Empiricism and Henry Fielding’s Theory of Fiction

In this article, I argue that the theory of fiction Henry Fielding developed in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones is meant to address an understudied tension between empiricism and the pedagogic ambitions of the eighteenth-century novel. Empiricist philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume dismissed imaginative narratives as possible sources of socio-ethical knowledge, which they insisted should be drawn instead from direct experience or reliable factual reports. I argue that Fielding’s moral epistemology was more fundamentally empirical than scholars usually recognize, and that an important function of his theoretical chapters in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones is to show that prose fiction can be sufficiently grounded in the data of experience to meet the epistemic standards of empiricism. Fielding pursues this goal by developing two theses: first, that his characters and events are embodiments of principles derived inductively from observation and experience, and, second, that the conformity between the copies and the originals can be empirically measured by the reader’s subjective sense of probability.