David Simple and the Fallacy of Friendship

This essay explores the relation between Sarah Fielding's novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and its sequel Volume the Last (1753). It argues that the later book should be seen as qualifying some of the ideas put forward in the earlier one, especially in connection with two related issues: the value of sentimentality as a way of apprehending the world, and the rewards and dangers of friendship. In the pessimistic views about friendship expressed in Volume the Last, Fielding shows herself to have been influenced by her brother Henry and other eighteenth-century moral commentators such as Samuel Johnson in their treatment of "Loss of Friends" as a topic of Christian consolation.