Henry-Fielding.doc

Henry Fielding
The author of the first great novel in English; also a playwright, a newspaperman, and a judge who helped found a famous police force

His Life
• Henry Fielding was born in a family that included earls and dukes. He was educated, for a period of time, at Eton, where he cultivated a wide and genuine taste for the classics. Due to a quarrel with his father, he had to work for a living early in life. He first tried his luck at play writing, and during a span of nine years (1729-37) he turned out 26 plays and became the most successful living playwright of the time. His plays were mostly comedies and farces filled with political and social satire.
• In them Fielding mercilessly exposed the English courts of law, the parliamentary system and the corruption of government officials. He attacked the vices of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, their hypocrisy, greed and cruelty. Thus he was applauded by the public but hated by the government.
• His theatrical career came to an end in 1737 when the political censorship of the Licensing Act went into effect. He then took up law and was called to the bar in 1740.
• Meanwhile he had not given up writing. In 1739 appeared The Champion, a newspaper published thrice a week, and written mainly by Fielding.
• In 1745 he was appointed Justice of the Peace for Westminster and then Middlesex, a position that brought him little income but much renown, for he served as an honest, upright and efficient magistrate.
• In 1754 he became very ill; he left England for Lisbon, Portugal but never returned.
Points of View
• Fielding was very sympathetic toward the poor and unfortunate, and protested strongly against social injustice, inequality, hypocrisy, wickedness and political corruption in his writings.
• He was fully aware of duality of human nature. He held that to err was human and that one could be saved as long as he was determined to remedy his errors.
• As an educated man, he firmly believed in the educational function of literature. He shared the contemporary view of the English enlighteners that the purpose of the novel was to present a faithful picture of life, "the just copies of human manners", with sound teaching woven into their texture, so as to teach men to know themselves , their proper spheres and appropriate manners.
Fielding as a Playwright
• During his career as a dramatist, Fielding had attempted a considerable number of forms of plays: witty comedies of manners or intrigues in the Restoration tradition, farces or ballad operas with political implications, and burlesques and satires that attack the contemporary vices of the English society.
Dramatic works
• Of all his plays, the best known are The Coffee-House Politician (1730), The Tragedy of Tragedies (1730), Pasquin (1736), and The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737). These successful plays not only contributed to a temporary revival of the English theatre but also were of great help to the playwright in his future literary career as a novelist.
Fielding as a Novelist
• Fielding started to write novels when he was preparing himself for the bar. As the “father of the English novel, he was the first to approach the genre with a fully worked-out theory of the novel; and in Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, which a modern critic has called comic epic, epic comedy, and domestic epic, respectively, he had established the tradition of a realism presented in panoramic surveys of contemporary society that dominated English fiction until the end of the 19th century.
Novels
• Joseph Andrews
• Jonathan Wild the Great
• Tom Jones
• Amelia
Joseph Andrews
• The full title of the novel is The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his friend Mr. Abraham Adams, Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes (1742), which was first intended as a burlesque of the dubious morality and false sentimentality of Richardson’s Pamela. Fielding began his novel with the intention of ridiculing Richardson’s work, by putting Pamela’s brother, Joseph Andrews, under the same temptations.
• Joseph, a handsome young man, is a man-servant of Mr. B’s windowed aunt, Lady Booby. Lady Booby, attracted by Joseph’s manly charms, pursues him as obstinately as her nephew did Pamela. Joseph, who is a good youth, repels her advances. But he, unlike his sister Pamela, does not at last have his ‘virtues rewarded’ with his mistress’s hand. Instead, he is turned out of doors by his mistress.
• This part of the novel is an ingenious parody of the main theme of Pamela. But after the first ten chapters, the book quickly turns into a great novel of the open road, a ‘comic epic in prose,’ whose subject is ‘the true ridiculous’ in human nature, as exposed in all its variety as Joseph and the amiable quixotic parson Adams journey homeward through the heart of England. The dominating qualities of the novel are its excellent character-portrayal, timely entrances and exits, robustness of tone and hilarious, hearty humor.
Jonathan Wild the Great
• The History of Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), is a satirical novel, in which Fielding exposes the English bourgeois society and mocks at its political system. It takes the life of a notorious real-life thief as a theme for demonstrating the petty division between a great rogue and a great soldier or a great politician such as Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister.
• The author relates the career of a great rogue, from his birth to his arrival at the ‘tree of glory’, the gallows. The hero, having shown at school his disposition for iniquity, enters on his career of crime under the auspices of Mr. Snap, keeper of a sponging-house, and shows dexterity as a pickpocket. He becomes the chief of a gang of robbers, contriving their exploits, taking the largest share of the booty, keeping himself out of the clutches of the law, and maintaining discipline by denouncing any of the gang who contest his authority. He marries Snap’s daughter, Letitia, who is as worthless as himself, and whose assumption of virtue provides some amusing scenes.
• His principal undertaking is his attempt to ruin the fortunes and domestic happiness of his old schoolfellow, the virtuous jeweler Heartfree. He robs him and gets him locked up as a bankrupt, induces Heartfree’s wife by a trick to leave England, accuses Heartfree of having made away with her, and brings him within an ace of execution. But his trickery is fortunately exposed, and he meets his end with the ‘greatness’ that has distinguished him throughout.
• The ironical praises for the very qualities of the unscrupulous self-aggrandizement of Wild point out the way the Prime Minister had achieved his ‘greatness.’ The Great Man, properly considered, is no better than a great gangster.
• Of ‘greatness’ Fielding put forward two definitions: ‘Greatness consists in bringing all manner of mischief to mankind;’ ‘Greatness consists in power, pride, insolence, and doing mischief to mankind.’ This view of greatness can be applied to all the ‘great’ personages of the ruling classes. Therefore, Fielding’s Jonathan Wild becomes a bitter satire of the exploiting and oppressing classes.
Tom Jones
• The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) is a masterpiece on the subject of human nature. With its great comic enthusiasm, vast gallery of characters, and contrasted scenes of high and low life in London and the provinces, it has always constituted the most popular of his works.
Amelia
• The History of Amelia (1751) deals with the miseries and sufferings of an idealized woman, Amelia and her husband Captain Booth until they finally attain to happiness in a surprising ending. The book is a sentimental picture of the social life at the time.
• William Booth, penniless young officer, with little to recommend beyond a good person and physical courage, has run away with the virtuous Amelia, against her mother wishes. The poverty of the couple, Booth’s folly and weakness of character, and the beauty of his wife, involve the couple in the series of misfortunes. Booth himself succumbs to the charms of Miss Mathews, whom he meets in prison, but his infidelity, when it subsequently comes to the knowledge of Amelia, is generously forgiven. Amelia becomes the object of the
• illicit pursuits of various unscrupulous admirers. The couple are reduced to the utmost misery, and the long-suffering devotion of Amelia is prolonged, until the situation is saved by the discovery that the will by which her sister inherited her mother’s property is forged and Amelia is the true heiress.
• Being a much more sombre work, it has always been less popular than Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. Fielding's mind must have been darkened by his experiences as a magistrate and Amelia is no attempt at the comic epic poem in prose. Rather, it anticipates the Victorian domestic novel, being a study of the relationship between a man and his wife and, in the character of Amelia, a celebration of womanly virtues. It is also Fielding's most intransigent representation of the evils of the society in which he lived, and he clearly finds the spectacle no longer comic.
Special features
• 1. Fielding has been regarded by some as "Father of the English Novel", for his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern novel. Of all the eighteenth-century novelists he was the first to set out, both in theory and practice, to write specifically a "comic epic in prose," the first to give the modern novel its structure and style.
• 2. Fielding adopted "the third-person narration", in which the author becomes the "all-knowing God". He "thinks the thought" of all his characters, so he is able to present not only their external behaviors but also the internal workings of their minds.
• 3. In planning his stories, he tries to retain the grand epical form of the classical works but at the same time keeps faithful to his realistic presentation of common life as it is. Throughout, the ordinary and usually ridiculous life of the common people, from the middle-class to the underworld, is his major concern.
• 4. Fielding's language is easy, unlaboured and familiar, but extremely vivid and vigorous. His sentences are always distinguished by logic and rhythm, and his structure carefully planned towards and inevitable ending.
• 5. His works are also noted for lively, dramatic dialogues and other theatrical devices such as suspense, coincidence and unexpectedness.
Tom Jones, a Foundling
• Fielding’s best work, consisting of eighteen ‘books’, each preceded by an introductory chapter in the nature of an essay on some theme more or less connected with the story. These essays contain some of Fielding’s best prose.
The story
• Tome Jones is a foundling, mysteriously discovered on night in the bed of the wealthy , virtuous, and benevolent Mr. Allworthy, who gives him a home and educates him, but presently repudiates him. The causes which lead to Tom’s dismissal are several. In the first place
Tom, a generous and manly, but too human, youth, has incurred his benefactor’s displeasure by his amour with Molly Seagrim, the keeper’s daughter. Then he has fallen in love with the beautiful Sophia, who is destined for another. He has incurred the enmity of his tutor, the pedantic divine, Thwackum, and, in a less degree, of his colleague, the hypocritical philosopher, Square.
• And lastly he is the victim of the cunning misrepresentations of young Blifil, a mean sneak, who expects to marry Sophia himself, and hates Tom. Tom sets out on his travels, accompanied by the schoolmaster Partridge, a simple lovable creature, and meets with many adventures, some of them of an amorous description, notably that with Lady Bellaston, which has been much criticized. Lady Bellaston falls in love with Tom, who does not show himself recalcitrant, and supports him in London out of her liberality. Meanwhile Sophia, who is in love with Tom and determined to escape from the marriage with Blifil to which her despotic father has condemned her, runs away from home, with Mrs. Honor, her maid, to a relative in London. Here she escapes a wicked design of Lady Bellaston to place her in the power of arrival of Squire Western in pursuit of her. Finally Tom is discovered to be the son of Allworth's sister, the machinations of Blifil are exposed, Sophia forgives Tom his infidelities and all ends happily.
Major Characters
• Tom Jones—the foundling; an upright, frank, kind-hearted youth; lover of Sophia, who may sometimes be very rash and commit rather serious errors, particularly in his relation with women, yet, who is always ready to help others and never once tries intentionally to harm anyone for his own benefit.
• Sophia—Fielding's beautiful, generous heroine and the daughter of the violent Squire Western; Tom’s love; representing the young women of the day with sufficient courage and independence to defy the wicked world. Like Tom, Sophia lavishes gifts on the poor, and she treats people of all classes with such respect that one landlady cannot believe she is a "gentlewoman." Sophia manages to reconcile her love for Tom, her filial duty to her father, and her hatred for Blifil through her courage and patience.
• Blifil—Tom’s half brother; a sly and faithless fellow, who pretends to be extremely moral and selfless, but actually always thinks up tricks and practices them upon the other people, in order to get what he wants by lying and cheating in the most unscrupulous way.
Selected Reading
• The excerpt chosen is taken from Chapter VIII, Book Four. Molly, the beautiful daughter of Mr. Seagrim, the gamekeeper, is found pregnant and she manages to convince the kind-hearted but innocent Tom that the child is his.
Summary
• Sophia is at church and is touched by Molly's beauty. Sophia later calls on Black George to tell him she would like to hire Molly as her maid servant. George Seagrim, Molly’s father, is secretly shocked that Sophia has not noticed that Molly is pregnant. He heads home for advice from his wife but the family is in an uproar over what happened at church, when the women assaulted Molly with "Dirt and Rubbish." In retaliation, Molly knocked out the leader of the pack and cleared herself a path using a skull and thighbone from the graveyard as her weapons.
• The narrator observes that since women never fail to aim for each other's breasts when fighting, Goody Brown, who is flat-chested, has the upper hand. Tom's arrival quells the fight.
• Here is a good example of Fielding's "comic epic in prose," a high art form given to the description of a fight between Molly and the angry villagers.
From a simulation test
• But now Fortune, fearing she had acted out of character, and had inclined too long to the same side, especially as it was the right side, hastily turned about: for now Goody Brown- whom Zekiel Brown caressed in his arms; nor he alone, but half the parish besides; s