The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 107 the Italian to uncover a political and religious allegory about Catholicism being expelled from England, calling this "new" understanding of nationalism "rigidly discriminating and cruel in principle" (p. 128). The allegorical reading is convincing, but Richardson's own politics and class loyalties were far more problematic than Chung suggests. It is Grandison and not Richardson who is said to be a strong supporter of the Union and the Hanoverian kings—for all the author's prudence in later life, he played with the High Flyers as a young printer. The sheer glamour of the Restoration leads to Richardson 's combining bourgeois rectitude with Caroline allure when he names his hero Sir Charles and his sister Charlotte, or when he proposes for Sir Charles and Clementina the same agreement as that between Charles I and Henrietta Maria: the sons to be raised as Protestant and the daughters Roman Catholic. Similar ambivalences occur when he models his attractive villain-hero on Rochester, Hobbes, and the Caroline poet Lovelace, or has him quote Herrick, Dryden, and Waller. Chung dismisses gender and class conflicts as irrelevant, and yet Richardson's concern with "contaminated" aristocrats seducing moral middle-class women surely makes it imperative to consider both. And although she talks of the analogy between nations and families, she does not mention Sir Robert Filmer's highly influential Patriarcha, which, if Virginia Woolf spoke true, established hierarchies for the imperialism Chung rightly loathes. Richardson was hardly the only eighteenth-century writer to be nationalistic and exclusive—the French in particular were fair game. But whatever one's sympathies , it is a fact that the Stuarts threatened the political and spiritual hegemony of Britain, while the ultramontane Roman Catholics always had the potential to undermine national autonomies, as Locke pointed out in his Letter Concerning Toleration . Chung's study implicitly raises the question about how hard we should be on those who fail to transcend their historical moment, and fail to think like us. Are we perhaps intolerant if we attack writers of the past for not being as modern , as enlightened as we are? More contextualization would help us assess the problem so carefully laid out by Ewha Chung. Jocelyn Harris University of Otago Sarah Fielding. The Adventures ofDavid Simple and Volume the Last. Ed. Peter Sabor. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. xli + 399pp. US$45.00 (cloth); US$16.95 (paper). Peter Sabor's edition of The Adventures ofDavid Simple and Volume the Last is a welcome addition to eighteenth-century studies. Essentially two critical editions in one volume, Sabor's work makes available Sarah Fielding's most popular novel and its sequel. The Adventures ofDavid Simple (1744) recounts the story of the titular hero, who, having been cheated out of his inheritance by his brother and servants, 108 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:1 searches for a "Real Friend." Travelling through London and Westminster, David initially encounters yet more deception and hypocrisy at the hands of Mr Orgueil, Mr Spatter, and Mr Varnish. David's search ends when he discovers Cynthia, Camilla, and Valentine, benevolent characters, all alienated from their families. Towards the end of the novel, David marries Camilla, Camilla's brother marries Cynthia, and all the characters, now living happily and peaceably together, are reconciled with their families. David Simple is engaging for its depictions of eighteenth-century family life, gender, and psychology. Volume the Last (1753) was written after Fielding experienced financial hardship and the loss of three siblings and a nephew. Sombre in tone and advocating a severe Christian fortitude, Volume the Last stands a precursor to Samuel Johnson's Rasselas. Sabor's edition is significant not only because it provides the first fully annotated text of David Simple, but also because it has been prepared from copies of Sarah Fielding's first edition. The only other modern production of the work, by Malcolm Kelsall in 1968, is based on the second edition, which was substantially altered by Henry Fielding. In his introduction, Sabor demonstrates the degree to which Henry Fielding was "motivated less by a desire to expunge errors than to shape his sister's novel into one reflecting his own concept of fiction" (p. xxx...