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“Stock the Parish with Beauties”: Henry Fielding's Parochial Vision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Scott Mackenzie
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Abstract

The parish and the social systems it sustains are prominent in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews. His parochial vision, formulated across the range of his literary, critical, and juridical writings, constitutes an intricate scheme of surveillance, discipline, and care that Fielding hoped to see applied throughout the nation. He combines a plan for reforming oversight of the poor (from the intimate confines of parish management through the supervisory offices of the county and the magistracy) with a heuristics of judgment and discrimination, based on the visible authenticity of poverty and verified by the ridiculousness of affectation, which he exemplifies through the antiromance of Joseph Andrews. Romance, for Fielding, is the literary version of affectation, a transgressive masquerade that belongs to social emulation and that can be unmasked by a “test of truth,” derived from the third earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 3 , May 2010 , pp. 606 - 621
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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