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G. M. Godden. Henry Fielding: a Memoir
Henry Fielding: a Memoir
Table of Contents
PREFACE
HENRY FIELDING
CHAPTER I. YOUTH
CHAPTER II. PLAYHOUSE BARD
CHAPTER III. MARRIAGE
CHAPTER IV. POLITICAL PLAYS
CHAPTER V. HOMESPUN DRAMA
CHAPTER VI. BAR STUDENT. JOURNALIST
CHAPTER VII "COUNSELLOR FIELDING"
CHAPTER VIII. JOSEPH ANDREWS
CHAPTER IX. THE Miscellanies AND Jonathan Wild
CHAPTER X. PATRIOTIC JOURNALISM
CHAPTER XI. TOM JONES
CHAPTER XII. MR JUSTICE FIELDING
CHAPTER XIII. FIELDING AND LEGISLATION
CHAPTER XIV. Amelia
CHAPTER XV. JOURNALIST AND MAGISTRATE
CHAPTER XVI. POOR LAW REFORM
CHAPTER XVII. VOYAGE TO LISBON--DEATH
APPENDIX. A
APPENDIX. B
APPENDIX. C
APPENDIX. D
APPENDIX. E
APPENDIX. F
APPENDIX. G
APPENDIX. H
APPENDIX. I
APPENDIX. J
Footnotes for Chapter 1
Footnotes for Chapter 2
Footnotes for Chapter 3
Footnotes for chapter 4
Footnotes for Chapter 5
Footnotes for Chapter 6
Footnotes for Chapter 7
Footnotes for Chapter 8
Footnotes for Chapter 9
Footnotes for Chapter 10
Footnotes for Chapter 11
Footnotes for Chapter 12
Footnotes for Chapter 13
Footnotes for Chapter 14
Footnotes for Chapter 15
Footnotes for Chapter 16
Footnotes for Chapter 17
Footnotes for Appendices
Отрывок из книги
G. M. Godden
Including Newly Discovered Letters and Records with Illustrations from Contemporary Prints
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Of these companions at Eton, George Lyttelton, afterwards known as the "good Lord Lyttelton," statesman and orator, stands foremost by virtue of the generous warmth of a friendship continued throughout the novelist's chequered life. To Lyttelton Tom Jones was dedicated; it was his generosity, as generously acknowledged, that supplied Fielding, for a time, with the very means of subsistence; and to him was due the appointment, subsequently discharged with so much zealous labour, of Magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex. It is recorded that George Lyttelton's school exercises "were recommended as models to his schoolfellows." Another Eton friend, Thomas Winnington, made some figure in the Whig political world of the day; he was accredited by Horace Walpole with having an inexhaustible good humour, and "infinitely more wit than any man I ever knew." Of the friendship with Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, of which we first hear at Eton, little is known, save the curious episode of the recovery, many years after its author's death, of Fielding's lost play The Good-Natured Man, which had apparently been submitted to Sir Charles, whose celebrity was great as a brilliant political lampoonist. Of the acquaintance with Henry Fox, first Baron Holland, we hear nothing in later life; but the name of the greatest of all these Eton contemporaries, that of the elder Pitt, recurs in after years as one of the party at Radway Grange, in Warwickshire, to whom Fielding, after dinner, read aloud the manuscript of Tom Jones. 11 A reference to his fellow-Etonian may be found in one of the introductory chapters of that masterpiece, where Fielding, while again advocating the claims of learning, takes occasion to pay this sonorous tribute to Pitt's oratory: "Nor do I believe that all the imagination, fire, and judgment of Pitt, could have produced those orations that have made the senate of England in these our times a rival in eloquence to Greece and Rome, if he had not been so well read in the writings of Demosthenes and Cicero, as to have transferred their whole spirit into his speeches and, with their spirit, their knowledge too."
However excellent a knowledge of the classics the youthful scholar took away with him from Eton, the rigours of his studies do not appear to have diminished that zest for life with which the very name of Henry Fielding is invested. For the obscurity of these early years is for a moment lifted to disclose the young genius as having already, before he was nineteen, fallen desperately in love with a beautiful heiress in Dorsetshire; and, moreover, as threatening bodily force to accomplish his suit. The story, as indicated in the surviving outlines, might be the draft for a chapter of Tom Jones. The scene is Lyme Regis. The chief actors are Harry Fielding, scarce more than a schoolboy; a beautiful heiress, Miss Sarah Andrew; 12 and her uncle, one Mr. Andrew Tucker, a timorous and crafty member of the local corporation. The handsome Etonian, who had been for some time resident in the old town, fell madly in love, it seems, with the lady, who is stated to have been his cousin on his mother's side. The views of her guardian were, however, opposed to the young man's suit, Mr. Andrew Tucker mercenarily designing to secure the heiress for his own son. Thereupon Harry Fielding is said to have made a desperate attempt to carry the lady off by force, and that, moreover, "on a Sunday, when she was on her way to Church." Further, the efforts of the impetuous youth would seem to have extended to threatened assaults on the person of his fair cousin's guardian, Mr. Tucker; for we find that affrighted worthy flying for protection to the arm of the law, as recorded in the Register Book of Lyme Regis, under date of the 14th November 1725:--" … Andrew Tucker, Gent., one of the Corporation, caused Henry Fielding, Gent., and his servant or companion, Joseph Lewis --both now for some time past residing in the borough--to be bound over to keep the peace, as he was in fear of his life or some bodily hurt to be done or to be procured to be done to him by H. Fielding and his man. Mr. A. Tucker feared that the man would beat, maim, or kill him." No words could more aptly sum up this delightful story than those of Mr. Austin Dobson: "a charming girl, who is also an heiress; a pusillanimous guardian, with ulterior views of his own; a handsome and high-spirited young suitor; a faithful attendant ready to 'beat, maim or kill' on his master's behalf; a frustrated elopement and a compulsory visit to the mayor--all these with the picturesque old town of Lyme for a background, suggest a most appropriate first act to Harry Fielding's biographical tragi-comedy." 13 It is possible that Fielding's own pen supplied the conclusion to this first act. For he tells us, in the preface to the Miscellanies, that a version, in burlesque verse, of part of Juvenal's sixth satire was originally sketched out before he was twenty, and that it was "all the Revenge taken by an injured Lover." The story loses none of its zest, moreover, when we remember that Harry Fielding was at this time still a Ward of Chancery.
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