Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Cicero’s Topics of Invention in Fielding’s Preface to Joseph Andrews

  • Article
  • Published:
International Journal of the Classical Tradition Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The unique six-page preface to Henry Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews (1742) has generated great acclaim for supplying an adroit analysis of classical genres and the several subspecies of comedy in its proposal that his novel should be considered a ‘comic Epic-Poem in Prose’. Judith Frank has suggested that Fielding’s preface might be “at once the most assigned and [yet] least analyzed discussion of the aesthetics of the novel in English studies”, alluding to both the importance of the preface for undergraduate conceptions of the novel genre and the inimitable vagaries of Fielding’s articulate style. Where critical understandings of the preface might therefore be disproportionate to its acclaim, and where only two articles have previously examined Fielding’s applications of formal rhetoric in his work, this paper addresses both lacunas by proposing that Fielding made use of Cicero’s scheme of topical invention (from his Topica) to assist with the composition of his preface. Cicero’s topical scheme is a system of sixteen prescribed loci or ‘topics’ (places for locating or inventing arguments) and these were promoted as a universal and comprehensive scheme for discovering the best arguments for any subject under consideration. This paper demonstrates that Fielding’s preface engages with ten out of sixteen of Cicero’s topical terms and displays an informed understanding of the logical processes pertaining to those topics. It also demonstrates that Fielding makes use of a fountain metaphor in much the same way that Cicero used a fountain metaphor in his Topica, and furthermore, that the sequence of topical terms in Fielding’s preface run in much the same sequence as promoted by Cicero in the Topica. Where the new logic and rhetoric of the eighteenth century rejected the informal processes of topical invention for their relative focus on probable arguments, the applications of Cicero’s topics in the preface to Joseph Andrews helps characterize Fielding as both a dedicated classicist and a Ciceronian rhetor.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. J. Frank, ‘The Comic Novel and the Poor: Fielding’s Preface to Joseph Andrews’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 27 ser., 2, 1993–4, pp. 217–34 (217).

  2. Ibid., p. 218.

  3. W. S. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, Princeton, 1971, p. 341.

  4. Howell states that the ‘the theory of topics in rhetoric and logic’ became afflicted by the Baconian and Cartesian emphasis on acquiring empirical knowledge in the seventeenth century (ibid., pp. 101 and 79) and that Bernard Lamy levelled destructive criticism against the art of topics in 1675 (p. 101), while John Locke and others found ‘little or no value’ in using the topics, suggesting that ‘Laziness, Impatience, Custom and want of Use and Attention’ led men to use the ‘probable Topicks’, which he described further as ‘misapplications of the Understanding in the search of Truth’ (295); see John Locke, Posthumous Works …, London, 1706, p. 31.

  5. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (n. 3 above), p. 79. When Petrus Ramus argued that the arts of invention and arrangement should be treated wholly by the discipline of logic, leaving only the expressive procedures of style and delivery to the discipline of rhetoric (ibid., pp. 25, 78), he effectively undid in the name of logic what Cicero’s Topica had done in the name of rhetoric – when it affirmed topical invention as a canonical process of rhetoric.

  6. Frank, ‘The Comic Novel’ (n. 1 above), p. 217.

  7. P. Baines, ‘Joseph Andrews’, in The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding, ed. C. J. Rawson, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 50–64 (51).

  8. Frank, ‘The Comic Novel’ (n. 1 above), p. 218.

  9. Ibid.

  10. J. Cruise, ‘Precept, Property, and “bourgeois” Practice in “Joseph Andrews”’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 37, 1997, pp. 535–52 (538).

  11. H. Goldberg, ‘Comic Prose Epic or Comic Romance: The Argument of the Preface to Joseph Andrews’, Philological Quarterly, 43, 1964, pp. 193–215 (193).

  12. Ibid., pp. 195, 198; Frank, ‘The Comic Novel’ (n. 1 above), p. 219.

  13. Cruise, ‘Precept, Property’ (n. 10 above), pp. 536–37.

  14. Goldberg, ‘Comic Prose Epic’ (n. 11 above), pp. 201–2.

  15. Ibid., p. 199.

  16. Although these processes are typical of most schemes of topical invention and not just Cicero’s (including those of Aristotle’s Topics and his Rhetoric), they allude to considering the topics of ‘definition’, ‘genus’, ‘species’ and differentiae (‘differences’) in order to determine the genus of a thing and to identify the key differentiae which distinguish its species from other species – this was Aristotle’s process for creating a formal definition; see Aristotle, Topica, transl. Hugh Tredennick and E. S. Forster, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge MA, 1960, p. 579 (141b, VI.4.25–35).

  17. See J. Bender, ‘Fielding and the Juridical Novel’, in Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, Chicago, 1987, pp. 165–200; L. Bertelsen, Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer, New York, 2000; and A. Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England, Baltimore, 1992.

  18. See D. Ivana, ‘Henry Fielding and the Rhetoric of Quixotic Benevolence: Don Quixote in England’, in ed., Embattled Reason, Principled Sentiment and Political Radicalism: Quixotism in English Novels, 1742–1801, Leiden, 2015, pp. 21–54.

  19. G. McClish, ‘Henry Fielding, the Novel, and Classical Legal Rhetoric’, Rhetorica, 14, 1996, pp. 413–40 (414); for more details on works that address Fielding’s uses of legal practice in general (rather than his specific uses of legal rhetoric), see p. 414 n. 3.

  20. Ibid., pp. 415–16.

  21. Ibid., p. 416.

  22. Ibid., pp. 416–17, 424, 430–1.

  23. H. K. Miller, ‘Some Functions of Rhetoric in “Tom Jones”’, Philological Quarterly, 45, 1966, pp. 209–35 (210).

  24. Ibid., p. 213.

  25. Ibid., pp. 213–15.

  26. B. Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, Oxford, 1998, p. 62; Q. Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare, Oxford, 2014, p. 4.

  27. Cicero, Topics, transl. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge MA, 1949, pp. 386-7 (Topica, I.7–8); Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, transl. and ed. D. A. Russell, Cambridge MA and London, 2001, pp. 374–7 (Institutio oratoria, V.10.20–1). See also K. Dodd, ‘Shakespeare and the Universal Topics of Invention’, Shakespeare, 16, 2020, 160–81 (161).

  28. P. Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic, Leiden, 1993, p. 132; Aristotle, Topica, transl. H. Tredennick and E. S. Forster, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge MA, 1960, passim.

  29. Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, transl. J. H. Freese, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge MA, 1926, pp. 296–325 (II.XXIII).

  30. Ibid., pp. 31–3 (1358a-b, I.II.21–I.III.1); See also McClish, ‘Henry Fielding’ (n. 19 above), p. 416.

  31. See, [Cicero] Rhetorica ad Herennium, transl. H. Caplan, Cambridge MA, 1964, pp. 33–55 (I.X.18-XVII.27).

  32. The topics of circumstance helped lawyers establish proof for their case. For Cicero, these were specific to ‘persons’ (name, nature, manner of life, fortune, habit, feeling, interests, purposes, achievements, accidents and speeches made) or specific to ‘actions’ (place, time, occasion, manner, facilities or things consequential to the deed): Cicero, On Invention, transl. H. M. Hubbell, Cambridge MA, 1949, pp. 67–91 (De inventione, I.XXIV.34–I.XXX.50). See also F. Magnano, ‘Cicero’s Lists of Topics from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages’, Revista española de filosofía medieval, ser. 22, 2015, pp. 85–118 (86–7, 99).

  33. Miller, ‘Some Functions of Rhetoric’ (n. 23 above), pp. 213–14.

  34. That is, it is the earliest surviving text explicitly concerned with a comprehensive scheme of universal topics. Cicero is believed to have adapted a late Hellenistic treatise (perhaps by Aniochus of Ascalon or Diodotus), so he might not have designed this scheme entirely himself. No earlier treatise survives, however, so Cicero’s Topica is credited with publishing the first practical treatise on the universal topics of invention: Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), p. 378.

  35. Cicero’s full scheme includes seventeen topics: the sixteen topics inherent to any subject and an additional singular topic that is extrinsic, which considers existing material based on authority, such as forms of testimony (sources that are not artistically invented by the author). For the sake of clarity, I refer only to Cicero’s main scheme of sixteen topics: Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), p. 387 (II.8); p. 397 (II.8); pp. 437–43 (XIX–XX.72–8).

  36. E. Rigotti and S. Greco, ‘Cicero’s Topica and the Establishment of the Topical Tradition by Boethius’, in Inference in Argumentation: A Topics-Based Approach to Argument Schemes, Cham, 2019, pp. 61–2.

  37. Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), pp. 389–99 (II.9–IV.24); p. 391 (III.11); pp. 399–439 (V.26–XVIII.73); p. 437 (XVIII.71). Cicero does not discuss wholes and parts explicitly as topics in their own right but shows that if your subject is material (such as a person or a house), it must have its parts enumerated; if, however, your subject is notional or conceptual (such as honour, love or justice), its genus should be divided into its species. Wholes and parts would therefore replace genus and species whenever one’s subject was material, so it is important to consider wholes and parts as subtopics of Cicero’s genus and species (as implied by the second topic, enumeration of parts or division): Cicero, Topica, pp. 400–7 (V.28–VIII.34). Magnano, ‘Cicero’s Lists of Topics’ (n. 32 above), pp. 87, 101, suggests that Cicero’s main scheme has eighteen topics because she includes a toto and a partibus (‘wholes’ and ‘parts’). For an examination of the topic of notatio as the topic of ‘names’, see K. Dodd, ‘“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare’s Inventio and the Topic of “Notatio” (Names)’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 21, 2019, pp. 1–35.

  38. Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), p. 437 (XVIII.71).

  39. Cicero, Divisions of Oratory [De partitione oratoria], transl. H. Rackham, Cambridge MA, 1942, p. 317 (III.8).

  40. Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), pp. 443–5 (XXI.79).

  41. J. B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama, Berkeley, 1978, p. 50.

  42. Erasmus, De copia, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, XXIV, ed. C. R. Thompson, Toronto, 1978, p. 606; Erasmus paraphrases Quintilian’s description of knocking on ‘every door’ until some ‘native capacity’ is developed for using individual topics: Institutes (n. 27 above) (V.10.122–4).

  43. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (n. 3 above), pp. 261–2.

  44. Practitioners were discouraged from including every topic if it was not crucial to the task, as Cicero states, ‘all topics scarcely ever occur in every inquiry’: Topica (n. 27 above), p. 443 (XXI.79).

  45. In the following I place paragraph numbers in parentheses: definition is used twice (both time in 13); enumeration of parts once (3); division once (2); notatio or names three times (3, 4, 7) and appellation once (7), the explanation of a word (etymology) once (12) [the topic ‘notatio’ is regularly Englished as “etymology” (see Topica (n. 27 above), p. 409 (VIII.35)), although Reinhardt shows that it also included denotation (n. 74 below)]; genus is referred to as ‘head’ once (3); whole twice (both times in 7); species six times (2, 4, 6, 11, 13, 19); parts twice (both in 3); similitudes as ‘resembles’ once (4); differences seven times (4, three times in 5, 6, twice in 14); contraries as ‘negation’ once (14); consequents once (18); repugnants once (14); and causes three times (twice in 14, 18). Fielding does not use the term ‘effects’, but this is implied by cause, just as antecedents are implied by consequences. He does not use the term ‘comparisons’, though he does use the ‘as … so’ formula for comparisons five times (5, 6, 10, 14, 14); and he does not allude to the topics of conjugates, adjuncts or antecedents.

  46. Baines, ‘Joseph Andrews’ (n. 7 above), p. 51.

  47. Here and elsewhere, my underlining. The Norton edition notes, ‘In Poetics 4, Aristotle credits Homer in his Margites – a lost comic epic named after its hero, a fool (margos) – with … outlining ‘the general forms of Comedy’ as he had done for Tragedy in the Iliad’: Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews: with Shamela and Related Writings, ed. H. Goldberg, New York, 1987, p. 3 n. 2.

  48. Oxford English Dictionary, henceforth OED, see ‘genre’, n. 1. b.

  49. Cicero’s method of divisio formae is regularly translated into English as ‘analysis’ (which, however, loses something of the technical connotation of ‘division’): Topica (n. 27 above), pp. 402–3 (V.30) and p. 401 (V.28).

  50. As Cicero writes: ‘In analysis [divisione] we have classes or kinds [formae]’, Topica (n. 27 above), pp. 402-–3 (VII.30). See also T. Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae, London, [1565] 1969, sigs Hhh3r, ZZZzz4r.

  51. H. Power, Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, & the Consumption of Classical Literature, Oxford, 2015, pp. 121–2, makes the cogent claim that Fielding’s preface might have been inspired by Pope’s satirical preface to his own mock-epic poem The Dunciad Variorum (1729) (written under his nom de plume of ‘Martinus Scriblerus’). Power notes that both Pope and Fielding stayed at the abode of Ralph Allen in Bath during the autumn of 1741, the time when Fielding was finishing Joseph Andrews (1742) and Pope was preparing to republish The New Dunciad (1742). The preface by ‘Scriblerus’ makes clear that while Pope had translated the surviving Homeric epics, The Dunciad was conceived as a replacement of Homer’s lost epic comedy Margites. Power also notes Samuel Butler’s earlier expression of ‘a new species of poetry’ that draws comparison with Homer’s lost Margites in a piece from the Grub-Street Journal (October 1730), which Fielding might have known and which was probably also influenced by the preface to Pope’s original Dunciad in 1729.

  52. See Ian Watt’s note in, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, Berkeley, 1957, p. 249, that ‘it is surely impossible to conceive of any narrative whatever which does not in some way contain “fable, action, characters, sentiments, and diction”’, and Power’s note that ‘it seems that Fielding is setting the bar ludicrously low for qualification as an epic poem’: Ibid., p. 123.

  53. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Goldberg (n. 47 above), p. 3 n. 3; Aristotle, Poetics, transl. S. Halliwell, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge MA, 1995, 1459b.

  54. Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), pp. 388–9 (II.10).

  55. Ibid., pp. 400–401 (V.28).

  56. Mack translates and summarizes Agricola in Renaissance Argument (n. 28 above), p. 130.

  57. Aristotle, Topica, 141b, VI.4.25–35, p. 579.

  58. When Goldberg, ‘Comic Prose Epic’ (n. 11 above), p. 194–9, examines the informal logic of Fielding’s preface, he notes much the same thing, but without connecting Fielding’s early processes of definition to later topical allusions and thus without referring the logic of the preface to the topics of invention (as the probable source for that logic). Goldberg notes how the ‘three parts of the phrase [‘Comic Epic-Poem in Prose’] mutually modify … one another’ (p. 194); how “invoking the authority of Aristotle [helps] develop a systematic classification of poetic species” (p. 197); and how Fielding ‘arrives at the definition of his species by a progressive narrowing of literary categories … each based on another independent principle of differentiation [so that] Fielding is formally stating a definition arrived at per genus et differentiae’ (p. 199).

  59. OED (n. 48 above), 37.a

  60. Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), p. 405 (VII.31).

  61. OED (n. 48 above), 11.

  62. Fielding then lists several vast French romances renowned for their improbable adventures, sexual disguises, surprise discoveries and miraculous reunions, which are more attributable to the romance than the epic: Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Goldberg (n. 47 above), p. 4 n. 5.

  63. In Cicero’s, De oratore, the topic of similitudines is translated as ‘resemblances’ pp. 316–17 (II.XXXIX.166).

  64. Fielding writes: ‘it may seem remarkable, that Aristotle, who is so fond and free of Definitions, hath not thought proper to define the Ridiculous’ (para. 13).

  65. Aristotle, Topica (n. 57 above), p. 579 (VI.4.25–35, 141b).

  66. Goldberg, ‘Comic Prose Epic’ (n. 11 above), p. 202.

  67. Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), pp. 416–17 (XI.47–8).

  68. Goldberg, ‘Comic Prose Epic’ (n. 11 above), p. 202.

  69. Aristotle, Poetics (n. 53 above), pp. 36–39 (1448b, IV 5-15).

  70. Donatus, De comoedia et tragoedia, transl. G. Miltz, in Theories of Comedy, ed. P. Lauter, New York, 1964, pp. 27–32 (12).

  71. Frank, ‘The Comic Novel’ (n. 1 above), p. 231.

  72. As Frank also notes, ‘while the Preface explicitly states its agenda as an imperative to transcend the burlesque by producing its opposite, Fielding’s theory in fact blurs the distinction between the two, and the binary opposition collapses’: ibid., p. 232.

  73. Goldberg, ‘Comic Prose Epic’ (n. 11 above), p. 203.

  74. Cicero, Topica, transl. T. Reinhardt, Oxford, 2003, pp. 132–3 (VIII.35).

  75. Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), p. 407 (VIII.33).

  76. Ibid.

  77. Ibid.

  78. Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), p. 395 (IV.21).

  79. The example was common, for even dawn and dusk are neither day nor night (but rather a blended state). Cicero’s repugnants shared a tripartite relation with the topics of antecedents and consequences, concerning what came before, what came after and what could never occur at the same time – a useful topic for forensic oratory and its concerns with circumstantial proof; see Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), pp. 420–23 (XIII.53; XIII.54), pp. 422–3 n. a.

  80. Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), p. 443 (XXI.79).

  81. Ibid., p. 421 (XII.53).

  82. Ibid., pp. 425–7 (XV.58–9).

  83. Ibid., p. 421 (XII.53).

  84. N. Mace, ‘Henry Fielding’s Classical Learning’, Modern Philology, ser. 88, 3, 1991, pp. 243–60 (243, 244 n. 4).

  85. Ibid., p. 244.

  86. N. Mace, Henry Fielding’s Novels and the Classical Tradition, Newark DE, 1996, p. 40.

  87. M. C. Battestin and W. R. Kenan Jr, A Henry Fielding Companion, London, 2000, p. ix.

  88. K. Eden, ‘Forensic Rhetoric and Humanist Education’, in The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–1700, ed. Lorna Hutson, Oxford, 2017, pp. 23-40 (32).

  89. McClish, ‘Henry Fielding’ (n. 19 above), pp. 415–16. See also Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (n. 3 above), pp. 75, 259–63, for a discussion of the veritable campaign by early eighteenth-century logicians and rhetoricians to rescue (or at least to reorient) the classical tradition of their disciplines after the curtailments of Ramus – where the logicians thought only of Aristotle for ancient logic, and the rhetoricians thought only of Cicero for their lessons in ancient rhetoric.

  90. T. G. Leesen, Gaius Meets Cicero: Law and Rhetoric in the School Controversies, Leiden, 2010, pp. 34–5.

  91. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (n. 3 above), p 75.

  92. Mace, Henry Fielding’s Novels (n. 86 above), p. 63. Cicero is ranked fourth behind the great poets: Horace, Virgil and Ovid.

  93. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (n. 3 above), p. 341.

  94. ‘Henry Fielding: 10 February 1755’, ed. H. Amory, Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons: Poets and Men of Letters, vol. 7, ed. A. N. L. Munby, London, 1973, p. 124.

  95. Ibid., p. 158.

  96. Mace, ‘Henry Fielding’s Classical Learning’ (n. 84 above), p. 246.

  97. ‘Henry Fielding: 10 February 1755’, ed. Amory (n. 94 above), p. 157.

  98. Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), pp. 383–7 (I.1–3, II.6–8); Cicero claims his Topica was a response to Aristotle’s Topica, which had confused his solicitor friend Trebatius, although Cicero’s topics are thought to more resemble the 28 topics mentioned by Aristotle in his Rhetoric: Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), p. 337.

  99. ‘Henry Fielding: 10 February 1755’, ed. Amory (n. 94 above), p. 134; see also Mace, Henry Fielding’s Novels (n. 86 above), p. 42.

  100. ‘Henry Fielding: 10 February 1755’, ed. Amory (n. 94 above), p. 134.

  101. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, New York, 1861, p. 460.

  102. Ibid., pp. 461–2 (here and below, my emphasis).

  103. Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), pp. 383–7 (I.2, II.6).

  104. Fielding, Tom Jones (n. 101 above), pp. 461–2.

  105. OED (n. 48 above), ‘invent’, v. 1., 2.

  106. Cicero, Topica (n. 27 above), p. 387 (II.7) (my emphasis).

  107. Ibid., pp. 387–9 (I.8).

  108. Mace, Henry Fielding’s Novels (n. 86 above), p. 68.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Sydney, Camperdown, Australia

    Kirk Dodd

Authors
  1. Kirk Dodd
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kirk Dodd.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Dodd, K. Cicero’s Topics of Invention in Fielding’s Preface to Joseph Andrews. Int class trad 29, 168–189 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-021-00601-7

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-021-00601-7

Search

Navigation