by Steven Moore
Amelia is a well-constructed novel—its tight structure is based on that of the Aeneid—with a varied cast of characters, but there’s a tiredness to the novel, as though Fielding were phoning in his performance, compounded by bland chapter titles (e.g., “Containing Various Matters”; “What Passed at the Bailiff’s House”), numerous anachronisms (the main action of the novel is set in the spring of 1733), and some self-indulgent displays of erudition. Fielding’s social consciousness and recommendations for reforms are commendable, but the didacticism isn’t, and after a while Amelia’s unquestioning devotion to her hapless husband becomes more maudlin than admirable. (The sermons delivered by the family clergyman don’t help.) There are occasional flashes of the old Fielding, the one who based his novels not on the dour Aeneid but on the comic Margites, and ultimately he deserves the compliment Amelia pays to her clergyman: “But you understand human nature to the bottom, . . . and your mind is the treasury of all ancient and modern learning” (9.5). Ever the teacher, Fielding continues to tutor readers and novelists by way of various asides on why he is leaving out or inserting information, his encouragement to readers to figure certain things out for themselves, and his reforms of older fiction conventions. (When telling their backstories, his characters always explain how they can recall dialogue, which few novelists before Fielding justified.) As fine a novel as any other published in the 1750s, Amelia suffers only in comparison to his previous work. As the aforementioned Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote, in his final novel Fielding is “inferior to himself, superior to most others.”232
Fielding disliked Betsy Thoughtless but loved The Female Quixote (1752), the second novel by a young woman named Charlotte Lennox (1729?–1804).233 Like Cervantes, Lennox doesn’t simply mock a worn-out genre—in her case, 17th-century French heroic romances—but uses them to dramatize the danger of confusing fiction with reality. Raised by her aristocratic father in an isolated castle and mistaking her dead mother’s collection of romances for history books, young Arabella assumes the outside world still resembles that depicted in the novels of La Calprenède and Scudéry, and models herself on their imperious heroines, with predictably funny results. (And I mean funny: I laughed myself silly over it.) Her cousin, Charles Granville, returns from his travels when Arabella is 17 and is baffled by her behavior, as are his father and sister when they pay an extended visit after the death of Arabella’s father. Falling in love with the strange but beautiful girl, Glanville tries to accommodate himself to her tastes, but regrets volunteering to read her favorite novels: “Arabella having ordered one of her women to bring Cleopatra, Cassandra, and The Grand Cyrus from her library, Glanville no sooner saw the girl return, sinking under the weight of those voluminous romances, but he began to tremble at the apprehension of his cousin laying her commands upon him to read them, and repented of his complaisance, which exposed him to the cruel necessity of performing what to him appeared a Herculean labour, or else incurring her anger by his refusal” (1.12). A young neighbor named Sir George Bellmour thinks he has a better shot at Arabella because he has actually read those novels, and in fact once started to translate Cyrus the Great, “but the prodigious length of the task he had undertaken terrified him so much that he gave it over” (3.7). To impress her, Sir George gives a long recitation of his “adventures” in heroic-romance style, but this gussied-up account of his affairs with old girlfriends backfires, for Arabella accuses him of “inconstancy,” the worst thing that can be said of a romance hero. In order to cure Arabella of her “foible,” the others take her first to the resort town of Bath, where Arabella’s antique costume and theatrical attitude excites comment and further hilarity, and then to London. Mistaking some distant gentlemen for dastardly abductors, she flees by jumping into the Thames, intending to swim away like Clelia in Scudéry’s novel of that name (and like Juliette in Subligny’s Mock Clelia, which may have inspired Lennox). As Arabella recovers from that ordeal, a kindly clergyman (said to be based on her mentor, Samuel Johnson) exposes her beloved “histories” as ludicrous fictions and recommends more realistic novels like Richardson’s Clarissa. (Richardson too was a patron; the talented 23-year-old attracted the attention of many older writers, including Fielding.) Learning that the modern world doesn’t resemble that of romance novels, Arabella ruefully notes “that the difference is not in favour of this present world” (9.11) and dutifully marries her long-suffering cousin.
Lennox displays a deep knowledge of heroic romances, and like a seasoned comedian milks them for every possible laugh, but does so in order to explore the nature of reading and interpretation. She makes it clear that Arabella isn’t crazy, like the protagonists of Don Quixote, The Extravagant Shepherd, or The Mock Clelia, but the victim of an honest mistake. After her mother died, her father moved her old romance novels from her closet into his own library, which presumably consisted mostly of authentic history books, so young Arabella had no way of knowing they belonged to a different genre, nor did her isolated upbringing in a castle provide any evidence to suggest they were not realistic. By the time she comes of age, she’s as committed to her worldview as any home-schooled fundamentalist raised to believe “holy” books are factual accounts of ancient history, and like them Arabella has “a most happy facility in accommodating every incident to her own wishes and conceptions” (1.7). Lennox dramatizes the vagaries of interpretation at the end of Sir George’s heroic recitation: Arabella believes it is literally true; Glanville’s father initially challenges and heckles the narrator about factual matters, but then “did not penetrate into the meaning of Sir George’s story and only imagined that, by relating such a heap of adventures, he had a design to entertain the company, and give a proof of the facility of his invention” (6.11); Glanville’s sister (who is keen on Sir George and resents his interest in Arabella) assumes “he had been ridiculing her cousin’s strange notions”; and Glanville correctly assumes Sir George told the story only to ingratiate himself with Arabella. One text, four interpretations, each listener convinced his or hers is the correct one.
The question of how to read texts, of how “to penetrate into the meaning” of texts that appear to be something else on the surface, is raised again at the end, when the clergyman explains to Arabella how to distinguish fiction from fact, and how to regard fiction. Echoing Johnson’s theory of fiction so closely that some older critics suspected he wrote the novel’s penultimate critifictional chapter (9.11), the clergyman tells Arabella that French romances are worthless because they aren’t realistic and because, unlike Clarissa, they fail “to convey the most solid instructions, the noblest sentiments, and the most exalted piety.” (Not a word about about linguistic virtuosity, formal inventiveness, or even a sense of humor.) Worst of all, he says, they encourage readers to dream, to live:
It is the fault of the best fictions that they teach young minds to expect strange adventures and sudden vicissitudes, and therefore encourage them often to trust to chance. A long life may be passed without a single occurrence that can cause much surprise, or produce any unexpected consequence of great importance; the order of the world is so established that all human affairs proceed in a regular method, and very little opportunity is left for sallies or hazards, for assault or rescue; but the brave and the coward, the sprightly and the dull, suffer themselves to be carried alike down the stream of custom.
Arabella respectfully questions whether the world is as drab and predictable as that, but admits French romances tend to glorify pride and cruelty and so renounces them. Patronized by both Johnson and Richardson, who helped her publish this novel, Lennox seems to acquiesce here to their theory of fiction, but she’s not the first young woman to tell older male admirers what they want to hear in order to get what she wants. The Female Quixote contradicts every rule for good fiction the clergyman lays down, from its barely believable premise, to its clever parodies of the heroic romance, to its flamboyant “proof of the facility of [Lennox’s] imagination.” Like Glanville’s sister, Johnson and Rich
ardson seem to have thought Lennox was merely ridiculing heroic romance in favor of their didactic conception of the novel, not realizing that no one following their guidelines could ever produce a novel as ingenious as The Female Quixote. The novel is more Fieldingesque than Richardsonian, and not surprisingly Fielding wrote a rave review of it, calling it “a most extraordinary and most excellent performance.”234 No solid instruction, noble sentiments, or exalted piety here, just a hilarious critifiction by a gifted young writer.235
Even more flamboyantly Fieldingesque is William Goodall’s 600-page Adventures of Captain Greenland (1752), written, the subtitle informs us, “In Imitation of All Those Wise, Learned, Witty, and Humourous Authors Who Either Already Have, or Hereafter May Write in the Same Style and Manner,” which indicates that Fielding’s “new species of writing” had become a recognizable, marketable genre. Goodall fills his work with so many references to contemporary novels (Pamela, Joseph Andrews, David Simple, Roderick Random, Pompey the Little, Amelia) and with so many remarks to his readers and reflections on the book trade that Captain Greenland is less a novel than a metafiction about novel-writing. The story follows the usual Fielding/Smollett career-path of a high-spirited, good-hearted young man named Silvius Greenland, a weaver’s apprentice, who develops a childhood crush on a local rich girl; when they grow old enough to marry, her disapproving relations send her off to Portugal. Greenland voyages after her (whereby he acquires the honorific title Captain), and after many adventures and peregrinations (including three or four years on an unknown island off the coast of Brazil, where he becomes rich) he rescues her from a forced wedding ceremony, marries her, and takes her back to their hometown of Worcester, where Greenland invites his friend Robert Willful to write the novel we’ve just read.236
Although late in the novel the narrator insists he’s not a “slavish” imitator of Fielding’s “innovations” (12.1), Goodall builds on his predecessor’s example to maintain a running dialogue with the reader—sometimes obsequious, sometimes truculent—and to justify various digressions—though, unlike Fielding, he invites readers to tear out the ones they dislike. I hope this doesn’t include library copies, for in one of the digressions he addresses the growing popularity of circulating libraries, which he complains robs authors of sales; consequently, he expects everyone who reads a library copy of his novel will buy one for home use, for it would be as scandalous “to be without the possession of this work as it would to be without The Practice of Piety, or Tom Thumb the Great, or Pamela, or Amelia, or Jack the Giant-killer, or any other useful book” (8.6). He tells his readers to think of his novel as a long stagecoach journey, during which the page numbers function as milestone markers and chapter breaks as rest stops. (He must have imagined his readers as incontinent, for he overdoes the chapter breaks, often unnecessarily breaking one continuous scene into several short chapters.) Sometimes he excuses himself from narrating predictable scenes and/or invites the reader to supply them, as when he says, “Our amorous readers, who either do or have felt this universal passion, may save our pen almost a quarter of an hour’s labour if they will here be pleased to conceive the extraordinary situation of our poor entangled Silvius” (1.10). Other times he reluctantly concedes to the perceived wish of his “amorous readers” for details by impatiently summarizing a predictable seduction scene: “let it suffice that we inform them that Willful prayed; she coloured; then he vowed; she sighed; he pressed; she frowned; . . .” (2.5). It doesn’t go much further than that, for despite a deliberately provocative profornication speech that Willful delivers later, the novel is rather chaste—which is unusual with satirical novelists of Goodall’s bent, though he does describe the attempted seduction of Greenland by a “son of Sodom” in more detail than other novelists dared (5.12).
Like Fielding before him, and like Sterne after (as Goodall predicts in his subtitle), the narrator distracts his readers and never lets them get “lost” in the story, constantly reminding them that they are beholding an aesthetic object, a “historical machine” as he oddly calls it (3.1). As he builds his machine, he often stops to show us the literary “parts” he’s using—literary conventions, reader expectations, formal devices, etc.—mostly taken from previous novels and adapted to his own needs. He provides one memorable metafictional example of how contrived all this is after telling the story of a stagecoach driver who was unfairly fired by his employer, whom the narrator rescued from poverty by hiring him to drive the stagecoach in his novel (5.8), gleefully contradicting the narrator’s repeated insistence that “our true romance is founded on facts” (5.11), another novelistic convention of the times. Goodall is goofily exuberant about the godlike powers of the novelist:
No sovereign prince that ever yet was born, not even Alexander the Great, who conquered the world, could boast of half the thousand part of our amazing power and dominion. Nor hath any witch, fairy, cabalist, conjurer, or even the Devil himself half a quarter of the tithe of our most wonderful art and capacity! We create, fashion, and destroy what, when, where, and howsoever we please: kings, princes, lords, and beggars; kingdoms, states, commonwealths, and palaces, as quick and regular as thought can form them. Every work of whatsoever kind we usher into the world, and in whatsoever form, or with whatsoever ceremony, whether with thunder, lightning, rain, wind, or sunshine. They are all created beings of our own, and our habitations are always peopled, animated, formed, and impregnated (as this great world was first by the omnipotent Author and Donor of our unlimited prerogative) only by the sole idea, will, pleasure, and invention of our definitive and incomprehensible genius. (1.1)237
The Adventures of Captain Greenland doesn’t live up to those grandiose claims—its characters and story-lines are unoriginal, and the long sequence on Puppet Island is merely an excuse for Goodall to mock British follies à la Swift—but it is a sightworthy milestone on the 10-year journey from Tom Jones to Tristram Shandy.
An Irishman named William Chaigneau (1709–81) joined the Fielding fold with The History of Jack Connor (1752), which likewise could be subtitled “In Imitation of All Those Wise, Learned, Witty, and Humourous Authors Who Either Already Have, or Hereafter May Write in the Same Style and Manner.” Personable Jack Connor’s career is quite similar to that of Tom Jones: born illegitimate, abandoned by his poverty-stricken family and raised in idyllic surroundings by Lord Truegood of Bounty Hall, educated as a gentleman but expelled after he’s caught in bed with the schoolmaster’s niece, banished to England, employed in various capacities as in picaresque novels (and which take him from Ireland to England, France, Flanders, and Spain), driven to desperate straits, and eventually identified as a relation of Lord Truegood and married to his beautiful daughter, Lady Harriot. But the narrator, who has compiled this “history” from papers left behind by Connor, gives a cheeky explanation for its resemblance to a popular 1749 novel:
As an historian, I must be extremely angry with one Henry Fielding, who has wrote the memoirs of a profligate fellow whom he calls Tom Jones. This man has done me great injury, and I am apt to believe has seen the materials of this history, for in one of his volumes, he has not only copied the very long discourse Mr. Pensè made on gaming, but has raked together all that the wisest have said, or could say on that subject, so that he has very unfairly deprived me of the benefit of a dozen or twenty pages, which I must strike out or be thought a plagiary. This is not the only place where the said Fielding has curtailed my reputation and cramped my genius. Without saying more on this barbarous and ungentlemanly usage, I must insist that the good-natured public will believe I should have had more reflections, and have been as fertile in wit and humor as the said Fielding, had he not cruelly and enviously forestalled my invention. (1.20)
This backhanded compliment is one of many intertextual references in a novel that, like Captain Greenland, is based less on real life than on earlier novels. In one episode, Connor “looked on himself as Gil Blas when with the Archbishop” (2.1), and the narrator snidely alludes to othe
r writers after he records a few pages of noisy tavern talk and then appeals to the reader:
I hope it will not be expected I should set down minutely and in order every single word and repartee during the first half hour’s conversation. The task would be too arduous even for the renowned author of Pamela and Clarissa, whose patience nothing could equal, except that of his readers. Old Bunyan would would have been at a loss, and the celebrated Mr. Cleveland would have found it impossible;238 how therefore can I, a weak, ignorant modern, pretend to attempt what such vast geniuses must have omitted. All I am able to do is to beg the learned reader to supply my defects by imagining, or, if he can, writing about thirty pages of the most fashionable oaths and refined bawdy jokes his wit can put together. Should his thoughts not be sufficiently elevated for so sublime a subject, let him take the Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure, whose author, as he undoubtedly merits, certainly ought to be preferred to the highest post on Hounslow, or some other convenient heath. (1.22)