Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2005 Desiring to do good: Sarah Fielding's David Simple in the context of Christianity and the writings of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson Michael Alan Behrens Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Behrens, Michael Alan, "Desiring to do good: Sarah Fielding's David Simple in the context of Christianity and the writings of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson" (2005). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 7111. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/7111 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Desiring to do good: Sarah Fielding's David Simple in the context of Christianity and the writings of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson by Michael Alan Behrens A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major: English (Literature) Program of Study Committee: Allen Michie, Major Professor Kathleen Hickok John Monroe Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2005 11 Graduate College Iowa State University This is to certify that the master's thesis of Michael Alan Behrens has met the requirements of Iowa State University Major Professor For the Major Program Ill Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. David Simple 11 3. Volume the Last 29 4. Works Cited 43 IV Acknowledgements I would like to thank Kathleen Hickok, John Monroe and especially Allen Michie. This thesis had its origin in his course and its completion would not have been possible without his help and encouragement. 1 1. Introduction In 1774, Mary Scott published The Female Advocate; A Poem. Occasioned by Reading Mr. Buncombe's Feminead. Scott regrets that "it was only on a small number of Female Geniuses that Gentleman bestowed the wreath ofFame" (v), and attempts to rectify this by honoring these "Female Geniuses" in her poem. Scotfhonors such names as Queen Elizabeth, the novelist Charlotte Lennox, the Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, and Sarah Fielding. About Fielding, Scott writes: *Twas FIELDING'S talent, with ingenuous Art, To trace the secret mazes of the Heart. In language tun'd to please its infant thought. The tender breast with prudent care SHE taught. Nature to HER, her boldest pen lent. And blest HER with a mind of vast extent; A mind, that nobly scorn'd each low desire. And glow'd with pure Religion's warmest fire. (22-23) Although Gae Holladay claims that Scott's poems "indicate strong religious fervor" (iii), it is interesting that Scott acknowledges the religious aspect of Sarah Fielding's work, choosing to end the poem by a mention of how her mind "glow'd with pure Religion's wannest fire." Although it seems as if Fielding's contemporaries recognized Christianity to be central to her writing, much recent criticism neglects to mention this aspect of her work, or relegates it to a brief discussion. However, it is rather obvious to anyone reading Fielding's most famous novel. The Adventures ofDavid Simple orits sequel Volume the Last} that Fielding's writing ^The Adventures ofDavid Simple: Containing an Account ofhis Travels Through the Cities ofLondon and Westminster, In the Search ofa Real Friend was publishedin 1744,followed by a second edition "Revised and Corrected With a PrefaceBy HenryFielding" in the same year. In 1747 Fieldingpublished Familiar Letters Between the Principal Characters in DavidSimple, AndSome Others. To Which is addedA Vision, although this workis onlytangentially connected to theevents of the firstbook. The Adventures ofDavidSimple. Volume theLast, In Which HisHistory is Concluded, which could be considered a "true"sequel, was published in 1753. Most commentators only discuss The Adventures ofDavid Simple and Volume theLast, choosing to ignore FamiliarLetters. There are three modem editions ofDavid Simple, all alsocontaining Volume the Last, butnot Familiar Letters. The fu-st was published by Oxford University Pressin 1969andeditedwithan is greatly influenced by the prevailing Anglican discourse ofthe period. It is the religious aspect ofFielding's work with which this essay is mainly concerned. This religious context is essential for an understanding ofDavid Simple and sentimental literature in general. It has been acknowledged by commentators that Fielding created one of the first, or even perhaps the first, men of feeling in English literature. Gerald Barker argues that Fielding "anticipates the novel of feeling decades before such writers as Mackenzie, Goldsmith, and Henry Brooke" and goes on to state that together "with Lucius Manley, the hero of Mary Collyer's Felicia to Charlotte (1744), David Simple shares the distinction of being one of the two earliest examples of the Man of Feeling in English fiction" (69). Likewise, FelicityNussbaum states that in "David Simple, SarahFielding creates perhaps the first man of feeling" (436). There is little question, then, that as an early writer of "sentimental"^ fiction and as perhaps the originator of the English man of feeling, historically Fielding is an extremely important writer. Until recently, however, shehas received very littlecritical attention. Thishaschanged in the pasttwenty years or so, andrecently there has been much published on her work, especially on the DavidSimple series. introduction by Malcolm Kelsall. This edition uses the second edition ofDavid Simple, edited by Henry Fielding. In 1998 Kentucky University Press published the first edition ofDavid Simple, edited with an introduction by Peter Sabor. This is the version that will be referred tothroughout this essay. In2002 Penguin Classics published the first edition edited with an introduction by Linda Bree. In this essay, I will generally refer to The Adventures ofDavid Simple as David Simple and David Simple. Volume the Last as Volume the Last. 2 As pointed• out by Tim Pamell (xv), the term "sentimental novel" is somewhat controversial. For example, John Richetti argues that "the term 'sentimental novel' is broadly uninformative" because almost all eighteenth- century fiction "explores moral problems, meditating on the difficulty ofregulating the passions and navigating virtuously through avicious and unjust world" (247). For a discussion ofsentimentalism see Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), GJ.Barker-Benfield, The Culture ofSensibility: Sex andSociety inEighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), John Mullan, Sentiment ' and Sociability: The Language ofFeeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) and Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Since it seems likely that Sarah Fielding had a significant hand in creating and setting the agenda for the English man of feeling of the period, it is worthwhile to examine the origins ofthis phenomenon. Although the cultural factors that influenced the sensibility of the period are complex and varied, perhaps the most important is Christianity, and Anglicanism specifically. Tim Pamell observes that the "Anglican discourse is among the most significant in the complex of discourses and ideas that informed the eighteenth-century 'cult', or culture, of sensibility" (xv). The period's Christianinfluence on the mid-century novel of sentiment is documentedin R.S. Crane's influential essay "Suggestions Towarda Genealogy of the 'Man of Feeling.'" Cranediscusses writings and sermons by Anglican divines of the Restoration and earlyeighteenth-century to locatethe origins of "the peculiar moral doctrine which lay back of the mid-eighteenth-century cult of the 'man of feeling'" (206). Crane writes: What I wouldsuggest, in short, is thatthekey to thepopulartriumph of "sentimentalism" toward 1750 is to besought, notso much in the teaching of individual lay moralists after 1700, as in the combined influence of numerous Anglican divines of the Latitudinarian tradition who from the Restoration onward intothe eighteenth century had preached to theircongregations and, through theirbooks, to the larger public essentially the ... ethics of benevolence, "good nature," and "tender sentimental feeling." (207-208) Crane considers four central aspects of the ethical discourse of these divines during the period from around 1660 toabout 1725: virtue as benevolence, benevolence as feeling, benevolent feelings as natiu-al tohumankind and the joy tobe found in benevolence. One may perhaps see at leastpart of the genesis ofDavid Simple's character in each of Crane's categories. For example, the disagreement between the benevolent David Simple and the rational Mr. Orgueil is probably influenced atleast somewhat by this discourse, as Crane demonstrates a similar dispute in the divines' opposition to the doctrine of Stoicism. He points out that for the divines, the "words 'charity' and 'benevolence' had a double sense, connoting not only the serviceable and philanthropic actions which the good man performs but still more the tender passions and affections which prompt to these actions and constitute their immediate reward"