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520 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:4 Henry Fielding. Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq; Volume Three. Introduction , Bertrand A. Goldgar; ed. Hugh Amory. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. xliv+370pp. US$85.00. ISBN 0-8195-5298-4. The History of the Life ofMr. Jonathan Wild the Great first appeared in the third volume of Henry Fielding's Miscellanies in April 1743. In March 1754, a few months before his death, Fielding published a new edition ofJonathan Wild "with considerable corrections and additions." Thus seeming to embody its author's final intentions, this revised version has served as the basis of most modern editions of the work. But, as Hugh Amory reminds us in his textual introduction, between 1743 and 1754 "Fielding had changed politics from the Opposition to the Administration and refashioned his image from a Grub-Street hack and dramatist to a gentleman, magistrate, and novelist." The different historical circumstances informing the composition and publication of each version should lead us to view these two substantially different texts as representing "two different 'final' intentions" (p. 216). Given that the present edition also aims to preserve the historical integrity of the three volumes of the original Miscellanies, it is sensible to offer as copy text the 1743 Jonathan Wild, as the present editors do, and to use the 1754 revision only for occasional corrections. Students of Fielding's career as a writer of prose ficiton should applaud this editorial decision. The text of the original Jonathan Wild allows us to see what Fielding was up to when he was beginning his efforts to found what he called, with characteristic modesty, "a new species of writing." The precise time of composition is difficult to ascertain, though allusions to contemporary events and publications—most notably Fielding's borrowings from the fifth edition of Joe Miller's Jests, published in July 1742, in book 2, chapter 12, "Of Proverbs"— seem to locate the writing of at least some sections in the months following the publication of Joseph Andrews in February 1742. What many aesthetically minded critics have perceived as the clumsy execution of Jonathan Wild, with its author seeming to be feeling his way towards his first novelistic triumph, must be rethought if the supposedly more primitive work turns out to have followed the more carefully crafted Joseph Andrews. At the very least, the possibility of a later date ofcomposition should prevent us from fashioning simple teleological models for understanding Fielding's novelistic career. But there is more at stake, for the editors of this edition, in defining the period ofcomposition oíJonathan Wild. For both Amory and Bertrand Goldgar, the later the date of composition the less likely the work can be interpreted as Fielding's personal attack on Sir Robert Walpole. As they present their cases, in their respective introductions, they even question the more moderate version of this view, the commonly held critical assumption that Jonathan Wild began as a satire on the Great Man of English politics and then became, as Fielding revised his work to reflect his own changing political allegiances, a more general indictment of"greatness ." For Amory, "conjectures ofan unpublished, early version oíJonathan Wild' are unwarranted (p. 197). This "Uv-WiId," as he calls it, has been created by critics who refuse to accept the work as it was published in 1743. All else, both Amory and Goldgar assert, is speculation. Proponents of the anti-Walpole reading could very well retort that the "Ur-WiW is not their creation but Amory's, REVIEWS 521 but the fact remains that all we have before us is the 1743 text. That text does indeed contain, as Goldgar admits, references that might be interpreted as personal attacks on Walpole, but they do not add up to a systematic satire on the "Prime Minister" (p. 1 87). I count fourteen such references—a very small portion of the published text, to be sure, but their presence suggests that the 1743 version of Jonathan Wild, while not a personal attack on Walpole, is not the Walpolefree zone Amory and Goldgar so vehemently wish to see. Absent solid historical facts, arguments on both sides of this vexing question will undoubtedly...

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