Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Christopher D. Johnson is disarmingly honest about the formidable difficulties he faced in his task of adding a study of Sarah Fielding to the Routledge Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies series. He cites firstly “the paucity of available biographical information” about Fielding and then “the author’s apparent lack of interest in politics” (1); turning to her work, he acknowledges that, since she was a collaborative writer, it is often difficult to be sure which words are hers, and since she wrote primarily to alleviate financial distress (“Perhaps the best Excuse that can be made for a Woman’s venturing to write at all,” as she declared in the “Advertisement to the Reader” at the head of her first novel The Adventures of David Simple [1744]), the form and content of her writings might well have been compromised by commercial pressures.

From such unpromising beginnings, Johnson goes on to offer a full and perceptive account of Sarah Fielding and her work. In the process, he even challenges critics who argue for political readings of one or another of Fielding’s narratives, such as the implications of her use of the word “commonwealth,” or that there is a relationship between The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia and the beginnings of the Seven Years’ War. Johnson concludes that for Fielding the political becomes personal, or at least interpersonal, and he offers convincing arguments for the value of this understanding in her writings.

Fielding’s work has always resisted easy definition. If David Simple is clearly a novel (indeed, one of the most prominent fictions of its time), the same cannot be said of its successor, Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple and Some Others (1747), a miscellany of moral essays, mostly presented in the form of epistolary exchanges. Fielding subsequently penned, alongside more novels, a text for children, at least two pamphlets of literary criticism (one of which was only discovered [End Page 319] recently: it is tantalizing to think there may be more), a jointly authored “dramatic fable,” a fictionalized autobiography, and a translation from Greek. Johnson moves chronologically through her life and career, with necessary emphasis on the work, since information about the life remains sparse. He offers particularly valuable new insights into Familiar Letters, which, as he points out, has rarely been considered by scholars, and on The Cry (1754), about which, after reviewing the available evidence of a collaboration between Fielding and her friend Jane Collier, he concludes that Fielding had the “artistic vision” (186), with Collier taking a subordinate, perhaps largely editorial role. More controversially, he argues that Fielding’s claim to be the editor rather than the author of The History of Ophelia (1760)—having, as she declared, found the manuscript in “an old Buroe” (256)—probably reflects the truth rather than literary convention: his careful assessment of the internal evidence supporting this view, coming after chapters devoted to Fielding’s other works, is persuasive.

Johnson finds a high level of consistency in terms of aims and themes across Fielding’s writings in all their different forms. He argues that Fielding is always concerned with how men and women can find happi ness in this world—an aim entirely compatible with Christian belief, but in a framework of practical action rather than faith, and with strikingly little consideration of any life to come—and that she sees the prospect of such happiness as threatened, above all, by “passion,” which for her means the self-centred and self-deceiving errors of pride and vanity. She shows how right-thinking only comes about through honest self-examination and self-knowledge. And she appropriates other literary texts, demonstrating how narratives can legitimately be rewritten by people thinking and analyzing for themselves (a rather clever argument on Johnson’s part, countering claims, made during Fielding’s lifetime and since, that her growing habit of extensive literary quotation was a form of padding).

The contradictions in Fielding’s philosophy also receive attention. Johnson...