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Fielding and Richardson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.
author of Charlotte Summers
Rather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966
References
1 The History of Charlotte Summers, anon. (London, n.d. [1749]), i, 220.
2 John Cleland, rev. of Peregrine Pickle, Monthly Review, iv (1751), 355–358.
3 Roderick Random, ed. W. E. Henley (Westminster, 1899), i, lxii: Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. George Saintsbury (New York, n.d.), v, 4.
4 Tom Jones (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. vii.
5 Martin C. Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art (Middletown, Conn., 1959).
6 Joseph Andrews (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 218.
7 “Dr. Johnson on Fielding and Richardson,” PMLA, lxvi (1951), 162–181.
8 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (Oxford, 1934), ii, 48–49.
9 E. L. McAdam, Jr, “A New Letter from Fielding,” Yale Review, xxxviii (1948), 304.
10 The Letters of Tobias Smollett, ed. Edward S. Noyes (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), pp. 40–41; Smollett's Continuation of the History of England, ed. Robert Anderson (Edinburgh, 1805), v, 325–328.
11 The History of Charlotte Summers, i, 220; The Adventures of a Valet, anon. (London, 1752), i, iv.
12 Two vols. (London, 1755).
13 William Dodd, The Sisters [1754], The Novelist's Magazine, v (London, 1782).
14 John Shebbeare, The Marriage Act, 2 vols. (London, 1754).
15 Shebbeare, ii, 124.
16 Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1752).
17 Charlotte Lennox, Henrietta, 2 vols. (London, 1758).
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19 Eliza Haywood, The History of Betsy Thoughtless [1751], 4th ed., 4 vols. (London, 1768).
20 The English Novel: Form and Function (New York, 1953), pp. 49–62.
21 The Rise of the Novel (London, 1957), pp. 228–238.
22 Mark Spilka, “Comic Resolution in Fielding's Joseph Andrews,” College English, xv (1953), 11–19.
23 Alan D. McKillop, The Early Masters of English Fiction (Lawrence, Kan., 1956), pp. 52–54; See also Katherine G. Hornbeck, “Richardson's Familiar Letters and the Domestic Conduct Books,” Smith Coll. Studies in Modern Lang., xix, No. 2 (1938), 1–50.
24 A. R. Towers, “Amelia and the State of Matrimony,” RES, v, N. S. (1954), 144–157.
25 Joseph Wood Krutch, Five Masters (New York, 1930), p. 151.
26 The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art, pp. 26–43, 89–129.
27 William Empson, “Tom Jones,” Kenyon Review, xx (1958), 217–249.
28 Allan Wendt, “The Naked Virtue of Amelia,” ELH, xxvii (1960), 131–148.
29 David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” 1748, Hume: Theory of Knowledge, ed. D. C. Yalden-Thompson (Austin, Tex., 1953), pp. 44–46.
30 Richardson, of course, used the term more frequently than Fielding. Martin Battestin has discussed this idea of Providence in the mid-eighteenth century in his The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art, pp. 44–51.
31 George Sherburn mentions this same point about Fielding in his article “Fielding's Social Outlook,” PQ, xxxv (1956), 1–23, reprinted in Eighteenth Century English Literature, ed. James L. Clifford (New York, 1959), pp. 251–273. Fielding, Sherburn says, never allowed society to be the “scapegoat” for man's evil, though he did think society corrupt (p. 265).
32 Tom Jones, p. 270.
33 Roderick Random, i, 36.
34 Warren H. Smith, Architecture in English Fiction (New Haven, 1934), p. 74, says that “Before 1765, indeed, before 1770, there is a great dearth of architectural description in the minor novels even where there seem to be good opportunities for such description.”
35 Fielding, pp. 8–9.
36 Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison (Oxford, 1931), vi, 20–28.
37 Maren-Sofie R⊘stvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphosis of a Classical Ideal: Vol. II, 1700–1760 (Oslo, 1958), pp. 9–24.
38 vi, 24, 38.
39 John Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830, revised edition (Penguin History of Art, 1955), p. 44, and pl. 23. Summerson, p. 187, remarks that the neo-Palladian taste became the Whig taste.
40 Tom Jones, p. 8.
41 Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1960). On p. 40, Fiedler says that the refusal to be raped was a metaphor of class war.
42 Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Idler, No. 82 (10 Nov. 1759), The Works of Samuel Johnson LL.D. (London, 1816), vii, 329–334.
43 William Chaigneau, The History of Jack Connor [1752] (London, 1753), 2 vols.
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45 Pamela (Oxford, 1929), iii, 367–371.
46 Arthur Sherbo, “Time and Place in Richardson's Clarissa,” Boston Univ. Studies in English, iii (1957), 139–146; “The Time-Scheme in Amelia,” Boston Univ. Studies in English, iv (1960), 223–228.
47 “Lex Loquens: A Study of the Formal Meaning of the Law in Tom Jones,” unpubl. Columbia Univ. Master's Essay, 1961, pp. 211–226.
48 Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (New York, 1960), pp. 1–34.