The Columbia History of the British Novel

Suggestively, as a London magistrate in the last years of his life, Fielding himself sponsored two innovations that resonated broadly with Walpole's new order. The more fanciful of these was a commercial agency founded by Fielding and his half brother John, which they called 'The Office of Intelligence: or, Universal Register of Persons and Things.' The services offered by the Fieldings' registry are familiar to us from the modern institutions of employment agencies, real estate agencies, travel agencies, and consignment shops, although the «universal» aspirations of their registry might strike us as unusual: the agency was to serve as a clearinghouse for services of every kind, matching (for a small fee) vacant jobs with would-be workers, vacant houses with buyers or renters, unwanted goods with new owners, and so on. Fielding put a great deal of effort into promoting or «puffing» this venture in his periodical writing and even in his last novel. Though the 'Universal Register' does not seem to have made his fortune, his hope that it might do so, and the faith he expressed that it could perform great services to society, make Fielding, in this venture at least, a voice for the commercial conception of society that was becoming more and more dominant during his lifetime.

More specifically, the basic premise of the 'Universal Register'-Fielding's discovery that information gathering is itself a valuable product-parallels in the commercial sphere one of Walpole's great discoveries in the realm of governance: the utility of centralized information as a form of power. Fielding's second scheme or innovation also applied the power of centralized information, and to much more consequential effect for the future of English society. From his position as magistrate at Bow Street in London, Fielding argued passionately the need for a troop of regular, skilled constables to pursue and apprehend criminals; and his lobbying resulted in the establishment of the 'Bow Street Run-' -109- 'nets,' the first efficient, professional police force in England. This innovation, now seemingly an inevitable part of civil life, improved law enforcement by providing professionals to 'run after' those who had committed a crime; but this improvement, as Fielding emphasized in his proposals, depended on the scheme's first and crucial provision-that of a centralized location for the reporting of crimes.

Critics and theorists of the novel have suggested that there is something about the novel form, with its capacities for centralized or totalizing narration (its inclusion of sweeping perspectives and minute detail, its apparent access into individual consciousnesses, its compelling effects on readers) that makes it appropriate that it emerged as a genre during the same period in which police forces, penitentiaries, and other systems of surveillance, reporting, and control developed as crucial forms of state power. How apt, then, that Fielding the novelist was also Fielding, the founder of the Bow Street Runners. And yet (to return more directly to our subject of Fielding and the Novel), Fielding did not simply or immediately embrace the new genre of the novel, at least not as it was practiced by one of its great popularizers, Samuel Richardson.

Readers from Fielding's day to our own have noted that this great writer was initially catapulted into his career as a novelist, having first gained fame as a playwright and having achieved some minor competence in other forms, by his cranky resistance to Richardson's vastly popular first novel, Pamela. Within six months of Pamela's publication in 1740, Fielding had dismissed it handily in a brilliant parody, Shamela, poking fun at the moral pretensions of Pamela's heroine and at Pamela itself, lowering the mode of the novel's events to broad burlesque, and shrinking the protracted span of its action to a whirlwind thirty or forty pages. Energetic and hilarious as this dismissal had been, Fielding somehow was moved to respond to Pamela again the following year; but what begins as another burlesquing of Richardson's novel, Joseph Andrews, becomes, as it goes on, Fielding's own first full-length contribution to the emerging genre. The particular story of Fielding's entry into the new novel form bespeaks, then, that same ambivalence we have remarked in his responses to other new institutions and practices. Though both he and Richardson were to engage in the practice of writing novels, they clearly interpreted that practice quite differently, and contended openly for the authority to define the new genre in their own -110- ways, reminding us that any historical innovation may be shaped in alternative directions or put to different, perhaps even opposing, purposes. Even within Fielding's novels, however, the interpretation of the new genre is a complex, self-reflective, and often divided one-one that may be made to look more unitary and self-consistent than it is when defined within a system of contrasts with Richardson's works.

The contrasts that have regularly been drawn between Richardson's and Fielding's novels are at once helpful and potentially misleading. Readers have always noticed that Fielding did not follow Richardson's example in employing the epistolary form of narration used in Pamela. Indeed, he vigorously parodied that form in Shamela, and then ridiculed it again in Joseph Andrews, where he also first offered his own alternative to the form: a narrator who describes events and characters in the third-person past tense, from outside the plane and time frame of the novel's action, speaking in his own distinctive voice. Fielding would develop his use of that narrative voice in Tom Jones, where the narrator again holds forth on matters literary and philosophical in the first chapters of each of the novel's books. The use of this omniscient and magisterial narrative voice has been linked by readers to Fielding's treatment of character, which they see as strikingly different from Richardson's. The nature of that difference has often been described as the difference between «internal» and «external» characterization: Richardson's fiction of a text composed by Pamela herself, written as events occurred, allows him to render those events from «inside» her present consciousness, whereas Fielding, it has been observed, generally describes characters as they would be seen and understood from the outside.

Some readers have seen this difference as a sign of the decided inferiority of Fielding's human understanding, as well as of his works. In Richardson and Fielding's own time, Samuel Johnson commented that there was as great a difference between the two novelists 'as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate.' Readers more sympathetic to Fielding have argued that his choice of external characterization reflects not the superficiality of his vision, but the profundity of his philosophical recognition that in life itself, other people's characters are always only experienced through external and often misleading evidence. Thus, the insistent theme of misrecognitions, particularly in Joseph Andrews, serves to illustrate the verisimilitude of Fielding's narrative technique, and shows the effects-often comic, sometimes tragic-of the opacity -111- of one person's true character to another. Fielding is not simply philosophical, however, about this opacity: an element of longing for mutual transparency and full access to others' inner selves appears in his novels. This longing contributes to an elegiac strain within them, which has been too frequently overlooked as critics concentrate on drawing broad distinctions between Fielding's work and Richardson's.

In drawing such distinctions, critics rightly observe that Richardson's and Fielding's novels have different generic affiliations as well as different forms of narration and characterization. Fielding called some of his plays 'dramatic satires,' and his novels, too, are indebted to satiric traditions in a way Richardson's do not seem to be. This is one way in which they seem more closely tied to Augustan literary culture than do Richardson's novels, as satire was a highly developed and valued form among the Scriblerus Club members and other writers of the early eighteenth century. However, as I have already briefly noted, Fielding's own stance toward satire is a complex one, and his view of satire's powers becomes increasingly dark in the course of his novel-and essay-writing career.

Further, while Richardson's first novel draws on the native English traditions of spiritual autobiography, model-letter books, and conduct manuals, Fielding, in his preface to Joseph Andrews and elsewhere, explicitly declares the generic roots of his own novels in the tradition of classical epic. When Richardson and Fielding adopt these distinct generic lineages for their novels, they strike quite different stances toward recent developments in literary history-and in social history as well. The classical heritage Fielding invokes was made available to him through the traditional education he received as an upper-class boy; Richardson was well schooled instead in the growing body of literature, largely didactic or religious in nature, written in English for the aspiring middle class. More broadly, the classical epics so valued by the Augustans contain an image of male heroism, located in a world of militaristic values, that many of the newer works of mid-eighteenth-centuryEngland, often focused on female virtue and located in a world of domestic relations, did not honor. The nature of these newer works bespoke important, if somewhat inchoate, changes within English social life: a new valuation of «companionate» rather than arranged marriages, and an increasing idealization of female nature, as of the roles of wife and mother. With Pamela, or [Female] Virtue Rewarded, Richardson places himself at the very center of these social changes; -112- while Fielding's affirmation of epic models seems to leave him outside them, belatedly harking back to a fading world.

Some critics have been so impressed with the contrasting concentrations of Fielding and Richardson on male and on female ideals that they have summed up the differences between these two early novelists by declaring Fielding a paradigmatically virile and masculine writer, 'a man's man,' and Richardson 'in all seriousness, one of our great women.' (We might thus revise the imagined dramatic scene with which we began as a testy encounter between 'Mr. Novel' and 'Mrs. Novel,' with Fielding and Richardson filling these respective puppet roles.) Critics have also remarked, however, that in his final novel, Amelia, Fielding explores the subjects of female heroism and