3 - Henry Fielding

Summary

Henry Fielding (1707-54) gave the English novel a new breadth. In his masterpiece, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1748), the title-page promise of the story of a low-life individual leads instead to an epic treatment of a contemporary society peopled by a vividly varied set of characters whose entertaining differences nevertheless add up, the narrator insists, to one fundamental article: human nature, that subject of endless Enlightenment fascination. Authors before and after Fielding looked for ways to create an epic poem for a modern age. Milton , in Paradise Lost, found in the Christian story a heroic argument to surpass classical heroism; Pope, in his darkly comic attack on modern civilisation, thought it worthy only of the mock-heroic epic that is The Dunciad; and Wordsworth took the epic quest within the self, making the subject of The Prelude the growth of the poet's mind. Fielding transferred epic ambition from poetry to novel. Prose narrative, he thought, could become the medium for a new human comedy: his work, as he famously put it in Joseph Andrews, was to produce 'a comic Epic-Poem in Prose'. Writing novels was not Fielding's first choice of literary career. During the 1730s he was England's foremost dramatist, writing five-act comedies and short, uproarious farces. His opinion at that time of the novel as a form can be gauged from his caricature of the popular novelist Eliza Haywood as 'Mrs Novel' in The Author's Farce: one of a medley of representatives of silly, modern, commercial entertainments, she lives in the style of her own erotic fictions, and has an affair with the equally ridiculous Signior Opera.