Henry Fielding (1707–1754): The comic epic in prose

Abstract

Fielding was long admired for his representation of a certain classic Englishness to be found nowhere else in such perfection outside the borders of his novels. His own contemporaries were not so much given to this view as the readers and writers of the next century and after, when Parson Adams and Tom Jones and Squire Western had begun to seem the inhabitants of a more distant and dreamlike England: ‘when the days were longer’, as George Eliot says in a famous tribute to Fielding's digressive genius, ‘when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings’. Or George Gordon Byron: ‘There now are no Squire Westerns as of old.’ William Makepeace Thackeray called him ‘Harry’ Fielding, like some friendly compatriot, and for all who wrote about the novelists of the eighteenth century it was Fielding who stood as the truest historian of that England. You have to be English to relish his writings fully, said Walter Scott – even if you are Scottish or Irish they may be slightly out of reach. ‘Parson Adams, Towwouse, Partridge, above all Squire Western, are personages as peculiar to England as they are unknown to other countries … and scarce an incident occurs, without its being marked by something which could not well have happened in any other country.’ Maybe so. But Fielding also belongs to Europe and European traditions more closely than that durable image of an Anglo-Saxon chauvinist Harry Fielding would suggest.