Abstract
Henry Fielding’s last offices were in Bow Street and the Strand. In Bow Street Fielding served as magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex from November 1748 to May 1754, a period during which he interrogated thousands of people—thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, carousers, receivers of stolen goods, con artists, embezzlers, wife beaters, husband beaters, rapists, and murderers—to determine whether alleged lawbreakers should be released, chastised from the bench, or committed to prison to await trial.1 At the same time, several blocks away at the Universal Register Office in the Strand, Fielding’s half-brother John, various clerks, and sometimes Henry Fielding himself made similar kinds of judgments on the truthfulness of presumably law-abiding clients—clergy, landowners, teachers, craftsmen, apprentices, and especially servants—who sought to register property, services, or themselves for sale, rent, or employment. In January 1752, to link and advertise the two institutions, the journalist Henry Fielding launched The Covent-Garden Journal, a periodical that served simultaneously to report and comment on the cases brought before Justice Fielding, to promote the Universal Register Office, and to provide readers with news, entertainment, and social commentary.
No useful Talent in the Society will be idle, nor will any Man long want a Seller and Purchaser of what he is desirous either to purchase or dispose of; whereas at present many a Man is Starving, while in the Possession of Talents, which would be highly serviceable to others, who could and would well reward him.
—A Plan of the Universal Register-Office, 1751
On Tuesday last William Neal was committed to Prison by Justice Fielding, for stealing several iron Rails, the property of Sir Francis Head: as was Christopher Emners, for picking the Pocket of Mr. Rolte of a silk Handkerchief; and John Marsh on an Indictment of wilful and corrupt Perjury. The same Day one Thomas Halwyn, charged Catherine his Wife, and Benjamin and Samuel, two young Lads, her Sons by a former Husband, with beating him.
—The Covent-Garden Journal, 1752
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Notes
Although Fielding took oaths for the Westminster magistracy on October 25, 1748, I date the beginning of his service as magistrate from November 2, 1748, when he began holding court in Bow Street. For the complexities of his appointments to the magistracy, see W. B. Coley, “Fielding’s Two Appointments to the Magistracy,” Modern Philology 63 (1965): 144–49.
For example, Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994)
Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth-Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996)
Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)
Paula McDowell, Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998)
John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987)
James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996).
For example, Alexander Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992)
John P. Zomchick, Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Public Conscience in the Private Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).
For a somewhat dated overview of relationship of law and literature in Fielding’s work, see B. M. Jones, Henry Fielding: Novelist and Magistrate (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1933).
Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), 460.
Bender, for example, does not once mention the existence of the Universal Register Office; see Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, 139–98, passim. Linebaugh discusses the Universal Register Office, but does not mention The Covent-Garden Journal. See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 252.
Henry Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Office, ed. Bertrand Goldgar (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1988), xv–xvi. Hereafter cited as Goldgar, CGJ.
Pat Rogers, Henry Fielding: A Biography (London: Paul Elek, 1979), 176; Linebaugh, Hanged, 252.
For a useful overview of Fielding’s biographers and critics prior to 1918, see Wilbur L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1918), 3:125–257.
For an overview of more recent criticism, see Albert J. Rivero, ed., Critical Essays on Henry Fielding (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998), 1–9. As Ronald Paulson remarked in 1962, “the effect of twentieth-century Fielding criticism has been to prove him moral,” a development Paulson found reductive; see Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 1–2. Over the past 35 years a more conflicted Fielding has emerged, particularly in the work of Claude Rawson and J. Paul Hunter, but this work has not in the main addressed Fielding’s performance as a magistrate and its relation to his business and journalistic interests.
See Rawson, Henry Fielding and theAugustan Ideal under Stress (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972)
Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975). Interestingly, Cross, reviewing Austin Dobson’s 1883 monograph on Fielding, credits Dobson with initiating the idea that Fielding possessed “‘a curious dual individuality.’ The reader is led to surmise that if he knew all there would emerge a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (3:250). It is a view Cross dismisses—“To explain him in this way is to resort to a crude psychology. Fielding was merely human like the rest of us” (3:251).
Cf. Roland Barthes: “Denotation is not the first sense, but it pretends to be. Under this illusion, in the end, it is nothing but the last of connotation (where the reading is at the same time grounded and enclosed), the superior myth, thanks to which the text pretends to return to the nature of language.” Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Sueil, 1970).Variations on Barthes’s (as well as Althusser’s, Veron’s, Baudrillard’s) analyses of the ideological dimension of language have become a staple of cultural and media studies in the “politics of signification,” but as yet have had no impact on the study of Fielding’s register office, court, and the texts that preserve and encode them. See, for example, Marina Camargo Heck, “The ideological dimension of media messages,” and Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 122–29.
Although historical “realities” are necessarily mediated through individual consciousness (and none more than Fielding’s), we would do well to remember Pocock’s observation that we “are studying an aspect of reality when we study the ways in which it appeared real to the persons to whom it was more real than to anyone else.” See J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 38.
On the problems of reconstructing historical contexts, see Robert D. Hume, Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo Historicism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), passim
cf. Leo Damrosch, Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 11–13. The ascendancy of materialist explanations of cultural change has had the tendency to emphasize the importance of developing political or economic systems at the expense of both residual cultural practices and individual agency. In recent eighteenth-century literary criticism, this tendency has manifested itself in the “new economic criticism” and its fascination with the “financial revolution” and “cash nexus” as controlling heuristics for the explication of the literature of the period. The theory that the gradually evolving use of bills and notes by merchants, as it was incorporated into common law, led to the increasing abstraction of the form of money (and thus of other forms of social interaction) has been invoked in myriad ways as a symbol and enabling condition for the dynamics of modern literary production and modern models of behavior. But as John O’Brien has recently pointed out, literary critics would do well to heed the argument of legal historian James Stevens Rogers that “the incorporation theory tends to flatten the landscape of this period’s commercial practices in order to emphasize the end result of the process: the pale, bloodless, and undifferentiated styles of exchange characteristic of mature capitalism.”
See O’Brien, “Union Jack: Amnesia and the Law in Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (1998): 67–69. It is crucial to remember that during the eighteenth century, more traditional, local, and personal practices continued to coexist with and penetrate developing forms of “modern” legal and economic procedure, and that in order to avoid reductiveness the literature of the period must be read with this reciprocal influence constantly in mind.
The classic discussion of dominant, emergent, and residual forms remains Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 115–27.
See Frank Donoghue’s discussion of the importance of biography to criticism in The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Literary Careers (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), 11–14. As Donoghue observes, it has become commonplace for scholars privately to chide biographers for “old-fashioned critical methods” while relying “upon these biographies anytime they write as thematic critics” (13).
For example, Susan Sage Heinzelman, “Guilty in Law, Implausible in Fiction: Jurisprudential and Literary Narratives in the Case of Mary Blandy, Parricide, 1752,” in Representing Women: Law, Literature and Feminism, ed. Susan Heinzelman and Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 309–36
Arlene Wilner, “The Mythology of History, the Truth of Fiction: Henry Fielding and the Cases of Bosavern Perdez and Elizabeth Canning,” The Journal of Narrative Technique 21 (1991): 185–202.
Angela J. Smallwood, Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and Feminist Debate 1700–1750 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 1. The phrase “misogynist monster” is Rivero’s, Critical Essays on Fielding, 7.
Jill Campbell, Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995).
On the messy contingency of the eighteenth-century moment, see Clement Hawes, “Introduction,” in Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, ed. Clement Hawes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 2–17.
Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 44
Lisa Forman Cody, “The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives’Alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man-Midwifery,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (1998): 478–79.
On the public sphere, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
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© 2000 Lance Bertelsen
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Bertelsen, L. (2000). Introduction Fielding’s Last Offices. In: Henry Fielding at Work. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299644_1
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