INFORMATION TO USERS
This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, sorne thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer.
The quality of thi. ntprOduction is depenclent upon the quallty of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, coIored or poor quarlty illusbatiOns and photographs, print bleedthrough. subs18ndard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. ln the unlikely event that the authOr did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages. these will be noted. Also. if unauthorized copyright material had ID be removed. a note will indicale the detetiOn.
Oversize materials (e.g., maps. drawings. charts) are reproduœd by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper Ieft-hand corner and continuing from 18ft ID right in equal sections with small overlaps.
Photographs induded in tfie original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6- x 9" black and white photographie prints are available for any photographs or iliustnltionS appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly te arder.
Bell & Howell Information and Leaming 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 481Q6.1346 USA UMI~
800-521-0600
UToo Fond to Be Bere Related": • Ironie Didacticism and the Moral Analogy in Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751)
by Adam. Budd
25 August 1997
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation to the Degree of Master of Arts
Department of English McGill University Montreal, Canada
This work is dedicated to Hr. Lewis Field: grandfather and gentle man • C Adam Budd, 1997. AlI riqhts reserved• National Ubrary Bibliothèque nationale 1+1 of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services services bibliographiques 395 Weflington Street 395. rue Wetlington Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada
The author has granted a 000 L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library ofCanada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distnbute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies ofthis thesis in microfonn, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic fonnats. la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique.
The author retains ownership ofthe L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts from it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation.
0-612-43839-2
Canadl •
Where a general abstract principle i5 first established, and i5 afterwards branched out into a variety of inferences and conclusions, may he more perfect in itself, [it] suits less the imperfection of human nature, and is a common source of illusion and mistake.
David Hume, An Enguiry concerninq the Principles of Morals 174
Renee, my worthy Reader, console thyself that however few of the other good Things of Life are thy Lot; the best of all Things, which is Innocence, i5 always within thy own Power; and tho' Fortune may make thee often unhappy, she ean never completely and irreparably make thee miserable without thy own Consent. Henry Fielding, Amelia 320
Minute attention to propriety stops the growth of virtue. Mary Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters 141 • UToo Fond to Be Bere Related": Ironie Didacticism and the Moral Analogy in • Benry Fielding's Amelia (1751)
Contents: Abstract in Enqlish 4 Résumé en français 5 Chronology of Significant Events 6
Introduction: David Hume and Fielding' s Moral Problem 7 Development: Irony and FormaI Characterization 30 Closing Discussion: Dialogue with Samuel Richardson 52
Notes 68 Works Cited 92
Acknowledgments:
l am grateful for the helpful advice l received from the staff at the interlibrary loans office at McGill university and from the hospitable librarians in the Upper Reading Room at the Bodleian Library (Oxford), who made available to me the first editions of the eighteenth-century novels and treatises that l refer to in this thesis. l want to thank David Hensley for his supportive critical insiqht and encouragement. l especially thank my mother, who suppliedme with that particular kind of emotional support and biographical insight which enabled me to start, sustain, and complete this project• • Budd 4
Abstract
• This thesis, entitled UToo Fond to Be Here Related": Ironie Didactieism and the Moral Analogy in Henry Fielding's "Amelia" (1751), opens by explorinq the current and historical critical reception of Fielding's final extended work of fiction. In an effort to explain Amelia's "failure"- the prevailing assessment among even its more sympathetic critics--I then argue that this experimental novel offers an innovative engagement with David Hume's moral philosophy. The emerging analogy provides a fascinating but previously negleeted departure from Samuel Riehardson's means of providing moral instruction throuqh a sentimental appeal to
upholding a specifie social eontract~ Fielding's unsteady narrator and provocative paradoxical treatment of the novel's protagonists invite us to appreciate the link between Amelia and the progressive social protest novels of the later eighteenth century•
• Budd 5
Résumé
• Cette mémoire sur l'Amelia d'Henry Fielding, entitulée (Toc Fond te Be Here Related»: Ironie Didacticism and the Moral Analogy in Henry Fieldinq's «Amelia» (1751), prend son ouverture avec une explication de l'accueil critique, historique, et actuelle du dernier roman de Fielding (1707 1754). Elle propose d'adopter une position critique envers le jugem.ement académique traditionnel que ce roman est un véritable «échec», et de suggérer par contre que cette oeuvre lance un engagement innovateur avec la philosophie morale de David Hume. Dans un traitement considérable mais mal reconnu qui s'éloigne de la programme poétique de Samuel Richardson- un auteur qui propose de donner aux lecteurs une education morale par un appel sentimental pour un contrat social--le narrateur chancelant de Fielding et le traitement paradoxical de ses protagonistes nous incitent à considérer les connexions entre Amelia et les romans anglais qui prennent ses débuts et qui empruntent ses consciences sociales dans les derniers années du XVlllème siècle•
• Budd 6
Chronology of Significant Events 1689 Birth of Samuel Richardson in Derbyshire 1690 Publication of John Locke's An Essay concerning • Human Understandinq 1707 Birth of Henry Fielding in Somerset 1711 Birth of David Hume in Edinburgh publication of Lord Shaftesbury's Characteristicks 1728 Publication of Francis Hutcheson's An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions 1739-40 publication of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature 1740-1 Publication of Richardson' s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded 1741 Publication of Fielding's An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews 1747-8 Publication of Richardson's Clarissa. Or, The History of a Young Lady, Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life 1748 Publication of Hume's Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding 1749 Publication of Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling 1750-2 Publication of Johnson's The Rambler 1751 Publication of Fielding's Amelia Publication of Fielding's An Enguiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, with Some ProposaIs for Remedving the Growing Evil Publication of Letters and Passages Restored from the Original Manuscripts of the History of Clarissa 1754 Death of Henry Fielding near Lisbon 1755 Publication of Richardson's A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Maxims, Sentiments,Cautions, and Reflections Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison 1759 Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments 1761 Death of Samuel Richardson in London • 1776 Death of David Hume in Edinburqh Budd 7
Introduction: David Hume and Fielding's Moral Problem
• "1 made the same observation," cries Booth: "sure some Misfortune hath befallen her." liA Misfortune indeed!" answered Amelia, "sure Child, you forget what Mrs. Ellison told us, that she had lost a beloved Husband. A Misfortune which l have often wondered at any Woman's surviving, "--at which Words, she cast a tender Look at Booth, and presently afterwards throwing herself upon his Neck, cried--"O Heavens! What a happy Creature am 1; when l consider the Dangers you have gone through, how l exult in my Bliss!" The goOO natured Reader will suppose that Booth was not deficient in returning such Tenderness, after which the conversation became too fond ta be here related. (Amelia 204-205)1
Captain William Booth and his wife Amelia know that they cannat successfully escape the constraints imposed on them by London's sinister justice system and its roving bands of mercenary bailiffs. Yet the hopelessness of the situation provides a special impetus for Amelia--"the most worthy, generous, and noble of all Human Beings"--to reflect positivelyon her predicament (89). Nothing, it seems, might renew Amelia's affections for her husband more effectively than a momentary reflection on another's misfortunes. Indeed, • the psychological pressure that social injustice exerts in Budd 8
this novel makes it a~ost ~possLble for Amelia to take action to improve her circumstances without first considering • --and, at times, sentimentally reenacting--the stories told to her; for this instructive paragon, the qualities of life afforded by "Fortune" or "Providence" always demand an
appreciation of another's suffering before they can be evaluated or understood as bearing implications for understanding her own. 2 In contrast, Amelia's "jealous Rival," Miss Mathews, encourages Booth ta narrate his past--and thus reflect on his family's sufferinq--as a means merely ta perform the role of an empathetic listener (161, 164). Unlike Amelia, when Mathews senses another's misfortunes, the experience leads her only to increase her own share: she will later use the fact of the illicit sexual encaunter with Booth ta blackmail him to extend the liaison, even as this coercion diminishes her status in the novel and in Booth's life. Before Miss Mathews responds to Booth's story throuqh her demand to extend the romance, she enjoys the status of an interactive confidante--a textual equal to Booth for the first four books of the "History"--and after her demand, she moves ta the periphery of the novel and of Booth's life: she becomes, in effect, merely a vaque nuisance to his conscience, a character who will henceforth speak only through ill-conceived letters, the disguised voice of a masque in a shepherdess' costume, and later a frantic woman in the street, implorinq Booth ta join her for supper • (164, 225, 417, 486) • Budd 9
As with Most of the extended retrospective dialogues in Amelia, the conversation that structures Booth's seduction • entails a tellinq of history that cffers only a provisional and perhaps disinqenuous view of the past. In this particular case, the seduction dialogue is bath powered and tempered by sexual dynamics which deny empathetic connections or mutual understandinq, and it stalls a foreseeable release from the characters' detainment at Newqate. Despite ambiquous and indirect hints of mixed motives and questionable morals on both sides of the conversation, the concludinq section of the dialogue will open a headnote--"the latter Part of which will please our Reader better than the former"--to indicate the presence of a didactic agenda (154).3 One's "ability to survive" in Amelia relies on one's ability to sustain the punishments that attach themselves to the consequences of making wrong choices, while survival also requires that one maintain a respect, as J. Paul Hunter indicates, for "the rewards and punishments [that] are meted out according to a
polarized moral world with qood nature serving as the basic dividing line" ("Lesson" 173). Amelia, Uthe finest Woman in England of her Age," makes herself the paraqon that proves Dr. Harrison' s solemn adaqe--and arguably Amelia' s operative
leitmotif--that "Domestie Happiness is the End of a~ost all our Pursuits, and the common Reward of aIl our Pains" (533, 414). In turn, she receives the elusive prize at the end of the novel: "ever ainee the above Period of this History [she • has] enjoyed an uninterrupted Course of Health and Happiness" Budd 10
while Miss Mathews is doomed, predictably, to live the negative consequences of Dr. Harrison's prophetie position: • she embodies the ridiculously self-parodie representation of growing "very disagreeable in her Person, and immensely fat" (532 531). This double ability, to make oneself worthy of the fortunes which derive from the negotiation of moral choices in times of extreme injustice, even as such conduct elicits a particular and at times unstable poetic justice, always applies ta puzzled readers as well as to the novel's characters: as Hunter arqued early in the past twenty-five years of renewed critical interest in the novel, umorality in Amelia is no longer very amusing, and the reader is not trusted to figure things out for himself" (209); Jill Campbell has found that "the narrator of Amelia often makes his readers uncomfortably aware of the willfulness of his explanations through the unsteadiness with whieh he sustains them" (226). No longer will Fielding appear as he once did ta George Eliot, Ua great historian ••• [who] seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in aIl the lusty ease of his fine English" (Midd1emarch 116). Narration in Amelia has become a far more sophisticated and ironie presentation. Perhaps no other novel of eiqhteenth-century England offers us the unpredictability, unconventionality, and yet avowedly serious moral intent of Amelia, Henry Fielding's final sustained work of fiction. Fielding's project--in which
Uwe shall best be instructed in this most useful of all Arts, • which l call the ART of LIFE"--pays a surprisinqly open Budd Il
compliment to Samuel Richardson's earnest claims for defendinq (or constructing) moral territory, a gesture that has led • critics to suspect that in their last novels "the two rivaIs were tacitly adoptinq characteristic features of each other's writing" (Amelia 17, Sabor 3). Arguably, Amelia' s value May also be assessed throuqh a bioqraphical study of its author, who May have "used Amelia to expose those glarinq public and private evils which were beyond [Fieldinq'sJ authority as a maqistrate to correct" (Battestin, A Life 544). In my view, however, Amelia does not distinguish itself merely throuqh its particular combination of debts to established literary genres (such as epistolary autobiography, conduct books, melodramatic theatre, and spiritual confession), nor does it distinguish itself primarily throuqh what Claude Rawson calls its strikinq "retrospective reversaI" of the qreqarious and more familiar "comic Epic-Poem in Prose," which Fielding introduces as a "new Species of Writing" in the Preface to Joseph Andrews and celebrates with festive gusto throuqhout Tom Jones, his "new Province of Writing" (Rawson 150, Andrews 4, la, Jones 2, 77). Apart fram its earnest citations of "favourite Divines" Robert South and Isaac Barrow, and the import of its socially realist portrait of London in 1133--features which have been weIl documented4--Amelia offers many complex propositions and responses to a highly divisive philosophical dialogue that occupied men of letters for the greater part of the eighteenth century• • Budd 12
Amelia is likely the first Enqlish novel to experiment with internaI narrators who historicize and fictionalize • fellow characters. l believe it is primarily through a treatment of this novel as an admittedly unstable and experimental project intended to offer a learned comment on its generic form and on its own tendency toward satirical prophecies, that we might explain "the failure, or partial
failure of Amelialr (Ribble 104). Rather than attempt ta elucidate what the "basic dividing lines" of Fielding's presumably moral project or notions of "qood nature" miqht be,s l hope to show that the stylistic treatment of characters who live with the consequences of their choices illuminates Amelia's strident attempts to engage in questioninq that derives from a critique of natural law theory contemporary with the novel's dates of composition. This critique tries to force both sides of a Shaftesburian "philosophical rhapsody" into concert with one another. Even as Fielding professes his intentions "to promote the Cause of Virtue, and to expose some of the most qlaring Evils, as well public as private, which at present infect the Country," he has allowed Amelia to address, as Martin Battestin has noted, "a sensationalist psycholoqy" that threatens "conventional Christian humanism" even as the novel represents "a theory of human nature virtually indistinguishable from the psycholoqy it ostensibly represents" (3, "Problem" 616, 635). AlI this from London's Most prominent court magistrate, who earlier the same year • produced An Enguiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Budd 13
Robbers, designed to offer in careful detail a national program to prohibit public drunkenness, gaming, urban hunger, • and violent theft. On a thematic level, the emotional tenderness implicit in the moral "conversation," which is "too fond to be here related" by the novel's narrator, supports and yet confuses the novel's representations of dialogue and Fielding's attempt to underscore AmeIia's opening speech, to the effect that IIgreat Fortunes are not necessary to Happiness" (162). The basis for what Robert Alter has called Fielding's "whole didactic weakness" (163) derives from an innovative poetics that tries te outline the personal stakes of social corruption while it allows a certain ambiguity and ironie self reflexivity that might challenge the reader to question the ability of fiction to improve the reader's moral conduct. 6 In this special sense--which implies a crucial consequence for the novel's formaI construction--Amelia is more a critical
commentary on Richardson' s ideal that the novel' 5 drama "should be considered as little more than the Vehicle to the more necessary INSTRUCTION" than it is an attempted embodiment
of i t (Clarissa 1, vi). 7 Even as the novel offers extended parables and dialogues to validate AmeIia's exemplary speech, and indeed Fielding's punctilious "exordium" (14-17), Fielding ends with what critics have found a "remarkably unconvincing," even "forced and arbitrary" resolution that is not only abrupt, but aiso the enormous inheritance that is unexpectedly • bestowed on Amelia in the noveI's final ten pages seems to Budd 14
equate financial success with domestic happiness, as the text's final yet certainly contradictory lesson (Wolff 52, • Oakman 487). In my view, which l hope to support primarily through a critique of the novel's formal and thematic composition, this "arbitrary" deus ex machina--which is only one of the many devices Fielding borrows from the Virgilian epic--functions as an ironie comment on the very desirability of ending a drama of social and perhaps poetic protest with a miraculous, but in a sense generic, happy ending.
Although we may not find any explicit references to David Hume in Fielding's novels, journalism, or letters, we know that Fielding owned a first edition of Hume's Philosophical Essays concerninq Human Understandinq (1748) (Thornbury 185). Fielding probably received his copy of Hume from Andrew Millar, his own publisher and close friend, who was also printing all of Hume's works between 1748 and 1768. The final three pages of the first edition of the Philosophical Essays contain a list of "Books Printed for and Sold by A. Millar," and this list advertises aIl of Fielding's works that had been published in his name before 1748 (252-254). Curiouslyenough, however, Hume's name does not appear in that list even though the title of his present volume does. 8 By advertising Fielding prominently in Hume's volume, Millar might be publicizing both the commercial and social compatibility of Fielding's novels with Hume's philosophy. Looking back centuries later, cultural • historian John Brewer points out that Millar had continued to Budd 15
promote Hume alongside Richardson's and Fielding's popular novels: uMillar had been the chief undertaker hehind David • Hume's History of Enqland" some years after Fielding's death, while Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Pamela, and Clarissa continued to sell in their respective new editions (481). The 1748 edition of the Philosophical Essays concerninq Human Understandinq, the title of which seems deliberately to evoke John Locke's famous treatise, is a short collection of interconnected essays that explicate the empiricist premises Hume introduced in his magisterial yet professedly "dead-Born" Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) and would refine three years later in the more succinct Enguiry concerninq the Principles of MoraIs (1751).9 The moral aspect of Hume's premises can be summed up as the conviction that one's moral judgement cannot be determined through an evaluation of one's actions. To locate the moral basis of an action, one must evaluate the intentions that motivated it, since morality implies an intended code of conduct and not merely an ability to physically execute an action. At the sarne time, "reason alone can never he a motive to any action, or give rise to volition [since] ••• nothing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion, but a contrary impulse" (Treatise 414). Hume asserts, in his celebrated phrase, that "reason is, and
ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them" (Treatise 415); reason generates imaqinary copies of impulses • merely to theorize a result, and "the Most lively Thought is Budd 16
still Inferior to the dullest Sensation" (Philosophical 21 22). Hume also maintains--and this is crucial for my study of • Amelia--that one cannot discern with reliability the moral quality of another's intentions by examininq their actions. As the intention i5 the operative cause and an action is its effect, "every Argument deduced from Causes to Effects must of Necessity be a gross Sophysm [sic]; since it is impossible for you to know any thing of the Cause but what you have, antecedently, not inferr'd, but discover'd to the full, in the Effect" (Philosophical 218). Morality, then, is not a quality inherent in an action. To attribute a moral intention on the basis of evaluatinq an action is just, in fact, a case of chimerical projection on the spectator's part, since actions themselves cannot contain a practical basis to prove a virtuous intention: Hume concludes that "morality is
determined by sentiment [and] virtue [is] whatever mental action or guality [whichl gives to the spectator the pleasinq sentiment of approbation" (Enquiry 261). Hume ends his complex proposaI by turninq inward toward a refocussed discussion of the subjective preferences of the person who decides what is and what is not a moral intention. Hume reiterates throughout the Philosophical Essays that IIthe active principle can never be founded on an inactive," that reason (an inactive faculty of judqement) cannot control the passions (an active function of natural impulse). This suqgests, of course, that the moral content of any action • cannat be shown by citinq one's adherence ta external laws, Budd 17
since the primary adherence of an action is to the passionate desire to perform acts that fee1 riqht, or qive rise to that • upleasinq sentiment." Hume sardonically invokes Locke's ethical rationalism when he offers a sarcastic lament for the times when
aIl Morality was suppos'd to he built on eternal and
~utable Relations, which to every intelligent Mind vere equally invariable as any Proposition concerninq Quantity or Number. (Philosophical 14-15)w
Later, Hume states his position directly:
It seems to me, that the only Object of • Demonstration is Quantity and Number, and that all Attempts to extend this more perfect Species of Knowledqe beyond these bounds are mere Sophistry and Illusion. (252) l am convinced that in Amelia, as in Hume'S moral writinqs,
Fielding attempts to show that eternal and immutable relations might never be a reliable gauge of one's virtue; one must try instead to locate the kind of "active" psychological interest that motivates people's intentions to act, an interest that is necessarily subject to turbulent and confused social contexts
and means of interpretation. But a faith in one's ability to predict actions based on a presumed knowledge of inclination is terribly dangerous, as Booth seems doomed to demonstrate. Amelia's thematic and formaI concerns encourage us to keep
Hume's argument in mind throuqh Fieldinq's apparent interest • in the ways in which the recurrent and costly experience of Budd 18
misinterpretations and seeminqly unending disappointments force his characters to recognize that one's moral qualities • do not reveal themselves through any particular code of conduct or demonstrable ideoloqical alleqiance. The conceptions of morality arise, instead, through one's empirical reflections on another's customary conduct: a dialogic reflection based on experience, and not on attempts ta project or infer the moral nature of inclinations. Moreover, Fielding's novel articulates its own critique of natural law theory through its insistence that no adherence to any rnaxim, however outwardly virtuous, will guarantee an eventual reward in the novel's denouement. Indeed, characters who appear to perform good acts, such as Robinson, the repentant thief who hopes ta reserve his place in heaven by confessing his sins before death (and thus providing for the climactic restoration of Amelia's fortune), cannat be recognized as particularly moral due to the complex causal link between the nature of one's acts and the realization of one's wishes (517). After his temporary reformation, we learn that Robinson has "returned ta vicious Courses," has been apprehended for stealing a handbag, and has been hanged at Tyburn: a formulaic sequence that supports Fielding's view:
"50 apt are Men, whose Manners have been once thorouqhly corrupted, to return, from any Dawn of an Amendment, into the dark Paths of Vice" (532). But this poetic justice does not extend beyond the close circle of the novel's main characters, • and we might even wonder whether this Maxim will apply ta Budd 19
Booth after his sudden recovery fram his tendency toward gambling, adultery, atheism, and material extravagance. As • Ronald Paulson has pointed out, the ending is negligible in its literaI resolution: "[Amelia'S London] society remains as corrupt at the end as at the beginninqW (Satire 163). George Sherburn has referred to Booth's swift conversion to Christian humanism in the novel's final pages as Ua supernatural intervention" that does not deserve its reward (151). The vivid characterizations of suffering and depravity somehow defy the attempted closure of Fieldinq's "conclusion," and they problematize Dr. Harrison's solemn moment with Booth at the end of the novel in which he asserts that "Providence hath done you the Justice at last, which it will one day or other render to aIl Men" (522). In the trouhled world Amelia evokes through its suspenseful unpredictability, actions usually suggest characteristically irreverent intentions, and nowhere does an act of ostensible benevolence fail to invite the reader's anxious suspicion of a mixed motive. When Amelia herself realizes her virtue rewarded, the reward is not for her conduct--she in fact performs few actions in the course of the novel--but for her inclinations, the ambiquities of which continue to lead critics to reject Fieldinq's conferral of a favourable poetic justice. Fielding seems to characterize Booth/s reformation as a straightforward and instantaneous response to reading: • Budd 20
"You say you have had your Ooubts, young Gentleman, indeed l did not know that--And pray, what were your • Doubts?" "Whatever they were, Sir," said Booth, "they are now satisfied, as l be1ieve those of every impartia1 and sensitive Reader will be, if he will, with due Attention, read over these excellent Sermons. n (511) will Amelia promote the cause of virtue through its own impartial and sensitive readers? How will the novel manage the controversial link between morality and teaching, between judgement and conduct? Hume offers an aesthetic theory to extend his view of moral judgement with the argument that one's subjective sympathies--and not one's attachment to conventions--actively determine one's sense of reality. Formally, the novel's problematic link to the epic genre seems to negotiate this aesthetic argument to the effect that, for Hume, this Conduct of the Epic Poet depends on that particular Situation of the Imagination and of the Passions, which is suppos'd in that Production. The Imagination, both of Writer and Reader, is more enliven'd, and the Passions more enflam'd than in History, Bioqraphy, or any Species of Narration, which confine themselves to strict Truth and Reality. (Philosophica1 37) Generic conventions do not determine the reader's sympathies, but they do anticipate distinctive readerly postures. Fielding, like Hume's epic poet, appears ta demand of his • reader, throuqh his manipulation of inherited generic forms, Budd 21
sympathy and concern for his protaqonists. Meanwhile, Fielding's socially critical aqenda makes it impossible for • him ta sustain Virgil's elevated generic style, a style that clearly refers to a mythical past. Another problem arises: the high and familiar epic conventions, despite their anticipated enlivened intensity, might indeed alienate the reader from
what could appear to he exalted fiqures of epic tragedy in the all-too-familiar but hardly appealing guise of unfortunate London commoners. Such an alienation would eut short Fielding's wish to convey to his reader a real sense of political urgency. Thus, Fielding's eomplex engagement with Hume' s paradoxical moral and aesthetic theories--an engagement that attempts to thematize the moral theory and allegorize both aesthetic modes--has misled even Amelia's more sympathetic readers. Fielding's latest biographer, for example, has cited Fielding's famous attacks on "the philosophers who have laboured to degrade and debase [human nature] to the lowest sink of iniquity and vice" (The Champion, 22 Jan. 1739/40, 162) and on "those Writings which were calculated to support the glorious Cause of Disaffection or Infidelity" (Covent Garden, 21 Jan. 1752, 49). These powerful citations, in Battestin's view, "contemptuously referred" to Hume. Although l do not agree that Fielding targets Hume in these attacks,ll Hume's notoriety as a "sLmply perverse" "outright atheist" swelled dramatically after 1748, once he began to attach his • name to his publications (Raphael 14, Stone 573).u Budd 22
Nevertheless, important elements in Hume's writings that challenge the ethical rationalism of Locke--a rationalism • which insists that Has incontestable as those in Mathematicks, the measure of right and wrong might be made out" (Essay 4.3.18, II 208)--are problems that Fielding's final novel engages directIy. Fielding's didactic precision, effected through judgmental reflections on the dialogues his narrator
represents, and framed by an unusual self-reflexive formaI dynamic, invite us to examine the philosophicai problems that permeate the novel and continue te confound us. My epigraph intends to suggest that Amelia's emotional expression of her own good fortune, which arises through her awareness of another's apparent misfortune, is consistent with the Augustan humanist values the narrator outlines throughout the novel. Yet, this gratitude is articulated through a Humean appeal to sentiment that pays hornage to an inconsistent awareness of faets and feelings, not to a subscription to rules of conduct or codes of justice. The rhetorical analogy between Hume's Philosophical Essays and Fieiding's Amelia makes itself felt very early in each texte Hume opens his first essay with a keen sense of his pedagogie role: We may observe in every Art or Profession, even those which most concern Life or Action, that a Spirit of Accuracy carries aIl of them nearer their Perfection, and renders them subservient to the Interests of Society • and ••• has improved and probably will improve ••• Budd 23
by familiar Gradations. (Philosophical 9) Perhaps Fielding is thinking of this discussion when he • similarly introduces his task in writing and narrating Amelia: 13 By examininq carefully the several Gradations which conduce to bring every Model to Perfection, we learn
truly to know that Science in which the Model is formed
••• 50 by observing minutely the several Incidents which tend to the Catastrophe or Completion of the whole, and the minute Causes whence those Incidents are
produced, we shall he instructed in the most useful of aIl Arts, which l calI the ART of LIFE. (17) Fielding's didactic intentions here do not suggest that the narrator will examine carefully and then describe the desired model of moral perfection. Rather, the project is a decidedly ironie one: Fielding will attempt to provide a social representation that will reflect on its own inheritance of generic conventions and then offer a sufficient range of psychological gradations so that the reader might develop a sense of the distinction between virtuous and vicious conduct. The fallowing section in my thesis will explore the self-reflexive formaI structure of Amelia's retrospective opening books, which satirizes the strict relation of external
contexts--whether they he systems of justice, a gentleman's code af honour, or even the rhetorical bounds implied by the novel as a genre--to determine a character's internaI notions • of moral conduct. This satire is constructed formally through Budd 24
the novel's deep indebtedness to and yet decisive departure from Virgil's Aeneid. 14 Amelia's paradoxical "play of epic • reminder" with a genre that dedicates itself to mythologizinq, in Northrop Frye's view, "the consistent order [that] is not a divine fiat or fatalistic causation, but a stability in nature controlled by the gods, and extended to human beings if they accept it" is for Fielding an ironie comment on the very notion that human beings might bring a peaceful stability to their lives through adherence to any code of conduct, even one prescribed by religion (Rawson 150, Anatomy 319). No one in Amelia has the power to "accept" the kind of consistency evoked through the epic's proud cosmology, and this explains, perhaps, the novel's "nightmare atmosphere of deception and self-delusion" (Blewett xviii).B But Amelia does suggest, throuqh its significant debts to virqil's conventions, that a self-reflexive critique of the novel as a genre might bring the reader closer to improving the contemporary state of social injustice. This part of my thesis will propose that, ultimately, Amelia elicits a heightened critical awareness of the epic as an artificial guide to social improvement, and this awareness entails a sentimental appeal to the reader's own empirical reflections on that experience. It seerns clear to me that Amelia's metafictional irony-- which supports Fielding's didactic purposes--extends an important analogy to Hume's key proposition in his arguments concerning the nature of moral judgement: • Budd 25
Vice and virtue are not qualities in objects ••• but
perceptions in the mind: And this discovery in mora~s • • is to be regarded as a considerable advancement of the speculative sciences; tho', like that too, it has
littie or no influence on practice. Nothing can he more real, or concern us more, than our own sentiments of pleasure and uneasiness; and if these be favourable to virtue, and unfavourable to vice, no more can be requisite to the regulation of our conduct and behaviour. (Treatise 469) As r hope to show, even though Booth, Miss Mathews, and Mrs.
Bennet do appear at times to be models of various philosophically constructed stereotypes--Booth himself has
been called Uthe psychological and mora~ interest of Amelia" (Towers 258)--the novel's formaI treatment of these characters and indeed of their predicaments provides the novel's signal connection to Hume. Fielding's novel offers specifie instances ta illustrate Hume's argument that uMorals and Criticism are
not 50 properly Objects of the Understanding as [they are] of Taste and Sentiment" in a thematic way. For example, in Mrs. Bennet's decision to marry Sergeant Atkinson despite her
ardent and carefu~ly reasoned condemnation of second marriages: ur solemnly declare," she says ta Booth and Amelia before having met Atkinson, ur see but little Difference between having two Husbands at one time, and at severai different times" (Philosoehical 255, Amelia 256). Amelia'S • political message further emphasizes the difficulty of Budd 26
determining moral inclinations, as every one of the c:onvicts we enc:ounter in the novel (and there are many) seems to be • imprisoned on faulty grounds. Fielding's apparent support of Hume's position, notwithstandinq its allowance for paradoxical behaviour with subversive implications, serves Fielding's wish to expose evil and promote virtue as this project requires that the text distinquish between a morality that is ostensibly based on reasoned adherenc:e to a social contract and morality that derives fram a sentimental approval of other people's conduct. While the value of Amelia with respect to
its technical innovation cannot he determined by an evaluation
of its readers' improved conduct (which may he fortunate!), it certainly can be illustrated through its representation--and indeed its formal reproduction--of an empirical reflection on morality that accommodates contradictory behaviour in support of virtue. My closinq discussion will suqqest that Fielding required a critique of ethical rationalism in his novel of social protest particularly for its decisive emphasis on the importance of mutable individual experiences in determining the basis and course of moral judqement. This argument will allow me to comment on the philosophical rcots of Hume's critique of rational measures of virtue, a critique which involves a striking challenge to Lockers confidence in "placing Morality amongst the sciences capable of demonstration" (Essay 4.3.18, II 208). Hume's position also • pays an important hornage to Francis Hutcheson's view, that Budd 27
l'the same Cause which determines us to pursue Happiness for ourselves, determines us both to Esteem and Benevolence on • their proper Occasions" (Inguiry into the Original 2.2.5, 131), and more polemically, "whoever explains virtue or vice by justice or injustice, right or wrong, uses only more
ambiguous words" (Illustrations 2, 230) .16 Hume's critique of ethical rationalism, his arguments to substantiate the belief that morality finds its basis in one's feelings of approval and not in one's attachment to laws, elucidates the pedagogie project and very basis of the formaI and thematic didactic irony in Amelia. With respect ta narrative epistemology, Fielding invites us to draw an analogy between himself and Hume through his decisive departure fram Richardson's means of publicizing his elaborate attempts ta editorialize and control his readers' interpretive experience: the publication history of Clarissa offers us a model of Lackean insistence on maintaining what Clarissa herself calls "the course l shall be permitted or be
forced to steer [when] l must be considered, a person out of her own direction" (Clarissa 2, 138). When Locke tries to reconcile his empiricist convictions with his Christian faith, he requires an embodiment of "reason, our last Judge and Guide in everything" to help him divide "enthusiastic" ideas from those derived fram divine revelation. Richardson, tao, appears determined ta give a clear direction for his readers when their impassioned sympathies become confused. Locke writes, in • his discussion of divine inspiration: Budd 28
Though faith he founded on the testimony of Gad (who cannot lie), revea1ing any proposition to us ••• we • cannot have an assurance of the truth of its being a divine revelation qreater than our own [natural] knowledge. (4.18.5, II 421) He salves this problem with a suggestion that Micheal McKeon likens to a Hnaïve empiricism" which Hinvolves a dependence on received authorities and a priori traditions" (Oriqins 21):
What l see, l know to be so, by the evidence of the thing itself; what l believe, l take ta be so upon the testimony of another. (4.19.3, II 430) The mast important ideoloqical and poetic differences hetween Richardson and Fielding stem fram the extent to which the editor of Clarissa sees himself as a figure analoqous to
Locke's divine guide. As editor, Richardson tries to clear up didactic ambiguities and maintain the tradition of naïve empiricism, where observers at times require Ha new set of discoveries communicated by Gad to establish their opinions and regulate their conduct" (4.19.3-4, II 431). Throuqh the guise of editor, Richardson tries to define our quality of belief regarding the testimony of fictional figures who are represented in his novels as paradigmatic, instructive, real people. This, perhaps, is the reason why Richardson, unlike Fielding, but conspicuously like the ostensibly self-effacing religious authors of medieval times, never named himself in his novels; nor did he name others as beneficiaries af a • dedication. Such an overt self-disclosure might have revealed Budd 29
his primarily creative, and hence not entirely justified, corrective roie. The analogy between Richardson and Locke • provides a revealing contrast, l think, to Fielding's thematic and philosophical embrace of Humean ambiguity and scepticism. The two analogies allow us to consider bath authors in their respective epistemological, and hence poetic, literary contexts. To his horror, Richardson discovered as early as OCtober 1748 (before the release of the novel's final installment) that his seductive villain, Lovelace, was being admired for his charm. Thus, the "principal views of the Publication" were being threatened by a miscomprehending audience: "it has been a matter of surprise to me," Richardson writes politely to Lady Bradshaigh, "and indeed of some concern, that this character has met with so much favour from the good and virtuous," including Bradshaigh herself (Clarissa l, viii; Correspondence 4, 187). Fielding was weIl aware of the undesirable complexity of readerly sympathies for the Manichaean character who would later rape and destroy Clarissa: "The character of Loveless [sic] is heightened with great Judgement," Fielding wrote to Richardson that same month, "His former Admirers must lose aIl Regard for him on his Perseverance, and as this Regard Ceases, Compassion for Clarissa rises in the same Proportion" (MacAdam Jr 304). His sister, Sarah Fielding, always a committed advocate of Richardson's scrupulous teachings, gave "the most ambitious • defence of Clarissa" later that year (Eaves and Kimpel 291) • Budd 30
While Richardson chose to issue for free revised and expanded sections of his novel "for the Sake of doinq Justice to the • Purchasers of two First Editions," a collection which came complete with the explicitly corrective title Letters and Passages Restored ta the Original Manuscripts of the History of Clarissa, Fielding chose to defend Amelia against the charge that Amelia "exerts no Manner of Spirit, unless, perhaps, in supportinq Afflictions" by promising never to publish another novel again (Richardson i, Duncan Eaves and Kiffipel 315; Letters 1; Covent-Garden 21 Jan. 1752, 58; 25 Jan. 1752, 66). Fielding seems to adopt Hume's challenginq philosophical argument to question the viability of Richardson's attempts "to amiably illustrate, and strongly enforce, the properVirtues of Man" (Richardson, A Collection vi). Noting this in the context of his conduct as a public author, we realize the significance of Fielding's innovative merger of didacticism with self-reflexive poetics. Development: Irony and FormaI Characterization
Amelia opens with three books that document Booth's imprisonment at Newgate in the private company of Miss Mathews, where the two are isolated entirely from Amelia and from the novel's other main characters. The structural function of "this criminal Conversation" (154), which describes Booth's past and also offers a vivid account of the characters who inhabit the notorious prison, gives immediate • appeal and efficiency both to the novel's plot and to Budd 31
Fielding's didactic project. The novel opens by attempting to sustain a double formaI structure: first, the Newqate • episodes, in their depictions of the suffering inflicted by the capricious judgements of Justice Thrasher, invite an irresistible intertextual slippage ta recall the legendary mock-heroic strugqles of Tom Jones to "bear his Punishment with great Resolution" under the tyrannical powers of Reverend Thwackum (Jones 1, 122). Fieldinq maintains an evenly detached narrative commentary on this seemingly barbarie system of
justice which, for example, will ~prison starvinq children for stealing bread: "Good Laws should execute themselves, •• as [watchmaker] Graham would do, if he should form. aIl the Parts of a Clock in an exquisite Manner," Fielding posits; "In this Case, surely we miqht say that there was a smail Defect in the Constitution of the Clock" ( 34, 19).17 This kind of scathingly suave understatement, which reduces human traqedy to specifically noncorporeal components in the interest of a didactic metaphor, offers the reader a tacit promise like the one constructed throuqhout Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones: "Fielding's constant aim is to keep the reader from actually participating in the action" even as we sympathize with the protagonists, Paulson suggests. "The purpose of [this] irony," Paulson continues, His always subordinate to the analytic," where the narrator keeps us pedantically aware of the author's self-consciously structural achievement while we keep our distance from its textual figures (Satire 141) • • Budd 32
Second, Amelia's opening scenes initiate a close correspondence to Virqil's Aeneid, such that Many of the • characters' actions appear predetermined and their destinies predictable, qiven their consistency vith the epic's familiar conventions. As this atternpt ta maintain the two structures- the intertextual and the qeneric--eventually collapses under the weight of Fielding's reformist agenda, which cannat accommodate artificial generic forms or an inherited thematic means of promoting the cause of virtue, the merger creates a remarkably innovative self-reflection on its own didactic intentions. The satirical portrait of Thrasher--the first character introduced in the novel--immediately reminds us of Thwackum in Tom Jones. Both characters distinguish themselves through a cruel treatment of the protagonist, and their prosopopoaeic names imply a self-representation de facto of their personalities, like those characters of humour in Fielding's early comic dramas. Despite Thwackum.' s severe treatment of Jones--which in a sense defines him as our hero--the contemptible pedagogue ultimately proves an exaqgerated theatrical figure necessary for the eventual construction of Jones's mock-heroic battle to liberate himself from his teacher's control. Likewise in Amelia, Thrasher's link to Thwackum--and our anticipation of his eventual reduction to an innocuous stock character--enables us to recognize Captain Booth, the victim, as the novel's protagonist even thouqh his • name does not refer to the "Amelia" in the title. As lan Watt Budd 33
has observed, althouqh Jones suffers under Thwakum's persecution, the potentially traumatic events ultimately serve • a specifically uneo-classical" formaI project: HFielding's comic purpose • required an external approach [to character], and for a compelling reason. If we identify ourselves with the characters we shall not be in any mood to appreciate the humour of the larger comedy ••• the comic author must not make us feel every stroke of the lash as his characters squirm under his corrective rad" (Rise 271, 273). In Amelia, Fielding implies throuqh the Lmmediate presence in the novel's overture of Thrasher and his equally improbably mimetic constable, Mr. Gotobed, that such a comie reduction May be in store for them. Yet the gravity of the suffering and misery inflicted by the lashinqs, cheating, poverty, starvation, and general depravity at Newqate, which swiftly assimilates Booth into its Dnpoverishment and hopelessness, quickly abandons the comic conventions and adopts a sharply realistic unpredictability. With the exception of the easily managed Bondum, the bailiff in Book VIII, no other comic stock eharacters appear in the novel, a serious lack of conventional consistency that effectively troubles the period of Booth's incarceration for debt and his eventuai (but nonetheless eternally tentative) release from prison. In much the same way, the novel's formaI analoqy to the Virgilian epic constructs but then outperforms its conventions. Amelia invokes Virgil's epic in obvious ways--for • example, in its use of tweive books and in its seduction of Budd 34
the hero in a cavern where he is both confined and protected {Aeneid 4.174, 227-331)--as other critics have mentioned (see • note 14). However, the stronq requisite implication that Amelia will maintain the Latin epic's alienation of history (agency) from the hero's declining fortunes (destiny) is of principal importance to Fieldinq's early adoptive gestures to the Aeneid. Accidents happen in the Latin epic genre only to serve an urgent contemporary interest to mythologize one's origins. Erich Auerbach has described this "intrahistorical" motif in his discussion of Virgil's near contemporary, Petronius: In the mimetic literary art of antiquity, the instability of fortune almost always appears as a fate which strikes from without and affects only a limited area, not as a fate which results from the inner processes of the real, historical world. (Mimesis 29) Indeed, Fielding prefaces his text in the Dedication to his friend Ralph Allen with a message that enforces the nationally emblematic significance of Booth's fortunes--which limits and specifies his significance--while it aiso assures a predetermined course of action. Inside the text, Dr. Harrison, who, for Battestin, "serves as Fieldinq's spokesman throughout," refers to the immutable idealism of King Priam (of Homer's Iliad and Virqil's Aeneid) and to the doctrines offered by Latin autodidacts Cicero and Ovid in order to illustrate his very first piece of advice to the newlyweds: uI • have long thought that there is no Calamity so great that a Budd 35
Christian Philosopher may not reasonably laugh at it" (Battestin 1974, 614; Amelia 137).18 But the novel's • depictions of suffering do not derive from calamities of an exalted past; they are alarminq crises located in the urgently unfolding present. l would not suggest that Fielding's epic program depicts what Mikhail Bakhtin has described as "an absolutely completed and finished generic form, whose constitutive feature is the transferral of the world it describes to an absolute past of national beqinnings and peak times" because Fieldinq's uncertain narratorial role preempts such a firm command of the text's temporal position (Dialogic
15) .19 Nevertheless, the references to Virqil supply Fielding's general readers with a kind of roman à clef, one which asserts Booth's status as a contemporary emblem and stresses the importance of the novel's representative moment in national history. Fieldinq's "Science in which the Model is formed ••• in the ART of LIFE" requires at a later stage a break from the bounds of epic form to demonstrate (not merely to describe or ostentatiously orchestrate) Booth/s alarming descent into outright financiai and social desperation. But durinq his extended narration of his past while with Miss Mathews, Booth' s tellinq of "the Particulars of my Courtship to the best and dearest of Women" seems to anticipate actions that display the very opposite to Booth's professed loyaity to his wife (66). This double-vision of a textual event and a real • life situation, in which Booth remains unaware of Budd 36
circumstances that are obvious to the reader through our familiarity with the Aeneid's seduction analogy, initiates a • crucial thematic consistency with the conventions of dramatic irony. Like Aeneas's tryst with Dido, Booth's conversation with Miss Mathews ultimately becomes inclistinguishable from Booth's sexual involvement with her; once Booth and Miss Mathews pay the fee "to lock up double" so as not to interrupt Booth' s story--the part of his story that leads him to "repent" for his "slippery Descent of Vice" (153-S5)--his speech becomes a transgression in place of a tribute. The affair with Miss Mathews provides a sharp distinction between
cr~inal acts, those presumably punished by Thrasher, and those "acts of Vice" which trouble Booth's conscience (155). The inconsistency between Booth's professed intentions and his subsequent acts that impose his sense of guilt only further emphasize Fielding's didactic purposes, and Amelia's subsequent actions--which further illustrate in contrast to him her unshakable "Constancy"--furnish Booth with a proleptical inspiration to begin his reformation. While their children play in their rooms just following his release from Newgate, Booth exclaims in tears, "Amelia, how much are you my Superior in every Perfection! How wise, how great, how noble are your Sentiments!" (162). Booth seconds Fielding's own views of Amelia with an ingenuousness that derives its force from Booth's knowledge of his own guilt (cf. 71, 89, 101, 167, 435, 488). But even Amelia i5 prey to a rupture in her • constancy; after Booth is incarcerated yet again for his Budd 37
gambling debts, Amelia commands her son to Mmention hiBl no more • indeed he i8 a wicked Man! " (491). • This implicit prefatory promise to the reader, that the novel will maintain predictably incremental dramatic irony, suggests that Amelia, like the Aeneid, will not only mark a poignant moment in national history (a moment of inhumane punishments and self-adulterating encomia), but also as an epic analogy it will attempt to articulate a noble explanation of its cultural meaning. Yet, together with the familiar satire of the absurdly sinister maqistrate's court, the Virgilian analogy grows top-heavy in its obsessive interest in depicting contemporary concerns. As the conventions invert themselves and move away from what Rawson has called the Augustan "parade of gentlemanly point scoring" (127) toward a stylistics of political urgency, the novel depicts a sincere and "scientific" focus on current illustrations of social injustice. The rhetoric of dramatic irony that complements the analogy to the epic beqins ta maye away from its allegorical base toward a pointedly rnimetic appeal to locating the familiar moment of contemporary currency in the drama. Booth's dialogue with Miss Mathews ernphasizes not only the dramatic events he recollects from memory, but also the ironies implicit in the verbal exchange that comprise the metaphoric and literaI basis of Booth's infidelity to his wife. The socially critical implications of these simple paradoxes rapidly grow sharper and more specifie as their • psychological effects becorne painfully obvious to the Budd 38
protagonist and his family. Once Booth is released from Newgate midway through Book IV (159)--thanks to Miss Mathews's • bribing the prison governor--the thematic aspects of Fieiding's ironie didacticism remain consistent with his prefatory inversion of formaI epic conventions to emphasize the unpredictable yet directly downward descent in Booth's fortunes. In the novel's opening lines, Fielding prepares us for a performance familiar to his readers, an openinq Sherburn Iikens to the arma virumgue (148), whereby the Virgilian epic opens with a schematic agenda attached to a pedagogie problem that the narrative will eventually resolve. Booth's imprisonment and extended retrospective speech--the prefatory books in media res--provide an additional analogue to Virgil and a tacit promise to maintain or at least construct an ailegory of the convention. The novel begins thus: The various Accidents which befel a very worthy Couple, after their uniting in the State of Matrimony, will be the subject of the following History. The Distresses which they waded through, were some of them so exquisite, and the Incidents which produced these so extraordinary, that they seemed to require not only the utmost Malice, but the utmost Invention which Superstition hath ever attributed to Fortune. (15) Booth's long and detailed account of his courtship and the early years of marriage to Amelia gives a complex definition to Fielding's concept of "Accidents." As the reader would • notice, neither Booth nor Miss Mathews represents events that Budd 39
took place after Booth's marriage to Amelia, whose na~e--and hence Booth's relation to her--does not even appear in the • novel until the opening of the second book (66), and here only to narrate events leading up to the marriage. Yet, as Booth's story and the complexity of his feelings for his listener develop, we realize that the very circumstances of the conversation are themselves crucial events that befall Booth and Amelia. In Book IV, as Colonel James offers to support Booth in his efforts to find a position in the army--and then publicly embarrasses Booth and appears to break the agreement --we learn that James is in fact the Hunfortunate LoverH Miss Mathews has rejected in favour of Booth (176). Miss Mathews, through her liaison with Booth, Hhath now Piqued my Pride," James declares, "for how can a man of my Fortune brook being
refused by a Whore?" (176). Of course, the epic genre provides no convention that might pilot the reader through James's unpredictable behaviour and his potentially explosive role in the Booths' ensuing domestic crisis. Yet the novel supplies immediate detailed references to eontemporary codes of conduct--for a gentleman's obligations to duel to defend his honour (209-211, 215), for a husband to manage his infidelity through denial (232-233), and for a wife to maintain a respectable home and constant trust in her patron despite her desperate penury (235)--to make realistic the novel's generic uncertainty. The abundant referenees to specifie contemporary places such as the Verge of the Court and the duelling ground • in St. James's Park (209), the aIl but obsessive interest in Budd 40
recording the London street-names where Booth takes his weekly walks, along with the novel's engagement with actual cultural • institutions such as the notorious Ranelagh pleasure resort, bring a contemporary relevance to the novel' s action. 20 As Richardson's lofty objection to Amelia suggests, Fielding's subjects "are all drawn from what he has seen and known," and this betrays "he has little or no Invention" (Correspqndence 4, 61). Fielding's break with the epic through his abandonment of Virgil's conventions and through his insistence on the novel ' s concern with actual contemporary problems constructs a social realism that demands formaI self-reflexivity. Leo Braudy, referring to Miss Mathews's woeful lament of her "one faise Step" that led to her fall into "the bottomless pit" of ruin, has suggested that this "rhetoric of Richardsonian iron-chain causality" aligns Miss Mathews with a Richardsonian figure (Amelia 53, Braudy 205). Certainly, the narrator in Amelia uses the exchange between Miss Mathews and Booth to reveal to the reader motives on Miss Mathews's part which Booth does not see--for example, her intention to bribe for Booth' s freedom so she can make a claim on his liberty (158)--and this special knowledge elevates the reader above the two characters and reduces them to embodyinq distinctive examples of moral conscience. Unlike Miss Mathews, however, Booth suffers from a chronic inability to reflect critically or--unlike Amelia and Mes. Bennet--to reflect cooperatively on his past experience in order to make sense of his current • difficulties. While Miss Mathews's effusive sentimentality and Budd 41
(to the reader) her obvious intention to seduce Booth imply a wish on her part to exaqqerate "the unhappy Storyn of "the • Period of my Ruin," Booth does not seem able to piece together any such intention, even after he terminates the liaison (S9, 53). Similarly, and more seriously, Booth never seems able to gauge properly the lecherous intentions of the noble lord who promises his patronage, or the detailed schemes of his presumed friend, Colonel James, who plans to hire Atkinson to pimp Amelia after James dispatches Booth to a post overseas (339-342).
As in the novel' s thematic treatment of deductive j udqement, Booth's crisis of misfortune--which derives primariIy from his chronic misinterpretations of events and motives--operates through a didactic irony that finds an analogue in Fielding's turn away from Virgil' s familiar epic grandiosity toward domestic realism. Booth's merely gentlemanly failings (his gambling, duelling, and tendency to indulqe in material extravagances) are weIl known to him, along with their predictable consequences--indeed, the classically trained Dr. Harrison often reminds everyone of the risks such vices involve--yet, the unpredictable and enormous risks Booth takes through his naïve means of attributing the nature of a cause through an analysis of its effects are entirely unknown to him. 21 Just as Amelia' s formaI structure suggests that inherited conventions provide a merely illusory guide to • rectifying social injustice, Booth's self-destructive tendency Budd 42
to believe "in the Truth of my Doctrine, that all Men act entirely fram their Passions" and ucould do no otherwise" • (114, 32), coupled with his confidence in his ability to determine those passions, illustrates the disastrous results of Booth's faith in his ability to predict the future actions of others based on his knowledge of their inclinations. This adherence to a convention again leads to a crisis of unpredictability. Booth believes, for example, that Colonel James is "the best-natured Man in the World" based simply on "the extraordinary Acts of Friendship done me by [him]" (115). He believes so strongly in his private opinion of James that he proposes, to Amelia's horror, that while he is abroad, Uhe will not only be a father to my Children, but a Husband to you" (369). The hastiness of the inference's strateqy of deduction--but certainly not its Humean overtones per se-- ultimately leads Booth to place his professional prospects, and indeed even his family's physical security, at tremendous risk of ruine Booth's confidence in his ability to determine James's inclinations leads him to forget or ignore the implications of what his friend had said to him earlier: "Pox of her Inclination," James had said of Miss Mathews, "I want only the Possession of her Person" (177). One of the supremely ironie moments in Amelia occurs when Booth uses this self-destructive deductive strategy to win James's friendship and, hopefully, to rid himself of Miss Mathews; as they stroll toqether through St. James's Park, • Booth advises James that the key to winning Miss Mathews is Budd 43
through an appeal to her "Yanity [which] is plainly her
predominant Passion" (177). While Booth May be right in his • estimation of Miss Mathews--and indeed this turns out to be effective advice--Booth's reliance on determining one's inclinations through an examination of one's actions leads him to continue taking risks of such magnitude that no one in the novel seems able to anticipate properly the results of Booth's naïve choices. Another technical result of Booth's advice to James is the increased sense of trust and ostensible intimacy between the two men, a trust that makes it increasingly difficult for Booth to accept that James is plotting to seduce his wife. Amelia's meticulously detailed conversation with Mrs. Bennet about her experience at the hands of the noble lord (which occupies Most of Book YII) is a central illustration to show that the only way one might be able to anticipate another's actions is through a careful and sceptical attempt to recognize that person's customary behaviour, in the belief that the experience of injustice is the only reliable convention at issue; to place one's faith in
the ability ta determine the moral content of that person' s inclinations, as Booth does, only misleads him and places his family in danger. As Hume forcefully arques, "Causes and
Effects are discoverable, not by reason r but by experience" (Philosophical 51). That Fielding never provides the noble lord with a proper name further suggests that the lord's personal identity, which May elicit a reasoned attempt to • determine the nature of his passions through a knowledge of Budd 44
his view of the past, is far less important than his dangerous conduct which requires no name, just another's experience of • his behaviour. 22 In a more humourous instance, when Sergeant Atkinson deducts EIOO from Booth's debts to indicate his willingness to contribute that sum to gain Booth's freedom, "Booth did not apprehend the generous Meaninq of the Sergeant" and he finds it difficuit to grasp Atkinson's intention, holding fast to his generai view that Atkinson is Umy old faithful Servant" and Unot my Equal" (333, 182, 447). An empirical reflection on his experience would correct Booth's conception: Atkinson has saved Booth twice in battle, rescued him. once from drowninq, and saved him three times from
imprisonment for debt by contributing earnings he has deducted fram his own wages (111-13, 123, 191, 200). In a crucial moment, Atkinson defends Booth's tendency to run up his debts in an effort to mollify James's frustration with Booth, in the hope that James will overlook this UVice" and secure for Booth a post in the army (341). Amelia's posture as a sympathetic yet decidedly sceptical listener to Mrs. Bennet (now Krs. Atkinson), gives a successful exemplum of Hume's underlying argument throughout his Philosophicai Essays: AlI inferences from Experience, therefore, are Effects of Custom, not of Reasoning. Custom, then, is the great Guide of Human Life•••• Without the Influence of
Custom, we should be entirely Ignorant of every Matter • of Fact ••• We should never know how to adjust Means Budd 45
to Ends, or to employ our natural Powers in the Production of any Effect. (74-76) • Amelia has pressing personal reasons for listening to Mrs. Atkinson with scepticism, sinee her very reasons for the conversation stem from her recognition of Mrs. Atkinson's handwriting in an ominous unsiqned letter delivered to her that morning (265). The letter foretells that"a dreadful Snare/ ls laid for virtuous Innocence," a rhetoric Fielding resorts to later in the novel in his suggestion that "The Truth is, that it is almost impossible Guilt should miss the discovering of aIl the Snares in its Way: as it is constantly prying closely into every Corner, in order to lay Snares for others" (262, 347). Mrs. Atkinson appeals to Amelia in her wish to reseue her and Booth from catastrophe throuqh a detailed narration of her own experience: o graeious Heaven, how happy shall l think myself, if l should have proved your Preservation! l will explain my Meaning, but in order to disclose aIl my Fears in their just Colours, l must unfold my whole History to you. (266) The history is relevant to Amelia because it reveals the habituaI conduct of the noble lord and his duplicitous friend, Mrs. Ellison: "you are the destined sacrifice to this wicked Lord; and that Mrs. Ellison, whom l no longer doubt to have been the Instrument of my Ruin, intended to betray you in the same Manner [as she did me]" (303). The appeal here ta the • authority of experience and to the signifieanee of customary Budd 46
conduct implies, moreover, a certain loss of innocence (in favour of learning the snares) when Fielding suggests • following Amelia's resolution to leave Mrs. Ellison's house: Innocence is more Blind that Guilt ••• it is not Want of Sense, but Want of Suspicion by which Innocence is often betrayed. (347) Certainly Amelia's exposure to Mrs. Atkinson's experience marks an important break in Amelia's adherence to codes of etiquette and thus fashions a new operative definition of "innocence" in her new-found vigilance: she breaks her promise ta Mrs. Ellison never ta tell Mrs. Atkinson that she had read a letter Mrs. Atkinson once sent (237), she departs speedily fram Sergeant Atkinson's house Unever having once thought of wishing hLm Joy on his Marriage" (307), and this resolution to trust in a repetition of the lord's actions leads her to deceive her husband at the Masquerade by switching places with MIs. Atkinson and then disguising her while Booth awaits, oblivious, outside (412); uForgive me this first Deceit l ever practised," Amelia says to Booth, uand indeed it shall be the last" (421). This contradictory behaviour is intended to protect Amelia' s "Virtue," and i t shows that the Booths are more likely to prove successful in averting their ruin by trusting in the experience of custom and not in the abstract determination of--and their subsequent placement of trust in- another's motives. The cooperative inquiry into establishing the lord's • habituaI behaviour through a valuation of experience Budd 47
allegorizes the epic genre's message that an acknowledgment of past events will help explicate the state of current affairs. • Yet, unlike Booth's naive reliance on his own reason to predict future events based on a knowledge of another's controlling passion--an alleqory of the epic's promise to
justify the capricious wishes of the qods by appealinq to a nationally emblematic fiction--Amelia and MIs. Atkinson's empiricist interest in the significance of custom points to the current reality of social injustice as the only predictable issue enabled by experience, a knowledge that makes no claim to actualize a predetermined future. Indeed, unlike Booth's resigned faith in the eventual realization of one's inclinations, the knowledge Amelia and Mrs. Atkinson glean from their experience is one that allows them to shape the course of future events and to turn another's customary practice to their own benefit. Amelia realizes at this point, as Hume did, "that the Knowledqe of Causes is not only the
Most SatisfactorYi this Relation or Cor~exion being the strongest of ail Others; but also the Most Instructive; since it is by this Knowledge alone, we are able to controul Events, and govern Futurity" (Philosophical 36). The result of Amelia's deception of Booth, of course, allowed Krs. Atkinson's deception of the noble lord at the masquerade which
in turn enabled her to confi~--and later preempt--the lord's designs on Amelia (411). Fielding has aiso thematized the moral aspect of Hume's • empiricism through his treatment of Dr. Harrison's conduct• Budd 48
Critics have called Harrison "the usual mouthpiece [of]
Fiel.dinq' s views, n "the centre of the book's moral • positives," and "Fielding's spokesman in the novel" (Sherburn 151, Palmer 135, Battestin 1974, 633). Despite Harrison's role as a spokesman who offers elaborate speeches designed to teach "that if one step ever so l.ittle out of the Ways of Virtue and Innocence, we know not how we may slide; for aIl the Ways of
vice are a slippery Oescent, n his actual behaviour toward Booth offers a contradictory illustration of his view that "the Practice of any Virtue is a kind of mental Exercise, and serves to maintain the Health and Vigour of the Soul" (445, 425). Amelia voices her high regard for Harrison's scrupulous embodiment of moral goodness when she learns that Harrison might he responsible for Booth'a latest arrest and imprisonment. 5he cries out: "WeIl then, there is an End of aIl Goodness in the World. l will never have a good Opinion of any human Being more" (307). This viewequates itself, according to Harrison's own theology, with blasphemy: "Fie, Child," cries the Doctor. "Do not make a Conclusion sa much to the Dishonour of our great Creator. The Nature of Man is far from being itself Evil: It abounds with Benevolence, Charity and Pity, coveting Praise and Honour, shunning Shame and Disgrace." (374) In fact, Amelia is correct in her belief that Dr. Harrison has not acted in accordance with his teaching, for example, in his • lecture to a young clergyman on the obligations of citizens: Budd 49
Indeed, as an Enemy merely, and from a Spirit of Revenge, he cannot, and he ought not to prosecute hint; • but as an Offender against the Laws of his çountry he may and it is his DutY so to do ••• Revenge, indeed, of all Kinds is strictly prohibited, sa neither are we ta make Use of the Law as the Instrument of private Malice. (391 ) Dr. Harrison, a short time before he gives this speech, takes the law into his own vengeful hands when he takes out a writ for Booth's arrest based on the village gossip spread to him
by Booth's jealous country neighbours, and his surprised infuriation with the sight of a gold watch in the Booths' apartment (357-58). Dr. Harrison's "Temper of Mind,n his "Anger or Resentment," leads to the scIe episode in the novel when an imprisonment of any kind i5 not presided over by a magistrate. Dr. Harrison effectively enforces Booth's period of imprisonment until the time when he sees "the Most tragical Sight" of Amelia in absolute despair and her children in tears, and takes pitY on them, agreeing Uto go and release" Booth from prison despite the fact that Harrison is in no position to authorize the legal aspect to allegations of Booth's debts (359). Later, in an unusual challenge to his authority, Amelia "expresse[s] some Bitterness against the Doctor for breaking his Trust" (438). If Dr. Harrison fills the nove!'s role of moral spokesman, his actions illustrate the ultimate difficulty of identifying the moral aspect of his • inclinations; his treatment of Booth underlines his Budd 50
sentimental disapproval of Booth's presumed conduct, an ac:t which shows that regardless of his articulate defences of • Christian codes of conduct, his morality defines itself through a subjective sense of his own disapprobation. As Hume
argues, III tis evident these laws can ooly be deriv'd from human conventions, when men have perceive'd the disorders that result from following their natural and variable principles" (Treatise 533). Perhaps the most complex and materia1 example of Fielding's ironie representation of adherence to rules governing proper moral conduct appears in his characterization of Sergeant Atkinson, Amelia's foster brother (87, 107). Throughout the novel, Atkinson remains the most loyal and honest of Booth's London acquaintances; in Amelia's words, U1 think him to be one of the best-natur'd and honestest Creatures upon Earth" (481). As noted earlier, Atkinson saved Booth's life three times while bath men were serving in Gibraltar, and he is introduced in the novel as the heroic defender of Booth's son--and perhaps Booth, too--when the two are threatened by an ill-tempered soldier during a family outing in St. James's Park (181). Atkinson expresses his attachment to the Booth family in an effort to bolster Booth's chance of patronage in a meeting with Colonel James. Durinq this meeting, in defence of Amelia's need for financial security, Atkinson instinctively says, "r have always loved her as if she was my own Sister.--Nay, she hath very often • called me Brother" (341). Fielding ironically refers to Cicero Budd 51
again to illustrate Atkinson's Umany other Qualities," implying that Atkinson also is prone to realizing the ironie • function of his own epic dimensions which might, short1y, outperform themselves (182). Such a paradoxical performance is exactly what occurs toward the end of the novel when we learn that Atkinson's "almost unparallel'd Fidelity" and unswerving attention to defending Booth and his family derive not from any specifically moral qualities on his part, but from his clandestine and to some extent incestuous love for Amelia (115). Atkinson is first mentioned in the novel in his capacity as Booth's servant: "his Sense and Spirit," Booth believes, are illustrated when Atkinson overwhelms hLmself with a maudlin outburst as he sees Booth and Amelia's first parting (108). When Atkinson fa11s ill after observinq a heated exchange of insults between Amelia and his wife, Fielding orchestrates a deus ex machina in reverse, leadinq Atkinson to confess that he stole--and has been secretly cherishinq for years--the jewelled picture of Amelia that was
meant to be given to Booth many years earlier (482). That moment of effusive tears, which Booth had understood lias an Instance of his Affection towards me" appears in fact to have been an expression of Atkinson's troubled illicit desire for Booth' s wife (108). Much to Amelia' s embarrassment, Atkinson begs her to grant his wish for the final favour of letting him kiss her hand, believing it ta be "the last, and then l shall • die in Peace" (482). This contrived deathbed confession Budd 52
anticipates Robinson's admission of fraud fifty pages later, a sequence of demystifications of moral conscience that accounts • for Fielding's use of inconsistent, even at times cr~inal behaviour, as part of the larger project of promoting Uthe Cause of Virtue."
Closinq Discussion: Dialogue with Samuel Richardson
In a letter dated 10 May 1748, before the final three volumes of Clarissa were even printed, Richardson announced that he intended to rewrite his novel in an effort to correct his readers' interpretations of it, a rewriting which might weIl be "the earliest example of the effect upon a novel of audience reactions in the course of publication" (Kinkead Weekes 157). Richardson's persistent desire to correct and revise his novel provides a meaninqful commentary on Clarissa's strict moral teachinqs, especially when we compare Richardson's release of Letters and Passages Restored from the Original Manuscripts of the History of Clarissa with Fielding's promise, which he made in the midst of a barrage of critical hostility over Amelia: Uto trouble the World no more with any Children of mine by the same Muse" (Covent-Garden 28 Jan. 1752, 66; see note 6). Fieldinq's swift promise not to revise or correct, or even to write another novel aqain, which he made while his readers were in lucid critical revolt, represented an audacious and very public departure from • Richardson' s means of moral communication. 23 The dialogic Budd 53
relationship between the two textual events operates on both a stylistic and a conceptual level, and discussinq its • complexity might help us recognize the depth of commitment each author had to supportinq his distinctive pedagogie project. In an address "to lead the common Reader into sorne tolerable conception of the nature of this Work and the design of its Author," the Preface to the fourth volume of the first edition of Clarissa insists that the author intends his novel to offer IIDirections for [the reader's] Conduct, or Employment for his Pity, in a HISTORY of LIFE and MANNER5, where, as in the World itself, we find Vice, for a time, triumphant, and Virtue in distress" (4, iv).24 Where Richardson makes strident efforts to remind his readers that the act of interpretation is itself an indication of moral judgement in the real world of actions (as opposed to merely abstract ideas), Fielding encourages us to realize that the moral quality of interpretation derives from an eternally complex relationship between "vice" and its ostensible opposite, "virtue in distress," a relationship which might not ever be properly fixed or indicated in a work of fiction nor realize itself in a specifie actual event. Fielding's explicit intention not ta publish another novel assured that Am~lia, through this implicitly defiant answer, will provoke and continue question the link between the public figure of the court magistrate and his complex literary representations of moral conduct. • Richardson, on the other hand, was so sensitive ta public Budd 54
misinterpretation and so determined to school his readers in specifie principles that he printed two extensive~y revised • editions of Clarissa within three years of its original release, and sent this -restored" material gratis to all paid
subscribers of the first edition. 25 Toward the end of his career he assembled A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, -in order to render these Letters more completely useful" (Collection vii). No one in the century, it would seem, made a more convincinq or more public effort to uphold Samuel Johnson's austere demand that in fiction, "vice, for vice is necessary to be shewn, should always disgust; nor
should the graces of qaiety, or the dignity of courage, be 50 united with it, as to reconcile it to the mind" (Rambler 4;
Works 2, 20). A revea~inq complexity arises, however, when we explore the stylistic evocations of Clarissa in Amelia, and wonder why Fielding seemed to require references to Richardson as a means to promote his own sceptical project. Each author had a distinctive theory of the relation between readerly experience and moral conduct; thus each novel treats its
"history of problems" with a specifie eonceptua1 vocabulary. 26 Perhaps the most important formal difference between the two novels derives fram the extent to which writing--careful, ostensibly private, yet as Lovelace declares, "written to the moment"--substitutes for actual speech in Clarissa (4, 288). The composition, delivery, discovery, and interpretation of letters play an important role in Amelia: however, unlike • Clarissa, where letters provide the total and exclusive means Budd 55
of representinq dialogue, history, and voiee, the Ietters in Fieldinq's novel fulfill a delayed and secondhand didactic • function. The epistolary mode renders Richardsonian conversation indistinquishable from writing, since all speech in Clarissa (and indeed in his other novels) is subjected to
the l~itations and capabilities inherent in the process of composing and interpretinq the letter. Moreover, the epistolary conversations that comprise Clarissa define a historian's role for the novel's UEditor": he is technically indispensable as the orqanizer of the letters, and this enables him to represent fictionai actions as examples of the private conduct of real people. As Linda Kauffman has arqued, Uwritinq is Clarissa's crime and her punishment": Richardson presents letter-writing as the most obvious and precise example of private and public behaviour (132). Richardson's editorial position also, of course, allowed him to rewrite the text and represent this revision as the "restoration" of material. He provided, in the subsequent editions, extended annotations to the text to support his pedagogie purposes. In a direct and probably intended contrast, writing in Amelia exacts a deIayed didactic function, since the letters in Fieldinq's novel are read, interpreted, and introduced by the characters before the narrator learns of themi they offer only one example of public and private conduct among many, including verbal conversation, messaqes whispered to servants, and stories told to children. Amelia is narrated entirely from • a retrospective position and the narrator suggests that his Budd 56
actual friendships with the novel's characters disable him from having a superior command of their private histories. • This posture openly prevents him from providing us with an effective, let al.one editorial., moral quide to the UHistory." The subtlety with which Fieldinq constructs his narrator may be best understood in light of its rel.ation to its riqorous precursor, which was arguably the qiant that overshadowed every narrator who claimed editorship in novels of the later eighteenth century. In his UHints of a Preface to Clarissa," Richardson provides a lucid explanation for the eventual destruction of his heroine: uClarissa takes but one false Step in the wnole Piece ••• but this single Step was of the utmost Consequence" (Brissenden 10). As l mentioned earl.ier, Leo Braudy's sense that Fielding's construction of Miss Mathews evokes Uthe rhetoric of Richardsonian iron-chain causal.ity" May be well justified, but Fielding's evocations of Richardson serve an ultimately satirical agenda (Braudy 205). One of the first letters we encounter in Amelia is written by Betty Harris, AmeIia'S oider unmarried sister, who deceives Amelia in an effort to conceal their mother's wi5h for Amelia to inherit the family fortune. This letter suqqests an outriqht imitation of Richardson on Fielding's part:
My Mamma being much disordered, hath commanded me to tell you, she i5 bath shocked and surprised at your extraordinary Request, or, as she chuses to cali it, Order • for Money. You know, my Dear ••• that your Marriaqe with Budd 57
this Red-coat Man was entirely against her Consent, and the Opinion of aIl our Family, (1 am sure l may include myself • in that Number) and yet after this fatal Act of Disobedience, she vas prevailed on to receive you as her
Child; not, however, nor are you 50 to understand it, as the Favourite which you vas before. (121) This evident signal to Richardson's first edition of Clarissa-
th~ only edition in which Clarissa refers to her "Mamma," not "Mother,,27_-succeeds as an ironie commentary on the "iron chain" theory of causality. Richardson intends to defend the view that Clarissa's false step and crucial lapse in her otherwise characteristically exceptional judgement is larqely responsible for her eventual demise; he indicates in the Preface that "it is one of the principal Views of the Publication, te caution ••• Children against preferring a Man of Pleasure to a Man of Probity"; and in his correspondence he states clearly that while "My Girl is thouqht over nice by Many • • • l would that she should have some Little thinqs to be blamed for" (Clarissa l, viii, Selected Letters 88). Elsewhere, Richardson remarks to one of his more critical friends: "I must say, that l humbly think, sufficient Attention is not qiven to her beinq so roughly impelled, so impoliticly driven, into the Power of a Man she must, and l thought apparently would, more probably have avoided" (Selected Letters 81). Betty Harris's letter, on the other hand, satirizes this fixed-link loqic throuqh the novel's ultimate revelation that Harris i5 lyinq to Amelia to conceal • her own forged and betched claim te the inheritance. The Budd 58
invocation of Richardson here suggests that the rhetoric of naïve causality betrays a simple-minded and self-incriminatinq • justification of nothinq more than a jealous fantasy. In Amelia this strategy does not perm.it or explain the destruction of the heroine; it merely embarrasses the exiled older sister whose folly leads to the restoration of the heroine's fortunes. Thus the Richardsonian device--of rhetorical and ideoloqical condescension--does not offer us didactic instruction at all. Miss Mathews provides another example of Fieldinq's dialogic loan of Richardsonian rhetoric when, in the very act of seducing a married man, she echoes Richardson's paternal admonition: Uwhat is called beinq upon a good Footing is, perhaps, beinq upon a very dangerous one; and a Woman who hath
given her Consent to marry, can hardly be said to be safe till she is married" (53). Mathews's words of illusory wisdom
eventually descend into what at first appears to be a recital of tragic melodrama, the climax of which describes her in a fit of jealous rage, stalkinq and then stabbing her ex-suitor with a penknife because he refuses to marry her. Ber description of the event offers an exact reversaI of the circumstances surrounding Clarissa's threat to her own life, the famous penknife scene at Krs. Sinclair's (cf. Clarissa 5, 340-345). Mathews narrates the prelude to her story thus: Scarce had l recovered my the Use of my Senses, when l received a Letter from the Villain, declaring he had not Assurance to see my Face, and very kindly advising me to • endeavour to reconcile myself to my Family; concluding Budd 59
with an Offer, in case l did not succeed, to allowme twenty Pounds a-Year to support me in some remote part • of the Kingdom. (59) In Fielding's treatment, Miss Mathews's desperate attempt on Hebbers's life expresses a proud desire for revenge--"for this Fact l am ready to die, and shall vith Pleasure receive the Sentence of the Law"--a desire that achieves the level of burlesque farce; Booth can hard1y contain his laughter while
the story is told to h~ (59). Yet, if we consider the presumed source and Most direct influence on the penknife scene, or interpret the conversation in the hypothetical context of an epistolary exchanqe, Booth would be compelled to express his response in the measured language of polite yet private correspondence, the comedy would quickly deflate. As readers of Clarissa as well as Amelia, we might realize that had Booth married Mathews instead of Amelia (Mathews claims maliciously that he was her first choice), none of this violence, distress, and imprisonment would have taken place. The analoqy to the famous penknife scene in Clarissa proposes a deeper reflexive commentary on Fielding' s dramatic purposes: when Clarissa threatened ta stab herseIf, the desired effect was to move her captors to fear the consequences of her violence, while it expressed, in act of masochistic desperation, her internalized sense of quilt and defeat after Lovelace raped and continued to imprison her. Miss Mathews
might be trying to affect Booth's sympathies by describing her • own penknife scene in such detail, but the dramatic effect Budd 60
fails, and the actual experience brands Mathews as just one more of Justice Thrasher's quilty parties, pathetically and • carelessly sentenced to Lmprisonment. Fear of her violent temper further encourages Booth to avoid any subsequent contact with her; hence any masochistic desire on Mathews's part indeed succeeds, but we know enouqh about Mathews at this point to conclude with confidence that her scheme is highly self-conscious, and her story Most likely a contrived exaggeration. It seems clear to me that Fielding succeeds in his appeal to the importance of our empirical reflections on the experience of misfortune: its references to other narratives, the risks involved in determining the quality of moral judgement, and the practical pertinence of contradictory behaviour. Humers insistent appeal to experience seems to empower Fieldinq's unpredictable, suspensefu1 handling of the anxious plots of motivation and uncertainty. Later in the century, Immanue1 Kant distinguished obedient conduct from a desire for attaining virtue, an argument which must be
understood as an important development and revision of Hume' 5 notion that attachment to laws do not define morality. Kant's Critique of Practica1 Reason suggests that The Christian principle of morality ••• places the real incentive for obedience to the 1aw not in the desired consequences of obedience but in the conception of dutY a10ne, in true observance of which the • worthiness to attain the latter alone consists. (133-4) Budd 61
Fielding's successful structural innovation in Amelia--his experimentation vith extended retrospective narration--ailows • his narrator to explore the democratic consequences of internai dialogues without making a Richardsonian insistence on the literaI morality of the characters who require our attentive sympathies. The narrator in Amelia opens the novel vith Richardsonian pretensions to improve his reader, but by the end of the novel the delayed didactic status of his characters' experiences enables him to pretend to a status that is contemporaneous with his characters: just as he "brings our History to a Conclusion," he underlines this puzzling assertion of equivalent status vith the remark, Amelia declared to me the other Day, that she did not remember to have seen her Husband out of Humour these last ten years; and upon my insinuatinq to her, that he had made the best of wives, she answered with a Smile,
that she ought to be 50, for that he had made her the happiest of Women. (531, 533) Fielding's suggested friendship vith the novel's characters serves us a mimetic middle qround, highly evocative of the bathetic "Conclusion" to the fourth volume of Richardson's Pamela, where the connection between the author and his characters seems too casuai and incidental to offer a later Richardsonian "HISTORY of LIFE and MANNERS, where, as in the World itself, we find Vice, for a time, triumphant, and Virtue • in distress .. " At the same time, the relationship is Budd 62
sufficiently realistic to warrant a democratic invitation for us to compare ourseives with the novel' s characters. • Fielding, moreover, requires Booth's gentlemanly failings--his sexual infidelity, irresponsible gambling, and reluctance to confess his guilt--to substantiate his heroism, even as these failings which are not subjected to a proven reformation. Booth's attachment to unchristian codes of
conduct seems 50 nearly Mandevillian that when this is suggested to him, Booth must explain in detail that in fact his values are not (114-115). Without these deficiencies, and the abundant examples of their unfortunate results-- misfortunes that appear both predetermined and acutely
contemporary--Fielding would not be able to integrate his experience of social injustice into a novel that engages directly with actual legal controversies. These incremental ironies, the contradictions between the behaviour appropriate te the paragon's husband and his actual conduct, remain in certain ways within the bounds implied by the Virgilian anaiogy; as Eustace Palmer reminds us, Uthe Aeneid is not really about war at all but about a man's overcoming his vices and acquiring faith, as he proceeds toward his destiny" (137). A decidedly non-dramatic irony, however, lies in Amelia's refusaI to permit epic conventions to distort or support its infernal representations of the alarminqly barbarie treatment of prisoners and their families. The evident philosophical analoqy in Amelia gestures • back to the umoral sense" theory of Lord Shaftesbury earlier Budd 63
in the century. This apparently uncomplicated orqanic position, that everyone miqht make moral choices solely on the • basis of our ability to reason, would seem to encourage Fieldinq's evident confidence in his reader's self-reflexive reading experience. Shaftesbury writes: Let us suppose a Creature, who wantinq Reason, and beinq unable to reflect has, notwithstanding, many good Qualities and Affections; as Love to his Kind, Couraqe, Gratitude, or Pity. 'Tis certain that if you qive to this Creature a reflectinq Faculty, it will at the same
instant approve of Gratitude, Kindness, and Pity~ be taken with any shew or representation of the social Passion, and think nothing more amiable than this, or more odious than the contrary. And this is ta he capable of Virtue, and to have a Sense of Right and Wrang. (53) Later, Adam Smith's interest in the spectator's natural ability to empathize with another, a position he describes in his opening pages of The Theorv of Moral Sentiments, further polemicizes Amelia's departure from Richardsonian demands for guidance. Fielding's navel seems ta promote the "Cause of Virtue" through an appeal ta the reader's sentiments, and not our attachment to or desire for a more carefully explicated social contract. Smith suqgests that, As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they
are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should • feel in the like situation. Though our brother is on the Budd 64
rack, as lonq as we ourselves are at our ease, our sense
wi~~ never info~ us of that he suffers •••• by the • imagination, we place ourselves in his situation. (4-5) Smith's refinement of Shaftesbury's notion of the "Faculty of Reason," by defininq it as the subjective "imagination" refers
to a Richardsonian test of the reader's mora~ conscience, whereas for Fielding the notion of a moral faculty invites an exciting and promisinq experiment through the presentation of ambiguous depictions. The reliance on a de facto imaginative or intellectual capacity arouses a distrust of readerly independence in Richardson which is evidenced by the anxiety that energizes his relentless editorial revisions.
In January 1746/7, Richardson may have borrowed Fielding's
terminology when referrinq to his own "Scribbling" as 'la New Species of Writing," a rhetoric he used when confiding to his friends the problems he faced while developing the plot structure of Clarissa. He imp~ied a contrast to the more complex notions of readerly reception that would be elicited by Amelia: l never had the Assurance to think it any-thing extraordinary --Only knew my Intention: and thought the Stories might do some Good, if not ill-received. (Selected Letters 78) Yet, as l noted earlier, the Preface to Clarissa (which was first published in December 1747) seems to suggest that • Richardson had heeded the advice of his gentlemen friends and Budd 65
may have qiven up on providing an entertaining story• Certainly, by this time he had been fearinq the pedagoqical • complications of a dramatic "Amusement": They were of the Opinion, That in ail Works of This, and
of the Dramatic Kind r STORY, or AMUSEMENT, should be considered as Little more than the Vehicle to the more necessary INSTRUCTION. (Clarissa 1, vi) Whereas Richardson struqqles through his plot to maintain a clear didactic appeal to upholdinq a partieular moral standard, Fielding remains silent in arder ta emphasize that his protagonists require shorteomings, paradoxes, and even failures to support his final didactic project. 28 As the English novel of social protest developed through Fielding's claustrophobie domestie concerns, employing a decidedly ironie means of achieving its didactie intention, it began to foreshadow the first-person accounts of sufferinq which appear in the dark Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764) and the sinister Mysteries of Udoloho by Ann Radcliffe (1794), the novel refines itself through the desperate and paranoid Jacobin Caleb Williams of William Godwin (1794) and Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Woiistonecraft (1798). In these novels, didactic morality develops implicitly, through an intense preoccupation with psychological motivation, imagination, and at times paradoxieal behaviour which intends only to further support a specifie notion of moral conducti no editor is alluded to or anticipated in any • of these novels~ sinee the first-person narrator is itself the Budd 66
"guide" ta its own test±mony. Toward the century's close, the genre--and indeed its times--demanded a poetics of disclosure • and confession to define the experience of survival through universal standards of justice and personal security. Whereas Amelia encourages its readers to replicate the kinds of empirical reflections that its characters fail so miserably to perform, the genre proceeds to reproduce those acts of autobiographical realization. Whereas Fielding encourages us ta consider the primary relevance of custom and not morality in his representations of social injustice, Wollstonecraft takes this notion further, to emphasize what Maggie Kilgour calls "the faise systems of representation which, perpetuated
by custorn and prejudice, impede [women's sense of] their individuality" (75). After the fashionable consumption of Laurence Sterne's and Tobias Smollet's playful sentimental experiments began to wane, while revolution and bloodshed threatened ta rush acrass the Channel (or so pertinent voices such as Edmund Burke's argued), intellectual and artistic discourses continued to concern themselves with universality and the problem of moral instruction. Thirty-eight years after Godwin published Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams in 1794, he recalled the confidence and urgency he feit while composing his novel: l said to myself a thousand times, NI will write a tale, that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the
reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be • exactly the same man that he was before."--I wrote these Budd 67
things down just as they happened, and with the most entire frankness. (338) • In my view, Fielding's final effort as a novelist, to emphasize the experience of injustice with all its paradoxical and at times unpopular implications for the genre's ability to improve public conduct, prepares us for the arrival of the confessional narratives that ernpty themselves of Richardsonian demands--and the presumed. attendant desire--for correction, control, and insistent editorial intervention•
• Budd 68 Notes 1 With the exception of the one case in which l refer ta Amelia in its first edition, my parenthetical references to • the novel cite The Wesleyan Edition of the Warks of Henry Fielding: Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
2 As in aIl of Fielding's novels, "Fortune" and "Providence" are given special siqnificance in the construction of character and in the narrator's speculative vocabulary. o. S. Thomas devotes an article to establishing the classical roots of Fielding's use of these terms in Amelia. Toward the conclusion of his paper, he suggests: There is an interesting example of [the terms'] double usage in Amelia. When at last justice is done and Amelia and Booth receive their rewards, Dr. Harrison as a theologian attributes this ta Providence (517)]. Fielding, speaking as a novelist, expresses a similar
view in the final chapter but uses the term "Fortune. Il (183) As this chapter will show, in Amelia Fielding has revised his earlier sense of mortal passivity in the face of an unblinkinq personification of Fortune. In the closing pages of Jonathan Wild, first published in in 1743, Fielding argues (perhaps ironically) that "to struqqle aqainst that lady's decrees is vain and impotent; and whether she hath determined
you shall be hanged or be a prime minister, it is in either • case lost labout to resist" (212). For further detailed Budd 69
references to instances which support the argument that • ucharacters in Amelia often believe they are at the mercy of adamant impersonal causes," see Braudy 204-212. See also Battestin's notes ta Amelia 15 and 87. Several feminist critics have linked AmeIia's high moral conscience with a curious inability to make actual decisions ta imprave effectively her family's difficulties; Cynthia Griffin wolff has arqued that "Amelia's virtue is private, and its influence can he felt only in personal interaction" (54), and Alison Conway adds: "it seems that even privately Amelia can effect very little change" (45).
3 For more self-consciously teacherly examples, see the elaborate headnotes listed in Fielding's extensive Table of Contents (5-14), such as the headnote for Book II, chapter 2: Mr. Booth continues his Story. In the Chapter there are some Passages that may serve as a kind of Touchstone, by which a young Lady May examine the Heart of her Lover. l would advise, therefore, that every Lover be obliged ta read it over in the presence of his Mistress, and that she carefully watcn his Emotions while he is reading. (69)
These notes are 50 outrageously prescriptive of the reader's conduct--and of the novel's ability to effect social change- that in this instance, as vith others which l will address • later, Fielding is making an openly ironie comment on his Budd 70
Dedication's claim to Hpromote virtue" through literary • representation (4).
4 Battestin has provided detailed references to Robert South and Isaac Barrow throughout the critical texte For references to Barrow, Fielding's "favourite Divine" (see Covent-Garden Journal for 14 January, 24 March, Il April, 16 May, 2 June, and 4 November 1752), Battestin provides notes on pages 15-16, 30, 37, 125, 203, 256, 374, 417, and 511. For South, notes are provided on pages 30, 364, 366, 391-2, and 512.
5 Amelia has stirred up considerable interest in Fielding's intended moral agenda; perhaps the most extensive reflection appears in articles by Alison Conway, Carla Mulfard, and George Sherburn. Battestin offers a sustained argument to support a consistently Latitudinarian morality in Amelia, and indeed, he argues in his biography of Fielding
that Amelia is "the most personal novel he ever wrote" (A Life 531, cf. 531-546; cf. Amelia xvi-xxi). Leo Braudy succinctly rejects this approach: "To see Fielding, as is currently popular, in terms of Imoral' aims implies a particularly static writer, whose novels are primarily designed ta illustrate ethical abstractions" (94) • • Budd 71
6 When Fielding defended Amelia in his mock "Court of • Censorial Enquiry" three weeks following Amelia' S publication, he held to his high pedagogie purpose and strong sense of paternal responsibility for the novel's "Education" and "Conduet," particularly with respect to the Fielding's use of Virgil as its "noble model": If you, Mr. Censor, are yourself a Parent, you will view me with Compassion when r declare r am the Father of this poor Girl the Prisoner at the Bar; nay, when l go
farther, and avow, that of aIl my Offspring she is my
favourite Child. l can truly say that l bestowed more than ordinary Pains in her Education; in which l will
venture to affirm, l followed the Rules of aIl those who are acknowledged to have writ best on the Subject; and if her Conduct he fairly exarnined, she will be found to deviate very little from the strictest Observation of aIl those Rules; neither Homer nor Virgil pursued thern with greater Care than myself, and the candid and learned Reader will see that the latter was the noble model, which l made use of on this Occasion.
l do not think my Child is entirely free from
Faults. l know nothing human that is Sai but surely she doth not deserve the Rancour with whieh she hath been treated by the Public. (Covent-Garden 28 Jan. lï52, 65) Lyall Powers has tried to ehart the analogy between Virgil's • Aeneid and Amelia; despite the dubious success of an Budd 72
uadherence to the Aeneid" (335), the intertextual intention- • its opening in media res and its noble wish ta record the uHistory" of nationally emblematic "Accidents"--indicates Fieiding's deeply self-conscious didactic praject (see note 14, below). For detailed accounts of the novel's hostile reception upon its release on 19 December 1751, see Paulson ed., Fielding 286-336, 345-351, and Battestin, Amelia l-lvii.
7 Despite his early praise of Clarissa, it is my view that with Amelia Fielding proposes a serious challenge to Richardson's poetic means of promoting domestic improvement. In a famous letter to Richardson,. dated 15 OCtober 1748 (the period after the release of the first two installments of Clarissa), Fielding describes of his experience of reading the novei's first installment:
My Affections are 50 strongly engaged, and my Fears are so raised, by what l have already read, that l cannot express my eagerness to see the rest. Sure this Mr. Richardson is Kaster of ail that Art which Horace compares to Witchcraft. (McAdam Jr. 302) But Richardson was not reading Fielding, nor was he finding a favourable literary comparison for his admirer: While the Taste of the Age can be gratified by a Tom Jones (Dear Sir, have you read Tom Jones?) l am not to expect that the World will bestow Two Readings, or One • indeed, attentive one, on such a grave story as Budd 73
Clarissa, which is designed to make those think of Death • who endeavour aIl they can to banish it from their Thoughts. l have found neither Leisure nor Inclination yet to read that piece; and the less Inclination, as several 9000 Judges of rny Acquaintance condemn it and the genera1 Taste together. (Selected Letters 126) Richardson saw four editions of Clarissa through his press- the first in 1747-48, the second in 1749, the third in 1751,
and a fourth in 1759--and they were sold by Fielding's own bookseller, Andrew Millar. l will continue to cite the 1747 48 edition in this paper sinee it seems that, on his own testimony, this edition is the one Fielding had been best acquainted with (Sale Jr. 48). Only the third edition offers significant variations from the first, and it is doubtful that Fielding would have had the time or physieal energy during 1750-1, two years of serious illness and overwork, to have reread Richardson before December 1751, when Amelia was published. For an evaluation of the significant differences among the editions of Clarissa, see Kinkead-Weekes; for the detailed discussion, collation, and interpretation of these
variations, to which l am very much indebted, see Van Marter 1973, 1975. l am puzzled by the fact that none of Richardson's novels appears in the catalogue of Uthe entire and valuable LIBRARY of BOOKS of the late HENRY FIELDING, Esq." (Thornbury 168). A copy of the catalogue, which was • complied for the purposes of auction in 1755, may he found in Budd 74
the Appendix to E.M. Thornbury's Henry Fielding's Theory of • the Comic Prose Epie, 168-189. The cata~ogue vas discovered by Austin Dobson and introduced by him in the 1896 edition of Eiqhteenth Centurv Vignettes (Rpt. London: n.p., 1907).
8 It is interesting to note Hume's express wish not to link his name vith these writinqs of the period before 1748.
The third section of the Treatise r "Qf MoraIs"--which is of particular concern in this paper--did nat appear in print until 1740, and then under anonymous authorship. None of Hume's publications cited him as the author until the third edition of his collected Essays Moral and Political was released in April 1748; thus Fieldinq's copy of Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding links itself "to the Author of Essays Moral and Political" but does not cite Hume by name (1). Hume claimed authorship for aIl of his works published after this date except the Treatise, vhich he did not claim until April 1776 (the year of his death) in the Advertisement ta Essays and Treatises and in the 1777
posthumous release of My Own Life, a late autobiographical essay (Mossner 223-24). rt vas not until after Fielding died, in October 1754, that Hume made the effort to publicly acknowledge this work as his own• • Budd 75
9 Hume emphasized this correspondence to his other works • in a letter to his fellow scholar and longtime friend Gilbert Elliot: l believe the philosophical Essays contain every thing of Consequence relating to the Understanding, which you would meet in the Treatise & l qive you my advice against reading the latter. By shortening and simplifyinq the Questions, l really render them more complete. (Letters 1, 158) The Philosophical Essavs is listed--albeit vith a slightly mistaken title--in the Catalogue of Fielding's library, item 539. Since 1758, Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding has been known as An Enguiry concerninq Human Understandinq. In the Postscript to Battestin's paper that traces Ua drama residing in Fielding's anxious response to a new and particularly disturbing species of philosophical scepticism," Uwhose formidable champion was David Hume," he offers very convincing evidence that Fielding was aware of Hume's writing during the 17405, given the overlap in Hume's and Fieldinq's respective social circles ("The Problem of Amelia" 617, 616).
10 Hume's cynical allusion probably refers to Locke's passage in which he relates ethical propriety to mathematical certainty. This is what Locke suqqests in An Essay concerninq • Human Understanding: Budd 76
Where there is no property, there is no injustice, is a • proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid: for the idea of property being a right to any thing; and the idea to which the name injustice is qiven, beinq the invasion or violation of that right; it is evident that . • • l cao as certainly know this proposition to he true, as that a triangle has three angles equal ta two right ones. (4.3.18, II 208)
11 In his notes to the eritical edition of Amelia, Battestin argues that "Hume was only the most formidable of a swarm of atheists, deists, and free-thinkers to whom Fielding contemptuously referred in The Covent-Garden Journal (21 Jan. 1752 (50]), declaring , Infidelity, Scurrility, and Indecency' ta be the subjects which 'have principally exercised the Pens of the Modems'" (400n). We should note that aIl of Fielding's journalism durinq this period--from 21 January through ta 1 February 1752--i5 indignant over what appear to be cynieal philistine reviewers whom Fielding personifies,
strangely enough, as "Time, [which] seems 50 bitter and malicious an Enemy, as to the Works of the learned" (Covent Garden 47). In the issue Battestin cites, "The Court of Censorial Enquiry" (Covent-Garden 46-66) is devoted entirely to responding to specifie critical charges against ulearned" literary analogies such as Amelia, and not to theologieal or • philosophical controversies. Hume was certainly the target of ---- Budd 77
attack for his professed atheism after 1751, but not for any • disrespect toward classical education or learned literature, and certainly never directly from Fielding- Indeed, Hume never referred to Fielding in his essays or letters either,
50 it is doubtful that Fielding had Hume or his H swarm" in
mind as an object of direct crit.ica~ rebutta~, especial~y in these numbers of his Journal. Despite Battestin' s view, we should note that in no place does Fielding ever refer to Hume by name, publication, or even the vaguest inference;
moreover, Hume published nothinq at all between li48 and li51
(Green and Grose 85), 50 we might wonder what would justify a contemptuous attack from Fielding on any critical grounds during this time of critical self-defence. By Hume's own account, the 1751 publication of Book III of the Treatise Ucame unnoticed and unobserved into the World" (Life 4), and the first review of it did not appear until January 1752, in the Monthly Review, several weeks after Amelia went ta press (Mossner 225). This date coincides with the first issue of The Covent-Garden Journal ta he published after Amelia's release: the end-page of the second volume in the first edition announces that the next issue of The Covent-Garden Journal "will be certainly published on Saturday the 4th of January next," that is, in 1752 (Amelia 2, 263). While the Monthly Review indicates that "the reputation this inqenious author [Hume] has acquir'd as a fine and elegant writer, • renders it unnecessary for us to say anythinq in his praise," Budd 78
Fielding's own journalism remains ostensibly silent on the • issue (Mossner 225). Despite the Monthly Review' s praise, Hume's biographer suggests that Hume's writings were little known or reviewed in London before the mid-l750s, when the 1756 Wilburton controversy ensued (see note Il below). This occurred, of course, decided1y after Fieldinq's final departure from England on 30 June 1754 and his death in
Lisbon on 8 OCtober that same year. The historical background contradicts a topical passage in Hume's modest memoir, My Own Life:
Meanwhile [in 1749], my bookseller, A. Mi]- ~~, informed me, that my former publications (ail but the unfortunate Treatise) were beginning to be the subject of conversation; that the sale of them was qradually increasing and that new editions were demanded. Answers
by Reverends, and Right Reverends, came out two or three
in a year; and l found, by Dr. Warburton's railing, that the books were beginning to he esteemed in good company. (4) This is a surprisingly complex account, particularly vith respect to Fielding, as Hume and Fielding (and Richardson) shared the same bookseller. In fact, a glance at the respective title-pages shows that Millar published the first editions of Amelia in the same period when he vas likely to be selling copies of Hume's works. The passage suggests that • the Treatise--the most significantly moralistic of the works Budd 79
thus published--was not much read, yet Hume ambiguously cites • Warburton's Uesteem" when, as Battestin notes, UWarburton was implacable in his hatred of Hume" (1974, 645). Hume seems to have remained true to his ufixed resolution, never to reply to anybody" (Life 4), but perhaps this comment on Warburton's "esteemed company" playfully inflates the worthiness of Hume's readership for the sake of having the last--and certainly powerful--final ward over Warburton. As every edition of the short essay has indicated, the piece was written on 18 April 1776, just four months before Hume's death: UI composed [it] a few days before l left Edinburgh;
when ! thouqht, as did all my friends, that my life was despaired of" (Letter to Adam Smith, "History" 79). Paulson has pointed out in his latest book on Fieldinq and mid-century aesthetics that "Battestin has increasingly emphasized Fielding's orthadoxy" at the cost of not properly appreciating the critical role Humean and Shaftesburian deism played in Fielding' s formative notions of the Unew Province of Writing" he founded (The Beautiful 99). l will return ta this subtle but important controversy later in this paper.
12 In his Lite of David Hume, Ernest Mossner explains that Uat London early in 1749 David Hume found himself still little known in the world of letters ••• yet within eight years, that ia by 1757, Hume was qenerally acknowledged ta he • the leading man of letters" (223). Even though Mossner's Budd 80
biography provides no evidence or argument to indicate Hume's • reputation as an atheist durinq Fielding's lifetLme, William Warburton publicly referred to Hume as Han atheistical Jacobite" in 1757 and tried--with some success--to suppress Hume/s Four Dissertations of 1756 (Mossner 309, 324). l have found no evidence to sugqest the extent to which Fielding ever articulated any opinion of Hume or his writings.
13 For two important reasons, my argument makes no distinction between Fielding's identity as the novel's author and his presence in the text as the narrator. l do not mean ta suggest, however, that Fielding specifically intends to identify himself as the text's narrator: only that the distinction is not an important one for Fielding's purposes. We need recall that, first, the novel describes itself as a HHistory" on its opening page, and promises a didactic program entirely consistent with the epistolary Oedication that Fielding signs at the beginning of the novel. This unalvely empiricaln proqram. prescribes the observation of "the Accidents that befel a worthy Couple," not a self conscious construction of them, even though reflexivity will later subvert this program. Second, the novel's narrator makes extensive use of the sinqular first-person pronoun in his account of the HHistory" through which, on the novel's final page, he tries to authenticate the characters (and thus • his project's historical veracity) by claiming: Budd 81
Amelia declared to me the other Day, that she did not • remember to have seen her Husband out of Humour these ten years; upon my insinuating to her, that he had the best of Wives, she ansvered vith a Smile, that she ought to be so, for he had made her the happiest of Women. (533) Certainly, Fielding tries--though perhaps vith limited success--to set the novel rs actions in near-contemporary times (see Amelia Appendix l, 536-539); thus, while this does not guarantee that Fielding wants ta identify himself with his narrator, a rigorous distinction of the two wauld seem ta me unnecessary and inconsistent with Fielding's intentions. For the same reasan, no critic (ta my knowledge) distinguishes the UEditor" of Richardson's Clarissa from Richardson himself just as no one seems ta doubt that the text is in fact a nevel and net, as the novel's Preface indicates, a "History [that] is qiven in a Series of Letters written principally in a double, yet separate,
Correspondence" between two pairs of correspondents (l, v). Richardson continued to publish his novels under anonymous Ueditorship" after his final publication of A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections in 1755, even thouqh the Preface here, written NBy a Friend," refers to Richardson as "the author [who has remained] modestlyanonymous in his three Warks" (v). From • his letter of 1748, we might assume that Fielding admired Budd 82
Richardson for his ability to maintain the "Air of • Genuineness" which demands anonymous authorship of Clarissa; Richardson himself considered such a guise indispensable for his moral purposes, as he explains to William Warburton: l could wish that the Air of Genuineness had been kept up, tho' l want not the letters to be thouqht genuine;
only 50 far kept up, l Mean, as that they should not
prefatica~~y [sic] be owned not to be qenuine: and this for fear of weakening their Influence where any of them are aimed to he exemplary; as well as to avoid hurting that kind of Historical Faith which Fiction itself is generally read with, tho' we know it to be Fiction. (Selected Letters 85)
14 See Maurice Johnson, Fieldinq's Art of Fiction (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P 1961), 139-156; Palmer 136-138; and Lyall Powers's article, which devotes itself entirely to explicating the analogy. l presume it may be needless ta point out that the sexual entanglement between Booth and Miss Mathews does not at aIl correspond to what T. S. Eliot called "the love of Aeneas and Dido [which] has great tragic force" ("Virgil and Destiny" 93). While Palmer has argued that ugenerally the events in Amelia occur one book earlier than the corresponding events in the Aeneid" (151), in my view this accord illuminates an Lmportant • contrast between the two works: the sweeping pathos and Budd 83
historical grandiosity of Virgil is neither implied nor • eEfected in Amelia's largely socially critical satire.
15 In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle invokes a theory of the capricious and desire-driven acts of the gods, arguinq that codes of moral conduct must inevitably derive fram an individual's conscience; the gods have no moral standards: The life of moral virtue ••• 1s happy only in a secondary degree. For the moral activities are purely human: Justice, l mean, Courage, and the other virtues we display in our intercourse with our fellows, when we observe what is due to each in contracts and services and in our various actions, and in our emotions also; and aIl of these things seems to he purely human affairs. (10.8.1, 619)
The gods, as we conceive them, enjoy supreme felicity and happiness. But what sort of actions can we attribute ta them? Just actions? but will it not seem ridiculous to think of them as making contracts, restoring deposits
and the like? • surely it would be derogatory to praise them for not having evil desires! (10.8.7, 623) Perhaps Fielding's interest in the unstable morality of explicitly articulated epic cosmologies intends to shift our Eocus away from the pedantic aspects of the genre, toward • more powerful yet ostensihly amoral actions of divine Budd 84
Providence (or caprice). In his Journal of a Voyage to • Lisbon, written less than two years after Amelia's release, Fielding refines his sceptical view of divine perfection in the followinq passage:
l now renewed a reflection, which l have often seen occasion to make, that there is nothing so incongruous in nature as any kind of power, with lowness of mLnd and of ability, and that there is nothing more deplorable
than the want of truth in the whimsica~ notion of Plata; who tells us [in Laws 4.713-4, 1 285-6] that "Saturn, well knowing the state of human affairs, gave us kings and rulers, not of human, but divine original • we may at least learn, with our utmost endeavours, to imitate the Saturnian institution; borrowing aIl assistance from our immortal part, while we pay ta this the strictest obedience, we should form both our private œconomy, and public policy, fram its dictates." (155)
16 l am sure l am not alone in my debt to D. o. Raphael's helpful guide ta the philosophical background supporting his claim that "the essential structure of the first part of Book
III [of the Treatise], containinq the critique of ethical rationalism, is the seed from which grew the whole of Hume's theory of knowledge" (15) • • Budd 85
17 Fielding's allusion recalls the important moment in • Richardson' s Pamela, where Kr. B. earnestly dictates to Pamela his "Resolution to stick to old fashioned Rules" in the management of his household since, as he proceeeds to explain, "Man is as frail a piece of Machinery, and, by Irregularity, is
as subject ta he disordered as a Clock" (2, 216).
18 It is interesting to consider that the two Roman voices Harrison alludes to here were close contemporaries of Virgil (70-19 B.C.), and thus Fielding might be providing an obscure suggestion that the novel will offer a thematic affinity to its formaI link to the Aeneid; Cicero lived during 106-43 B.C., and Ovid roughly during 43 B.C. to A.O. 17. Like Virgil, Ovid and Cicero were concerned most specifically with
explicating contemporary political problems by constructing ambitious narratives to explicate the past; Cicero's most famous example is Tusculanae Oisputationes, and Ovid' s i5, of course, the Metamorphoses.
1 9 As I suggest in the introduction to my thesis, perhaps Amelia's most noted quality in Fielding criticism is its uncertain and unpersuasive narrator. This ia most thorouqhly discussed in Alter 141-177; Hunter, OCcasional Form 192-216; in Campbell 225-226; and in Andrew Elphenbein, uMysteries of Conduct: Gender and Narrative Structure in Fielding's • Budd 86
Amelia," (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Department of English, • n.d. ), an unpublished paper Campbell cites.
20 For references to London streets, which seem to read as a map of Booth' s wanderinqs toward places of his eventual incarcerations, see 4, 58, 164, 207, 209, 211, 218, 229, 410, 431. Both current critical editions (the Blewett and the Battestin) provide a map of London in 1733 to indicate the actual locations of the thirty-seven prominent landmarks named in the novel. For references to Ranelagh, see 247-49, 260, 294, 336. Battestin provides detailed notes on 311 to explicate the ineffectual government reforms to abolish London's extortionate sponqinq houses. The houses are represented in careful (and indignant) detail in Amelia; see
311-15, 351-56, 496-501, and 538.
21 Harrison expounds his views on adultery in his letter to Colonel James, which is found by two Uyounq rakish Bucks" and derisively read aloud to a public audience, which includes Booth, at the Ranelaqh masquerade: l need not tell you that Adultery is forbid in the Laws of the Decalogue, nor need I, l hope, mention, that it is expressly forbid in the New Testament ••• You see therefore ••• what the law is, and therefore none of you will be able to plead Ignorance when you come to the • Old-Baily in the other World. (414) Budd 87
Gambling is the one "Vice" that Harrison will not forgive. • After learninq of Booth's latest imprisonment he tells Amelia: l really think he deserves no Compassion. You say he hath promised never to play again; but l must tell you he hath broke his Promise to me already: for l had heard he was formerly addicted to this Vice, and had given him sufficient Caution against it. (S02) Dr. Harrison's extended admonishments against Booth's "Choice of such gross Instances of Weakness" as riding around London in an equipage while his family remains impoverished, appear in an indignant letter to Booth: "Vanity is always contemptible," Harrison urges, "will it not finally end in that of your paor Wife and Children?" (165).
22 Although the lord's name is not revealed to the reader, the novel suggests that his name is weil known to its characters; when Mrs. Atkinson describes the events of the masquerade to Dr. Harrison, the narrator indicates "for certain it is, [that] she never mentioned the Name of the noble Peer" to him (425). Fieldinq's conspicuous omission of the villain's name from the text stems from a wish to emphasize the impossibility--and indeed, the irrelevance--of the lord's intentions; it is his lecherous actions that are important to Amelia, not his wishes. Perhaps Fieldinq was • denying a subjective identity to the lord in an effort to Budd 88
avoid the kind of unexpected sympathies Richardson's readers • feit for Lovelace, which likely resulted from Richardson' s elaborate construction of his villain's psychological motives. Richardson wrote to his favourite correspondent, Lady Bradshaigh: l told you in my first Letter that [Lovelace] had some good Qualities qiven him in Compliment to the Eye and Ear of Clarissa. But little did l think at the time that those Qualities (politically rather than from Principle exerted as some of them evidently were, particularly in his Behaviour to his Rosebud) would have given Women of Virtue and Honour such a likinq to him, as l have found to be the Case with many. (Selected Letters 113)
23 Despite his promise, Fieldinq provided (at a mysteriously undocumented period) notes for a carefully revised edition of the novel; however, this second edition was not published until 1762, in Arthur Murphy's The Works of Henry Fielding, Esg.: with the Lite of the Author (London: Printed for A. Millar), 4 vols (Duden 1137).
24 John Carroll, alonq with Mark Kinkead-Weekes, arques that this preface was is fact written by Warburton (85, 165). Richardson wrote to Warburton on 19 April 1748: l am infinitely obliqed to you, sir, for your Papers. • But how shall l take it upon myself? l must, if put to Budd 89
me, by Particulars r suppose it to me, at least, by sorne • Learned Friend, so disquisinq as you May not be suggested to be the Person. And l have transcribed it, that not even my compositor May guess at the Author--But it is really so much above my learning and ability, that it will not be supposed mine by anybody. (Selected Letters 85)
25 Richardson's Letters and Passages Restored was published simultaneously with the third edition of Clarissa in 1751, emphasizing effectively the differences between the editions (Van Marter 1975, 119).
26 David Hensley, in his 1995 McGill graduate seminar entitled uClarissa and the Theory of the Novel" (110-728A) made a point of defining the later eighteenth-century novel, and its attendant theoretical commentary, in these terms. This 16history of problems" approach informs this brief attempt to treat Clarissa as a contribution to eighteenth century aesthetics. l wish to mention the usefulness of Dr. Hensley's helpful and detailed Guide to Richardson's "Clarissa" <1747-48), McGill University seminar paper (McGill University: Montreal, 1995) in the preparation of this section. For Walter Bejamin's reference to the "history of • problems" as a critical orientation, see Walter Benjamin Budd 90
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hennann • Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 7 vols, 1.1:11. In an English translation, Benjamin describes it thus: "Just as mosaics preserve their majesty despite their fragmentation into capricious particles, so philosphical contemplation is not lackinq in momentum" (On the Oriqin 28).
27 Shirley Van Marter explains that Uanother large set of revisions systematically alters various terms of address throughout the second edition." She continues: One of the most obvious patterns is the disappearance of Clarissa's childlike use of Umamma" and "papa." In 1749 Richardson consistently replaced these two words with the more restrained greeting UMother" and UFather." (1973, 112)
28 Fielding was well aware of this difference between himself and Richardson, which was most marked in the novels; in his "work founded on truth" This is how he describes it: [This i5 a] moderation for which [the reader] may think himself obliged to m.e, when he compares it with the conduct of authors, who often fill a whole sheet with their own praises, to which they sometimes set their own names, and sometimes a fictitious one. One hint, however, l must qive the kind reader; which is, that if he should find no sort of amusement in this book, he • will be pleased to remember the public utility which Budd 91
will arise from it. If entertainment, as Mr. Richardson • observes., he but a secondary consideration in the romance • sure it will be so considered in a work founded, like this, on truth; and where political reflections form so distinguishing a part. (Journal 129) This double-sided public reference to Richardson, which at first suggests an indignant incrimination of Richardson's notorious vanity but then qestures to the Preface of Clarissa to support Fielding's current (and very last) literary project, offers an interestinq supplement to Fieldinq's 1748 letter to Richardson. The letter remained lost until its discovery in an Oxford bookshop in 1948. Rere is an extract from the letter which, it seems, Richardson never answered: And sure the World will not suppose me inclined to flatter one whom they will suppose me to hate if the[y] will be pleased to recollect that ve are RivaIs for that coy Mrs. Fame. Believe me however if your Clarissa had nat enqaqed my Affections more that this Krs. aIL your Art and aIL your Nature had not been able to extract a single Tear: for as to this Krs. l have ravished her long ago, and live in settled cohabitation with her in defianee of the Public Voiee which is supposed to be her Guardian, and to have alone the Power of giving her away. To explain this Riddle. It is not that l am less but more addicted to Vanity than others; so much that l • Budd 92
can wrap my self up as warmly in my own vanity, as the • Ancient could himself in his Virtue. (McAdam Jr., 305-306)
• Budd 93
Works Cited Alter, Robert. Fielding and the Nature of the Novel. • Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1968. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. H. Rackham.. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1934. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Trans. Willard R. Transk. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1953. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. The Dialoqic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Battestin, Martin C. Introduction. Amelia. By Henry Fielding. xv-Lxi. with Ruthe R. Battestin. Henry Fielding: A Life. London: Routledge, 1989. ---. "The Problem of Amelia: Hume, Barrow, and the Conversion of Captain Booth." Enqlish Literary History 41 (1974): 613-648. ---. "The Time-Scheme of Amelia." Appendix 1. Amelia. By Henry Fielding. 535-539. Benjamin, Walter. On the Oriqin of German Traqic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: New Left Books, 1977. Blewett, David. Introduction. Amelia. By Henry Fielding. Hannondsworth: Penguin, 1987. ix-xx. Boswell, James. Mr. Boswell Dines vith Professor Kant. Ed. Lewis White Beck. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1979. Braudy, Leo Beai. The Narrative Stance. Ann Arbor: U • Microfilms, 1968• Budd 94
Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: Enqlish Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Hammersmith: Harper • Collins, 1997. Campbell, Jill. Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding's Plays and Novels. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1995. Conway, Alison. uFielding's Amelia and the Aesthetics of Virtue." Eiqhteenth-Century Fiction 8 (1995): 35-50.
Crane, R. s. ~~A Note on Richardson's Relation to French Fiction" Modern Philoloqy 16 (1918-19): 490-505. Dobson, Austin. uFielding's Library." Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 1896. St. Martin's Library. Third Series. London: n.p., 1907. Duden, F. Homes. Bibilography. Vol 2. Henry Fielding: His Life, Works, and Times. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. 2 vols. 1126-1157. Duncan Eaves, T.e. and Kimpel, Ben D. Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871. Ed. David Carroll. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose. Ed. John Hayward. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Fielding, Henry. Amelia. 1751. London: Printed for A. Millar, 1752 [sic]. 4 vols. ---. Amelia. 1751. Ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983 • • Budd 95
---. The Champion. 1739-41. Ed. William Ernest Henley. Vol 2 • Miscellaneous Writings. 3 vols. The Works of Henry • Fielding. London: Frank Cass and Company, 1967. 75-342. 16 vols. ---. The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Office. 1751-52. Ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U P, 1988. ---. UAn Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, with Some Proposals for Remedying this Growing Evil." 1751. Legal Writinqs. Henley. Vol. 13. 5-130. ---. The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. 1749. Ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U P, 1975. 3 vols • . The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great. 1743. Ed. David Nokes. Harmondsworth: Penquin, 1986. ---. Preface. Joseph Andrews. 1742. Ed. Martin C. Battestin. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U P, 1967. 3-11. •A Journey trom This World to the Next and The Journal of a Voyage ta Lisbon. 1743, 1755. Ed. Ian A. Bell and Andrew Varney. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1997. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton U
Pt 1957. Godwin, William. Appendix 2. Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams. Ed. David McCracken. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. 335-341. Green, Thomas Hill and Grose, Thomas Hodge. UHistory of the • Editions." Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. By Budd 96
David Hume. Vol 1. London: Longmans, Green, 1874. 2 vols. 15-86. • Hume, David. An Enguiry concerninq the Principles of Morais. 1751. Ed. Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. Vol 1. London:
Longmans, Green, 1874. 2 vols. 167-307. ---. The Letters of David Hume. Ed. J.Y.T. Greig. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1932. 2 vols.
---. My Own Life. 1776. Green and Grose, vol 1. 1-8. ---. Philosophical Essays concerninq Human Understanding.
London: Printed for A. Millar, 1748.
---. A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt ta introduce the experimental Method of Reasoninq ioto Moral Subjects. 1739-40. Ed. L. A. Selby- Biqqe. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1928. Hunter, J. Paul. "The Lesson of Amelia." Ed. Larry S. Champion. Quick Springs of Sense. Athens, GA: U of
Georqia P, 1974. 157-182 • . Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1975. Hutcheson, Francis. An Essav on the Nature and Conduct of the
Passions and Affections. With Illustrations on the Moral Sense. 1728. Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1769 • . Treatise 2. An Inguiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtuej in Tvo Treatises. London: John
D'Arby, Etc., 1725 • • Budd 97
Johnson, Samuel. The Works of Samuel Johnson. 9 vols. Oxford: Talboys and Wheeler, 1825. • Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. 1788. Trans. Lewis White Beek. Library of Liberal Arts Series. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956. Kauffman, Linda S. Diseourses of Desire. Ithaea: Cornell U P,
1986. Kay, Carol. Politieal Constructions. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothie Novel. London: Routledqe, 1995. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. "Clarissa Restored?" Review of English Studies New Series 10 (1959): 156-171. Knight, Charles. "The Narrative Structure of Fielding's Amelia." Ariel Il (1980): 31-47.
Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. 1690.
Ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1895. 2 vols. Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. 1732. Ed. F. B. Kaye. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924. 2 vols. McAdam, E. L., Jr. uA New Letter from Fielding." Yale Review
38 (1948-49): 300-310. McKeon, Michael. The Oriqins of the English Novel 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. McKillop, Alan D. "Local Attachment and Cosmopolitanism--the Eighteenth-Century Pattern." From Sensibility ta • Budd 98
Romanticism. Ed. Frederick W. Willes and Harold Bloom• Oxford: Oxford OP, 1965. 191-218 • • . Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1936. Mossner, Ernest Campbell. The Life of David Hume. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Palmer, Eustace. "Amelia--The Decline in Fielding's Art." Essays in Criticism 21 (1971): 135-151. Paulson, Ronald. The Beautiful, Novel, and Stranae. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1996 •
. Ed. Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Rall, 1962 • . Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. New
Haven: Yale U P, 1967. Plato. Laws. Trans. R. G. Bury. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1914. 2 vols. Powers, Lyall. uThe Influence of the Aeneid on Fielding's Amelia." Modern Language Notes 71 (1956): 330-336. Raphael, D.D. UHume's Critique of Ethical Rationalism." Hume and the Enlightenment. Ed. William B. Todd. Edinburgh: The University Press, 1974. 14-29. Rawson, Claude. "Henry Fielding." The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Ed. John Richetti. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1996. 120-152. Reeve, Clara. The Proqress of Romance and the History of Charoba, Queen of Eqypt. 1785. Reprint of 1785 edn. New • York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930 • Budd 99
Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa. Or, The History of a Young
Lady: Comprehendinq the Most Important Concerns of • Private Life. 1747-48. London: Printed for S. Richardson .•• and Sold by A. Millar, 1748 [sic]. 7 vols. ---. Clarissa: Preface, Hints of a Preface, and Postscript. Ed. R.F. Brissenden. Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1964. ---. A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles
Grandison. London: Printed for S. Richardson ••• and
Sold by Andrew Millar, 1755. ---. The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. Ed. Anna
Laetitia Barbauld. London: Phillips, 1804. 6 vols. . Letters and Passages Restored fram the Original Manuscripts of the History of Clarissa. London: Printed
for S. Richardson ••• and Sold by Andrew Millar, 1751. ---. Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded. 1740-2. London: Printed for
S. Richardson, 1740-2. 4 vols. ---. Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson. Ed. John Carroll, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. Sabor, Peter. "Amelia and Sir Charles Grandison: The Convergence of Fielding and Richardson." Wascana Review 17 (Fail 1982): 3-18. Sale, William Merritt., Jr. Samuel Richardson: A Biblioqraphical Record of His Literary Career with • Historical Notes. New Haven: Yale U P, 1936 • Budd 100
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinons, Etc. 1711. Reprint of 1714 edn. • Farnborough: Gregg International, 1968. Sherburn, George. uFieldinq's Amelia: An Interpretation." 1936. Ed. Ronald Paulson. Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962. 146-157. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Reprint of 1759 edn. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sax and Marriaqe in England 1500 1800. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Thomas, o.s. "Fortune and the Passions in Fielding's Amelia." Modern Language Review 60 (1965): 176-187. Thornbury, E.M. Appendix. Henry Fieldinq's Theory of the Comic Prose Epie. 1931. New York: Russell and Russell, 1966. 168-189. Towers, A.R. "Fielding and Dr. Samuel Clarke." Modern Languaqe Notes 70 (1955): 357-260. Van Marter, Shirley. uRichardson's Revisions of Clarissa in the Second Edition." Studies in Bibliographv 26 (1973): 105-132.
~--. "Richardson's Revisions of Clarissa in the Third and Fourth Editions." Studies in Bibliography 28 (1975): 119-152. Virgil (Publius Verqilius Maro). The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Random House, 1981 • • Budd 101
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: U of California
P, 1957. • Wollstonecraft, Mary. Collected Letters. Ed. Ralph M. Wardle. Ithaca: Corne!l U P, 1979. ---. Maria; or, The Wronqs of Woman. Volume 1. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd. Pickering Masters Series. London: Pickering, 1989.
5 vols. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. uFieldinqrs Ame~ia: Private Virtue and Public Geod." Texas Studies in Language and Literature
10 (1968): 37-55 •
•