Henry and Sarah Fielding on Romance and Sensibility

Abstract

One of the remarkable things about the eighteenth-century is the manner in which it gradually became less overtly political without ever giving up politics. Such works of the early decades of the century, such as Manley's New Atalantis and Swift's Gulliver's Travels often had a free-standing political content, a political content seated upon a generic platform, to be sure, but detachable nonetheless. This way of interfacing form and content, which indicates not less sophistication but a different range of cultural needs, all but disappeared in the second half of the century, as the pivoted toward its watershed novel of form. It was in that liminal period between, say, Gulliver's Travels (1726) on the one hand and The Man of Feeling (1771) or Evelina (1778) on the other, that the stakes of writing were perhaps highest. The Augustan form of the genre, with its characteristic way of interfacing form and political content, was no longer on the pulse of the times, and the sensibility form, with its more integrated approach to form and content, had not yet arrived. Everything was negotiable. The genre itself seemed to be east of Milton's Eden, as it were, with all its possibilities spread out before it. The of the 1740s, at the center of that liminal period, is in fact marked by its own characteristic political and formal questions, questions that not only indicate the particular zeitgeist of the decade but also determine, in part, the possible futures of the genre itself. Politically, the conflict between bourgeois and landed ideologies reaches peak visibility in the novels of the 1740s. Before that decade, as Ros Ballaster points out, political conflicts were more often framed by party interests than by ideological convictions per se (11). After the 1740s, the landed/bourgeois dyad gradually lost its claim on the public imagination. It was certainly passe by the time of Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling, wherein it takes all the filial respect Harley can muster just to pay attention to his elder aunt's insistent discourse upon the relative authority of money and birth (108). One might indeed turn closer to home and suggest that Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751) marks the beginning of the end of the dyad's currency value. Whereas Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) had playfully lingered over the landed versus bourgeois cultural wars, Amelia attempts to face more directly the dynamics of an increasingly urban and capitalist world of social relations. In short, although the issue certainly pans out in both historical directions, the conflict between bourgeois and landed allegiances has a peculiar dominance in driving the political content of the 1740s novel, underpinning works by such authors as Richardson and Cleland as well as the Fieldings. In terms of form, the interfacing of a separable political content and a chosen narrative form was perhaps less viable in the 1740s than it had been in the heyday of Augustan satire. It was certainly becoming less common practice for