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Fielding and The Meaning of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Philip Stevick
Philip Stevick*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut, Storrs
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Extract

In the English eighteenth century, as in most ages before the twentieth century, to take history seriously was to believe, almost without exception, that history coheres, that it has a shape, that it is moving in a more-or-less orderly, more-or-less obvious direction toward or away from certain teleological poles. History was a decline from the “natural” condition of man for Shaftesbury and the primitivists; or it was an ascent toward the “natural” condition of man for Priestley and the progressivists. It was a decline from a general happiness for Lord Edward Fitzgerald; and it was an ascent toward a general happiness in at least that aspect of Pope's thought represented in the lines, “Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim!/ Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! What e'er thy name.” For Swift, and to a lesser extent Clarendon and Temple, history was a monstrous progressive aberration from standards of truth and reason. For most of the doctrinaire Whigs it was a gradual realization of human freedom. History was visualized by Young and Akenside as a corollary of what A. O. Lovejoy calls “the temporalizing of the Great Chain of Being.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 5 , December 1964 , pp. 561 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1907

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References

1 Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1934), pp. 35–38.

2 Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932), pp. 119–168.

3 Whitney, pp. 51–53.

4 Essay on Man, Twickenham Edition, iii, i, ed. Maynard Mack (London, 1950), 128.

5 See the unpubl. diss. (Wisconsin, 1959) by Morton I. Rosenbaum, “Swift's View of History.”

6 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1951).

7 The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 242–287.

8 Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia (Berkeley, 1949), pp. 153–203.

9 John B. Black (The Art of History, New York, 1926, p. 96) somewhat unfairly makes uniformitarianism his chief indictment of Hume as historian; E. C. Mossner (“An Apology for David Hume, Historian,” PMLA, lvi, 1941, 666) argues that Hume is no less an historian for his attempt to find universal principles of human nature in history.

10 Whitney, pp. 35–38; Daniel J. Boorstin, The Mysterious Science of the Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), pp. 62–85.

11 Fielding's library, which was especially rich in histories, is listed in Ethel Thornbury's Henry Fielding's Theory of the Comic Prose Epic (Madison, Wis., 1931). Wilbur Cross (The History of Henry Fielding, New Haven, 1918, iii, 77) calls it “the largest working library possessed by any man of letters in the eighteenth century, surpassing even Dr. Johnson's.” The extent of Fielding's familiarity with history is treated in Robert Wallace's “Fielding's Knowledge of History and Biography,” SP, xliv (1947), 89–107. And Wallace's dissertation (“Henry Fielding's Narrative Method: Its Historical and Biographical Origins,” unpubl. diss., North Carolina, 1945) treats some of the fictional consequences of Fielding's historical learning.

12 The Covent-Garden Journal, ed. G. E. Jensen, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1915), i, 139–144.

13 The ironic pattern of the Covent-Garden Journal essay is related to the “double-irony” which William Empson finds characteristic of Fielding's novels; “Tom Jones,” Kenyon Review, xx (1958), 218–219.

14 The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, ed. W. E. Henley and others, 16 vols. (New York, 1902), xii, 254. In references which follow, I refer to this edition as “Henley.”

15 Henley, xv, 358.

16 Henley, xiii, 14.

17 London, 1747, p. 48.

18 Henley, xvi, 28–29.

19 Henley, iv, 148. References to the fiction that follow are to the Henley edition and are incorporated in the text.

20 Ernst Cassirer (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F. C. A. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove, Princeton, 1951, p. 206) writes: “It is no accident that he chose for his critical work the form of a Historical and Critical Dictionary. For the dictionary allows the spirit of mere co-ordination to prevail by contrast with the spirit of subordination that dominates the rational systems. In Bayle there is no hierarchy of concepts, no deductive derivation of one concept from another, but rather a simple aggregation of materials, each of which is as significant as any other and shares with it an equal claim to complete and exhaustive treatment.”

21 “Fielding and ‘Conservation of Character’,” in Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ronald Paulson (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), p. 160.

22 Coolidge, p. 165.

23 Henley, xiii, 137.

24 London, 1752, p. 4.

25 Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. George J. Irwin (London, 1961), p. 149.

26 Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), pp. 51, 167, 172, 181, 178.

27 “Henry Fielding's Comic Romances,” Papers of the Michigan Academy, xlv (1960), 415–416.

28 See Sheridan Baker, “Fielding's Amelia and the Materials of Romance,” PQ, lxi (1962), 437–449.

29 The Psychology of Laughter: A Study in Social Adaptation (London, 1953), p. 39.

30 Pp. 89–92, 129.

31 Fielding, for example, attributes the reading of “the excellent Bishop Burnet” to Amelia; Henley, vi, 309.

32 “Joseph Andrews, Mask and Feast,” Essays in Criticism, xiii (1963), pp. 209–210.