¹ Daily Advertiser, 12 Nov. 1746, p. 4. Wilbur L. Cross, using trie Gentleman's Mag., the London Mag., and Scots Mag., had already placed the pamphlet in Nov. (History of Henry Fielding, New Haven, 1918, iii, 313).

² I am indebted to Mr. A. W. Vivian-Neal, F. S. A., and Mr. E. S. Rickards, Clerk of the County Council, Somerset, for helping me to locate the Bristol copy, and to Professor Woods for knowledge of his own copy, as well as for helpful suggestions. The Bristol library also owns The Surprising Adventures of a Female Husband, likewise anonymous, a 19th-century version of Fielding's pamphlet, highly seasoned, illustrated with a folding colored frontispiece by George Cruikshank, and published in 1813 by J. Bailey of 116 Chancery Lane, a specialist in this trade. Clearly, had Fielding's authorship been known, his name would have been added. The book is approximately the same length as the original. It substitutes new adventures and rewrites for heightened effect, even making Mary Hamilton a traveling saleswoman of her specialized wares. Another copy of The Surprising Adventures may be seen in the Cruikshank Collection, Widener Memorial Lib., Harvard. I am indebted to the Faculty Research Fund of the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, Univ. of Michigan, for a summer fellowship and research grants, and to Professors Benjamin Boyce and James A. Work for suggestions concerning the presentation of the evidence.

³ The passage from Ovid refers to Caeneus, born Caenis, turned into a man at her own request by Neptune after he had caught and enjoyed her. She wished to avoid such trouble in the future. Nestor tells the tale (my translation): “ ‘… and there was a very amazing thing about him; he'd been born a woman.‘ They were moved by this monstrous oddity, everyone there: and they asked him to tell it.”

⁴ Notice, for the moment, how this phrasing, together with “serjeant of grenadiers in the Foot-Guards,” recalls two incidental Fielding characters: a “poor drummer who was lately turned out of an Irish regiment” in Pasquin (Works, Henley ed., New York, 1902, xi, 219) and the peddler in Joseph Andrews (New York, Rinehart, 1948, Bk. iv, p. 324) who “was a drummer in an Irish regiment of foot.”

⁵ Cross's bibliographical note (iii, 313) does not equivocate at all about Fielding's authorship. Unknown to Cross, Emanuel Green had listed The Female Husband as an anonymous pamphlet, along with The Surprising Adventures of a Female Husband, in his Bibliotheca Somersetensis (Taunton, 1902), II, 463–464. I owe this information also to Mr. Rickards. It should be further noted that between 1745 and 1747 Mary Cooper published seven things for Fielding, including the True Patriot (for which her shop also served as an address for letters to the editor), and in addition she participated with others in publishing Ovid's Art of Love Paraphrased and the Jacobite's Journal.

⁶ Henry Fielding, Novelist and Magistrate (London, 1933), p. 98.

⁷ Henry Fielding (Oxford, 1952), p. 544.

⁸ The OED confirms this usage. The Lord Chief Justice who tried Elizabeth Canning for perjury ended his decision with: “and concluding, I think her notoriously guilty” (Lillian de la Torre, Elizabeth is Missing, New York, 1945, p. 214).

The Ipswich Journal of Sat., 15 Nov., three days after Fielding's publication, again repeats Boddely verbatim. Other papers searched: British Telescope, Court and City Register, General Evening Post, Gentleman's Diary, Glasgow Courant, (3, 10, 17, 24 Nov. only), London Evening Post, London Gazette; dates searched: 13 Sept.-12 Nov., with some exploration on into 1747.

⁸ Cross cites issues of this paper in dating several of Fielding's works, and he uses it for data on Ovid's Art of Love Paraphrased, which he associates with The Female Husband. Apparently the Daily Advertiser was not available to him, as Emmett L. Avery also suggests (“Some Notes on Fielding's Plays,” Research Stud, of the State Coll. of Wash., iii, 1935, 48–50). Cross may also have assumed Hamilton's notoriety from Fielding's own reference in Ovid's Art of Love Paraphrased (Feb., 1747) : “Pasiphaë, I am very sorry to say it, conceived a Passion worse, if possible, than that of Mrs. Mary Hamilton…” I quote from a Dublin reprint of 1756 in Yale Lib., p. 33. Cross believed that only another Dublin reprint (1759), The Lover's Assistant, remained in existence, but the lines and text seem the same. See Cross ii, 52, and iii, 313.

¹⁰ Sheridan Baker ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953), pp. 56, 43, 47.

¹¹ Fielding uses “Vartue” 11 times in Shamela, but I cannot find that he uses it in Joseph Andrews, as Cross asserts (i, 307). This illiterate letter in The Female Husband may be compared with others in Jonathan Wild (Everyman, Bk. iii, p. 100), Tom Jones (Modern Lib. College ed., Bk. xv, pp. 730–731), and The Champion (Works, xv, 137), with one by Richardson in Clarissa (Everyman, i, 492–493) and with an authentic specimen in Lillian de la Torre's Elizabeth is Missing (p. 133). Fielding's manner is easily distinguishable. The “hurry of spirits” found in Shamela (p. 20), Tom Jones (Bk. xiii, p. 635), and Amelia (Everyman, Bk. i, p. 26; Bk. iv, p. 163) appears in The Female Husband as a “flutter of spirits” (p. 16)—though the phrase seems common enough: Richardson uses “hurry of spirits” (Clarissa, Iv, 212), Smollett uses “flutter of spirits” (Humphry Clinker, Modern Lib., 1929, pp. 73, 98, 206,408).

The Female Husband repeats several of Fielding's phrasal patterns. “Whether… or from what other motive it proceeded, I will not determine” (p. 6) stands exactly as it does in Tom Jones (Bk. xiii, p. 622). The Female Husband begins a paragraph with “Nothing remarkable happened to her during the rest of her stay” (p. 5); Joseph Andrews begins Ch. xii, Bk. i, with “Nothing remarkable happened on the road.” Similarly, The Female Htisband: “during which time, no adventure occurred worthy remembrance” (p. 13); Tom Jones: “without having encountered any one adventure on the road worthy the dignity of this history to relate” (Bk. XI, p. 531). I am indebted to Professor Allan Wendt for the following further parallels: The Female Husband has “As soon as the first violence of her passion subsided…” (p. 5), and this idea in nearly the same phrasing appears in Tom Jones (Bk. xiv, p. 685, and Bk. xviii, p. 821), and in Joseph Andrews in slightly different context (Bk. i, p. 72); The Female Husband has “when fortune seemed inclined to make her amends for the tricks she had hitherto played her” (p. 8), and Fielding uses almost these same words in the next-to-last paragraph in Amelia and repeats the idea in many other places (see Tom Jones, Bk. ii, p. 63, and Bk. xii, p. 540).

¹² A young man claiming to be married to a woman of 70, though he was not, and a young man actually married to a woman of 80 both appeared before Fielding, at a later date, when he was justice of the peace (Archibald Boiling Shepper-son, “Additions and Corrections to Facts About Fielding,” MP, LI [1954], 220–221).

¹³ Bk. i, p. 26; changed to “undress” in the 1754 edition. See Aurelien Digeon, Le texte des romans de Fielding (Paris, 1923), p. 23.

¹⁴ Bk. v, pp. 174–175.

¹⁵ Cross (n, 330) suggests that Amelia's jealous older sister derives characteristics from the actual older sister of Fielding's wife. These others may share the same source.

¹⁶ See below, n. 22.

¹⁷ See my introduction, 1953 ed., pp. xvi ff., and George Sherburn, “Fielding's Social Outlook,” PQ, xxxv (1956), 8–9.

¹⁸ The passage goes on to mention “criminal correspondence.” See also Amelia, Bk. iv, p. 162: “criminal conversation.” All references are to the legal term “Crim. Con.”

¹⁹ Bk. i, pp. 29, 31. Amelia (Bk. ii, p. 59) also presents a close parallel: “Men are often blind to the passions of women: but every woman is as quick-sighted as a hawk on these occasions; nor is there one article in the whole science which is not understood by all our sex.” The Female Husband has: “It has been observed that women know more of one another than the wisest men (if ever such have been employed in the study) have with all their art been capable of discovering. It is therefore no wonder that these hints were quickly perceived and understood by the female gallant…” (p. 9).

²⁰ George Hamilton seems also accidentally connected with the Man of the Hill in Tom Jones. Hamilton escapes “thro' bye-roads and across the country, into Somersetshire, missing Exeter, and every other great town which lay in the road” (p. 15); the Man of the Hill, traveling the other way, escapes “on the Exeter road, and then abandoning our horses, scrambled as well as we could through the fields and bye-roads” (Bk. viii, p. 405).

²¹ Tom Jones, Bk. vi, p. 232, and Bk. vii, p. 297; Love in Several Masques in Works, viii, 35, 37.

²² Inferring from a passage in the True Patriot, Cross dates Fielding's commencement of Tom Jones not later than mid-June 1746. Then, using 2 allusions in Tom Jones to John Freke's An Essay to Shew the Cause of Electricity, Cross argues plausibly that Fielding was into Bk. ii., Ch. iv, in Oct. and into Bk. iv., Ch. ix, in Nov. 1746. To supplement Cross, I submit the following dates from the Daily Advertiser: Freke's 1st edition appeared 11 Oct. 1746; his 2nd (and last), 3 Nov. 1746. The General Evening Post confirms Oct. as the date of the 1st edition, but the file of this newspaper, checked for me at Yale by Miss Jean C. Smith, is incomplete. The 13–15 Nov. issue lists Freke's 2nd edition under the heading “This day was published,” but newspapers customarily listed a book in several successive issues under this standard and erroneous heading.

²³ Somerset Quarter Sessions Rolls, Ref. No. 314.7(5). This and the other extracts below follow an official transcription kindly sent me by Mr. E. S. Rickards.

²⁴ Ref. No. 314.7(6).

²⁵ Ref. No. 314.6(53).

²⁶ Ref. No. 314.7(3). Jones (Henry Fielding, Novelist and Magistrate, p. 98) seems to have misread Hughes's letter—and Dudden (Henry Fielding, p. 544) repeats Jones— in stating that Henry Gould “examined the accused woman.” The date of this letter is obviously wrong. Reference to “Informations,” in the plural, indicates that both Hamilton's and Mary Price's statements were in hand. Since Mary Price's was not taken until7 Oct., thedate of the Sessions, the letter could have been written no earlier than 7 Oct. Reference to “the Sessions,” in the future—“I hope to hear from you soon after the Sessions”—indicates that the letter could have been written no later than 7 Oct. Therefore, the letter was written, I believe, just before the trial on 7 Oct., or perhaps even during the trial. Boddely's newspaper states that there was uncertainty in court and debate about what the crime was and what the sentence should be—and the mistakes of syntax and date might well be owing to haste. Mr. Ivor P. Collis, County Archivist of Somerset, informs me that a contemporary “rate assessment” in the County Museum, Taunton Castle, includes the name of a Thomas Hughes; otherwise Hughes remains unidentified. His reference to his clerk, the fee, the request for advice, however, pretty clearly indicate that he was the trial lawyer: the procedure behind the letter is exactly that followed by a lawyer named Salt in consulting Fielding in the case of Elizabeth Canning (Works, xiii, 238–239).

²⁷ After waiting, under arrest, for the Quarter Sessions, vagrants could be “detained and kept in the House of Correction to hard Labour for any further Time not exceeding six Months;… such Person in the mean Time to be corrected by Whipping, and may after be sent away by Pass…” (Theodore Barlow, The Justice of Peace, London, 1745, p. 560). Since Hamilton was sentenced on 7 Oct., we must assume either that Gould sent his advice immediately, or that the justices went ahead with the maximum sentence for vagrancy, hoping that Gould's advice would confirm them (and if we can trust Fielding at all, it did). The “sometime since committed” can refer only to Hamilton's original commitment to await trial by Quarter Sessions.

²⁸ I am inclined to leave the St. James's Evening Post out of account because it alone of the three papers reprinting Boddely's 3 Nov. article (including the tardy Ipswich Journal) corrects the spelling of “council.”

²⁹ This name seems to have attached itself to the Mary Hamilton story from a real George Hamilton, Captain of Hussars, who had pleaded not guilty of rebellion in the Jacobite uprising of the preceding year. His trial and execution, among others, was much in the public eye. Mary Hamilton was tried 7 Oct., in Somerset, with apparently no immediate flurry in the papers whatsoever. Captain George Hamilton was tried 6 Oct., in York, and the papers in general followed the trial. Captain George Hamilton and others were drawn and quartered, their hearts cut out and thrown in the fire on 1 Nov. at York. This news reached the London papers at the very time the two reprints about Mary Hamilton did. The St. James's Evening Post of Saturday, 8 Nov., prints the account of the execution on p. 2, under “COUNTRY NEWS”: immediately under this, also with no specific headline, is the piece on Mary Hamilton, just half as long. For a further example of relative news value, the General Evening Post of 8 Nov. prints on p. 1 substantially the same account of George Hamilton and the rebels, but says nothing of Mary Hamilton.

³⁰ The Vagrancy Act of 1744 (17 George II, c. 5) reads: “… or using any subtil craft to deceive and impose on any of his Majesty's subjects” (Danby Pickering, The Statutes at Large from the 15th to the 20th Year of King George II, xviii [Cambridge, 1765], 146).

³¹ “Council,” of course, is not absolute evidence of Fielding's copying. We do not have what Fielding put down on paper but what the printer set up from it, and, though the 1st edition of Joseph Andrews spells “counsel” correctly (p. 166), the 1st edition of A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning (p. 30)—and the 2nd edition as well (p. 23)—has “council” for “counsel” twice in the same sentence. And Fielding does not mean, I think, the County Council of Somerset, or the “Genll' of the Corporation of Glaston.” Glastonbury is strangely slighted in Fielding's narrative, and county councils did not exist, as such, until the Local Government Act of 1888.

³² The preface to his Ovid (1756 Dublin reprint) states that it is “ entirely a new Undertaking, and might perhaps, if properly encouraged, be carried on with other Latin Poets…” (pp. vii-viii).