The Healthy Henry Fielding

Abstract

In eighteenth century Sir John Hawkins wrote that Fielding done more towards corrupting rising generation than any writer we know of' (95).1 And Samuel Johnson warned Hannah More that Tom Jones was a corrupt book (2: 190). Perhaps remembering this warning, Hannah More later wrote that a young girl may safely read improbable romances in which she finds it impossible to identify with characters, but that she should avoid a more realistic work like Tom Jones because strong identification with characters might convey a contagious sickliness to and make her disenchanted with insipidity of common life (2:82). In middle of nineteenth century William Spalding claimed that exposure to Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne is like descending into galleries of a productive but ill-ventilated mine. Around us clings a foul and heavy air, which youthful travellers in realm of literature cannot safely breathe (336). This brief sampling of critical hostility toward Fielding reveals notion of some readers that his fiction is, metaphorically speaking, like a sickness or an unwholesome corruption. Not surprisingly, then, Fielding's many defenders, after diagnosing his fiction, particularly Tom Jones, pronounced it healthy and wholesome. Coleridge, more than any other critic, established long-lasting belief that Fielding's fiction has a healthy quality about it, especially when contrasted with sick tone of Richardson's: There is a cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere, strongly contrasted with close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson (Miscellaneous Criticism 302-303). Coleridge believed that Fielding's treatment of sexual behavior could not be harmful to a normal reader because the gusts of laughter drive away sensuality (Shakespearean Criticism 2:18). Furthermore, Fielding's adherence to principle of poetic justice could only have a positive moral effect: Every indiscretion, every immoral act, of Tom Jones... is so instantly punished by embarrassment and unanticipated evil consequences of his folly, that reader's mind is not left for a moment to dwell or run riot on criminal indulgence itself' (Miscellaneous Criticism 303). It is astonishing to discover how many critics repeated Coleridge's sentiments. In 1855 Frederick Lawrence announced that grand characteristic of Joseph Andrews is singular healthiness of its tone, and that even its offensive passages are preferable to sickly sentiment and trite morality of Richardson (162). At beginning of twentieth century, William E. Henley wrote that fornication, sole Unpardonable Sin in English Fiction, is but a detail... in Joseph