42 ity rather than embarrass himself or his family by revealing his Grub Street livelihood . Ms. Noble observes that Mottley’s Compleat List Of All the English DramaticPoets (1747),althoughanonymous, contains unusually detailed biographical information about himself, including identification of all his unattributed publications. She speculates that at the end of his life, finally secure after publishing scholarly biographies of Peter I and Catherine the Great, Mottley chose to out himself as a Grub Street playwright . Perhaps the fact that Coffey died collecting subscriptions for a prestigious edition ofDrayton’spoetrysoftenedMottley ’s embarrassment about their collaborations . But since Ms. Noble also points out that one of Mottley’s entries practically demands his inclusion in The Dunciad , perhaps he preferred acknowledgment , even as a hack writer, to oblivion . MAJOR BOOKS MARTIN C. BATTESTIN. A Henry Fielding Companion. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2000. Pp. 333. $82.95. RONALD PAULSON. The Life of Henry Fielding: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell , 2000. Pp. 400. $64.95. 2000 is not the only year in which Messrs. Battestin and Paulson both published books on Henry Fielding. In 1962, Mr. Battestin published a volume on Tom Jones in the Twentieth-Century Interpretations series; Mr. Paulson, one on Fielding in the Twentieth-Century Views series. Both have shaped, even defined the course of scholarship for over forty years. An easy but, finally, misleading contrast is possible. Citing Booth’s observation that the narrator is the most important character in Tom Jones, Mr. Battestin in 1962 claims of Fielding, ‘‘It is useful . . . to know something of the man whose wit entertains us and whose genial wisdom instructs.’’ For his 1962 volume, the ‘‘only restriction’’that Mr. Paulson ‘‘imposed is that it [an essay] must be concerned primarily with Fielding’s literary works, not with the man, his life or ideas in isolation.’’ In his The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art (1959), still a central text in Fielding studies, Mr. Battestin completed the rehabilitation of Fielding’s character that Wilbur Cross and James Work began. ‘‘Although it has been an important corrective,’’Mr. Paulson suggests in 1962 that ‘‘the Christianizing of Fielding stresses an aspect of his work that is neither the most characteristic nor . . . the most interesting one.’’ Antithesis is tempting here: Mr. Battestin stands as the consummate biographical critic, culling the sermons of Hoadly, Barrow, and Tillotson for sources of Fielding’s prose, devoting three pages in a recent article to a list of ‘‘errors of fact’’in Mr. Paulson’s Life; Mr. Paulson is the consummateliterary critic, dubious about ‘‘Battestin’s singleminded focus on sermons,’’ and sensitive to 43 Fielding’s grounding in the satiric tradition of Dryden, RochesterandSwift,‘‘themaster genre of the period in which Fielding launched his career.’’ The enduring achievements of Messrs. Battestin and Paulson are, in no small part, owing to their transcending and ameliorating this antithesis. Critics with strong tendencies and sturdy methods, they nonetheless rarely foreclose possibilities. While they no doubt were under pressure from Prentice-Hall to avoid duplication in their 1962 volumes, both Messrs. Battestin and Paulson included William Empson’s once-famous Kenyon Review essay on Tom Jones that showed Fielding’s amenability to Empson’s quirky version of New Criticism, and they excerpted almost the same pages (260–289) from Watt’s Rise of the Novel, a book that famously focuses upon social antecedents at the expense of literary. Fielding studies have flourished in the past forty years in large part because its exemplars, Messrs. Battestin and Paulson, have set ahighstandard for work that articulates relationships: sermons and satire, social history and literary tradition, life and works. The books published in 2000 enact this articulation in very powerful, if subtle ways. As Messrs. Battestin and Paulson review Fielding’s career, they keep finding eachother. Mr. Battestin’s Companion offers copious biographical and textual information; its two pages (219–220) on Fielding’s ‘‘Manuscripts’’ are remarkable for the generosity with which they condense a lifetime’s pursuit of these documents. But the Companion also includes entries on Dryden, Rochester, Pope, Swift, and the Scriblerus Club that reveal Mr. Battestin’s mastery of the great theme of Mr. Paulson’s early career, therelationship between ‘‘satire and the novel...
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Jan 11, 2023
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