Subjects
A Political Biography of Henry Fielding
J A Downie
Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies
978 1 85196 915 9: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 680 6
Best known today as the author of three seminal novels, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Amelia, Henry Fielding (1707–1754) was the most successful playwright of his day until Walpole put an end to politics on the stage by passing the theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 – ‘the greatest dramatist, with the single exception of Shakespeare, produced by England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century’, according to George Bernard Shaw. Turning to political journalism, Fielding wrote the lead essays for periodicals such as the Champion (1739–41), True Patriot (1745–6) and Jacobite’s Journal (1747–8), as well as swingeing political satire in prose and verse.
Although scholars agree that Fielding subscribed to the principles of the revolution of 1688, existing accounts of his political ideas are insufficiently aware not only of the structure of politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, but of the ways in which the various strands of Whig political ideology developed during the sixty years following this event. This political biography explains and illustrates what ‘being a Whig’ meant to Fielding.
Sample pages
Readership
Eighteenth-Century Studies
Contents
Introduction
1 ‘So Dissipated, Though Well Born and Well-Educated a Youth’
2 ‘Unshap’d Monsters of a Wanton Brain!’: 1728–1731
3 ‘Court Poet’?: 1732–1735
4 ‘Dramatick Satire’: 1736–1739
5 ‘Writ in Defence of the Rights of the People’: 1739–1741
6 The Political Significance of The Opposition. A Vision
7 ‘There are Several Boobies who are Squires’: 1742–1745
8 ‘A Strenuous Advocate for the Ministry’: 1745–1748
9 ‘A Hearty Well-Wisher to the Glorious Cause of Liberty’: Tom Jones and the Forty-Five
10 ‘This Botcher in Law and Politics’: 1749–1754
Conclusion
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