[In the following essay, Rivero discusses Fielding's concerns with representation, authority, and authenticity in Shamela, which the novelist explores more fully in Joseph Andrews.]

The title page of Joseph Andrews indicates that the work we are about to read is “Written in Imitation of The Manner of CERVANTES, Author of Don Quixote.”¹ This is an interesting acknowledgment of debt, one made especially tantalizing by the absence of the name of the author of this imitation. Fielding's first published full-length novel is not acknowledged by its own author but “authorized” by the author of a book whose avowed purpose is the questioning of the authority of authors. That authority, Cervantes suggests, is, in many ways, derived from readers. The chivalric romances Don Quixote lives by have gained their authority not from any intrinsic merit, mendacity being their distinguishing characteristic, but from a brain that has dried up while reading them. The author of Don Quixote has also read those romances, but, unlike his protagonist, his brain has not totally dried up. As the book opens, he is nonetheless afflicted by authorial aridity: he does not know how to go about writing a preface. He summons a friend, and the account of their exchange concerning the ease and imbecility of writing prefaces becomes the preface to Don Quixote.

After reading a good portion of the narrative that follows this preface, however, we discover that its author is not the author of the “original” version of Don Quixote but the diligent transcriber of a series of fragments written in Arabic by the “very exact Historian” Cid Hamet Benengeli, whose veracity is facetiously defended by the “author” of Don Quixote after conceding the addiction to lying prevalent in Arabian countries.² The “author” of Don Quixote thus confers authority on his “author”—an author whose existence and veracity are questionable and whose language, as he confesses, he does not fully understand—and, in doing so, gives authority to himself. As Cervantes represents the fable of the origins of his work, the making of Don Quixote is analogous to the making of Don Quixote. Don Quixote reads, believes, and goes mad; the author of Don Quixote reads, pretends to believe, and writes. Donning, as it were, a quixotic mask to write Don Quixote, Cervantes' author both believes and disbelieves his own authorial representations. In acknowledging his debt to Cervantes, the anonymous author of Joseph Andrews reveals something more important than his historical identity. By striking a quixotic pose as he ventures into the realm of novel-writing, Fielding reminds his readers that authorial claims are rarely (if ever) what they appear to be, that literary representation is replete with duplicities.

Although the preceding account of Don Quixote is somewhat reductive, it offers a corrective to the interpretation of the phrase, “in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes,” shared by most Fielding scholars. Briefly, when Fielding imitates Cervantes, he is not so much copying incidents from Don Quixote (e.g., the Maritornes episode as a prototype of the Fielding inn scene) or reincarnating Don Quixote in Parson Adams, though I agree that these are important indices of Fielding's debt to his Spanish predecessor, but imitating his manner.³ That is to say, Fielding is adopting Cervantes' strategies toward his material, strategies he would have found present in the works of the other two members of his “great Triumvirate” of writers, Lucian and Swift.⁴ Thus, the author of Lucian's A True Story reveals that his lying is more honest than other authors' “for tho' the only true Word in the following History is, that 'tis wholly made up of Lyes, yet I fansie I shall hereby avoid the Reader's Censure, since I frankly tell him 'tis to expect nothing but Lyes at my Hands.”⁵ In a similar manner, Swift gives us a “true historian” whose veracity becomes legendary, so that “it became a Sort of Proverb among his Neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a Thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke it,” a statement exemplifying how the same words can carry opposite signification, how the thing that is not can become, in Gulliver's linguistic world, the word that is—and is not.⁶

Cervantes, Lucian, and Swift, writing in different historical circumstances, seem to agree that lying is the distinguishing characteristic of authors. There is always the possibility, of course, that truth might come out of the mouth (or pen) of an author, but, given the human propensity toward self-love, toward a favorable representation of one's self, the possibility is remote. Authors are especially dangerous when they protest their veracity or impartiality; they are even more dangerous when they admit that they are lying—both are strategies designed to bamboozle the reader. Even when an author thinks that he is telling the truth, the reader cannot be sure. The “author” of Don Quixote might believe that Cid Hamet's account is true; Gulliver might believe in the reality of the story he tells. The problem is that, since language can represent the thing that is not as the thing that is, we cannot trust language itself to underwrite its own truth. Since the authority of authors is constructed in language, we cannot grant authority unless we step outside language or posit a connection between author and reader that can somehow bypass language. Cervantes, Lucian, and Swift, as the critical controversies over their “real” views testify, represent in their works the difficulties of getting at the real through language. There is no historical truth that can be captured in language, only stories, more or less true, always fictive, always partial. Fielding himself makes a similar point in the opening chapter of the third book of Joseph Andrews, in which he explodes “the Authority of those Romance-Writers, who intitle their Books, the History of England, the History of France, of Spain, & c.”⁷

I am not, of course, the first critic to recognize the problematic nature of Fielding's novels. From Ian Watt to Michael McKeon, historians of the novel have noted that, if “formal realism” (as Watt defines it) is the hallmark of the new species of prose fiction that emerges in England in the first half of the eighteenth century, Fielding is no ordinary novelist.⁸ Fielding's stories are presented by a narrator who constantly reminds his readers of the fictive nature of the narratives they are reading. As I have argued elsewhere, this procedure of “enstrangement” or “defamiliarization”—to borrow Viktor Shklovsky's useful term—is also found in many of Fielding's dramatic works.⁹ One could say that Fielding, both in his plays and in his novels, introduces diegesis to question the naive mimesis evident in the “exact” representations of reality of Cibber and Richardson. Yet, what makes the authorial presence in Fielding's novels authoritative is our belief that the representation of the author in the work is somehow exempted from the rules that govern the rest of the work. And we do so because we trust Fielding not to deceive us at this critical point, to grant us a stable point from which to view his artistic creation. That stability, I believe, is missing in Swift, though many modern critics have attempted to normalize his works by inventing such convenient fictions as the Hack and the Modest Proposer.¹⁰ I am not suggesting that we view Fielding's narrators as Tubbian or Gulliverian or that we confuse Fielding with Swift. What I am suggesting is that we read Fielding's novels with the same suspicions of literary representations that he seems to bring to them. In this essay, I hope to start such an inquiry by examining in some detail Fielding's exploration of, and immersion in, the duplicities of representation as he begins his career as a novelist.

I

Because of its concern with representation, the title page of Shamela is a good place to begin our inquiry. It also offers an interesting contrast to the title page of Joseph Andrews. Although I agree with Martin C. Battestin that Joseph Andrews is not a parody of Pamela, its origins clearly lie in Richardson's novel.¹¹ But, as he had done at the beginning of his dramatic career, in the preface to Love in Several Masques, Fielding attempts to sever the connection between his work and its most obvious predecessor. Fielding acknowledges that the modest success of Love in Several Masques is indebted to Cibber's kindnesses as actor and manager, but he refuses to extend this acknowledgment to the Cibberian subject-matter and manner of his play. Instead, the young playwright obliquely invokes Wycherley and Congreve as his models, thus fashioning a dramatic tradition for himself that bypasses Cibber altogether.¹² Similarly, as we have seen, the anonymous author of Joseph Andrews refuses to name Pamela on his title page, except for the vestigial patronymic “Andrews,” and connects his work to a novelistic tradition begun by the “Author of Don Quixote.” As it turns out, of course, this representation of origins is duplicitous for at least two reasons: Joseph Andrews is falsely represented as Pamela's brother, a fraternal connection thus masking a “paternal” debt to Richardson; and, as we learn in the preface that follows, Homer is the “real” father of this novel, though that fatherhood is founded on the lost Margites. Not only is Richardson erased as origin but so are Cervantes and Homer: Cervantes after the mention of Homer, Homer after the mention of the Margites. Joseph Andrews is both the offspring and the reconstruction of that lost ancient original. By the end of the Preface to Joseph Andrews, the still anonymous author, though trailing clouds of Homeric and Cervantic glory, stands virtually alone as the fons et origo of his work. “Writing,” as Fielding writes in The Champion, “seems to be understood as arrogating to yourself a Superiority … of the Understanding,” as attaining a “Pre-eminence.”¹³ In Joseph Andrews, the author attains that “Pre-eminence” by invoking and replacing his originals, the literary son becoming, after some fancy rhetorical flourishes, his own father.

Such is not the case with the title page of Shamela. Here, the debt to the author of Pamela is foregrounded. Given the recent publication of An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian, Fielding might have suspected that the author of this self-serving, first-person epistolary narrative had to be his old antagonist. But even if Fielding did not think so and perhaps knew the identity of the real author—there is no historical evidence to ascertain the extent of Fielding's knowledge here—the attribution of Pamela to Cibber is a brilliant stroke, since it allows the author of Shamela to settle several political as well as literary scores. It also casts Cibber in a familiar role, as the embodiment of yet another repudiated tradition. Shamela, in short, allows Fielding to vent his dislike for the man who, by rejecting his second play, had nearly ended his dramatic career, who, in blaming him for the passing of the Licensing Act of 1737, had dubbed him a “broken Wit.”¹⁴ More importantly, by attributing Pamela to Cibber, Fielding erases the “real” author. Richardson's subsequent vehement assertions, throughout his novelistic career, of his authority over his texts and readers, of his authorship, may be seen as a response to Fielding's (perhaps unwitting) act of authorial erasure. The title page of Shamela proclaims the death of the actual author of Pamela and clears the way for the teasing revelation and concealment of this subject on the title page of Joseph Andrews.

But let us return to the title page of Shamela and its concerns with representation. As revealed in this bill of fare, the purpose of the work is to expose and refute “the many notorious Falshoods and Misrepresentations”—an adventitious misrepresentation of “misrepresentations” introduced (perhaps) in the printing process—“of a Book called PAMELA” and to present “a full Account of all that passed between her [Shamela] 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.”¹⁵ What we have here is a contest between authorial representations, a contest made even more interesting by the fact that, by adopting “the peculiar situation of the editor,” the author of Pamela—to continue quoting from Frances Burney's preface to Evelina—has “happily wrapped [himself] up in a mantle of impenetrable obscurity.”¹⁶ In Burney's astute rendering, the editor is both responsible and not responsible for the material he or she represents. The editor is more like a midwife facilitating the “delivery” of the book, not the actual parent, not the actual author, a covered figure presiding at the birth. But were the suspicious reader to remove that “mantle of impenetrable obscurity”—since it is “impenetrable,” the “mantle” cannot be penetrated or seen through but removed—he or she would discover the author laboring to conceal himself. That act of uncovering, paradoxically carried out by covering himself in the pseudonymous mantle of Conny Keyber, is precisely what the author of Shamela intends to do. The “editor” of Pamela claims to be offering the authentic correspondence of his heroine. The title page of Shamela labels that correspondence a “misrepresentation” and suggests that the “real” correspondence was otherwise, predicated on the criminal correspondence between Shamela and Parson Williams.

The focus on Parson Williams is important. When, as Shamela reveals near the end of her last letter in Shamela, the “strangest fancy … that can be imagined” enters “my Booby's head,” “to have a book made about him and me,” Booby wishes Parson Williams to write such a book. Since Booby has been bamboozled into marriage by his wife's representations of her “vartue,” the book he has in mind will no doubt look very much like Pamela. But, as Williams knows, were he to write a true account of their story, the book he would write would look very much like Shamela. Thus, he volunteers to find another parson “who does that sort of business for folks, one who can make my husband, and me, and Parson Williams, to be all great people; for he can make black white, it seems.” Not quite understanding how these fictions are fashioned, Shamela is reassured by Parson Williams that “the gentleman who writes lives, never asked more than a few names of his customers, and that he made all the rest out of his own head; you mistake, child, said he, if you apprehend any truths are to be delivered.”¹⁷ What that author delivers, of course, is Pamela, a book written for hire, his “characters” becoming “customers” before becoming “characters.” Devoid of truth, the final product turns out to be very similar to the sort of book imagined by the deceived Booby. In Fielding's reading, Booby is more quixotic than Don Quixote: he believes what he reads even before he reads it. But he does so because, like Mr. B. before him, he believes his wife's representations to be true. Unlike Parson Williams and the author of Shamela, Booby is a naive reader unaware of the duplicities of representation. He grants authority without questioning the grounds of that authority. Naive readers of Pamela and Pamela, from Mr. B. to Parson Tickletext, grant authority to a story they ought to regard with suspicion. Such an unquestioning reading leads, among other things, to the equation of the heroine with the book in which she appears. As Shamela exults in her concluding sentence, “Well, all these matters are strange to me, yet I can't help laughing, to think I shall see myself in a printed book.”¹⁸

It is this authority granted the “printed book” that Fielding attempts to “expose” and “refute” in Shamela. Even Shamela, who knows better, finds herself caught up in the reification—and deification—of the self wrought by the magic of the printed word. Like Sancho Panza, who begins to believe his own “enchantment” of Dulcinea after that story is printed in the first part of Don Quixote, Shamela both believes and disbelieves authorial representations and claims of textual authority. However, unlike Sancho, who, while a fairly good spinner of oral yarns, is frankly puzzled by the transforming power of print, Shamela knows how to use the written word to achieve her ends, though her epistolary threats to her “mamma” suggest that she is a rather crude practitioner of the art. Not so “the gentleman who writes lives.” Although his purpose is to deceive and to make money, he knows how to mask his intentions. Indeed, the author of Pamela is faithful to the “historical” Shamela—according to Fielding, the only Pamela that “really” exists—by imitating the manner of her “vartuous” representations to Booby. Like Shamela, the author of Pamela knows how to dupe his audience, albeit in a finer tone since he can get the spelling right and hide his sordid purpose behind “the mantle of impenetrable obscurity” of an editor.

Shamela, in short, is an actor in life, while the author of her life is an actor in print. The role of editor is only a ruse, meant to trap naive readers or even more sophisticated readers, since readers can choose to suspend their disbelief and read any fiction as if it were true.¹⁹ This is true of theatrical audiences or even audiences at what Fielding calls the “Theatre of Time.”²⁰ Authors, playwrights, actors, and ministers like Walpole know that their performances will succeed only if they find audiences foolish enough to be duped or willing to cede their judgment. Combining several of these roles—if not all, since, by his own admission, he played prime minister at Drury Lane—Cibber carries the duplicities of representation to a new level in Pamela. In his Apology, he had displayed his voluminous ego in his own voice. In Pamela, he cloaks his double intent—to dupe his readers and to make money—in a double impersonation. The first impersonation, as editor, masks and enables the second impersonation as the virtuous Pamela. Cibber impersonates the virtuous Pamela, and it is the authority of her virtue that ultimately lends authority to the story she purportedly tells. Fielding's target, then, is not so much the self-serving story told by Pamela because, as the author of Shamela insinuates, there is no Pamela. His real target is the author of Pamela who, by covering himself in the mantle of Pamela's virtue, makes a profit while pretending to retail moral instruction. And since authors have no authority without cooperating readers, Fielding also attacks readers who, like Parson Tickletext, pretend to be elevated by the book's morality while indulging in the gratification of emotions raised by “a poor girl's little, & c.”²¹ Equating furtive sexual pleasure with moral edification, confusing heroine with book, Parson Tickletext's masturbatory reading of Pamela cements Cibber's role as the founder of a new species of self-worshipping fiction.

If the success of a bad book like Pamela is predicated on several acts of bad faith, on acts of commission as well as omission, it is no wonder that a moral writer like Fielding would attempt to undermine the bases of its authority. Like Cervantes in Don Quixote, Fielding undermines the authority of one fiction by creating a counterfiction, by fashioning a text that, while fictional, claims to get at the “truth” by revealing the “real” events misrepresented in a previous text. But how does Fielding establish the authority of his representation of events? First, as we have already seen, by fashioning the fiction that he has discovered a more authoritative text, one closer in time and in fact to the presumably actual events. But Fielding does not present this authoritative text in Shamela; what we have, at best, is a representation of that text. As the title page clearly indicates, Shamela offers its readers “exact Copies of authentick Papers delivered to the Editor.” How these “authentick Papers” were “delivered to the Editor” we are not told. Indeed, we are not told very much. Are we reading the “exact Copies” of those “authentick Papers”—the “authentick Papers” having been or still being in the possession of the editor—or are we reading copies of those “exact Copies”? Unaware of the duplicities of representation endemic to the transmission of texts, naive readers of Pamela had confused the book in their hands with the “authentick” letters of the heroine, even though, in the very first letter, there is a clue that the book Pamela is nothing more than a printed copy of those letters. As Pamela spills tears on her missive and tells her parents not to “wonder to see the Paper so blotted,” readers of the book, unless they are weeping in sympathy, cannot see that blot on their paper.²² That is, there are at least two “papers” involved in the transmission of this text, in which case questions ought to arise concerning the accuracy of the transmission.

As we have noted, Cervantes obfuscates this issue in Don Quixote so that, in fact, we are many times not sure whether the narrative voice we hear is that of Cid Hamet (provided the translation is accurate), that of the translator, or that of the transcriber—or, indeed, whether another author, compiling the transcriptions of the transcriber, transmits the narrative to us. The issue becomes even more complicated in the second part, when the transmission of the first part in a printed book both undermines and supports the “reality” of the hero and his squire. At the most elementary level, the point of all these obfuscations is to keep readers from reading like Don Quixote, from granting authority and belief too quickly. But, as his many disruptions suggest, Cervantes was aware that even the most self-conscious readers of fiction need to be reminded of the peculiar aphasia brought on by the reading of fiction. Simply put, we forget that what we are reading is the thing that is not. We need to be told, over and over, that our paper is not blotted, that someone has transformed those “authentick Papers” into the printed document we are now reading and, in all likelihood, has falsified and misrepresented them.

What is needed, then, is the identification of that someone. In the title page to Pamela, Richardson cleverly evades that identification by foregrounding the name of his heroine, by claiming a moral purpose and a truthful “foundation” for the narrative, and by posing as the editor. The narrative is Pamela's, and Pamela is a historical person, a “hint” reiterated in the first of several letters to the editor (written by Aaron Hill) “prefixed” to the second edition:

But I think, the Hints you have given me, should also prefatorily be given to the Publick; viz. That it will appear from several Things mentioned in the Letters, that the Story must have happened within these Thirty Years past: That you have been obliged to vary some of the Names of Persons, Places, & c. and to disguise a few of the Circumstances, in order to avoid giving Offence to some Persons, who would not chuse to be pointed out too plainly in it; tho' they would be glad it may do the Good so laudably intended by the Publication. And as you have in Confidence submitted to my Opinion some of those Variations, I am much pleased that you have managed the Matter, as to make no Alteration in the Facts; and, at the same time, have avoided the digressive Prolixity too frequently used on such Occasions.²³

By establishing several mutually reinforcing foci of authority, Richardson creates the illusion that his narrative is authentic. But this illusion is shattered somewhat by this prolix and meandering commendatory epistle. While attempting to bolster Pamela's status as a historical person and the editor's probity and unselfish concern for the good of the public, the author of this epistle casts doubts on the fidelity of the representation. The letters have been altered, thus setting up Fielding's “recovery” and representation of the “exact” transcriptions of those originals. In anticipating objections to the truth of his work, Richardson offered “hints” to those who would wish to undermine it.²⁴

Richardson plays several parts here—Pamela, editor, pen pal of the editor—but never reveals his real identity as author, let alone as the historical Samuel Richardson, master printer.²⁵ The title page to Shamela fills in the inviting blank. The author, we find out, is a certain “Conny Keyber,” a composite pseudonym meant to attack, as many critics have noted, the master of self-praise Colley Cibber and the master of fulsome flattery Conyers Middleton.²⁶ This undermining of the moral integrity of the author continues in Keyber's revelatory and lubricious dedication to “Miss Fanny” as well as in John Puff's sardonic “character” of the author. Interestingly enough, John Puff does not seem to know the identity of the author. For him, “Conny Keyber” is a fictitious entity concealing a real historical author whose talents, given this performance, deserve to be put to better use, namely to “undertake the life” of Sir Robert Walpole.²⁷ If the prefatory matter to Pamela is meant to establish the authority of the author to write a morally useful book, the prefatory matter to Shamela destroys that authority by fashioning a shameless author who, parading his moral shortcomings, knows what the public wants and is ready to deliver.

That author, of course, is Henry Fielding, well concealed under the mantle of the pseudonymous Conny Keyber—so well concealed, in fact, that it was not until this century that Fielding's authorship, though suspected before, was finally established.²⁸ Before proceeding, I wish to emphasize that I agree with critics who, like Martin C. Battestin, read Shamela as a moral corrective to Pamela.²⁹ I wish to suggest, however, that Fielding's purpose is double, perhaps even duplicitous. To begin, Fielding wrote Shamela and Joseph Andrews, as Richardson suspected, to cash in on the enormous success of Pamela. We know that Fielding's financial circumstances at this time were dismal. On the grounds of necessity alone, he was perhaps justified, like Moll Flanders, to find a way to support himself and his family.³⁰ We also know that, at least once in his career, in The Female Husband, Fielding would cater to the public's double taste for pornographic titillation and moral commentary.³¹Shamela, then, needs to be viewed not as the work of the moral novelist that Fielding would become later on, the canonical Fielding we all revere, but as a work participating in the duplicities of representation it aims to expose and refute. In this respect, Shamela is reminiscent of A Tale of a Tub, a brilliant impersonation of a venal modern author by an author, who, perhaps unlike Swift, was closer to his avowed enemy than he was ready to reveal.

To be sure, Fielding also impersonates the good Parson Oliver, whose unimpeachable character, we are asked to believe, guarantees the “authenticity” of the story he tells, but we should not forget that Parson Oliver is a character in a book written by “Conny Keyber.” Indeed, our position as readers of Shamela is uncomfortably close to that of Parson Tickletext. That Parson Oliver's authority is confirmed within the work by the gullible (and angry) Parson Tickletext, who accepts the “authenticity” of the letters without seeing the originals and before he has “a certain account, that Mr. Booby hath caught his wife in bed with Williams; hath turned her off, and is prosecuting him in the spiritual court,” dramatizes the problems of assessing the truth of authorial representations.³² At the very end, we are asked to believe “a certain account” of dubious authenticity, related by a less than reliable source. Moreover, as Parson Tickletext reveals, he might be the final link in the transmission, if not the actual publisher or “editor,” of the “authentick Papers” we have just read. We believe, in short, only if we choose to forget virtually everything we have learned about the duplicities of representation while reading Shamela. Readers of Shamela find themselves in the peculiar position of accepting the moral while distrusting the fable, of risking reading like Don Quixote while maintaining a double perspective, of knowing and not knowing, of believing and not believing.

II

Because of its more comprehensive design, Joseph Andrews explores these issues more extensively. Because the exploration of these issues in Joseph Andrews is, in many ways, an extension of what goes on in Shamela, there is no need to examine the whole work. Instead, to avoid unnecessary repetition, I shall focus my attention in this section on two places in the narrative where these issues are prominently addressed: the Preface and the reading scene near the end. As I noted in the first part of this essay, the initial set of authorial duplicities occurs on the title page, in which Fielding reveals two “traditions” for his work. The Richardsonian tradition “hinted” at in “Andrews” is immediately occluded by the ostentatious announcement of indebtedness to the “author of Don Quixote.” Indeed, the name of the hero turns out to be a misrepresentation as Joseph, an unwitting Telemachus, eventually finds his real father and his real surname of Wilson. In this manner, the kinship to Richardson's heroine is erased, in romance fashion, by recovering the “true” genealogy. In an issue of The Champion (1 March 1739/40) devoted to the mysteries of authoring and publishing, Fielding expatiates knowingly on the topic of fathering:

Numberless are the Arts which the Street-walking Muses make use of to lay their Bastards at the Doors of their Betters, or in other Words by which Booksellers and their bad Authors endeavour to steal the Names of good ones. This Stratagem hath been long practised on the Dead, and since the Restoration of Learning and the Invention of Printing, most of the celebrated Authors of Antiquity have been forced to adopt as their own, the Offspring not only of several Ages beyond them, but even of such as have not had the least Affinity to them. I remember about twelve Years ago, upon the Success of a new Play of Shakspeare's, said to have been found somewhere by Somebody, the Craft set themselves to searching, and soon after I heard that several more Plays of Shakspeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ben Johnson were found, and the Town to be entertain'd with them. …

But the great Improvement of this Art is said to be the Growth of the present Age; namely, the borrowing the Name of an Author while he is alive.³³

Although the author of The Champion refuses (or pretends to refuse) to cooperate with the ruses devised by his bookseller to “give a Name (as he calls it) to this Paper,” he nonetheless accepts the realities of the marketplace, carefully disguising his mercenary intentions in the nonmercenary language of merit and paternity:

I answered him, that I scorned to impose false Colours on the World, that if my Paper could not succeed by Merit, it should not owe its Success to the Roguery of the Author. In short, that, like some tender Parents, I had such a Fondness for my Offspring, that I would not part with them to another even for their own Advantage.

However, to pacify him, I was forced to condescend to agree, that in order to make my Paper appear like a Spectator, it should for the Future be adorned with a Capital Letter at the End, as well as a Motto at the Beginning.³⁴

In Joseph Andrews, Fielding also avails himself of the advantages of this duplicitous procedure. Like Joseph, Fielding's book enters the world of print without the name of its actual “father,” its anonymous author establishing his “merit” by proclaiming his “affinity” to the “author of Don Quixote” rather than to his most immediate novelistic “father,” the author of Pamela Andrews.

The process of proclaiming—and disclaiming—affinities continues in the Preface. Nearly forty years ago, while presenting a largely unsympathetic account of Fielding's credentials as a novelist, Ian Watt asserted that, in the Preface to Joseph Andrews, Fielding is “at pains to justify his enterprise both to himself and to his literary peers by bringing it into line with the classical literary tradition.”³⁵ Watt also went on to suggest that “not too much importance should be attached to [the] Preface, which does not really adumbrate a whole theory of fiction; it merely, as Fielding himself says, contains ‘some few very short hints.’”³⁶ In the intervening years, many critics have attempted to refute this assessment, some finding in the Preface a theory of fiction that is indeed applied in the ensuing work.³⁷ Its most recent critic, however, has read the Preface more suspiciously, as a “cultural” (to use the most current critical term) rather than a literary document, suggesting that it “may also be read as a kind of ethics of representation of the urban poor.”³⁸ Though I question the value of unmasking Fielding as yet another oppressor of the poor and downtrodden—Fielding never pretends that he is their champion—I agree that the representations found in the Preface ought to be read with suspicion: they are not the transparent statements of purpose Fielding would have us believe. In fact, although I disagree with his dismissive assessment, I agree with Watt that the Preface is meant to justify the work to Fielding and his contemporaries and that it “does not really adumbrate a whole theory of fiction.” Unlike Watt, however, I read the Preface as a fictional performance, not as an unequivocally serious statement of purpose. If one reads the Preface too seriously, as Watt and his detractors (approaching it from different critical perspectives) do, one is bound to be disappointed. Fielding is pretending to be writing a serious preface, a preface which, as it turns out, might help some readers better to understand the work. But he is also doing other, far more interesting things with those prefatory words.³⁹

What Fielding is doing, first of all, is justifying the work to himself and to his contemporaries, not by connecting it to the “classical literary tradition” but by pretending to do so. A “Classical Reader” himself, Fielding knows that the ensuing work is not a classical epic or anything close to it. It represents—ironically, though not entirely so—a romance narrative of social climbing, underwritten by an improbable discovery of genealogical gentility, capped by an improbable happy ending, very much the kind of work the author insists throughout that he is not writing. What distinguishes Joseph Andrews from other works of this kind is its serious moral purpose, a subject on which Martin C. Battestin has written brilliantly, if not definitively.⁴⁰ That moral purpose is evident throughout the book and does not need a classical pedigree to justify it. But novels were regarded as a “low” form, “written chiefly,” in Jonson's famous later formulation, “to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life.”⁴¹ I would change the emphasis of Johnson's statement and suggest that novels were written chiefly to make money for booksellers and authors but were read primarily by apprentices, servant-maids, and the young of both sexes.⁴² But, given the right “moral” justification, there were other readers of this “low” form willing to come out of their reading closets. The “epidemical phrenzy” raging over the publication of Pamela confirmed that such was the case. By pretending to link his book to the classical literary tradition, Fielding, a classically trained, aristocratic Etonian driven to write novels by economic necessity, justifies his own excursion into this low province of writing and makes it acceptable for people like him to own up to their consumption of novelistic fiction.⁴³ Taken as a whole, the Preface to Joseph Andrews is an enabling fiction, a document significant not so much for what it “actually” says—though what it “actually” says can be used to establish its significance—as for the uses to which the sayings found within it can be put.

The Preface, then, commands both our belief and our disbelief. Occupying that liminal space between the title page and before the beginning of what seems to be the unmistakably fictional narrative—though, in Joseph Andrews, as well as in Tom Jones and Amelia, the opening chapter turns out to be another preface—the Preface appears to mark a transition between our world and the fictional world, between literal and literary statements. For this reason, many readers read prefaces seriously, as true statements written by the real author. My point, of course, is that the Preface to Joseph Andrews is just as fictional as what follows it. But Fielding exploits both what the Preface is and what it appears to be, its double status as historical and fictional document. To be “good-natured” readers of Joseph Andrews, we must act as if we believe, among other things, the author's claim to originality, his definition of the “comic Epic-Poem in Prose,” the convoluted genealogy he offers for his book (followed a few pages later, in case we have not yet got the joke, by the clearly parodic attempts to find “ancestors” for the hero).⁴⁴ Although the author avers that he does not “remember” to “have seen [this kind of writing] hitherto attempted in our Language,”⁴⁵ readers with moderate memories would recognize that, even if one agrees with the author and grants originality to the work as a whole, the Preface itself recalls such English antecedents as Congreve's self-mocking preface to Incognita (1692) as well as A. M. Ramsay's solemn “A Discourse upon Epic Poetry,” one of several documents serving as preface to Ozell's translation of The Adventures of Telemachus (1740). And, of course, Cervantes offers a problematic version of these “curious matters” in the canon's “discourse upon books of knight-errantry,” problematic because the canon, after blasting these books for their mendacity and improbability, proceeds to praise them (“for Epicks may be as well writ in Prose as in Verse”) and reveals that he once thought of writing such a book himself but refrained because of his reluctance, given his office, to stoop to such low entertainment and risk being “laugh'd at for my Pains.”⁴⁶

It could be argued that, once we learn the identity of the author of Joseph Andrews with the publication of the third edition, the Preface commands more serious attention, its seriousness supported by the authority we—and, to a lesser extent, his contemporaries—grant to Henry Fielding, Esq. But that granting of authority, of belief, ought to be accompanied by some skepticism: the author of this Preface is also the author of another, very similar pseudo-Aristotelian document, the preface to The Tragedy of Tragedies written by H. Scriblerus Secundus. The Preface to Joseph Andrews is, in short, another Scriblerian performance, not so much a “preface” as a representation of a preface. Readers of prose fiction expected to find prefaces justifying and extolling the virtues of the ensuing work, and Fielding, faithfully imitating the “Arts” of “Booksellers and their bad Authors,” delivers precisely what his readers want. A Preface that contains an extensive disquisition on affectation and hypocrisy invites careful scrutiny.

Before we agree to assume the role of “good-natur'd Reader” encouraged by the author at the end of his Preface, then, we must ponder the implications of doing so. Although the author appears to suggest that “my good-natur'd Reader” has the freedom “to apply my Piece to my Observations,” it is clear that, if we do not do so, we stop being “good-natur'd.”⁴⁷ Underlined by the proprietary (if not patronizing) “my,” this subtle bullying of the reader into accepting a prescribed reading recurs throughout Fielding's works. Sometimes the bullying is not so subtle. For example, in Tom Jones, after the narrator has discoursed learnedly and sensibly on love, he enjoins his “good Reader” to “examine your Heart … and resolve whether you do believe these Matters with me.” Then, in a tone reminiscent of Gulliver in his letter to his Cousin Sympson, the narrator continues:

If you do, you may now proceed to their Exemplification in the following Pages; if you do not, you have, I assure you, already read more than you have understood; and it would be wiser to pursue your Business, or your Pleasures (such as they are) than to throw away any more of your Time in reading what you can neither taste nor comprehend.⁴⁸

Of course, this overt badgering of the reader might be read as another authorial pose, as another argumentative strategy adopted for the purposes of instruction. Whether serious or playful, however, these statements reveal Fielding's distrust of his readers' ability to arrive at the correct reading without authorial prodding. But readers need to discriminate among reading situations. There is a difference between accepting a moral judgment after assessing its validity and acceding to an authorial representation simply because the author says so. We are warned about this naive granting of authority when the author pretends to believe the exculpatory assertions of Tom Suckbribe and his defenders: “But, notwithstanding these and many other such Allegations, I am sufficiently convinced of his Innocence; having been positively assured of it, by those who received their Informations from his own Mouth; which, in the Opinion of some Moderns, is the best and indeed only Evidence.”⁴⁹ That this statement occurs within an episode representing a pseudojudiciary procedure should remind the reader that, like a magistrate or jury, he or she must sift the “Evidence” before passing judgment. As William Empson, writing magisterially on Tom Jones, phrased it nearly forty years ago, “The unusual thing about Fielding as a novelist is that he is always ready to consider what he would do if one of his characters came before him when he was on the bench. … As to the reader of a novel, Fielding cannot be bothered with him unless he too is fit to sit on a magistrate's bench, prepared, in literature as in life, to handle and judge any situation. That is why the reader gets teased so frankly.”⁵⁰ The author clearly has a palpable design on us but, as the example of Parson Adams so glaringly illustrates, there are dangers to being a “good-natur'd Reader.”

Authors, in short, have many motives—some good, some bad—for making representations to readers and, to achieve their ends, resort to “numberless … Arts.” Parson Adams, as many critics have noted, is a less than “fit” reader.⁵¹ An excellent classical scholar, whose brilliant oration on Homer makes Wilson suspect “whether he had not a Bishop in his House,”⁵² Adams seems unable to apply the knowledge he has garnered from books to the world unfolding before him. In fact, if the Christian doctrine of the book depends, as we are repeatedly told, on his “Character,” some explanation is clearly needed. Fielding provides such an explanation in the concluding paragraph of the Preface, and, in doing so, tests our own fitness as readers of authorial representations:

As to the Character of Adams, as it is the most glaring in the whole, so I conceive it is not to be found in any Book now extant. It is designed a Character of perfect Simplicity; and as the Goodness of his Heart will recommend him to the Good-natur'd; so I hope it will excuse me to the Gentlemen of his Cloth; for whom, while they are worthy of their sacred Order, no Man can possibly have a greater Respect. They will therefore excuse me, notwithstanding the low Adventures in which he is engaged, that I have made him a Clergyman; since no other Office could have given him so many Opportunities of displaying his worthy Inclinations.⁵³

This is Fielding doing a Richardsonian turn, anticipating and attempting to answer objections to his work. We know from other contexts—for example, the “Apology for the Clergy” appearing over several numbers of The Champion (March 29 and April 5, 12, and 19)—that Fielding's comments on the clergy here may be taken as authentic. But their authenticity is compromised by the context in which these statements now appear, in a preface to a novel, where “apologies” of another sort are usually found. The problem is that Parson Adams, as Fielding admits, is not represented in a wholly admirable light, that, because of his being “engaged” in “low Adventures,” he is often more ridiculous than admirable. With its claim to originality and its appeal to the “Good-natur'd,” this paragraph is meant not so much to explain the author's problematic “design” as to convince readers that that “design” is justified on “moral” grounds. It is, in short, another instance of those “Arts” of the book trade which readers ought to regard with extreme suspicion. Simply put, Henry Fielding and Andrew Millar want readers to buy the book, and this apology to the clergy, whatever its degree of sincerity, is a necessary strategy to achieving that end. The book that follows may indeed be a moral book, but the author's representations concerning his motives and procedures in the Preface, self-serving as all such authorial representations inevitably are, cannot be taken as a guarantee of that morality.

Suspicion of authorial representations is what is lacking in Parson Adams and what makes him, though learned, a deficient reader. Parson Adams, at first, does not appear to be like Don Quixote, who grants authority to books that do not deserve it. The books Parson Adams grants authority to are the most authoritative books in our tradition, namely the Scriptures and the Greek and Roman classics. But, as we learn near the end of Joseph Andrews, this habit of granting authority extends to less worthy books as well. As his little son begins to read the story of Leonard and Paul—a story exemplifying how the granting of, and submission to, authority is often related to self-interest—Parson Adams notices a contradiction: “‘But good as this Lady was, she was still a Woman; that is to say, an Angel and not an Angel—’ ‘You must mistake, Child,’ cries the Parson, ‘for you read Nonsense.’ ‘It is so in the Book,’ answered the Son. Mr. Adams was then silenc'd by Authority, and Dick proceeded.”⁵⁴ For Parson Adams, the book is an “Authority” simply by being a book, its power to “silence” the reader residing in that fact alone. Fortunately, this deficiency does not undercut his status as a good man, especially since he does not grant authority indiscriminately outside books, in the “real” world, and can thus stand up to Lady Booby's abuse of authority when she attempts to prevent the marriage of Joseph and Fanny. At moments like these, we recognize that, for Adams, God is the ultimate authority. But, when he reads, his god is his book, its authority overruling his reason and making him accept “Nonsense.” Parson Adams thus resembles Parson Tickletext before his “conversion” and Parson Oliver in his role as true Christian priest. Readers of Joseph Andrews are expected to assume a double perspective, to laugh at Parson Adams's inadequacies while admiring his “Character,” to read suspiciously with their heads while giving faith with their hearts—in short, to add judgment to their presumed good nature.

It is on this presumption of his readers' good nature that Fielding hopes to base his authority. It is clear, from the diffident tone of his justification of Adams's “Character,” that Fielding recognizes the dangers of representing Parson Adams as a figure of mirth. Unlike Shaftesbury, who seemed to have had unbounded confidence in the “Test of Ridicule,” Fielding understood the risks of this procedure.⁵⁵ If readers begin to regard Adams as an object of contempt, from the superior perspective of Hobbesian laughter, then the doctrine of the book would be undermined. This is why, within the narrative itself, those who engage in this contemptuous laughter are rarely viewed as good natured. In fact, the good nature of any given character is often tested by his or her reaction to Adams. By mixing ridicule and moral instruction, Fielding is asking his readers to engage in acts of careful discrimination. By appealing to their good nature, he is also flattering them into submitting to his authority. In short, like Leonard and his wife, who submit to Paul's authority to gain superiority of understanding, we grant Fielding authority because his presumption of our good nature appeals to our self-love. Like Don Quixote, we contribute to our own deception. The reading scene near the end of Joseph Andrews allows us to feel superior to Adams—we do not, after all, read so foolishly; it also ought to remind us that, having read this far, we are more like Parson Adams and Don Quixote than we had suspected, that we, too, have been fooled by the duplicities of representation. But we have also been enlightened by an author who, immersed in those duplicities himself, has taught us to read differently.

Notes

1. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 1. Further quotations of Joseph Andrews will be from this edition.

2. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Life and Atchievements of the Renown'd Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Peter Motteux (1700), rev. John Ozell (New York: Modern Library, 1930), 53-55. Further quotations of Don Quixote will be from this edition. Don Quixote was actually translated by several anonymous “hands,” published by Motteux, and later revised by Ozell. Fielding owned the sixth edition of the Motteux-Ozell Don Quixote (1733).

3. For a modest selection of critical works on this topic, see Homer Goldberg, The Art of Joseph Andrews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 117-36; Susan Staves, “Don Quixote in Eighteenth-Century England,” Comparative Literature 24 (1972): 193-215; and Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 140-63.

4. The Covent-Garden Journal (4 February 1752), in The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Office, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 74.

5. “Of True History,” trans. Thomas Brown, in The Works of Lucian, 4 vols. (London, 1711), 3:125. For Fielding's debt to Lucian, see Henry Knight Miller, Essays on Fielding's Miscellanies: A Commentary on Volume One (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 365-419; and Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1967), 31-42.

6. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), xxxviii.

7. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 185. On Fielding and history, see Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding & Gibbon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 91-212; and Leland E. Warren, “History-as-Literature and the Narrative Stance of Henry Fielding,” Clio 9 (1979): 89-109.

8. See Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 382-409; and Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 239-89 (for Watt's definition of “formal realism,” see 32-34).

9. Albert J. Rivero, The Plays of Henry Fielding: A Critical Study of His Dramatic Career (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989); Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990) (for Sher's remarks concerning his coinage of “enstrangement” and his preference of that term over “defamiliarization,” see xviii-xix).

10. This is especially true of studies of A Tale of a Tub. See, for example, John R. Clark, Form and Frenzy in Swift's Tale of a Tub (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970); Robert C. Elliott, “Swift's Tale of a Tub: An Essay in Problems of Structure,” PMLA 66 (1951): 441-55; Phillip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of A Tale of a Tub (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Ronald Paulson, Theme and Structure in Swift's Tale of a Tub (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960); and Miriam Kosh Starkman, Swift's Satire on Learning in A Tale of a Tub (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). For a selection of counterarguments, see Irvin Ehrenpreis, “Personae,” in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 25-37; Cary Nelson, The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Frederik N. Smith, Language and Reality in Swift's A Tale of a Tub (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979); Gardner D. Stout, Jr., “Speaker and Satiric Vision in Swift's A Tale of a Tub,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969): 175-99; and John Traugott, “A Tale of a Tub,” in The Character of Swift's Satire: A Revised Focus, ed. Claude Rawson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), 83-126.

11. See Martin C. Battestin's General Introduction to the Wesleyan, Joseph Andrews, xv-xvi, and The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art: A Study of “Joseph Andrews” (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959). For a dissenting view, see Robert Alan Donovan, The Shaping Vision: Imagination in the English Novel from Defoe to Dickens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 68-88.

12. See Rivero, The Plays of Henry Fielding, 7-15.

13. The Champion (1 March 1739/40), in The Champion, 2 vols. (London, 1741), 1:322. Fielding had devoted an earlier issue (15 January 1739/40) to defining authority, primarily in a political context:

    By Authority, then, I understand, that Weight which one Man bears in the Mind of another, resulting from an Opinion of any extraordinary Qualities or Virtues inherent in him, which prepares the latter to receive the most favourable Impression from all the Words and Actions of the Person thus esteem'd: This Opinion, when it becomes General of any Man, constitutes what we call Popularity, which whoever hath attained, may with great Facility procure any Thing, which it is in the Power of the People to confer on him, may persuade them to, or dissuade them from any Purposes. Whatever he affirms, they will believe; whatever he affects they will hope; whatever he commands, they will execute.

    (187)

    The paper ends with a self-referential ironic twist equating politicians with authors:

    Whence this Authority accrues, is not necessary to discuss. In public Characters, I believe, it is generally the Attendant on Merit, tho' I confess that sometimes here, and often in private Life, we owe Esteem and Contempt, to accidental, indirect, and sometimes ridiculous Circumstances; of which I shall give this flagrant Instance, that ‘till my Removal to a polite Part of the Town, the World paid very little Respect to those excellent Discourses with which I obliged them, possessing themselves with an Opinion, that nothing worth their reading, could possibly come from Hockley in the Hole.

    (189)

14. Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 155.

15. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961), 299. Further quotations of Shamela will be from this edition.

16. Frances Burney, Evelina or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 7.

17. Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, 337.

18. Ibid.

19. This is a point Richardson makes in a letter to William Warburton (19 April 1748), following Warburton's writing of a preface for the first edition of Clarissa:

    Will you, good Sir, allow me to mention, that I could wish that the Air of Genuineness had been kept up, tho' I want not the letters to be thought genuine; only so far kept up, I mean, as that they should not prefatically be owned not to be genuine: and this for fear of weakening their Influence where any of them are aimed to be exemplary; as well as to avoid hurting that kind of Historical Faith which Fiction itself is generally read with, tho' we know it to be Fiction.

    (Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964], 85)

20. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 325. Further quotations of Tom Jones will be from this edition.

21. Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, 305.

22. Samuel Richardson, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, 2 vols. (London, 1741), 1:2.

23. Ibid., 1:viii-ix. After the appearance of Shamela and other “sequels” to Pamela, Richardson, sounding almost like Cervantes in the second part of Don Quixote, asserts the factuality of his story and heroine and thus attempts to recover his literary property. I quote the advertisement appearing at the end of the fourth volume of the 1742 edition:

    There being Reason to apprehend, from the former Attempts of some Imitators, who, supposing the Story of PAMELA a Fiction, have murder'd that excellent Lady, and mistaken and misrepresented other (suppos'd imaginary) Characters, that Persons may not be wanting, who will impose new Continuations upon the Publick: It is with a View to some Designs of this Nature, that the Editor (who is sorry to find himself under a Necessity of declaring disagreeable Truths, and who both hates and would avoid all Occasion of Offence or Reflection) gives this publick Assurance, by way of Prevention, That all the Copies of Mrs. B.'s Observations and Writings, upon every Subject hinted at in the preceding Four Volumes, and in particular those relating to Devotion, Education, Plays, & c. are now in One Hand Only: And that, if ever they shall be published, (which at present is a Point undetermined) it must not be, till after a certain Event, as unwished, as deplorable: And then, solely, at the Assignment of SAMUEL RICHARDSON, of Salisbury-Court, Fleetstreet, the Editor of these Four Volumes of PAMELA: or, Virtue Rewarded.”

    (4:472)

    Like Cervantes, Richardson was willing to “murder” his own heroine to avoid further unauthorized sequels. On sequels to Pamela, see Bernard Kreissman, Pamela-Shamela: A Study of the Criticisms, Burlesques, Parodies, and Adaptations of Richardson's “Pamela” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960).

24. Lady Davers, for example, anticipates many of Fielding's criticisms, especially those concerning the issue of social leveling (which is, perhaps, one of the reasons why her character is extirpated at the end of Shamela).

25. Given the opening epistle of Shamela, we can infer that Fielding assumed that the “commendatory letters” prefixed to the work were written by the “Editor to Himself” (303). This mistaken assumption led to the end of his friendship with Aaron Hill, the actual author of those letters. On this point, see Martin C., with Ruthe R., Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), 308.

26. On this topic, see Martin C. Battestin's introduction to his edition of Shamela (Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela), x-xvi. On the political significance of Shamela, see Hugh Amory, “Shamela as Aesopic Satire,” ELH 38 (1971): 239-53; J. Paul Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 88-93; and Eric Rothstein, “The Framework of Shamela,” ELH 35 (1968): 381-402.

27. Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, 303.

28. See C. B. Woods, “Fielding and the Authorship of Shamela,” Philological Quarterly 25 (1946): 248-72.

29. See Martin C. Battestin, Introduction to Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, x-xvi; and The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art, 3-5.

30. On Fielding's financial circumstances at this time, see the Battestins' account in Henry Fielding: A Life, 257-304.

31. For a reading of this shoddy performance, see Terry Castle, “Matters Not Fit to Be Mentioned: Fielding's The Female Husband,” ELH 49 (1982): 602-22.

32. Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, 339-40.

33. The Champion, 1:323.

34. Ibid., 1:325-26. On Fielding's implication in the commercial world, see James Cruise, “Fielding, Authority, and the New Commercialism in Joseph Andrews,” ELH 54 (1987): 253-76.

35. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 248.

36. Ibid., 251.

37. See, for example, Sheridan Baker, “Fielding's Comic Epic-in-Prose Romances Again,” Philological Quarterly 58 (1979): 63-81; and Homer Goldberg, “Comic Prose Epic or Comic Romance: The Argument of the Preface to Joseph Andrews,” Philological Quarterly 43 (1964): 193-215. Joseph F. Bartolomeo ably summarizes and assesses the various views in this debate; see A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-Century Discourse on the Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 63-77.

38. Judith Frank, “The Comic Novel and the Poor: Fielding's Preface to Joseph Andrews,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (1993/4): 218. On the differences between Fielding's representations in his fiction and social pamphlets, see John Richetti, “Class Struggle Without Class: Novelists and Magistrates,” The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation 32 (1991): 212; and Malvin R. Zirker, Jr., Fielding's Social Pamphlets: A Study of An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 138-39.

39. My thinking about literary language and the nature of fictions has been influenced by the following: J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982); Jeremy Bentham, Bentham's Theory of Fictions, ed. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1932); Kate Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. Marilynn Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973); Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Marthe Robert, Origins of the Novel, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Barbara Herrnstein Smith, On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); and Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As if”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965).

40. See Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art.

41. Samuel Johnson, Rambler no. 4 (31 March 1750), in Selected Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler, ed. W. J. Bate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 11.

42. On the early readers of novels, see J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 61-88.

43. In the same issue of The Covent-Garden Journal in which he refers to his “great Triumvirate,” Fielding, quoting Horace and Richardson, addresses this point: “When Wit and Humour are introduced for such good Purposes, when the agreeable is blended with the useful, then is the Writer said to have succeeded in every Point. Pleasantry, (as the ingenious Author of Clarissa says of a Story) should be made only the Vehicle of Instruction; and thus Romances themselves, as well as Epic Poems, may become worthy the Perusal of the greatest of Men” (73). Fielding here may be answering the charges of his friend James Harris who, writing in Hermes (London, 1751), wishes “that those amongst us, who either write or read … would inspect the finished Models of Grecian Literature; that they would not waste those hours, which they cannot recall, upon the meaner productions of the French and English Press; upon that fungous growth of Novels and of Pamphlets, where ‘tis to be feared, they rarely find any rational pleasure, and more rarely still, any solid improvement” (424-25). Unlike the patrician, financially comfortable Harris, Fielding could not afford to steer clear of those “meaner productions.” Harris sides with Parson Adams, not with Fielding, on another important issue: “And as to those who tell us, with an air of seeming wisdom, that ‘tis Men, and not Books we must study to become knowing; this I have always remarked from repeated experience, to be the common consolation and language of Dunces” (425).

44. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 20-21.

45. Ibid., 3.

46. Cervantes, Don Quixote, 405-9. A footnote to “for Epicks may be as well writ in Prose as in Verse” informs the reader that “the Adventures of Telemachus is a Proof of this” (408).

47. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 10.

48. Fielding, Tom Jones, 271. A similar passage appears in Joseph Andrews: “O Reader, conceive if thou canst, the Joy which fired the Breasts of these Lovers on this Meeting; and, if thy own Heart doth not sympathetically assist thee in this Conception, I pity thee sincerely from my own: for let the hard-hearted Villain know this, that there is a Pleasure in a tender Sensation beyond any which he is capable of tasting” (270).

49. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 71-72.

50. William Empson, “Tom Jones,” Kenyon Review 20 (1958): 249.

51. On this subject, see Charles A. Knight, “Joseph Andrews and the Failure of Authority,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4 (1992): 119-20; and Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel, 126.

52. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 199.

53. Ibid., 10-11.

54. Ibid., 316. In Of the Conduct of the Understanding, published in 1706, Locke writes at length on reading; I quote from Francis W. Garforth's edition (New York: Teachers College Press, 1966): “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours.” Then, echoing Bacon, Locke continues: “We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment” (73). It is clear that Fielding encourages his readers to engage in this kind of “ruminating” reading. At the same time, aware of the dangers of encouraging this freedom, he aims to control his readers' responses, thus becoming the “jure divino Tyrant” he claims not to be in Tom Jones (77). In short, Fielding wishes for readers who, believing themselves to be autonomous, read as submissively and as reverentially as Parson Adams. For Locke's comments on reading and authority, see Of the Conduct of the Understanding, 83-86.

55. For Shaftesbury's “Test of Ridicule,” see “A Letter concerning Enthusiasm to My Lord Sommers” (1708), published as Treatise I in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols. (London, 1714), 1:10-12. Whether ridicule undermined religious doctrine was hotly debated. On the one hand, Shaftesbury, attacking the enthusiasm of Puritans and other religious fanatics, postulated that ridicule allows us to discern “true Gravity from the false” (11) and thus get at the truth. One of his disciples, Anthony Collins, in A Discourse concerning Ridicule and Irony in WRITING (London, 1729), cites Erasmus as “one of the greatest and best Authorities for the pleasant and ironical manner of treating serious matters” (10), goes on to praise Lucian for employing his “Talents against Superstition and Hypocrisy” (11), and defends Swift for his “drolling” in A Tale of a Tub (39). On the other hand, William Warburton, in The Divine Legation of Moses (1738), clearly identifies this position with “free-thinkers,” to whom he ironically “dedicates” his work. While not sharing the “free-thinking” slant of Shaftesbury's argument, Fielding found his position congenial, especially when sanctioned by the practice of Lucian and of religious men like Erasmus and Swift. Swift, of course, was widely suspected of being the author of “A Letter concerning Enthusiasm” before Shaftesbury's public acknowledgment of authorship, a suspicion Swift attempts to allay in the author's Apology to A Tale of a Tub. Given these circumstances, it is understandable why Fielding, no doubt aware of the potentially irreligious uses to which the “Test of Ridicule” could be put, when “testing” became a cover for mockery, proceeds with caution here. Whether his precepts accord with his example, whether his representation of purpose is consonant with his representation of Parson Adams, is still a matter of debate.