Henry Fielding - The Criticism of Henry Fielding. Edited by Ioan Williams

Henry Fielding began his literary career in 1728 at the age of twenty-one; he continued writing until 1754, when he died in Lisbon at the age of forty-seven. This relatively short period of twenty-six years was one of ceaseless activity and incredible diversity. Fielding was dramatist, poet, translator, essayist, political journalist, pamphleteer, novelist, theatre-manager, lawyer and magistrate. In the first nine years of his career he produced twenty-five burlesques, farces, political satires and comedies, until his activity was brought to a sudden end by the Stage Licensing Act of 1737. He then turned to more general activities, became a lawyer and a political journalist. In his first newspaper, The Champion, which he ran from November 1739 to June 1741, he attacked the Walpole Government and defined his position as moralist and social critic. In 1741 he published Shamela, his burlesque of Samuel Richardsons Pamela (1740), following it in 1742 with his own first novel, JosephAndrews. His next major publication was the three-volume Miscellanies (1743), in which he published the first version of his Jonathan Wild, his Essays, On Conversation and Onthe Knowledge of the Characters of Men, together with poems on good nature and true greatness.

Between 1743 and 1749 Fielding was again concerned with political journalism, this time in support of an Administration of which he approved. In defence of the Government of the Pelhams he conducted The True Patriot from November 1745 to June 1746. After the Jacobite Rebellion was over, he defended the Patriot Administration against the attacks of the Jacobites and malcontents in the columns of The Jacobites Journal between December 1747 and November 1748. Only six months later he published Tom Jones, and at about the same time became Justice of the Peace for Westminster and Middlesex. In spite of the enormous exertions which his duties as magistrate involved, he followed Tom Jones with Amelia in December 1751 and began his last newspaper, The Covent Garden Journal, which he kept up almost single-handed from January to November 1752. His last finished work, The Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon, was published posthumously in 1755.

A selection of Fieldings criticism must draw on the whole range of his work, including material from plays, novels and newspapers. W.L. Cross rightly said of him: His works, though they all unroll in different patterns, were really all of a piece. No writer was ever more uniformly himself. For him social converse, political behaviour, the conduct of the theatre, acting and writing, were all subject to the laws which governed human life and thought. He considered it his function to bring the powers of judgement and intelligence to bear on human behaviour, and though far from reactionary, he saw himself as a guardian of intellectual and moral standards in a world which seemed increasingly to ignore or distort them.

This conviction Fielding shared with many of the best among his contemporaries and predecessors, and he drew immediate inspiration from their works. He held many opinions in common with Addison, Steele, Shaftesbury, Swift and Pope, borrowed many of the devices which he used most frequently from the Spectator, the Tatler, The Tale of aTub (1704), The Art of Sinking (1728) and The Dunciad (1729 and 1742), and associated himself with the authors of the Scriblerus papers by direct quotation and the pseudonym Scriblerus Secundus. Behind Jonathan Wild (1743) The Beggars Opera (1728) is clearly visible, behind The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) the Duke of Buckinghams The Rehearsal (1672). His earliest work and his latest, his farces, his essays in The Champion and TheCovent Garden Journal, his attacks on confusion, false criticism, pedantry, pertness, the debasement of the stage, the unscrupulous tricks of booksellers, the grotesque self-seeking of politicians are closely related to the work of the English satirists from Samuel Butler to Alexander Pope.

Moreover, Fieldings relationship with other English writers of Restoration and early eighteenth-century England was closer than superficial resemblances of style and subject would indicate. His whole mental outlook was deeply affected by the events in recent history and the related developments in religious thought and literary taste. His mind took shape under the influence of the philosophers, moralists, historians and divines who preceded him. An early reading of Hobbes, Locke, Shaftesbury, Clarendon and the Restoration divines had given him, in common with many of his contemporaries, a tendency to value most highly those political, intellectual and social qualities which seemed able to ensure stability of government and freedom and security in social life. Repugnance for enthusiasm, excess and distortion of any kind was deep in Fieldings mind. His idea of political rectitude was founded on the principles of the Whig Revolution of 1688 and his concept of healthy religious devotion on a feeling that it was necessary to adapt the demands of Christianity to fit the context of civilized life.