Cambridge University Press
9780521854511 - The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding - Edited by Claude Rawson
Frontmatter/Prelims

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO
HENRY FIELDING

Now best known for three great novels – Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews and Amelia – Henry Fielding (1707–1754) was one of the most controversial figures of his time. Prominent first as a playwright, then as a novelist and political journalist, and finally as a justice of the peace, Fielding made a substantial contribution to eighteenth-century culture, and was hugely influential in the development of the novel as a form, both in Britain and more widely in Europe. This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars describes and analyses the many facets of Fielding’s work in theatre, fiction, journalism and politics. In addition it assesses his unique contribution to the rise of the novel as the dominant literary form, the development of the law, and the political and literary culture of eighteenth-century Britain. Including a Chronology and Guide to Further Reading, this volume offers a comprehensive account of Fielding’s life and work.

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO
HENRY FIELDING

EDITED BY
CLAUDE RAWSON

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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First published 2007

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CONTENTS

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

PAUL BAINESM is a Professor in the School of English, University of Liverpool. He has published The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope (2000), an edition of romantic-period plays (2000), The Long Eighteenth Century (2004), and articles on several eighteenth-century figures in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. His biography of Edmund Curll, Edmund Curll, Bookseller, co-written with Pat Rogers, will appear in 2007.

LINDA BREE is the Literature Publisher at Cambridge University Press. She is the author of Sarah Fielding (1996) and editor of Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (2002) and (with Claude Rawson) of Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (2004), as well as of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (2000).

JENNY DAVIDSON teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of two books: Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (2004), and Heredity (2003), a novel about Jonathan Wild.

BERTRAND A. GOLDGAR, Professor of English at Lawrence University, is the author of The Curse of Party: Swift’s Relations with Addison and Steele and Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742. For the Wesleyan Edition of Fielding’s Works he has edited The Covent-Garden Journal (1988) and co-edited (with Hugh Amory) Miscellanies, vol. II (1993) and Miscellanies, vol. III (Jonathan Wild) (1997). Currently he is preparing the volume English Political Writings 1711–1714 for the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift.

NICHOLAS HUDSON, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, is the author of Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought (1988), Writing and European Thought, 1600–1830 (1994), Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England (2003), and of numerous essays on eighteenth-century literature, thought, and culture.

THOMAS KEYMER is Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. His books include Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’ and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge University Press, 1992, 2004), Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (2002), and the Penguin Classics editions of Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1996) and Tom Jones (2005).

CHARLES A. KNIGHT is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He has written The Literature of Satire (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele: A Reference Guide (New York, 1994), as well as numerous articles on literary periodicals, on satire, and on Fielding and other eighteenth-century novelists.

THOMAS LOCKWOOD is Professor and former Chair of the Department of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has published widely on Fielding and other eighteenth-century subjects and is editor of the drama volumes of the Oxford ‘Wesleyan’ edition of the works of Fielding: Plays, vol. I (2004), vol. II (2007), and vol. III (in progress).

CLAUDE RAWSON is Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University. His publications on Fielding include Henry Fielding (1968); Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (1972); Henry Fielding: A Critical Anthology (1973); Order from Confusion Sprung (1985); and Satire and Sentiment 1660–1830 (1994). He contributed the chapter on Fielding in the Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1996). His most recent book is God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492–1945 (2001).

PAT ROGERS, DeBartolo Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of South Florida, is the author of numerous books and articles on all aspects of eighteenth-century literature and culture, of which the most recent are Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts (2005) and, with Paul Baines, Edmund Curll, Bookseller (2007). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope (2007).

PETER SABOR is Canada Research Chair in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Director of the Burney Centre at McGill University. His work includes (with Thomas Keymer) ‘Pamela’ in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the Juvenilia volume in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (2006).

JANE SPENCER is Professor of English at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on the eighteenth-century novel and women’s literary history from the Restoration to the nineteenth century. Her latest book is Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon, 1660–1830 (2005). She is currently working on animals in eighteenth-century writing.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to the contributors not only for their own essays, but in many cases for valuable advice. Linda Bree, Thomas Keymer, and Peter Sabor contributed information on multiple occasions. As always, my assistant Cynthia Ingram helped mightily with the preparation of this book.

NOTE ON EDITIONS USED

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Fielding will be from the Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding, Executive Editor W. B. Coley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967–), and page references will be to the relevant volumes of that edition. Sectional references to book, chapter, act, or scene will be provided for readers using other editions. Parenthetical references in the text will therefore give page numbers in the Wesleyan Edition, followed by book and chapter (or act and scene) numbers, e.g. 96; II. iv. The Wesleyan Edition to date includes (for full publication details, see Guide to Further Reading):

The Adventures of Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin

Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin

Contributions to the Champion, ed. W. B. Coley

Covent-Garden Journal, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar

‘An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers’ and Related Writings, ed. Malvin R. Zirker

The History of Tom Jones, ed. Martin C. Battestin

The Jacobite’s Journal, ed. W. B. Coley

Miscellanies, vol. I, ed. Henry Knight Miller

Miscellanies, vol. II, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar and Hugh Amory

Miscellanies, vol. III, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar and Hugh Amory (includes Jonathan Wild)

Plays, vol. I, 1728–31, ed. Thomas Lockwood

The True Patriot and Related Writings, ed. W. B. Coley

For the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, not yet included in the Wesleyan Edition, the edition used is that of Thomas Keymer (London: Penguin, 1996). For Fielding’s letters, the edition used is The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Clive T. Probyn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

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