford, and Harriot’s brother. QUIBBLE: A hack writer in Bookweight’s employ, specializing in polemical pamphlets. ROBGRAVE: A sexton in the puppet show. SAILOR: Charon’s helper in the puppet show. SCARECROW: A hack writer. SEEDO, MR.: In the revised version produced at Drury Lane in 1734, the theater’s German-born musician, who composed the overture to the puppet show, becomes himself a character in the rehearsal. See Mr. Seedo. SOMEBODY and NOBODY: A traditional pair of comic characters who dance in the puppet show. SPARKISH: A “comedian” and, with Marplay, fellow manager of the theater— representing Robert Wilks, who with Colley Cibber and Barton Booth, was one of the triumvirate of managers at Drury Lane. TRAGEDIO, DON: In the puppet show, an author of wretched tragedies—a ﬁgure representing Alexander Pope’s prince of dunces in The Dunciad (1728), Lewis Theobald. UGLY, COUNT: In the revised version of 1734, this character, representing the notorious impresario of masquerades, John James “Count” Heidegger, was added to the cast of the puppet show. WITMORE: Luckless’s cynical, generous friend. The Coffee-House Politician (1730) See Rape upon Rape. The Covent-Garden Tragedy (1732) BILKUM, CAPTAIN: The bully of the brothel, in love with Stormandra. CHAIRMAN: Bilked of his fare by Bilkum. GALLONO: Lovegirlo’s friend, who prefers wine to women. KISSINDA: A whore of the brothel, in love with Lovegirlo. (Played by “Kitty” Raftor, later Catherine “Kitty” Clive.) LEATHERSIDES: Mother Punchbowl’s procurer, also “known to write” for The

A Henry Fielding Companion

252

Grub-Street Journal—a character based on one Leathercoat, pimp and porter at the notorious Rose Tavern, Covent Garden. LOVEGIRLO: Fond of “woman” in general but of Kissinda in particular. (Played by Theophilus Cibber.) NONPAREL (Jenny): Newest and freshest of Mother Punchbowl’s girls. PUNCHBOWL, MOTHER: The madam of the brothel—a character recalling the notorious bawd, Elizabeth “Mother” Needham, who had died in 1731 while suffering punishment in the pillory. STORMANDRA: A whore of the brothel, once jealous of Kissinda for being Lovegirlo’s favorite, but won at last by Bilkum.

Don Quixote in England (1734) AUTHOR: Serving in place of a prologue, the play opens with a dialogue between the author and the manager of the theater. BADGER, SQUIRE: A Somersetshire squire, in love with hunting, ale, and Dorothea. (Played by Charles Macklin.) BRIEF, MR.: A lawyer, stopping at Guzzle’s inn. DON QUIXOTE: The famous hero of Cervantes’ novel, mistaken for a candidate for the Court Party in the election. DOROTHEA: Sir Thomas Loveland’s daughter, in love with Fairlove and courted by Squire Badger. DRENCH, DR.: A physician, stopping at Guzzle’s inn. FAIRLOVE (Billy): In love with Dorothea. GUZZLE: An innkeeper. GUZZLE, MRS.: His wife. JEZEBEL: Dorothea’s maid. JOHN: Fairlove’s servant. LOVELAND, SIR THOMAS: Dorothea’s father, a candidate for the Country Party in the election. MAYOR: The mayor of a West Country town, eager to sell his vote. RETAIL, MR.: A voter. SANCHO (Panza): Don Quixote’s famous squire, who speaks in proverbs. SCUT: Squire Badger’s huntsman. SNEAK, MR.: A traveler stopping at Guzzle’s inn with his wife and daughter.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

253

Eurydyce, or the Devil Henpeck’d (1737) Published in HF’s Miscellanies, vol. 2 (1743) as Eurydice, a Farce. As it was damn’d at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. AUTHOR: Introducing, and from time to time interrupting the play, the author and a critic comment on its merits. CHARON: The boatman who ferries the dead to the underworld. CRITIC: In dialogue with the author. EURYDICE: The ghost of Orpheus’s wife, who prefers life in the underworld to returning home with her husband. (Played by Catherine “Kitty” Clive). MACCAHONE: The ghost of an impecunious Irishman. ORPHEUS: The husband of Eurydice come to the underworld to rescue her by the enchantment of his singing, a ﬁgure representing the castrato Farinelli. (Played by Michael Stoppelaer.) PLUTO: Henpecked king of the underworld. PROSERPINE: Pluto’s queen, who sides with Eurydice against her husband. SPINDLE, MR. (Jack): The ghost of a beau, a courtier who was hanged. WEAZEL, CAPTAIN (Jack): The ghost of an army beau. (Played by Charles Macklin.) Eurydice Hiss’d: or, A Word to the Wise (1737) DAPPER, LORD: A foppish nobleman at the rehearsal. HONESTUS: An honest man opposed to Pillage’s corrupt practices. MUSE: Pillage (now representing HF instead of Sir Robert Walpole) is visited by his true muse, the muse of Pasquin, who reproves him for forsaking her. (Played by Eliza Haywood.) PILLAGE: In the play being rehearsed, Pillage is the author of the farce and manager of the theater—representing ﬁrst the prime minster Sir Robert Walpole, in the metaphorical theater of politics, and then HF himself as author and manager of the Haymarket Theatre. SOURWIT: A critic at the rehearsal. SPATTER: Author supervising the rehearsal of the play, his “tragedy,” so called because its subject is the damnation of his (i.e., HF’s) Eurydice. (Played by Charlotte Charke.) The Fathers: or, The Good-Natur’d Man (1778) BONCOUR, MISS (Harriet): Boncour’s daughter, in love with Young Valence until he reveals his dishonorable intentions toward her.

A Henry Fielding Companion

254

BONCOUR, MR.: The “good-natur’d man” of the title—a henpecked husband who, though not otherwise a weak or foolish man, indulges every selﬁsh desire of his family. BONCOUR, MRS.: His wife, a contrary and demanding woman. BONCOUR, SIR GEORGE: Boncour’s brother—a worldly-wise bachelor, with no very good opinion of human nature, who admonishes Boncour about the consequences of his excessive generosity. BONCOUR, YOUNG (George): Boncour’s eldest son, a “ﬁne gentleman,” thoroughly spoiled by his father’s complaisance; in love with Miss Valence until she reveals the vanity of her character. KENNEL, SIR GREGORY: A friend of Old Valence and Boncour from the country, an ignorant fox-hunting baronet. KENNEL, YOUNG (Gregory): His eldest son, a conceited, uneducated fop recently returned from the Grand Tour—an experience that has taught him only to despise his father and the customs of his native country. VALENCE, MISS (Sophia): Miss Boncour’s unworthy friend. VALENCE, OLD: A worldly and hypocritical man, the antithesis of Boncour: a strict disciplinarian of his children and a schemer who would take advantage of Boncour’s good nature to ruin him. VALENCE, YOUNG (Charles): Young Boncour’s unworthy friend. The Grub-Street Opera (1731) APSHINKEN, LADY: Sir Owen’s shrewish, pious wife—representing Queen Caroline. APSHINKEN, MASTER OWEN: The impotent, philandering son of Sir Owen—representing Frederick, Prince of Wales. APSHINKEN, SIR OWEN: A Welsh gentleman and head of the family—representing the king, George II. APSHONES, MOLLY: Daughter to Mr. Apshones, in love with Master Owen Apshinken. APSHONES, MR.: Tenant of Sir Owen. JOHN: Sir Owen’s groom—representing John, Lord Hervey. MARGERY: Housemaid, in love with John. PUZZLETEXT: Sir Owen’s worldly chaplain and the darling of his lady. ROASTMEAT, SUSAN: Sir Owen’s cook, in love with William. ROBIN: Sir Owen’s butler, and Lady Apshinken’s favorite—representing Sir Robert Walpole.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

255

SCRATCH, GOODY: A witch (in the original Welsh Opera only) who resolves all conﬂicts and marries Parson Puzzletext. SCRIBLERUS SECUNDUS: Author of the opera—HF’s pseudonym. SWEETISSA: Lady Apshinken’s chambermaid, in love with Robin—possibly representing Molly Skerrit, Sir Robert Walpole’s mistress. THOMAS: Sir Owen’s gardener—representing Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle. WILLIAM: Sir Owen’s coachman and Robin’s enemy—representing William Pulteney. The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737) APOLLO’S BASTARD SON: The “god” of modern poetry and drama. BANTER: A rude beau, friend to Dangle. BARTER, MRS.: A lady at the auction. DANGLE: A beau; ladies’ man and friend to Banter. DAPPER, LORD: A vain and tasteless nobleman. GROUND-IVY: A poet and theatrical manager who takes pride in his alterations of Shakespeare’s King John—representing Colley Cibber. HEN (Christopher): An auctioneer—representing Christopher Cock. (Played by Charlotte Charke.) MEDLEY: Author of the play. PISTOL: Pompous, self-conceited “Prime Minister Theatrical” who speaks in bombastic blank verse—representing Colley Cibber’s son Theophilus, deputy manager at Drury Lane and famous for acting the part of Shakespeare’s Ancient Pistol. PROMPTER: A nameless but important ﬁgure in the rehearsal of the play. QUIDAM (in Latin, “a certain person”): Leader of the ministerial politicians, who bribes the “patriots” to dance to his tune—a ﬁgure representing the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. SCREEN, MRS.: A woman at the auction. (Played by Eliza Haywood.) SOURWIT: A critic at the rehearsal; sycophant of Lord Dapper. The Intriguing Chambermaid (1734) BLUFF, COLONEL: One of the sponging guests who abuse Valentine’s hospitality and help plunge him into debt. (Played by Charles Macklin.) CHARLOTTE: Mrs. Highman’s niece, in love with Valentine but intended by her aunt for the older, wealthier Oldcastle.

A Henry Fielding Companion

256

GOODALL: Valentine’s kindly father, who surprises his son by returning a year sooner than expected from a voyage to the Indies. HIGHMAN, MRS.: Charlotte’s aunt, who intends to marry her to Oldcastle. LETTICE: Valentine’s clever, cheeky servant maid, loyal to her master and in love with Rakeit. (Played by Catherine “Kitty” Clive, to whom HF dedicated the play.) MARQUIS, MONSIEUR LE: A French nobleman, guest at Valentine’s party and keen on gaming. OLDCASTLE: An elderly, wealthy squire, to whom Mrs. Highmore means to marry Charlotte. PRIDE, LORD: With Lord Puff, an arrogant nobleman, guest at Valentine’s party. PUFF, LORD: A nobleman at Valentine’s party, proud of his class and of taking his low-born host’s money at cards. RAKEIT: Mrs. Highman’s footman, in love with Lettice. SECURITY: A usurer, to whom Valentine is deeply in debt. SLAP: A bailiff who attempts to arrest Valentine for debt. TRICK: A moneylender to whom Valentine is deeply in debt. TRUSTY: Valentine’s servant. VALENTINE: Goodall’s lovable but extravagant son, in love with Charlotte; in his father’s absence abroad he squanders the family’s fortune by staging lavish parties. The Letter-Writers: or, A New Way to Keep a Wife at Home (1731) BETTY: Servant of Mr. and Mrs. Wisdom. COMMONS (Jack): Nephew of Mr. Wisdom and Mrs. Softly and friend of Rakel. He has come to London from the university to indulge in a month’s debauchery before taking holy orders, his “call” being “the promise of a good living.” At the denouement, we learn with relief that his uncle will buy him a commission in the army instead. (Played by William Mullart.) CONSTABLE: Summoned to Wisdom’s house, he apprehends Risque riﬂing the family’s valuables and Rakel, who is conducting an affair with Mrs. Wisdom, hiding under a table. FIDDLER 1: A musician whom Commons, who has no money, cannot persuade to play at his revels. FIDDLER 2: Very like Fiddler 1. JOHN: Servant of the Wisdoms. RAKEL (Captain Tom): A likable rake who would protect his lover’s reputation

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

257

even at the cost of his life. Having tired of his affair with Mrs. Softly, he is now engaged in an intrigue with Mrs. Wisdom. Falsely accused by Risque of being a highwayman and intending to murder Mrs. Wisdom, he narrowly avoids imprisonment. (Played by James Lacy.) RISQUE (Ned): Rakel’s manservant and pimp, an unprincipled scoundrel who, when caught burgling the Wisdoms’ house, falsely impeaches Rakel in order to escape punishment. SNEAKSBY: Clerk to Mr. Softly, the justice. SOFTLY, MR.: Elderly merchant and justice of the peace. He plots with the no less superannuated Mr. Wisdom to frighten their young wives into staying at home by sending them, anonymously, letters threatening that they will be murdered if they stir abroad. SOFTLY, MRS. (Lucretia): Commons’s aunt and the young wife of old Softly, whom she has cuckolded with Rakel. Unintimidated by the threatening letters, she goes about town with a guard of footmen armed with blunderbusses. (Played by Mrs. Mullart.) WHORE 1 (Suky): Jack Commons having no money, she refuses to join in his debauch. WHORE 2: Very like Whore 1. WISDOM, MR.: Commons’s uncle, like Softly a merchant. The two old men scheme to terrify their young wives into staying at home by sending them anonymous letters threatening their lives if they should leave the house. WISDOM, MRS. (Elizabeth): While her friend Mrs. Softly ignores the threats and goes about town protected by her footmen, Mrs. Wisdom is content to conduct her intrigue with Rakel at home. (Played by Mrs. Lacy.) The Lottery (1732) BUYER 1: A gentleman adventurer in the lottery. BUYER 2: A hackney coachman, adventurer in the lottery. CHLOE: A silly country girl, lately come to town expecting to win a fortune in the lottery. Pursued by Lovemore, she marries Jack Stocks instead, believing him to be a lord; when her husband discovers that her only wealth is a worthless lottery ticket, he readily sells her to Lovemore for £1000. (Played by “Kitty” Raftor, later Catherine “Kitty” Clive.) IRISHMAN: An adventurer at the drawing of the lottery. JENNY: Chloe’s maid. LADY: A “person of quality,” also an adventurer in the lottery. LOVEMORE: A young, well-to-do country squire, in love with Chloe, whom he has followed to town.

A Henry Fielding Companion

258

MOB 1: An adventurer at the drawing of the lottery. MOB 2 (Mr. Harrow): An adventurer at the drawing of the lottery. STOCKS, JACK: The foppish, spendthrift younger brother of Mr. Stocks. Mistakenly believing Chloe to be rich, he disguises himself as a lord in order to marry her; upon ﬁnding that her only wealth is a worthless lottery ticket, he sells his bride to Lovemore for £1000. (Played by Theophilus Cibber.) STOCKS, MR.: An unscrupulous lottery broker, elder brother to Jack Stocks. STOCKS, MRS.: Stocks’s sister-in-law, whom Lovemore in pursuit of Chloe mistakes for the madam of a brothel. SUGARSOPS, MRS.: An adventurer at the drawing of the lottery. WHISK: Lovemore’s servant.

Love in Several Masques (1728) APISH SIMPLE, SIR: A foolish baronet to whom Sir Positive Trap hopes to marry his niece Helena. Simple’s own intentions, however, are ﬁxed on Lady Matchless and her estate. CATCHIT: Scheming, mischievous chambermaid to Vermilia. FORMAL, LORD: An affected fop, suitor to Lady Matchless. (Played by Benjamin Grifﬁn.) HELENA: In love with Merital but intended by her guardian, Sir Positive Trap, for a more lucrative match with Sir Apish Simple. MALVIL (Jack): The witty, romantic friend of Merital, in love with Vermilia. MATCHLESS, LADY: A wealthy, beautiful, and virtuous widow, in love with Wisemore. (Played by Anne Oldfield.) MERITAL (Tom): A young man about town, friend to Malvil and in love with Helena. (Played by Robert Wilks.) POSITIVE TRAP, SIR: Guardian to his niece Helena. Avaricious and excessively proud of his lineage, he intends to marry her by force to Sir Apish Simple. RATTLE (Harry): A fop who aims to marry Lady Matchless for her money. (Played by Colley Cibber.) TRAP, LADY: Helena’s aunt, who lusts after her niece’s lover, Merital. VERMILIA: Friend to Lady Matchless and in love with Malvil. WISEMORE (Ned): A “man of sense” and learning, in love with Lady Matchless. (Played by Wiliam Mills.)

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

259

The Miser (1733) BUBBLEBOY, CHARLES: A toyman. CLERMONT: In love with Harriet. To be near her, he ingratiates himself with Lovegold, hoping to spoil his intention to marry his daughter to an odious old man of means. (Played by William Mills.) DECOY, MR.: An unscrupulous broker who, unknown to either Frederick (who needs the money) or his father (who is willing to lend it at extortionate interest), arranges with Lovegold to provide the loan. FREDERICK: Lovegold’s son, in love with Mariana. FURNISH, MR.: An upholsterer. HARRIET: Lovegold’s daughter, in love with Clermont. JAMES: Lovegold’s servant, both cook and coachman. LAPPET: Harriet’s scheming, spirited chambermaid, courted by Ramilie. (Played by “Kitty” Raftor, later Catherine “Kitty” Clive.) LAWYER: Draws up the marriage contract between Lovegold and Mariana, which proves to be the instrument for bringing all the young lovers together. LIST, MR.: A tailor. LOVEGOLD: The miser, father to Frederick and Harriet, and his son’s rival for the hand of Mariana. (Played by Benjamin Grifﬁn.) MARIANA: Harriet’s friend, a vain but good-natured coquette, courted by both Lovegold and his son Frederick. RAMILIE: Frederick’s servant, in love with Lappet. (Played by Theophilus Cibber.) SATTIN, MR.: A mercer. SPARKLE, MR.: A jeweler. THOMAS: Servant to Mariana. WHEEDLE: Mariana’s maid, Lappet’s friend. WISELY, MRS.: Mariana’s mother, eager to marry her daughter to Lovegold. Miss Lucy in Town, a Sequel to The Virgin Unmasqued (1742) BALLAD, MR.: A singer from the playhouse; client of the brothel. BAWBLE, LORD: Client of the brothel; a rich, sophisticated libertine with whom Lucy becomes infatuated. CANTILENO, SIGNIOR: A castrato from the Italian opera; client of the brothel—a ﬁgure of the castrato Amorevoli. (Played by John Beard.) GOODWILL: Lucy’s father.

260

A Henry Fielding Companion

JOHN: A coachman, servant to Lucy and Thomas. He carries them to Mrs. Midnight’s London brothel, mistaking the house for a reputable place of lodging. MIDNIGHT, MRS.: Keeper of the brothel; taking advantage of Lucy’s simplicity and vanity, she attempts to peddle her sexual favors to her clients. TAWDRY: A prostitute. THOMAS: Lucy’s honest husband, formerly footman to Lord Bawble. WIFE (Lucy): The silly country heiress of the Virgin Unmask’d, who has married Thomas, her father’s footman. (Played by Catherine “Kitty” Clive.) ZOROBABEL, MR.: A wealthy Jew who is a lottery monger in the City; a client of the brothel and rival of Lord Bawble’s for Lucy’s favors. (Played by Charles Macklin.) The Mock Doctor, or, The Dumb Lady Cured (1732) CHARLOTTE: Sir Jasper’s daughter, in love with Leander. To avoid marrying Dapper, she feigns dumbness. DAVY: A fellow seeking a cure for his wife’s dropsy. DORCAS: Gregory’s mischievous, quarrelsome wife. (Played by “Kitty” Raftor, later Catherine “Kitty” Clive.) GREGORY: Dorcas’s husband: a fagot gatherer, formerly Merry Andrew to a traveling physician. Dorcas convinces Sir Jasper’s servants that he is the doctor they seek to cure Charlotte’s dumbness. (Played by Theophilus Cibber). HARRY: Footman to Sir Jasper. HELLEBORE, DR.: A physician specializing in “mad” cases, into whose care Gregory commits Dorcas. JAMES: Footman to Sir Jasper. JASPER, SIR: Charlotte’s father, who intends to marry her to Dapper against her will. LEANDER: Charlotte’s true love. Disguised as an apothecary, he sings a love song that “cures” her dumbness and, after inheriting an estate, marries her. MAID: Charlotte’s maid. ROBERT, SQUIRE: Attempts in vain to interfere when Gregory beats Dorcas. The Modern Husband (1732) BELLAMANT, CAPTAIN: The sparkish, spoiled son of Mr. Bellamant. He marries Lady Charlotte Gaywit to secure her fortune, thus enabling Gaywit to inherit an estate. (Played by Theophilus Cibber.) BELLAMANT, MR. (Jack): Husband of virtuous Mrs. Bellamant. Though he

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

261

loves his wife, he has a nearly ruinous affair with the scheming Mrs. Modern. (Played by Robert Wilks.) BELLAMANT, MRS.: The virtuous and loving second wife to her husband and stepmother to his children, Emilia and Captain Bellamant. BRAVEMORE, CAPTAIN: A friend of Captain Merit. COURTLY, COLONEL: An upstart courtier. EMILIA: Bellamant’s virtuous daughter, in love with Gaywit. GAYWIT, LADY CHARLOTTE: The affected, silly daughter of Lord Richly. (Played by Susannah Arne Cibber.) GAYWIT, MR. (Harry): Lord Richly’s nephew and Bellamant’s friend. Formerly Mrs. Modern’s lover, he is in love with Emilia and marries her when Lady Charlotte Gaywit’s marriage to Captain Bellamant enables him to claim his inheritance. (Played by William Mills.) JOHN: A servant in the Modern household, in love with Lately. LATELY: Chambermaid to Mrs. Modern. (Played by Charlotte Charke.) LAZY, LORD: A courtier and friend of Lord Richly. MERIT, CAPTAIN: A soldier who appeals in vain to Lord Richly for advancement. MODERN, MR.: Conspires with his wife to sell her sexual favors to Lord Richly, and later to surprise Bellamant in her arms in order to sue him for damages. MODERN, MRS. (Hillaria): Though she despises her husband, in order to support their extravagant lifestyle, she readily agrees when he proposes that she prostitute herself to Lord Richly and Bellamant. PORTER: Doorkeeper to Lord Richly’s levee. RICHLY, LORD: An unscrupulous “great man” who, with her husband’s consent, buys Mrs. Modern’s sexual favors, and seeks in vain to debauch Mrs. Bellamant. (Played by Colley Cibber.) The Old Debauchees (1732) BEATRICE: Isabel’s pious cousin who, after witnessing Father Martin’s villainy, abandons her plan to enter a nunnery. ISABEL: Jourdain’s fun-loving daughter, a clever and spirited young woman in love with her ﬁance´, Young Laroon. Aware of Father Martin’s villainous intentions toward her, the two lovers successfully scheme to expose him. (Played by “Kitty” Raftor, later Catherine “Kitty” Clive.) JOURDAIN: Isabel’s foolish father, a man so obsessed by fears of being damned for his sins that he is in thrall to his confessor, Father Martin, and would

A Henry Fielding Companion

262

immure his daughter in a nunnery, where, he supposes, her prayers for him would be more efﬁcacious. LAROON, OLD: A hearty, unrepentant old rake and an outspoken enemy of the church. LAROON, YOUNG (Jack): His son, in love with Isabel. MARTIN, FATHER: A lecherous and hypocritical priest who intends to ravish Isabel. An Old Man Taught Wisdom: or The Virgin Unmask’d (1735) BLISTER: An apothecary, one of Goodwill’s booby cousins competing to marry Lucy for her money. BLISTER, MASTER: Blister’s son, also an apothecary. COUPEE: A dancing master, Goodwill’s cousin, courting Lucy for her money. GOODWILL: Lucy’s wealthy father, who, in a foolishly benevolent spirit, means to bestow his daughter in marriage on “the most worthy of [his] poor relations.” LUCY: Goodwill’s silly, spoiled daughter, in love with Mr. Thomas. (Played by Catherine “Kitty” Clive.) QUAVER: A singing master, Goodwill’s cousin, also courting Lucy for her money. THOMAS, MR.: Footman to a lord and loved by Lucy. WORMWOOD: An attorney, Goodwill’s cousin, another competitor for Lucy’s hand. (Played by Charles Macklin.) Pasquin: A Dramatick Satire on the Times. Being the Rehearsal of Two Plays, viz. A Comedy call’d, The Election; and a Tragedy call’d, The Life and Death of Common-Sense (1736) COMMON-SENSE, QUEEN: Enemy to Ignorance in Fustian’s tragedy. FIREBRAND: In the tragedy, the hypocritical “Priest of the Sun” who deserts, and later kills, Common-Sense to serve Ignorance. FOX-CHACE, SIR HENRY: Like Squire Tankard in Trapwit’s comedy, a candidate of the Country Party in the parliamentary election. FUSTIAN: Author of the tragedy, “The Life and Death of Common-Sense.” HARLEQUIN: In the tragedy, the ambassador from the two theaters to Ignorance—representing John Rich, manager of the Covent Garden Theatre and famous in the pantomime role of Harlequin. IGNORANCE, QUEEN: Enemy to Common-Sense in the tragedy. LAW: A venal attorney in the tragedy.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

263

MAYOR: A venal tradesman and mayor of the town in the comedy. Although he favors the Country Party, which wins the election, his wife persuades him to return the candidates of the Court Party. MAYORESS, MISS: His daughter, who, like her mother, favors the Court Party and marries Colonel Promise. MAYORESS, MRS.: Her mother, who in the election favors the court candidate, Lord Place. PHYSICK: A venal physician in the tragedy. PLACE, LORD: In the comedy, a candidate of the Court Party for election to Parliament. (Played by Charlotte Charke.) PROMISE, COLONEL: In the comedy, like Lord Place, a candidate of the Court Party in the election. SNEER-WELL: A critic at the rehearsal of Trapwit’s comedy and Fustian’s tragedy who ﬁnds fault with both. STITCH, MISS: In the comedy a tailor’s daughter who favors the opposition but, persuaded by Mrs. Mayoress’s bribe of a fan, comes to see more merit in the Court Party candidates. TANKARD, SQUIRE: In the comedy, like Squire Fox-Chance, a candidate of the Country Party for election to Parliament. TRAPWIT: Author of the comedy, “The Election.” Rape upon Rape: or, The Justice Caught in His Own Trap (1730), Later renamed The Coffee-House Politician BRAZENCOURT: With Fireball, Justice Squeezum’s false witness against Hilaret. CLORIS: Hilaret’s saucy chambermaid. CONSTANT, CAPTAIN (Billy): Ramble’s friend, in love with Hilaret. DABBLE: Politic’s neighbor, and like him a coffeehouse politician. FAITHFUL: Politic’s manservant. FIREBALL: With Brazencourt, Justice Squeezum’s false witness against Hilaret. HILARET: Politic’s daughter, in love with Constant. ISABELLA: Justice Worthy’s sister and Ramble’s wife—until the end of the play, she is thought to have drowned. POLITIC: A merchant obsessed with political events reported in the daily newspapers. Hilaret’s father—and, as later appears, Ramble’s as well. PORER: A coffeehouse politician like Politic and Dabble. QUILL: Justice Squeezum’s clerk. RAMBLE (Jack): A likable rake recently returned from a voyage to the East

264

A Henry Fielding Companion

Indies, where, he believes, he has lost his wife, Isabella, and their fortune at sea. Unwittingly he attempts to ravish his sister, Hilaret. SOTMORE: Ramble’s friend, who mightily prefers wine to women. SQUEEZUM: A corrupt justice of the peace, who means to ravish Hilaret. SQUEEZUM, MRS.: Justice Squeezum’s extravagant wife who lusts after Ramble. STAFF: A constable, associate of the corrupt Justice Squeezum. WORTHY: Isabella’s brother and the exemplary magistrate who brings Squeezum to justice. The Temple Beau (1730) BELLARIA: Sir Avarice’s rich and virtuous niece, in love with Veromil. CLARISSA: Engaged to Valentine, who is temporarily infatuated with Bellaria; she forgives him, and they marry. GRAVELY, LADY: Sister to Sir Avarice Pedant and an ill-natured prude, infatuated with Wilding. PEDANT: Sir Avarice’s son, a scholar at the university, vain of his little learning; though he prefers scholarship to matrimony, his father intends that he wed the wealthy Bellaria. PEDANT, LADY LUCY: A foolish coquette, sister-in-law to the prude Lady Gravely and young Pedant’s stepmother; infatuated with Wilding. PEDANT, SIR AVARICE: Having lost most of his wealth in the crash of the South Sea Company, he means to recoup the family fortune by marrying his reluctant son to Bellaria. PINCET (Gilbert): Wilding’s mischievous manservant. Formerly Veromil’s father’s servant, he conspired with Veromil’s brother to deprive Veromil of his inheritance. TAILOR: Wilding’s dunning creditor, together with a milliner, periwigmaker, shoemaker, and hosier. TRICKSY: One of Wilding’s doxies. VALENTINE: Sir Avarice’s nephew, a student at the Temple and Veromil’s friend from their days at Oxford; having seen Bellaria, he breaks his engagement to Clarissa and unknowingly becomes his friend’s rival. VEROMIL (Charles): Valentine’s sensible friend from Oxford days, in love with Bellaria. At the denouement, he regains the inheritance that his brother and Pincet have cheated him of. WILDING (Harry): The Temple Beau—an extravagant, immoral rake who dupes his father, Sir Harry, into believing his expenses are necessary to his studies at the Temple. He hopes in vain to marry Bellaria for her wealth.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

265

WILDING, SIR HARRY: A naive country gentleman who comes to town intending to marry his son to Bellaria. Tom Thumb (1730) ARTHUR, KING: Legendary King of Britain. BAILIFF and FOLLOWER: Killed by Thumb for attempting to arrest Noodle for debt. CLEORA: Maid of honor to Huncamunca. DOLLALOLLA, QUEEN: Arthur’s queen, in love with Thumb. DOODLE: A courtier. GRIZZLE, LORD: Enemy to Thumb, whose ghost he kills. HUNCAMUNCA, PRINCESS: Daughter of Arthur and his queen, in love with Thumb. MUSTACHA: Maid of honor to Huncamunca. NOODLE: A courtier. PHYSICIANS: Upon a false report of Thumb’s death, they are rivals in diagnosing the cause. THUMB, TOM: The diminutive hero of ancient fable, in love with Huncamunca; their marriage is prevented when he is swallowed by a cow. The Tragedy of Tragedies: or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731) The quoted descriptions are HF’s own, from the dramatis personae. ARTHUR, KING: “A passionate sort of King, Husband to Queen Dollallolla, of whom he stands a little in Fear; Father to Huncamunca, whom he is very fond of; and in Love with Glumdalca.” BAILIFF and FOLLOWER: “Of the Party of the Plaintiff.” CLEORA: Like Mustacha, maid of honor to Huncamunca, in love with Noodle. DOLLALLOLLA, QUEEN: “Wife to King Arthur, and Mother to Huncamunca, a Woman entirely faultless, saving that she is a little given to Drink; a little too much a Virago towards her Husband, and in Love with Tom Thumb.” DOODLE: A courtier “in Place, and consequently of that Party which is uppermost.” FOODLE: A courtier much like Doodle and Noodle. GHOST of Gaffer Thumb, Tom Thumb’s father: “A whimsical sort of Ghost.” GLUMDALCA: “Of the Giants, a Captive Queen, belov’d by the King, but in love with Tom Thumb.”

266

A Henry Fielding Companion

GRIZZLE, LORD: “Extremely zealous for the Liberty of the Subject, very cholerick in his Temper, and in Love with Huncamunca.” HUNCAMUNCA, PRINCESS: “Daughter to their Majesties King Arthur and Queen Dollallolla, of a very sweet, gentle, and amorous Disposition, equally in Love with Lord Grizzle and Tom Thumb, and desirous to be married to them both.” MERLIN: “A Conjurer, and in some sort Father to Tom Thumb.” MUSTACHA: Like Cleora, maid of honor to Huncamunca; in love with Doodle. NOODLE: A courtier, very much like Doodle and Foodle. PARSON: “Of the Side of the Church.” THUMB THE GREAT, TOM: “A little Hero with a great Soul, something violent in his Temper, which is a little abated by his Love for Huncamunca.” Tumble-Down Dick: or, Phaeton in the Suds (1736) AURORA: The Dawn, annoyed at her maid whose failure to provide her with clean linen has delayed her breaking. CLYMENE: According to the “advertisement” to the play, “a Grecian oysterwench,” wife to Old Phaeton and mother to Young Phaeton, the bastard son of Phoebus. (Played by Charlotte Clarke.) COLUMBINE: Harlequin’s mistress. FUSTIAN: Author of the “Tragedy” in Pasquin, to which Tumble-Down Dick was the afterpiece; he reappears here at the rehearsal of Machine’s “entertainment.” GENIUS OF GIN: A spirit, appropriately, representing the unpopular Gin Act of 1736. HARLEQUIN: Representing John Rich in the zany pantomime role he made famous; he is arrested by the watch for picking the Poet’s pocket of his play. JUPITER: King of the gods; he rebukes Phoebus for the disaster he has caused by trusting his bastard son Young Phaeton with his lantern. JUSTICE: A corrupt and illiterate justice of peace who, bribed by Columbine, releases Harlequin and commits the Poet whose play Harlequin ﬁlched. JUSTICE’S CLERK: As illiterate as the Justice, he appears in the loose, white costume of Pierrot, a character in French pantomime. MACHINE: “Composer” of the “entertainment”—representing John Rich, manager of the Covent-Garden Theatre, where he staged elaborate pantomimes in which, under the name of “Lun,” he played the principal role of Harlequin. HF facetiously dedicated the play to him. NEPTUNE: Emperor of the sea in the character of a Thames waterman.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

267

PHAETON, OLD: Clymene’s cuckolded husband, a cobbler. PHAETON, YOUNG: Bastard son of Phoebus and Clymene. When Phoebus, captain of the city’s watchmen, grants his son’s wish to carry his lantern for a day, confusion ensues. PHOEBUS: A burlesque Apollo, god of the sun: he is captain of the watch and Young Phaeton’s father. His “Palace,” where he keeps his lantern, is the watchmen’s round-house. PISTOL: Though a silent character, he represents Theophilus Cibber, assistant manager of Drury Lane and an actor long mockingly identiﬁed with the bombast of Shakespeare’s Pistol, a role he played on stage. POET: Harlequin picks his pocket of a play and is arrested by the watch; but when Columbine bribes the Justice he, rather than Harlequin, is committed to jail. PROMPTER: The prompter of the theater, who, in the rehearsal format of the play, serves as intermediary between the observers and the actors. SCHOOL-MISTRESS: She attempts to teach the Justice and his clerk how to spell. SNEERWELL: The critic in the rehearsal of Pasquin, now also attending the rehearsal of the afterpiece, Machine’s “entertainment.” TERRA: Goddess of the earth, extremely fond of dancing. The Universal Gallant: or The Different Husbands (1735) CLARINDA: The Rafﬂers’ niece, in love with Gaylove, toward whom she affects indifference. GAYLOVE, MR.: Mondish’s close friend, in love with Clarinda. (Played by William Mills.) MONDISH, MR. (George): A philanderer who, though a friend of Colonel Rafﬂer, has an affair with his wife. When she injures his pride by breaking off the relationship, he resolves to win her back. (Played by James Quin.) RAFFLER, COLONEL: Brother to Sir Simon and the gullible, complaisant husband of Mrs. Rafﬂer. RAFFLER, LADY (Mary): A prude of strict virtue who despises her jealous husband. RAFFLER, MRS.: Lady Rafﬂer’s sister—a clever, witty woman who was formerly Mondish’s lover. RAFFLER, SIR SIMON: Brother to the colonel—an imperious, ill-tempered man, without reason obsessively jealous of his wife. (Played by Benjamin Grifﬁn.)

A Henry Fielding Companion

268

SPARK, CAPTAIN: Mondish’s cousin—“an errant walking contagion on women’s reputations”: a courtier who slanders women by cultivating a false reputation for gallantry. (Played by Theophilus Cibber). The Virgin Unmask’d (1735) See An Old Man Taught Wisdom. The Wedding-Day (1743) BRAZEN: Millamour’s impertinent footman. CHARLOTTE: Old Stedfast’s ﬂighty daughter, at the center of the plot’s complexity of frustrated relationships. Although gentle Heartfort loves Charlotte to distraction, she prefers the rake Millamour, who adores Clarinda; but Clarinda, despairing that Millamour will ever reform, has just married Stedfast, who insists on marrying Charlotte to the reluctant Young Mutable. At the denouement of the comedy, all these complexities are resolved as Clarinda, before her marriage to Stedfast is consummated, is found to be Stedfast’s illegitimate daughter: Heartfort weds Charlotte, and Millamour weds Clarinda. (Played by “Peg” Wofﬁngton, who also spoke the epilogue.) CLARINDA: Millamour’s true love, who, despairing that he will ever reform, marries Stedfast, a rich and sober old man. Fortunately, they discover before the union is consummated that she is Stedfast’s illegitimate daughter by Mrs. Plotwell, and she is free to marry a chastened Millamour. CRISIS, DR.: A physician who attends Clarinda when, to postpone the consummation of her marriage to old Stedfast, she feigns illness. HEARTFORT (George): Millamour’s friend, a young, sensible gentleman in love with Charlotte. LUCINA: Millamour’s cast-off mistress. MILLAMOUR: An attractive but impecunious rake whose prodigal way of life causes his mistress, Clarinda, to break with him and marry old Stedfast. (Played by David Garrick.) MUTABLE, MR. (Thomas): Young Mutable’s father, incapable of making up his mind and obsequiously in awe of the nobility. MUTABLE, YOUNG (Jack): Millamour’s friend, who pretends to a wide acquaintance with nobility he has never met. More interested in gaming than in women, he narrowly escapes being forced by his father to marry Charlotte. PLOTWELL, MRS. (Cleomela): A bawd, a go-between in Millamour’s affair with Lucina. As the consequence of an affair with Stedfast in her youth, she is Clarinda’s mother. PRIG: Clerk to Squeezepurse, the attorney.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

269

SQUEEZEPURSE: An attorney. STEDFAST, MR.: Charlotte’s father—an obstinate, foolish old man who means to force her into an unsuitable marriage with Young Mutable. He has himself married Clarinda, who, however, before the union is consummated, is found to be his illegitimate daughter by Mrs. Plotwell. (Played by Charles Macklin, who also spoke the prologue.) USEFUL, MRS.: A bawd who, as go-between, assists Millamour in his affair with Clarinda. The Welsh Opera (1731) See The Grub-Street Opera. IN THE FICTION In order to give the reader a sense of the unfolding of the plot, characters in the ﬁction are listed here sequentially, in the order of their ﬁrst appearance in the narrative. For the minor characters, grouped together under “Others,” the book-and-chapter reference after the name locates their ﬁrst appearance in the narrative.

Amelia (1751) Principal Characters THRASHER, Justice Jonathan. A corrupt magistrate, ignorant of the law, who commits Booth and other innocent but penniless people to prison. BOOTH, Lieutenant William, husband to Amelia. Just as HF’s heroine is the idealized ﬁgure of his ﬁrst wife, so, as Samuel Richardson and others who knew him were convinced, her husband “Billy” Booth and many of the regrettable events that happen to him, are reﬂections of his author’s own character and circumstances—though HF was not, of course, a soldier. Booth has the essential qualities of all HF’s heroes: he is a “good-natured” man— honest, kind, loving, and brave. But, like Tom Jones, he is weak where an attractive woman is concerned. In Booth’s case, however, we are meant to see the cause of his weakness as intellectual. Although he is “in his Heart an extreme Well-wisher to Religion,” for most of the novel he suffers from the morally paralyzing conviction that our actions are entirely determined by whichever passion happens to be uppermost, that reason and the will are powerless to control them. Wrongly imprisoned in Newgate by the corrupt Justice Thrasher, he allows himself to be seduced by Miss Mathews, a fellow prisoner who had formerly been Amelia’s rival. His improvidence with money nearly ruins his family. ROBINSON. A freethinker who cheats at cards, Robinson is a prisoner in New-

270

A Henry Fielding Companion

gate when Booth is committed there. His fatalistic notions prompt Booth to reveal his own deterministic belief that we act according to whichever of our passions is uppermost. Unknown to Booth, prior to their meeting in prison, Robinson had been clerk to Murphy, an unscrupulous attorney of Salisbury, and had conspired with him to defraud Amelia of her inheritance. MISS MATHEWS, Fanny (alias Mrs. Vincent). Amelia’s passionate and jealous rival. An old ﬂame, Booth meets her by chance in Newgate, where, under the name of Mrs. Vincent, she has been committed for the attempted murder of Hebbers, her faithless lover. When Booth spurns her after their brief affair, she becomes his nemesis and the mistress of his friend Colonel James. MURPHY. An unscrupulous attorney from Salisbury, where he was Mrs. Harris’s solicitor; on her death he conspires with Amelia’s sister to defraud Amelia of her inheritance. He offers his services to Miss Mathews in Newgate, and Dr. Harrison, who is unaware of his true character, employs him to arrest Booth for debt. AMELIA BOOTH (ne´e Harris), wife to Captain Booth. Even more closely than Sophie Western of Tom Jones (1749), the heroine of HF’s last novel was modeled after his beloved ﬁrst wife, Charlotte Cradock Fielding. Like Charlotte, Amelia is from Salisbury, and, like her, she has suffered a frightful injury to her nose owing to the overturn of a coach, her beauty being preserved only by the skill of the surgeon. Even Amelia’s family name is no doubt a compliment to James Harris, Charlotte’s friend and neighbor at St. Anne’s Gate in the cathedral Close. Amelia is HF’s ideal woman. As he deﬁned that ideal in the Covent-Garden Journal (1 August 1752), she is fair; “Modesty,” the classical ideal of femininity, is her characteristic; and she unites in herself “the two principal Female Characters, that of Wife and Mother.” She is strong in adversity and a loving partner to her husband, whose inﬁdelity she can forgive. She is intelligent, but she is not, like her pretentious friend Mrs. Bennet/Atkinson, learned in the classical languages, which HF and his contemporaries considered to be a strictly masculine pursuit. Instead she has equipped her mind with a knowledge of those subjects, and only those which were generally thought suitable for a gentlewoman: belles lettres in the vernacular, divinity, and the history of her own country (VI. vii)—to which she adds an understanding of French (II. vi) and a love of music, particularly the music of Handel (IV. ix). MRS. HARRIS. Amelia’s mother, she at ﬁrst disapproves of Booth’s attentions to her daughter; then, when Dr. Harrison takes the lovers’ part, she consents to their marriage, only to change her mind again when Winckworth, a wealthy squire, seems a better catch. Shamed, however, by Dr. Harrison into accepting Amelia’s marriage to Booth, she is reconciled to it at last. DR. HARRISON (his Christian name known only by the initial “R”). A wise and learned divine, the Booths’ counselor and protector.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

271

BETTY HARRIS. Amelia’s wicked sister, she conspires with lawyer Murphy to deprive her of her inheritance. ATKINSON, Sergeant (later Captain) Joseph. The son of Amelia’s nurse; he is Amelia’s foster brother. He is devoted to her, as well as being a loyal friend to Booth. He marries the widow Mrs. Bennet. JAMES, Colonel Robert. Though at ﬁrst a generous friend to Booth, he becomes his jealous enemy when he senses that his mistress, Miss Mathews, is infatuated with Booth. He means to seduce Amelia. BATH, Colonel. A soldier who stands upon his dignity and from the strictest sense of “Honour” would rather kill a man in a duel than suffer a slight. He is devoted to his sister, though he thinks his affection for her an unmanly weakness. MRS. JAMES (ne´e Bath), Jenny. Colonel Bath’s sister, married to Colonel James. A “ﬁne Lady” who considers “Form and Show” the most important things in life, she hopes, in vain, to have an affair with Booth. MRS. ELLISON. The Booths’ landlady at their lodgings in Spring Garden, Charing Cross, within the Verge of the Court. An amiable but treacherous woman, she assists her cousin, the Noble Lord, in accomplishing his amours. MRS. BENNET (later ATKINSON), Molly. Amelia’s friend, learned in the Latin classics, she is the widow of a poor clergyman, who dies soon after learning that she has been vilely dishonored by the Noble Lord. She marries Sergeant Atkinson. NOBLE LORD. Cousin to Mrs. Ellison, who assists him in his plots of seduction. BONDUM, a bailiff. The keeper of the sponging house in Gray’s Inn Lane, where Booth is twice incarcerated for debt. TRENT, Captain George. An unscrupulous ofﬁcer, formerly of Booth’s regiment. Having prostituted his own wife to the Noble Lord, he enters his service as pimp. He cheats Booth at cards in order to run him into debtors’ prison, where he will be unable to interfere with the lord’s plans to seduce Amelia. A WORTHY MAGISTRATE. The antithesis of the corrupt Thrasher, this honest justice, who resembles HF himself, is wise and learned in the law. In examining the servant maid who has been arrested for stealing Amelia’s clothes, he uncovers the evidence that brings the novel to a just and happy close. Others CONSTABLE GOTOBED [I. ii]. A corrupt ofﬁcer, who carries the innocent but penniless Booth before Justice Thrasher. KEEPER OF NEWGATE [I. iii]. The venal “governor” of the prison in which Booth and Miss Mathews are conﬁned.

272

A Henry Fielding Companion

BLEAR-EYED MOLL [I. iii]. A prisoner in Newgate. MR. COOPER [I. iv]. A pious Methodist who picks Booth’s pocket in Newgate. MR. MATHEWS [I. vii]. Miss Mathews’s father. BETTY MATHEWS [I. vii]. Her musical sister. HEBBERS [I. vii] A handsome ofﬁcer in the dragoons, he deceives and seduces Miss Mathews, who becomes his mistress. When she discovers that he has secretly married the widow Cary, she stabs him. MRS. CARY [I. vii]. An attractive widow who, unknown to Miss Mathews, marries Hebbers. MISS OSBORNE [II. iii]. A Salisbury belle, Amelia’s rival in beauty. NANCY BOOTH [II. iv]. Booth’s beloved sister, who dies of fever on the eve of his marriage to Amelia. MR. WINCKWORTH [II. v]. A wealthy squire, Booth’s unwelcome rival for Amelia’s hand in marriage. ATKINSON, MRS. [II. vi]. Amelia’s former nurse and the mother of Atkinson. MONS. BAGILLARD [III. viii]. A French gentleman of wit and learning whom the Booths meet at Montpellier, where they have gone to recover Amelia’s health. He is wounded in a duel by Bath, who discovers his designs on Amelia. “BILLY” BOOTH [IV. vii]: The Booths’ six-year-old son. “LITTLE BETTY” [VI. iv]. The Booths’ ungrateful servant maid. SURGEON [V. v]. A tacit compliment to HF’s friend John Ranby, he successfully treats Colonel Bath after Booth has wounded him in a duel. AN AUTHOR [VIII. v]. A hackney political writer for the opposition whom Booth meets in the sponging house. A PHILOSOPHER [VIII. x]. A well-read gentleman whom Booth encounters in the sponging house and whose abstract stoicism proves useless in the face of real misfortunes. LADY BETTY CASTLETON [IX. vii]. A fashionable hostess who keeps “a morning Rout” of card playing. A YOUNG DIVINE [IX. viii]. A self-conceited young clergyman who visits Dr. Harrison with his father and is instructed by the doctor in the meaning of charity. YOUNG “BUCKS” [IX.ix] An insolent noble lord and his companion who behave rudely to Amelia, Dr. Harrison, and his guests at Vauxhall. Another pair of “Bucks” [X. ii], equally insolent, having accidentally found Dr. Harrison’s letter to Colonel James concerning the sin of adultery, read it aloud mockingly before the company at the masquerade. LIEUTENANT BOB BOUND [X.ix]. A veteran ofﬁcer down on his luck whom Booth knew at Gibraltar.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

273

NOBLE LORD (2) [XI. ii]. A “Great Man” at Court who makes Dr. Harrison’s support of an unsuitable candidate for election the condition of his sponsoring Booth for reinstatement as an ofﬁcer at full pay. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743) Principal Characters JONATHAN WILD the elder. The hero’s father—a “follower” of Snap the bailiff. JONATHAN WILD. The eponymous “hero” of HF’s narrative in ironic celebration of “Greatness” is the infamous real-life rogue Jonathan Wild— receiver of stolen goods and self-styled “Thief-Catcher-General of Great Britain”—who was hanged for his crimes in 1725. In the political polemics of the day Wild became a ﬁgure for “the Great Man,” Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister from 1720 to 1742. SNAP. A sheriff’s bailiff who keeps a sponging house for debtors. LAETITIA SNAP (Tishy). Snap’s promiscuous daughter and Wild’s cousin, whom he marries. THEODOSIA SNAP (Doshy). Her sister, the object of Count La Ruse’s affections. COUNT LA RUSE. A gamester, colleague of Wild in his schemes, and his frequent dupe. Lover of Doshy Snap, who has his bastard child. BOB BAGSHOT. A footpad in league with Wild, and Tishy Snap’s lover. THOMAS HEARTFREE. A jeweler by trade. A thoroughly good man who serves as foil to Wild, who, under the cloak of friendship, seeks to destroy him. MRS. HEARTFREE. His virtuous and loving wife—the object of Wild’s, and many others’, lust. JACK FRIENDLY. Heartfree’s loyal apprentice, who marries his eldest daughter. FIREBLOOD. An unscrupulous rogue who, for his own purposes, readily agrees to execute Wild’s plan of robbery and murder. Sent by Wild to deliver his proposal of marriage to the reluctant Laetitia, he ravishes her—or would have done so “if she had not, by a timely Compliance, prevented him.” To save himself, he gives evidence against Wild that, by exposing Wild’s malevolent designs against Heartfree, saves Heartfree from the gallows. THE ORDINARY OF NEWGATE. The prison chaplain—a worldly and bigoted high churchman who preaches hellﬁre and damnation. A WORTHY MAGISTRATE. On hearing Fireblood’s testimony concerning Wild’s false accusations against Heartfree, he exerts himself to save the good man from hanging and to secure the king’s pardon.

274

A Henry Fielding Companion

Others TOM SMIRK [I. x]. A tallow-chandler’s apprentice, another of Tishy Snap’s lovers. MOLLY STRADDLE [II. iii]. A whore and familiar of Wild’s. THOMAS FIERCE [II. v]. A thief who deﬁes Wild by withholding booty from him and is consequently framed by him for a capital offence. JAMES SLY [II. vi]. Fierce’s partner in crime, whose evidence hangs him. ROGER MORECRAFT [II. vii]. A nobleman’s steward; he writes Heartfree, who is conﬁned for debt, refusing to pay his bill. CHARLES COURTLY [II. vii]. A courtier who writes refusing to pay Heartfree’s bill. CATHERINE RUBBERS [II. vii]. Having lost at cards the money her husband gave her to settle an overdue account with Heartfree, she writes explaining why she cannot pay him. PETER POUNCE [II. vii]. The miserly moneylender of Joseph Andrews, who writes refusing to grant Heartfree a loan. CHARLES EASY [II. vii]. The main character in Colley Cibber’s The Careless Husband (1705). Though Heartfree has in the past helped him out of ﬁnancial difﬁculties, Easy writes him now to say he ﬁnds it inconvenient to return the favor. CAPTAIN OF A FRENCH PRIVATEER [II. x]. Having captured the ship carrying Mrs. Heartfree and Wild to Rotterdam, he sets Wild adrift in a boat and hopes to seduce Mrs. Heartfree. He is prevented from executing this plan when his ship is captured by an English man-of-war. BLUESKIN [III. xiv]. A character based on the historical Joseph Blake, who was hanged in 1724. A member of Wild’s gang of thieves, Blueskin, on being condemned on Wild’s evidence to hang for robbery, pulled a knife and stabbed his accuser. ROGER JOHNSON [IV. iii]. An actual criminal who, in a chapter important to the political theme of the novel, appears as Wild’s rival for leadership of the “Prigs” in Newgate. CAPTAIN OF AN ENGLISH MAN-OF-WAR [IV. vii]. Having captured the French privateer, he also has designs on Mrs. Heartfree which come to nothing. CAPTAIN OF A BRIGANTINE [IV. viii]. He commands the third ship carrying Mrs. Heartfree, which is wrecked off the coast of Africa. After a series of improbable adventures, which she relates, she ﬁnds a complicated passage homeward.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

275

Joseph Andrews (1742) Principal Characters JOSEPH ANDREWS. Lady Booby’s footman, and (it appears) the brother of Pamela Andrews, eponymous heroine of Samuel Richardson’s novel. A handsome, manly young man of twenty-one, he is, like his namesake the biblical Joseph (Genesis 39), particularly remarkable for his chastity. He loves Fanny Goodwill. ABRAHAM ADAMS. Curate of the parish in his ﬁftieth year, he supports a wife and six children on £23 a year. HF’s delightful example of the “goodnatured” man, he is entirely ignorant of the ways of the world—a sort of Christian Quixote. Pugnacious in defense of injured innocence, he sees life through the bookish lens of classical literature and the Bible. HF’s contemporaries were sure that the model for this, the most memorable of all his characters, was his friend the Reverend William Young. MRS. SLIPSLOP. Lady Booby’s “waiting-gentlewoman” in her forty-ﬁfth year. Like her mistress, she lusts after Joseph. The daughter of a clergyman, she anticipates Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop in being “a mighty Affecter of hard Words.” LADY BOOBY. Widow of Sir Thomas Booby, the uncle of the celebrated Squire Booby, Pamela’s husband. A proud woman, she nevertheless lusts after her footman, Joseph. PAMELA BOOBY (ne´e Andrews). The heroine of Richardson’s famous ﬁrst novel, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), she was formerly Squire Booby’s servant maid and the object of his lust; but now, as the reward for her perfect chastity, she has become his “Lady.” She is also (it appears) Joseph Andrews’s sister, whose edifying example has helped preserve his own “Virtue.” PETER POUNCE. Lady Booby’s steward, remarkable for his avarice—a character based on the real-life ﬁgure of Peter Walter, a money scrivener notorious for his usurious practices. FANNY GOODWILL. A milkmaid in her nineteenth year, remarkable for her beauty and modesty and very much in love with Joseph Andrews. MR. WILSON and family. A country gentleman in whose house Parson Adams, Joseph, and Fanny take shelter on their journey homeward. Wilson relates the story of his rake’s progress from afﬂuence to penury owing to his dissolute way of life in London. He is rescued from debtors’ prison by the charity of Harriet Hearty, whom he marries. Rejecting the destructive vanities of life in the metropolis, they retire to the country to raise their children. A PEDLAR. When the rich Parson Trulliber refuses, this poor man empties his pocket to pay Adams’s bill at an alehouse. Later he reappears, saving Adams’s

276

A Henry Fielding Companion

son from drowning and disclosing the secret of Joseph’s and Fanny’s true parents. Others LADY TITTLE and LADY TATTLE [I. iv]. Polite gossips in town who observe Lady Booby’s amorous inclinations toward Joseph. TIMOTHEUS [I. x]. In life, one Timothy Harris, convivial keeper of the Red Lion inn at Egham, Surrey. TRAVELERS IN A STAGE COACH [I. vii]. The episode is HF’s redaction of the Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:25–37). Of all the riders in and on the coach—a lawyer, a lady and her footman, two gentlemen, and the coachman and his postilion—only the poor postilion shows true charity toward Joseph, whom a pair of footpads have robbed, beaten, stripped, and left for dead by the roadside. MR. and MRS. TOW-WOUSE [I. xii]. The mercenary keepers of the aptly named Dragon Inn, where Joseph recuperates from his beating by the robbers. BETTY [I. xii]. Their open-hearted chambermaid. A SURGEON [I. xii]. He attends Joseph at the Dragon Inn, speaking the sesquipedalian jargon of his profession to mask his incompetence. BARNABAS [I. xii]. A punch-loving clergyman who attends the injured Joseph at the inn and enters into a dispute with Parson Adams concerning the relative importance of faith and goodworks. A THIEF [I. xiv]. One of the rufﬁans who robbed Joseph. He is apprehended, but having been locked in a room at the inn, he makes his escape out the window. A CONSTABLE [I. xvi]. A bribe-worthy ofﬁcer of the law. A PAIR OF TRAVELERS [II. iii]. Replying to Parson Adams’s query at an alehouse, they give very different accounts of a neighboring gentleman’s character. A LADY IN THE COACH [II. iv]. She tells the story of Leonora, “the Unfortunate Jilt,” who, to her sorrow as it happens, spurns honest Horatio, her true love and ﬁance´, in favor of the rich and Frenchiﬁed fop Bellarmine. MISS GRAVEAIRS [II. iv]. A prude in the coach. A SPORTSMAN AND PATRIOT [II. vii]. A gentleman out to shoot game birds who, after denouncing the cowardice of the army in the war with Spain, ﬂees at the ﬁrst sign of danger, leaving Parson Adams to rescue Fanny from a ravisher. A COUNTRY JUSTICE [II. xi]. An ignorant and class-conscious magistrate who is about to commit Adams and Fanny on false testimony until he learns that the parson is a gentleman.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

277

PARSON TRULLIBER [II. xiv]. A pig-farming clergyman who, though he knows the scriptures, refuses Parson Adams charity. A PROMISING GENTLEMAN [II. xvi]. A gentleman who promises Adams and his companions extraordinary favors, without, however, intending to fulﬁll them. AN ALEHOUSE KEEPER [II. xvi]. He has charity enough to forgive Adams the bill for his victuals, but as he was formerly a seafaring man, he disputes the parson’s contention that knowledge of the world is better gained from books than from experience. A “ROASTING” SQUIRE [III. vi]. After setting his pack of dogs on Adams, he pretends to make amends by offering the parson and his companions hospitality at his house, intending to use the opportunity to ravish Fanny and provide sport for his retinue of parasites by offering up Adams as the butt of their mockery. A ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIEST [III. viii]. A penniless priest, traveling the country incognito, who engages Parson Adams in a discourse on the worthlessness of riches. A POET and A PLAYER [III. ix]. Members of the “roasting” squire’s retinue of parasites, they are with the party he sends to kidnap Fanny at the inn, but choose rather to debate the relative merits of their professions belowstairs than to join their companions abovestairs in the risky business of subduing Fanny’s protectors. JAMES SCOUT [IV. ii]. A pettifogging attorney who, at Lady Booby’s bidding, would send Joseph and Fanny to Bridewell for cutting a twig from a hazel tree. SQUIRE BOOBY [IV. iv]. Lady Booby’s nephew and Pamela’s husband, he intervenes to prevent Justice Frolick from committing Joseph and Fanny to Bridewell. JUSTICE FROLICK [IV. v]. Another ignorant and class-conscious magistrate who is narrowly prevented from cooperating with Lawyer Scout by committing Joseph and Fanny to the house of correction. BEAU DIDAPPER [IV. vii]. A foppish, brazen little courtier who schemes to ravish Fanny by stealing into her room while she sleeps. HF appears to have modeled the character after John, Lord Hervey. MRS. ADAMS [IV. viii]. Parson Adams’s wife and the mother of his six children—“a very good sort of Woman, only rather too strict in Œconomicks”— as well she might be, having to provide for her large family on her husband’s stipend of £23 a year. DICKY ADAMS [IV. ix]. The Adamses’ son, a good-hearted boy who, at his father’s bidding, reads the company the story of Leonard and Paul.

A Henry Fielding Companion

278

GAFFAR and GAMMAR ANDREWS [IV. xv]. Joseph’s humble parents, it appears. A Journey from This World to the Next (1743) Principal Characters THE AUTHOR. Having left his dead body as a spirit, he recounts his adventures on the way to Elysium and describes the curious spirits he encounters after arriving there. JULIAN THE APOSTATE. A Roman emperor of the fourth century who converted to paganism. In Elysium the Author meets Julian, who proceeds over the course of many chapters to give an account of the reincarnations he had been required to experience before Judge Minos deemed him ﬁt for admission to the other world. He was, in order, a slave, a Jew, a general, an heir, a carpenter, a fop, a monk, a ﬁddler, a “wise” man, a king, a fool, a beggar, a prince, a statesman, a soldier, a tailor, an alderman, a poet, a knight, a dancing master, and a bishop. ANNA BOLEYN. The Journey concludes with the history of Anne Boleyn (1507–36), the unfortunate second wife of Henry VIII and mother of Queen Elizabeth I, related by herself from the other world. This section of the work was probably written by Sarah Fielding. Others MERCURY [I. i]. The god who conducts the spirits of the dead to the other world. SPIRITS JOURNEYING TO THE OTHER WORLD [I. ii]. The Author joins a group of spirits who, on their journey to the other world, relate the causes of their deaths: one was dispatched by a quack physician, another died from a surfeit of mussels, a third was killed in a duel, and a fever and consumption took off two others. HOST OF AN INN [I. iii]. The informative host of an inn where the spirits stop at the entrance to the City of Diseases. LORD SCRAPE [I. iii]. A miser in the City of Diseases who has been sentenced to keep a bank for the purpose of distributing money gratis to the spirit travelers. MALADIE ALAMODE [I. iii]. In the City of Diseases the Author visits this lady, a ﬁgure of syphilis or the “French pox,” the cause of his own death. EMPEROR DEATH [I. iv]. In the Palace of Death, the Author observes the emperor seated between the shades of Charles XII of Sweden and Alexander the Great. THE SPIRIT OF A KING [I. v]. Addressing a crowd of spirits who mock him out of contempt for the worldly grandeur that awaits him on earth, one who

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

279

will be born a king defends his future role in life, asserting that the power he will have will enable him to promote the happiness of his subjects. JUDGE MINOS [I. vii]. Keeper of the gate to Elysium. SPIRITS WHOM MINOS JUDGES [I. vii]. Those spirits whom Minos judges as being ﬁt or unﬁt for entrance into Elysium: an ostentatious benefactor of hospitals, a sanctimonious puritan, a virtuoso who collects butterﬂies, a coquette, a playwright, a beau, the miser Peter Walter, a duke, a robber, a captain at the head of his troop of soldiers, a poor family, a parson, a Patriot who has left the opposition to become a courtier (a ﬁgure recalling John Carteret and William Pulteney, Earl of Bath), a Lord Mayor of London (Sir Robert Godschall), a fair lady, a prude—and the Author, who greatly resembles HF himself. SPIRITS IN ELYSIUM [I. viii]. In Elysium the Author meets a number of happy souls: his daughter (HF’s dead daughter, Charlotte), Leonidas of Sparta (a compliment to the poet Richard Glover), Orpheus, Sappho, Homer (who hopes one day to see his translator, Alexander Pope), Mme. Dacier, Virgil (the occasion of a sarcasm directed at Joseph Trapp, translator of the Aeneid, and of a compliment to William Warburton), Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, Shakespeare (the occasion of a gibe at the expense of his editor, Lewis Theobald), the actors Thomas Betterton and Barton Booth, and John Milton. MORE OF THE SAME [I. ix]. The Author meets more spirits: John Dryden, HF’s Tom Thumb, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Martel, and the historian Livy (the latter being the occasion of a compliment to Nathaniel Hooke). Shamela (1741) Principal Characters CONNY KEYBER. The supposititious editor of the “authentick Papers” of the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (HF does not appear to have known that Richardson wrote the work). The name he gives the editor combines elements of the names of Conyers Middleton, who had dedicated his Life (1741) of Cicero to the courtier John, Lord Hervey, and of Colley Cibber (Keiber in Danish), author of An Apology for his own life. MISS FANNY. The subject of the editor’s dedication, a parody of Conyers Middleton’s dedication of the Life of Cicero to the effeminate Lord Hervey. JOHN PUFF, ESQ. His letter to the editor praising his “inimitable Performance” parodies the fulsome tributes Samuel Richardson preﬁxed to the second edition of Pamela. PARSON THOMAS TICKLETEXT. Like the Reverend Benjamin Slocock, who praised Pamela from the pulpit of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, Tickletext writes

A Henry Fielding Companion

280

enthusiastically to recommend the novel to his friend Parson Oliver, who convinces him of his error by revealing the “true” character of Samuel Richardson’s heroine. PARSON J. OLIVER. HF’s spokesman in the work, he knows the true character of Pamela, whose name is actually Shamela, and transmits to Tickletext the “authentick” correspondence of that artful minx. The name HF gives this good clergyman is no doubt a compliment to the Reverend John Oliver, curate of St. Mary’s, Motcombe, a parish adjacent to HF’s farm at East Stour, Dorset, who tutored him in Latin as a child. HENRIETTA MARIA HONORA ANDREWS. Shamela’s unwed mother, an orange wench at the playhouse who resides nearby at the Fan and PepperBox in Drury Lane. Her Christian name is that of the queen of Charles I. SHAMELA ANDREWS. Formerly a servant in the Bedfordshire household of Squire Booby she has become his “Lady” by resisting his attempts to ravish her and ﬂaunting her “Vartue.” She does not, however, allow the inconvenient circumstance of her marriage to interfere with her relationship with Parson Williams, by whom she has had a “Bantling.” Her taste in reading runs to the autobiography of the Methodist evangelist George Whitefield and the bawdy published by the notorious bookseller Edmund Curll. SQUIRE BOOBY. The ardent but foolish young master of Booby Hall. MRS. LUCRETIA JERVIS. Formerly the mistress of a lord, she is now Squire Booby’s canny housekeeper, who, while pretending to assist him in his designs on Shamela’s chastity, instead cooperates with Shamela in her designs on his worldly goods. Anticipating her dismissal from Booby’s service, she hopes Shamela’s mother, her old acquaintance, will help her procure a bagnio in town. REVEREND ARTHUR WILLIAMS. The proud and worldly parson of the parish, he preaches justiﬁcation by faith alone, eschewing good works—a doctrine he ﬁnds useful in promoting his affair with Shamela. MRS. JEWKES. Squire Booby’s more dutiful housekeeper at his Lincolnshire estate. Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) Principal Characters SQUIRE ALLWORTHY (Thomas). The rich and benevolent master of Paradise Hall, situated near Glastonbury, Somersetshire. In dedicating the novel to his friend George Lyttelton, HF declares that he modeled Allworthy on the examples of Lyttelton and another patron, Ralph Allen.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

281

BRIDGET ALLWORTHY (later the wife of Captain Bliﬁl). Allworthy’s sister, equally remarkable for her piety and her passion for the opposite sex. In her late thirties she marries the fortune-hunting Captain Bliﬁl. TOM JONES. The hero of the novel, found as a newborn infant in Allworthy’s bed and raised by him at Paradise Hall. In love with Sophia Western and hated by Bliﬁl. He is handsome, brave, good-natured, but rather too impulsive for his own good. DEBORAH WILKINS. Allworthy’s housekeeper—at ﬁfty-two a spinster with a strict sense of propriety. JENNY JONES (later MRS. WATERS). A servant girl in the house of Partridge, the schoolmaster, who has the bad judgment to teach her Latin—an advantage in her education that earns her the envy and ill will of the village. Believed to be the mother of Tom Jones, the foundling, she is sent from the village by Allworthy. Some twenty years later and many miles from Glastonbury, she reappears in the story as Mrs. Waters, the common-law wife of a captain in the army, and plays a crucial role in the events that lead, after near fatal complications, to a fortunate conclusion. CAPTAIN BLIFIL (John). A well-made man of thirty-ﬁve “not a little suspected of an Inclination to Methodism.” Having sold his commission in the dragoons, he and his elder brother come to live with Allworthy at Paradise Hall, where he repays his host’s hospitality by getting Bridget with child and marrying her for her fortune. BLIFIL (whose given name is known only by the initial “W”). Offspring of the unhappy union between Bridget Allworthy and the Captain, he is raised with Tom at Paradise Hall. A malevolent hypocrite, he is the villain of the piece. PARTRIDGE (Benjamin). A young man “of Oddity and Humour” in his twenties, he is the village pedagogue and barber. Accused of being Tom Jones’s father he incurs his benefactor Allworthy’s displeasure and, after the death of his wife, leaves to seek a living elsewhere. Tom meets him for the ﬁrst time some twenty years later at an inn on the road to Gloucester, and Partridge, believing him to be Allworthy’s heir, becomes his companion on the circuitous journey that takes them to London. BLACK GEORGE SEAGRIM. Squire Allworthy’s, and then Squire Western’s, gamekeeper and Molly’s father. Except when the prospect of easy money interferes with loyalty, he is Tom’s friend from childhood. SQUARE (Thomas). With Thwackum he is tutor to Tom and Bliﬁl. A deist philosopher, his favorite precepts of “the natural Beauty of Virtue” and “the unalterable Rule of Right” prove inadequate as moral imperatives. THWACKUM (Reverend Roger). A bigoted and worldly high churchman who, with the philosopher Square, is tutor to Tom and Bliﬁl. He preaches the

282

A Henry Fielding Companion

doctrine of grace as the only remedy for the depravity of human nature and disciplines wayward behavior by frequent applications of birch. SQUIRE WESTERN. Allworthy’s neighbor and Sophia’s father—a hearty, hare-hunting, hard-drinking man and in politics a zealous Tory who favors the cause of Bonny Prince Charlie, the “Chevalier” of the Jacobites, after whom he has named his favorite hunter. SOPHIA WESTERN. The beautiful and virtuous daughter of Squire Western, Allworthy’s neighbor. She is in love with Tom, as he is with her. When introducing her to the reader in Book IV, Chapter ii, HF hints that she is the idealized ﬁgure of his beloved ﬁrst wife, Charlotte Cradock Fielding, “one whose Image never can depart from my Breast.” MOLLY SEAGRIM. The handsome, open-hearted daughter of Black George the gamekeeper. She is Tom’s ﬁrst love—but he is not hers: that distinction belonging to one Will Barnes, who has got her with child. There is also a place in Molly’s garret bedroom for the philosopher Square. HONOUR BLACKMORE. Sophia’s garrulous and short-tempered maid. PARSON SUPPLE. The obsequious curate of the parish, who acts as a sort of upper servant to Western. DOWLING. An unscrupulous, and seemingly ubiquitous, attorney of Salisbury who serves Bliﬁl’s wicked purposes. MRS. WESTERN (called by her cousin Lady Bellaston both “Di” and “Bell”). Squire Western’s spinster sister—a sophisticated woman, well versed in political matters and an ardent advocate of the Court interest. MR. FITZPATRICK (Brian). An Irishman who appears at the inn at Upton in hot pursuit of his wife, who has eloped to join her noble lover in London. MRS. FITZPATRICK (Harriet). The Westerns’ niece, a woman of independent means. She marries the fortune-hunting Fitzpatrick without their consent, thereby incurring Mrs. Western’s ire, who believed she herself was the object of his affections. Cruelly used by her husband in Ireland, she elopes to join her lover in London. LADY BELLASTON. A lewd woman of the politest society, infatuated with Tom. She urges Lord Fellamar to rape Sophia and assists him in the attempt; and when Jones succeeds in extricating himself from his entanglement with her, she advises Fellamar to have him pressed into the navy. MRS. MILLER. A plain good woman—the poor widow of a clergyman with two daughters. She keeps the house in Bond Street where Tom and Partridge and young Nightingale lodge in London. NANCY MILLER. Her elder daughter, a girl of seventeen, in love with Nightingale.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

283

NIGHTINGALE (Jack). A young gentleman of pleasure, at heart a good fellow, who, like Tom and Partridge, lodges at Mrs. Miller’s house. After getting Nancy with child, he is persuaded by Tom to make an honest woman of her. LORD FELLAMAR. A young nobleman, so enamored of Sophia, whom he is assured will never accept him, that he complies with Lady Bellaston’s scheme to force her to marry him by raping her. Others DR. BLIFIL [I. x]. A physician who knows no physic. He is the elder brother of Captain Bliﬁl and, if he had not been married already, would have been his rival for Bridget Allworthy’s hand in marriage. Once the Captain has married Bridget, he treats his brother with such contempt that he dies of a broken heart. MRS. PARTRIDGE [II. iii]. The ﬁercely jealous wife of the schoolmaster. COMBATANTS IN THE BATTLE IN THE CHURCHYARD [IV. viii]. When Molly Seagrim attends church in Sophia’s hand-me-down dress, the envious villagers engage her in a battle burlesquing one between the Greeks and Trojans in Alexander Pope’s version of the Iliad (IV–V). Molly’s adversaries are as follows: ragged Bess; Jemmy Tweedle, the ﬁddler; old Echepole, the sow gelder; Kate of the Mill; Betty Pippin and Roger, her lover; Tom Freckle, the smith’s son; Miss Crow, a farmer’s daughter; John Giddish, a farmer; Nan Slouch; Esther Codling; Will Spray; Tom Bennet; the three Misses Potter, the innkeeper’s daughters; Betty Chambermaid; Jack Ostler; and many others—all overmatched by Molly, who, however, falls herself before the furious assault of Goody Brown, promiscuous wife of Zekiel. GOODY SEAGRIM [IV. ix]. Molly’s mother, the proud and prudent daughter of a poor deceased clergyman. BETTY SEAGRIM [IV. ix]. Molly’s jealous elder sister, who preceded her as Will Barnes’s lover. WILL BARNES [V. vi]. A country gallant, seducer of, among many others, the Seagrim sisters. A SURGEON [IV. xiv]. He sets Tom’s broken arm as painfully as possible. A PHYSICIAN [V. viii]. He attends Allworthy in his illness. MRS. WESTERN’S MAID [VII. viii]. A town-bred, class-conscious woman who angers Honour by patronizing her. A QUAKER [VII. x]. In conversation at the inn at Hambrook, he annoys Tom by declaring his intention to disown his daughter, who has married against his will. ROBIN [VII. x]. The landlord at Hambrook, where Jones ﬁrst stops after being expelled from Paradise Hall. Having heard from the guide of Tom’s low birth, he suspects him of intending to rob the inn.

284

A Henry Fielding Companion

A COMPANY OF SOLDIERS [VII. xi]. At the inn at Hambrook, Tom joins a company of the king’s soldiers marching north against the Jacobite rebels in November 1745. He wins their favor by treating them to drinks. Among their number, he converses with the recruiting sergeant, who sells him a sword; the commanding ofﬁcer, a lieutenant who at “near sixty Years of Age” has been passed over for promotion despite his bravery in Marlborough’s wars; a French lieutenant; and a pair of ensigns: Jack Adderly and the villain Northerton. ENSIGN NORTHERTON [VII. xii]. A foul-mouthed villain who publicly defames Sophia before his fellow ofﬁcers and when Tom challenges him, fells him with a bottle. Arrested, he makes his escape by bribing the landlady. Later Tom prevents him from murdering Mrs. Waters. A LANDLADY [VII. xii]. A publican far more interested in cash than in the comfort or character of her guests. A SURGEON [VII. xii]. He attends Tom at the inn, relying on an unintelligible stream of medical jargon to conceal his lack of skill. MRS. WHITEFIELD (Elizabeth) and her HUSBAND (Richard) [VIII. viii]. This couple are historical ﬁgures who kept the Bell Inn at Gloucester, where Tom and Partridge stop to refresh themselves on their journey. Although Richard was the brother of the Methodist evangelist George Whitefield, whose Calvinism HF regarded as pernicious, the character he gives these publicans in the novel is highly complimentary. THE MAN OF THE HILL [VIII. x]. A misanthrope, clothed in the skins of animals, who lives as a recluse in the Malvern Hills near Upton, his only companion an ancient crone who is his servant. Tom rescues him from robbers and, with Partridge, hears the story of his alienation from the human race. THE LANDLORD and LANDLADY AT UPTON [IX. iii]. Master and mistress of the inn at Upton to which Tom leads Mrs. Waters after rescuing her from Northerton. Obsequious to gentlefolk, they are violently inhospitable to those they take to be riffraff. SUSAN [IX. iii]. Their loyal, and no less pugnacious, chambermaid. A COMPANY OF MUSQUETEERS [IX. iv]. They quarter at the inn with a deserter in custody. Their sergeant, who recognizes Mrs. Waters as the captain’s lady, tells her story. MR. MACLACHLAN [X. ii]. An acquaintance of Mr. Fitzpatrick and like him remarkable for expressing himself in bulls. THE LANDLORD and LANDLADY AT MERIDEN [XI. ii]. They mistake Sophia and Mrs. Fitzpatrick for Jacobite ladies—taking Sophia in particular for Jenny Cameron, the Young Pretender’s mistress—who are ﬂeeing the king’s soldiers.

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

285

AN IRISH PEER [XI. viii]. Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s lover, who meets her and Sophia on their way to London. A BEGGAR MAN [XII. iv]. A lame and illiterate beggar whom Tom and Partridge encounter at a crossroads and who, without knowing its value, shows Tom Sophia’s lost pocketbook containing a bank note for £100. The discovery gives Tom the motive, as well as the direction, to pursue Sophia to London. A PUPPET-SHOWMAN [XII. v]. Tom and Partridge stop at an inn where a puppetshowman, who despises the “low” entertainment of Punch and Joan, exhibits instead the more edifying “genteel” comedy of Colley Cibber’s The Provoked Husband, only to ﬁnd that the loose example of the character of Lady Townly has moved the maid to couple with the Merry Andrew on stage. Other knowing critics at the inn, in addition to the landlord and his wife, are an attorney’s clerk and an exciseman. THE GYPSY KING [XII. xii]. Journeying toward Coventry on a stormy night, Tom and Partridge take shelter in a barn where a band of gypsies are making merry. Their king, an absolute ruler descended from the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, enjoys the affection of his people, whom he governs wisely. MR. ENDERSON [XII. xiv]. A would-be highwayman whom Tom disarms and then befriends after learning that the fellow has taken to the road because his wife and children are dying of hunger. He proves to be the cousin of Mrs. Miller, Tom’s landlady in London. ETOFF [XIII. iii]. Lady Bellaston’s French maid. OLD NIGHTINGALE and his BROTHER [XIV. viii]. Nightingale’s rich and mercenary father, a money broker, who, having arranged to marry his son proﬁtably, opposes Nightingale’s union with Nancy Miller. The old man’s brother, ostensibly a kinder and more generous man, is no less opposed to the match. Later [XVIII. iii] Nightingale’s father is accidentally responsible for revealing Black George’s secret appropriation of the money Allworthy had given Tom when expelling him from Paradise Hall. ARABELLA HUNT [XV. xi]. A wealthy young widow who makes Tom a proposal of marriage. THE LANDLORD OF THE HERCULES PILLARS [XVI. ii]. The keeper of a famous inn at Hyde Park Corner, where the Westerns lodge in London. CAPTAIN EGGLANE [XVI. ii]. On behalf of Lord Fellamar, whom Western has affronted, he challenges him to a duel—an invitation the squire declines. INDEX TO THE CHARACTERS Abbreviations after the characters’ names indicate the plays and works of prose ﬁction in which they appear. For the key to the abbreviations, see the “Abbreviations” chapter.

286

A Henry Fielding Companion

The Plays Apish Simple, Sir (LSM) Apollo’s Bastard Son (HR) Apshinken, Lady (GSO) Apshinken, Master Owen (GSO) Apshinken, Sir Owen (GSO) Apshones, Molly (GSO) Apshones, Mr. (GSO) Arthur, King (TT, TrT) Aurora (TDD) Author (DQE, E) Badger, Squire (DQE) Bailiff (TT, TrT) Ballad, Mr. (MLT) Bantamite (AF) Banter (HR) Barter, Mrs. (HR) Bawble, Lord (MLT) Beatrice (OD) Bellamant, Captain (MH) Bellamant, Mr. Jack (MH) Bellamant, Mrs. (MH) Bellaria (TB) Betty (LW) Bilkum, Captain (CGT) Blister (OMTW) Blister, Master (OMTW) Blotpage (AF) Bluff, Colonel (IC) Boncour, Miss (Harriet) (F) Boncour, Mr. (F) Boncour, Mrs. (F) Boncour, Sir George (F) Boncour, Young (George) (F) Bookseller (AF) Bookweight (AF) Bravemore, Captain (MH) Brazen (WD) Brazencourt (RR) Brief, Mr. (DQE) Bubbleboy, Charles (Mi) Buyers 1 and 2 (Lot) Cantileno, Signior (MLT) Cat (AF)

Catchit (LSM) Chairman (CGT) Charlotte (IC, MD, WD) Charon (AF, E) Cheat’em, Mrs. (AF) Chloe (Lot) Clarinda (UG, WD) Clarissa (TB) Cleora (TT, TrT) Clermont (Mi) Cloris (RR) Clymene (TDD) Columbine (TDD) Commons (Jack) (LW) Common-Sense, Queen (P) Constable (AF, LW) Constant, Captain (Billy) (RR) Coupee (OMTW) Courtly, Colonel (MH) Crisis, Dr. (WD) Critic (E) Curry (AF) Dabble (RR) Dangle (HR) Dapper, Lord (EH, HR) Dash (AF) Davy (MD) Decoy, Mr. (Mi) Director (AF) Dollalolla, Queen (TT, TrT) Don Quixote (DQE) Doodle (TT, TrT) Dorcas (MD) Dorothea (DQE) Drench, Dr. (DQE) Emilia (MH) Eurydice (E) Fairlove (Billy) (DQE) Faithful (RR) Farcical Comic, Sir (AF) Fiddlers 1 and 2 (LW)

Characters in the Plays and Fiction

287

Fireball (RR) Firebrand (P) Foodle (TrT) Formal, Lord (LSM) Fox-chace, Sir Henry (P) Frederick (Mi) Furnish (Mi) Fustian (P, TDD)

Jasper, Sir (MD) Jenny (Lot) Jezebel (DQE) John (DQE, GSO, LW, MH, MLT) Jourdain (OD) Jupiter (TDD) Justice (TDD) Justice’s Clerk (TDD)

Gallono (CGT) Gaylove (UG) Gaywit, Lady Charlotte (MH) Gaywit, Mr. (Harry) (MH) Genius of Gin (TDD) Ghost (TrT) Glassring, Mrs. (AF) Glumdalca (TrT) Goodall (IC) Goodwill (MLT, OMTW) Gravely, Lady (TB) Gregory (MD) Grizzle, Lord (TT, TrT) Ground-Ivy (HR) Guzzle (DQE) Guzzle, Mrs. (DQE)

Kennel, Sir Gregory (F) Kennel, Young (Gregory) (F) Kingcall, Lady (AF) Kissinda (CGT)

Harlequin (P, TDD) Harriet (Mi) Harriot (AF) Harry (MD) Heartfort (George) (WD) Helena (LSM) Hellebore, Dr. (MD) Hen (Christopher) (HR) Highman, Mrs. (IC) Hilaret (RR) Honestus (EH) Huncamunca, Princess (TT, TrT) Ignorance, Queen (P) Index (AF) Irishman (Lot) Isabel (OD) Isabella (RR) Jack (AF) James (Mi, MD)

Lady (Lot) Lappet (Mi) Laroon, Old (OD) Laroon, Young (OD) Lately (MH) Law (P) Lawyer (Mi) Lazy, Lord (MH) Leander (MD) Leathersides (CGT) Lettice (IC) List, Mr. (Mi) Lovegirlo (CGT) Lovegold (Mi) Loveland, Sir Thomas (DQE) Lovemore (Lot) Lucina (WD) Luckless (Harry) (AF) Lucy (MLT, OMTW) Maccahone (E) Machine (TDD) Maid (MD) Malvil (Jack) (LSM) Margery (GSO) Mariana (Mi) Marplay (AF) Marplay, Jr. (AF) Marquis, Monsieur Le (IC) Martin, Father (OD) Matchless, Lady (LSM) Mayor (DQE, P) Mayoress, Miss (P)

288 Mayoress, Mrs. (P) Medley (HR) Merit, Captain (MH) Merital (Tom) (LSM) Merlin (TrT) Midnight, Mrs. (MLT) Millamour (WD) Mobs 1 and 2 (Lot) Modern, Mr. (MH) Modern, Mrs. (Hillaria) (MH) Mondish, Mr. (George) (UG) Moneywood, Mrs. (AF) Murdertext (AF) Muse (EH) Mustacha (TT, TrT) Mutable, Mr. (Thomas) (WD) Mutable, Young (Jack) (WD) Neptune (TDD) Nonparel (Jenny) (CGT) Nonsense, Goddess of (AF) Noodle (TT, TrT) Novel, Mrs. (AF) Oldcastle (IC) Opera, Signior (AF) Orator, Dr. (AF) Orpheus (E) Pantomime, Mons. (AF) Parson (TrT) Pedant (TB) Pedant, Lady Lucy (TB) Pedant, Sir Avarice (TB) Phaeton, Old (TDD) Phaeton, Young (TDD) Phoebus (TDD) Physicians (TT) Physick (P) Pillage (EH) Pincet (Gilbert) (TB) Pistol (HR, TDD) Place, Lord (P) Plotwell, Mrs. (Cleomela) (WD) Pluto (E) Poet (AF, TDD) Politic (RR) Porer (RR)

A Henry Fielding Companion Porter (MH) Positive Trap, Sir (LSM) Pride, Lord (IC) Prig (WD) Promise, Colonel (P) Prompter (HR, (TDD) Proserpine (E) Puff, Lord (IC) Punch and Joan (AF) Punchbowl, Mother (CGT) Puzzletext (GSO) Quaver (OMTW) Quibble (AF) Quidam (HR) Quill (RR) Rafﬂer, Colonel (UG) Rafﬂer, Lady (Mary) (UG) Rafﬂer, Mrs. (UG) Rafﬂer, Sir Simon (UG) Rakeit (IC) Rakel (Captain Tom (LW) Ramble (Jack) (RR) Ramilie (Mi) Rattle (Harry) (LSM) Retail, Mr. (DQE) Richly, Lord (MH) Risque (Ned) (LW) Roastmeat, Susan (GSO) Robert, Squire (MD) Robgrave (AF) Robin (GSO) Sailor (AF) Sancho (Panza) (DQE) Sattin, Mr. (Mi) Scarecrow (AF) School-Mistress (TDD) Scratch, Goody (GSO) Screen, Mrs. (HR) Scriblerus Secundus (GSO) Scut (DQE) Security (IC) Seedo, Mr. (AF) Slap (IC) Sneak, Mr. (DQE) Sneaksby (LW)

Characters in the Plays and Fiction Sneerwell (P, TDD) Softly, Mr. (LW) Softly, Mrs. (Lucretia) (LW) Somebody and Nobody (AF) Sotmore (RR) Sourwit (EH, HR) Spark, Captain (UG) Sparkish (AF) Sparkle (Mi) Spatter (EH) Spindle, Mr. (Jack) (E) Squeezepurse (WD) Squeezum (RR) Squeezum, Mrs. (RR) Staff (RR) Stedfast, Mr. (WD) Stitch, Miss (P) Stocks, Jack (Lot) Stocks, Mr. (Lot) Stocks, Mrs. (Lot) Stormandra (CGT) Sugarsops, Mrs. (Lot) Sweetissa (GSO) Tailor (TB) Tankard, Squire (P) Tawdry (MLT) Terra (TDD) Thomas (GSO, Mi, MLT) Thomas, Mr. (OMTW) Thumb, Tom (TT, TRT) Tragedio, Don (AF) Trap, Lady (LSM)

289 Trapwit (P) Trick (IC) Tricksy (TB) Trusty (IC) Ugly, Count (AF) Useful, Mrs. (WD) Valence, Miss (Sophia) (F) Valence, Old (F) Valence, Young (Charles) (F) Valentine (IC, TB) Vermilia (LSM) Veromil (Charles) (TB) Weazel, Captain (Jack) (E) Wheedle (Mi) Whisk (Lot) Whores 1 (Suky) and 2 (LW) Wife (MLT) Wilding (Harry) (TB) Wilding, Sir Harry (TB) William (GSO) Wisdom, Mr. (LW) Wisdom, Mrs. (Elizabeth) (LW) Wisely, Mrs. (Mi) Wisemore (Ned) (LSM) Witmore (AF) Wormwood (OMTW) Worthy (RR) Zorobabel, Mr. (MLT)

The Fiction Since many minor characters are referred to by their occupation only (e.g., “Surgeon,” “Landlady,” “Philosopher”) the list that follows is limited to characters with proper names. All minor characters, however, are listed under the entries for the relevant works, with book-and-chapter references locating their ﬁrst appearance in the narrative. The names of principal characters are in bold type. Adams, Abraham (JA) Adams, Dicky (JA) Adams, Mrs. (JA) Allworthy, Bridget (later Mrs. Bliﬁl) (TJ)

Allworthy, Thomas (TJ) Amelia (see Booth, Amelia) (Am) Andrews, Gaffar and Gammar (JA) Andrews, Henrietta Maria Honora (Sh)

290 Andrews, Joseph (JA) Andrews, Shamela (Sh) Atkinson, Mrs. Molly (also Bennet) (AM) Atkinson, Mrs., nurse (AM) Atkinson, Seargent Joseph (Am) Bagillard, Mons. (Am) Bagshot, Bob (JW) Barnabas, Parson (JA) Barnes, Will (TJ) Bath, Colonel (Am) Bellaston, Lady (TJ) Bennet, Mrs. Molly (also Atkinson) (Am) Betty, chambermaid (JA) Betty, servant (Am) Blackmore, Honour (TJ) Blifil (TJ) Blifil, Captain John (TJ) Bliﬁl, Dr. (TJ) Blueskin, a thief (JW) Boleyn, Anna (JWN) Bondum, a bailiff (Am) Booby, Lady (JA) Booby, Pamela (formerly Pamela Andrews) (JA) Booby, Squire (JA, Sh) Booth, Amelia (formerly Amelia Harris) (Am) Booth, Billy (Am) Booth, Nancy (Am) Booth, Lieutenant William (Am) Bound, Lieutenant Bob (Am) Cary, Mrs. (Am) Castleton, Lady Betty (Am) Cooper, Mr. (Am) Courtly, Charles (JW) Death, Emperor (JWN) Didapper, Beau (JA) Dowling, a lawyer (TJ) Easy, Captain Charles (JW) Egglane, Captain (TJ) Ellison, Mrs. (Am) Enderson, Mr. (TJ) Etoff, a maid (TJ)

A Henry Fielding Companion Fanny, Miss (Sh) Fellamar, Lord (TJ) Fierce, Thomas (JW) Fireblood, a robber (JW) Fitzpatrick, Brian (TJ) Fitzpatrick, Mrs. Harriet (TJ) Friendly, Jack (JW) Frolick, justice (JA) Goodwill, Fanny (JA) Gotobed, a constable (Am) Graveairs, Miss (JA) Harris, Betty, Amelia’s sister (Am) Harris, Mrs., Amelia’s mother (Am) Harrison, Dr. (Am) Heartfree, Mrs. (JW) Heartfree, Thomas (JW) Hebbers, an ofﬁcer (Am) Honour (see Blackmore) (TJ) Hunt, Arabella (TJ) James, Mrs. Jenny (Am) James, Colonel Robert (Am) Jervis, Mrs. Lucretia (Sh) Jewkes, Mrs. (Sh) Johnson, Roger (JW) Jones, Jenny (later Mrs. Waters) (TJ) Jones, Tom (TJ) Julian the Apostate (JWN) Keyber, Conny (Sh) La Ruse, Count (JW) Maclachlan, Mr. (TJ) Maladie Alamode (JWN) Mathews, Betty (Am) Mathews, Fanny (Am) Mathews, Mr. (Am) Mercury (JWN) Miller, Mrs. (TJ) Miller, Nancy (TJ) Minos, Judge (JWN) Moll, “Blear-eyed” (Am) Morecraft, Roger (JW) Murphy, a lawyer (Am)

Characters in the Plays and Fiction Nightingale, Jack (TJ) Nightingale, Old (TJ) Northerton, Ensign (TJ) Oliver, Parson (Sh) Osborne, Miss (Am)

291 Snap, Theodosia (JW) Square, Thomas (TJ) Straddle, Molly (JW) Supple, Parson (TJ) Susan, a maid (TJ)

Robin, a landlord (TJ) Robinson, a freethinker (Am) Rubbers, Catherine (JW)

Thrasher, Justice Jonathan (Am) Thwackum, Reverend Roger (TJ) Tickletext, Parson Thomas (Sh) Timotheus (Timothy Harris), an innkeeper (JA) Tittle and Tattle, ladies (JA) Tow-wouse, Mr. and Mrs., innkeepers (JA) Trent, Captain George (Am) Trulliber, Parson (JA)

Scout, James (JA) Scrape, Lord (JWN) Seagrim, Betty (TJ) Seagrim, Black George (TJ) Seagrim, Goody (TJ) Seagrim, Molly (TJ) Slipslop, Mrs. (JA) Sly, James (JW) Smirk, Tom (JW) Snap, a bailiff (JW) Snap, Laetitia (JW)

Waters (see Jones, Jenny) (TJ) Western, Mrs. (TJ) Western, Sophia (TJ) Western, Squire (TJ) Whiteﬁeld, Mrs. Elizabeth (TJ) Wild, Jonathan (JW) Wild, Jonathan the elder (JW) Wilkins, Deborah (TJ) Williams, Reverend Arthur (Sh) Wilson, Mr. (JA) Winckworth, Mr. (Am)

Partridge, Benjamin (TJ) Partridge, Mrs. (TJ) Pounce, Peter (JA, JW) Puff, John, Esq. (Sh)

Works Cited

Works frequently cited are listed under “Abbreviations.” Alter, R. (1968), Fielding and the Nature of the Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Amory, H. (1967), “Henry Fielding,” in Four Oaks Library, ed. G. Austin (Somerville, NJ: n.p.) 29–40. ——— (1968), “A Preliminary Census of Henry Fielding’s Legal Manuscripts,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 62:587–601. ——— (1973), “Henry Fielding,” in Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, gen. ed., A. N. L. Munby, vol. 7 (London: Mansell Information/Publishing, with Sotheby Parke Bernet Publications), 123–58. ——— (1987a), Henry Fielding: An Institute of the Pleas of the Crown. Exhibition of the Hyde Collection at the Houghton Library, 1987 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard). ——— (1987b), New Books by Fielding: An Exhibition of the Hyde Collection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College). Ashley, L. R. N. (1989), Colley Cibber (Boston: Twayne). Babington, A. (1969), A House at Bow Street: Crime and the Magistracy, London, 1740– 1881 (London: McDonald). Baker, S. (1959a), “Henry Fielding’s Comic Romances,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 45:411–19. ——— (1959b), “Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband: Fact and Fiction,” PMLA 74: 213–24. ——— (1962), “Fielding’s Amelia and the Materials of Romance,” Philological Quarterly 41:437–49. ——— (1979), “Fielding’s Comic Epic-in-Prose Romances Again,” Philological Quarterly 58:63–81. ——— (1999), “The Authority of the Two Versions of Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon,” in The Culture of the Book: Essays in Honour of Wallace Kirsop (Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand), 182–200. Ballaster, R. (1992), Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

294

Works Cited

Baruth, P. E. (1998), Introducing Charlotte Charke, afterword by F. Nussbaum (Urbana: University of Illinois Press). Battestin, M. C. (1959), The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of “Joseph Andrews” (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press). ——— (1963), “Lord Hervey’s Role in Joseph Andrews,” Philological Quarterly 42: 226–41. ———. (1966a), “Fielding and ‘Master Punch’ in Panton Street,” Philological Quarterly 45:191–208. ———. (1966b). Osborne’s Tom Jones: Adapting a Classic,” Virginia Quarterly Review 42:378–93. ——— (1967), “Tom Jones and ‘His Egyptian Majesty’: Fielding’s Parable of Government,” PMLA 82:68–77. ——— (1974a), “The Problem of Amelia: Hume, Barrow, and the Conversion of Captain Booth,” ELH 41:613–48. ——— (1974b; reprinted 1989), The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press; reprinted, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia). ——— (1980), “Fielding and the Glastonbury Waters,” Yearbook of English Studies 10: 204–9. ——— (1983a), “Pictures of Fielding,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 17:1–13. ——— (1983b), “Four New Fielding Attributions: His Earliest Satires of Walpole,” Studies in Bibliography 36:69–109. ——— (1986), “Fielding’s Contributions to the Universal Spectator (1736–7),” Studies in Philology: 88–116. Battestin, M. C. with R. R. Battestin (1977–78), “Fielding, Bedford, and the Westminster Election of 1749,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 11:143–85. ——— (1980), “A Fielding Discovery, with Some Remarks on the Canon,” Studies in Bibliography 33: 131–43. Baum, R. M. (1934), “Hogarth and Fielding as Social Critics,” Art Bulletin 16:36–40. Beasley, J. (1981), “Portraits of a Monster: Robert Walpole and Early English Prose Fiction,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14:406–31. Beattie, J. (1783), Dissertations, Moral and Critical. Black, J. (1992), Pitt the Elder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Bliss, I. S. (1969), Edward Young (New York: Twayne). Bouce´, P-G. (1976), The Novels of Smollett (London: Longman). Boyce, B. (1967a), The Benevolent Man: A Life of Ralph Allen of Bath (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). ——— (1967b), ed. Scarron’s Comical Romance, trans. Tom Brown (New York: Blum). Branham, R. B. (1989), Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Bree, L. (1996), Sarah Fielding (New York: Twayne). Brett, R. L. (1951), The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (London: Hutchinson’s University Library). Brewer, J. (1997), The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux). Brown, W. C. (1955), “A Belated Augustan: Bonnell Thornton, Esq.,” Philological Quarterly 34:335–48. Bruckman, P. (1997), A Manner of Correspondence: A Study of the Scriblerus Club (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press).

Works Cited

295

Bull, J. (1998), Vanbrugh and Farfuhar (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Burling, W. J. (1986), “Henry Fielding and the ‘William Hint’ Letter: A Reconsideration,” Notes & Queries, N.S. 33:498–99. Butler, L. St.J. (1985), “Fielding and Shaftesbury Reconsidered: The Case of Tom Jones,” in Henry Fielding: Justice Observed, ed. K. G. Simpson (London: Vision):56– 74. Campbell, J. (1990), “Tom Jones, Jacobitism, and Gender: History and Fiction at the Ghosting Hour,” Genre 23:161–90. Cantrell, P. (1995), “Writing the Picture: Fielding, Smollett, and Hogarthian Pictorialism,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 24:69–89. Carlton, P. J. (1987), “The Mitigated Truth: Tom Jones’s Double Heroism,” Studies in the Novel 19:397–409. ——— (1988), “Tom Jones and the ’45 Once Again,” Studies in the Novel 20:361–73. Carswell, J., and L. A. Dralle, eds. (1965), The Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Castle, T. (1986), Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in EighteenthCentury Culture and Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). ——— (1995), “ ‘Matters Not Fit to Be Mentioned’: Fielding’s The Female Husband,” in The Female Thermometer (New York: Oxford University Press): 67–81. Chatten, E. N. (1980), Samuel Foote (Boston: Twayne). Chibka, R. L. (1990), “Taking ‘The Serious’ Seriously: The Introductory Chapters of Tom Jones,” Eighteenth Century 31:23–45. Clark, C. (1986), Three Augustan Women Playwrights (New York: P. Lang). Cleary, T. R. (1975), “The Case for Fielding’s Authorship of An Address to the Electors of Great Britain (1740) Re-opened,” Studies in Bibliography 28:308–18. ——— (1984), Henry Fielding, Political Writer (Waterloo, ONT: Wilfred Laurier University Press). Clinton-Baddeley, V. C. (1952), “Henry Fielding,” in The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660 (London: Barnes and Noble): 51–65. Coley, W. B. (1957), “The Authorship of An Address to the Electors of Great Britain (1740),” Philological Quarterly 36:488–95. ——— (1959), “The Background of Fielding’s Laughter,” ELH 26:229–52. ——— (1962), “Fielding and the Two Covent-Garden Journals,” Modern Language Review 57:386–87. ——— (1963), “Fielding, Hogarth, and Three Italian Masters,” Modern Language Quarterly 24:386–91. ——— (1966), “Henry Fielding and the Two Walpoles,” Philological Quarterly 45:157– 78. ——— (1994), “Did Fielding Write the Rat?” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 88:13–35. Connely, W. (1955), Beau Nash: Monarch of Bath and Tunbridge Wells (London: Laurie). Crane, R. S. (1934), “Suggestions toward a Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling,’ ” ELH 1:205–30. Damrosch, L. (1985), God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Davis, R. M. (1939), The Good Lord Lyttelton (Bethlehem, PA: Time Publishing Company).

296

Works Cited

Day, R. A., ed. (1974), Francis Coventry, The History of Pompey the Little: or The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog (London: Oxford University Press). ——— (1979), “When Doctors Disagree: Smollett and Thomas Thompson,” E´tudes Anglaises 32:312–24. DeBruyn, F. (1981), “Latitudinarianism and Its Importance as a Precursor of Sensibility,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 80:349–68. de Castro, J. P. (1915), “The Rev. Dr. John Williamson, F. R. S., 1749,” Notes and Queries 11th Ser., 11: 251. ——— (1916), “Fielding at Boswell Court,” Notes and Queries 12th Ser., 1: 264–65. de la Torre, L. (1945), Elizabeth Is Missing (New York: Knopf). Deutsch, O. E. (1955), Handel: A Documentary Biography (London: A. and C. Black). de Voogd, P. J. (1981), Henry Fielding and William Hogarth: The Correspondence of the Arts (Amsterdam: Rodopi). Doherty, F. (1985), “Fragment of a Fielding Mermorandum Book,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 8: 187–89. Dunbar, J. (1968), Peg Woffington and Her World (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin). Eaves, T. C. D. and B. D. Kimpel (1971), Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Elwood, J. R. (1973), “Henry Fielding and Eliza Haywood: A Twenty Year War,” Albion, 5: 184–92. Epstein, W. H. (1974), John Cleland: Images of a Life (New York: Columbia University Press). ——— (1985), “John Cleland,” in DLB 39. Erskine-Hill, H. (1975), The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope (New Haven: Yale University Press). Farrell, W. J. (1966), “The Mock-Heroic Form of Jonathan Wild,” Modern Philology 63: 216–26. Farringdon, J. (1996), Analysing for Authorship: A Guide to the Cusum Technique (Cardiff: University of Wales Press). Farringdon, M. G. [and A. Morton] (1990), Fielding and the Federalist (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, Department of Computer Science). Feather, J. (1981), “John Nourse and His Authors,” Studies in Bibliography 34: 205–26. Ferguson, O. (1964), “Partridge’s Vile Encomium: Fielding and Honest Billy Mills,” Philological Quarterly 43: 73–78. Folkenﬂik, R. (1974), “Purpose and Narration in Fielding’s Amelia,” Novel 7: 168–74. Fortuna, J. (1980), The Unsearchable Wisdom of God: A Study of Providence in Richardson’s “Pamela” (Gainesville: University of Florida Press). Foxon, D. F. (1975), English Verse 1701–1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gautier, G. (1995), “Marriage and the Family in Fielding’s Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 27: 111–28. Gilman, S. (1986), “On Henry Fielding’s Reception of Don Quixote,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Honour of Robert Brian Tate, ed. R. A. Cardwell and I. Michael (Oxford: Dolphin), 27–38. Goldberg, H. (1969), The Art of Joseph Andrews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Goldgar, B. A. (1976), Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska).

Works Cited

297

——— (1977), “Pope and the Grub-Street Journal,” Modern Philology 74: 366–80. ——— (1982), “Fielding, the Flood Makers, and Natural Philosophy: Covent-Garden Journal No. 70,” Modern Philology 80: 136–44. ——— (1988), “Swift and the Later Fielding,” Yearbook of English Studies 18: 93–107. ——— (1997), “ ‘The Learned English Dog’: Fielding’s Mock Scholarship,” in Augustan Subjects, ed. A. J. Rivero (Newark: University of Delaware Press). Gonda, C. (1996), Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Grean, S. (1967), Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study in Enthusiasm (Athens: Ohio University Press). Green, F. C. (1935), Minuet: A Critical Survey of French and English Literary Ideas in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Dutton). Greene, D. (1977), “Latitudinarianism and Sensibility: The Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’ Reconsidered,” Modern Philology 75: 159–83. Grundy, I. M. (1972), “New Verse by Henry Fielding,” PMLA 87: 213–45. Halsband, R. (1956), The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ———, ed. (1965–67), The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ——— (1966), “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” Philological Quarterly 45: 145–56. ——— (1973), Lord Hervey, Eighteenth-Century Courtier (New York: Oxford University Press). Hampton, J. D. (1965), History of the Lisbon Chaplaincy (Lisbon: published by order of the Church Council). Harris, F. (1982), “Accounts of the Conduct of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough,” British Library Journal 8: 7–35. Harrison, B. (1975), Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones”: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (London: Sussex University Press). Hartwig, R. J. (1972), “[Marivaux’s] Pharsamon and Joseph Andrews,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 14: 45–52. Hassall, A. J. (1979), “Fielding and Garrick’s Hamlet,” in Studies in the Eighteenth Century, 4, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (Canberra: Australian National University), 147–65. Hatﬁeld, G. W. (1968), Henry Fielding and the Language of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Heriot, A. (1956), The Castrati in Opera (London: Seeker and Warburg; reprinted New York: Da Capo, 1974). Hernlund, P. (1967), “William Strahan’s Ledgers: Standard Charges for Printing,” Studies in Bibliography 20: 89–111. Hodges, L. F. (1984), “Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Tom Jones,” Philological Quarterly 63: 223–38. Howson, G. (1970), Thief-Taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild (New York: St. Martin’s Press). Hughes, H. S. (1922–23), “Fielding’s Indebtedness to James Ralph,” Modern Philology 20: 19–34. Hume, R. D. (1985), “Henry Fielding and Politics at the Little Haymarket, 1728–1737,” in The Golden and the Brazen World: Papers in Literature and History, 1650– 1800, ed. J. M. Wallace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 79–118.

298

Works Cited

——— (1988), Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728–1737 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Humphreys, A. R. (1947), “ ‘The Eternal Fitness of Things’: An Aspect of EighteenthCentury Thought,” Modern Language Review 42: 188–98. Hunt, R. A. (1976), “Johnson on Fielding and Richardson: A Problem in Literary Moralism,” Humanities Association Review 27: 412–20. Hunter, J. P. (1975), Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Huntings, R. S. (1957), “Fielding’s Revisions of David Simple,” Boston University Studies in English 3: 117–21. Hutchens, E. N. (1965), Irony in “Tom Jones” (University: University of Alabama Press). Irwin, W. R. (1941), The Making of Jonathan Wild: A Study in the Literary Method of Henry Fielding (New York: Columbia University Press; reprinted Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966). Jacques, E. (1992), “Fielding’s Tom Jones and the Nicomachean Ethics,” English Language Notes 30: 20–32. “Janus” (1965), “Saunders Welch: First of Modern Policemen,” Police College Magazine 8: 286–96. Jarvis, R. C. (1946), “The Death of Walpole and a Forgotten Cause Ce´le`bre,” Modern Language Review 41: 113–30. Jenkins, A. (1977), Nicholas Rowe (Boston: Twayne). Jensen, G. E. (1916), “The Crisis: A Sermon,” Modern Language Notes 31: 435–37. ——— (1936), “A Fielding Discovery,” Yale University Library Gazette 10: 23–32. Johnson, C. (1996), “ ‘British Championism’: Early Pugilism and the Works of Fielding,” Review of English Studies 47: 331–51. Johnson, C. B. (1990), Don Quixote: The Quest for Modern Fiction (Boston: Twayne). Johnson, M. (1961), Fielding’s Art of Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Jones, B. P. (1961), “Was There a Temporary Suppression of Tom Jones in France?” Modern Language Notes 76: 495–98. Jones, C. E., ed. (1961), The Lovers Assistant: or The New Art of Love (1760). Augustan Reprint Society, No. 89 (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library). [Reprint of HF’s Ovid’s Art of Love Paraphrased (1747)]. Kelsall, M., ed. (1969), Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple (London: Oxford University Press). Kerby-Miller, C., ed. (1950; reprinted 1988), The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (New Haven: Yale University Press). Kermode, F. (1950), “Richardson and Fielding,” Cambridge Journal 4: 106–14. Keymer, T. (1992), Richardson’s “Clarissa” and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——— (1996a), “Fielding’s Amanuensis,” Notes and Queries N.S. 43: 303–4. ———, ed. (1996b), HF’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (London: Penguin Books). ——— (1998), “Joseph Andrews, Benjamin Martyn’s Timoleon, and the Statue of Surprize,” Notes and Queries N.S. 45: 460–61. Klein, L. E. (1994), Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Works Cited

299

Knapp, L. M. (1949), Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Knight, C. A. (1979), “Tom Jones: The Meaning of the ‘Main Design,’ ” Genre 12: 379– 99. ——— (1981), “Fielding and Aristophanes,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 21: 481–98. Koon, H. (1985), Colley Cibber: A Biography (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky). Kramnick, I. (1968), Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Kropf, C. R. (1974), “Educational Theory and Human Nature in Fielding’s Works,” PMLA 89: 113–20. Lambert, F. (1994), “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Lang, P. H. (1966), George Frideric Handel (New York: W. W. Norton). Leduc, G. (1999), E´ducation des anglaises au XVIIIe sie`cle: la conception de Henry Fielding (Paris and Montre´al: L’Harmattan). Lees-Milne, J. (1962), Earls of Creation: Five Great Patrons of Eighteenth-Century Art (London: Hamish Hamilton). Leslie-Melville, R. (1934), The Life and Work of Sir John Fielding (London: Lincoln Williams). Lewis, P. (1975–76), “Fielding’s The Covent-Garden Tragedy and Philips’s The Distrest Mother,” Durham University Journal N.S. 37: 33–46. ——— (1987), Fielding’s Burlesque Drama: Its Place in the Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Liesenfeld, V. J. (1984), The Licensing Act of 1737 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). Lind, L. R. (1936), “Fielding and Lucian,” Classical Weekly 29: 84–86. Lindboe, B. (1982), “ ‘O Shakespeare, Had I Thy Pen!’ Fielding’s Use of Shakespeare in Tom Jones,” Studies in the Novel 14: 303–15. Lockwood, T. (1980), “A New Essay by Fielding,” Modern Philology 78: 51–54. ——— (1984), “New Facts and Writings from an Unknown Magazine by Henry Fielding,” Review of English Studies N.S. 35: 463–93. ——— (1985), Introduction to The History of Our Own Times (1741), Attributed to Henry Fielding (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints). ——— (1989), “William Hatchett, A Rehearsal of Kings (1737), and the Panton Street Puppet Show (1748),” Philological Quarterly 68: 315–23. ——— (1993), “Early Poems by—and Not by—Fielding,” Philological Quarterly 72: 177–84. Loftis, J. (1959), Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding (Stanford: Stanford University Press). ——— (1963), The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford: Clarendon Press). London, A. (1985), “Sarah Fielding,” in DLB: 39. Lonsdale, R. (1979), “New Attributions to John Cleland,” Review of English Studies 30: 268–90. Love, H. (1974), Congreve (Oxford: Blackwell). Low, D. (1985), “Mr. Fielding of Bow Street,” in Henry Fielding: Justice Observed, ed. K. G. Simpson (London: Vision), 13–33. Lynch, J. J. (1986), Henry Fielding and the Heliodoran Novel: Romance, Epic, and

300

Works Cited

Fielding’s New Province of Writing (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press). McCarthy, B. E. (1979), William Wycherley: A Biography (Athens: Ohio University Press). McCrea, B. (1981), Henry Fielding and the Politics of Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press). ——— (1983), “Politics and Narrative Technique in Fielding’s Amelia,” Journal of Narrative Technique 13: 131–40. ——— (1990), Addison and Steele Are Dead: The English Department, Its Canon, and the Professionalization of Literary Criticism (Newark: University of Delaware Press). ——— (1998), Impotent Fathers: Patriarchy and Demographic Crisis in the EighteenthCentury Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press). McDowell, P. (1998), The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Mace, N. A. (1987), “Fielding, Theobald, and The Tragedy of Tragedies,” Philological Quarterly 66:457–72. ——— (1996), Fielding’s Novels and the Classical Tradition (Newark: University of Delaware Press). McKillop, A. D. (1931), “The Personal Relations Between Fielding and Richardson,” Modern Philology 28: 423–33. ——— (1956), The Early Masters of English Fiction (Lawrence: University of Nebraska Press). ———, ed. (1962), Francis Coventry’s [?] Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Mr. Fielding, Augustan Reprint Society, 95 (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library). MacLean, K. (1936), John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press). Maslen, K., and J. Lancaster, eds. (1991), The Bowyer Ledgers: The Printing Accounts of William Bowyer Father and Son (London: Bibliographical Society). Maslin, N. (1983), “Henry Fielding’s Homes,” Notes and Queries 30: 50–51. Mayer, R. (1997), History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Midgley, G. (1973), The Life of Orator Henley (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Milhous, J., and R. D. Hume (1988), “Edward Phillips and the Authorship of Marforio (1736),” English Language Notes 26: 22–25. Miller, H. K. (1961), Essays on Fielding’s “Miscellanies”: A Commentary on Volume One (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). ——— (1976), Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” and the Romance Tradition (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria). Mintz, S. I. (1962), The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Moore, R. E. (1948; reprinted 1969), Hogarth’s Literary Relationships (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; reprinted, New York: Octagon Books). ——— (1951), “Dr. Johnson on Fielding and Richardson,” PMLA 66: 162–81. Morrissey, L. J., ed. (1973), HF’s Grub-Street Opera (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd).

Works Cited

301

Nash, R. (1992), “Benevolent Readers: Burnet’s Exposition and Eighteenth-Century Interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 25:353–60. Nichol, A. (1980), The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the Eighteenth Century, ed. S. Rosenfeld (Athens: University of Georgia Press). Nichols, C. W. (1992), “Fielding and the Cibbers,” Philological Quarterly 1:278–89. Nichols, J. (1812–16), Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols. (London: Nichols, son, and Bentley). Noyes, R. G. (1953), The Thespian Muse: Shakespeare in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Providence, RI: Brown University Press). Nussbaum, F. (1987), “Heteroclites: The Gender of Character in the Scandalous Memoirs,” in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (London: Methuen), 144–67. Oakeshott, M., ed. (n.d.), Hobbes’s Leviathan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Oakleaf, D. (1983), “Sliding Down Together: Fielding, Addison, and the Pleasures of the Imagination in Tom Jones,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 9:402–17. Olshin, T. A. (1970), “Pompey the Little: A Study in Fielding’s Inﬂuence,” Revue des langues vivantes 36:117–24. Owen, J. B. (1957), The Rise of the Pelhams (London: Methuen). Palmer, E. (1971), “Amelia—The Decline of Fielding’s Art,” Essays in Criticism 21: 135–51. Park, W. (1966), “Fielding and Richardson,” PMLA 81:381–88. ——— (1975), “Tom and Oedipus,” Hartford Studies in English 7:207–15. Paulson, R. (1967), Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). ——— (1979), Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press). ———(1995), “Henry Fielding and the Problem of Deism,” in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response 1660–1750, ed. R. Lund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 240–70. ——— (1997), Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Peach, R. E. M. (1891), Bath: Old and New (London and Bath). Pettit, A. (1997), Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Response to Walpole, 1730–1737 (Newark: University of Delaware Press). Phillips, H. (1964), Mid-Georgian London (London: Collins). Pollock, J. (1972), George Whitefield and the Great Awakening (Garden City, NY: Doubleday). Powers, L. H. (1956), “The Inﬂuence of the Aeneid on Fielding’s Amelia,” Modern Language Notes 71:330–36. ———(1962), “Tom Jones and Jacob de la Valle´e [see Marivaux’s Le Paysan parvenu],” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 47:559–67. Preston, J. (1966), “The Ironic Mode: A Comparison of Jonathan Wild and The Beggar’s Opera,” Essays in Criticism 16:268–80. ———(1982), “Fielding and Smollett,” in From Dryden to Johnson, ed. B. Ford, New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Penguin), 305–22. Pringle, P. (1955), Hue and Cry: The Story of Henry and John Fielding and Their Bow Street Runners (New York: Morrow).

302

Works Cited

Rawson, C. J. (1972), Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). ——— (1987), “Fielding and Smollett,” in Dryden to Johnson, ed. R. Lonsdale (New York: Bedrick), 223–57. Reed, W. L. (1981), An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic Versus the Picaresque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Reilly, P. (1985), “Fielding’s Magisterial Art,” in Henry Fielding: Justice Observed, ed. K. G. Simpson (London: Vision), 75–100. Ribble, F. G. (1981), “Aristotle and the ‘Prudence’ Theme of Tom Jones,” EighteenthCentury Studies 15:26–47. ——— (1990), “William Robinson, Contributor to Fielding’s Champion,” Studies in Bibliography 43: 182–89. ——— (1998), “Fielding’s Lost Poems: ‘The Coronation’ and ‘Ode on the Birth-Day,’ Notes and Queries N. S. 45:456–59. Richetti, J. (1987), “Representing an Under Class: Servants and Proletarians in Fielding and Smollett,” in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. F. Nussbaum and L. Brown (New York: Methuen), 84–98. ——— (1990), “The Old Order and the New Novel of the Mid-Eighteenth Century: Narrative Authority in Fielding and Smollett,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2:183– 96. Rivero, A. J. (1989), The Plays of Henry Fielding: A Critical Study of His Dramatic Career (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia). Rizzo, B. (1974), “A New Prologue by Christopher Smart and a Forgotten Skirmish of the Theatre War,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 68:305–10. ——— (1978), “Joseph Lewis in Real Calamity,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 81:84–89. ——— (1985), “Notes on the War between Henry Fielding and John Hill,” Notes and Queries, 6th S., 7:338–53. Roberts, E. V. (1964), “Henry Fielding and Richard Leveridge: Authorship of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ ” Huntington Library Quarterly 27:175–81. ——— (1966), “Mr. Seedo’s London Career and His Work with Henry Fielding,” Philological Quarterly 45:179–90. ———, ed. (1968), HF’s Grub-Street Opera (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press) Robinson, C. (1979), Lucian and His Influence in Europe (London: Duckworth). Rogers, P. (1970), “Fielding’s Parody of Oldmixon,” Philological Quarterly 49:262–66. Rothstein, E. (1967), George Farquhar (Boston: Twayne). Round, J. H. (1901), Studies in Peerage and Family History (Westminster: A. Constable). Rousseau, G. S. ed. (1982), The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill (New York: AMS Press). Sabor, P., ed. (1998), Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple and The Adventures of David Simple, Volume the Last (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky). Sackett, S. J., ed. (1958), The Voyages of Mr. Job Vinegar from “The Champion,” Augustan Reprint Society No. 67 (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library). ———(1959), “Fielding and Pope,” Notes and Queries N.S. 6:200–204. Sacks, S. (1964), Fiction and the Shape of Belief: A Study of Henry Fielding with Glances at Swift, Johnson and Richardson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press).

Works Cited

303

Sambrook, J. (1991), James Thomson, 1700–1748: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Schnorrenberg, B. B. (1976), “Education for Women in Eighteenth-Century England: An Annotated Bibliography,” Women and Literature 4:49–55. Schoﬁeld, M. A. (1985), Eliza Haywood (Boston: Twayne). Scholtz, G. (1988–89), “Anglicanism in the Age of Johnson: The Doctrine of Conditional Salvation,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22:182–207. Shaw, G. B. (1909), Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (New York: Brentano’s). Shea, B. (1957), “Machiavelli and Fielding’s Jonathan Wild,” PMLA 72:55–73. Sheehan, D. (1979), “Pope and Palladio, Hogarth and Fielding: Kinds of Discipline in Interdisciplinary Studies,” Eighteenth-Century Life 5:76–82. Sherbo, A. (1967), Christopher Smart, Scholar of the University (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press). Sherburn, G. (1956), “Fielding’s Social Outlook,” Philological Quarterly 35: 1–23. Sheriff, J. K. (1982), The Good-Natured Man: The Evolution of a Moral Ideal, 1660– 1800 (University: University of Alabama Press). Shesgreen, S. (1972), Literary Portraits in the Novels of Henry Fielding (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press). Shipley, J. B. (1963a), “James Ralph: Pretender to Genius,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University). ——— (1963b), “A New Fielding Essay from the Champion,” Philological Quarterly 42: 417–19. ——— (1968), “Ralph, Ellys, Hogarth, and Fielding: The Cabal against Jacopo Amigoni,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 1: 313–31. Shroff, H. J. (1978), “Greatness, Goodness, Happiness—‘A Great, Useful and Uncommon Doctrine’—Henry Fielding,” in The Eighteenth-Century Novel: The Idea of the Gentleman (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press), 123–60. Simon, I. (1967), Three Restoration Divines: Barrow, South, Tillotson (Paris: Socie´te´ d’Edition ‘Les Belles Lettres’). ——— (1968), “Early Theories of Prose Fiction: Congreve and Fielding,” in Imagined Worlds: Essays on Some English Novels and Novelists in Honour of John Butt, ed. M. Mack and I. Gregor (London: Methuen), 19–35. Small, M. R. (1935), Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, an Eighteenth-Century Lady of Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press). Smallwood, A. J. (1989), Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and Feminist Debate 1700–1750 (New York: St. Martin’s Press). Smith, D. N. (1928), Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Smith, L. W. (1961), “Fielding and Mandeville: The ‘War Against Virtue,’ ” Criticism 3: 7–15. Spector, R. D. (1979), Arthur Murphy (Boston: Twayne). Stafford, J. M., ed. (1997), Private Vices, Public Benefits? The Contemporary Reception of Bernard Mandeville (Solihull: Ismeron). Staves, S. (1972), “Don Quixote in Eighteenth-Century England,” Comparative Literature 24: 193–215. Stephens, L. (1876; reprinted 1962]), History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace and World). Stevenson, J. A. (1994), “Tom Jones and the Stuarts,” ELH 61: 571–95. ——— (1997), “Fielding’s Mousetrap: Hamlet, Partridge, and the ’45,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 37: 553–71.

304

Works Cited

Stewart, M. M. (1971), “Henry Fielding’s Letter to the Duke of Richmond,” Philological Quarterly 50: 135–40. Stovel, B. (1989), “Tom Jones and the Odyssey,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 1: 263–79. Strauss, R. (1970), The Unspeakable Curll: Being Some Account of Edmund Curll, Bookseller, to Which is Added a Full List of His Books (New York: A. M. Kelly). Stromberg, R. N. (1954), Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Sullivan, R. E. (1982), John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Sutherland, J. (1960), “Robert South,” Review of English Literature 1: 5–12. Tave, S. M. (1960), The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth Century and Early Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Thomas, D. (1992), William Congreve (Boston: Twayne). Thomson, P. (1993), “Fielding, Walpole, George II and the Liberty of the Theatre,” Literature and History 2: 42–67. Thornbury, E. M. (1931; reprinted 1966), Henry Fielding’s Theory of the Comic Prose Epic. University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 30 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; reprinted New York: Russell and Russell). Thorson, C. C. (1986), “Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding,” Swift Studies 1:77–79. Thrale, H. L. (1942), Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776–1809, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Treadwell, M. (1982), “London Trade Publishers 1675–1750,” Library 6th S., 4:99– 134. Trefman, S. (1971), Samuel Foote, Comedian (New York: New York University Press). Uglow, J. S. (1997), Hogarth: A Life and a World (London: Faber and Faber). Vance, J. A. (1983), Joseph and Thomas Warton (Boston: Twayne). Vander Motten, J. P. (1988), “Molly Seagrim in the Plains of Troy,” English Studies 69: 249–53. Varey, S. (1982), Lord Bolingbroke’s Contributions to the “Craftsman” (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ——— (1984), Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (Boston: Twayne). Walker, W. (1994), Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Walsh, M. (1997), Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wasserman, G. R. (1976), Samuel “Hudibras” Butler (Boston: Twayne). Watt, I. (1957), The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Weinbrot, H. D. (1970), “Chastity and Interpolation: Two Aspects of Joseph Andrews,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 69:14–31. Weinsheimer, J. (1984), Imitation (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Wells, J. E. (1912), “Henry Fielding and The Crisis,” Modern Language Notes 27:180– 81. Welsh, A. (1981), Reflections on the Hero as Quixote (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Works Cited

305

Williams, A. (1968), “Poetical Justice, the Contrivances of Providence, and the Works of William Congreve,” ELH 35:540–65. ——— (1971), “Interpositions of Providence and the Design of Fielding’s Novels,” South Atlantic Quarterly 70:265–86. Williams, M. R. (1973), Marriage: Fielding’s Mirror of Morality (University: University of Alabama Press). Wilner, A. (1991), “The Mythology of History, the Truth of Fiction: Henry Fielding and the Cases of Bosavern Penlez and Elizabeth Canning,” Journal of Narrative Technique 21:185–201. Winton, C. (1964), Captain Steele: The Early Career of Richard Steele (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). ——— (1970), Sir Richard Steele, M.P.: The Later Career (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). ——— (1985), “Benjamin Victor, James Miller, and the authorship of The Modish Couple,” Philological Quarterly 65:121–30. ——— (1993), John Gay and the London Stage (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky). Woods, C. B. (1949), “Fielding’s Epilogue for Theobald,” Philological Quarterly 28: 419–24. ——— (1962), “The ‘Miss Lucy’ Plays of Fielding and Garrick,” Philological Quarterly 41:294–310. Yolton, J. W. (1956; reprinted 1968), John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ——— (1990), Philosophy, Religion and Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Rochester: University of Rochester Press). Zirker, M. R., Jr. (1966), Fielding’s Social Pamphlets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press).

Bibliography

REFERENCE Bibliographical Works Amory, H. “A Preliminary Census of Henry Fielding’s Legal Manuscripts.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 62 (1968): 587–601. Battestin, M. C. “Henry Fielding.” In G. Watson, ed., The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, vol. 2: 1660–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971, 925–48. Hahn, H. G. Henry Fielding: An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979. Morrissey, L. J. Henry Fielding: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Stoler, J. A., and R. D. Fulton. Henry Fielding: An Annotated Bibliography of TwentiethCentury Criticism, 1900–1977. New York: Garland, 1980. Supplemented by J. A. Stoler, “Henry Fielding: A Party Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1978– 1992.” Bulletin of Bibliography 50 (1993): 83–101.

Catalogs Amory, H. “Henry Fielding.” In Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons. London: Mansell Information/Publishing, with Sotheby Parke Bernet Publications, 1973: 123–58. Includes a facsimile of the sale catalog. Ribble, F. G., and A. G. Fielding’s Library: An Annotated Catalogue. Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1996.

General Reference Works Rawson, C. Henry Fielding: A Critical Anthology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Williams, I. M. Ed. The Literary and Social Criticism of Henry Fielding. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.

308

Bibliography

EDITIONS Collected Works The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding. Exec. ed. W. B. Coley, text. ed. F. Bowers and H. Amory, in progress, 11 vols. so far published. Oxford: Clarendon Press and Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1966– . The authoritative edition, with historical and textual introductions, explanatory annotations, and textual apparatus. The following volumes have been published to date: Amelia. Ed. M. C. Battestin. 1983. The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register Office. Ed. B. A. Goldgar. 1988. An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings. Ed. M. R. Zirker. 1988. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, 2 vols. Ed. M. C. Battestin and F. Bowers. 1974 and 1975, library ed. Rev. paperback ed., 1975 (Wesleyan University Press only). The Jacobite’s Journal and Related Writings. Ed. W. B. Coley. 1975. Joseph Andrews. Ed. M. C. Battestin. 1966, 1967. Miscellanies, Volume 1. Ed. H. K. Miller. 1972. [Poems and essays] Miscellanies, Volume 2. Ed. B. A. Goldgar and H. Amory. 1993. [A Journey from This World to the Next, Eurydice, and The Wedding Day] Miscellanies, Volume 3. Ed. B. A. Goldgar and H. Amory. 1997. [Jonathan Wild] The True Patriot and Related Writings. Ed. W. B. Coley. 1987. Of many previous collections only two need be cited here: The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq. with an Essay on the Life, Genius and Achievement of the Author by William Ernest Henley. 16 vols. London: William Heinemann, 1903; reprinted, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967. Useful only for speciﬁc works not yet included in the Wesleyan edition—chieﬂy, that is, the plays, certain minor prose works and poems, and a generous selection of the periodical, The Champion. The Works of Henry Fielding, Esq; with The Life of the Author by Arthur Murphy. 8 vols. octavo, 4 vols. quarto. London: A. Millar, 1762. Though incomplete and textually imperfect, the so-called Murphy edition served to ﬁx the canon for more than a century. Notable features are the frontispiece portrait of HF by his friend William Hogarth, and the fact that the texts of Amelia and The Covent-Garden Journal incorporate HF’s revisions.

Selection The Female Husband and Other Writings. Ed. C. E. Jones. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960.

Specialized Selections New Essays by Henry Fielding: His Contributions to the Craftsman (1734–1739) and Other Early Journalism. Ed. M. C. Battestin. With a Stylometric Analysis by M. G. Farringdon. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

Bibliography

309

The Voyages of Mr. Job Vinegar from The Champion. Ed. S. J. Sackett. Augustan Reprint Society, No. 67. Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1958.

Individual Works Amelia. Ed. M. C. Battestin. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. (WE paperback) ———. Ed. D. Blewett. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987. ———. Intro. A. R. Humphreys. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent and New York: Dutton, 1974. The Author’s Farce. Ed. C. B. Woods. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. The Covent-Garden Tragedy. In Burlesque Plays of the Eighteenth Century, ed. S. Trussler. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. The Grub-Street Opera. Ed. E. V. Roberts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1967; London: Arnold, 1969. ——— Ed. L. J. Morrissey. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1973. The Historical Register for the Year 1736 and Eurydice Hissed. Ed. W. Appleton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967. Jonathan Wild. Ed. D. Nokes. London: Penguin, 1982. Jonathan Wild and The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. Intro. A. R. Humphreys, notes by D. Brooks. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent and New York: Dutton, 1973. Joseph Andrews. Ed. M. C. Battestin. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. (WE paperback) Joseph Andrews and Shamela. Ed. M. C. Battestin. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1961. ———. Intro. and notes D. Brooks. London: Oxford University Press, 1970; rev. with new intro. T. Keymer, 1999. ———. Ed. S. Baker. New York: Crowell, 1972. ———. Ed. S. Copley. London: Methuen, 1987. The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. Ed. T. Keymer. London: Penguin, 1996. ———. Ed. H. E. Pagliaro. New York: Nardon Press, 1963. A Journey from This World to the Next. Intro. C. Rawson. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent and New York: Dutton, 1973. A Journey from This World to the Next and The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. Ed. I. A. Bell and A. Varney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. The Lovers Assistant, or The New Art of Love. Ed. C. E. Jones. Augustan Reprint Society, No. 89. Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1961. A 1760 reprint of Ovid’s Art of Love Paraphrased (1747). Pasquin. Ed. OM Brack, Jr., W. Kupersmith, and C. A. Zimansky. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1973. Tom Jones. Ed. S. Baker. New York: Norton, 1973. ———Ed. M. C. Battestin and F. T. Bowers. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975. (WE paperback) ———Ed. D. Brooks-Davies. London: Dent and Vermont: C. E. Tuttle, 1998. ———Ed. R.P.C. Mutter. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966. Tom Thumb and The Tragedy of Tragedies. Ed. L. J. Morrissey. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press and Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1970. The True Patriot: and The History of Our Own Times. Ed. M. A. Locke. University: University of Alabama Press.

310

Bibliography

Other editions of most of the above works have been published; those listed here are most frequently used. Letters The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding. Ed. M. C. Battestin and C. T. Probyn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Reception Blanchard, F. T. Fielding the Novelist: A Study in Historical Criticism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1926. Paulson, R., and T. Lockwood. Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969. Rawson, C. Henry Fielding: A Critical Anthology. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973.

BIOGRAPHY Battestin, M. C. with R. R. Battestin. Henry Fielding: A Life. London: Routledge, 1989; rev. paperback 1993. Cross, W. L. The History of Henry Fielding, 3 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1918. Dobson, A. Henry Fielding: A Memoir. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1900. Dudden, F. H. Henry Fielding: His Life, Works and Times, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Godden, G. M. Henry Fielding: A Memoir. London: Sampson Low, Marston, and New York: Barse and Hopkins, 1910. Pagliaro, H. Henry Fielding: A Literary Life. London: Macmillan, and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Rogers, P. Henry Fielding: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979. Thomas, D. Henry Fielding. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990 and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

CRITICISM Collections Critical Essays on Henry Fielding. Ed. A. J. Rivero. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. R. Paulson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962. Modern Critical Views: Henry Fielding. Ed. H. Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Monographs Alter, R. Fielding and the Nature of the Novel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Bibliography

311

Banerji, H. K. Henry Fielding: Playwright, Journalist, and Master of the Art of Fiction, His Life and Works. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1929. Reprinted New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. Battestin, M. C. The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959. Bell, I. A. Henry Fielding: Authorship and Authority. London: Longman, 1994. Butt, J. Fielding. Writers and Their Work, No. 57. London: Longman, Green, 1954; rev. 1959. Cleary, T. R. Henry Fielding: Political Writer. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1984. De Voogd, P. J. Henry Fielding and William Hogarth: The Correspondence of the Arts. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1981. Digeon, A. The Novels of Fielding. London: Routledge, 1925. Reprinted New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. Dircks, R. J. Henry Fielding. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Ehrenpreis, I. Fielding: Tom Jones. London: Arnold, 1964. Goldberg, H. The Art of Joseph Andrews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Golden, M. Fielding’s Moral Psychology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966. Han, J. Henry Fielding: Form, History, Ideology. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1997. Harrison, B. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher. London: Sussex University Press, 1975. Hassall, A. J. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979. Hatﬁeld, G. W. Henry Fielding and the Language of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Hume, R. D. Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728–1737. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Hunter, J. P. Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. Hutchens, E. N. Irony in Tom Jones. University: University of Alabama Press, 1965. Irwin, M. Henry Fielding: The Tentative Realist. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Irwin, W. I. The Making of Jonathan Wild. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941. Jenkins, E. Henry Fielding. London: Home and Van Thal, 1947; Denver: Allen Swallow, 1948. Johnson, M. Fielding’s Art of Fiction: Eleven Essays on Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961. Jones, B. M. Henry Fielding, Novelist and Magistrate. London: Allen and Unwin, 1933. Kalpakgian, M. The Marvellous in Fielding’s Novels. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981. Lewis, P. Fielding’s Burlesque Drama: Its Place in the Tradition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1987. Lynch, J. J. Henry Fielding and the Heliodoran Novel: Romance, Epic, and Fielding’s New Province of Writing. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986. Mace, N. A. Henry Fielding’s Novels and the Classical Tradition. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996. McCrea, B. Henry Fielding and the Politics of Mid-Eighteenth-Century England. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981.

312

Bibliography

Miller, H. K. Essays on Fielding’s Miscellanies: A Commentary on Volume One. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. ———. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and the Romance Tradition. English Literary Studies Series, No. 6. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1976. Peereboom, J. J. Fielding Practice: A Study of the Novels of Fielding. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984. Rawson, C. J. Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Rivero, A. J. The Plays of Henry Fielding: A Critical Study of His Dramatic Career. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Sacks, S. Fiction and the Shape of Belief: A Study of Henry Fielding with Glances at Swift, Johnson and Richardson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964. Shesgreen, S. Literary Portraits in the Novels of Henry Fielding. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1972. Smallwood, A. J. Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and Feminist Debate 1700–1750. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Thornbury, E. M. Henry Fielding’s Theory of the Comic Prose Epic. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1931. Trainor, C. The Drama and Fielding’s Novels. New York: Garland, 1988. Uglow, J. Henry Fielding. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1995. Varey, S. Henry Fielding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ———. Joseph Andrews: A Satire of Modern Times. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Wright, A. Henry Fielding: Mask and Feast. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965. Zirker, M. R., Jr. Fielding’s Social Pamphlets. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966.

Other Relevant Criticism Auty, S. G. The Comic Spirit of Eighteenth-Century Novels. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975. Battestin, M. C. The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Beasley, J. C. Novels of the 1740s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. Bender, J. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Braudy, L. Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding, and Gibbon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970. Brooks, D. Number and Pattern in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973 Castle, T. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. Damrosch, L. God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985. Davis, L. J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Bibliography

313

Donovan, R. A. The Shaping Vision: Imagination in the English Novel from Defoe to Dickens. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966. Goldgar, B. A. Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976. Kettle, A. An Introduction to the English Novel. London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1951; New York: Harper and Row, 1960. McKeon, M. The Origins of the English Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. McKillop, A. D. The Early Masters of English Fiction. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1956. Maresca, T. E. Epic to Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974. Paulson, R. Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967. ———. Popular of Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979. Preston, J. The Created Self: The Reader’s Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. London: Heinemann, 1970. Price, M. To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964. Probyn, C. T. English Fiction of the Eighteeth Century, 1700–1789. London: Longman, 1987. Rothstein, E. Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975. Sherbo, A. Studies in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1969. Sheriff, J. K. The Good-Natured Man: The Evolution of a Moral Ideal, 1660–1800. University: University of Alabama Press, 1982. Spacks, P. M. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ———. Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Spearman, D. The Novel and Society. New York: Barnes and Noble and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Tave, S. The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Van Ghent, D. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Rinehart, 1953; reprinted, 1961. Watt, I. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press and London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. West, R. The Court and the Castle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957; London: Macmillan, 1958. Zimmerman, E. The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

MISCELLANEOUS Bosse, M. The Vast Memory of Love: A Novel. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992. HF in his capacity as magistrate appears as a character in this novel, which is set in the eighteenth century.

314

Bibliography

Coleman, B. The Later Adventures of Tom Jones: A Novel. New York: Linden Press/ Simon & Schuster, 1985. Osborne, J. Tom Jones: A Film Script. London: Faber and Faber, 1964.

FILMS, VIDEOS, AND RELATED CRITICISM Battestin, M. C. “Fielding and the Sister Arts: Adapting Novels for Film and Television,” in The Eighteenth-Century Novel on Screen, ed. R. Mayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). ———. “Osborne’s Tom Jones: Adapting a Classic,” Virginia Quarterly Review 42 (1966): 378–93. Reprinted in Man and the Movies, ed. W. Robinson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967); in Tom Jones: A Casebook, ed. N. Compson (London: Macmillian, 1970); in Film and Literature: Contrasts in Media, ed. F. H. Marcus (Scranton: Chandler, 1971); and in Film and /as Literature, ed. J. Harrington (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977). ———. “Fielding on Film,” Eighteenth-Century Life 11 (1987): 110–13. On Joseph Andrews. ———. “Tom Jones on the Telly: Fielding, the BBC, and the Sister Arts,” EighteenthCentury Fiction 10 (1998): 501–5. The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones. Film: written by Jeremy Lloyd and Don MacPherson, directed by Cliff Owen. 1976. Behrens, L. “The Argument of Tom Jones,” Literature/Film Quarterly 8 (1980): 22–34. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. BBC Television adaptation (ﬁve hours): written by Simon Burke, directed by Metin Hu¨seyin. 1997.Insdorf, A., and S. Goodman, “A Whisper and a Wink.” In The English Novel and the Movies, ed. M. Klein and G. Parker (New York: Ungar, 1981), 36–43. On Tom Jones. Joseph Andrews. Film: written by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, directed by Tony Richardson. 1977. Laban, L. F. “Visualizing Fielding’s Point of View,” in The English Novel and the Movies, ed. M. Klein and G. Parker (New York: Ungar, 1981), 28–35. On Joseph Andrews. Lock up Your Daughters. Film version of the play based on HF’s comedy Rape upon Rape: written by Lionel Bart, Willis Hall, Bernard Miles, and Keith Waterstone, directed by Peter Coe. 1969. Mullan, J. “Admirable Accidents,” Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 1997. On the BBC television version of Tom Jones. Tom Jones. Film: written by John Osborne, directed by Tony Richardson. 1963.

Index

Bold type indicates principal page references. Fielding’s works are indexed according to genre. Addison, Joseph, 19–20, 120, 122, 190, 242, 279. Works: Cato, 20; Dialogues on Medals, 19; The Freeholder, 19, 236; Letter from Italy, 19; Remarks on Italy, 20; The Spectator, 19–20, 138, 227; The Tatler, 19, 138. Addison, Lancelot, 226. Adlerfelt, Gustaf, Histoire Militaire de Charles XII, 20, 40, 87, 152. See also Translations. adultery, 60, 221, 224, 240. Aeschylus, 20, 135. Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of, 112. Alcmaeon, 76. Aldrit, William, 7, 217. Alexander the Great, 20–21, 36, 40–41, 118, 196, 235, 278. Alfred the Great, 21. Allen, Hugh, 21. Allen, Ralph, 3, 15, 21, 29, 95, 113, 118– 19, 156, 211; Amelia dedicated to, 21, 191; model for Allworthy in Tom Jones, 21, 280. Amhurst, Nicholas, 21–22, 121. Works: The Craftsman, 22, 189, 201–3. Amorevoli, Angelo, 242. Amory, Hugh, 37. Andrew, Sarah, 18, 22.

Anne, queen of England, 12, 32, 130, 236. An Apology for the Conduct of a Late Celebrated Second-Rate Minister, 164. An Apology for the Life of Mr. T[heophilus] Cibber, Comedian, 45. Arbuthnot, Dr. John, 42. Argyll, John Campbell, second duke of, 22–23, 190, 235. Ariosto, Ludovico, 23. Works: Orlando Furioso, 23. Aristophanes, 23–24, 86, 97, 103, 122, 133, 166, 181. Works: Plutus, 86. See also Translations. Aristotle, 24, 84, 89, 92, 122, 131, 146, 245. Works: Nicomachean Ethics, 24; Poetics, 24, 83, 227, 247; Politics, 24; Rhetoric, 24. Arnall, William, 24–25; HF’s ridicule of, 200–201. Works: contributions to The Daily Gazetteer, 25, 115; The Free Briton, 25. Arne, Thomas, 44. Works: The Opera of Operas, 73. Arrian, Anabasis, 20. Ash, Isabella, 7, 15, 217. Ataxerxes, 167. Austrian Succession, War of the, 212.

316 Bacon, Sir Francis, 24, 25; on wit, 92. Works: The Advancement of Learning, 25, 93; Works, 96. Baker, Henry, 25–26. Works: An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Polype, 25–26, 207; translation of Molie`re, 25, 100; Universal Spectator, 25. Baker, Samuel, 26. Bangorian controversy, 79. Banks, John, 26. Works: The Albion Queens, 26; Cyrus the Great, 26; The Unhappy Favourite, 26; Vertue Betray’d, 26. Barber, Frances, 7, 129. Barbeyrac, Jean, editions of Grotius and Pufendorf, 69. Barker, Dr. John, 2, 13, 26, 212. Barrow, Isaac, 26, 46, 79, 137, 147, 160, 226, 231, 234, 237, 241. Works: sermons on the Apostles’ Creed, 26, 133, 230. Barry, Spranger, 28. Bath, Somerset (HF’s residence), 3. Bathurst, Henry, 27. Bathurst, Peter, 26–27. Bayle, Pierre, 27. Works: Dictionnaire historique et critique, 27. Beard, John, 259. Beaumont, Francis, 27, collaboration with Fletcher, 27, 86. Bedford, John Russell, fourth duke of, 4, 27–28, 35, 149, 243; appoints HF High Steward of New Forest, 28; enables HF to qualify for Middlesex magistracy, 28; HF’s correspondence with, 209, 215. Bellamy, Georgiane, 28. Bellegarde, Abbe´ Jean Baptiste Morvan de, Re´flexions sur le ridicule, 29. Bennet, Philip, 3, 29. Bennet, Thomas, 29, 138, 283. Bentham, Marie, 7–8. Bentley, Richard, 29–30, 34. Works: editions of Horace, 30; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 30. Berkeley, Bishop George, Siris, 90. Betterton, Thomas, 33, 134, 279. The Bible, New Testament: 1 Corinthians 13, 222; James 2, 193; Luke 10, 222.

Index The Bible, Old Testament: Ecclesiates 7, 148, 160; Genesis 39, 58, 193. Birch, Thomas, 30, 227; HF’s correspondence with, 217. Works: Life of Tillotson, 30. Birt, Richard, 30–31; HF’s correspondence with, 213. Blake, Joseph, 274. Bland, Henry, 2, 31. Blandy, Mary, 31, 111. Blenheim, Battle of, 10, 98; Blenheim Palace, 98; Blenheim Street (HF’s residence), 2. Blunt, Elizabeth, 31, 141. Bodens, Captain Charles, 31–32. Works: supposed author of The Modish Couple, 31–32, 100, 104, 127, 188. Boileau, Nicholas Despreaux, Traite´ du Sublime, 92. Boleyn, Anne, second queen of Henry VIII, 193–94. Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, ﬁrst viscount, 32, 148, 189, 230. Works: The Craftsman, 22, 32, 121; A Dissertation on Parties, 21, 32; The Idea of a Patriot King, 32; Letters on the Study and Use of History, 32; Works, 32, 96, 133, 176. Boor, Richard, 8, 217. Booth, Barton, 32–33, 77, 121, 134, 163, 251, 279. “The Bottle Conjurer,” 104. Boumelha, P., 219. Bow Street, Covent Garden (HF’s residence and court), 5. Bow-Street Runners, 14–15, 114, 159. Bowyer, Thomas, 79. Bowyer, William the younger, 33. Boyse, Samuel, 33. Works: Deity, 33. Brewer, John, 229. Brewster, Dr. Thomas, 33. Works: translation of Persius, 33. Bridgewater, Roger, 99. Broadhead, Henry, 33. Brogden, Joshua, 33–34, 89, 216. Brompton, nr. Knightsbridge (HF’s residence), 4. Broughton, John, 34.

Index Brown, John, Essays on the Characteristics, 133. Brown, Lady Margaret, 108, 211. Browne, Mountfort, 79. Brownlow Street, London (HF’s residence), 5. Brutus, Marcus Junius, 234. Buckingham, George Villiers, second duke of, 34. Works: The Rehearsal, 9, 34, 39, 67, 184. Burmann, Pieter, 29, 34. Works: editions of Petronius Arbiter, 34; Quintilian, 32, 122; Valerius Flaccus, 34. Burnet, Bishop Gilbert, 34–35. Works: account of Rochester, 128; The History of His Own Time, 35; The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, 35. Burnet, Sir Thomas, 35, 62, 210. Works: edition of Gilbert Burnet’s History of His Own Time, 35. Burney, Dr. Charles, Memoirs, 51, 74. Burt, Joseph, 8. Butcher, Robert, 35; HF’s correspondence with, 213–14. Bute, Lady Mary, countess of, 9–10. Butler, Samuel, 35, 135. Works: Hudibras, 35, 119, 189. Cadell, Thomas, 36. Cadosa, Samuel, 36, 114. Caesar, Gaius Julius, 36, 235. Calvinism, 161, 237–38, 241. Cameron, Jenny, 140, 236. The Candidates for the Bays, 62. Canning, Elizabeth, 18, 36–37, 66, 79, 109, 173, 216–17. Careless, Elizabeth (“Betty”), 37. Carey, Henry, 37. Works: Chrononhotonthologos, 37; The Dragon of Wantley, 37; The Honest Yorkshireman, 37; “Sally in My Alley,” 37; Six Cantatas, 37. Carlyle, Alexander, 135. Caroline, queen of George II, 37–38, 46, 68, 125, 206, 254. Carte, Thomas, 38. Works: General History of England, 38, 56.

317 Carteret, John Lord (later Earl Granville), 38–39, 121, 132, 279. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 39–40, 93, 97, 103, 122, 141. Works: Don Quixote, 39–40, 90, 97, 130, 135–36, 180, 195, 228, 252; Joseph Andrews an imitation of, 192–93. Chancery, Court of, 2, 7–8, 11–12, 15, 17. Chandler, Richard, 40. Chappelle, Henry, 40, 207, 210. charity, 193, 221–23, 237, 241. Charke, Charlotte, 40, 253, 255, 261, 263, 266. Works: Narrative of her life, 40. Charles II, king of England, 128. Charles XII, king of Sweden, 20–21, 40– 41, 152, 196, 278. Charteris, Colonel Francis, 185. chastity, 193, 222, 223–25. Chesterﬁeld, Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth earl of, 22–23, 41–42, 71, 119, 154, 180, 190, 214, 235, 243. Works: Common Sense, 103, 246. Chetwood, William Rufus, 42. Works: General History of the Stage, 42; Voyages, 42. Cheyne, Dr. George, 42. Works: Essay of Health and Long Life, 42; Essay on Regimen, 42; Philosophical Conjectures, 42. Child, Sir Josiah, 42–43. Works: New Discourse on Trade, 42–43. Christian humanism deﬁned, 221–22. Chubb, Thomas, 2, 43. Works: A Discourse concerning Reason, 43, 229; The Ground and Foundation of Morality, 43, 229; The True Gospel of Jesus Christ, 43. Cibber, Colley, 22, 43–44, 86, 182, 191, 194, 203, 250–51, 258, 261; manager at Drury Lane, 32, 43–44, 163, 179. Works: alteration of Shakespeare, 44, 181, 255; An Apology for his life, 44, 279; The Careless Husband, 274; epilogues for HF’s plays, 43; The Provoked Husband, 110, 150–51, 166, 285.

318 Cibber, Susannah Arne, 44, 66, 261. Cibber, Theophilus, 44, 44–45, 121, 179, 181, 196, 250, 252, 255, 258–60, 267– 68. Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 24, 45–46, 131, 241, 245. Works: De Officiis, 46; Tusculan Disputations, 45–46. Clarendon, Edward Hyde, ﬁrst earl of, 46, 53, 60, 124. Works: History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, 46, 56. Clarke, Samuel, 46–47, 79, 137, 147, 160, 226, 229–30, 237. Works: A Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, 47. Cleland, John, 47. Works: The Case of the Unfortunarte Penlez, 47; Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 47; reviews in Monthly Review, 47, 239–40. clergy, 157–58, 205, 225–27, 241; nonjurors, 236. Clive, Catherine Raftor (“Kitty”), 47, 66, 164, 180, 182–84, 242, 250–51, 253, 256–57, 259–62. Cloe¨ (a chef), 108. Cobham, Sir Richard Temple, viscount, 48, 113. Cock, Christopher, 48, 181, 255. Cogan, Francis, 48. Coke, Sir Edward, 48–49, 71. Works: Reports, 48, 109, 116. Coleman, Charles, 49, 213–14; HF’s correspondence with, 215. Coley, W. B., 59. Collier, Dr. Arthur, 13, 49, 212. Collier, Jane, 49–50. Collier, Margaret, 50, 163–64, 217. Collins, Anthony, 47. The Comedian, 51, 61, 200, 206. comic prose epic, 24, 63, 83, 89, 126, 193, 227–29. Common Sense, 41, 172. Congreve, William, 50, 86, 120, 137, 150, 166. Works: “Essay Concerning Humour in Comedy,” 50. The Connoisseur, 103. Cooke, Thomas, 50–51, 73, 132, 147, 150, 229. Works: The Battle of the Po-

Index ets, 51; The Candidates for the Bays, 51; The Comedian, 51, 154, 206; The Craftsman, 51; A Demonstration of the Will of God by the Light of Nature, 51; The Mourning Nuptials, 76; of Plautus, 50, 117, 143; translations of Hesiod, 50. Cooper, Mary, 51–52, 100. Cooper, Thomas, 51, 52. Corbett, Charles, 52. Corneille, Pierre, 52. Works: “Discours” on drama, 52; Sophonisbe, 52. Corsica, 144. Coscia, Cardinal Nicolo, 201. Cottington, Katherine Gould, 1–2, 8, 12– 13, 15, 17. Cotton, Charles, translation of Montaigne’s Essays, 105. Courteville, Ralph, 25, 52–53, 201. Works: Daily Courant, 52–53; Daily Gazetteer, 25, 53, 115. Coventry, Francis, 53. Works: Essay on HF’s “New Species of Writing,” 53; Pompey the Little, 53. Cradock, Catherine (HF’s sister-in-law), 9– 10, 158. Cradock, Elizabeth (HF’s mother-in-law), 9–10, 158. The Craftsman, 22, 51, 107, 200–5. Crane, R. S., 237. Cranstoun, William Henry, 31. Creake, Bezaleel, 206. Croesus, 76. Croke, Sir George, Reports, 109. Cromwell, Oliver, 53–54, 60, 279. Culloden, Battle of, 54, 68, 139–40, 236. Cumberland, William Augustus, duke of, 54, 68, 139–40, 197, 236. Curll, Edmund, 54, 179, 249, 280. Cyrus the younger, 167. Dacier, Andre´, 54, 89. Dacier, Anne Lefe`vre, 54–55. Works: Des Causes de la corruption du gouˆt, 55; translation of Anacreon, 54; translations of Aristophanes, 54; translations of Homer, 54–55, 279; translations of Plautus, 54; translations of Terence, 54.

Index The Daily Advertiser, 65, 202. The Daily Courant, 53. The Daily Gazetteer, 25, 52, 58, 76, 181, 201. The Daily Post, 125, 200. Dalston, Betty, 190. Dalton, John, 55. Dalton, Richard, 55. dancing, 61, 64. Darby, Widdrington, 164. Dashwood, Sir Francis, 144. Deards (or Deard), William, 55–56, 191. Defoe, Daniel, 56, 228. Works: The Life of Jonathan Wild, 56; Robinson Crusoe, 56, 246; Secrets of the Invisible World Disclos’d, 56; “A True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veale,” 56; The Universal Spectator, 25. deism, 43, 46–47, 51, 116–17, 123, 132– 33, 147, 225, 229–30, 232–33, 237, 241. Delaborde, Anne (HF’s governess), 8. Demosthenes, 56–57, 197. Works: Against Aristogeiton, 56; First Olynthiac, 56–57, 197. Denbigh and Desmond, earls of, 8–9, 153, 206. Dennis, John, 50, 57, 62–63. Works: Liberty Asserted, 57. Desfontaines, Pierre Franc¸ois Guyot, Abbe´, 57–58. Works: translation of HF’s Joseph Andrews, 57–58. Desmarais, Franc¸ois-Seraphin Regnier, translation of Cicero’s De divinatione, 45. Dettingen, Battle of, 169. DeVeil, Sir Thomas 5, 33, 58. D’Halluin, Phillip, 146. Dickens, Charles, 194. Dodd, Ann, 58, 100, 127. Dodington, George Bubb (later Baron Melcomble), 22–23, 32, 58–59, 71, 113, 123, 144; HF’s Of True Greatness dedicated to him, 190, 235. Douglas, Jenny (“Mother”), 59. Dover Street, Mayfair (HF’s residence), 3. Drummond and Co., Edinburgh, 207.

319 Dryden, John, 59–60, 86, 89, 120, 129, 147, 184, 279. Works: Absalom and Achitophel, 59; All for Love, 59; Amphitryon, 60; Aureng-Zebe, 59; Cleomenes, 59; The Conquest of Granada, 59; Don Sebastian, 59; Dramatick Works, 59; “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” 59; The Indian Emperor, 60; “Of Heroic Plays,” 59; MacFlecknoe, 59; translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, 102, 152. Dublin Evening Post, 206. Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester, 203. Eachard, John, 226. Ealing, Middlesex (HF’s residence), 5. East Stour, Dorset (HF’s residence), 1–2. Eccles, Mary Hyde, Viscountess, 159. Echard, Laurence, 46, 53, 60, 124. Works: The History of England, 60; The Roman History, 60. education, 55, 57, 91–92, 230–33, 234, 248. Egypt, polity of ancient, 204. Elizabeth 1, queen of England, 203. Ellys, John, 51, 61, 77, 163; HF’s verse epistle to, 51, 61, 63–64, 206. Epistles of Phalaris, 29. Erasmus, Desiderius, 1. An Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Mr. Fielding, 53. Essex, John, 61. Works: The Dancing Master, 61; A Teatise of Chorography, 61; The Young Ladies Conduct, 61. Essex Street, London (HF’s residence), 4. Estienne (or Stephanus), Henri, edition of Plato, 116. Etherege, Sir George, The Man of Mode, 128. Eton College (HF’s residence), 2. Euripides, 20. Eyre, Giles, 61–62. Falconer, Capt. Richard, 42. The Fall of Phaeton, 186. Farinelli, Carlo Broschi, 62, 181, 242, 253.

320 Farquhar, George, 62–63. Works: The Beaux Stratagem, 63; The Constant Couple, 63; Love in a Bottle, 62; The Recruiting Officer, 62–63; The Stage Coach, 62. Farrell, W. J., 118. Farringdon, Jill, 199, 204. Farringdon, Michael G., 199. Feilding, Charles, 153, 206. Fe´nelon, Franc¸ois de Salignac de la Mothe, 63. Works: Les Avantures de Te´le´maque, 63, 228. Ficino, Marsilio, edition of Plato, 116. Fielding, Allen (HF’s son), 15, 209. Fielding, Anne (HF’s sister), 1, 13. Fielding, Anne Rapha (HF’s stepmother), 11, 14. Fielding, Beatrice (HF’s sister), 1, 13, 16, 128, 209. Fielding, Catharine (HF’s sister), 1, 8, 11, 12–13, 16. Fielding, Catherine (HF’s daughter), 10. Fielding, Charlotte (HF’s daughter), 4, 10, 177, 279. Fielding, Charlotte Cradock (HF’s ﬁrst wife), 2–4, 9–10, 14, 16, 72–73, 116, 127, 158, 167, 190; HF’s ideal wife, 239; illness and death, 211–12; model for Amelia, 9–10, 192, 270; model for Sophie Western, 10, 270, 282. Fielding, Gen. Edmund (HF’s father), 1, 7–8, 10–12, 14–15, 17, 78, 107, 142. Fielding, Lt. Edmund (HF’s brother), 1, 13. Fielding, Eleanor Hill (HF’s stepmother), 11. Fielding, Elizabeth Sparrye (HF’s stepmother), 11. Fielding, Elizabeth Whittingham (John F’s wife), 15. Fielding, Col. George (HF’s uncle), 12. Fielding, Henrietta Eleanor (HF’s daughter), 10, 50, 163, 217. Fielding, Henry: Chancery custody case, 2, 11–12, 17; education at Eton, 2, 11, 57, 111; Hapsburg connection, 8–9; on HF’s magistracy, 14–15, 27–28, 159; on HF’s political career, 41–42, 48, 58–

Index 59, 94–95, 111–12, 153–55; holograph will, 7, 8, 220; at Leiden, 3, 34, 57, 122; praise of Clarissa, 214–15. Fielding, Henry (HF’s son), 10. Fielding, John (HF’s grandfather), 9, 10, 13–14. Fielding, John (HF’s uncle), 14. Fielding, Sir John (HF’s half-brother), 5, 7, 14–15, 107, 142, 209; magistracy, 14–15, 159, 214, 217; HF’s correspondence with, 217. Works: An Account of the Original and Effects of a Police, 15; A Plan for Preventing Roberies, 15; Universal Register Ofﬁce, 14, 197. Fielding, Louisa (HF’s daughter), 15. Fielding, Mary Amelia (HF’s daughter), 15. Fielding, Mary Daniel (HF’s second wife), 4–5, 15, 16, 136, 159, 213, 217. Fielding, Penelope (HF’s daughter), 10. Fielding, Sarah (HF’s sister), 1–4, 15–16, 107; correspondence, 209–10. Works: The Adventures of David Simple, 16, 83, 126, 177; contribution to HF’s Joseph Andrews, 16; contribution to A Journey from This World to the Next, 16, 193–94, 278; The Cry (with Jane Collier), 16, 49; Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple, 16, 126, 177; The Governess, 15, 129; The History of Ophelia, 224; The History of the Countess of Dellwyn, 16; The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, 16; Remarks on Clarissa, 16; translation of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, 16, 72, 129. Fielding, Sarah Gould (HF’s mother), 10– 11, 12. Fielding, Sophia (HF’s daughter), 15, 217. Fielding, Ursula (HF’s sister), 1, 5, 13, 16, 128, 150, 209. Fielding, William (HF’s son), 4, 15, 209, 213. Figg, James, 63–64. Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha, 236. Fisher, Henry, 164.

Index Fitzherbert, Sir Anthony, Natura Brevium, 109. Fitzpatrick, Richard, 165. Fleet Prison, 11, 110. Fleetwood, Charles, 64. Fletcher, John, collaboration with Beaumont, 27. Works: The Bloody Brother, 27; The Little French Lawyer, 27. Fleury, Andre´-Hercule de, Cardinal, 204. Fog’s Weekly Journal, 103, 199–200. Foote, Samuel, 65, 196. Fordyce, David, Dialogues concerning Education, 233. Forrester, James, Dialogues on the Passions, Habits, and Affections peculiar to Children, 233. Fox, Henry, ﬁrst Baron Holland, 158. Francis, Ann, 65, 177. Francklin, Richard, 207. Franklin, Benjamin, 123. The Free Briton, 25. Gale, Thomas, edition of Herodotus’s Historia, 76. Garrick, David, 65–66, 79, 88, 121, 125, 165–66, 187, 268; discovery of HF’s lost play, 209. Works: Lethe, 65; Miss Lucy in Town (with HF?), 65, 183; prologue and epilogue to HF’s The Fathers, 66, 181. Garth, Samuel, The Dispensary, 75. Gascoyne, Sir Crisp, 37, 66, 217. Works: An Address to the Liverymen of London, 66. Gay, John, 66–67, 130, 242. Works: The Beggar’s Opera, 66–67, 130, 162, 181– 82; Polly, 67, 120, 189. The Gentleman’s Magazine, 85–86. George II, king of England, 37–38, 67– 68, 113, 127, 139, 254; HF’s lost poem on, 206. Gibbon, Edward, Memoirs, 8, 194. Giffard, Henry, 77. Gilliver, Lawton, 68. Gin Act of 1736, 202; of 1752, 96. Girard, Fr., 184. Glastonbury Waters, HF’s defense of, 206.

321 Glover, Richard, 68, 279. Works: Leonidas, 68; London, 68. Godschall, Sir Robert, 279. Goldgar, Bertrand A., 25, 235. Goldwyre, Edward, 2, 10, 68. good-nature, 189, 132, 168, 181, 187, 189, 192–93, 233–34, 237, 244, 253– 54. Goodwin, Timothy, The Life and Character of . . . Dr. Edward Stillingfleet, 138. Gould, Davidge (HF’s uncle), 1, 17–18, 70, 150; HF’s correspondence with, 210. Gould, Henry (HF’s cousin), 18, 70. Gould, Sir Henry (HF’s grandfather), 1, 10–11, 17–18. Gould, Lady Sarah (HF’s grandmother), 1– 3, 7–8, 10–13, 15, 17–18, 138. Gould, William (HF’s cousin), 18, 150. Works: An Account of English Ants, 18. Grafton, Charles Fitzroy, second duke of, 183. Graham, Josiah, 68–69. Granville. See Carteret, John Lord. Gravelot, Hubert, illustrations of Tom Jones, 88. greatness, 20–21, 36, 38–39, 40–41, 58, 79, 116, 121, 137, 162, 184, 190, 192– 93, 234–35. Grifﬁn, Benjamin, 259, 267. Grotius, Hugo, 69. Works: De Jure Belli ac Pacis, 69. The Grub-Street Journal, 51, 129, 154, 179, 183–84, 200. Grundy, Isobel, 188. Guthrie, William, A General History of England, 153. Hale, Sir Matthew, 69–70. Works: A Discourse Touching Provision for the Poor, 69; History of the Pleas of the Crown, 69; A Meditation concerning . . . Evil Angels, 69–70. Hall, Virtue, 36–37. Hamilton, Mary, 18, 70, 161, 176, 242. Hanbury Williams, Sir Charles, 2, 70, 158, 181, 210–11, 243. Works: “A Di-

322 alogue between Peter Walter & HF,” 156. Handel, George Frideric, 71, 242, 270. Works: Deborah, 71, 180, 211. Hanmer, Sir Thomas, edition of Shakespeare, 134. Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, ﬁrst earl of, 71– 72, 150, 213–14, 216; HF’s correspondence with, 216. Harlequin Ranger, 165. Harrington, Dr. Edward, 33. Harrington, Sir John, translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, 23. Harris, James, 2–4, 9, 13–14 , 16, 71, 72– 73, 132, 270; HF’s correspondence with, 209, 210–13. Works: assists HF with translation of Demosthenes, 197; contribution to HF’s True Patriot, 72, 212; “An Essay on the Life and Genius of HF,” 72–73, 107, 209–10; Hermes, 24, 72, 212–13; “The History of Nobody,” 72, 211; Three Treatises, 113. Harris, Thomas, 144, 212. Hatchett, William, 73. Works: The Fall of Mortimer, 73, 76; The Opera of Operas, 73, 186; The Rehearsal of Kings, 73, 210. Hatsell, Henry, 73, 150. Hawkins, Sir John, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 132. Hayes, John, 191, 244. Hayter, Thomas, 156. Haywood, Eliza, 74, 97, 250, 253, 255; relations with HF, 74, 179; with William Hatchett, 73. Works: The History of Betsy Thoughtless, 74, 146; The Opera of Operas, 74, 186. Haywood (or Heywood or Hayward), “Mother,” 74, 108, 183. Heidegger, John James, 74–75, 179, 189, 240–41, 251. Henley, Anthony, 76. Henley, John (“Orator”), 75–76, 179, 250; his eulogy on HF, 76. Works: The HypDoctor, 75–76. Henley, Robert, 76, 120. Works: prologue to Thomas Cooke’s Mourning Nuptials, 76.

Index Henrietta Maria, queen of Charles I, 280. Herodotus, 76–77, 83, 147, 167. Works: Historia, 76. Hervey, John, Lord, 32, 77, 99, 108, 194, 254, 277, 279. Highmore, John, 44–45, 64, 77, 182. Hildrop, John, 226. Hill, Aaron, 73, 78, 115; HF’s correspondence with, 210. Works: The Prompter, 78; review of HF’s Pasquin, 78, 184. Hill, Dr. John, 66, 78–79, 165–66; subject of Christopher Smart’s Hilliad, 79, 107 135. Works: The Adventures of Mr. George Edwards, 78; The Adventures of Mr. Loveill, 78; The History of a Woman of Quality, 78; The Impertinent, 79, 135; “The Inspector” (London Daily Advertiser), 37, 78–79, 165–66; The Story of Elizabeth Canning Considered, 79. Hippocrates, 244. Hoadly, Benjamin, bishop, 46, 79–80, 137, 147, 160, 190, 222, 226, 235, 237, 241. Works: The Happiness of the Present Establishment, 79–80; The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ, 79; A Plain Account of . . . the Sacrament, 79, 238. Hoadly, Dr. Benjamin, 80. Works: The Suspicious Husband, 80. Hoadly, John, 80. Works: The Contrast, 80; memorial to Sarah Fielding, 16. Hobbes, Thomas, 80–81, 147, 230, 234; his theory of laughter, 81. Works: The Leviathan, 80–81, 237. Hodges, Sir James, 81, 87. Hoey, James, 81. Hogarth, William, 47, 61, 63, 82, 149, 191. Works: Analysis of Beauty, 61; Characters and Caricaturas, 82, 89, 247; frontispiece for HF’s Tragedy of Tragedies, 82, 186; Gin Lane, 82, 96; The Harlot’s Progress, 82, 102, 108, 247; Marriage a` la Mode, 240; portrait of HF, 82, 106; The Rake’s Progress, 82, 247. Holderness, Robert D’arcy, fourth earl of, 242.

Index Homer, 54–55, 82–83, 116, 146, 152, 191, 279. Works: Iliad, 83,101, 119; Margites, 83, 227; Odyssey, 83. Honor, HF’s concept of, 235–36. Hooke, Nathaniel, 83, 279. Works: An Account of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, 83, 98, 176; The Roman History, 83. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 84, 87, 89, 92, 122. Works: Ars Poetica, 84; Bentley’s edition of, 30; Satires, 84. Howard, Leonard, Miscellaneous Pieces, 74. Huband, Jane, 76. Hulett, James, illustrations of Joseph Andrews, 193. Hume, David, 230, 245. Hume, Robert D., 77, 178, 245. Hunter, J. Paul, 133. Hunter, William, 84. Works: contributions to HF’s Covent-Garden Journal, 84. Indecent Proposal, 183. Jacobitism, 19, 32, 38, 67, 79, 110–11, 129, 164, 236–37; 1715 rebellion, 22, 121, 236; 1745 rebellion, 54, 68, 124, 139–40, 172, 184, 212, 236–37. James, Dr. Robert, 85. Works: A Medicinal Dictionary, 85. James I, king of England, 69. James II, king of England, 236. Jenkins Ear, War of, 204. Joe Miller’s Jests, 54. Johnson, Charles, HF’s epilogue to Cœlia, 188. Johnson, Roger, 39. Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 85–86, 90, 242. Works: contributions to Gentleman’s Magazine, 85–86, 90; Dictionary, 85; The Rambler, 85. Jonson, Ben, 44, 50, 60, 86–87, 89, 111, 129, 166, 247. Works: Bartholomew Fair, 86–87; Every Man Out of His Humour, 86, 247.

323 Journalism: The Champion, 19, 40, 48, 52, 58, 68–69, 81, 123, 128, 171; contributions to Common Sense, 172, 219; The Covent-Garden Journal (1752), 19, 34, 81, 171, 197; The Jacobite’s Journal, 19, 172; The Public Advertiser, 165; The True Patriot, 19, 35, 59, 123, 172, 212. Journalism probably written by HF: contributions to The Champion, 206; The Comedian, 51, 200; Common Sense, 206; The Craftsman, 14, 22, 200–205; Daily Advertiser, 202; Daily Post, 125, 129, 179, 200; Fog’s Weekly Journal, 199–200; General Advertiser, 206; The History of Our Own Times, 35, 206; Mist’s Weekly Journal, 199; Universal Spectator, 202, 203. Julian the Apostate, narrator of HF’s Journey from This World to the Next, 64, 124, 132, 193. Jurin, Dr. James, 87, 124. Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis), 87. Works: HF’s modernization of his Sixth Satire, 87, 189. Kempson, John, 141. Kenrick, William, 87. Works: Fun, 87; The Kapelion, 87. Knapton, John and Paul, 87. Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 61. Lacy, James, 66, 88, 125, 257. Works: Fame, 88. Lambin, Denys, edition of Cicero, 45. La Motte, Antoine Houdar de, 55. La Place, Pierre Antoine de, 88. Works: Histoire de Tom Jones, 88. Laroon, Marcellus, 88–89. Works: Night Walkers before a Justice, 88–89. latitudinarianism, 14, 26, 34, 46, 79, 147, 160, 223, 226, 229, 234, 237–38, 241. Leake, James, 89, 211. Le Bossu, Rene´, 54, 89, 103. Works: Traite´ du poe¨me e´pique, 89. Lee, Nathaniel, 52, 60, 86, 89–90, 129. Works: Caesar Borgia, 89; The Duke of Guise, 89; Gloriana, 89; Lucius

324 Junius Brutus, 89; Mithridates, 89; Nero, 89; Oedipus, 89; The Rival Queens, 89; Sophonisba, 52, 89; Theodosius, 89. Legal and Social Works: A Charge delivered to the Grand Jury (1749), 172–73 216; A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning, 36–37, 66, 79, 173, 216; An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, 36, 42–43, 72, 85, 173; Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder, 81, 96, 173; Ms. “Draught of a Bill” to reform the police, 72, 109, 219–220; Ms. “Institute of the Pleas of the Crown,” 69, 219; A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor, 42– 43, 69, 112, 173–74; “A Treatise on the Ofﬁce of Constable,” 174; A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez, 47, 113, 174, 212, 215. A Letter from Henry Woodward . . . to Dr John Hill, 165. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 148. Leiden, Holland, university of, 3, 34–35. Lennox, Charlotte, 40, 90. Works: The Female Quixote, 40, 86, 90; The Life of Harriet Stuart, 90. Leonidas of Sparta, 68, 279. Lesage, Alain-Rene´, 90. Works: Gil Blas, 90, 97, 130, 135. A Letter to a Noble Lord, 183. Leveridge, Richard, “The Roast Beef of Old England,” 190. Lewis, Joseph, 18, 22. Lewis, Thomas, 114. Lillo, George, 90–91; HF’s obituary for, 91. Works: Fatal Curiosity, 90–91, HF’s prologue to, 190, and puff for, 202; The London Merchant, 90. Lisbon, Portugal (HF’s residence), 6. Livy (Titus Livius), 60, 83, 91, 279. Works: Historia, 91. Locke, John, 24–25, 91–92; on wit, 92, 122. Works: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 91–92, 230–31; The Reasonableness of Christianity, 91;

Index Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 61, 91, 232; Two Treatises of Government, 91, 236. Lockman, John, translation of Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation, 152. Lockwood, Thomas, 200. The London Daily Advertiser, 78–79. Longinus, 84, 89, 92–93. Works: Peri hypsous, 92; Boileau’s translation, 92. lotteries, 182, 238–39. Lovell, Christopher, 38. Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus), 93. Works: Pharsalia, 93; Rowe’s translation, 129. Lucian of Samosata, 20, 93–94, 97, 103, 117, 122, 135, 141; HF’s projected edition of, 94, 168–69. Works: Dialogues of the Dead, 193. Lyme Regis, Dorset, 22. Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, 184. Lyttelton, George, 2, 15, 21, 23, 32, 68, 71, 94–95, 101, 106, 136–37, 145, 190, 235, 280; his poem “Liberty” dedicated to, 189; his verse epistle to, 94, 118, 188–89; HF’s correspondence with, 216. Works: contributions to Common Sense, 68, 103; Dialogues of the Dead, 94; Letters from a Persian in England, 94; Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul, 94, 160; Observations of the Life of Cicero, 99. Macheath turn’d Pyrate, 67. Machiavelli, Niccolo` di Bernardo dei, 95; HF’s pseudonym, 201. Works: Il Principe, 95. Macklin, Charles, 95, 250, 252–53, 255, 260, 262, 269. Works: Pasquin Turn’d Drawcansir, 95; prologue to HF’s Wedding Day, 95. Maddox, Isaac, bishop, 96. Works: The Expediency of Preventive Wisdom, 96. magistracy. See Fielding, Henry. Mairet, Jean, Sophonisbe, 52.

Index Mallet, David, 96. Works: edition of Bolingbroke’s Works, 96; Eurydice, 96; life of Bacon, 96. Malmesbury, William James Harris, sixth earl of, 209, 219. Mandevillie, Bernard, 81, 96–97, 147, 230, 237; attack on Shaftesbury, 97. Works: The Fable of the Bees, 96–97. Manley, Delarivie`re, 97. Works: The New Atalantis, 97. Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de, 97, 97–98, 122, 157. Works: La Vie de Marianne, 97, 130; Le Paysan parvenu, 97, 130. Marlborough, Charles Spencer, third duke of, 98, 187, 215, 242. Marlborough, John Churchill, ﬁrst duke of, 10, 20, 36, 41, 48, 54, 98, 116, 176, 190, 235, 284. Marlborough, Sarah, duchess of, 83, 98– 99, 104, 176. marriage, 190, 192–93, 221, 238–40. Marshalsea Court, 214–15. Martel, Charles, 279. Martyn, Benjamin, 99; monument to Shakespeare, 99. Works: Timoleon, 99. Mary, queen of England, 236. masquerades, 74–75, 189, 240–41. Meard’s Court, Soho (HF’s residence), 5. Melmoth, William, translation of Cicero’s Letters, 45. Methodism, 148, 160–61, 183, 205, 223, 241–42. Middleton, Conyers, 99, 194. Works: Life of Cicero, 77, 99, 279. Middleton, Francis Willoughby, viscount, 243. Miles, Bernard, Lock Up Your Daughters, 185. Milford Manor, Wiltshire (HF’s residence), 3. Millar, Andrew, 16, 18, 25, 51, 58, 87, 90, 96, 99–100, 128, 139, 146; edition of HF’s Works, 106–7, 168, 209–10; HF’s holograph copyright assignments, 220. Miller, Henry Knight, 57, 120.

325 Miller, James, 100. Works: HarlequinHorace, 100; An Hospital for Fools, 101; The Man of Taste, 100; The Modish Couple, 100, 104, 127; Seasonable Reproof, 100; translation of Molie`re’s Select Comedies, 25, 100. Miller, Sanderson, 101, 116. Mills, William, 101, 258–59, 261, 267. Milton, John, 101–2, 158, 279. Works: Paradise Lost, 101–2, 152, 227–28; Paradise Lost, Bentley’s edition of, 30; inﬂuence on Tom Jones, 102, 195. Misaubin, Dr. John, 102, 183. Miscellanies (1743): 174–75. Miscellaneous Prose: The Charge to the Jury (1745), 87, 124, 155, 175; A Dialogue between a Gentleman . . . and an Honest Alderman, 175; “A Dialogue between Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic,” 20; A Dialogue between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender, 175; “An Essay on Conversation,” 175–76; “An Essay on Nothing,” 80–81, 128; “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” 176; The Female Husband, 70, 176; “A Fragment of a Comment on L. Bolingbroke’s Essays,” 32, 46, 176; A Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough, 83, 98, 176, 220; The History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland, 176–77, 212; The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 50, 65, 177, 217; “Of the Remedy of Afﬂiction for the Loss of Our Friends,” 45, 177; The Opposition: A Vision, 23, 38–39, 52, 155, 177; Preface and Letters XLXLIV of Sarah Fielding’s Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple, 126, 129, 177; Preface to Sarah Fielding’s David Simple, 83, 126, 177; A Proper Answer to a Late Scurrilous Libel, 164, 178; A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain, 178; Some Papers Proper to be Read before the R[oya]l Society, 156, 178.

326 Miscellaneous Prose probably written by HF: An Address to the Electors of Great Britain, 207; An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Hanover Rat, 25–26, 207; The Covent-Garden Journal (1749), 208; The Crisis: A Sermon, 12, 207; Some Thoughts on the Present State of the Theatres, 20, 207; Ten Queries, 207– 08. Mist’s Weekly Journal, 103, 199. Mitchell, Joseph, 102–3. Works: Epistle to Sir Robert Walpole, 103; The Highland-Fair, 103; The Sine-Cure, 102–3. Mohocks, 35. Molie`re, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de, 97, 103, 122. Works: L’Avare, 103, 117, 182; Le Me´decin malgre´ lui, 103, 183; Select Comedies (translation by Baker and Miller), 25, 100. Molloy, Charles, 103–4; review of HF’s The Crisis, 104. Works: Common Sense, 103–4, 172; Fog’s Weekly Journal, 103, 189. Montagu, John, second duke of, 32, 100, 104, 127, 188, 242. Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 4, 9–10, 15, 67, 103, 104–5, 118, 130, 135, 140, 153, 182–83, 188–89, 206, 219; HF’s correspondence with, 210. Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 24, 105. Works: Essays, 197. The Monthly Review, 47, 53, 239. Moore, Edward, 73, 105–6, 150, 216. Works: Fables for the Female Sex, 105; The Foundling, 105–6, 142; The Trial of Selim Slim, 106. Moore, Jenny Hamilton, 106. Morrissey, L. J., 181. Mortimer, Cromwell, 207. Mosquito Indians, 205. Mullart, William, 106, 256–57. Murphy, Arthur, 106–7. Works: The Craftsman, 107; edition of HF’s Works, 82, 100, 106–7, 210; “An Essay on the Life and Genius of HF,” 10, 16, 107, 209–10; The Gray’s Inn Jour-

Index nal, 107; preface to Smart’s Hilliad, 107, 135. The Muscovita, Lucia Panichi, 242. Nash, Richard “Beau,” 107–8, 169, 211. Needham, Elizabeth (“Mother”), 108, 179, 252. Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, ﬁrst duke of, 71–72, 108–9, 114, 243, 255; HF’s correspondence with, 216–17. Newgate Prison, 191–92, 216, 269–70, 273–74. New Prison, Clerkenwell, 109, 114. Newton, Sir Isaac, 101, 120, 195. Nollekins and His Times, 88. Nourse, John, 4, 87, 109, 220; HF’s correspondence with, 210. Nutt, Elizabeth, 207. Odell, Thomas, 109, 185. Oglethorpe, Gen. James Edward, 109–10. O’Hara, Kane, Tom Thumb, a Burletta, 186. Old Boswell Court, London (HF’s residence), 4. Old England, 12, 196. Oldﬁeld, Anne, 110, 258. Oldmixon, John, 110; HF’s parody of, 110. Works: Critical History of England, 110; History of England, 110; Secret History of Europe, 110. Oliver, John, 110, 280. opera, Italian, 62, 70, 71, 183, 211, 242– 43, 259. Osborne, Francis, 115. Osborne, George, The True Briton, 110. Oson, Jan, 3. Otway, Thomas, 111, 166. Works: Don Carlos, 111; The History and Fall of Caius Marius, 111; The Orphan, 111; Venice Preserv’d, 111. Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 111. Works: Ars Amatoria, 111; HF’s paraphrase of, 111, 197; Metamorphoses, 111. pantomimes, 125, 186. Panton Street, London (HF’s residence), 5.

Index passions, 45–46, 96–97, 131–32, 191, 222, 224, 230, 232, 243–45, 269–70. Paxton, Nicholas, 201. Peirce, Jerry, 211. Pelham, Henry, 32, 39, 71, 108, 111–12, 113, 215, 237, 243. Pembroke, Henry Herbert, ninth Earl of, 112–13. Penlez, Bosavern, 47, 113, 149, 165, 174. Pentlow, William, 109, 113–14, 159, 216. Pericles, 146. Perkins, Hutton, HF’s correspondence with, 216. Perkins, James, 31, 49, 213. Phalaris, Epistles of, 29. Philip V, king of Spain, 197. Philip of Macedonia, 197. Philips, Ambrose, 114. Works: The Distrest Mother, 114, 179. Phillips, Edward, 114–15. Works: Marforio, 115; The Stage Mutineers, 114, 125. Phillips, Teresia Constantia, 115. Works: Apology for her conduct, 115, 161. Physicians, College of, 144, 158. Pilkington, Laetitia, Memoirs, 140. Pitt, James, 25, 115–16; HF’s ridicule of, 200–1, 205. Works: contributions to Daily Gazetteer, 25, 115; London Journal, 115. Pitt, William, later ﬁrst earl of Chatham, 2, 57, 94, 101, 116. Plato, 46, 116–17, 128, 131, 167. Works: Phaedo, 117; Phaedrus, 117; The Republic, 117, 193. Plautus, Titus Maccinus, 117. Works: Aulularia, 117, 182; Cooke’s edition and translation of the comedies, 117. Plays: The Author’s Farce (1730), 178– 79, 249–51; The Author’s Farce (1734), 179, 249–51; The Coffee-House Politician (previously titled Rape upon Rape), 125, 185; The Covent-Garden Tragedy, 108, 114–15, 179, 196, 200, 220, 251–52; The Debauchees, 180; Deborah, 71, 180; Don Quixote in England, 23, 41, 154, 180, 252; Eurydice, 180, 253; Eurydice Hiss’d, 180,

327 253; The Fathers; or, The GoodNatur’d Man, 36, 66, 70, 180–81, 209, 253–54; The Grub-Street Opera (revision of The Welsh Opera), 37–38, 68, 75, 124–25, 181, 254–55; The Historical Register, 181, 255; The Intriguing Chambermaid, 47, 125, 182, 255–56; The Letter-Writers, 182, 256; The Lottery, 182, 238, 257–58; Love in Several Masques, 32, 105, 182, 210, 258; The Miser, 103, 117, 127, 182– 83, 259; Miss Lucy in Town, 74, 108, 183, 220, 259–60; The Mock Doctor, 102, 103, 183, 260; The Modern Husband, 105, 154, 183–84, 210, 260–61; The Old Debauchees (later revived as The Debauchees) (1745), 184, 220, 261–62; An Old Man Taught Wisdom: or, The Virgin Unmask’d, 184, 262; Pasquin, 184, 253, 262–63; Rape upon Rape (retitled The Coffee-House Politician), 185, 263–64; The Temple Beau, 123, 185, 264–65; Tom Thumb, 185– 86, 265; The Tragedy of Tragedies, 26, 29–30, 34, 52, 57, 59, 89, 111, 133, 167, 186, 265–66; Tumble-Down Dick, 186, 266–67; The Universal Gallant, 3, 98, 187, 267–68; The Virgin Unmask’d (see An Old Man Taught Wisdom); The Wedding-Day, 187, 268–69; The Welsh Opera (see The Grub-Street Opera). Plutarch, 117–18, 132. Works: Moralia, 117–18; Parallel Lives, 117–18. Poetry: Burlesque of The Dunciad (“—O to look oer the old Records of Time”), 19, 105, 130, 154, 188, 189–90, 219, 227–28; “A Description of U[pto]n G[rey],” 2, 187–88; “The Dusky Night Rides down the Sky,” 180, 188; Epilogue for Charles Johnson’s Cœlia, 188; Epilogue for James Miller’s The Modish Couple, 188; Epilogue for Lewis Theobald’s Orestes, 188; “Epistle to Mr. Lyttleton,” 94, 105, 143–44, 188– 89, 219; “Juvenal’s Sixth Satire Modernized,” 189; “Liberty,” 145, 189; The Masquerade, 35, 75, 127, 189, 241–42; “Of Good-Nature,” 127, 189; Of True

328 Greatness, 22–23, 58, 190, 210, 234– 35; “Plain Truth,” 190; Prologue for George Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity, 190; “The Roast Beef of Old England,” 180, 181, 190; “To a Friend on the Choice of a Wife,” 190–91; “To John Hayes, Esq.,” 191, 244; “To Miss H[u]band at Bath,” 76; “To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole” (1730), 3, 154, 191; “To [Walpole],” 191 (1731); The Vernoniad, 30, 34, 83, 151–52, 191, 210. Poetry probably written by HF: “The Coronation” and “An Ode on the Birthday,” 67, 127, 153, 206; “An Epistle to Mr. Ellys the Painter,” 51, 61, 206; “The Norfolk Lanthorn,” 154, 206. political career. See Fielding, Henry. Pope, Alexander, 4, 19, 94, 118–19, 120, 137, 145, 242. Works: Dunciad, 29, 118–19, 125, 130, 250–51; Dunciad, HF’s burlesque of, 189–90; Dunciad Variorum, 130; edition of Shakespeare, 134, 144; Eloisa to Abelard, 118; Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 77; Epistle to Cobham, 191; Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue 1, 118; An Essay on Criticism, 84, 93, 133; An Essay on Man, 119, 191, 195, 197, 244; imitation of Horace’s Satires, 105, 118, 188; Peri Bathous, 130; The Rape of the Lock, 118; translation of Iliad, 102, 119, 279, 283; Windsor Forest, 118. Popple, William, The Prompter, 187. Porto Bello, Battle of, 151, 191. Potter, John, 119–20. Pratt, Charles, 76, 120. Prior, Matthew, 120. Works: “Paolo Purganti and His Wife,” 120. prizeﬁghting, 34, 63–64. Prose Fiction: Amelia, 4, 12, 21, 152, 191– 92, 212–13, 269–73; Amelia, autobiographical dimension of, 192; Amelia, Cleland’s review of, 47, 239–40; Amelia, Johnson’s opinion of 86; Jonathan Wild, 58–59, 118, 155, 162–63, 190, 192, 273–74; Joseph Andrews, 39–40,

Index 100, 126, 192–93, 194, 275–78; Joseph Andrews, comic prose epic, 193, 227– 29; Joseph Andrews, copyright to, 168, 220; Joseph Andrews, imitation of Cervantes, 192–93; Joseph Andrews, satiric of Richardson’s Pamela, 126, 193; Joseph Andrews, theory of the Ridiculous, 193, 246–48; Joseph Andrews, William Young the model for Parson Adams, 168; Journey from This World to the Next, 193–94, 278–79; Journey from This World to the Next, Gibbon’s opinion of, 194; Journey from This World to the Next, inﬂuence of Lucian and Plato, 193; Shamela, 77, 99, 110, 194, 279–80; Shamela, parody of Richardson’s Pamela, 126, 193; Tom Jones, 1, 21, 194–95, 280–85; Tom Jones, copyright to, 220; Tom Jones, Gibbon’s opinion of, 8; Tom Jones, theme of providence, 195, 245; Tom Jones, of prudence, 195, 245–46. providence, 195, 245. prudence, 224, 244, 245–46. Pseudonyms: Mum Budget, 172; Madame de la Nash, 5, 65, 108, 195; Sir Alexander Drawcansir, 28–29, 34, 79, 171; Pasquin, 172; Petrus Gualterus [Peter Walter], 178; Lemuel Gulliver, 130, 140, 189; Conny Keyber, 191; James Macpherson, 176–77; Philalethes [Lover of Truth], 129, 179, 200; Scriblerus Secundus, 130, 140, 178; H. Scriblerus Secundus, 29–30, 52, 57, 62, 89, 130, 140, 186; John TrottPlaid, 172; Hercules Vinegar, 154, 171. Pseudonyms probably of HF: A.B., 204; A. Briton, 205; Anglo-Germanicus, 204; Wm. Hint, Candle Snuffer, 200; C.C.P.L. [Colley Cibber, Poet Laureate], 203; Constans, 204; Democritus, 204; Proteus Dimplcheek, 203; R. Dudley, 203; Rachel Foresight, 202; Ned Friendly, 202; Harry Hunter, 200; Will. Lovemeal, 12, 202; N. Machiavel, 95, 201; A Moderate Man, 202; Pharmacopola, 205; Philomath, 203; Philo-Tonsor, 202; Jack Ramble, 201;

Index Septennius, 200; Tho[mas] Squint, 199; T.P., 205; T.T., 202; Paul Wronghead [Paul Whitehead], 162. The Public Advertiser, 165. Public Register Ofﬁce, 146. Pufendorf, Samuel, 69. Works: Law of Nature and Nations, 69. Pulteney, William, later ﬁrst earl of Bath, 23, 120–21, 243, 255, 279. Works: The Craftsman, 22, 32, 121. Puppet Theater in Panton Street, 5, 65, 115, 195–96. Quin, James, 65, 95, 121–22, 267. Quintilian, 122. Works: Institutio Oratoria, 122. Rabelais, Franc¸ois, 93, 97, 122–23, 133, 141. Works: Gargantua, 122; Pantagruel, 122. Rackett, Thomas, 209. Raftor. See Clive, Catherine Raftor. Ralph, James, 51, 115, 123, 132, 147. Works: collaboration with HF on The Champion, 123, 171; collaboration with HF on The True Patriot 123; The Fashionable Lady, 123; prologue to HF’s The Temple Beau, 123, 185; The Remembrancer, 123; The Touch-Stone, 123; Weekly Register, 154. Ranby, John, 5, 87, 123–24, 155, 169, 139, 272. Works: A Narrative of the Last Illness of . . . the Earl of Orford, 87, 124. Rapin (or Rapin-Thoyras), Paul de, 53, 60, 124. Works: The History of England, 124. Rayner, E., 124–25, 181, 187. Regnard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 125. Works: Le Retour impre´vu, 125, 182. Residences: Sharpham Park, Glastobury (birthplace), 1; Barnes, 5; Bath, 3; Blenheim Street, 2; Bow Street, 5; Brompton, 4; Brownlow Street, 5; Buckingham Street, 3; Dover Street, 3; Ealing, 5; East Stour, Dorset, 1–2; Essex Street, 4; Eton College, 2; Leiden, Holland, 3, 34; Lisbon, 6, Meard’s

329 Court, 5; Milford Manor, Wiltshire, 3; Old Boswell Court, 4, 158; Panton Street, 5, 195–96; Salisbury, 2; Spring Garden, 4; Twerton, 4; Twickenham, 4; Upton Grey, Hampshire, 2–3, 187–88. Reynolds, Sir Joshua, portrait of HF (?), 89. Ribble, Frederick G., 168. Ribbles, Frederick G. and Anne G., 20, 45, 69, 84, 133, 137. Rich, John, 125; his pantomimes ridiculed by HF, 144, 179, 186, 251, 262, 266; manager of Covent Garden, 66, 79, 88, 114–15, 165; manager of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 80, 189. Richardson, Samuel, 16, 85, 125–27, 177, 228, 269. Works: Clarissa, 126, 240; Clarissa, HF’s letter on, 214–15; Clarissa, his reviews of, 172; Pamela, 126, 246; Pamela, HF’s ridicule of, 194, 196, 214, 224, 226, 275, 279–80. Richmond, Charles Lennox, second duke of, 32, 100, 104, 127, 183, 188–89; HF’s correspondence with, 216. The Ridiculous, 29, 86, 228, 246–48. Riot Act, 113, 174. Rivero, Albert J., 178. Robbins, Walter, 3, 127, 210. Roberts, Edgar V., 181. Roberts, James, 127–28, 158. Robin Hood Society, 230. Robinson, William, 128. Works: contributions to The Champion, 128. Rochester, John Wilmot, second earl of, 128. Works: “A Satyr against Reason and Mankind,” 128; “Upon Nothing,” 128. Rollin, Jacques, 88. Rookes, Mary, 2, 12, 16–17, 128–29. Rowe, Nicholas, 60, 86, 89, 129. Works: edition of Shakespeare, 129; The Fair Penitent, 129; Jane Shore, 129; Tamerlane, 129; translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, 129. Royal Hospital, Chelsea, 10, 169. Royal Society, 18, 30, 130, 207. Works: Philosophical Transactions, 131, 178.

330 Russel, Richard, 129. Works: The GrubStreet Journal, 129. Rutland, John Manners, third duke of, 242. Sacramental Test Act, 79, 205. Salisbury, Wiltshire (HF’s residence), 2. Sappho, 279. Scarron, Paul, 97, 130. Works: Le Roman comique, 130. The Scriblerus Club, 67, 105, 130–31, 133, 140, 189–90. Seagrim, Randolph, 142. Seedo, Mr., 131, 182, 251. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 131–32, 241. Works: Hercules Oetaeus, 132; Phaedra, 132. Senesino, Francesco Barnardi, 242. Septennial Act, 200. Servandoni, Jean-Nicholas, 104. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, second earl of, 72. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of, 46, 117, 132–33, 237; Works: Characteristicks, 132–33, 229; An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, 132; Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, 132. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, fourth earl of, 132. Shaftesbury, Dorset, 1, 29. Shakespeare, William, 133–34. Works: character of “Ancient Pistol,” 45, 255, 267; editions of by Pope, 134; editions by Theobald, 134, 279; editions by Hanmer, 134; editions by Warburton, 134, 156; Hamlet, 134; 1 Henry IV, 133–34; King John (altered by Cibber), 44, 255; Macbeth; Othello, 134, 279; Romeo and Juliet, 28, 44, 111, 133; Twelfth Night, 85. Sharpe, John, 213. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, produced HF’s The Fathers, 66, 70. Works: The Rivals, 275. Shipley, J. B., 200. Silius Italicus, 93. Skerret, Molly, 255.

Index Slack, John, 34. Slocock, Benjamin, 279. Smart, Christopher, 134–35. Works: contributions to The Student, 135; epitaph for HF, 135; The Hilliad, 79, 107, 135; The Horatian Canons of Friendship, 135; The Midwife, 135; prologue to HF’s Mock Doctor, 166. Smith, M. M., 219. Smollett, Tobias George, 135–36, 194. Works: Continuation of the Complete History of England, 136; A Faithful Narrative, 136; Peregrine Pickle, 136; Roderick Random, 135–36. Socrates. See Plato. Soho Rep Company, New York, 185. Sophocles, 20, 136–37. Works: Ajax, 136– 37; Oedipus Tyrannus, 137. South, Robert, 46, 50, 137. Spenser, Edmund, 137–38, 158. Works: The Faerie Queene, 137, 150, 160. Spring Garden, Charing Cross (HF’s residence), 4. Squires, Mary, 36, 66. St. James’s, Piccadilly, 46, 52. St. Paul, 161. Stackhouse, Thomas, 226. Statius, Publius Papinius, 93. Steele, Sir Richard, 19–20, 138, 182, 279; against dueling, 236. Works: The Conscious Lovers, 20, 138; The Spectator, 19, 138; The Tatler, 19, 138; The Tender Husband, 138. Stillingﬂeet, Edward, bishop, 138. Stillingﬂeet, Robert, 2, 29, 138–39. stoicism, 45–46, 51, 131–32, 237, 241, 243. Stoppelaer, Michael, 242, 253. Strahan, William, 51, 139. Stromberg, R. N., 237. Stuart, Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, 54, 139–40, 175, 236–37. Stuart, James Francis Edward, the Old Pretender, 139, 236. Stuart, Lady Louisa, 15. Stubbs, John, 217. Swift, Jonathan, 140–41; borrows from Steele, 138; HF’s high opinion of, 93–

Index 94, 97, 103, 120, 122, 135; HF’s obituary of, 93, 141; HF’s satire of, 189; his wit, 137; Jonathan Wild in the manner of, 192, 235; the Scriberus Club, 130. Works: An Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 140– 41; The Battle of the Books, 29, 140; Gulliver’s Travels, 130, 140, 171; A Modest Proposal, 141. Talbot, William Lord, 23, 141. Taylor, Giles, 141–42. Taylor, Peter, 142. Temple, John, 142. Temple, Sir William, 29, 142. Terence (Publius Terentius Afer), 142–43. Works: Adelphi, 142; Heuton Timorumenos, 142. Tey, Josephine, The Franchise Affair, 37. Thackeray, William Makepeace, 194. Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, 203. Theobald, Lewis, 143–44, 179, 251. Works: edition of Shakespeare, 134, 143–44, 279; Orestes, HF’s epilogue for, 125, 143–44, 188; Orpheus and Eurydice, 144; The Persian Princess, 143; The Rape of Proserpine, 144; translation of Aristophanes, 143, 197. Theocritus, 119, 197. Theodore I, king of Corsica, 144. Thompson, Dr. Thomas, 144–45, 212. Works: Treatise on the gout, 144. Thomson, James, 94, 145–46. Works: The Castle of Indolence, 138, 145–46; Liberty, 145, 189; The Seasons, 99– 100, 145; Sophonisba, 52, 145. Thornton, Bonnell, 146. Works: DruryLane Journal, 146; Spring-Garden Journal, 146. Thucydides, 77, 83, 146–47, 167. Works: History of the Peloponnesian War, 146. Tillotson, John, Archbishop, 26, 46, 79, 137, 147, 160, 222, 225–26, 230, 234, 237, 241. Works: “Of the Education of Children,” 232.

331 Tindal, Matthew, 147–48, 229. Works: Christianity as Old as the Creation, 147–48. Tindal, Nicholas, translation of Rapin’s History, 124. Toland, John, 148. Works: Christianity Not Mysterious, 148; Miscellaneous Works, 148. Translations: Adlerfelt’s Military History of Charles XII, King of Sweden, 20, 40– 41, 87, 109, 152, 196; Aristophanes’ Plutus, the God of Riches (with William Young), 20, 55, 86, 128, 141, 153, 196–97; Demosthenes’ “First Olynthiac,” 56–57, 72, 197, 211; Lucian’s works (with Young, proposed but never done), 94, 168–69; Ovid’s Art of Love Paraphrased, 111, 197. Trapp, Joseph, 148–49, 194. Works: The Nature, Folly, Sin, and Danger of being Righteous over-much, 148–49, 160; translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, 148, 279. Trembley, Abraham, 178. Trentham, Granville Leveson-Gower, Viscount, 28, 113, 149, 151, 162, 207–8, 215. Tucker, Andrew, 22, 220. Twerton, Somerset (HF’s residence). See Bath. Twickenham, Middlesex (HF’s residence), 4. Tyers, Jonathan, 51, 73–74, 105, 117, 149–50. Universal Register Ofﬁce: 14, 78, 105, 142, 146, 165, 197. The Universal Spectator, 25. See also Journalism probably written by HF. Upton, James, 18, 150. Upton, John, 18, 150. Works: Arrian’s Epictetus, 150; Critical Observations on Shakespeare, 150; edition of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 150; Remarks on The Faerie Queene, 150. Upton Grey, Hampshire (HF residence), 2, 187–88.

332 Vaillant, Paul, 150. Vanbrugh, Sir John, 50, 150–51. Works: The False Friend, 150–51; A Journey to London, 150–51; The Provok’d Wife, 150; The Relapse, 150. Vandeput, Sir George, 113, 149, 151, 161. Vaughan, William, 42. Vauxhall gardens, 149. Veale, Capt. Richard, 151, 217. Venus in the Cloister, 54. Verge of the Court, 4, 11, 271. Vernon, Admiral Edward, 151–52, 191. Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 116, 152, 167, 279. Works: Aeneid, 83, 101, 148, 191; HF’s mock exegesis, 204; translations of by Dryden, 102, 152; translations of by Trapp, 148. Voltaire (Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet), 152. Works: Brutus, 152; Le Sie`cle de Louis XIV, 152; Letters Concerning the English Nation (Lockman trans.), 152; L’Histoire de Charles XII. Roi de Sue`de, 40, 152. Wade, Gen. George, 121, 188–89. Wales, Frederick Louis, Prince of, 32, 68, 144, 152–53, 254. Waller, Thomas, 153. Wallis, Albany, 209. Walpole, Horace, 26, 31. Walpole, Horatio, later baron of Wolterton, 95, 153, 181, 201. Walpole, Sir Robert, later ﬁrst earl of Orford, 153–55, 253–55, 273; HF’s verses to, 3, 191; his conduct investigated, 211; his death, 87, 123–24, 175; Jonathan Wild a ﬁgure for, 192; The Modern Husband dedicated to, 183–84. Walsingham, Sir Francis, 24. Walter, Peter, 155–56, 178, 275, 279. Warburton, William, 89, 119, 150, 156– 57, 211, 227, 279; opinion of HF’s novels, 97–98, 157. Works: The Divine Legation of Moses, 156–57; edition of Pope’s Works, 97, 156–57; edition of Shakespeare, 134, 156; Julian, 156.

Index Ward, Joshua (“Spot”), 157. Warner, Ferdinando, 157–58. Works: A Scheme of a Fund for the better Maintenance of the Widows and Children of the Clergy, 157–58. Warton, Joseph, 158. Works: The Enthusiast, 158; An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, 158. Warton, Thomas (the elder), 158. Warton, Thomas (the younger), 158. Wasey, William, 158. Watts, George, 158, 211, 227. Watts, John, 127, 158–59, 220. Welch, Saunders, 159, 165, 216; BowStreet Runners, 159. Works: Observations on the Office of Constable, 114, 159. Wells, Susannah, 66. Wesley, John, 160. West, Gilbert, 160. Works: A Canto of the Fairy Queen, 137, 160 Whiteﬁeld, George, 79, 148, 160–61, 205, 223, 237–38, 241–42, 284. Works: An Explanatory Sermon on the Mistaken Text, Be not Righteous overmuch, 160; God’s Dealings with the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, 128, 194, 280; Works, 161. Whiteﬁeld, Richard, 161, 242, 284. Whitehead, Paul, 149, 161–62, HF’s lampoon of, 207. Works: The Case of the Hon. Alexander Murray, 162; “Con” Phillips’s Apology, 115. Whitelocke, Sir Bulstrode, 53, 60, 124. Wild, Jonathan, 162–63, 273; Defoe’s biography of, 56, 162; HF’s ﬁgure of false greatness, 235; HF’s novel, 192, 273–74. Wilkie, James, 142. Wilks, Robert, and widow, 32, 61, 64, 77, 163, 179, 182, 251, 258, 261. Willes, Sir John, 113. Willets, William, The Christian Education of Children, 233. William III, king of England, 124, 236. Williams, Sir Charles Hanbury. See Hanbury Williams, Sir Charles.

Index Williamson, John, 163–64, 217, 227. Willoughby, Richard, 164. Winnington, Thomas, 144, 164, 178. Witchcraft Act, 202. Wofﬁngton, Margaret (“Peg”), 164, 268. Wood, John, the elder, 21. Wood, Peter, 165. Woodfall, George, 165. Woodfall, Henry, 165. Woodward, Henry, 165–66. Woolston, Thomas, 148. Works of HF. See specific genres. Wycherley, William, 50, 86, 111, 166. Xenophon, 77, 83, 147, 166–67. Works: Anabasis, 167; Hellenica, 167; Sarah Fielding’s translation of Memoirs of Socrates, 16, 167. Xerxes, 76.

333 Yonge, Sir William, 167, 204. Yorke, Philip, 30, 106. Young, Edward, 167–68, 190. Works: Busiris, 167; Imperium Pelagi, 167; The Love of Fame, 168; Night Thoughts, 168; The Revenge, 167. Young, William, 136–37, 168–69, 211, 227, 275. Works: contributions (probable) to The History of Our Own Times, 168; contributions (probable) to The Jacobite’s Journal, 168; edition of Ainsworth’s Latin Dictionary, 169; editions of Hederich’s Greek Lexicon, 169; translation (with HF) of Aristophanes’ Plutus, 20, 23, 55, 137, 141, 168, 196– 97. Younge, Edward, 169. Zirker, Malvin R., 69.

About the Author MARTIN C. BATTESTIN is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Virginia. He is coeditor of the Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding and the author of several books on eighteenthcentury literature. His numerous articles have appeared in such journals as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in Bibliography, Studies in Philology, Eighteenth-Century Studies, ELH, PMLA, and Philological Quarterly.