Public Context and Imagining Self in Amelia

MORRIS GOLDEN Public Context and Imagining Self in Amelia Thinking back on his life while examining his current world, the Fielding of Amelia advances hesitantly through a dark forest. In place of the grand vision of human possibility in Tom Jones, animated by a kind of religious gratitude for his life with his beloved Charlotte and by exhilarating national challenges and changes, he offers in Amelia to show us what to salvage from the Fall: 'To retrieve the ill Consequences of a foolish Conduct, and by struggling manfully with Distress to subdue it, is one of the noblest Efforts of Wisdom and Virtue. ,1 Now he had to trudge endlessly through the political tangles of his magistracy to support an often ailing family, himself often ill, in a tired post-war England. His novel thus becomes an extraordinary merger of the details of the present with psychological emanations from the past, of his own maturity with his nation's decay, that almost equates them, an admonition to his younger self and to young England not to repeat the last twenty years. Although Amelia's central figures are still the best Everyman and Everywoman, the searcher for improvement and the ideal, they are now more tightly squeezed than Tom and Sophia among conflicting individuals and groups struggling for power. In this post-war England, where even party has yielded to private self-interest in the view of a magistrate daily swimming among footpads, family fights, gin sellers, rich gamblers, rioting sailors, and a dirty parliamentary election, there is no central principle of authority except as glimmers of Providence filter down to illuminate this or that life. Perhaps because he is narrowing his focus to the domestic and the local in time and place, Fielding reflects even more obsessively on his own life than in the other novels. At some times, his reveries tie him to recollections of his father (whose career has its share in Booth); at others, to the pressing demands of the present, as in his public buffetings in the Opposition press or the domestic aching illnesses of children and deaths of sisters. Although this curious mixture of the past and the present, as of folklore and grim realism, probably owes much to the pressure to make money and to reform society now, the loss of a sustaining vision of earthly possibilities must count as well.2 Amelia seems to receive its external stimuli less from news events or magazine pieces than from Fielding's recent activities and perceptions, as justice of the peace for Westminster, partner in the Universal Register UNIVERSlTI' OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1987 378 MORRIS GOLDEN Office and Pelhamite political writer. The ordinary subjects of his time naturally came in to fill up imaginative space, sometimes taking precedence - as in the central symbolism of the masquerade, a cliche of the periodicals that had assumed new prominence during the Forty-five. The staples of journalistic novels like Defoe's and Smollett's, such as deSCriptions of the sights of London for periodicals (as in S. Toupee's series on Vauxhall for the Scots Magazine of July, August, and September 1739), the details of prison life, or satiric attacks on noblemen's levees, which Fielding had earlier disdained, enter here almost raw. In Tom Jones, Drury Lane theatre works to exhibit Partridge'S naivete and to complicate the plot by way of Mrs Fitzpatrick, and we are told almost nothing in the guidebook way; in Amelia, we visit Vauxhall for no artistic purpose but to see it. Outside the central young family, political and social relations in Amelia show a corruption that Fielding senses - in part for personal reasons - as deep in the world around him. Despite his claim that the story occurred twenty years before, the mood and issues are contemporary with the writing, as he followed the calendar of 1750. The specific distancing event, the Gibraltar campaign, had a current stimulus in Opposition fears that the fortress would be given to Spain.' Politically, 1750 featured an aging king; coalition governments immersed in struggles for spoils and attacked daily by a jingOist Opposition press with the old anti-corruption slogans; Henry Pelham...