The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding, ed. by C. J. Rawson

Abstract

127 prime attraction of Mr. Ross’s edition is that it gathers the correspondence, including Arbuthnot’s letters to and from Swift and Pope, in one place for the first time. While these can of course be found in Sherburn’s and Williams’s and Woolley’s editions of Pope’s and Swift’s Correspondence, respectively, a different perspective on these letters opens up when they are read in the context of Arbuthnot ’s other correspondence. Readers of the Scriblerian will also want to read what Mr. Ross has to say in the sections on ‘‘The Arbuthnot-Swift Letters’’ and ‘‘The Arbuthnot-Pope Letters’’ in Part III, a ‘‘Dissertation’’ in which, in six chapters, he not only explains the rationale behind his edition, but considers the letters as ‘‘Literary Documents’’ and discusses the ideas expressed in them in detail. J. A. Downie Goldsmiths College, London The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding, ed. C. J. Rawson. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2007. Pp. xv ⫹ 202. $85; $29.99 (paper). This Companion includes an Introduction and Mr. Rawson’s essay, ‘‘Fielding’s Style,’’ plus eleven ‘‘specially -commissioned’’ pieces on Fielding ’s life, his theatrical career, his individual prose fictions, his periodical journalism, his relations with female authority , his social pamphlets, and his critical reputation. The Companion is satisfyingly complete and remarkably uniform. None of the essays strays very far from the template proposed over thirty years ago by Mr. Rawson in his Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal Under Stress. The individual authors regularly cite (fourteen times) a Rawson precedent and repeatedly portray Fielding as struggling, typically unsuccessfully, to reconcile literary precedents with social change. Thus, in ‘‘Fielding’s Theatrical Career,’’ Thomas Keymer rightly places Fielding’s plays between ballad operas in the mode of Gay and sentimental comedies in the mode of Cibber, a characterization that has been around since the early 1980s, but then, making the Rawson-move, sees Fielding looking toward ‘‘theatre of the absurd’’ rather than a new genre (‘‘true history’’). Paul Baines in ‘‘Joseph Andrews’’ rightly describes Fielding’s ‘‘overwriting’’ rather than parodying of Pamela, but then, in a complicated version of the Rawsonmove , mischaracterizes Fielding’s narrator as an ‘‘authority figure,’’ as a ‘‘Patrician narrator,’’ as ‘‘every inch the gentleman.’’ Of course, Fielding’s narrator is much more flexible, always ready to admit to what he does not know and does not remember; indeed, he actually is a first-person narrator. But a Rawsonite needs an authority to put under stress. After the obligatory Rawson citation, Nicholas Hudson in ‘‘Tom Jones’’ focuses on ‘‘antiquated modes of social authority’’ in asserting that Fielding’s ‘‘irony’’ pervades the novel as part of its bespeaking ‘‘the upheaval of perceived values.’’ This, of course, is why Tom Jones inherits and unifies the estates of Allworthy and Western and provides an heir to them, much to the delight (and praise) of all in the neighborhood. In Amelia, Peter Sabor, after citing Mr. Rawson, argues that Amelia falls between, as it were, the two stools of classicism (its Virgilian precedent) and domestic detail (Ms. Atkinson’s cherry brandy). The first edition of the novel, with Amelia’s problematic and embar- 128 rassing shattered nose, is better than the second, which Fielding carefully revised , because it is more provoking, more challenging. Bertrand Goldgar’s ‘‘Fielding’s Periodical Journalism’’ celebrates The Covent Garden Journal, which Mr. Goldgar has edited authoritatively and insightfully , and dismisses the political periodicals that preceded it. The True Patriot , rather than building Whig consensus during the ‘45, was ‘‘ineffective’’; The Jacobite’s Journal only brought Fielding ‘‘distress.’’ Jane Spencer’s ‘‘Fielding and Female Authority’’ places Fielding during a time when, as Samuel Johnson convincingly argued, ‘‘female cultural power was visible, highly contested, and especially associated with both the theatre and the novel.’’ She perceptively describes Fielding’s ‘‘mixture of responses to female authority,’’ Kitty Clive, Sarah Fielding, and Charlotte Lennox won authority through their talents; theirs were achievements Fielding acknowledged and honored. He wrote for Clive, even as he deferred to his first patron, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In Ms. Spencer ’s innovative account, the Augustan Ideal is not under stress so much as any easy dismissal of Fielding as a misogynist . Mr...