The Columbia History of the British Novel

careful artifice, as at least as humanly dignified and appealing as Amelia's original nose. Thus, in his final novel, Fielding embraces a sense of human character as altered by time and history, its features layered by the perhaps indistinguishable, though sometimes contradictory, contributions of nature, artifice, and circumstance.The character we encounter in tracing Fielding through his life's works is itself thus layered, often clearly shaped by the accidents of his historical situation, and strikingly contradictory in the multiple impulses he expresses over time. The man who so memorably ridiculed Richardson's tale of a master marrying his maid went on, eventually, to marry his own; the same writer who produced devastating satires of Walpole's ministry was to become a most vocal supporter of the ministerial establishment. The ways that Fielding strikes us as enmeshed in history, and the ways that historical change involves him, frequently, in contradictions, do not seem, however, to silence him, as they often do Booth. Sometimes cacophonously, always energetically, Fielding's voice, at mid-century, issues forth.

Jill Campbell

Selected Bibliography

Bakhtin Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Battestin Martin C., with Ruthe R. Battestin. Henry Fielding: A Life. New York: Routledge, 1989. -125-

Bender John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Brown Homer Obed. 'Tom Jones: The 'Bastard' of History.' Boundary 27 (1979): 201 -33.

Carlton Peter J. 'Tom Jones and the 45 Once Again.' Studies in the Novel 20 (1988): 361 -73.

Castle Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth- Century English Fiction and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.

Hammond Brean S. 'Politics and Cultural Politics: The Case of Henry Fielding.' Eighteenth-Century Life 16 (1992): 76–93.

Hunter J. Paul. Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstunce. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

McKeon Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Paulson Ronald. Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967.

Rawson C. J. Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress: 'Nature's Dance of Death' and Other Studies. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.

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From Swift to Smollett: The Satirical Tradition in Prose Narrative

SMOLLETT'S most enduring contribution to the English novel lay in combining diverse strains of satire and picaresque tales into a thoroughly original cast of fiction. Upon these preexisting narrative modes he imposed dozens of characters, 840 in all (excluding the characters in his Travels), and fabricated comic scenes that have delighted readers for over two centuries; and while it is wrong to think of him primarily as a 'satiric novelist' or as the Georgian realist par excellence who embodied 'picaresque satire in prose,' it is fitting to acknowledge the prominent place of these features in his fiction. His 'brisk, masculine, and nervous style,' as he himself called it, possesses a stylistic force rarely found in the sweep of the English novel-indeed he seems to have converted his own rambunctious energy in real life into a kind of fictional jouissance. His complex systems of morality and didacticism resulted in his becoming one of the most profound social commentators of his era, and his hawk's eye for vivid detail rendered him the Hogarth of eighteenth-century prose, especially in the 'progress pieces' and the depiction of 'grotesques.' These insignia are as crucial to his accomplishment as any incorporations of satire and the picaresque.

His vision of the world derived from a wide array of literary traditions that embraced the blend of idealism and irony of Cervantes's Don Quixote, revenge tragedy, comedy of 'humors,' the great satires of Swift and Pope, rogue tales, Hogarthian grotesque, and a more local British heritage of sea stories and Scottish lore that he knew firsthand. Scott, — 127- Dickens, Henry James, and many other novelists have commented on his extraordinary originality, as have those of Smollett's twentieth-century literary heirs who knew to what degree he was one of their so-called founding fathers. He was an uneven novelist, capable of miscalculation and unpredictability and often writing too quickly and erratically, and his penchant for experimentation in the novel cost him as much aggravation as it reaped reward and financial benefit; but he remains the only competitor of Sterne in the satirical phase of the English novel at midcentury.

Satire did not, of course, lead to the early eighteenth-century novel in any prescriptive or formal sense, but shaped it in so many ways that the overlaps of the two forms-satire and novel-have always been worthy of study, despite the frustrations involved in trying to arrive at neat conclusions about reciprocity or coherent theories about influence. A more secure approach reasons that satiric narrative enriched the early British novel. Even in the domain of readerly expectations, no coherent patterns can be traced through the early novelists from Defoe and Fielding to Sterne and Jane Austen. Satire was an ancient form of literature, already highly developed in its Horatian and Juvenalian poetic incarnations, and by the end of the seventeenth century it had undergone such transformation that it had become impossible to set it off from such competing forms as pastoral and autobiography, let alone to delineate its boundaries from the newly developing novel of the 1720s. The single aspect of satire clearest to its readers of the 1720s was that it assumed moral norms with which readers could agree or disagree. It was these norms, or values, that rendered it such a controversial form.

Satire had been especially suited to broad concerns of chaos and incoherence-the clutter and medley of diurnal life-rather than nobler strains of order, integration, and perfection. By the time the great English poets Dryden, Pope, and Swift laid their imprints upon the form of satire, it had become the accepted vehicle for criticism of confused systems of patronage and social order, as well as human frailties and irrationalities-so much so that some readers perceived its goals as inflexible and unbending, and consequently dubious. Satirists shaped their readers to believe that its norms were the correct ones, its values solid, whether in the sphere of the public realm versus the private or the city versus the country. Set the chronological dials to approximately 1725, in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble when England's economic climate was turbulent and fraught with anxiety, and it is clear - 128- that for good reason madness and bestiality have become two of satire's most fundamental images.

Even so, satire, both in poetic and prose forms, was unable to cope with the demands for realism of the new reading public. The matter is not that satire failed (it hardly failed), or even that it had become worn out and tired, but rather that in some primal way the imagination of its greatest authors (the Popes and Swifts) existed in a realm removed from the pressing needs of the moment. The urgency of the moment was at stake, not form or artistic failure. It was not that satiric narrative was incapable of coping with the concerns of the day-the rampant sense that the world had gone mad or the new cannibalism of life in the cities-but rather that its psychological mechanisms for coping were unsuited to the needs of contemporary readers, especially young readers. In Swift's case, the coping mechanisms were further complicated by his sense that all moral norms had been toppled and replaced with values impossible to consider reasonable; and because of the insidious ways he saw these new values absorbed into the infrastructure of his society, he became incensed with virtually all forms of creation-even literary and novelistic creation. Stated in another key, satire (exposure) and realism (concern for the moment) did not get along. An example of the disparity is found in Swift's Tale of a Tub, the story of a hack driven mad in the process of turning out prose paid for by the word. He is a quixotic figure in reverse who has no means of coping with the bestiality of his modern society, and he has neither the desire nor the inclination to belong to, or connect with, his milieu. He lives in a cluttered and filthy urban garret far removed from nature and the land, and harbors no sense of private spaces, either within the house or outside in the garden; a public creature exclusively, he defines himself in the present place and time only, without reference to the past or to his own family's roots. The more the hack churns out words, the worse he writes and the more confused his opinions become. Swift ridicules him as an