Chapter 2 Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews 2.1 The 18 th century British literature affords historians and students a vista of contrasts. Law ‘had come to replace religion as the main ideological cement of society’ 1, but lawyers were acerbically satirised. As the parliamentarians extended the death penalty to a myriad of misdemeanours, the literary legislators applied the weapons of satire to the vice and disorder around them. Injustices produced by law were a common subject for satire. The middle decades of the 18 th century saw a wave of anxiety about crime. Henry Fielding 2 (1707-54), who as a young man witnessed the hanging of Jonathan Wild at Tyburn in 1725, immersed himself uniquely in the literary and legal discourses on crime from the 1740s. Fielding led a life in successive phases, as a young man about town, as a playwright, a lawyer and a novelist. In 1749 he was appointed to the magistracy, and he devised the Bow Street Runners police force during his term in office. Though he may appear to us as a representative of the integrated culture of law and letters, it was only when Walpole’s Licensing Act of 1737 closed down the theatres that he enrolled in the Middle Temple, studied law and became a barrister. As a struggling advocate on the Western Circuit, he combined both professions. In early 1730s, Fielding wrote anonymous political satire and essays for journals such as The Champion , but in 1742, he published his first novel, 48 Joseph Andrews . Styling his book a ‘comic epic poem in prose’ Fielding attempted an accurate representation of the manners and morals of his society. Rather than direct condemnation, he sought to elicit ridicule of folly and vice by satire. He professes allegiance in this work to realist canons of portraiture, not to the caricaturist’s technique of exaggeration. Joseph Andrews tests the innocence of Joseph, Fanny and Parson Adams against the depredations of greedy publicans, uncharitable priests, cunning robbers and a host of self-serving ‘People of Fashion’ in a series of adventures on the road. Fielding established himself as a writer before he embarked on his legal studies, and he had achieved success in the novel before he became a magistrate. Nevertheless, issues related to crime and law underlay his entire career as an author, even in his earlier days as a dramatist and journalist. His mother’s father was a justice of the Queen’s Bench, while his paternal grand-father was an archdeacon of Salisbury; in these two men there may have been something of the genesis of Fielding’s bent toward the law and his firm sense of Christian morality. During 1728 to 1737, Fielding wrote over twenty comedies and burlesques. By that time, he was established as England’s leading playwright. In 1737, the Stage Licensing Act was passed by the Horace Walpole’s government which made dramatic performances open to government censorship 3. The Act effectively ended Fielding’s dramatic career. He turned to three alternative occupations which were to occupy him to the end of his life, and which interacted with each other in various ways: the law, political journalism 4 and novel-writing. He was called to the Bar in 1740, practising on the Western Circuit, and in 1748 became Justice of the Peace for Westminster, eventually extending his jurisdiction to the whole of Middlesex. He created the force which eventually became the Metropolitan 49 Police, and in his later years as a magistrate wrote a number of tracts on socio-legal issues. His judicial philosophy, as expressed in these, was relatively hard-line, but his novels, and especially Amelia (1751), show an angry awareness of the malpractices and injustices of the law and a compassionate feeling for its victims: the plight of good persons driven by poverty into petty crime and punished by corrupt and unfeeling magistrates is a recurrent preoccupation. A tension between the claims of strict justice, and those of a larger perspective on the whole human case, seems to have exercised Fielding throughout his legal and fiction-writing career. It is evident in the early Journey from this World to the Next (1743) as well as in Tom Jones (1749). Years surrounding the publication of Joseph Andrews were hard ones for Fielding. 5 Moreover, as a result of his literary and political notoriety, it was difficult for Fielding to get ahead in the legal profession. Yet if Fielding could not get money by practicing law, he did use the subject of law in his writing: Jonathan Wild (1743) is filled with biting accounts of the grotesque malpractices in the system of criminal law. Criminal justice in London In the early Hanoverian age it was widely thought that crime had reached a new pitch of intensity: people in most ages have felt the same. Yet there were rational grounds for believing that social unrest posed an increasing threat, especially in the capital. Even if the crime waves Fielding wrote about were in some measure a matter of perception rather than objective reality (the statistics do not show a simple graph of upward progression), there was enough reality in them to warrant serious concern. For one thing, a polite and commercial nation could no longer endure some of the blatant evils which had gone on more or less unchecked in earlier 50 centuries. For another, demographic changes had outrun the administrative capacity of a system based on medieval and Tudor institutions. Thirdly, sheer growth meant that the law encountered a different scale, if not always a different kind, of problems in its operations. According to Pat Rogers 6 some historians have interpreted the entire system as a ruling-class conspiracy masquerading as a genuine operation of criminal justice. He further says that the view has not been accepted by the majority of scholars, who have pointed to the checks and balances by which some of the rigours of the law could be mitigated, and by which the court- room could provide a relatively level playing-field, granted the inequalities which prevailed outside the compass of law in the wider society. Fuller investigation of the day-to-day workings of legal institutions has shown that the system contained many fair-minded and hard-working people, who attempted to carry out their duties honourably in the face of huge social problems presented by the new urbanized environment. Pat Rogers further states that Justice Thrasher in Amelia displays no such urge to deal equitably with the men and women who come before him, and he was not alone in this. But in his magisterial capacity Fielding himself met the best standards of the time, even if his conduct does not stand up to meticulous scrutiny on every occasion, and his judicial philosophy lagged behind the most advanced thinking of the Enlightenment. Seated in his house on the west side of Bow Street, Fielding did not have to look far to see the evidence of what was going on. When first appointed to the magistracy, he had briefly taken a house in the neighbourhood, at Brownlow Street, off Drury Lane. From this site he could have taken a five-minute stroll and assembled a hundred career criminals, if they had been willing to show themselves. Close by squatted the fearsome ‘rookeries’ of St. Giles, a byword for poverty, disease, and crime for another 51 century, and a model for the slum Tom-all-alone’s which Dickens later created in Bleak House . Legal and Social Works – Soon after Henry Fielding’s appointments to the magistracy in 1748 (for Westminster) and 1749 (for Middlesex County), he was elected chairman of the Westminster Sessions and in that capacity addressed the grand jury in 1749 – A Charge delivered to the Grand Jury . It is the first of his several important works where he exhorts the members of the jury strictly to enforce the laws against public immorality. As soon as Fielding was appointed to the magistracy, he naturally took a central role in the national discourse regarding legal and social affairs. The area of his responsibility covered some of the most notorious blackspots in the entire country, with a thriving criminal subculture and a pattern of unrest marked by frequent riots. In addition, Fielding did more than serve as a proactive Justice of the Peace in the capital. He wrote widely on matters of public policy, as they were affected by the law and by the institutions which supported its implementation: pamphlets, charges to the jury, and articles in the press flowed from his pen during the brief tenure of his magistracy. Of course, his novels deal centrally with some of the same issues, as they had done from the start. Equally, his comic masterpiece, Jonathan Wild , touches (albeit with satiric obliquity) on authentic issues regarding crime in London. Most of Fielding’s pronouncements relate to topical circumstances, such as an apparent wave of violent robberies, a riot in the streets, or a controversial ‘missing persons’ case. However, the cast of mind underlying the writing of these works is philosophic as well as pragmatic. While Fielding was a practical reformer and active participant in day-to-day controversial discourse, he was also a deeply reflective man, with a fuller 52 knowledge of humane learning – history, literature ancient and modern, and political theory – than almost all of his colleagues on the bench. Even if he had never written his plays or his fiction, his remaining oeuvre would still interest students of early Hanoverian England, because it discusses the controversies of the time through the prism of a thoughtful attitude towards society and a well-stocked mind.