Henry Fielding, Politician?

“I do not in any wise esteem myself obliged to give a Reason for this, or any other Undertaking which I shall in my great Wisdom enter upon”—so announced “Hercules Vinegar” in the first issue of the Champion in November 1739. As Alan Downie writes somewhat ruefully in this new account of Henry Fielding’s politics, it is hard to resist seeing this as Fielding’s comment on his own works. No clear personal statement by Fielding about his political motives and beliefs has survived. In its absence, scholars interested in discovering his political views have had to wend a very wary way through books, essays, and pamphlets, many of them insecurely attributed, which seem to derive from a variety of political standpoints, and employ literary and rhetorical style that is often indirect or even self-contradictory. And yet no one denies that Fielding was hugely influential in the politics of his time: his plays were so embarrassing to the government that they are said to have been the main reason for the reintroduction of stage censorship in 1737; a decade later he was, as Downie argues, the government’s leading propagandist.

Downie is a historian with a clear grasp of the complex politics of the early eighteenth century and a long-standing interest in the literature of the period, particularly the work of Defoe (another problematic figure in political terms) and Fielding. Here he traces the political aspects of Fielding’s writings carefully and methodically from his earliest play, Love in Several Masques (1728), to his last writings in the early 1750s. In a political context, more than half of Fielding’s writing career was dominated by his obscure, shifting, more-or-less troubled relationship with Prime Minister Robert Walpole, while the 1745 rebellion, and the political upheavals of the late 1740s, impinged directly on his later work.

Downie sets out to show that throughout his life Fielding maintained a consistent political viewpoint, which is quite a challenge, since Fielding’s writings were widely seen at the time, and since, as deriving entirely from his need to be paid, whatever the source—this is, after all, the man who wrote that his career choices were to become either a hackney writer or a hackney coachman. However, Downie painstakingly builds up an image of Fielding through all the turns of his writing career as recognizably an old-style Whig, with a firm belief in liberty and the Protestant church in terms that can be traced back to Trenchard and Locke. He goes on to argue that it was changes in the nature of the Whig government, rather than his own vacillations or compromises, that prompted Fielding’s various and varied interventions in political debate.

In the process, Downie offers much useful information and historical analysis, and some salutary factual correctives. Dealing with the matter of attribution of anonymous pamphlets, he sensibly supports the recent quashing of the claims of Fielding’s biographer Martin Battestin that Fielding was the author of a number of opposition pamphlets in the 1730s. Making good use of evidence from Harris family letters that have recently come to light, Downie clarifies the sources of Fielding’s income and allegiances in the 1740s.

Recognizing that Fielding’s politics have long been a contested issue, in making his own arguments, Downie engages extensively with the views of previous scholars of Fielding’s politics, particularly Battestin, William Coley, and Thomas Cleary. Indeed, Downie often enters on a particular subject by giving an account of their views and then agreeing or, more often, disagreeing with them: many sentences begin with phrases such as “Sufficient attention has not so far been given to,” or “It has not been sufficiently appreciated that.” This approach is no doubt very useful for specialist scholars of Fielding’s politics, who are thus shown where scholarly nuances have lain and where Downie plans to situate his own ideas, but it is less engaging for those readers who, while interested in Fielding’s political ideas, lack detailed familiarity with previous...