1

In the Richardson-Fielding rivalry of the 1740s it is easy to be reminded of the more tacit opposition between Defoe and Swift several decades earlier. The similarities are temperamental as well as cultural. Richardson's transparent vanity, masking a persistent sensitivity to his lack of "the very great Advantage of an Academical Education," seems a natural foil to the serene diffidence and careless superiority of the graduate of Eton and Leyden, who counted the Earl of Denbigh among his blood relations. But Fielding's mastery of a certain aristocratic hauteur belies a social background—and social attitudes—of considerable complexity. His father was the younger son of a younger son and a military man under Marlborough. His mother came from a family of established professional standing, and after her death when Henry was eleven, there ensued a custody suit that consumed the remainder of his youth, and enforced on him an alternation between city and country pursuits and between culturally divergent expectations of how his own way was to be made in the world.¹

Until the Licensing Act of 1737, Fielding made his way most successfully as a playwright, a profession in which many of the narrative preoccupations with which we will be concerned underwent an important development. The highly reflexive quality of much of Fielding's drama suggests that he was both fascinated and impatient with an artistic mode so obligated to the evidence of the senses that its illusions fairly cried out for an easy disconfirmation. In The Historical Register for the Year 1736, for example, Fielding toys with the literalistic, pseudo-Aristotelian "unity of time," and its requirement of a strict correspondence between time represented and time elapsed in its representation, in a way that presages his later play with the naíve claim to historicity and its pretense to an unselective completeness of narrative detail. These farces are also Fielding's first laboratory for the experimental juxtaposition of questions of truth and virtue. It was not hard to see, in the popular theater of the period, a connection between the epistemological ingratiation of the senses evident in the wholesale reliance on theatrical "spectacle," and the shameless commercial pandering that was entailed in such theatrics. Moreover Fielding often seized the occasion to specify the traditional analogy of the world and the stage to a self-conscious critique of political manipulation and corruption under the Whig "management" of the 1730s. Even the old dramatic device of discovery and reversal takes on (at least with hindsight) a characteristically Fieldingesque exorbitance. Thus, in The Author's Farce (1730), we follow the fortunes of a platitudinously progressive hero who, "thrown naked upon the world … can make his way through it by his merit and virtuous industry," and who nevertheless turns out, in a riot of romance revelations of parentage, to be heir apparent to royalty.²

Given the energy with which he pushed against the conventions of dramatic representation, it is scarcely surprising that, once obliged to turn to narrative, Fielding adopted the skeptical stance of the "historian." His earliest work of this sort, The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), was substantially complete before Pamela appeared at the end of 1740. Its satiric response to the problem of how to tell the truth in narrative therefore owes less to the instigations of Richardson than to Fielding's wide reading in ancient and modern historiography. And the difficult complexity of that response can be explained by the way the parodic mode of his skepticism both does and does not coordinate with the ironic mode of his mock-heroic.³

What is shared by these modes is the familiar pattern of "double reversal." Fielding's parodic "history" is first of all a critique of the idealizing, "romancing" method of traditional biographies, with their near-immemorial lineages, premonitions of greatness, frankly supernatural deliverances, fabricated speeches, and the like. Yet the parody of traditional history can also implicitly subvert the modern and rationalizing standard of historicity, from which it is incompletely separated. On this second level of formal satire, Fielding parodies the distinctively modern form of criminal biography, its characteristic devices of authentication, and especially the proliferation of documents on which its claim to historicity depends—ordinary's accounts, authentic letters and journals, convincingly fragmentary shorthand transcriptions, and painstaking ear-witness testimony. Thus the critique of the old, romancing histories is supplemented by a critique of the "new romance" of naíve empiricism and its modernized methods of imposing on the credulity of the reader. By the same token, Fielding's mock-heroic is first of⁴ all an ironic reduction of the unheroic rogue by the normative standards of genuine heroism and its conventional panegyric forms; but it is then also an unstable and self-subverting movement against the heroic standard itself. Jonathan Wild is like Alexander and Caesar in evincing the "imperfection" of "a mixture of good and evil in the same character." But Fielding is different from the ancient biographers in knowing—and in letting us know—that these qualities are morally incompatible: that precisely what we call "heroism" is the essence of evil in such figures, and that it entirely overshadows whatever small goodness they may also exhibit (I, i, 3-5; IV, xv, 175-76). Modern heroes are rogues; but so are ancient heroes, and on this recognition Fielding bases his sincere claim "to draw natural, not perfect characters, and to record the truths of history, not the extravagances of romance" (IV, iv, 135). So the critique of modern roguery is supplemented by a critique of ancient roguery and of the romancing historians who call it heroism.⁵

The self-subversive instability of Fielding's mock-heroic, which he shares with his age, is parallel to that of naíve empiricism and an expression of the same implacable process. Once launched, the skeptical critique might assume a force of its own and overturn its original premises. What makes Fielding's satire notoriously difficult here is that the same element, traditional historiography, occupies opposed positions in the two parallel reversals. In Fielding's strategy of extreme skepticism, Plutarch and Suetonius are the negative examples that are attacked by the normative standard of empirical history, even as naíve empiricism itself is subjected to parody. But in the mock-heroic movement, it is the modern example that is negative; the positive norm by which it is criticized is ancient history, which in turn becomes vulnerable to a similar attack. What is achieved by this remarkable interweaving of satiric strategies that are structurally parallel but asymmetrical in substance? The major effect of the asymmetry—the confusing conflation of terms (positive and negative, ancient and modern, hero and rogue) that have been posited in opposition to each other—is to emphasize what is a dominant feature of each strategy as it operates on its own: the sense of the collapse of categories. At the same time, the structural parallel between the skeptical and mock-heroic strategies is solid enough to suggest that what is at issue here is not only questions of truth. For the latter movement mediates us from the epistemological concerns of the former to an analogous realm of ethical and social concerns, from questions of truth to questions of virtue.

Fielding's central term in the critique of heroism—the slippery notion of "greatness"—bears a close relation to the equally slippery notion of Machiavellian virtu. Machiavelli is the modern historian most responsible for extending and transforming the Roman "ideal" of amoral heroism, and Fielding's Jonathan Wild is a classic Machiavellian "new man" who rises by force and fraud and even learns to purvey his own Machiavellian "maxims" (IV, xv, 173-74). Like his epistemology, Fielding's ideology is the issue of a double critique: first of aristocratic ideology by progressive, then of progressive ideology by conservative. The slipperiness of "greatness" is vital to this dialectical movement. To the progressive mentality, the greatness of a newly risen "Great Man" like Sir Robert Walpole is a matter of social stature that implies a correspondent moral elevation. But Fielding shows that progressives are the unconscious and stealthy heirs of ancient aristocratic assumptions about the congruity of inner and outer states. The moral proximity of great men like Walpole and Alexander the Great (who might with justice end their days by hanging), and rogues like Wild (who actually do), argues the conservative truth that status inconsistency yet reigns in the modern world of progressive "social justice" as surely as it did in ancient, aristocratic culture, when "greatness" and "goodness" were taken to be coextensive (IV, xii, 168, xiv, 170, 171).⁶

Yet if Fielding's major purpose in Jonathan Wild is clearly a conservative critique of the progressive upstart, the narrative retains the coherent, if schematic, imprint of its enabling progressive premise, the skeleton of a progressive plot satiric of aristocratic honor. Of course, the progressive foundation is evident elsewhere in Fielding's work as well. Earlier, in the Miscellanies, he is outspoken in his contempt for the way that

the least Pretensions to Pre-eminence in Title, Birth, Riches, Equipage, Dress, &c. constantly overlook the most noble Endowments of Virtue, Honour, Wisdom, Sense, Wit, and every other Quality which can truly dignify and adorn a Man … That the fortuitous Accident of Birth, the Acquisition of Wealth, with some outward Ornaments of Dress, should inspire Men with an Insolence capable of treating the rest of Mankind with Disdain, is so preposterous, that nothing less than daily Experience could give it Credit.

And to the "infamous worthless Nobleman" who claims that his inherent worth has descended to him with his title, Fielding makes the empiricist retort "that a Title originally implied Dignity, as it implied the Presence of those Virtues to which Dignity is inseparably annexed; but that no Implication will fly in the Face of downright positive Proof to the contrary."7

In Jonathan Wild, the dominant conservative satire is supported by the scaffolding of a progressive satire against aristocratic values. Like Fielding's worthless nobleman, Jonathan Wild is convinced of the genealogical powers of "the blood of the Wilds, which hath run with such uninterrupted purity through so many generations," and he passionately believes honor to be "the essential quality of a gentleman" (IV, x, 156; I, xiii, 37). To appreciate Wild's story as a progressive satire on aristocratic ideology we must isolate that discontinuous but palpable strain of "greatness" which consists in a genealogical gentility distinguished by nothing so much as petty viciousness and bumbling incompetence. We begin with "the fortuitous accident of birth" memorialized in the Wild lineage (I, ii). His father educates "the young gentleman" in "principles of honour and gentility" and sends him on his own version of the Tour (I, iii, 11, vii, 21-22). Wild soon learns to socialize with aristocratic types like Count la Ruse, whose status as "men of honour" is firmly established by their apparent willingness to duel at the drop of a glove (see I, iv, 11-12, viii, 25-26, xi, 31, xiii, 36-37). And his later career is broadly marked by a succession of dupings—generally receiving worse than he gives—that confirm in the "gentleman" an absence both of virtue and of dignity.⁸

In a truly progressive plot, the dominant corollary of this negative example would be the positive story of the rise of industrious virtue.⁹ In Jonathan Wild we have the problematic shadow of such a corollary in the figure of Heartfree (to whom I will return). But the more fundamental—and characteristically conservative—tendency is to collapse the very distinction between positive and negative, on which progressive plots thrive, by making "industrious virtue" itself a highly suspect category. Thus the "progressive" critique of the "aristocratic" Wild is constantly neutralized by the demonstration that the legitimate and successful man of virtue, against whom he has putatively been judged, is essentially no different from Wild himself. As we are relentlessly compelled to attend to the leveling analogy between rogue and statesman, Fielding's progressive plot dissolves before our eyes. The insistent proximity of Wild and Walpole forces us to identify the trappings of "honor" as the hypocritical aggrandizements of the assimilationist upstart; and the status inconsistency of aristocratic culture, so far from being resolved by the rise of the new men of "virtue," is seen to be aggravated by it.¹⁰

Echoing his conservative predecessors, Fielding sometimes makes the relation between rogue and statesman intelligible as one not simply of similarity but of contiguity, as the plot of doing well enough in the world to be called no longer the former but the latter:

Can there be a more instructive Lesson against that abominable and pernicious Vice, Ambition, than the Sight of a mean Man, rais'd by fortunate Accidents and execrable Vices to Power, employing the basest Measures and the vilest Instruments to support himself; looked up to only by Sycophants and Slaves and sturdy Beggars, Wretches whom even he must in his Heart despise in all their Tinsel; looked down upon, and scorned and shunned by every Man of Honour … without Dignity in his Robes, without Honour from his Titles, without Authority from his Power [?]

Here is the classic conservative reduction. Progressive "virtue" only recapitulates the old arbitrariness of aristocratic "honor": if inherited nobility owes its ascendancy to "the fortuitous accident of birth," the self-made upstart is similarly "raised by fortunate accidents and execrable vices." But in Jonathan Wild the rise of rogue to statesman is less crucial than the riveting fact of their similarity. A "great man and a great rogue are synonymous," Fielding writes, and in this conjunction he focuses on the internal quality of "greatness" that is essential to the new aristocracy of upstarts, cutting across the old social categories (in a parody of progressive virtue and Protestant grace) by uniting "high and low life" (IV, xv, 176; I, v, 17). By this means he conflates the several villains of conservative imagination—the scheming rogue of criminal biography, the Whiggish "public servant," the industrious parvenu of improving parables, the enthusiastic convert of spiritual autobiography—into a single resonant figure of corruption."

As the Newgate debtors discover, to be "great" is to be "corrupted in their morals" (IV, xii, 161), a character trait that qualifies the petty London gangleader for legitimate and distinguished professional careers in the (scarcely separable) fields of politics and high finance. As Wild observes at one point, not only robbery but even murder is comfortably carried on "within the law" (III, iii, 91). If fraud is a "courtier's" accomplishment, then the policy of the "statesman" and the "prime minister" elevates petty theft and the betrayal of friends to an engagement with the "public trust" itself (I, vi, 19, v, 16, 18; II, viii, 69). "Greatness," the unifying element in "prigs," "statesmen," and "absolute princes" (I, xiv, 42; II, iv, 58), depends not upon the nature or scope of one's sphere of influence but on one's will to exercise "absolute power" there (III, xiv, 120-22; IV, xv, 175). Fielding's argument resists the customary restriction of "absolutism" to the sphere of princely "authority," radically modernizing it as a psychological and moral capacity to engross power, whose egalitarian servant, willing to work for any man and to corrupt all others, "is indeed the beginning as well as the end of all human devices: I mean money" (I, xiv, 43).

It is not surprising that Fielding propounds the familiar parallel between theft and financial investment, or that Wild passes "for a gentleman of great fortune in the funds" (I, vi, 21; see also I, xiv, 43-44). At the heart of the parallel that ties the absolute politician to the absolute possessive individualist is the unlimited indulgence of the appetites, which here are arranged in a characteristically conservative hierarchy. When Fielding observes that "the truest mark of greatness is insatiability," it is clear at once that he refers most of all to the desire for material goods (II, ii, 51). Wild's "most powerful and predominant passion was ambition … His lust was inferior only to his ambition … His avarice was immense, but it was of the rapacious, not of the tenacious kind" (IV, xv, 172-73). Avarice and lust are reciprocal signs of corruption, but unlike the case of the progressive villain, here the lust for money predominates. Thus, although Wild is inflamed by the very sight of Mrs. Heartfree, the ruin of Mr. Heartfree has a clear priority over the rape of his wife (II, i, 47, viii, 71). Only when both have been arranged does Wild, "secure … of the possession of that lovely woman, together with a rich cargo," anticipate the satisfaction of both appetites in language that renders them well-nigh interchangeable: "In short, he enjoyed in his mind all the happiness which unbridled lust and rapacious avarice could promise him" (II, viii, 74). By the same token, Wild's beloved Laetitia knows that of her "three very predominant passions; to wit, vanity, wantonness, and avarice," she can implicitly rely on Jonathan to satiate the third in particular (II, iii, 55). We, at least, are left in no doubt that theirs is a "Smithfield" match—a marriage for money—and soon after it Laetitia informs her insulted husband that she married him not for love but "because it was convenient, and my parents forced me" (III, vi, 98, viii, 105; see also vi, 99-100, 103).¹²

So despite the intimations that, as in Richardson's progressive ideology, "honor" may be purged of aristocratic poisons and realigned with "virtue," the more compelling argument in Jonathan Wild is that the term has been so corrupted by progressive assimilationism as to be completely and unredeemably arbitrary. "A man of honour," says Wild, "is he that is called a man of honour; and while he is so called he so remains, and no longer" (I, xiii, 38). Fielding's "preoccupation with semantic instability"¹³ expresses an insight into the analogous relation between linguistic and socioeconomic corruption, an insight he shares with Swift and other utopian travel narrators. The attack on modern cant terms is a microscopic version of the attack on modern narrative, which has only devised, through the pretense of telling an antiromance truth, a more efficient method of imposing on the credulity of the innocent. For corruption to operate successfully in these several spheres it is essential that the two principals, not only the knaves but also the fools, faithfully perform in their respective roles: "Thus while the crafty and designing Part of Mankind, consulting only their own separate Advantage, endeavour to maintain one constant Imposition on others, the whole World becomes a vast Masquerade." "Constant imposition" is crucial both for "The Art of Politics" and for "the Art of thriving." In an allegorical satire on the Whig establishment, Fielding depicts monetary corruption not as naked opportunism but as a credulous religious rite, the worship of a deity called MNEY and of its ambitious high priest, whose creed includes the maxim that "All Things Spring from Corruption, so did MNEY, and therefore by Corruption he is most properly come at." As in other conservative writers, the model is of an artfully constructed, quasi-religious social fiction whose greatest power is to impose upon the credulity of the many."

Throughout Fielding's narratives, the law provides an especially persistent example of such a social fiction. Jonathan Wild's main weapon against his enemies is not brute force but the law, which he is able to turn to his own ends only because it depends so fully on procedures of witness, testimony, and evidence that enjoin an earnest empiricist belief and are highly subject to falsification. But Fielding's most explicit articulation of the analogy between sociopolitical and epistemological imposition—between questions of virtue and questions of truth—in Jonathan Wild invokes the fictions not of the law but of the stage, and it recalls the analogy of world and stage that had earlier preoccupied him in the farces. Wild is about to enact the supreme betrayal of his friend Heartfree. A great man such as he, Fielding observes, is best compared to a puppet master, for the effectiveness of his manipulations depends entirely upon his inaccessibility to sense perception:

Not that any one is ignorant of his being there, or supposes that the puppets are not mere sticks of wood, and he himself the sole mover; but as this (though every one knows it) doth not appear visibly, i.e. to their eyes, no one is ashamed of consenting to be imposed upon …

It would be to suppose thee, gentle reader, one of very little knowledge in this world, to imagine thou has never seen some of these puppet-shows which are so frequently acted on the great stage … He must have a very despicable opinion of mankind indeed who can conceive them to be imposed on as often as they appear to be so. The truth is, they are in the same situation with the readers of romances; who, though they know the whole to be one entire fiction, nevertheless agree to be deceived; and, as these find amusement, so do the others find ease and convenience in this concurrence. But, this being a subdigression, I return to my digression. (III, xi, 114)

The passage suggests a three-part analogy of impositions: Wild is to Heartfree as Walpole is to the people, and as the romance writer is to his readers. The willingness of those on the receiving end to be deceived in these relationships is that of the audience at a puppet show. The tenor of the comparison, however, is not art but political exploitation. The effect of the analogy is to oblige us to see the posture of the audience not in the positive light of an "aesthetic response" but in the negative light of political bad faith. And of course the analogy strikes close to home. If we "gentle readers" seek no more than a passive "ease and convenience" in this narration—if we resist Fielding's self-conscious reference to his own digressive manipulations, for example, preferring a comfortable belief in his claims to historicity—then we are really no different from Heartfree.

But what does it mean to be no different from Heartfree? Critics have recognized Heartfree's inadequacy as a positive norm in Jonathan Wild, but they have disagreed about Fielding's awareness of this inadequacy and hence about its role in the narrative's moral and social program.¹⁵ Heartfree's several soliloquies on the comforts of a good conscience, the satisfactions of Christian behavior, and the anticipated rewards of the world beyond are indistinguishable from Fielding's "own" precepts, which he occasionally delivers in this homiletic mode, but they also bespeak, in the face of worldly injustice, a comprehensive passivity (III, ii, 88-89, v, 97-98, x, III). A jeweler by trade, Heartfree is (not surprisingly) a remarkably fair dealer who would never impose on his customers (II, i, 46), and Fielding encourages us to associate the Heartfrees' willingness to "credit" the lies by which Wild and the Count impose upon them with their willingness to extend these villains financial "credit" (e.g., II, iii, 52, viii, 70). There are limits to this credence. When Wild persuades Mrs. Heartfree to flee the country for her husband's sake, Mr. Heartfree soon overcomes his initial doubts about his wife's fidelity (III, i, 85, v, 95-96); but of Wild's account of the affair he cannot help wondering "whether the whole was not a fiction, and Wild … had not spirited away, robbed, and murdered his wife" (III, ix, 109). But it is not until Mrs. Heartfree returns from her travels, and is called upon to tell her own story, that Fielding fully illuminates the function of Heartfree in posing the multifaceted problem of imposition and "convenient" fictions.

Even in the absence of the "wonderful chapter" that Fielding deleted after the first edition, Mrs. Heartfree's interpolated tale is replete with events and devices—storm, shipwreck, pirates, attempted rapes, a hermit castaway, a curious native culture—that contemporaries would have associated with the related marvels of romance mutability and travel-narrative historicity. Fielding expressed his contempt for the naíve empiricism of romancing travel narratives at several points in his career, most lucidly in his own, posthumously published travel journal. There he distinguishes ancient and modern travel "romances" from the "true history" he himself has composed, "the former being the confounder and corrupter of the latter." Vanity, he claims, leads these travel romancers both to describe things that have never happened and, on the contrary, to record minute trivialities whose only distinction is that they happened to the author. The good traveler must be highly selective. The worth of his character will be reflected not in any spurious, quantitative completeness of detail or observation but in the success of his selection in "diverting or informing" the reader.¹⁶

Judged by these standards, Mrs. Heartfree's credibility is impugned not only by the conventionalized wonders of her narration but by its patent self-interest. After all, it is the story of how she managed, despite a succession of threats that include the ravenous lust of half a dozen men, not only to preserve her chastity but to miraculously recover the jewels that had been stolen from her husband. Like Robinson Crusoe and Pamela, Mrs. Heartfree attributes all her good fortune to the power of providence, and she ends her narrative with the cheerful lesson that virtue gets rewarded in the end—"THAT PROVIDENCE WILL SOONER OR LATER PROCURE THE FELICITY OF THE VIRTUOUS AND INNOCENT" (IV, xi, 161; see also IV, vii, 145, 146, viii, 147, ix, 153, xi, 160). Yet her self-reliance reminds us of no one so much as Wild himself. Her adaptive mastery of nautical terminology is striking enough for her husband to comment upon, and she lingers over the romance compliments of her suitors as though they were vital to her story rather than to her self-love (IV, vii, 143, ix, 155, xi, 157). She fends off would-be seducers by pretending to comply with their desires (e.g., IV, vii, 146), a technique of imposture at which she is so accomplished that in the crucial exchange—when she obtains the jewels—we experience some doubt as to just how it has been done. To be sure, Mrs. Heartfree's official story is one of providential repossession (IV, ix, 153). But it is she herself who plants in her persecutor's mind the idea that her virtue might be vulnerable to a bribe, and before she is providentially rescued she energetically attempts "to persuade him of my venality" (IV, ix, 151). The supposed imposture has the ring of plausibility, for the pragmatic and business-like exchange of one "jewel" for another may seem by now more likely than the earnest narrator's account of one more wonderful event. The play on words itself becomes explicit at the very end of Mrs. Heartfree's narrative, when yet another suitor is said to give her "a very rich jewel, of less value, he said, than my chastity" (IV, xi, 160).

Most important, our mounting skepticism at the circumstances of these windfalls is greatly strengthened by our wish to dissociate ourselves from the credulity of our surrogate audience, Mr. Heartfree, whose acute anxiety at the recurrent threats to his wife's virtue during her narration is exceeded only by the ease with which he credits her persuasions "that Heaven had preserved her chastity, and again had restored her unsullied to his arms" (IV, vii, 145; see also IV, vii, 144, ix, 152). And the general instability of this marital interaction is heightened when it is interrupted all at once by its mock-heroic reduction. Mrs. Heartfree has been narrating her story in Newgate, and suddenly Wild creates an uproar because he has caught his wife Laetitia with his confederate Fireblood. For the improbably delicate Wild, it is as much his own fastidious "honor" that is offended as it is hers, and he reiterates the word with a manic insistence (IV, x, 155-57). Coming as it does in the middle of another tale of imperiled honor, Wild's absurdly elevated outrage provides a perspective on both Heartfrees: a reflection of the wife's false idealism, and a foil for the husband's easy agreement to be deceived. But the episode is also an artful interpolation within an interpolation, and like Fielding's earlier "subdigression," it amounts to a formal reminder of the manipulative and "political" power of the narrator, affording us an opportunity to distinguish ourselves from the good Mr. Heartfree by doubting the accuracy of his wife's story. In this way Fielding transforms her, if only for the space of her travel narrative, from the constant female lover of romance into the scheming rogue of conservative ideology, whose claim to truth is imposture and whose protestation of inner virtue masks an essential avarice. And her husband, because he will not be a knave like Wild, tends to be his wife's ideal audience—that is, a willing fool.¹⁷

Thus Jonathan Wild reflects, like Gulliver's Travels before it, the analogous and interlocked asperities of extreme skepticism and conservative ideology. And like Swift, Fielding is impelled to reverse the implacable momentum of his critique by guardedly reaffirming the old values. As in his predecessors, this amounts not to an unmediated act of faith but to a defense of the instrumentality and utility of belief, a tactic whose repercussions are not easily controlled. Thus, when in other contexts Fielding the latitudinarian refutes deist arguments against the reality of future rewards, his earnest insistence that the "Delusion" (if such it be) affords a "Spring of Pleasure" recalls not only Tillotson and South but also his own rather silly Heartfree. And when he defends the old social forms and titles—"His Grace," "Right Honourable," "Sir"—not because they have any substantial "philosophical" meaning but because, "being imposed by the Laws of Custom," they have become "politically essential," we are reminded as much of Jonathan Wild as of Jonathan Swift.¹⁸

If the "instrumentality of belief argument seems even more volatile and contradictory in Fielding's hands than in those of his predecessors, it is partly because his commitment to some of the basic institutions of conservative ideology is less profound than theirs. His family background tied him securely to the "upstart" Marlborough's war, to the system of financial investment by which it was funded, and to the reality of nonlanded property. Moreover Fielding seems to have been sufficiently comfortable with the modern system of political management to have accepted a bribe from Walpole in exchange for delaying publication of Jonathan Wild—by Swiftian lights surely an act of "corruption." Because Fielding does not fully share Swift's comprehensive aversion to progressive institutions, he cannot share Swift's circumspect dedication to the utopian idea of a preprogressive culture. As a result, his advocacy of an instrumental belief in institutions whose authority may be fictional—social deference, custom, the law—can sound less like a parabolic intuition of a better dispensation than like a hearty and forward-looking justification of this one. Thus, in Jonathan Wild the figure of the "good magistrate" (IV, vi, 141, xv, 176) benevolently beckons our saving faith in a legal system whose viciousness—"politically essential" to the corruptions of great upstarts—Fielding has been at great pains to document from the outset.¹⁹

Yet the good magistrate is a persistent personage in Fielding's narratives, increasingly a model for the author's own stance as the benevolent narrator. And the example of this dual function—the external institution internalized as an authorial capacity—suggests how Fielding makes the "instrumentality of belief argument more adequately his own. Whereas in Swift the argument is most explicit in the realm of ideology and sociopolitical institutions, in Fielding the major emphasis modulates to the epistemological "institution" of narrative form, to the reclamation of specifically literary fiction as a mode of telling the truth. Buttressing Fielding's extreme skepticism is a critique of empiricist objectivity (and of the allied belief that the instrument of verification is separable from the object verified) that would make a deist proud. On the basis of this powerful critique, Fielding implicates narrative in the fictionalizing deceptions of the political puppeteer. The question, then, is not how to avoid the inevitable condition of fictionality (of "romance"), but how to avoid the ethical pitfalls that seem to be an inevitable part of it: the impositions of the puppeteer and the bad faith of his audience. What is required is a fiction so palpable, so "evident to the senses," that its power to deceive even a "willing" audience becomes neutralized.²⁰

Indeed, Fielding has this requirement in view when, instead of seeking the quantitative completeness of the naíve empiricists, he explicitly insists on the necessity of narrative selection and the qualitative discrimination between the virtuous and the vicious, the important and the trivial. In Jonathan Wild we have already seen an example of this insistence in Fielding's advocacy of "mixed characters" and his critique of the notion, among both ancients and moderns, of a perfect "uniformity of character" (I, i, 4). He makes a similar point less explicitly, and with respect to plot rather than character, when he apologizes for the shortness of a chapter that covers eight years in Wild's life. The problem is that the period "contains not one adventure worthy the reader's notice"; and unlike experiential time, narrative time is selective (I, vii, 21-22). Relatively programmatic passages like these should be seen as part of the more general phenomenon of Fielding's highly distinctive self-consciousness, an epistemological strategy that is entirely familiar from his best-known narratives but already effective in Jonathan Wild. Undoubtedly (in the words of the title page of Joseph Andrews) more in "the manner of Cervantes" than of Swift, this narrative reflexiveness aims to enclose its object in a shell of subjective commentary. Its ideal and unstated function is simultaneously to demystify fiction ("romance," "history") as illusion and to detoxify it, to negate its negation, to empower it by ostentatiously enacting, even announcing, its impotence to tell an immediate truth.²¹ Two brief examples from Jonathan Wild will help clarify the "theory" of this dialectical technique.

Late in Book II, Jonathan, having cast himself into the sea, is "miraculously within two minutes after replaced in his boat," and the narrator promises to explain how this escape occurred by natural means, without the traditional aid of dolphin or sea horse. Rejecting all "supernatural causes," he personifies Nature, describes her power, depicts her working her purposes on Wild—who obligingly changes his mind and leaps aboard again—and thereby demonstrates the naturalness of his "history" (II, xii, 79-81). Proudly disowning artifice ("romance") at the outset, Fielding makes abundantly clear that what he calls "nature" ("true history") is only art by another name. But to show that all is art is to vindicate its vices by acknowledging their inevitability, and we accept Fielding's manipulations (at least in theory) precisely because they are so ingenuous and obtrusive. In a similar fashion, Fielding's narrator boasts of spurning the romance convention whereby the story ends with a happy marriage, and instead we are treated to Jonathan and Laetitia's marital dispute in the middle of Book III (vii-viii, 103-7).²² Yet the episode is introduced by conventionalized claims to historicity and then conveyed, in a "dialogue matrimonial," as a page from the script of a bedroom farce. And by the end of the narrative, Fielding is content to close very much according to convention, histrionically rewarding the good and punishing the great (IV, xv, 176-77).

How does this differ, we may ask, from Mrs. Heartfree's dubious invocations of providential reward at the end of her own story? Presumably in the fact that here there is no imposition, because there is no belief: unlike Heartfree, the knowing reader agrees not to be deceived but to be "diverted" (in the language of the Voyage to Lisbon) by Fielding's reclamation of fictionality. But we may sense that Fielding would wish to acknowledge this state, too, as a species of belief, if only he could disentangle its mysterious, knowing innocence from the moral opprobrium of the agreed-upon deception. We are close here to the realm of the aesthetic and its own peculiar rationalization of the reader's commitment and response. But the sizable distance yet to be traversed is suggested by the fact that it will entail a rethinking of the other half of the Horatian dictum—not only to be "diverted" but also to be "informed"—which is more fundamental than anything Fielding and his contemporaries are willing to undertake.

2

Thus, by the time Pamela was printed in the fall of 1740, Fielding's future course in narrative had already been charted in the unpublished drafts of Jonathan Wild. Within the space of a year Fielding wrote Shamela and Joseph Andrews. In both works it is clear that he is continuing what he had begun and that his target is by no means simply Richardson. But Pamela provided an occasion for the emergence into public controversy—for the "institutionalization"—of that characteristically dialectical relation of action and reaction in which the origins of the English novel had thus far less obtrusively consisted. And in this important respect, Shamela and Joseph Andrews are quite accurately seen as a reactive response to Pamela, a negation and a completion of its achievement.²³ In the remainder of this chapter I will attempt to show how the most significant ties of these works both to Pamela and to Jonathan Wild are also significant for the origins of the novel.

The fact that Shamela negates Pamela by fully extending its premises can be seen clearly in the way Fielding parodically subverts Richardson's epistolary form. It is not that narrative empiricism is inherently naíve, but that, on the contrary, Pamela's claim to historicity is not authentic enough. The events themselves possess a reality, but the documents of which Pamela consists (according to Fielding's parodic premise) were fabricated by a hired pen and completely misrepresent her true history. Luckily her mother has communicated the "authentic" "originals" to Parson Oliver. He in turn has sent copies of these to his ingenuous colleague Parson Tickletext, whose former enthusiasm for Pamela's truth and virtue is memorialized in the correspondence that precedes the printing of these truly authentic documents. Tickletext's name itself ties him to the vanity and credulousness of Protestant self-documentation. But having read Oliver's "authentic copies," he is much abashed at having endured so easily the "imposition" of Pamela, and it is he who is responsible for publishing (in the words of the title page) these "exact Copies of authentick Papers delivered to the Editor."2"

Tickletext is like a Heartfree who has ceased to agree to be deceived. And it is easy to see why, since everything is altered, in this truer history, by the candor of the narrator. It is not entirely clear whether the name change—Shamela's parodic rebirth into the romance gentility of a Pamela—is due to the ingenuity of the protagonist or to that of the hack author of Pamela (cf. 308, 309, 337). But the restoration of the authentic name aptly encapsulates Fielding's central strategy, which is to restore the crucial access to Pamela's inner motives, whose absence rendered the historicity of Pamela (we can now appreciate) fatally incomplete. Even Richardson's Pamela is obliged to engage in the occasional subterfuge, to counterplot against Mr. B.'s plotting. And Mrs. Heartfree carries this extenuated duplicity further. But Shamela's character consists in nothing but the will to impose herself upon Mr. Booby, to misrepresent herself as what she is not. Fielding makes good use of those episodes in Pamela, like the pretended drowning (321), in which Shamela's deceit can be seen to have a basis in Pamela's. But he also makes Shamela a complete "Politician" (299), as Pamela never was. Thus her master's excitement at seeing her dressed like a farmer's daughter clearly becomes, as Mr. B. had charged, the result of a deliberate "stratagem" on Shamela's part (315). Yet even here, the barely plausible effect is that of, not a different person but the same person unbowdlerized, carelessly and candidly reporting the whole truth back home to her mother. And the whole truth requires not a greater quantity of details but a critical selection of the most vital ones concerning her own conniving state of mind. In this context, "writing to the moment" can only appear suspect, one more instance of supposedly "innocent" activity hilariously betrayed by the intimately self-conscious reflex of reporting (e.g., 313). Pamela's "virtue" becomes Shamela's "vartue," like Machiavelli's virtu a corrupted term that embodies its own contradictory negation. Moving from Pamela to Shamela is like hearing Mary Carleton's story retold as a rogue's tale by her husband John and posterity—except that here the transformation is achieved simply by letting the protagonist speak in her own person.²⁵

Shamela is a rogue because she is a scheming, ambitious upstart. Fielding leaves us in no doubt as to the moral both of his own work and of its model. Pamela teaches "young gentlemen … to marry their mother's chambermaids" and "servant-maids … to look out for their masters as sharp as they can" (338, 307). By disclosing the real Pamela in action, Shamela reverses this moral. We see her profiting from the subversive loyalty of the "family of servants"; we observe her "betraying the secrets of families"; we watch her plot her progress from one family to the other; and we end up convinced of Parson Oliver's prediction that "the character of Shamela will make young gentlemen wary how they take the most fatal step both to themselves and families, by youthful, hasty and improper matches" (316, 338, 337). Six years after the publication of Shamela Fielding himself was content to marry his first wife's maid. But for the moment this kind of social mobility, at least in Richardson's rendition of it, could resonate for Fielding with the culturally fraught effrontery of the rise of the undeserving. Fielding's ostensible target in Shamela is not only the anonymous author of Pamela but also Colley Cibber's autobiographical Apology of 1740 and Conyers Middleton's Life of Cicero (1741). And as Hugh Amory has observed, the attack is unified by the fact that all three works "explain the success of parvenus by their superior moral merit and all three substantiate this contention from the very mouths of their parvenus, whose naíve candor seems unquestionable."26

Shamela's status as a conservative villainess is solidified by the predominance of her avarice. Of course her lubricity is never in doubt either, at least when Parson Williams is around. But her first lust is the lust for money. Like her mother and Mrs. Jervis, Shamela is at heart a whore (308-9). Advised by the former early on to make "a good market" with her "rich fool" of a master (311), she is pleased to find in Lincolnshire that Mrs. Jewkes also will help "sell me to my master" (317). But as in all such roguery, the success of the transaction depends upon the hypocritical disguise of financial ambition as the outer mark of inner virtue. Shamela tells Booby that "I value my vartue more than all the world, and I had rather be the poorest man's wife, than the richest man's whore" (324). And in a certain sense she is quite sincere. Presented with the possibility of being a whore—of a sham-marriage "settlement" as Mr. Booby's "mistress"—Shamela, like Pamela, rejects the offer (313, 321). But her reasons are rather different. Whereas Pamela fears the loss of (what is admittedly a complex entity) her virtue, Shamela simply fears the loss of the more lucrative settlement of a genuine marriage. "No, Mrs. Jervis," she insists, "nothing under a regular taking into keeping, a settled settlement, for me, and all my heirs, all my whole lifetime, shall do the business" (313). To be a wife is a financial improvement on being a whore; "virtue" is eminently profitable. Indeed, this is the meaning of Shamela's famous Machiavellian maxim: "I thought once of making a little fortune by my person. I now intend to make a great one by my vartue" (325). The corruption of virtue culminates in the corruption of marriage.

After the wedding Shamela allows the mask to slip somewhat. She engages in a bit of desultory charity. But unlike Pamela, who exults, "Oh how I long to be doing some Good!" Shamela only complains: "I long to be in London that I may have an opportunity of laying some out, as well as giving away. What signifies having money if one doth not spend it." "It would be hard indeed," she adds, "that a woman who marries a man only for his money, should be debarred from spending it" (331, 332). In the presence of such consummate presumption, even the fatuous Booby takes on some dignity, and in the final scenes of the narrative he affords us fleeting glimpses of a normative type in conservative ideology: the Tory squire, natural ruler of the besieged English countryside. To Shamela he vents his just irritation at Parson Williams, "whose family hath been raised from the dunghill by ours; and who hath received from me twenty kindnesses, and yet is not contented to destroy the game in all other places, which I freely give him leave to do; but hath the impudence to pursue a few hares, which I am desirous to preserve, round about this little coppice" (333). That night Booby rails against the ignorant politics of Williams and the rest of the company that presumes upon his hospitality until all hours, "a parcel of scoundrels roaring forth the principles of honest men over their cups" (335).²⁷

As we might expect, the opportunistic parson is of "the court-side," holding that "every Christian ought to be on the same with the bishops" (336). But Williams becomes a rather complicated satirical butt in Fielding's conservative treatment. As a proponent of "what we believe" over "what we do" (319), Williams represents for Fielding the Methodist reawakening of the old Puritan individualism and self-indulgence. The historical continuity had a real basis, and Fielding's association of the renovated doctrine of faith not only with progressive notions of "virtue" but also with empirical standards of truth is clear in the deep appreciation expressed by the credulous Parson Tickletext for "the useful and truly religious doctrine of grace" that Williams preaches (304). But Williams advocates at least a certain species of "works" as well, contending "that to go to church, and to pray, and to sing psalms, and to honour the clergy, and to repent, is true religion" (319). Fielding's additional target here is, in part, the nominal observance promoted by complacent Anglican opponents of the Methodist revival. Yet much else about Shamela's favorite clergyman—doctrinal points like the conviction that a multitude of sins can "be purged away by frequent and sincere repentance," but also the haughty ease of his general manner and address—carries the cavalier associations of High Church Laudian and crypto-Jacobite culture (317-18).²⁸

In this respect there is a Swiftian economy to Williams's overdetermination as a satiric butt, for he demonstrates, like Jack in A Tale of a Tub, how the radical subversion of Anglican orthodoxy involuntarily and stealthily recapitulates the original Roman enemy. But Fielding's Anglicanism is not Swift's, and it is not entirely clear that his two-pronged attack through the serviceable figure of Williams leaves any room for his own middle way. Like the latitudinarian divines he admired, Fielding is eloquent on the preferability of actions to words as a guide in ethical judgments. But so is the Puritan Bunyan, who excoriates Talkative for ignoring that "the soul of religion is the practice part." Whatever Fielding's contemporaries wished to believe, Puritanism and latitudinarianism are not simply antagonists; they are closely parallel Protestant strategies for confronting the problem of mediation, and they necessarily reflect a similar instability. No less than Puritan discipline, Fielding's hearty and no-nonsense embrace of good works places a large instrumental faith in the power of worldly institutions and achievements to make a moral signification, an investment whose ideological implications could only be uncertain. The greatest commitment of this sort in Joseph Andrews is to the institutional practice of charity.²⁹

3

As Martin Battestin has shown most fully, Joseph Andrews is dedicated to promulgating the two Christian virtues that are embodied in its two principal characters, Joseph and Abraham Adams. Chastity and charity may be understood, respectively, as analogous private and public modes of moral restraint, the Christian capacity to limit the power of the selfish and destructive human passions. Joseph's early resistance to Lady Booby, which is the narrative's most declaratory reaction against Richardsonian example, broadly represents to us the triumph of chastity as such. If Shamela is Pamela as she really is, stripped of her feigned innocence, Joseph is Pamela as she should have been, stripped of her self-indulgence. Joseph is a reproach to Richardson's progressive protagonist because, unlike her, he masters both his sexual and his social appetites. Although he deferentially models his behavior on his older sister's, we are made to sense the unwitting and ironic contrast when he writes to her, "I never loved to tell the Secrets of my Master's Family," instantly reconciling himself to leaving Lady Booby's service so as to "maintain my Virtue against all Temptations."³⁰ But despite Fielding's easily insinuated parallel between the social servitude of Joseph the footman and that of Pamela the lady's maid, the sexual difference is allimportant. It is not just that, as Fielding admits, a man's "Chastity is always in his own power" (I, xviii, 87). By making the issue one of male chastity, he slyly avoids all the social ramifications of female chastity.

For Richardson's Pamela, the "religious" injunction to remain chaste is overlaid by a complex "political" requirement, and she has both more to lose and more to gain—a social transformation—as the potential consequence of a liaison with her better. For Fielding's Joseph the situation is, despite appearances, much simpler. Already in love with Fanny, he must do no more than control his momentary sexual desire (I, x, 46-47). Although to Lady Booby he implies that he is chaste by virtue of being "the Brother of Pamela," to Pamela he writes that it is as much from Parson Adams's religious instruction as from her that he has learned "that Chastity is as great a virtue in a Man as in a Woman" (I, viii, 41, x, 46; see also xii, 53). And for Adams the principle of chastity, devoid of any social complexities, has the simple moral purpose of guarding against "the Indulgence of carnal Appetites" (IV, viii, 307). Of course succumbing to Lady Booby would bring some material reward. Adams knows that with the proper encouragement and education, Joseph might rise up the ladder of domestic service as his sister did (I, iii, 26). But the final great elevation, from service to gentility, is not within the power of Lady Booby to engineer. This is the lesson Mr. B. teaches his sister, Lady Davers, in Pamela. In Joseph Andrews Lady Booby ends up the counterpart, in this respect, of Lady Davers rather than of Mr. B., prevented from doing what Mr. Booby has done with Pamela not only by Joseph's resistance but also by her own obsessive fear that so far from raising him to her level, she has the power only "to sacrifice my Reputation, my Character, my Rank in Life, to the Indulgence of a mean and vile Appetite" (IV, xiii, 328). Lady Booby's echo of Parson Adams's religious teachings here clearly is not a sign that she, too, believes in chastity. Instead it suggests how effectively Fielding has managed, not to refute Richardson's progressive social ethics in the great contest between "industrious virtue" and "aristocratic corruption," but to defuse its social volatility through the stealthy reversal of sexes. Adrift from its moorings in female experience, Joseph's heroically passive resistance soon becomes rather silly,3 and in a characteristically conservative turn, neither "virtue" nor "corruption" comes off very well in the contest. In fact, so far from occupying the center stage that it has in Pamela, in Joseph Andrews the encounter quickly shrinks into an attenuated frame within which questions of virtue are most efficiently propounded in terms of the problem not of chastity but of charity.

An English Quixote obsessed with the rule of Apostolic charity, not of romance chivalry,32 Abraham Adams reminds us of both the madness of the hidalgo estranged from reality and the conservative wisdom of the utopian social reformer. Traversing the circuit to London and back again, he upholds the standard of good works against a cross-section of humanity whose complacency, hypocrisy, and downright viciousness announce, again and again, the absence of charity in the modern world. The traditional proponents of charity—clergymen like Barnabas and Trulliber—abhore Methodist reform for the wrong reasons and jealously defend their own material comforts against the needs of the poor (I, xvii; II, xiv). The inheritors of the feudal obligation of charity, the country gentry, are, if possible, even worse. One squire specializes in entrapping the needy with false promises of munificence. Having been tricked himself by this man, Adams then listens in horror to "true Stories" of how the squire has ruined several local youths, among them a Pamela figure and a hopeful younger son, by feeding their expectations of upward mobility and withdrawing his support only after they have become fully dependent upon it (II, xvi-xvii). Another squire is so corrupted in sensibility and education that he has become addicted to victimizing those who have come into his care. Adams protests that "I am your Guest, and by the Laws of Hospitality entitled to your Protection" (III, vii, 247), but the practical jokes culminate in a serious attack upon his traveling party and the abduction of Fanny as a prospective "Sacrifice to the Lust of a Ravisher." The rape is foiled by Lady Booby's steward, Peter Pounce, a "Gentleman" and burlesque progressive "gallant"—the chivalric protector as monied man—who "loved a pretty Girl better than any thing, besides his own Money, or the Money of other People" (III, xii, 268-69). But needless to say, the monied man soon evinces his own species of corruption, and the adventure ends on a conservative note with Pounce replicating the sins of the selfish gentry, reviling the poor laws and asserting that charity "does not so much consist in the Act as in the Disposition" to relieve the distressed (III, xiii, 274).

The paradigmatic instance of failed charity in Joseph Andrews is the early stagecoach episode, in which an entire social spectrum of respectable passengers refuses to relieve Joseph's distress until the lowest of them all, the postilion, gives him his greatecoat (I, xii). Later confirmed by the humble goodness of Betty the chambermaid and the mysterious pedlar (I, xii, 55; II, xv, 170; IV, viii, 309-10), this episode establishes the basic paradox that if charity involves giving something for nothing, only those with nothing are likely to be charitable. And the traveling lawyer is of course no more compassionate than anyone else. Throughout Joseph Andrews the law is seen as the secularizer of traditional institutions, possessed of at least the potential to civilize their social functions for the modern world. In the progressively oriented "History of Leonora," for example, the symbolic supplanting of sword by robe nobility is intimated by the rivalry between the dishonorable fop Bellarmine, an accomplished "Cavalier," and the sober Horatio, who, "being a Lawyer … would seek Revenge in his own way" (II, iv, 115). Most often, however, the authority of the law in the settlement of modern disputes works only to aggravate the old thirst for "revenge" by making it financially profitable. This Adams learns when the interpolated tale of Leonora is itself interrupted by the fistfight at the inn, and a litigious bystander advises the parson's antagonist that "was I in your Circumstances, every Drop of my Blood should convey an Ounce of Gold into my Pocket" (II, v, 121). Later on Mrs. Trulliber, seeing that her husband is about to strike Adams for calling him uncharitable and un-Christian, advises him instead to "shew himself a true Christian, and take the Law of him" (II, xiv, 168).

It is a typically conservative reversal that in Joseph Andrews the modern institution of the law tends not to civilize the bloody passions of anger and revenge but to corrupt them, to replace physical with financial violence. And in this respect the law is a distinct deterioration from the traditional peacekeeping institutions—like Christianity—that it is quickly displacing in the modern world. When Adams delivers Fanny from her highway ravisher, he does it in the chivalric spirit of a stout "Champion" in defense of an innocent "Damsel" (II, ix, 139). But when the case is brought before the justice it is quickly corrupted by the ambitions of everyone involved for some portion of the reward. The innocents are libeled as "Robbers," "Highwaymen," and "Rogues," and they escape only through the chance intervention of a local squire and the justice's extreme obsequiousness to gentility (II, x-xi, 142-43, 145, 148-49). And when Lady Booby wishes to foil the match between Joseph and Fanny, she has no trouble persuading Lawyer Scout and Justice Frolick to help her in circumventing the settlement laws. As Scout puts it, "The Laws of this Land are not so vulgar, to permit a mean Fellow to contend with one of your Ladyship's Fortune" (IV, iii, 285).

But if the modern purveyors of charity and justice are riddled with corruption, we are also justified in being skeptical about the efficacy of Adams's anachronistic ideals, and not simply because the parson's own means of fulfilling them are severely limited. As a comprehensive moral imperative, the rule of charity does not readily admit of fine ethical distinctions as to relative obligations and deserts, a problem of which the growing popularity of benevolist philosophies was making contemporaries aware.³³ The innkeeper Mrs. Tow-wouse is surely discredited when she exclaims to her husband, "Common Charity, a Ft !" (I, xii, 56). But her real point here is suggestively echoed later on by Adams's wife and daughter. Book IV opens with a sharp contrast between the reception of Lady Booby and that of Parson Adams on their return to their respective country seats. We are well aware of the total absence of feudal care in her ladyship, and Fielding's ironic portrait of her entry into "the Parish amidst the ringing of Bells, and the Acclamations of the Poor" is quickly followed by a sincere account of how the parson's parishioners "flocked about" him "like dutiful Children round an indulgent Parent, and vyed with each other in Demonstrations of Duty and Love" (IV, i, 277). As Mrs. Adams tells Lady Booby, her husband does indeed say "that the whole Parish are his Children," but there are children of his own on whose career prospects the parson has exercised less patriarchal care than on those of Joseph and Fanny. "It behoved every Man to take the first Care of his Family," she complains to her husband. However, Adams is oblivious, Fielding adds, persisting "in doing his Duty without regarding the Consequence it might have on his worldly Interest" (IV, xi, 321, viii, 307). There is certainly no calculation on the part of the parson, but is his virtue always untainted by his interest? Even the innocent Joseph knows how "an Ambition to be respected" can inspire acts of goodness, and Fielding has allowed us to observe how Adams's vanity can be manifested in the very denunciation of vanity (III, vi, 233, iii, 214-15). Fielding's latitudinarian beliefs are very close to the Mandevillian argument that the autonomous purity of virtue is a pleasing fiction. And although we clearly are not encouraged to see the parson's undiscriminating love of his neighbor as a stealthy self-love, nevertheless, to a real degree, the Apostolic and feudal role of charity is itself demystified in Joseph Andrews as a Quixotic social fiction.

By the same token, although Fielding surely strips modern institutions like the law and the gentry of their authority, at times the assault is moderated and the reigning fictions are allowed a certain instrumental utility. We have already seen this to be true of the law in Jonathan Wild and of gentility in Shamela. When Mr. Booby discovers that his brother-in-law has been ordered to Bridewell for, in Justice Frolick's sage words, "a kind of felonious larcenous thing," he is shocked by the triviality and brutality of the law. But the justice is happy to commit Joseph and Fanny to Booby's benevolent custody instead, easily discerning now, with the kindly lechery that often distinguishes Fielding's basically good-natured men, that Fanny's beauty deserves better than Bridewell (IV, v, 289-91). And at the end of the narrative, Booby calls to mind his own briefly normative incarnation in Shamela, becoming the true representative of feudal gentility by dispensing gifts of "unprecedented Generosity" and by entertaining the assembled company "in the most splendid manner, after the Custom of the old English Hospitality, which is still preserved in some very few Families in the remote Parts of England" (IV, xvi, 343, 341).

At such moments of affirmation, customary noblesse oblige and the hallowed system of the English law seem able to redeem themselves as the best scheme of social justice available, if also the only one. But this is not to say that they are also able to counter the endemic condition of status inconsistency—perhaps the more precise term for Fielding would be "status indeterminacy." In a central chapter of Joseph Andrews, Fielding characteristically affirms that social distinctions are merely formal, being determined neither by birth nor by accomplishments but by fashion (II, xiii, 156-58). High People" are distinguished from "Low People" by the way they dress, and the great "Ladder of Dependance," of which social hierarchy consists, is a closely articulated chain of employments, each of which attends upon its next-highest neighbor and is attended upon, in turn, by the next-lowest one. The function of attendance is essentially the same; what differs is the level at which it is done. Thus social station is arbitrary: the relative placement of a Walpole or a Wild—of a Booby or a Slipslop (I, vii, 34)—is quite accidental. But if the ladder is a fiction in that its rungs are placed arbitrarily, the ladder itself is systematic and functional. And if there is no basis for affirming the justice of the present arrangement, there is no reason to suppose that any systematic alteration would be an improvement. To be sure, there are exceptions to the rule of status inconsistency. Fielding "could name a Commoner raised higher above the Multitude by superior Talents, than is in the Power of his Prince to exalt him," but he also "could name a Peer no less elevated by Nature than by Fortune" (III, i, 190-91; cf. III, vi, 235). The very ease with which exceptions to all rules can be enumerated seems to strengthen the implacability of the system itself, which continues remorselessly to grind out the present dispensation, certainly no better, but probably no worse, than any replacement for it might do.

Something akin to this quiet desperation must be the issue of any direct attempt to distill Fielding's stance on matters of social justice and reform—on questions of virtue—in Joseph Andrews. And it is strikingly discordant with the genial and confident exuberance of the voice that self-consciously suffuses so much of the narrative. How does his stance on questions of truth help palliate Fielding's social vision? Calling itself, on the title page and at various points throughout the narrative, a true and authentic history, Joseph Andrews deploys the range of authenticating devices and claims to historicity with which we have become familiar not only in Fielding's predecessors but also in his own earlier efforts.³⁴ His extreme skepticism is never really in doubt, but it is conveyed to us through a characteristic combination of parodic impersonation and self-subversive definition that undertakes the positing of a form by a series of contradictory negations. In Chapter I, for example, Fielding specifies his "History" as a biographical life; yet after a brief allusion to ancient Roman biographies, his chief instances of this form are several late-medieval redactions of chivalric romance (I, i, 17-18)." Moreover, two eminent modern examples are autobiographies that work, "as the common Method is, from authentic Papers and Records"; but these are none other than Cibber's Apology and Pamela (I, i, 18).

In the first chapter of Book III (185-91) Fielding picks up, where this early discussion left off, the account of what he means by "history," and now he is prepared to be more explicit in his epistemological reversals. Whatever "Authority" they may be accorded by the vulgar, books that bear the title "the History of England, the History of France, of Spain, &c." are really the work of "Romance-Writers." The skeptical reader is correct to judge them "as no other than a Romance, in which the Writer hath indulged a happy and fertile Invention," for it is in biography "that Truth only is to be found." Of course no one would deny that the aforementioned "histories" can be relied upon for the quantitative and topographical recording of isolated "Facts." "But as to the Actions and Characters of Men," the very same facts can be "set forth in a different Light." Biography is concerned with this more qualitative sort of truth. The "Facts we deliver may be relied on" because their truth is understood to be fully dependent upon the interpretive "light" in which they are "set forth." Biography aims at the truth of general nature and of universal types. A good example is the "true History" of Gil Blas or Don Quixote: the "Time and Place" of Cervantes' characters may well be questioned, but "is there in the World such a Sceptic as to disbelieve the Madness of Cardenio, the Perfidy of Ferdinand … ?"

It is clear enough that Fielding is seeking here to distinguish between a naívely empiricist and a more "imaginative" species of belief. But he is also at pains to emphasize the crucial degree to which he is in accord with the empiricist perspective, and to distinguish his preferred sort of belief also from the sheer creativity of romance.³⁶ For he quickly adds, "I would by no means be thought to comprehend" in this preferred category "the Authors of immense Romances" or of chroniques scandaleuses, "who without any Assistance from Nature or History, record Persons who never were, or will be, and Facts which never did nor possibly can happen: Whose Heroes are of their own Creation." Both romancers and romancing historians, in other words, rely too much on a "happy and fertile invention." As a biographer, Fielding is "contented to copy Nature" and to write "little more than I have seen," aiming not at all to repudiate the evidence of the senses but to do full justice to its complexity. And the category "true History," in which he places Joseph Andrews at the conclusion of the chapter, provides a positive term for the complicated dance of double negation—neither romance nor history—in which his extreme skepticism has thus far consisted.

Another such category, of course, is "comic romance." Fielding's "Preface" to Joseph Andrews is as celebrated as it is in part because it so explicitly announces the fact that this is a project in epistemological and generic categorization, an effort to describe a "kind of Writing, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our Language," and which "no Critic hath thought proper to … assign … a particular Name to itself' (3). Fielding's taxonomic procedure in the "Preface" is self-consciously imitative of Aristotle's, but only up to a point. For given the normative meaning of "history" in Fielding's redefinition of the term, the invidious Aristotelian distinction between "history" and "poetry" can hold no attraction for him. So despite its crucial importance in most of his other generic considerations, in what has become the most famous of all the term "history" makes no appearance whatsoever. Even so, "comic romance" is an appropriate substitute for "true history." Together these terms resuscitate the two generic categories Fielding's extreme skepticism has decisively discredited, and the adjectival addition in each case signifies that the naíveté of the original category has been corrected by (a Cervantic procedure) conjoining it more closely with its supposed antithesis.³⁷

How does "romance" correct "history" in the body of Joseph Andrews? Most obviously, in the parodic and self-subversive deployment of the claim to historicity that I have already noted. But as in Jonathan Wild, all modes of self-conscious narration work here to subjectify the objective historicity of the narrative line. On the micronarrative level these reflexive intrusions are everywhere, and they are most amusing when Fielding's ostensible purpose is not to frankly advertise his control of the plot but on the contrary to underwrite a self-effacing authenticity.³⁸ On the macronarrative level, authorial intrusion amounts to a quite palpable interruption of the main action by apparently unrelated episodes. On such occasions, the challenge to the historical criterion of truth involves replacing the linear coherence of contiguity by—not chaos, but the alternative coherence of relations of similarity, which are simply too neat to be "natural." The most complex instance of this in Joseph Andrews occurs in Book III, when the "authentic History" of Fanny's rape (ix, 255) is interrupted by two successive chapters of static dialogue, first between the poet and the player and then between Joseph and Adams (x, xi). The first discourse, disclaimed as "of no other Use in this History, but to divert the Reader" (x, 259), concerns the power of actors to affect for good or ill the material that authors give them to work with. The second discourse, acknowledged as "a sort of Counterpart of this" (x, 264), debates the proper degree of human submission to "the Dispensations of Providence." And when at last we irritably return to Fanny's plight, we find that the "main plot" has really been continued rather than suspended by these analogous "episodes," since she was destined all along to be delivered by Peter Pounce (had we only had patience enough to submit ourselves to Fielding's narrative dispensations).³⁹

Because Joseph Andrews is periodically punctuated by coincidental meetings that increasingly seem too neat to be natural—Joseph with Adams (I, xiv, 64), Adams with Fanny (II, x, 143), Joseph with Fanny (II, xii, 154-55), Fanny with Peter Pounce (III, xii, 269)—its entire plot gradually takes on the air of a "historical" line that has been charmed, by the magical intrusions of "romance," into a circle. Yet there is one coincidental discovery, Joseph's meeting with Mr. Wilson, that is different from these in that our intrusive author denies us the crucial knowledge needed to distinguish it from the random ongoingness of everyday history—the knowledge that Mr. Wilson is Joseph's father. (Thus our ignorance of our hero's lineal descent at this point preserves the impression of linear contingency.) We cannot say that we have not been warned—although the early clues are rather ambiguous. True, there have been "romance" intimations of Joseph's genealogical gentility in what we have heard of his external appearance (I, viii, 38-39, xiv, 61). But readers have long since become used to hearing such things said of progressive protagonists who possess "true," as distinct from inherited, gentility, especially in narratives that progressively insist, as here, that their heroes are capable "of acquiring Honour" even in the total absence of ancestry (I, ii, 21). In other words, Fielding's "romance" conventions are equally parodic, antiromance conventions, and they create in us the erroneous expectation of an empiricist and a progressive ending.⁴⁰

So as his long-lost child, innocently returned to his place of birth, sits listening, Mr. Wilson concludes the history of his life with the only episode for which he cannot gratefully thank "the great Author," the theft of his eldest son by gypsies. Shortly thereafter the three travelers Renéw their journey. Joseph and Adams are soon lost in discourse about the rival claims of nature and nurture, until they find themselves all at once in "a kind of natural Amphitheatre," nature reworked by art, whose trees "seemed to have been disposed by the Design of the most skillful Planter … [And] the whole Place might have raised romantic Ideas in elder Minds than those of Joseph and Fanny, without the Assistance of Love" (III, iii, 224, v, 232). Here the travelers rest, and here our own author, as though encouraging us to rest in his analogous design, informs us that Mr. Wilson plans to pass through Parson Adams's parish in a week's time, "a Circumstance which we thought too immaterial to mention before." And as a pledge of his good will Fielding ends this chapter by letting the reader in on what the next contains, "for we scorn to betray him into any such Reading, without first giving him Warning" (III, v, 233). Thus the narrative power of imposition is defused by being made explicit, and the incredibility of "romance" coincidence is gently softened into a benign and watchful disposition of the author. When Mr. Wilson's visit later turns out to coincide remarkably with other events to which it is intimately related, Fielding will remind us that we knew it was going to happen (IV, xv, 338), as though now encouraging us toward an instrumental belief in a palpable fiction in which, after all, we are already to this degree knowingly invested. The last chapter heading—"In which this true History is brought to a happy Conclusion"—finely balances the claims of history and romance contrivance, and its closing words pleasantly insist upon the present historicity of Fielding's characters, as if counting on us to know the sort of belief with which to honor that claim (IV, xvi, 339, 343-44).

It is tempting to say that questions of truth and virtue merge with the climactic discovery of Joseph's parentage. Certainly it is a scene of contrivance calculated enough to permit the ghosts of romance idealism and aristocratic ideology to be raised simultaneously. But the effect depends so fully on the delicate balance of our liaison with our author that the relation is most accurately seen not as a merging but as a subsumption of questions of virtue by questions of truth. Not that Fielding does anything now to discourage our (highly provisional) belief in the benevolent authority of the gentry and the law. Thus far he has led us to associate Joseph's social elevation—the overcoming of his status inconsistency—with the interested goodness of Mr. Booby, who not only improves the law of Justice Frolick but immediately thereafter has Joseph "drest like a Gentleman" (IV, v, 292). If anything, Mr. Booby's charity increases in the last episodes of the narrative. But of course the real agent of Joseph's upward mobility, Fielding's narrative procedure insists, is not noblesse oblige at all; it is the good will of our benevolent author. Social justice and the rule of charity are most dependably institutionalized not in the law or the gentry but in the patriarchal care of the narrator, who internalizes the charity of an imagined "old English hospitality."

The representatives of the archaic feudal order that one finds among Fielding's characters are plentiful enough, but they are hedged about with a suppositional aura that we detect also in the power of providence—in some respects analogous to the power of the old gentry in Fielding-—largely because of the perpetual association of providence with the more manifest power of the author. Not that he would have us doubt for a moment the reality of divine justice. But the belief in it that Fielding argues for most energetically tends to be a well-rationalized and instrumental one. And meanwhile we are able to experience the palpable poetic justice of the narrator—why not call it providence?—who periodically intrudes into the daily life of story so as to ensure there what divine and human justice manifestly do not ensure in the world outside.⁴¹ Fielding's subsumption of questions of virtue by questions of truth transfers the major challenge of utopian projection from the substantive to the formal realm. And a central reason for this, we may speculate, is the relative uncertainty of his commitment to the utopian institutions and communities envisioned by conservative ideology. Attracted, on the other hand, to the energy of the career open to talents, Fielding was appalled by the vanity and pretension of those who enacted that career with any success or conviction. Accordingly, what "happens" at the end of Joseph Andrews (and Tom Jones) is less a social than an epistemological event; not upward mobility but—as in the invoked model of Oedipus (IV, xv, 336)—the acquisition of knowledge.

The subsumption is anticipated in Joseph Andrews in its two most extended discussions of formal strategy, the "Preface" and the first chapter of Book III. In both discussions Fielding's extreme sensitivity to the analogous relation between questions of truth and questions of virtue leads him to exemplify the former by the latter. Thus we are told in the "Preface" that comic romance works through the discovery of affectation, as when we find someone "to be the exact Reverse of what he affects." And the exemplary cases of affectation are also cases of status inconsistency: a "dirty Fellow" who "descend[s] from his Coach and Six, or bolt[s] from his Chair with his Hat under his Arm"; or a "wretched Family" in whose presence we find an "Affectation of Riches and Finery either on their Persons or in their Furniture" (9). Later on Fielding qualifies his technique of representing universal types in biography by acknowledging that life admits of exceptions to the rule. And the exceptions singled out for comment are those elevated individuals whose social status is, surprisingly enough, consistent with their "superior Talents" and "Mind" (III, i, 190). The ease with which formal argument comprehends the substantive social problem in both of these passages, by treating as an exemplary case, prefigures the increasing facility with which Fielding's charitable narrator will tacitly compensate for the failure of social—and providential—mechanisms to justify our provisional credence, by mobilizing narrative's own more perfect versions of them. Fielding's reflexive narration permits the discursive argument of the instrumentality of a belief in what cannot be shown to be credible to infiltrate narrative form itself. And once acclimatized, it becomes an automatic and all-purpose gesture of reconciliation, an invisible thread of affirmation that is as unconditional as the fact of the narrative form into which it has been woven. Approaching it from a very different direction, Fielding meets Richardson at the nexus where moral and social pedagogy hesitate on the edge of their transformation into something else entirely, aesthetic pleasure.…

Notes

¹ During Henry Fielding's lifetime the family was thought to derive from the Hapsburgs, a spurious genealogy that was concocted once Denbigh's main line had been raised to the peerage after his marriage to the Duke of Buckingham's sister in 1622. On Fielding's lineage and on the custody suit, see Wilber L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), vol. I, chap. 1. On the inflation of honors under Buckingham and James I, see [The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, by Michael McKeon (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); hereafter cited as Origins,] chap. 4, n. 31. For Richardson's sensitivity see Samuel Richardson to David Graham, May 3, 1750, in Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 158.

² Henry Fielding, The Author's Farce, ed. Charles B. Woods, Regents Restoration Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), II, x, 15-17 (the speaker is the hero's beloved). For the unity of time see idem, Historical Register, ed. William W. Appleton, Regents Restoration Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), I, 58-59, 66-69, where Sourwit wonders "how you can bring the actions of a whole year into the circumference of four-and-twenty hours," and Medley replies, "My register is not to be filled like those of vulgar news-writers with trash for want of news, and therefore if I say little or nothing, you may thank those who have done little or nothing." See Fielding's Jonathan Wild (1743), I, vii, and Tom Jones (1749), II, i, for a similar comparison and argument. Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 52-53, observes the affinity between Pope's and Fielding's satire on the spectacles of "the Smithfield Muses." On the analogy of world and stage see J. Paul Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 57-67; see also Hunter's suggestive discussion of reflexiveness in Fielding's drama (69-74). On the formal relations between drama and narrative see [Origins], chap. 3, nn. 81-86.

³Jonathan Wild was published in 1743 as Volume III of the Miscellanies. On its composition see F. Homes Dudden, Henry Fielding: His Life, Works, and Times (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), I, 480-483; Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722-1742 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 197-98. On the extent and character of Fielding's historiographical reading see Robert M. Wallace, "Fielding's Knowledge of History and Biography," Studies in Philology, 44, no. I (Jan., 1947), 89-107.

⁴ For the primary critique of traditional biography see Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild, ed. A. R. Humphreys and Douglas Brooks (London: Everyman's Library, 1973), I, ii-iii, 5-9; II, xii, 79-81; III, vi, 100-01 (hereafter cited as Jonathan Wild [Everyman's ed.]). All parenthetical references in the text are to this edition and include book, chapter, and page numbers. In these examples, the second-level critique occurs where the supernatural intrusion of dolphins and sea horses is disowned only to be replaced by the ostentatiously "natural" intrusion of authorial rationales, and the eloquence of modern heroes also is shown to be an invention. For parody of the authenticating devices of criminal biography see ibid., I, vii, 22, xiii, 36; II, vii, 67-68; III, vi, 100, vii, 103; IV, xii-xiii, 163-65, xiv, 169. On the form of criminal biography see [Origins], chap. 3, nn. 16-24. Among the several models available to Fielding for the writing of this particular life was Daniel Defoe's True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the late Jonathan Wild; not Made up out of Fiction & Fable, but Taken from his own Mouth, and Collected from Papers of his own Writing (1725). On Wild's contemporary notoriety see William R. Irwin, The Making of Jonathan Wild: A Study in the Literary Method of Henry Fielding (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), chap. 1. Maximillian Novak observes in Fielding and Swift a similar distrust of the materials of criminal biography as conducive to a "wrong kind of art"; see his Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe's Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 122.

⁵ For Jonathan Wild as a normatively stable mockheroic, see William J. Farrell, "The Mock-Heroic Form of Jonathan Wild," Modern Philology, 63, no. 3 (Feb., 1966), 216-26. On its formal instability see John M. Steadman, Milton and the Renaissance Hero (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 173; and C. J. Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 158. On the relation between the critique of ancient heroes and that of ancient historians in Jonathan Wild, see ibid., 148-55.

⁶ On the Machiavellian connection see, generally, Bernard Shea, "Machiavelli and Fielding's Jonathan Wild," PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], 72, no. 1 (March, 1957), 54-73. Shea argues that Fielding was indebted to the 1695 translation of Machiavelli by the republican Henry Neville, and he sees an especially close parallel between Fielding's version of Wild's career and the Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca (ibid., 66-73). On Machiavellian virtu see [Origins] chap. 5, nn. 16-18. On the common application of the term "great man" to Walpole for purposes of both praise and blame, see John E. Wells, "Fielding's Political Purpose in Jonathan Wild," PMLA, 28, no. 1 (1913), 14-19.

⁷ Henry Fielding, "An Essay on Conversation," in Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq; (1743), vol. I, ed. Henry K. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 138, 140; Henry Fielding, "An Essay on Nothing," ibid., 186. In his imaginary voyages of Job Vinegar, Fielding satirizes the belief of the Ptfghsiumgski or "Inconstants" that the virtues of the nobility "descend in a perpetual Line to their Posterity"; see Champion, no. 106 (July 17, 1740), in "The Voyages of Mr. Job Vinegar," ed. S. J. Sackett, Augustan Reprint Society, no. 67 (1958), 7.

⁸ Compare Henry Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal, ed. Gerard E. Jensen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915), no. 4 (Jan. 14, 1752), I, 156, where Fielding defines "Honour" simply as "Duelling." For other instances of Fielding's ironic subversion of gentility and aristocratic honor see Glenn W. Hatfield, Henry Fielding and the Language of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 19-20, 117-18, 163-65, 168-73. Rawson is particularly sensitive to the comic oafishness of Fielding's protagonist; see his Henry Fielding, especially chap. 4.

⁹ The corollary is explicit in Fielding's diatribes against hereditary honor. E.g., see Henry Fielding, The Champion, 2 vols (1741), Nov. 17, 1739, I, 8, 10-11: "This Esteem for hereditary Honour was at so high a Pitch among [the ancient Romans], that they looked on the Plebians as Persons of almost a different Species, which may, I think, be collected from the Appelation they gave to what we call an Upstart, namely, Novus Homo, a new Man… I have often wondered how such Words as Upstart, First of his Family, &c. crept into a Nation, whose Strength and Support is Trade … For my Part, I am at a Loss to see why a Man, who has brought 100,000 1. into his Country by a beneficial Trade, is not as worthy and honourable a Member of the Community, as he who hath spent that Sum abroad, or sent it thither after French Wines and French Foppery."

¹⁰ Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 75, argues that John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) "was Fielding's most important source for the use of the heroic level as a parallel instead of a contrast to his subject." Fielding's own Don Quixote in England (1734) uses the wise madness of the Cervantic protagonist to discern the rogue in the statesman or vice versa; see Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 89. On the assimilationism of rogues and statesmen compare Fielding's account of Jonathan Wild in the "Preface" to the Miscellanies, ed. cit., I, 13: "This Bombast Greatness then is the Character I intend to expose … [which takes] to itself not only Riches and Power, but often Honour, or at least the Shadow of it." In his Brief and true History of Robert Walpole and his Family From Their Original to the Present Time … (1738), William Musgrave spends thirty-eight pages tracing Walpole's lineage up from the Norman Conquest. Among his sources are "several ancient Charters in the Custody of the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole, who out of Regard to Literature, and the Memory of his Ancestors, favoured me with the Perusal of them" (2).

¹¹ Fielding is not the only writer to see the possibilities of this sort of generic conflation. The Statesman's Progress … (1741), an anonymous parodic fusion of The Pilgrim's Progress and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, narrates the allegorical joumey of a rogue figure toward "Greatness Hill"; see Irwin's discussion in The Making of Jonathan Wild, 46-47. For the classic conservative reduction see Champion, June 10, 1740, II, 318. On the fortuitous accident of birth see [Origins], n. 7. Compare Champion, Dec. 6, 1739, I, 66, 67, where Fielding gives a characteristically conservative account of Oliver Cromwell's career as exemplifying the Juvenalian maxim that "Fortune often picks a great Man, in Jest, out of the lowest of People." Cromwell is the Machiavellian "new prince" who owes his power "principally to Chance; namely, to the Death of those great Men whom the long Continuance of the Civil War had exhausted; those who begun [sic] that War would have disdained to have seen the Nation enslaved to the absolute Will of a Subject, in Rank very little above the common Level." For related conservative accounts of the macronarrative of the English Revolution see [Origins], chap. 6, n. 18.

¹² Conservative ideologues were able to understand marriages of convenience as an institution of aristocratic culture given new life by the culture's supposed, progressive antagonist. For another context in which Fielding clearly associates such marriages with the new monied culture, see Champion, no. 114 (Aug. 5, 1740), in "Voyages of Mr. Job Vinegar," ed. cit., 15-17. Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 80, remarks on the characteristic inadequacy of Fielding's "great" villains as lovers, in contrast to their political and financial success; cf. Justice Squeezum in Fielding's Rape upon Rape; or, The Coffee-House Politician (1730). For the parallel between theft and financial investment, and for the conservative hierarchy of appetites, see [Origins], chap. 6, nn. 31, 53-54.

¹³ Hatfield, Henry Fielding, 40.

¹⁴ Henry Fielding, "An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men," in Miscellanies, ed. cit., I, 154-55; Champion, no. 98 (June 28, 1740), in "Voyages of Mr. Job Vinegar," ed. cit., 5. In a parody of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, Fielding combines the critique of naíve empiricism with the critique of the naíve progressive enchantment with money; see "Some Papers Proper to be Read before the R I Society, Concerning the Terrestrial Chrysipus, Golden-Foot or Guinea," in Miscellanies, ed. cit., I, 191-204. (For other satirical allusions to the Royal Society by Fielding see ibid., p. xl, n. 1; and Hatfield, Henry Fielding, pp. 30-31 and n. 8.). With Fielding's cult of MNEY compare Eliza Haywood's cult of Lust and Pecunia in her Memoirs of a Certain Island (1725), [Origins], chap. 6, n. 53.

¹⁵ E.g., cf. Allan Wendt, "The Moral Allegory of Jonathan Wild," ELH [English Literary History], 24 (1970), 302-20; and Rawson, Henry Fielding, chap. 7.

¹⁶ Henry Fielding, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), printed with Jonathan Wild (Everyman's ed.), "Author's Preface," I, 187; see, generally, 183-88. The deleted chapter is IV, ix of the 1743 edition. Its subtitle invokes the maxim "strange, therefore true": "A very wonderful chapter indeed; which, to those who have not read many voyages, may seem incredible; and which the reader may believe or not, as he pleases" (The Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great [London: Shakespeare Head, n.d.], IV, ix, 196). For a parody of the self-advertising mode in travel narratives see Champion, no. 112 (July 31, 1740), in "Voyages of Mr. Job Vinegar," ed. cit., 12-15. Fielding precedes this parodic political allegory by complaining that "there are a sort of Men so sceptical in their Opinions, that they are unwilling to believe any Thing which they do not see … Several excellent Accounts of Asia and Africa have been look'd on as little better than fabulous Romances. But if a Traveller hath the good Fortune to satisfy his Curiosity by the Discovery of any new Countries, any Islands never before known, his Reader allows him no more Credit than is given to the Adventures of Cassandra, or the celebrated Countess Danois's Fairy Tales. To omit Robinson Cruso, and other grave Writers, the facetious Capt. Gulliver is more admired, I believe, for his Wit than his Truth" (Champion, no. 55 [March 20, 1740], in "Voyages of Mr. Job Vinegar," ed. cit. 1). See also Fielding's imaginary voyage, which opens with the discovered manuscript topos and has been refused by the Royal Society (according to its discoverer) because "there was nothing in it wonderful enough for them": A Journey from This World to the Next (1743), ed. C. J. Rawson (London: Everyman's Library, 1973), 2. As Rawson observes (viii-xiii), the formal self-consciousness of the Journey seems to be aimed both at a Lucianic or Scriblerian satire of "learned" works and at a parody of the modern claim to historicity. Fielding much admired the works of Lucian, among them the True History; see the discussion in Henry K. Miller, Essays on Fielding's Miscellanies: A Commentary on Volume One (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 366-86.

¹⁷ With Mrs. Heartfree's tale compare the first account of Bavia's adventures in W. P., The Jamaica Lady; or, The Life of Bavia (1720), in which Bavia refuses the advances of the ship's captain on the grounds "that her honor was dearer to her than her life," but promises him, in exchange for her deliverance, "one rich jewel of a very great value, which she brought with her by accident." The skeptical audience to this account, Captain Fustian, "believed it (as he afterwards found it) all a romance." See William H. McBurney, ed., Four before Richardson: Selected English Novels, 1720-1727 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 100, 102. For the common "jewel/jewel" metaphor see, e.g., Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740), ed. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 166.

¹⁸ See Champion, Jan. 22, 1740, I, 208-9 (cf. Heartfree on the same subject, Jonathan Wild [Everyman's ed.], III, ii, 88-89); Fielding, "An Essay on Conversation," in Miscellanies, ed. cit., I, 127-28.

¹⁹ On the political significance of Fielding's family background see Brian McCrea, Henry Fielding and the Politics of Mid-Eighteenth Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), chap. 2. For documentation of Fielding's great admiration for Marlborough see ibid., 217n.19. Contrast Swift and other conservative authors, [Origins], chap. 5, n. 55; chap. 6, nn. 24-25. McCrea's useful argument nevertheless ignores some important evidence of Fielding's profound distaste for monied culture. For a review of the evidence for the general proposition that Fielding took money from Walpole, and for the particular role of Jonathan Wild in this relationship, see Martin C. Battestin, "Fielding's Changing Politics and Joseph Andrews," Philological Quarterly, 39, no. I (Jan., 1960), 39-55; Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits, 197-98, 205-7. Goldgar (219) summarizes how most of the men of letters contemporary with Fielding "sought some accommodation with the administration." Fielding later defended a writer's changing sides for money; see The Jacobite's Journal, ed. W. B. Coley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for Wesleyan University Press, 1975), no. 17 (March 26, 1748), 215.

²⁰ For Fielding's extreme skepticism, compare Champion, March 1, 1740, I, 322: "Writing seems to be understood as arrogating to yourself a Superiority (which of all others will be granted with the greatest Reluctance) of the Understanding … The Understanding, like the Eye (says Mr. Lock) whilst it makes us see and perceive all other Things, takes no Notice of itself; and it requires Art and Pains to set it at a Distance and make it its own Object. This Comparison, fine as it is, is inadequate: For the Eye can contemplate itself in a Glass, but no Narcissus hath hitherto discovered any Mirrour for the Understanding, no Knowledge of which is to be obtained but by the Means Mr. Lock prescribes, which as it requires Art and Pains, or in other Words, a very good Understanding to execute, it generally happens that the Superiority in it, is a Cause tried on every dark and presumptive Evidence, and a Verdict commonly found by self Love for ourselves." On Lockean epistemology and the analogy between knowledge and visual sense perception see [Origins], chap. 2, nn. 31-32, 36. On the parallel between magistrate and narrator see the discussion in Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 96.

²¹ For a related argument concerning what he calls Fielding's "language of irony" see Hatfield, Henry Fielding, esp. chap. 6.

²² The device was common in the French antiromance: cf. [Charles Sorel], The Extravagant Shepherd … (1654), trans. John Davies, 193; and [Antoine Furetière], Scarron's City Romance … (1671) (a translation of Furetière's Roman Bourgeois), 19. See also Samuel Richardson, "Hints of Prefaces for Clarissa," 2, in Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript, ed. R. F. Brissenden, Augustan Reprint Society, no. 103 (1964).

²³ The unity is artificial, however, if limited to this interchange. Part II of Pamela, which was begun two weeks after the publication of Shamela in April, 1741, may be at least in part a counterdefense against it; see Owen Jenkins, "Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's 'Vile Forgeries,"' Philological Quarterly, 44 (Oct., 1965), 200-210.

²⁴ Henry Fielding, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews … (1741), in Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 299, 306-8, 337, 339; all parenthetical citations to Shamela in the text are to this edition. A source for Fielding's credulous clergyman may be found in the Mr. Tickletext of Aphra Behn's The Feign'd Curtezans; or, A Night's Intrigue (1679) (see [Origins], chap. 3, n. 55). Fielding refers to Behn's character in discussing the absurdities of the claim to historicity in travel journals; see "Author's Preface," Voyage to Lisbon, 187-88. Behn's Tickletext as a source for Fielding's has been overlooked by editors of Shamela; see, e.g., Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Sheridan Baker (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972), 9-1On.9. Fielding was not the only critic of Pamela who used the strategy of claiming to possess the truly authentic papers; see [Origins], chap. 11, n. 3.

²⁵ See [Origins], chap. 6, nn. 32-34.

²⁶ Hugh Amory, "Shamela as Aesopic Satire," ELH, 38, no. 2 (June, 1971), 241. On Fielding's second marriage see Cross, History of Henry Fielding, II, 60; his first wife had died three years earlier. The parallel with Mr. B. and Pamela did not escape the notice of Fielding's critics (ibid., II, 61).

²⁷ With Fielding's Booby compare Swift's Lord Munodi, [Origins], chap. 10, n. 7. For Pamela's exultation see Pamela, 315.

²⁸ On Fielding's satire of complacent, and of High Church, Anglicanism see, respectively, Hunter, Occasional Form, 78-80, and Amory, "Shamela as Aesopic Satire," 245-46. On Methodist satire—and the relation of Methodism to Puritanism—see Eric Rothstein, "The Framework of Shamela," ELH, 35, no. 3 (1968), 389-95. On the continuity between seventeenth-century radical Protestantism and eighteenth-century Methodism see, generally, Umphrey Lee, The Historical Backgrounds of Early Methodist Enthusiasm (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931). For a discussion of pious, and specifically Methodist, journals, lives, and spiritual autobiographies of the 1730s and 1740s that reflect many features of their seventeenth-century predecessors, see Jerry C. Beasley, Novels of the 1740s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 128-34. On the provenance of Tickletext's credulity see [Origins], n. 24.

²⁹ On the relationship between "latitudinarian" liberal Anglicanism and capitalist ideology see [Origins], chap. 5, nn. 42-43. Compare Champion, Jan. 24, 1740, I, 213: "Virtue is not … of that morose and rigid Nature, which some mistake her to be … she has been known to raise some to the highest Dignities in the State, in the Army, and in the Law. So that we find Virtue and Interest are not… as repugnant as Fire and Water." For the defense of actions over words see Champion, Dec. 11, 1739, I, 79; and Fielding, "An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men," in Miscellanies, ed. cit., I, 162-63 (cf. Jonathan Wild [Everyman's ed.], IV, xv, 174). On the stealthy recapitulation in Swift's Tale, and its relation to the double reversal of extreme skepticism, see [Origins], chap. 5, n. 36.

³⁰ Henry Fielding, 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 (1742), ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), I, v, 29-30, x, 47 (hereafter cited as Joseph Andrews). All parenthetical citations in the text and in the notes of this chapter are to this edition, and include book, chapter, and page numbers. While still in her service, Joseph hopes "your Ladyship can't tax me with ever betraying the Secrets of the Family, and I hope, if you was to turn me away, I might have the Character of you" (ibid., I, v, 29). When he later learns that Lady Booby "would not give him a Character," Joseph says that he will nonetheless always give her "a good Character where-ever he went" (ibid., IV, i, 279). On the importance of these matters of "character" in Pamela, see [Origins], chap. 11. n. 18. On Joseph and Abraham as embodiments of chastity and charity, see Martin C. Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), chaps. 2, 3, and passim.

³¹ Many critics have observed this. However, it is worth noting that what is ludicrous is not male chastity itself but the spuriously social resonance it acquires in this particular encounter. On male chastity see [Origins], chap. 4, n. 40.

³² See the observations of Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 120.

³³ E.g., see Samuel Johnson, Rambler, no. 99 (Feb. 26, 1751), in The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), II, 164-69.

³⁴ E.g., see Joseph Andrews, I, ii, 20, xvi, 71-72; II, xv, 168; III, vi, 235, vii, 246, ix, 255; IV, v, 289, xvi, 339.

³⁵In Jacobite's Journal, ed. cit., no. 13 (Feb. 27, 1748), 177-78, Fielding attacks Thomas Carte's General History of England as a "great Romance," compares it to these same popular romances, and advises that if published serially as they are, it should have as good a sale as "the inimitable Adventures of Robinson Crusoe."

³⁶ The difficulty of the exercise is suggested by the fact that in another context Fielding used the story of Cardenio, Ferdinand, Dorothea, and Lucinda as an example of how Cervantes "in many Instances, approaches very near to the Romances which he ridicules": Covent-Garden Journal, ed. cit., no. 24 (March 24, 1752), I, 281. In the absence of a stable critical theory, to reject naíve empiricism inevitably risks a return to its antagonist, romance idealism.

³⁷ Thus, just as Fielding distinguishes his own "true history" from the naíve claim to historicity that he discredits, so here he distinguishes the "comic Romance" from the serious "Romance." And we would seem to be justified in identifying the latter with "those voluminous Works commonly called Romances" (Joseph Andrews, "Preface," 3-4), that is, with the French heroic romances that he later alludes to as those "immense Romances" and that he discredits for their idealist detachment from both nature and history (see [Origins]). As Sheridan Baker has argued, and despite modern critical practice, the significant generic term in the "Preface" is "comic Romance" and not the pedantically exhaustive synonym "comic Epic-Poem in Prose"; see Baker's "Henry Fielding's Comic Romances," Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, 45 (1960), 441.

³⁸ Contrast the following passages from Joseph Andrews: "to which likewise he had some other Inducements which the Reader, without being a Conjurer, cannot possibly guess; 'till we have given him those hints, which it may be now proper to open" (I, x, 47); and "Indeed, I have been often assured by both, that they spent these Hours in a most delightful Conversation: but as I never could prevail on either to relate it, so I cannot communicate it to the Reader" (II, xv, 168).

³⁹ Compare the technique of Cervantes [Origins], chap. 7, sec. 1). The invasion of "historical" contiguity by "romance" similarity is especially pleasing when it occurs within an interpolated tale, which is already itself an interruption of the linear plot and which nonetheless may lay claim to being integral with it. A good example of this in Jonathan Wild is the disruption of Mrs. Heartfree's travel narrative by Wild's marital outrage. The best instance in Joseph Andrews is the progressive plot of Leonora (II, iv-vi), which is accompanied by claims to historicity but interrupted by the conservative themes that arise during Adams's fistfight at the inn.

⁴⁰ In Joseph Andrews Fanny also has a "natural Gentility" (II, xii, 153), so much so that once on the road she is more than once taken to be a young lady of quality either run or stolen away from her parents (III, ii, 199-200, ix, 257).

⁴¹ Thus the status of Fielding's narratives as expressions of a belief in a providentially ordered universe seems to me far more problematic—or, at its simplest level, far less interesting—than it does to Aubrey Williams, "Interpositions of Providence and the Design of Fielding's Novels," South Atlantic Quarterly, 70, no. 1 (Spring, 1971), 265-86; see also Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), chap. 5. See [Origins], chap. 3, nn. 75-80. For Fielding's instrumental belief in divine justice see, e.g., [Origins], n. 18.