“wrought with love…. Nought modish in it, pure and noble lines Of generous womanhood that fits all time.”
There are many women who forgive; but Amelia does more — she not only forgives, but she forgets. The passage in which she exhibits to her contrite husband the letter received long before from Miss Matthews is one of the noblest in literature; and if it had been recorded that Fielding — like Thackeray on a memorable occasion — had here slapped his fist upon the table, and said “That is a stroke of genius!” it would scarcely have been a thing to be marvelled at. One final point in connection with her may be noted, which has not always been borne in mind by those who depict good women — much after Hogarth’s fashion — without a head. She is not by any means a simpleton, and it is misleading to describe her as a tender, fluttering little creature, who, because she can cook her husband’s supper, and caresses him with the obsolete name of Billy, must necessarily be contemptible. On the contrary, she has plenty of ability and good sense, with a fund of humour which enables her to enjoy slily and even gently satirise the fine lady airs of Mrs. James. Nor is it necessary to contend that her faculties are subordinated to her affections; but rather that conjugal fidelity and Christian charity are inseparable alike from her character and her creed.
As illustrating the tradition that Fielding depicted his first wife in Sophia Western and in Amelia, it has been remarked that there is no formal description of her personal appearance in his last novel, her portrait having already been drawn at length in Tom Jones. But the following depreciatory sketch by Mrs. James is worth quoting, not only because it indirectly conveys the impression of a very handsome woman, but because it is also an admirable specimen of Fielding’s lighter manner: —
“‘In the first place,’ cries Mrs. James, ‘her eyes are too large; and she hath a look with them that I don’t know how to describe; but I know I don’t like it. Then her eyebrows are too large; therefore, indeed, she doth all in her power to remedy this with her pincers; for if it was not for those, her eyebrows would be preposterous. — Then her nose, as well proportioned as it is, has a visible scar on one side. [Footnote: See note on this subject in chapter iv., and Appendix No. III.] — Her neck likewise is too protuberant for the genteel size, especially as she laces herself; for no woman, in my opinion, can be genteel who is not entirely flat before. And lastly, she is both too short, and too tall. — Well, you may laugh, Mr. James, I know what I mean, though I cannot well express it. I mean, that she is too tall for a pretty woman, and too short for a fine woman. — There is such a thing as a kind of insipid medium — a kind of something that is neither one thing or another. I know not how to express it more clearly; but when I say such a one is a pretty woman, a pretty thing, a pretty creature, you know very well I mean a little woman; and when I say such a one is a very fine woman, a very fine person of a woman, to be sure I must mean a tall woman. Now a woman that is between both, is certainly neither the one nor the other.”
The ingenious expedients of Andrew Millar, to which reference has been made, appear to have so far succeeded that a new edition of Amelia was called for on the day of publication. Johnson, to whom we owe this story, was thoroughly captivated with the book. Notwithstanding that on another occasion he paradoxically asserted that the author was “a blockhead”— “a barren rascal,” he read it through without stopping, and pronounced Mrs. Booth to be “the most pleasing heroine of all the romances.” Richardson, on the other hand, found “the characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty” that he could not get farther than the first volume. With the professional reviewers, a certain Criticulus in the Gentleman’s excepted, it seems to have fared but ill; and although these adverse verdicts, if they exist, are now more or less inaccessible, Fielding has apparently summarised most of them in a mock-trial of Amelia before the “Court of Censorial Enquiry,” the proceedings of which are recorded in Nos. 7 and 8 of the Covent-Garden Journal. The book is indicted upon the Statute of Dulness, and the heroine is charged with being a “low Character,” a “Milksop,” and a “Fool;” with lack of spirit and fainting too frequently; with dressing her children, cooking and other “servile Offices;” with being too forgiving to her husband; and lastly, as may be expected, with the inconsistency, already amply referred to, of being “a Beauty without a nose.” Dr. Harrison and Colonel Bath are arraigned much in the same fashion. After some evidence against her has been tendered, and “a Great Number of Beaus, Rakes, fine Ladies, and several formal Persons with bushy Wigs, and Canes at their Noses,” are preparing to supplement it, a grave man steps forward, and, begging to be heard, delivers what must be regarded as Fielding’s final apology for his last novel: —
“If you, Mr. Censor, are yourself a Parent, you will view me with Compassion when I declare I am the Father of this poor Girl the Prisoner at the Bar; nay, when I go further and avow, that of all my Offspring she is my favourite Child. I can truly say that I bestowed a more than ordinary Pains in her Education; in which I will venture to affirm, I followed the Rules of all those who are acknowledged to have writ best on the Subject; and if her Conduct be fairly examined, she will be found to deviate very little from the strictest Observation of all those Rules; neither Homer nor Virgil pursued them with greater Care than myself, and the candid and learned Reader will see that the latter was the noble model, which I made use of on this Occasion.
“I do not think my Child is entirely free from Faults. I know nothing human that is so; but surely she doth not deserve the Rancour with which she hath been treated by the Public. However, it is not my Intention, at present, to make any Defence; but shall submit to a Compromise, which hath been always allowed in this Court in all Prosecutions for Dulness. I do, therefore, solemnly declare to you, Mr. Censor, that I will trouble the World no more with any Children of mine by the same Muse.”
Whether sincere or not, this last statement appears to have afforded the greatest gratification to Richardson. “Will I leave you to Captain Booth?” he writes triumphantly to Mrs. Donnellan, in answer to a question she had put to him. “Captain Booth, Madam, has done his own business. Mr. Fielding has overwritten himself, or rather under- written; and in his own journal seems ashamed of his last piece; and has promised that the same Muse shall write no more for him. The piece, in short, is as dead as if it had been published forty years ago, as to sale.” There is much to the same effect in the worthy little printer’s correspondence; but enough has been quoted to show how intolerable to the super-sentimental creator of the high-souled and heroic Clarissa was his rival’s plainer and more practical picture of matronly virtue and modesty. In cases of this kind, parva seges satis est, and Amelia has long since outlived both rival malice and contemporary coldness. It is a proof of her author’s genius, that she is even more intelligible to our age than she was to her own.
At the end of the second volume of the first edition of her history was a notice announcing the immediate appearance of the above-mentioned Covent-Garden Journal, a bi-weekly paper, in which Fielding, under the style and title of Sir Alexander Drawcansir, assumed the office of Censor of Great Britain. The first number of this new venture was issued on January the 4th, 1752, and the price was threepence. In plan, and general appearance, it resembled the Jacobite’s Journal, consisting mainly of an introductory Essay, paragraphs of current news, often accompanied by pointed editorial comment, miscellaneous articles, and advertisements. One of the features of the earlier numbers was a burlesque, but not very successful, Journal of the present Paper War, which speedily involved the author in actual hostilities with the notorious quack and adventurer Dr. John Hill, who for some time had been publishing certain impudent lucubrations in the London Daily Advertiser under the heading of The Inspector; and also with Smollett, whom he (Fielding) had ridiculed in his second number, perhaps on account of that little paragraph in the first edition of Peregrine Pickle, to which reference was made in an earlier chapter. Smollett, always irritable and combative, retorted by a needlessly coarse and ve
nomous pamphlet, in which, under the name of “Habbakkuk Hilding, Justice, Dealer and Chapman,” Fielding was attacked with indescribable brutality. Another, and seemingly unprovoked, adversary whom the Journal of the War brought upon him was Bonnel Thornton, afterwards joint-author with George Colman of the Connoisseur, who, in a production styled Have at you All; or, The Drury Lane Journal, lampooned Sir Alexander with remarkable rancour and assiduity. Mr. Lawrence has treated these “quarrels of authors” at some length; and they also have some record in the curious collections of the elder Disraeli. As a general rule, Fielding was far less personal and much more scrupulous in his choice of weapons than those who assailed him; but the conflict was an undignified one, and, as Scott has justly said, “neither party would obtain honour by an inquiry into the cause or conduct of its hostilities.”
In the enumeration of Fielding’s works it is somewhat difficult (if due proportion be observed) to assign any real importance to efforts like the Covent-Garden Journal. Compared with his novels, they are insignificant enough. But even the worst work of such a man is notable in its way; and Fielding’s contributions to the Journal are by no means to be despised. They are shrewd lay sermons, often exhibiting much out-of-the-way erudition, and nearly always distinguished by some of his personal qualities. In No. 33, on “Profanity,” there is a character- sketch which, for vigour and vitality, is worthy of his best days; and there is also a very thoughtful paper on “Reading,” containing a kindly reference to “the ingenious Author of Clarissa,” which should have mollified that implacable moralist. In this essay it is curious to notice that, while Fielding speaks with due admiration of Shakespeare and Moliere, Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift, he condemns Rabelais and Aristophanes, although in the invocation already quoted from Tom Jones, he had included both these authors among the models he admired. Another paper in the Covent-Garden Journal is especially interesting because it affords a clue to a project of Fielding’s which unfortunately remained a project. This was a Translation of the works of Lucian, to be undertaken in conjunction with his old colleague, the Rev. William Young. Proposals were advertised, and the enterprise was duly heralded by a “puff preliminary,” in which Fielding, while abstaining from anything directly concerning his own abilities, observes, “I will only venture to say, that no Man seems so likely to translate an Author well, as he who hath formed his Stile upon that very Author” — a sentence which, taken in connection with the references to Lucian in Tom Thumb, the Champion and elsewhere, must be accepted as distinctly autobiographic. The last number of the Covent-Garden Journal (No. 72) was issued in November 1752. By this time Sir Alexander seems to have thoroughly wearied of his task. With more gravity than usual he takes leave of letters, begging the Public that they will not henceforth father on him the dulness and scurrility of his worthy contemporaries; “since I solemnly declare that unless in revising my former Works, I have at present no Intention to hold any further Correspondence with the gayer Muses.”
The labour of conducting the Covent-Garden Journal must have been the more severe in that, during the whole period of its existence, the editor was vigorously carrying out his duties as a magistrate. The prison and political scenes in Amelia, which contemporary critics regarded as redundant, and which even to us are more curious than essential, testify at once to his growing interest in reform, and his keen appreciation of the defects which existed both in the law itself and in the administration of the law; while the numerous cases heard before him, and periodically reported in his paper by his clerk, afford ample evidence of his judicial activity. How completely he regarded himself (Bathurst and Rigby notwithstanding) as the servant of the public, may be gathered from the following regularly repeated notice: —
“To the PUBLIC.
“All Persons who shall for the Future, suffer by Robbers, Burglars, &c., are desired immediately to bring, or send, the best Description they can of such Robbers, &c., with the Time and Place, and Circumstances of the Fact, to Henry Fielding, Esq.; at his House in Bow Street.”
Another instance of his energy in his vocation is to be found in the little collection of cases entitled Examples of the Interposition of Providence, in the Detection and Punishment of Murder, published, with Preface and Introduction, in April 1752, and prompted, as advertisement announces, “by the many horrid Murders committed within this last Year.” It appeared, as a matter of fact, only a few days after the execution at Oxford, for parricide, of the notorious Miss Mary Blandy, and might be assumed to have a more or less timely intention; but the purity of Fielding’s purpose is placed beyond a doubt by the fact that he freely distributed it in court to those whom it seemed calculated to profit.
The only other works of Fielding which precede the posthumously published Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon are the Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor, etc., a pamphlet dedicated to the Right Honble. Henry Pelham, published in January 1753; and the Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning, published in March. The former, which the hitherto unfriendly Gentleman’s patronisingly styles an “excellent piece,” conceived in a manner which gives “a high idea of his [the author’s] present temper, manners and ability,” is an elaborate project for the erection, inter alia, of a vast building, of which a plan, “drawn by an Eminent Hand,” was given, to be called the County- house, capable of containing 5000 inmates, and including work-rooms, prisons, an infirmary, and other features, the details of which are too minute to be repeated in these pages, even if they had received any attention from the Legislature, which they did not. The latter was Fielding’s contribution to the extraordinary judicial puzzle, which agitated London in 1753-4. It is needless to do more than recall its outline. On the 29th of January 1753, one Elizabeth Canning, a domestic servant aged eighteen or thereabouts, and who had hitherto borne an excellent character, returned to her mother, having been missing from the house of her master, a carpenter in Aldermanbury, since the 1st of the same month. She was half starved and half clad, and alleged that she had been abducted, and confined during her absence in a house on the Hertford Road, from which she had just escaped. This house she afterwards identified as that of one Mother Wells, a person of very indifferent reputation. An ill-favoured old gipsy woman named Mary Squires was also declared by her to have been the main agent in ill- using and detaining her. The gipsy, it is true, averred that at the time of the occurrence she was a hundred and twenty miles away; but Canning persisted in her statement. Among other people before whom she came was Fielding, who examined her, as well as a young woman called Virtue Hall, who appeared subsequently as one of Canning’s witnesses. Fielding seems to have been strongly impressed by her appearance and her story, and his pamphlet (which was contradicted in every particular by his adversary, John Hill) gives a curious and not very edifying picture of the magisterial procedure of the time. In February, Wells and Squires were tried; Squires was sentenced to death, and Wells to imprisonment and burning in the hand. Then, by the exertions of the Lord Mayor, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, who doubted the justice of the verdict, Squires was respited and pardoned. Forthwith London was split up into Egyptian and Canningite factions; a hailstorm of pamphlets set in; portraits and caricatures of the principal personages were in all the print shops; and, to use Churchill’s words,
” — Betty Canning was at least,
With Gascoyne’s help, a six months feast.”
In April 1754, however, Fate so far prevailed against her that she herself, in turn, was tried for perjury. Thirty-eight witnesses swore that Squires had been in Dorsetshire; twenty-seven that she had been seen in Middlesex. After some hesitation, quite of a piece with the rest of the proceedings, the jury found Canning guilty; and she was transported for seven years. At the end of her sentence she returned to England to receive a legacy of L500, which had been left her by an enthusiastic old lady of Newington-green. [Footnote: So says the Annual Register for 1761, p. 179. But according to later accounts (Gent. Mag. xliii. 413), she never returned, dying in 1773 at Weathersfield i
n Connecticut.] Her “case” is full of the most inexplicable contradictions; and it occupies in the State Trials some four hundred and twenty closely-printed pages of the most curious and picturesque eighteenth-century details. But how, from the 1st of January 1753 to the 29th of the same month, Elizabeth Canning really did manage to spend her time is a secret that, to this day, remains undivulged.
Complete Fictional Works of Henry Fielding Page 437
