The Demoniacs
Page 25
The reader may be tempted to wonder how far Fielding’s love of satire has carried him into exaggeration, born before and after he himself became a magistrate. Granting the grotesquerie of the crooks, could all those who dealt with them—magistrates, prison officials, thief-takers, constables, watchmen—have been equally careless or crooked?
If the student wonders at this, he should next dip into The Complete Newgate Calendar, edited by J. L. Rayner and G. T. Crook (London; The Navarre Society, 5 vols., 1926), and read straight through E. Eden Hooper’s History of Newgate and the Old Bailey (London: Underwood Press, 1935). Supplementary evidence will be found in Alfred Marks’s Tyburn Tree, Its History and Annals (London: Brown, Langham & Co., 1912) and Horace Blackley’s The Hangmen of England (London: Chapman and Hall, 1929). It will be seen that Fielding exaggerated little and invented nothing.
In the same way, the paintings and engravings of Hogarth should be examined together with Miss Marjorie Bowen’s comprehensive biography, William Hogarth, the Cockney’s Mirror (London: Methuen, 1936). It may be instructive to compare Hogarth and Fielding as they show themselves in their work and picture the age too.
They had much in common, as Miss Elizabeth Jenkins has pointed out with her brilliant critical study of Fielding. And this is the more striking because at first there seems little temperamental kinship between cantankerous Will Hogarth, the industrious apprentice who did well for himself, and easy-going Harry Fielding, the gentleman’s son who was always broke or in trouble.
Hogarth’s moral judgements are ferocious. It is difficult not to suspect that secretly he was as drawn towards crime and vice as he was bored by copy-book virtue. His series of Industry and Idleness (1747) makes the triumph of the industrious apprentice either lifeless or more dreary than the end of the idle apprentice on the gallows. But he would never have conceded this; perhaps he never guessed it. He paints a frieze of inhumanity and seems almost to gloat. Nor shall we find answers by calling this a typical attitude of his time. Boswell’s London Journal, in which the greatest of biographers shows himself also the greatest of diarists, at least once brings a man of decent feelings unexpectedly face to face with what the law means. When curiosity drives Boswell to watch a hanging, he is so horrified that it shakes his nerves and haunts the diary for days afterwards.
Fielding, like Boswell in more than the fact that both were literary artists, was very tolerant of any transgressions he could understand. There was too much in him of Tom Jones and Billy Booth; he knew a young man addicted to drinking, wenching, and extravagance does not necessarily end in a halter at Tyburn. But he could endure the prettification of rogues, as in Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, even less than he could endure the idealization of the self-righteous prude, as in Richardson’s Pamela. Above all he hated cruelty and meanness. When he ceased to be young Harry Fielding and became sober Justice Fielding of Bow Street—his health collapsing, his own nerves in rags, with little apparent solution except by tightening the laws—we have the apparent paradox that he could be as merciless as Hogarth sounded. It explains the attitude of his half-brother, and brings us to a final note.
7
The Real-Life Characters
Mr. (later Sir John) Fielding, perhaps the most famous of all Metropolitan magistrates, presided at Bow Street from 1754, the year of his brother’s death, until 1779. He took over the plain clothes detective-force suggested by Henry Fielding and known as ‘Mr. Fielding’s People’ until they became still more widely celebrated as the Bow Street Runners.
It is unnecessary to go into detail here. He has been the subject of a full-length biography, R. Leslie-Melville’s The Life and Work of Sir John Fielding (L. Williams, 1934), which stamps him under the familiar name of ‘the blind beak.’ There is a long account of him in Gilbert Armitage’s History of the Bow Street Runners (Wishart & Co., 1932), and his career is dealt with in Douglas G. Browne’s definitive work, The Rise of Scotland Yard (Harrap, 1956). Mr. Browne establishes from the Westminster rent-rolls the fact that the house used by Henry, and taken over by John, was on the east side of the street
Let me hope that no damage has been done to the memory of the Rev. Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy (first part, 1760) and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). If he proved irresistible as a comic character, it is believed he is made to do or say nothing here which in fact he might not have said or done in life. Percy Fitzgerald’s biography, Laurence Sterne (The Grolier Society, new ed., 2 vols., 1896), shall bear witness to all this.
Mr. Sterne’s attitude towards women was tolerably uninhibited, as he himself was the first to testify. He did belong to the society called The Demoniacs’; he did visit London in 1757, pursuing some unstated amorous adventure; his wife, born Elizabeth Lumley, did go out of her mind in 1758; his language may be reconstructed from his books and letters, and one anecdote is quoted in his own words; finally, when he visited London again in 1760, it is gratifying to find him a frequent visitor to Ranelagh. Let us praise his memory; the “sporting” parson of the eighteenth century did not behave altogether like a vicar in the works of Anthony Trollope, and our lives are made all the brighter thereby. On the other hand, if some admirer of Mr. Sterne should feel he has been done an injustice, no doubt I shall be reminded that in 1760 a fraudulent imitation of Tristram Shandy, third part, was published by a miscreant named John Carr.
About the Author
John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) was one of the most popular authors of Golden Age British-style detective novels. Born in Pennsylvania and the son of a US congressman, Carr graduated from Haverford College in 1929. Soon thereafter, he moved to England where he married an Englishwoman and began his mystery-writing career. In 1948, he returned to the US as an internationally known author. Carr received the Mystery Writers of America’s highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and was one of the few Americans ever admitted into the prestigious, but almost exclusively British, Detection Club.
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Copyright © 1962 by John Dickson Carr
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