The Appearance of Truth: The Story of Elizabeth Canning and Eighteenth-Century Narrative (review)

158 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 The problem of readers is even more telling in Bell's discussions of Joseph Andrews (chap. 3) and Tom Jones (chap. 5). He sees an antagonistic relationship between Fielding and his readers, as manifested by the narrator's intrusive advice, his shifting ironies, and his insulting images of readers, all of which, for Bell, indicate Fielding's discomforts about the readership of a new genre in a commercial culture. Bell's rhetoric of uncertainty and insult is drawn, however, from the narrator's comments to and about readers, without considering the likelihood that each reader shifts depreciation to other readers in order to establish a privileged relationship with the narrator. Bell needs a sophisticated concept of lecteur to match his notion oí auteur. He overlooks the difference between the game of temporary deception about facts and motives and the more serious business of interpreting. And authors retain an authority about the events of their fiction that the uncertainties of interpreting cannot question. Bell sees Fielding's uncertainty on moral matters as matching his uncertainty about readership, and he repeatedly points out the lack of moral parable, of direct advice, and of reliable narrative judgment. In this Bell moves too quickly from narrative indirection to moral uncertainty, forgetting that novels often create judgments through the convergence of diverse implications. Some of his examples do not serve his argument well. Lack of sexual control always has unfortunate consequences in Joseph Andrews, and hence sexuality hardly seems an instance of the author's moral confusion, as Bell suggests. Similarly, Tom's condemnation of the misplaced affections of the Man of the Hill is, as a moral interpretation, verified rather than, as Bell claims, undercut by Tom's liaison with Mrs Waters. (Tom's own misplaced affections may show that his behaviour is inconsistent with his interpretation but not that his interpretation is wrong.) Bell sometimes discusses familiar passages in the major novels without adding much to previous criticism, and he conducts his critical dialogue with only a few major studies. His view of Fielding's novels is similarly narrow. His goals of seeing Fielding in terms of modem theoretical concerns and of seeing the novels in terms of problems rather than certainties are, however, worthy, and his pursuit of them leads to instructive specific observations, despite the weaknesses at other points. Charles A. Knight University of Massachusetts, Boston Judith Moore. The Appearance of Truth:- The Story of Elizabeth Canning and Eighteenth-Century Narrative. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. 278pp. US$42.50. ISBN 0-87413-494-3. Elizabeth Canning was a London serving-girl who disappeared on New Year's Day 1753 and, starving and black in the face, returned to her family four weeks later, explaining that on New Year's Day, two men had robbed her and forced her to go with them ten miles north of London to a house of Mrs Wells; there a woman offered her fine clothes if she would "go their way"; when she refused, the woman took her stays and locked her in a loft with a gallon of water and a quartern (4 lb.) loaf of bread, on which she subsisted for twenty-eight days; finally she escaped by jumping out a window. Her enraged neighbours in Aldermanbury Postern and Cripplegate (later known as the "Canningites") took up her cause and rode off with Elizabeth to the house of Susannah Wells in Enfield Wash, where she somewhat uncertainly identified the loft as the place of her captivity, and more positively, one Mary Squires, a gypsy, as the woman who had cut off her stays. REVIEWS 159 Returning to London, the "Canningites" asked the advice of Henry Fielding, who (in his role as barrister) advised them that their case was actionable and then (putting on his magistrate's cap) issued a warrant for "all who should be found resident in the House of the said Wells, as idle and disorderly persons" (Wells and Squires having already been committed to custody). This raid netted, among others, a disorderly person called Virtue Hall, who, after some prevarication and a good deal of moral pressure, corroborated Canning's story in great...