Historiography, the Novel, and Henry Fielding's Joseph

Andrews

Noelle Gallagher

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 52, Number 3, Summer

2012, pp. 631-650 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sel.2012.0025

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/483634

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SEL 52, 3Gallagher
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© 2012 Rice University

Historiography, the Novel, and

Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews
NOELLE GALLAGHER

When Henry Fielding first presented Joseph Andrews to the

public in 1742, he described the work as a response to “two Books
lately published, which represent an admirable Pattern of the
Amiable in either Sex.”1 The first of these books was, of course,
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, a novel whose
heroine ostensibly provided a model for virtuous behavior in young
women—and it is to this novel that Fielding’s work has most often
been linked.2 Ian Watt provided the seminal example for treating
Fielding’s work as a response to Richardson’s when he located
both texts in the context of a shift toward “novelistic realism.”3
In the years since its appearance, Watt’s account of the novel’s
rise has been much critiqued, but the story of Richardson’s “Pat-
tern of the Amiable” and Fielding’s parodic response is one that
we still rely on heavily in our scholarship.4 It is also, of course, a
narrative we like to dramatize for our students; the Richardson-
Fielding pairing remains a standard element on undergraduate
course syllabi, and Joseph Andrews is frequently anthologized
with excerpts from Pamela, Shamela, or other anti-Pamela texts.5
But Fielding’s novel was a response to two books lately pub-
lished, and only one of them was Richardson’s iconic fiction. The
second of the works that had attracted Fielding’s condemnation
was a piece of historical prose: Colley Cibber’s flamboyant au-
tobiography, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (1740).6
Like Richardson’s Pamela, Cibber’s work offered a detailed, inti-
mate portrait of an individual life. And like Pamela, it elevated its
protagonist—an otherwise ordinary person—to the level not just
of narrative hero but also of admirable example. Taken together,
the two works constituted parallel examples, one novelistic and

Noelle Gallagher is a lecturer at the University of Manchester.

632 Historiography, the Novel, and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

one historical, of the same trend in literary style: a shift toward

the specific, the individual, and the private. Although we now
present Fielding’s novel as an intervention within a specifically
fictional tradition, Joseph Andrews was participating in a debate
that was as much about the current state of historiography as it
was about the development of the novel.

English Historical Culture, 1660–1740

In the Restoration and early eighteenth century, history was

a genre very much in flux. As historian Philip Hicks has noted,
this instability was in part the result of tensions between the
changing contexts for historical writing and the still-prominent
ancient standards for historical composition.7 Many English writ-
ers turned to the successful histories of neoclassical France as an
aesthetic model for their own narratives, and seventeenth-century
French artes historicae remained the most prominent guides for
the writing of the genre throughout the Restoration and early
eighteenth century. Manuals such as Rene Rapin’s Instructions
for History (1680) and Pierre Le Moyne’s Of the Art Both of Writ-
ing and Judging of History (1695) established rigorous guidelines
for would-be historians, using examples from Livy, Tacitus, and
other ancient writers to champion an idealized neoclassical defi-
nition of the genre.8 History, according to these theorists, was “a
continued Narration of things True, Great and Publick, writ with
Spirit, Eloquence and Judgment; for Instruction to Particulars and
Princes, and Good of Civil Society.”9 Its proper subjects were mili-
tary and political events, and its proper vehicle was grand-scale
causal narrative.10
Texts such as Le Moyne’s and Rapin’s also recommended
that the historian restrict his character portraits to “two or three
Colours”; by sketching political and military leaders with refer-
ence to a handful of defining psychological features, the histo-
rian could make the historical process universally transparent,
transforming individual historical figures into generic character
“types” recurrent throughout human history.11 Since human
nature was fundamentally unchanging, these critics contended,
history’s present-day readers—ideally, men with a role in public
life—could benefit from the examples provided by past character
types. By learning from history “what is to be done, or not done,
spoken or concealed,” Degory Wheare explained, statesman read-
ers could “foresee the Events of things, perceive their Causes, and
by remembring [sic] those Evils that are past, provide Remedies
Noelle Gallagher 633

against those which are coming upon us.”12 As a genre focused

on universal principles, history provided “Moral Philosophy,
cloathed in Examples,” to borrow Wheare’s formulation of the
commonplace.13
While writers such as Rapin and Le Moyne continued to pro-
pound a neoclassical ideal of historical writing, contemporary
historians often diverged substantially from critical prescrip-
tion. For one thing, they sought to appeal to a readership that
was far more diverse than that recommended by the prevailing
artes historicae—a readership that historical writing would have
shared with genres like the novel.14 Although statesmen may have
been reading neoclassical history for examples of civic virtue,
practicing what Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton have termed
“active reading,” such a model would hardly have suited female or
merchant-class readers, for whom great public events offered no
direct parallels in daily life.15 This diverse audience for historical
writing was as likely to be interested in topical political insights
or entertaining anecdotes from private life as it was to be engaged
with universal moral principles or generic behavioral examples.
At the same time as history was caught in the tensions be-
tween ancient and modern, it was also caught in the tensions
between different literary genres. Mark Salber Phillips has argued
that history in the later eighteenth century was “a group of over-
lapping and related genres”; Restoration and early eighteenth-
century historiography was, I would suggest, equally variegated
and complex.16 Although critics often attempted to maintain rigid
distinctions between elite formal history and “lesser” genres, his-
torical narrative was ultimately only one of a wide range of literary
forms—including satire and panegyric, as well as memoir—that
could be used to represent the past.17 Just as the nation’s his-
torians were struggling to depict modern events in neoclassical
narratives, then, writers such as Cibber were recording history in
alternative genres and, in the process, responding to the demands
of the period’s new readers.
While An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber was only
one of many works attempting to reach a popular readership for
biographical narrative, it achieved particular prominence for its
unabashedly self-important account of theatrical life. Cibber’s
work functioned self-consciously as both a personal memoir and
a formal narrative history; the title page to the Apology prom-
ised “an Historical View of the Stage during His Own Time,” and
Cibber’s autobiographical reminiscences were intermixed with
lengthy excurses on the lives of other actors and the changing
634 Historiography, the Novel, and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

theatrical culture of his age. Both Cibber’s egocentric portrait of

the artist and his “Historical View of the Stage” were informed by
a tongue-in-cheek comparison with neoclassical ideals, enabling
him to present theater history as history, and thus to promote
himself—only half ironically—to the position of important histori-
cal figure.18
At the same time, Cibber’s detailed style of narration gave his
account a psychological complexity that would have appealed
to readers interested in private eyewitness narratives or the
Richardsonian novel. As Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted, the
familiar first-person rhetoric of Cibber’s text bears a significant
resemblance to the sense of audience in Richardson’s Pamela.19
In employing an eyewitness perspective, texts such as the Apol-
ogy demonstrated a new, more detailed mode of historical writing,
providing a stylistic model that differed substantially from the
ideal promoted by neoclassical artes historicae.
By taking both Cibber’s and Richardson’s texts as his tar-
gets in Joseph Andrews, then, Fielding was able to reflect on
developments that affected a wide variety of mimetic genres. It
seems indicative of the broad range of Fielding’s interests that the
novel’s narrator consistently abstains from making any fixed or
firm distinctions between fictional and historical writings in his
discussions of literary style. Just as Cibber’s Apology is ridiculed
alongside Richardson’s Pamela, so Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quix-
ote, Alain Rene Le Sage’s Gil Blas, and other European novels are
mentioned in the context of histories by Lord Clarendon, Juan de
Mariana, Rapin, and others (pp. 187–8). Indeed, Fielding’s nar-
rator often goes beyond simply offering complementary historical
examples to match his discussions of epics, novels, and romances;
he seems deliberately to align historical and fictional modes of
representation. By connecting several different forms of mimetic
literature, including epic, history, romance, biography, and the
novel, Fielding’s narrator explores the potential for fruitful, as
well as dangerous, overlap between the different genres. Those
passages from Joseph Andrews that we tend to read as providing
Fielding’s “theory of the novel” contribute to a debate that crosses
our disciplinary as well as our generic boundaries.20

Neoclassical Epic and Neoclassical History

Perhaps the most obvious means by which historiographical

issues enter into Fielding’s novel is through the narrator’s inter-
est in classical epic. In an essay published more than sixty years
Noelle Gallagher 635

ago, Robert M. Wallace notes that Fielding’s personal library and

periodical writings suggest that “history and biography … rather
than the epic may have been the chief influence on the form and
purpose of the novels.”21 While critics have typically interpreted
Joseph Andrews’s classical allusions solely in relation to the
novel-as-epic, many of Fielding’s references to ancient literature
apply equally to classical epic and classical or neoclassical history.
There was a longstanding critical tradition—stretching back
to Horace’s Ars Poetica—of connecting history and epic; and
Fielding, with his wide-ranging critical knowledge and profess-
edly Aristotelian sensibilities, would undoubtedly have been
familiar with the associations between these two forms.22 For
many eighteenth-century critics, history and epic were automati-
cally aligned by virtue of their complementary positions in the
hierarchy of genres; just as history was the most elevated prose
form, so epic sat atop the hierarchy of verse genres. Neoclassi-
cal artes historicae sometimes even defined history as epic and
vice versa. Le Moyne’s manual, for example, cited Cicero’s view
that “History … is but a Poem without the Slavery of Dress,” and
insisted that “Homer’s Iliads … are only a Copy in Verse, made of
what Datis and Dictis have written in Prose of the Wars of Troy.”23
Writings on heroic or epic poetry also connected the two genres,
and sometimes critics disputed as to whether the label of “epic”
or that of “historical poem” was the most appropriate for a par-
ticular composition. (John Dryden, for example, “rank[ed] Lucan
rather among Historians in Verse, then Epique Poets”; and Edward
Howard insisted that “Daniel, Drayton, and the like” were “rather
Historians than Epicke Poets.”24)
In addition to their shared classical pedigree, history and
epic had several formal and thematic features in common. To at
least some degree, epics and histories covered the same subject
matter, since epic verse, although fictionalized, was meant to be
“rais’d on some known Historical Truth.”25 According to critics
such as John Dennis, writing about real persons and events made
an epic more convincing by enabling the poet to “give the Action
an Air of Truth” even when what he depicted was improbable.26
The attention to historical subject matter also meant a focus on
“Illustrious and Important” topics; according to the would-be epic
poet Richard Blackmore, the epic genre was meant to depict
“the Action of some great Person, about some noble and weighty
Affair.”27 Although critics disputed how closely an epic ought to
adhere to historical truth, there was a general consensus that
heroic verse, like formal history, should be rooted in the events
of a nation’s past.
636 Historiography, the Novel, and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

Because the epic as configured within the early modern criti-

cal tradition shared history’s subject matter, it also shared some
part of history’s elevated didactic goals. “An Epic Poem is a noble
magnificent Composition,” Tom Brown, for example, explained;
“the chief End of it is to excite Men to Virtue, by celebrating il-
lustrious Examples, and proposing them to Imitation.”28 To that
end, aspiring epic poets were instructed to depict generic character
“types” that, like those of neoclassical formal history, highlighted
one or two defining personality traits. Dennis, for one, advised
that the characters in an epic poem should all have distinct “Man-
ners” that “discover[ed] their Inclinations and their Affections.”29
Characters were meant to remain consistent throughout the
work, since it was by this means that a particular “type” could
be identified in later ages and imitated by readers. “The Poet is
to take care, not only that his Hero appears to have no contrary
Sentiments,” Dennis instructed, “but that the Quality, which is
the Foundation of his Character, and which constitutes him that
individual Hero, should always shine, and always predominate,
either on like or on contrary Occasions.”30 Like a neoclassical his-
torical narrative, an epic featured archetypal figures, presenting
moral lessons that remained universal and unambiguous as its
characters remained consistent.
At the same time as neoclassical tradition aligned the epic
with the historical, however, it also made distinctions between
the two genres—most often on the grounds that the epic poet
could fictionalize the persons and events he depicted. With the
advantage of creative license, the poet had much greater flexibility
than the historian in the choice and presentation of his subject
matter. A poet could condense the events of years or decades into
“one illustrious and perfect action,” creating a coherent narrative
from unrelated historical episodes.31 He could also take liber-
ties with chronology, “bring[ing] together those that liv’d several
Ages asunder.”32 Indeed, according to some critics, distortions of
chronology were not only acceptable but also necessary in order
to distinguish the epic’s narrative unity from the “broken action”
characteristic of a historical poem.33 “Though all must be natural
in an Epick Poem, yet the order that is observ’d in relating things,
ought not so to be,” Rapin explained, “for were it natural, and
according to the succession of time, it would be a History, and
not a Poem.”34
Both the amalgamation of different historical periods and
the reduction of complex events into one “perfect action” were
indicative of the epic poet’s mandate to “inlarge” upon, rather
Noelle Gallagher 637

than simply record, historical phenomena.35 Unrestricted by the

need to adhere to factual details, the epic poet could sketch past
persons and events in much broader terms than could the writer
of a formal narrative history. Once again the argument went back
to Aristotle, who, in Rapin’s words, contended that history could
depict goodness only “as it is found in the particulars,” while ep-
ics could imagine a virtue “free from all imperfections, and as it
ought to be in general, and in the abstract.”36 This distinction
made the epic potentially more effective as a didactic tool than
formal history, since a poet could invent characters whose virtues
were more widely applicable than those of particular historical
figures. According to Dennis, in fact, historical examples were
“very seldom … proportion’d to those who read them,” but an
epic could depict “General Action; something in which all might
be equally concern’d.”37
In addition to being more general, epic’s examples could also
be more unequivocal, consistent, or “perfect” than those of formal
history. Because the storyline of an epic was “Morally though not
Historically true,” the poet could present “greater Idea’s, and more
noble Examples then probably [could] be drawn from known His-
tory,” Edward Phillips explained.38 It was for this reason that the
Aristotelian tradition defined epic as a celebratory or panegyric
form. “Aristotle tells us, That Poetry is something more excellent,
and more philosophical, than History, and does not inform us
what has been done; but teaches what may, and what ought to be
done,” Rapin maintained.39 Although history necessarily involved
both cautionary and exemplary figures, the imagined past could
be “free from all imperfections, and as it ought to be in general,
and in the abstract.”40 It was therefore the better able “to allure
the inclinations” of the reader.41

Epic and History in Joseph Andrews

As the language of “particular” and “abstract” suggests, the

differences between epic and history were often articulated as
a general-particular relation, with the timeless, idealized epic
defined against the more “particular” historical narrative. Fre-
quently, the formal contrasts between different varieties of his-
torical writing were understood in similarly perspectival terms; a
memoir like Cibber’s Apology, for example, was necessarily more
“particular” than a formal history, since it offered an account of
only one individual life rather than a grand national narrative.42
Since the distinctions between genres like history and memoir
638 Historiography, the Novel, and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

were often cross-correlated with tensions between neoclassical

and modern styles of historical writing, the epic-history pairing
could also be used to model the clash between ancient and con-
temporary strategies for representing the world.
For Fielding, as for other writers concerned with the age’s
shifting literary sensibilities, the connection between history and
epic was as much about shared vulnerability as it was about
shared aesthetics. As ancient genres, both history and epic were
destabilized—and, to some degree, endangered—by the move-
ment toward a more detailed or immediate style of representation.
Eighteenth-century artes historicae combined their endorsements
of ancient standards for historical writing with attacks on recent
historians’ decidedly postclassical efforts.43 Equally, the Restora-
tion witnessed a surge in the amount of critical material devoted
to defining and discussing the epic—and to denigrating the efforts
of its modern practitioners. Would-be epic poets were denounced
for their “want of Genius” and “Ignorance of the Rules of writing
such a Poem” in much the same way that the age’s historians were
critiqued for failing to meet the elevated neoclassical standards
for their genre.44
For Fielding’s narrator in Joseph Andrews, the two forms
served in part as complementary touchstones for exploring the
dangers of the age’s shifting literary tastes; just as the ancient
epics of Homer and Virgil were being replaced by the domestic
trivialities of the Richardsonian novel, so the timeless lessons
of classical history were being drowned out by the narcissistic
musings of men such as Cibber. By discussing epic in the context
of historiography and vice versa, Fielding’s narrator was calling
for a return to neoclassical ideals in both historical and fictional
literatures, weighing in on a stylistic debate that affected all va-
rieties of mimetic narrative representation.
Despite the immense critical attention lavished on Joseph
Andrews as a pseudo-epic, many of the narrator’s musings on
literary practice are historiographically minded, and the work’s
epic sensibilities often have a strong and immediate historical
counterpart. Even Fielding’s oft-quoted description of Joseph
Andrews as a “comic Epic-Poem in Prose” potentially takes on a
new meaning in relation to neoclassical descriptions of epic as “a
Copy in Verse” of histories “written in Prose” (p. 4).45 In the book’s
opening pages, Fielding’s narrator evokes both history and epic
by reiterating the two genres’ common moral goal of presenting
behavioral models to be imitated by the reader. As Ruth Mack
notes, the narrator’s sentiments directly echo the language of
Noelle Gallagher 639

contemporary historiographical writings, as he explains that

“Examples work more forcibly on the Mind than Precepts: And if
this be just in what is odious and blameable, it is more strongly
so in what is amiable and praise-worthy. Here Emulation most
effectually operates upon us, and inspires our Imitation in an
irresistible manner” (p. 17).46
While the emphasis on “amiable and praise-worthy” models
over “odious and blameable” ones might initially seem to align
Joseph Andrews with the epic and its “perfect” examples as against
history’s cautionary tales, a later passage complicates this initial
declaration by presenting the work’s examples of vice, and not
virtue, as central to its moral purposes.47 The novel’s portraits,
the narrator explains, aim to “hold the Glass to thousands in
their Closets, that they may contemplate their Deformity, and
endeavour to reduce it” (p. 189). Here, once again, the narrator’s
language is strongly reminiscent of historiographical criticism,
since history was often described as a “mirror for magistrates”—or,
to use Dryden’s formulation of the commonplace, “a Prospective-
Glass” to be used “for the regulation of … private manners, and
the management of publick affairs.”48 By employing the language
of historical theory in his statements of purpose, Fielding’s narra-
tor establishes his work as one concerned with the real world of
human behavior, and not just with the imagined ideals of fiction.
Fielding’s narrator goes on to connect the novel’s cautionary
elements with satire—a genre that is treated in this context as
a form of historical rather than fictional prose. After explaining
that his own work proffers “general and noble” correctives rather
than vicious attacks on particular individuals, he observes that
this same distinction “places the Boundary between, and distin-
guishes the Satirist from the Libeller” (p. 189). In aligning himself
with the satirist, who mocks general vices, as against the libeler,
who attacks specific individuals, Fielding’s narrator draws on
another of the perspectival relations used to distinguish general
history from more “particular” genres such as satire or memoir.
Like many Restoration and eighteenth-century satirists, he lays
claim to the noble didactic goals of formal history, professing the
“general and noble Purposes” common to both ancient history
and ancient epic (p. 189). Seen in this light, the novel invites
critical evaluation according to historiographical standards as
well as fictional ones; libel is an issue, in other words, because
the novel’s characters are based on real historical individuals,
not imagined ideals.
640 Historiography, the Novel, and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

Neoclassical aesthetics govern the narrator’s accounts of the

novel’s characters, then, as well as its narrative form. Fielding’s
speaker adopts the same typological model of portraiture ascribed
to both neoclassical history and ancient epic, explaining that the
novel’s characters, although imagined, all embody types with vari-
ous historical incarnations; the lawyer, for example, while recog-
nizable to present-day fiction readers, “is not only alive, but hath
been so these 4000 Years” (p. 189). Similarly, Mrs. Tow-wouse,
although appearing in Joseph Andrews only as a tavern maid,
“hath likewise in the Revolution of Ages sat on a Throne” (p. 190).
Seen in these terms, the novel’s characters can be understood
as evoking the universal archetypes associated with neoclassical
historical narrative. Their number and diversity are also consistent
with formal history’s broad scope, as the reader is introduced
to a wide assortment of minor characters whose stories don’t
always clearly relate to the main narrative, but whose allegorical
names—Mr. Fickle, Miss Grave-Airs, Colonel Courtly—signal their
typological status. This coterie of characters effectively functions
as a “cabinet” of types from which the novel’s reader may—like
the statesman reader of classical history—“make choice of Mod-
els that he finds proper.”49 Their stories, as Homer Goldberg has
observed, can in turn be interpreted as cautionary tales.50

Romance, Biography, and History Proper

Just as Joseph Andrews evokes classical historical narrative

as well as ancient epic, so its discussions of more recent works
situate contemporary histories and biographies alongside the
novel and the romance. The novel offers a fairly extensive analysis
of modern historiography, in fact, in the preface to book 3. Here,
Fielding’s narrator delivers his own version of the critical lament
over the declining quality of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
historical writing, denouncing works by Laurence Echard, Bul-
strode Whitelocke, and Lord Clarendon as inaccurate in their
portrayal of human nature. Contemporary historians’ interpretive
disagreements over petty details, he explains, have rendered their
works reliable only as topography or chorography, since “all agree
in the Scene where the Fact is supposed to have happened,” but
none can come to a consensus about persons or events (p. 186):
“as to the Actions and Characters of Men, their Writings are not
quite so authentic, of which there needs no other Proof than those
eternal Contradictions, occurring between two Topographers who
undertake the History of the same Country: For instance, between
Noelle Gallagher 641

my Lord Clarendon and Mr. Whitlock, between Mr. Echard and

Rapin, and many others; where Facts being set forth in a different
Light, every Reader believes as he pleases, and indeed the more
judicious and suspicious very justly esteem the whole as no other
than a Romance, in which the Writer hath indulged a happy and
fertile Invention” (pp. 185–6). In articulating these objections, the
narrator implicitly defines history as an elite genre stocked with
generic characters and universal ideals, as he bemoans the “eter-
nal Contradictions” that result from modern historians’ intensive
analyses of specific events and individual historical figures. If a
history can no longer provide timeless moral lessons or recount
the unchanging truths of human nature, he contends, it loses
its didactic value, devolving into a form of pleasure reading no
better than mere romance.
The narrator then praises Cervantes and Le Sage as writers
who, in contrast with contemporary historians, excel at provid-
ing an “authentic” account of human behavior. Again evoking the
tensions between epic and history, Fielding’s narrator suggests
that the writer of fictional prose, like the epic poet, has the power
to create behavioral examples that are more “perfect”—more rel-
evant, more familiar, more consistent—than those provided by
the historical record. A novel such as Don Quixote is thus “more
worthy the Name of a History” than the work of a seventeenth-
century historian such as Mariana, he explains, “for whereas the
latter is confined to a particular Period of Time, and to a particular
Nation; the former is the History of the World in general, at least
that Part which is polished by Laws, Arts and Sciences; and of that
from the time it was first polished to this day; nay and forwards,
as long as it shall so remain” (p. 188). Here, the narrator’s com-
parison of history and fiction repurposes the language of Aristo-
tle—and, by extension, of classically minded critics such as Rapin
and Dennis—in order to issue a call for a return to neoclassical
values. Like Dennis, he insists that history’s examples “are not
Philosophical enough to instruct, because they are too Particular,”
championing works such as Don Quixote and Gil Blas as the best
contemporary vehicles for the moral philosophy expected of both
neoclassical history and classical epic.51
Yet in the same way that the narrator’s references to epic verse
find their complement in references to historical literature, so his
endorsements of works such as Don Quixote ultimately emphasize
qualities that are common to fictional and historical prose. Indeed,
the genre best able to fulfill neoclassical history’s noble didactic
goals, according to the narrator’s claims, is not the novel per se,
642 Historiography, the Novel, and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

but rather “Biography”—a genre that he extends back to “anti-

ent Writers … such as Plutarch [and] Nepos,” as well as forward
to novelists such as Cervantes and Le Sage (p. 17). It is within
this multivalent biographical tradition that the narrator locates
his own work, as well as the two texts—Richardson’s Pamela
and Cibber’s Apology—to which he seeks to respond. By defin-
ing biography as both a historical and a fictional form, Fielding’s
narrator signals to the reader that his concern is with aesthetic or
ideological distinctions rather than with generic ones. His evalua-
tions of literature make a clear practice of distinguishing ancients
from moderns, useful biographies from trivial ones—but not, ulti-
mately, “true” from “false,” fictional from historical literatures.52 If
anything, Fielding’s narrator is privileging history against fiction,
making claims for the novel that complicate its alignment with
ancient epic by using a historical genre—biography—as a model.

Ancient theories, modern practices

As the narrator’s many discussions of romance, biography,

and history suggest, Joseph Andrews often purports to address
questions of literary genre, but its narrator frequently shifts be-
tween terms and categories without making any clear or consistent
distinctions. Critics have often been frustrated, for example, by
the narrator’s use of the word “romance” as both a derogatory
term, to denote the French heroic romances he wishes to mock,
and a descriptive one, as a term for novels like his own.53 The
same instability, I would suggest, characterizes some of the
novel’s discussions of neoclassical aesthetics; while the narrator
unequivocally espouses neoclassical values in his commentary,
his theories sometimes jar—perhaps deliberately—with the novel’s
overall practice.
Both the narrator’s validation of history as a counterbalance
to epic and his endorsement of biography as a substitute for his-
tory proper involve him in arguments that support a “particular”
form as against a more general one. If we follow the critical cor-
relation of universality with neoclassicism and particularity with
modernity, both of these claims would seem to align his novel
with a Richardsonian or Cibberesque sensibility, as against a
neoclassical one. A more complicated slippage in aesthetic val-
ues appears in the novel’s formal focus on everyday experiences
and ordinary persons—subjects more common in contemporary
than in ancient literature. While the narrator’s opening remarks
define Joseph Andrews as an epic on the basis of its “extended
Noelle Gallagher 643

and comprehensive” scale, the novel’s diegesis applies that epic

scale, as the narrator himself observes, to “Persons of inferiour
Rank, and consequently of inferiour Manners” (p. 4). As many
critics have noted, the mock-heroic features of the work—its
invocation of the muse “who presidest over Biography” (p. 238),
its parodies of epic battle scenes (pp. 138 and 238–40)—play off
this incongruity between the novel’s grandiloquent language and
its obscure or trivial subject matter.
While these pseudo-classical passages enable Fielding’s nar-
rator to forge associations between modern and ancient literary
aesthetics, they also, paradoxically, align Joseph Andrews with
the mock-heroic elements of contemporary historical literature—
including Cibber’s memoir. Just as the Apology offers tongue-
in-cheek comparisons between Cibber’s exploits and those of
“Alexander himself, or Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, when at
the Head of their first victorious Armies” in order to assert the
historical importance of an “ordinary” man, so Fielding’s narrator
uses the dramatic language of epic to laud—again, only semi-
ironically—the moral example provided by the quixotic Parson
Adams.54 Even in those scenes that do not enlist epic values,
Joseph Andrews demonstrates an attraction to “inferiour” subject
matter that makes the work in many ways reflective of, rather
than reactive against, the stylistic trends of its time.
Fielding’s narrator further explains that the comic writer’s
focus on everyday occurrences and “inferiour” persons, like the
memoirist’s account of his own life, not only permits but also
requires the use of eyewitness evidence: “it may not be always
so easy for a serious Poet to meet with the Great and the Admi-
rable; but Life every where furnishes an accurate Observer with
the Ridiculous” (pp. 4–5). Here, once again, Fielding’s narrator
aligns the work more closely with the historical literatures of its
own day—with Cibber’s insider account of everyday life within the
theater, say—than with the detached philosophical perspective
of the neoclassical historian. Although the narrator claims that
he strives to replicate formal history’s timeless character types,
his own authority as a speaker—much like that of the modern
memoirist—is rooted in his personal experiences. And just as
Cibber’s use of eyewitness reportage implicitly shifts the basis for
historical authority away from elite social status and onto personal
experience, so Fielding’s narrator ultimately attributes his broad
knowledge of mankind to his own specific sensory observations
rather than to an abstract knowledge of moral philosophy.
644 Historiography, the Novel, and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

To some extent, the narrator’s reliance on material exclusively

“taken from [his] own Observations and Experience” might even be
said to compromise the degree to which his characters do manage
to adhere to generic types (p. 10). By insisting that he has “used
the utmost Care to obscure” the identities of the real-life models for
his characters, Fielding’s narrator effectively raises the opposite
possibility—that some of the traits he has depicted might prove
so idiosyncratic as to expose the historical individuals behind his
fictional types (p. 10).55 Indeed, he finally admits that a reader may
manage to trace an idiosyncrasy back to its historical original,
but “only where the Failure characterized is so minute, that it
is a Foible only which the Party himself may laugh at as well as
any other” (p. 10). Once again, there is an evocative parallel here
with Cibber’s Apology—a work characterizing the petty failings
of a man who “deserve[s] to be laugh’d at.”56
Fielding’s narrator also counters his argument for broad char-
acter types by exempting a few notable figures from the rule: “as in
most of our particular Characters we mean not to lash Individuals,
but all of the like sort; so in our general Descriptions, we mean
not Universals, but would be understood with many Exceptions”
(p. 190). Citing as his examples “a Peer no less elevated by Nature
than by Fortune” and “a Commoner raised higher above the Mul-
titude by superiour Talents,” Fielding’s narrator again privileges
eyewitness observation over general principle, insisting that such
portraits “must be … known” because “they are taken from the
Life, and not intended to exceed it” (pp. 190–1). Unlike the epic
poet, then, who makes it his purpose to “inlarge” upon history,
the narrator here declares his attempts to remain faithful to past
and present reality, vowing not “to exceed” the boundaries set by
his own personal experience.
As in a work like Cibber’s Apology, neoclassical sensibilities
and modern aesthetics exist in tension with each other in Field-
ing’s novel, and they mark the work as a site for the enactment,
rather than the resolution, of stylistic conflict. Understood in
this way, the genius of Joseph Andrews lies neither in its noisy
endorsement of the ancients nor in its quiet adoption of the mod-
ern, but rather in the flexibility, variety, and skill with which it
manages to express or enact the debate between the two. Just
as the work embraces the historical alongside the fictional, so it
explores the possibilities in present-day, as well as ancient, liter-
ary standards. Like many declaredly neoclassical works, Joseph
Andrews ultimately operates by a contradictory logic, marshaling
an endorsement of classical standards in part so as to justify the
introduction of innovative postclassical techniques.
Noelle Gallagher 645

Looking Forward: Joseph Andrews as

“Historical Novel”

There are many ways by which we might connect a novel such

as Fielding’s with the historical literatures of its time, and while I
have only sketched a few, the potential for intellectual gains from
such connections remains open for critical exploration. Fielding’s
overtly expressed historiographical interests offer only one of many
ways of interweaving literary history with the history of historiog-
raphy, and they lay the groundwork for how we might place our
narrative of the novel’s development alongside a story of shifting
tastes in historical representation. On a final note, we might also
recognize some evocative foreshadowing in Fielding’s interest in
the relationship between history and the novel. Although it is Tom
Jones, with its references to the ’45, that critics most often link
to the tradition of the historical novel, the commentary in Joseph
Andrews often predicts and addresses the same representational
questions that were later to inspire Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott,
and other contributors to that genre.57 We might even see Joseph
Andrews as itself a kind of experimental historical novel—one that
seeks not to bring past persons and events to life, but rather to
revive the universal character types and timeless moral lessons
characteristic of formal neoclassical history.
However conservative Fielding’s historiographical tastes may
have seemed in their own historical moment, they also impor-
tantly foreshadow those of Romantic writers of radically different
literary and aesthetic sensibilities. In his argument for fictional
“Biography” as the genre best able to fulfill history’s didactic goals,
Fielding not only echoes Aristotle, but also anticipates writers
such as William Godwin, whose essay “Of History and Romance”
(1797) was to advance very similar arguments more than half a
century later.58 Fielding’s literary aesthetics may not have found
many supporters in the Romantic age, but his arguments for the
shared subjects and purposes of fictional and historical litera-
tures may have laid the foundation for many subsequent works.
How ironic, then, that the detailed, intimate style of portraiture
favored by Fielding’s two targets, Cibber and Richardson, was
eventually to become one of fiction’s greatest assets in represent-
ing the historical world.

NOTES

I would like to express my thanks to Mark Salber Phillips and Peter Sabor
for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.
646 Historiography, the Novel, and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clar-

1 

endon Press, 1967), p. 18. Subsequent references to Joseph Andrews are

from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by page number.
2 
Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Albert J. Rivero
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011).
3 
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Field-
ing (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1957), pp. 239–40.
4 
For other discussions of Fielding’s novel in opposition to Richardson,
see John Richetti, The English Novel in History, 1700–1780 (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1999), pp. 121–35; William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The
Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1998), pp. 231–76; and Maurice Johnson, Fielding’s Art of Fiction:
Eleven Essays on “Shamela,” “Joseph Andrews,” “Tom Jones,” and “Amelia”
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), pp. 47–60.
5 
Although Joseph Andrews makes reference to works in a wide variety
of different genres, even the most heavily appendicized critical editions of
Joseph Andrews overwhelmingly privilege fictional contexts over historical
ones. Paul A. Scanlon’s edition of Joseph Andrews (Ontario: Broadview Press,
2001), for example, provides excerpts from Pamela and Shamela in “Appendix
B: Pamela and Shamela,” pp. 428–58; from Don Quixote, the French novels
Le Roman Comique and Le Paysan Parvenu, and Alexander Pope’s translation
of the Iliad in “Appendix C: Other Works of Influence by Other Writers,” pp.
459–82; and from Fielding’s periodical essays and later novels in “Appendix
D: Other Related Writings by Fielding,” pp. 483–503. Adam Potkay’s edition
of Joseph Andrews (New York: Pearson Longman, 2008) includes Don Quixote,
Le Roman Comique, and the classical romance The Adventures of Theagenes
and Chariclia in “The Romance Tradition,” pp. 327–39; and a short selection
of writings on ethics in “Ethics and Theology,” pp. 340–52.
6 
Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian,
and Late Patentee of the Theatre-Royal. With an Historical View of the Stage
during his Own Time (London: John Watts, 1740); ECCO ESTC N016310.
7 
Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon
to Hume (Houndmills UK: Macmillan, 1996), especially pp. 23–45.
8 
Rene Rapin, Instructions for History with a Character of the Most Con-
siderable Historians, Ancient and Modern (London: A. G. and J. P., 1680);
EEBO Wing (2d edn.) R262. Pierre Le Moyne, Of the Art Both of Writing and
Judging of History with Reflections upon Ancient as Well as Modern Historians,
Shewing through What Defects There Are So Few Good, and That It Is Impos-
sible There Should Be So Many So Much as Tolerable (London: R. Sare and
J. Hindmarsh, 1695); EEBO Wing (2d edn.) L1046. For further discussion
of the influence of classical historiography on eighteenth-century English
historical writing, see George H. Nadel, “Philosophy of History before Histori-
cism,” History and Theory 3, 3 (1964): 291–315; Arnaldo Momigliano, The
Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1990), pp. 54–131; Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), pp. 1–55; Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of
the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1991), pp. 267–413; Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern
English Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 155–89; and
Noelle Gallagher 647

Howard D. Weinbrot, “Politics, Taste, and National Identity: Some Uses of

Tacitism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradi-
tion, ed. T. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1993), pp. 168–84.
9 
Le Moyne, pp. 53–4. For similar definitions, see, for example, Degory
Wheare, The Method and Order of Reading Both Civil and Ecclesiastical His-
tories in Which the Most Excellent Historians Are Reduced into the Order in
Which They Are Successfully to Be Read, and the Judgments of Learned Men,
Concerning Each of Them, Subjoin’d (London: Charles Brome, 1698), p. 15;
EEBO Wing (2d edn.) W1594; Rapin, Instructions, p. 19; Thomas Hearne,
Ductor Historicus: Or, A Short System of Universal History, and an Introduc-
tion to the Study of It, 2 vols. (London: Tim Childe, 1704–05), 1:119; ECCO
ESTC T091201. Le Moyne’s and Rapin’s texts first appeared in French, and
Wheare’s first appeared in Latin. Hearne’s is a substantially modified trans-
lation of Pierre Le Lorrain, Les Elémens de l’Histoire (Paris, 1696). See I. G.
Philip, “The Genesis of Thomas Hearne’s Ductor Historicus,” BLR 7, 5 (July
1966): 251–64.
10 
Rapin, Instructions, p. 105; see also Le Moyne, p. 76; Wheare, p. 324.
For a discussion of the emphasis on character in eighteenth-century history,
see Neil Hargraves, “Revelation of Character in Eighteenth-Century Histori-
ography and William Robertson’s History of the Reign of Charles V,” ECLife
27, 2 (Spring 2003): 23–48.
11 
Le Moyne, p. 131.
12 
Wheare, p. 324; see also John Dryden, “The Life of Plutarch,” in Prose,
1668–1691, vol. 17 of The Works of John Dryden, gen. ed. Edward Niles
Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg Jr. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971),
17:239–88, 270–1; Letters to a Young Nobleman (London: A. Millar, 1762), p.
21; ECCO ESTC T063764; David Hume, Philosophical Essays concerning Hu-
man Understanding (London: A. Millar, 1748), p. 134; ECCO ESTC T004022.
13 
Wheare, p. 298; see also Dryden, “The Life of Plutarch,” Works, 17:274;
Le Moyne, p. 30; Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and
Use of History to Which Are Added Two Letters, and Reflections upon Exile
(London: A. Millar, 1752), 1:15; ECCO ESTC T088772.
14 
On the growing market for formal history in the eighteenth century, see
D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2000); Karen O’Brien, “The History Market in Eighteenth-Century
England,” in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New
Essays, ed. Isabel Rivers (London: Leicester Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 105–33.
15 
See Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How
Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past & Present 129 (November 1990): 30–78.
16 
See Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical
Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), p. 10.
17 
For a lengthier analysis of satire and panegyric as forms of historical
writing, see Noelle Gallagher, “‘Partial to Some One Side’: The Advice-to-a-
Painter Poem as Historical Writing,” ELH 78, 1 (Spring 2011): 79–101.
18 
See title page for Cibber. Examples abound: on one occasion, Cibber
likens his postproduction euphoria to the feelings experienced by “Alexander
himself, or Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, when at the Head of their first vic-
torious Armies” (p. 107); he later compares his decision to stage pantomimes
with Henry IV’s change in religious principles (p. 300).
648 Historiography, the Novel, and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in

19 

Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976),

pp. 193–226.
20 
See Fielding, pp. 3–11, 17–20, and 185–91.
21 
Robert M. Wallace, “Fielding’s Knowledge of History and Biography,” SP
44, 1 (January 1947): 89–107, 90. The most well-known account of Fielding’s
novel in relation to the epic remains that of Watt in The Rise of the Novel; for
other accounts, see, for example, E. T. Palmer, “Fielding’s Joseph Andrews:
A Comic Epic in Prose,” ES 52, 4 (August 1971): 331–9; Homer Goldberg,
“Comic Prose Epic or Comic Romance: The Argument of the Preface to Joseph
Andrews,” PQ 43, 2 (April 1964): 193–215; Mark Spilka, “Fielding and the
Epic Impulse,” Criticism 11, 1 (Winter 1969): 68–77.
22 
Horace, Epistles Book II and Epistle to the Pisones (“Ars Poetica”), ed.
Niall Rudd (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 63, 70.
23 
Le Moyne, pp. 5 and 4.
24 
Dryden, “An Account of the Ensuing Poem, in a Letter to the Honor-
able, Sir Robert Howard,” in Poems, 1649–1680, vol. 1 of Works, ed. Hooker
and Swedenberg (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1956), 1:49–59, 50;
Edward Howard, The British Princes: An Heroic Poem (London: T. N., 1669),
sig. A5v; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) H2965; see also sig. A8r, where Howard asks
the reader “not to look upon my Poem as a History.”
25 
Edward Howard, Caroloaides, or the Rebellion of Forty One. In Ten Books.
A Heroick Poem (London: J. B., 1689), sig. A2v; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) H2966.
26 
John Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entitled, Prince Arthur, An Heroick
Poem. With Some General Critical Observations, and Several New Remarks
upon Virgil (London: S. Heyrick and R. Sare, 1696), p. 9; EEBO Wing (2d
edn.) D1040.
27 
Richard Blackmore, Prince Arthur, An Heroic Poem in Ten Books (London:
Awnshaw and John Churchill, 1695), sig. b1r–v; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) B3080.
28 
Tom Brown, “To Sir W. S.,” in Familiar and Courtly Letters Written by
Monsieur Voiture to Persons of the Greatest Honour, Wit, and Quality of Both
Sexes in the Court of France (London: Sam. Briscoe, 1700), pp. 212–21, 217–8;
EEBO Wing (2d edn.) 2160:03. See also Rapin, Reflections on Aristotle’s
Treatise of Poesie, Containing the Necessary, Rational, and Universal Rules
for Epick, Dramatick, and the Other Sorts of Poetry: With Reflections on the
Works of the Ancient and Modern Poets, and Their Faults Noted (London: T.
N., 1674), p. 76; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) R270; Blackmore, sig. a2v.
29 
Dennis, p. 44.
30 
Dennis, p. 55. Dennis also quotes the French neoclassicist Rene le
Bossu as insisting that “the Hero must every-where appear to be animated
with the same Spirit which inspir’d him at first. That Quality which makes
the fundamental Part of his Character, is to predominate always, and upon
all Occasions” (p. 54).
31 
Rapin, Reflections, sig. a2v. See also Rapin, Reflections, pp. 79–80;
Dennis, pp. 17–8.
32 
Edward Phillips, Theatrum Poetarum, or A Compleat Collection of the
Poets Especially the Most Eminent, of All Ages, the Antients, Distinguish’t from
the Moderns in Their Several Alphabets (London: Charles Smith, 1675), sig.
6v; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) P2075. Poet Edward Howard observed that Virgil,
Noelle Gallagher 649

for example, had made his “Dido and his Aeneas contemporaries, which ac-
cording to the strictness of Chronology, could not be by some hundreds of
years” (British Princes, sig. a1r).
33 
See, for example, Dryden’s diagnosis of the “broken action” of “Annus
Mirabilis” or Dennis’s complaint that Blackmore “corrupt[s] the Unity of the
Action” in Prince Arthur (Dryden, “Account of the Ensuing Poem,” in Poems,
1649–1680, vol. 1 of Works, 1:49–59, 50; Dennis, pp. 20–7, 22).
34 
Rapin, Reflections, p. 82.
35 
Edward Phillips, sig. 6r.
36 
Rapin, Reflections, p. 75.
37 
Dennis, p. 5. See also Edward Howard, Caroloaides, sig. A3r; Samuel
Wesley, The Life of Our Blessed Lord & Saviour, Jesus Christ, An Heroic Poem,
Dedicated to Her Most Sacred Majesty (London: Charles Harper and Benj.
Motte, 1693), leaf 10 (unpag); EEBO Wing (2d edn.) W1371.
38 
Edward Phillips, sig. 6r.
39 
Rapin, Reflections, sig. a2r. See also, for example, Henry More, An
Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness, or, A True and Faithfull Rep-
resentation of the Everlasting Gospel of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ
(London: J. Flesher, 1660), p. 44; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) M2658; François-
Hédelin abbé d’Aubignac, The Whole Art of the Stage Containing Not Only the
Rules of the Drammatick Art, But Many Curious Observations about It, Which
May Be of Great Use to the Authors, Actors, and Spectators of Plays (London:
William Cadman, 1684), pp. 65–6; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) A4185.
40 
Rapin, Reflections, p. 75.
41 
Edward Phillips, sig. 7r.
42 
Historian Gilbert Burnet, for example, explained that “when a man
undertakes a History, he ought to be well informed of all that passed on both
sides, and is obliged to publish every thing that is of Importance … But he
that writes Memoires from such a Collection of Papers that are in his hands,
has no such ties on him, being only obliged to give a faithful account of such
things as are in his Papers” (The Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James
and William, Dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald, &c. in Which an Account Is
Given of the Rise and Progress of the Civil Wars of Scotland, with Other Great
Transactions Both in England and Germany, from the Year 1625, to the Year
1652 [London: J. Grover, 1677], sig. a1v; EEBO Wing [2d edn.] B5832). For
a contemporary critical discussion of the relationship between history and
memoirs, see Hicks, p. 28.
43 
On the critical denigration of Restoration and early eighteenth-century
historiography, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Re-
publican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991), pp. 49–59; Hicks, pp. 1–22. Hicks’s notes also provide a thorough
survey of contemporary eighteenth-century versions of the complaint. See
Hicks, p. 217n1.
44 
Blackmore, sig. a2r. See also Blackmore, sig. c1r; Edward Howard, Brit-
ish Princes, sig. A4r. Several twentieth-century literary critics have also noted
the problematic nature of epic in the eighteenth century. See, for example, W.
Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge MA:
Belknap Press, 1970); and Dustin Griffin, “Milton and the Decline of Epic in
the Eighteenth Century,” NLH 14, 1 (Autumn 1982): 143–54.
650 Historiography, the Novel, and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

Le Moyne, p. 4.
45 

Ruth Mack in fact suggests that Joseph Andrews satirizes the doctrine
46 

of exemplarity by highlighting Joseph’s inability to act as a “timeless, universal

type” himself or to imitate the successful example of his sister. See Mack,
Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-Century
Britain (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 63–9, 66.
47 
It is perhaps for this reason that the novel’s heroes are—as several crit-
ics have noted—not particularly convincing as moral exemplars. See Mack,
pp. 63–9; Warner, pp. 246–52; and J. Paul Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry
Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1975), especially pp. 111–6.
48 
Dryden, “The Life of Plutarch,” Works, 17:239–88, 270; see also Hearne,
1:113.
49 
Le Moyne, p. 42.
50 
Goldberg, “The Interpolated Stories in Joseph Andrews or ‘The History
of the World in General’ Satirically Revised,” MP 63, 4 (May 1966): 295–310.
51 
Dennis, p. 5.
52 
Brian McCrea sees Fielding as attempting “to portray the world both as
it ought to be and as it is” in Tom Jones, but relates this goal to the romance
and the newspaper (“Romances, Newspapers, and the Style of Fielding’s True
History,” SEL 21, 3 [Summer 1981]: 471–80, 479).
53 
See, for example, Goldberg, “Comic Prose Epic”; Arthur L. Cooke,
“Henry Fielding and the Writers of Heroic Romance,” PMLA 62, 4 (December
1947): 984–94.
54 
Cibber, p. 107.
55 
Paul Pickrel also observes, “An apparent contradiction in Fielding’s
approach to character is this: he justifies his work on the grounds that it
will change the reader, but the work itself presents a view of human nature
as by and large unchangeable” (“Flat and Round Characters Reconsidered,”
JNT 18, 3 [Fall 1988]: 181–98).
56 
See Cibber, p. 3.
57 
For discussions of Tom Jones in relation to historical writing and
historical phenomena, see, for example, Hamilton Beck, “The Novel between
1740 and 1780: Parody and Historiography,” JHI 46, 3 (July–September
1985): 405–16; Jill Campbell, Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Field-
ing’s Plays and Novels (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), especially pp.
131–200; and Peter J. Carlton, “Tom Jones and the ’45 Once Again,” SNNTS
20, 4 (Winter 1988): 361–73; McCrea, pp. 471–80.
58 
William Godwin, “‘Of History and Romance’ by William Godwin,” in
Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle
(Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1988), pp. 359–73.