In June 1739, in order to secure evidence for an action of libel,
agents of the Walpole ministry raided the offices of the printer and editor
of the Opposition organ, Common Sense, and seized their
papers. Of these, 218 autograph items, the great majority representing copy
for the printer, are preserved together at the Public Record Office
(Chancery Lane)—call number: SP9/35. Since this collection by no
means comprises a complete run of the printer's copy to the time of
seizure, and since—no doubt for prudential reasons—none of
the copy
is signed, scholars will find this material of limited use in identifying
contributors, though, by a comparative analysis of the handwriting, it is a
simple matter to distinguish, in a general way, articles written by the editor
from those submitted by occasional correspondents to the journal.
Included among these papers, however, is at least one item of
exceptional interest; for here, in the form of a pseudonymous letter to the
editor recommending silence as "the utmost Perfection of human Wisdom,"
is the only extant literary prose manuscript by Henry Fielding. Signed
"Mum Budget" and dated from Devon on April Fool's Day 1738, this witty
piece, though published in Common Sense on 13 May, has
never been attributed to Fielding. It is valuable, however, not only as an
important addition to the canon, representing one of Fielding's earliest
known publications as a periodical essayist, the form in which—as
editor
of The Champion (1739-41), The True Patriot
(1745-46), The Jacobite's Journal (1747-48), and The
Covent-Garden Journal (1752)—he would soon outshine every
rival
for a decade. What is more, appearing in the midst of the
two-and-a-half-year interval between the passage of the Theatrical Licensing
Act (June 1737), which put an
end to his career as a dramatist, and the publication of The
Champion (November 1739), when he emerged as principal
journalist
for the Opposition, the essay sheds light on Fielding's personal
circumstances and political relationships in one of the most obscure periods
of his life. Because
literary manuscripts by Fielding are so rare
[1] —and because this, indeed,
is the only
one extant which he intended as printer's copy—I will reproduce it
here
photographically, as well as supplying an annotated transcript for more
convenient reference. Fully to appreciate its implications, both political and
biographical, we need first, however, to review the circumstances in which
Fielding wrote it.
Sponsored by his friends in Opposition, Common Sense: or,
The
Englishman's Journal began publication on 5 February 1737, during
Fielding's final season as manager of the Little Theatre in the Haymarket.
In a month's time, with the production of The Historical
Register, he would cap the brilliant success of Pasquin
a
year earlier—a triumph no less spectacular than it was disastrous in
its
consequences for his career as a playwright; for, though Fielding's satire
in these plays spared neither party, it linked him in the public mind with the
Opposition's cause and moved the Ministry to silence him. As one
ministerial writer was well assured, Fielding's success with
Pasquin had caused him to be "secretly buoy'd
up,
by some of the greatest Wits and finest
Gentlemen
of the Age"[2] —among them,
surely, Lyttelton and Chesterfield, who had now initiated the new journal.
Its editor and principal writer,
however, was the Irishman, Charles Molloy (d. 1767), himself a comic
dramatist manqué and, as the former author of
Fog's
Weekly Journal (1728-37), a journalist well skilled in the art of
making ministerial politicians die sweetly in print. Its printer was the
inflexible Tory, John Purser.
In a sense Fielding, too, was associated with this paper from the start;
for its title had been borrowed from the "emblematical" figure whose
"Tragedy" is rehearsed, to hilarious effect, in the final acts of
Pasquin. Though in Pasquin Common Sense
suffered what might seem her inevitable fate in the age of Walpole, in the
pages of Molloy's weekly paper, presumably, she would live on, with due
acknowledgments to Fielding, who understood her best: "An ingenious
Dramatick Author," we are reminded in the first issue, "has consider'd
Common Sense as so extraordinary a Thing, that he has lately, with great
Wit and Humour, not only personified it, but dignified it too with the Title
of a Queen . . . ." A few months later, when Fielding needed
a "Vehicle" by which to answer a ministerial attack against the alleged
licentiousness of his political satire in The Historical Register,
it was, predictably, Molloy
who provided it.
[3] As C. W. Nichols
saw some time ago, the letter signed "Pasquin" published in
Common
Sense for 21 May 1737 is certainly by Fielding, an attribution
Molloy
himself confirms, albeit obliquely, in his leader of 21 October 1738.
[4] That Fielding, especially after the
Licensing Act had put a stop to his play writing, might contribute other
pieces to his friends' journal has always seemed likely. W. L. Cross, for
instance, wished to assign to him a pair of essays treating affectation as the
source of ridicule, which were published in
Common Sense
(3,
10 September 1737); and a recent anthologist of Fielding's criticism has
considered Cross's suggestion plausible enough to justify reprinting
them.
[5] But these essays, though the
opening of the first does bear some resemblance to Fielding's definition of
"the true Ridiculous" in the Preface to
Joseph Andrews
(1742), are stylistically quite different from his usual manner; and unlike
his known contributions to the journal, they take the form of leaders, not
pseudonymous letters to the editor—a circumstance suggesting that
they
are by someone (Chesterfield is the usual candidate) whose connection with
the paper was closer and more regular than Fielding's. Unfortunately, the
manuscripts of these essays, which would settle such speculation, have not
survived; but Cross's reasons for attributing them to Fielding are not
persuasive.
We may take it as certain, I believe, that after the "Pasquin" letter
almost precisely a year went by before Fielding made his next appearance
in Common Sense, this time as that wonderfully garrulous
advocate of the wisdom of holding one's tongue, "Mum Budget." The essay
begins, accordingly, with his anticipating the editor's surprise "at not
hearing from me in so long time." Besides making an amusing addition to
the canon, this piece is of considerable interest biographically, for what it
reveals both of Fielding's own sense of the events that precipitated the
Licensing Act, and of his hardening attitude toward Sir Robert Walpole,
whose patronage he once had courted.
[6] Indeed, to those who care about
the kind
of man Fielding was, one of the essay's special pleasures derives from its
tone: that he could make a joke of the hard blow the minister had dealt
him—by thus writing a witty
tour de force on the
wisdom of
keeping one's mouth shut in Walpole's England—is part of what one
finds so admirable in his character. For, as is evident here for the first
time, Fielding was himself convinced that, whatever may have been its
general utility to the government, the Licensing Act had been pushed
through Parliament specifically to muzzle him, and that, whatever other
plays may have
annoyed the prime minister, it was the satiric characterization of him as
Quidam in
The Historical Register which proved to be the
last
offending straw. After a long and humorous preamble, the essay from this
point takes the political turn for which, no doubt, it was chiefly written.
The yarn about the whimsical "Coffee House Politician" who was so fond
of silence that he bribed others "to hold their Tongue" and who by such
means became "the Oracle of the House" is, of course, a transparent
allegory of Walpole. The old gentleman's habit of urging "weighty Motions
concerning Tobacco, Coffee,
&c." recalls the prime
minister's unpopular Excise Scheme of 1733,
[7] as his way of fainting "at the
Sound of a
Musquet" ridicules his pacific policies toward Spain at a time when
"
Spanish Depradations" against English ships were a constant
theme of the Opposition press and in March 1738 the burden of petitions
presented to Parliament by
aggrieved merchants.
[8] His droll
indulgence of the inane and loquacious waiter, "
young Will,"
is a hit, surely, at Walpole's "creature," Sir William Yonge (1693-1755),
no less "notorious a Babbler" in "the House," who at the time was
consolidating his reputation for meaningless eloquence in speeches
supporting the minister's foreign policy.
[9] Clearly, however even-handed
Fielding
had earlier tried to be
in his political satires, he was ready now to take sides against Walpole and
his ministry. This essay is his first in a vein that, late in the following year,
would become familiar to readers of
The Champion.
The discovery of this manuscript, of course, makes the possibility all
the more attractive that Fielding made other contributions to
Common
Sense during the eighteen months that would pass before he
launched
his own paper in behalf of the Opposition. Textually, the relationship
between the manuscript and the two printed versions of the
essay—that
of the original issue of Common Sense (13 May 1738) and
that
appearing in the two-volume reprint (1738-39)—reveals, however,
certain
peculiarities which complicate the problem of identifying Fielding's hand
elsewhere in the journal. Most significant of these is the fact that, in setting
the article, the compositor systematically, and without editorial authority,
altered a characteristic of Fielding's style which has long served as an
indispensable test for anyone proposing additions to the canon: in every
instance Fielding's favorite archaism, the use of hath for
has, has been modernized. And presumably
his doth's would have been similarly treated if he had had
occasion to use that verb in the essay. To compound the problem, it is clear
that this particular sophistication was not a feature of Purser's "house
style": the printed versions of the "Pasquin" letter retain Fielding's
characteristic usage. Indeed, Molloy himself often (though not invariably)
prefers the same archaisms. These changes from the manuscript, therefore,
would seem to be an expression of the stylistic taste of a particular
compositor—who, since he was no doubt employed at other times by
Purser, may be supposed to have treated other essays in the same manner.
What this practice means to anyone looking for signs of Fielding's
authorship in the published numbers of Common Sense is
obvious: we cannot now automatically exclude an essay from consideration
merely because it shows has and does where
Fielding would have used hath and doth.
Inspection of the manuscript, and collation of the manuscript with
the printed versions, reveal two other sources of possible confusion.
Molloy, for instance, was not above tampering with Fielding's phrasing
when, to his by no means infallible ear, it seemed infelicitous. Thus in the
second sentence of the manuscript Fielding's forceful declaration "that the
utmost Perfection of human Wisdom is Silence" is padded out by Molloy
to read, "that the utmost Perfection that human Wisdom is capable of
attaining to is, Silence"—a pointless adulteration of the original
which I
have ignored in transcribing the essay. Another such revision occurs at the
end of the first sentence of the penultimate paragraph, where Molloy
obliterated Fielding's own phrase and substituted the words "maintained in
It as long as he lived." Happily, Molloy did not take many such liberties
with Fielding's text. Even so, this essay in its published form presents an
additional, if no doubt minor, hazard to anyone trying to weigh its claims
to be Fielding's work: we would be
right in supposing that Fielding could not have written the feeble phrase in
the first example above, but we would be wrong to infer therefore that
Fielding had not written the essay as a whole. And finally, anyone seeking
Fielding's traces in the pages of the two-volume reprint of
Common
Sense may expect to encounter numerous pitfalls of another sort.
For,
though the essay as originally published includes Molloy's revisions as well
as a number of errors committed by the compositor, who in several places
misread the manuscript, the version in the reprint is more imperfect still;
besides preserving the faults of the original issue, it introduces others of its
own, including the deletion of four entire phrases.
For these reasons, then, the task of identifying Fielding's hand in the
published numbers of Common Sense cannot be undertaken
very
confidently. Without the hath-doth test to rely on, we have
lost
one simple means of narrowing the range of possibilities. The manuscripts
preserved at the Public Record Office are, of course, a considerable help
toward this end, and in some instances may serve to chasten the rash: if,
for example, we set aside the hath-doth test, the leader
published in the journal on 30 September 1738—an ironic allegory
of
corruption in English society written in the form of a "Letter from Common
Honesty to Common Sense"—sounds rather like Fielding; but, as the
manuscript proves, he was not the author.[10] And what about the issue of 23
December
1738, in which the author anticipates the satiric analogy between Walpole
and Jonathan Wild which Fielding would develop at length in his novel? If,
like W. R.
Irwin,[11] we had resisted the
temptation to attribute
this leader to Fielding chiefly because it fails the
hath test, we
may wish now to have another, closer look; the manuscript, unfortunately,
has not been preserved. I doubt, however, that this is Fielding's work:
though the basic device of the satire is identical with that of
Jonathan
Wild—and represents, moreover, the earliest known instance
of the
analogy after its original occurrence in
Mist's Weekly Journal
(12, 19 May 1725)—yet Fielding could not have developed the idea
in so
dogged a manner, and his humor, needless to say, is never so lifeless and
heavy-handed. A more playful piece that might well be his is the clever
satire of Theophilus Cibber (
Common Sense, 19 May 1739)
which takes the form of a brazen, hectoring epistle, partly in verse, from
"Pistol" to the editor—"Pistol" being, of course, Fielding's name for
Theophilus Cibber in
Tumble-Down Dick (1736) and
The
Historical Register, where he is made to strut and rant in a
similar vein.
[12] But again, there is no
manuscript to confirm the attribution.
Since all the extant manuscripts of the journal antedate 27-28 June
1739, when Walpole's agents confiscated them,[13] they offer no clues to the
authorship of
any essays published after that time. In my opinion, however, Fielding did
make at least one, and quite possibly two, further contributions to
Common Sense during the period before The
Champion began publication on 15 November. On 15 September
Molloy devoted his front page to two witty and learned letters from,
ostensibly,
two anonymous correspondents. The first is a political piece which begins
with a friendly caveat to the editor—"The Restraint, or Excise,
which
Wit may some Time or other suffer, will confine the Use of it altogether
to Manuscripts or Discourse; and even then, the Use of it may lead its
Owner into great Inconveniencies, if he has not the Art to check it, or let
it loose with Judgment and Discretion"—and proceeds through
references
to Tacitus and Juvenal, Bacon and Ralegh, to apply the lessons of history
to present politics, most particularly to the consequences of corruption and
luxury in high places and to the threat ministerial "Whisperers" post to
freedom of expression. The second is on a moral theme, being the droll
complaint of a man who has pored over many books hoping in vain that the
wisdom of the ancients might cure him of his favorite
vices—"
Talkativeness" and "
Intemperance in
eating and
drinking." Both these letters show
has and
does
instead of Fielding's usual archaisms; but, with some reservations about the
first, I believe they are his work. Certainly, as the "Mum Budget" essay
attests, few others at this time could speak more feelingly, or with such
humor and playful erudition, about the "great Inconveniencies" authors
might suffer owing to the "Restraint, or Excise," on "Wit" in Walpole's
England. And again, with "Mum Budget's" views on the wisdom of silence
in mind, there is, at least, a witty symmetry worthy of Fielding in this new
piece on talkativeness from a man who, though he has "a thousand Precepts
in [his] Budget against going too far," finds them all sadly ineffectual.
Might we not see these two letters, treating political and moral matters in
that humorous way so characteristic of Fielding's manner in
The
Champion, as a sort of preliminary exercise calculated to
demonstrate
his qualifications for conducting a periodical paper of his own? However
that may be, I do believe he wrote them.
Proving he did is a very different matter of course, perhaps for another
occasion.
What follows is an annotated transcript of the manuscript in the
Public Record Office (Chancery Lane)—call number: SP9/35, items
215-16. The manuscript itself, comprising two folio sheets (12½ by
7¾ inches) with writing on both sides, is photographically reproduced
in the plates accompanying this article. In preparing the transcript, I have
tried to convey a sense of Fielding's original intentions. Whenever I was
confident that I could distinguish these from the changes introduced by
Molloy as he edited the copy, I have disregarded the latter in order to
restore Fielding's own phrasing and his own practice with respect to the
accidentals, particularly paragraphing. Unfortunately, though it is
comparatively easy to distinguish between author and editor in substantive
matters—Molloy's hand being quite different from
Fielding's— it is
virtually impossible to do so in the case of pointing. Elsewhere, in
his correspondence, Fielding tends toward minimal punctuation;
[14] but he may well have followed a
different
practice when marking copy for publication—and since the present
manuscript is the only such copy by him which has survived, there is no
basis for comparison. Some decisions affecting
capitalization—especially
the capitalization of nouns— were also difficult, since the form
Fielding
gives certain letters is constant, whether he intends them for upper or lower
case: this is true of his
m,
o,
s,
u,
v,
w, and occasionally his
a. When he means to capitalize these letters he simply writes
them larger; and size being a relative thing, his intention is not always
clear. In doubtful cases, therefore, I have followed his normal practice of
capitalizing substantive nouns. Finally, in annotating the essay, I have not
glossed biographical or political matters when these have been dealt with
above.
* * *
