Fielding on Fiction and History

Fielding on Fiction and HistoryBertrand A. Goldgar Among the great imaginative writers of the first half of the eighteenth century, Fielding was second only to Swift in his knowledge of history and his interest in historiographical problems. The striking evidence is not that he called his novels histories—he was not unique in that—but rather that he pursued the discipline avidly, amassing a large historical library and producing non-fictional writings which constantly display his historical learning. Moreover, he is one of the few great imaginative writers of any period to end a literary career by expressing an outright preference for "fact" over "fiction," for Herodotus over Homer: witness his extraordinary comment in the Journal ofa Voyage to Lisbon that, although he does not suppose Homer and other ancient poets intended to "pervert and confuse the records of antiquity," that was their effect, and that he "should have honoured and loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in humble prose than those noble poems."1 Given his fascination with historical writings, it seems somewhat ironic to consider how he has fared at the hands of a few theorists of our own century. We are told by Leo Braudy, for example, that Fielding rejects the very notion of "history as the record of public events," that he "wants primarily to emphasize the atmosphere of epistemológica! uncertainty in which we live," and that he "turns to novels because he believes that 'real' history ... has been discredited by partisan historians." From 1 Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild [and] a Voyage to Lisbon, Everyman's Library, ed. A.R. Humphreys and Douglas Brooks (London: J.M. Dent, 1973), p. 185. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 3, April 1995 280 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Michael McKeon we hear of Fielding's "extreme skepticism." Though McKeon is not using that term in its normal philosophical sense, he does suggest that Fielding's narratives are part of a "counter-critique" in reaction to the "naïve empiricism" which in turn had challenged the romance tradition. Fielding, he argues, subverts "the claim to historicity [the assertion that one is describing what really happened] by carrying it to absurdity." From still another critic, Lennard Davis, we learn that Fielding knew of history's "fictional bent."2 Fielding, if these critics are right, understood as well as Hillis Miller that history writing was "a problematic enterprise for eighteenth and nineteenth-century historians," since the "narrating of an historical sequence ... involves a constructive, interpretative , fictive act."3 And he would apparently feel right at home with our contemporary emphasis on the inseparability of fact and fiction—as though this novelist foreknew all that Hayden White was to say.4 This essay will argue that such comments derive from a misreading of Fielding's view of history and historians, one which ignores the historiographical traditions in which he was steeped. Fielding, in fact, was very firm on these matters; though well aware of the pitfalls on the road to certainty, he seemls almost naively positivistic in his central assumptions about the nature of history, and his regard for the genre was far greater than it has been represented to be. He did not turn to fiction simply because he thought it impossible to make sense of facts. Some of the difficulty may come from the tendency to look only at Fielding's novels, for his non-fictional works continually remind us that he was a lawyer and magistrate, trained and experienced in using documents and precedents, in assessing evidence to determine the "true State" of a case, and in forming a "Probable Conjecture" by the "Weight of the Evidence," as he put it in A Clear State ofthe Case ofElizabeth Canning (1753).3 Of course he was aware of the difficulty of attaining legal certainty ; he spoke of the "Confusion and Contradiction" of the current state 2 Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding, and Gibbon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 1 1-12, 176; Michael McKeon, 7Ae Origins ofthe English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 503n20; Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English...