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Dr. Johnson on Fielding and Richardson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert Etheridge Moore
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Extract

When a literary critic's judgments are never dull, it is inevitable that they will often be surprising. A more striking example is hardly to be found among the great critics than Dr. Johnson's remarkable comparisons of Fielding and Richardson. Many later judges, unwilling to do justice to Richardson, and contenting themselves with a cool recognition of his historical importance, have nonetheless been willing that Johnson should admire him extravagantly. That his evaluation of the novelist would be less impartial than theirs is easily understood, both because of the two men's friendship and because of eighteenth-century literary tastes, so different from our own. But Johnson's utter obtuseness towards Fielding is annoying to the modern critic, not merely because Fielding's reputation has far outstripped that of his rival, but also because he was immensely admired in Johnson's own lifetime. The Age of Reason gloried in the author of Tom Jones, yet here is the supreme critic of the century delivering himself of the most inflexibly contrary opinion. What are we to think of this?

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , March 1951 , pp. 162 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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References

1 Life of Johnson, ii, 48. AH references in my text or notes are to the Hill-Powell edition.

2 It is surprising to learn that Richardson had used a similar figure in a letter to Sarah Fielding, saying that her brother's was “the knowledge of a clock-work machine, while yours was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside.” Correspondence, ed. Mrs. Barbauld (London, 1804), ii, 104.

3 Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1897), ii, 190.

4 Cf. the passage in the Life where she “laid it on” (iv, 341).

5 Johnsonian Miscellanies, i, 282. Mrs. Thrale picked up this figure for her own comparisons as well. “I myself like Smollet's [sic] Novels better than Fielding's; the perpetual Parody teizes one;—there is more Rapidity and Spirit in the Scotsman: though both of them know the Husk of Life perfectly well—& for the Kernel—you must go to either Richardson or Rousseau.” Thraliana, ed. K. C. Balderston (Oxford, 1942), i, 248. Later (pp. 328–329), in her rating of contemporary novelists, she says: “The Female Quixote & Count Fathom I think far before Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews with regard to Body of Story, Height of Colouring, or General Powers of Thinking. Fielding however knew the Shell of Life—and the Kernel is but for a few.”

6 Lives of the Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1905), ii, 67.

7 See Basil Willey's discussion in The 18th-Century Background (London, 1940), Ch. iii.

8 This point has been much elaborated, though from a somewhat different approach, by W. M. Sale in an excellent essay, “From Pamela to Clarissa”, in The Age of Johnson (New Haven, 1949), pp. 127–138.

9 Rambler 36.

10 A Literary History of England (New York, 1948), p. 952.

11 It is a tantalizing coincidence that Johnson's only known meeting with Hogarth was at the home of Richardson, but his estimate of the painter has unhappily not been recorded.

12 See W. L. Cross, History of Henry Fielding (New Haven, 1918), i, 354 ff.

13 There are a few remarks on Grandison, but nothing that I know of on Pamela. I should welcome correction if I am in error here.

14 See, e.g., the Covent Garden Journal for 4 Feb. 1752; or his letter to Richardson for 15 Oct. 1748, recently discovered by Edward L. McAdam and printed in the Yale Review, xxxvin (1948), 300–310.

15 Johnsonian Miscellanies, ii, 436.

16 It may be worth noting that few major writers or critics of the time have commented upon Pamela. It is possible that Johnson thought the book did not especially reflect credit upon his friend. Yet if he did actually dislike it, he had nearly a quarter of a century in which to say so after Richardson's death.

17 Rambler 60.

18 Rambler 4.

19 Lectures on the English Comic Writers in Collected Works, ed. Waller and Glover (190204), viii, 119.

20 “Poets, indeed, profess fiction, but the legitimate end of fiction is the conveyance of truth” (Lives of the Poets, i, 271). Perhaps also pertinent is Alan D. McKillop's observation of the success of Grandison: “Many of the people who praised it were disposed to value a novel chiefly for being something other than a novel. Among these were Dr. Johnson and his Miss Williams, with her ‘Verses to Mr. Richardson on his History of Sir Charles Grandison.‘ ” Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill, 1936), p. 215.

21 Cf. George Sherburn, “Fielding's Amelia: an Interpretation”, ELH, iii (1936), 1–14.

22 Lives of the Poets, ii, 135. Cf. Tom Jones xv.i.

23 Johnsonian Miscellanies, i, 297.

24 Life, iii, 43, and Tkraliana, i, 247.

25 Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arllay, ed. Dobson (London, 1904), i, 71–72. Miss Burney's Cecilia occasioned Johnson's only criticism of Fielding I have found which does not mention Richardson: “Tis far superior to Fielding's, says Mr. Johnson; her Characters are nicer discriminated, and less prominent, Fielding could describe a Horse or an Ass, but he never reached to a Mule” (Thraliana, i, 555).

26 The remark of Miss Reynolds, Sir Joshua's sister, may be pertinent: “I have remarked that his dislike of anyone seldom prompted him to say more than that the fellow is a blockhead” (quoted by Hill, Life, ii, 173 n.). Might this not also suggest that probably he often used the term quite casually?

27 Cf. Tom Jones ix.i.

28 Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Hill (New York, 1892), i, 22.

29 By Sherburn, ELU, op. cit. in n. 21.

30 For example, cf. Tom Jones, xiv.i, with the Dick Minim papers. With Fielding's treatment of the French see Johnson on their superficiality, Life, i, 454.

31 Cf. the preface to Joseph Andrews, where Fielding is speaking of the “comic epic in prose.”

32 See Irma V. Sherwood, “The Novelists as Commentators”, in The Age of Johnson, pp. 113–125, and her unpublished Yale diss. (1945) for a fuller treatment.

33 Adventurer 95.

34 See Fielding's second paragraph.

35 “You guess that I have not read Amelia. Indeed, I have read but the first volume. I had intended to go through with it; but I found the characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty that I imagined I could not be interested for any one of them” (Correspondence, iv, 60).

36 Exception may be made of perhaps the lowest of them all, Mrs. Pamela Andrews.

37 Lives of the Poets, iii, 11.

38 Gentleman's Magazine, ix (1739), 3.

39 Letters, ii, 440.