8 - Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Sarah Fielding

Summary

Between 1740 and 1760, Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), Henry Fielding (1707-54), and his sister Sarah Fielding (1710-68) published a total of some eighteen novels - from Richardson's astonishingly successful and influential Pamela and its continuation (1740-1) to Sarah Fielding's The History of Ophelia (1760). During the 1740s, the three authors published their finest works: Richardson's Clarissa (1747-8), Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), and Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (1744, with a continuation in 1753). Thereafter Fielding and Richardson brought out ambitious and innovative last novels, Amelia (1751) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4), neither as well received as their predecessors, while Sarah Fielding published three of her most significant works: The Cry (1754), in collaboration with Jane Collier, The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757), and The History of the Countess of Dellwyn (1759). The relationships among these writers, and among their novels, are intricate and shifting, and shed valuable light on the larger phenomenon associated with their influence throughout the century to follow: the bifurcation of the novel genre into competing, though of course regularly intersecting, traditions, one building on the techniques of psychological representation pioneered by Richardson, the other on the social panoramas and self-conscious artifice of Fielding.