Public Context and Imagining Self in Amelia

Abstract

Thinking back on his life while examining his current world, the Fielding of Amelia advances hesitantly through a dark forest. In place of the grand vision of human possibility in Tom Jones, animated by a kind of religious gratitude for his life with his beloved Charlotte and by exhilarating national challenges and changes, he offers in Amelia to show us what to salvage from the Fall: 'To retrieve the ill Consequences of a foolish Conduct, and by struggling manfully with Distress to subdue it, is one of the noblest Efforts of Wisdom and Virtue.' Now he had to trudge endlessly through the political tangles of his magistracy to support an often ailing family, himself often ill, in a tired post-war England. His novel thus becomes an extraordinary merger of the details of the present with psychological emanations from the past, of his own maturity with his nation's decay, that almost equates them, an admonition to his younger self and to young England not to repeat the last twenty years.