Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer, and: Henry Fielding and the Narration of Providence: Divine Design and the Incursions of Evil (review)

REVIEWS 601 Lance Bertelsen. Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer. Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2000. 232 pp. US$45.00. ISBN 0-312-233361-1. Richard A. Rosengarten. Henry Fielding and the Narration ofProvidence: Divine Design andthe Incursions ofEvil. Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2000. xvii + 171 pp. US$49.95. ISBN 0-312-23245-4. After long years in which new book-length studies ofFielding were rare, there has been a relative abundance of late. Tiffany Potter's Honest Sins appeared in 1999, and Ronald Paulson's biographical-critical study, The Life of Henry Fielding, followed in 2000, as did, at the very end of the year, the two books under review here. While quite varied in their interests and ambitions, these studies collectively seem to mark a gathering momentum in Fielding studies to question some old paradigms, especially that strain of criticism that has laboured to convince the world of the sound Christian morality of Fielding's writing. That paradigm was broadly but never universally accepted, and so I do not want to overstate the case that we have reached some kind of revolutionary moment . Nonetheless, it is impossible to miss the prevailing willingness of all these books (especially Paulson, Bertelsen, and Rosengarten) to take on, and to take on vigorously, the work of Martin Battestin, unquestionably the dominant Fielding scholar of the last forty years. Battestin has left such a large mark because of his indefatigable labours in all types of scholarly production, not only publishing extensive critical commentary, but also writing the now-standard biography, and editing the standard editions of all three novels. There have always been very strong voices offering alternatives to Battestin's powerfully articulated vision of Fielding as an artist who represents a kind of final efflorescence of late Christian humanism (names like Hunter, Braudy, Rawson, and Paulson, in his earlier work on the novelist, all come to mind) and now there is abundant evidence for a new crop of critics ready to see Fielding in a different light. It is very hard to see Fielding steady and to see him whole, in part because he so thoroughly violates our anachronistic and Romantic expectations about what an artist should be. Possessed ofa high opinion ofhimselfby virtue ofboth his almostaristocratic birth and his talent, he had neither title nor wealth nor the slightest capacity for financial prudence. So, he set to work, making money by writing of a remarkably miscellaneous character, butperfectly willing also to earn itby his legal skills and in various business ventures. He seems to have been governed for most of his life by the impulse or necessity of the moment, seeking pleasure, pursuing money, avoiding his creditors, courting controversy—and somehow, along the way, writing one unassailable masterpiece, Tom Jones. Lance Bertelsen is interested in what happens after Tom Jones, and Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer reveals much about its central preoccupations in its title. Bertelsen's ambition is to look at the remarkably variegated labours of Fielding in his last five years, what he calls his "last offices ," as a unified body of work. These are the years of his magistracy, but they 602 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:4 also saw his attempt to set up that peculiar enterprise, the Universal Register Office , not to mention his editorship of the Covent-Garden Journal, his authorship of a mass of polemical material mostly related to crime, and the composition of his last novel, Amelia. While attempts have been made to connect Fielding the magistrate to Amelia, for instance, or to link his plan for workhouses for the poor to the critique of Newgate in the novel, no one before Bertelsen has tried so thoroughly to come to terms with all that Fielding did during the final years of his life. The difficulty of this task should not be underestimated, and the trap that has caught good critics in the past has always been the lure of consistency, usually achieved by selectiveness. John Bender's Imagining the Penitentiary, for all its learning and remarkable subtlety, achieves its argumentative aims by focusing on Amelia and the workhouse designs, and for the most part ignoring the...