Study Hall: Henry Fielding
May. 13th, 2016 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineI already read through the Fielding novel I'm studying for my exams (Jonathan Wild, which I heartily recommend for lols, hijinks, and social commentary—with an unexpected aside about the injustice of sexual double standards). I do want to commit some things about Fielding himself to memory, however, so some highlights of one of England's first great novelists:
His branch of the Fielding family were poor relations of the earls of Denbigh. The earls spelled the name Feilding, which Henry Fielding sneered at.
Henry Fielding sneered at a lot of things. Like the government. Specifically, Walpole's government.
More specifically, Fielding started his career as a dramatist, and became the greatest playwright of the day. He wrote burlesques, comedies, satires in the dozens, his plays growing more and more political and more harshly critical of the government, finally inspiring the Licensing Act of 1737, which made dramatic performances subject to governmental approval.
Until 1968.
That's right: Fielding snarked at the government enough that the legislation to deal with him lasted for over TWO HUNDRED YEARS. It's impressive, in a depressing, silencing sort of way.
It did not, however, achieve the result of silencing Fielding!
To begin with, he was a fanboy of the Augustan writers. While the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ("the long eighteenth century") is often called "the Augustan age," the Augustan writers really belonged to a specific strain of writers striving for a polished, formal, "patrician" style that encompassed wit, elegance, clarity, and sophistication, with precise, balanced phrases and a strong, controlled authorial presence, ostensibly inspired by Cicero, Horace, and Virgil (and quietly, the urbane French literary scene, with ofc a ton of influence from Restoration lit—especially the general ebullience and bawdiness). They tended to feel that being commissioned by an aristocratic patron was the Right and Proper Way to be a writer/artist, looking down on hired writers (hacks!) who got paid via actual sales, though some were more realistic on that front.
The heart of the Augustan circles: Addison and Steele, Alexander Pope (of course), Jonathan Swift, John Gay, John Dryden, Eliza Haywood (<3), Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson.
ANYWAY, the deal is: Henry Fielding had personal issues with some of them (he wrote nasty poems about them to his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had an ongoing and magnificent feud with Swift and Pope), but artistically they were his models. He thought Swift was one of the greatest satirical geniuses of all time, on a par with Cervantes and Aristophanes. (Fun fact: Swift once remarked that Fielding's comedy Tom Thumb was one of two things that made him laugh across his entire life. Senpai noticed you!)
So Fielding was following in the footsteps of people who took themselves, their art, and the world very seriously. This was not someone who was going to start turning out tepid government-approved plays. But this was also not someone who was going to stop writing. He was also someone, however, who had to earn a living. So he decided to study the law (starting right away in 1737) and eventually became Justice of the Peace for Westminster (1748) and ultimately all of Middlesex. He created a proto-police force. He was also a political journalist, and wrote legal tracts, aaaaand—novels!
The novel was a very new form with a lot of experimentation going on. But Fielding, following up from Defoe and (boo, hiss) Richardson, was exceptional in bringing the Augustan preoccupations, methods, ethos to bear on the novel—on the face of it, not really an Augustan form at all. It was new rather than classical, written in loose prose rather than neat, dense poetry, often highly sentimental or sensationalist rather than urbane and realistic. He managed to fuse Augustan principles into novelistic writing, more or less founding the comic English novel. (Austen's brothers were at pains to say she liked Richardson and Burney, not Fielding, who was too rough and gross for her. But while she certainly did read and value the Richardson-Burney school, and was very much influenced by them, she's obviously faaaaar more Augustan than them. Her priorities seem very Augustan tbh: a spare, precise language, controlled authorial presence, satirical edge, focus on realism and consistency, an elegant, restrained, polished style. Fielding reads astoundingly like her juvenilia—IMO he's very much her forerunner in terms of the comic novel.)
Part of his inspiration, like many great writers, was burning hatred. He loathed Richardson. His first novels were kicked off by just how much he hated Richardson's Pamela. Understandably, as far as I'm concerned! (Mr B can die in ALL THE FIRES. Though in all fairness, Fielding got invested despite himself in Clarissa and begged Richardson not to kill her. And wrote a thinly veiled criticism when he did kill her, ofc.) So he was actively trying to combat what he saw as vulgar and haphazard while also trying to ... y'know. Make money. He liked drinking and women, which makes his arguments that men shouldn't get a pass on sexual immorality while women are punished all the more !!!, and like a lot of aristocratic types, he preferred 1) other aristocrats and 2) the lower classes to mercantile types, so actually having to make money in a bourgeois way and deal with bourgeois people with their bourgeois morals was not his favourite thing.
He was both strict as a judge and harshly critical of the failures of the justice system, which he saw as closely associated with the failures of the government. The irl criminal of Jonathan Wild becomes a reallyyyyyy obvious parody of Walpole in his hands, except for the end, where he becomes a parody of Walpole's inadequate successor, while also functioning as a grotesquely entertaining character in his own right. And legal corruption/inadequacies pervade not only Jonathan Wild but just about all of Fielding's novels. Which, one presumes, is why he invented the police. He broke his health working for legal reform and went to Portugal to try and recover. He died there, aged 47.
:\
His branch of the Fielding family were poor relations of the earls of Denbigh. The earls spelled the name Feilding, which Henry Fielding sneered at.
Henry Fielding sneered at a lot of things. Like the government. Specifically, Walpole's government.
More specifically, Fielding started his career as a dramatist, and became the greatest playwright of the day. He wrote burlesques, comedies, satires in the dozens, his plays growing more and more political and more harshly critical of the government, finally inspiring the Licensing Act of 1737, which made dramatic performances subject to governmental approval.
Until 1968.
That's right: Fielding snarked at the government enough that the legislation to deal with him lasted for over TWO HUNDRED YEARS. It's impressive, in a depressing, silencing sort of way.
It did not, however, achieve the result of silencing Fielding!
To begin with, he was a fanboy of the Augustan writers. While the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ("the long eighteenth century") is often called "the Augustan age," the Augustan writers really belonged to a specific strain of writers striving for a polished, formal, "patrician" style that encompassed wit, elegance, clarity, and sophistication, with precise, balanced phrases and a strong, controlled authorial presence, ostensibly inspired by Cicero, Horace, and Virgil (and quietly, the urbane French literary scene, with ofc a ton of influence from Restoration lit—especially the general ebullience and bawdiness). They tended to feel that being commissioned by an aristocratic patron was the Right and Proper Way to be a writer/artist, looking down on hired writers (hacks!) who got paid via actual sales, though some were more realistic on that front.
The heart of the Augustan circles: Addison and Steele, Alexander Pope (of course), Jonathan Swift, John Gay, John Dryden, Eliza Haywood (<3), Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson.
ANYWAY, the deal is: Henry Fielding had personal issues with some of them (he wrote nasty poems about them to his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had an ongoing and magnificent feud with Swift and Pope), but artistically they were his models. He thought Swift was one of the greatest satirical geniuses of all time, on a par with Cervantes and Aristophanes. (Fun fact: Swift once remarked that Fielding's comedy Tom Thumb was one of two things that made him laugh across his entire life. Senpai noticed you!)
So Fielding was following in the footsteps of people who took themselves, their art, and the world very seriously. This was not someone who was going to start turning out tepid government-approved plays. But this was also not someone who was going to stop writing. He was also someone, however, who had to earn a living. So he decided to study the law (starting right away in 1737) and eventually became Justice of the Peace for Westminster (1748) and ultimately all of Middlesex. He created a proto-police force. He was also a political journalist, and wrote legal tracts, aaaaand—novels!
The novel was a very new form with a lot of experimentation going on. But Fielding, following up from Defoe and (boo, hiss) Richardson, was exceptional in bringing the Augustan preoccupations, methods, ethos to bear on the novel—on the face of it, not really an Augustan form at all. It was new rather than classical, written in loose prose rather than neat, dense poetry, often highly sentimental or sensationalist rather than urbane and realistic. He managed to fuse Augustan principles into novelistic writing, more or less founding the comic English novel. (Austen's brothers were at pains to say she liked Richardson and Burney, not Fielding, who was too rough and gross for her. But while she certainly did read and value the Richardson-Burney school, and was very much influenced by them, she's obviously faaaaar more Augustan than them. Her priorities seem very Augustan tbh: a spare, precise language, controlled authorial presence, satirical edge, focus on realism and consistency, an elegant, restrained, polished style. Fielding reads astoundingly like her juvenilia—IMO he's very much her forerunner in terms of the comic novel.)
Part of his inspiration, like many great writers, was burning hatred. He loathed Richardson. His first novels were kicked off by just how much he hated Richardson's Pamela. Understandably, as far as I'm concerned! (Mr B can die in ALL THE FIRES. Though in all fairness, Fielding got invested despite himself in Clarissa and begged Richardson not to kill her. And wrote a thinly veiled criticism when he did kill her, ofc.) So he was actively trying to combat what he saw as vulgar and haphazard while also trying to ... y'know. Make money. He liked drinking and women, which makes his arguments that men shouldn't get a pass on sexual immorality while women are punished all the more !!!, and like a lot of aristocratic types, he preferred 1) other aristocrats and 2) the lower classes to mercantile types, so actually having to make money in a bourgeois way and deal with bourgeois people with their bourgeois morals was not his favourite thing.
He was both strict as a judge and harshly critical of the failures of the justice system, which he saw as closely associated with the failures of the government. The irl criminal of Jonathan Wild becomes a reallyyyyyy obvious parody of Walpole in his hands, except for the end, where he becomes a parody of Walpole's inadequate successor, while also functioning as a grotesquely entertaining character in his own right. And legal corruption/inadequacies pervade not only Jonathan Wild but just about all of Fielding's novels. Which, one presumes, is why he invented the police. He broke his health working for legal reform and went to Portugal to try and recover. He died there, aged 47.
:\
