University of Virginia Library

Dating Fielding's Letters to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
by
Martin C. Battestin

When he was a young man trying to establish himself as a playwright, Henry Fielding turned for advice and assistance to his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the celebrated bluestocking. Two letters from Fielding to Lady Mary survive, both from this early period.[1] One of these, dated "London, 7br 4" [i.e. September 4], explicitly concerns the darkest of his comedies, The Modern Husband, a copy of which Fielding sent her for her "Perusal" and "Judgment." The "Scenes," he explained, were "written on a Model I never yet attempted," and he was therefore "exceedingly anxious least they should find less Mercy from you than my lighter Productions." Though Fielding did not specify the year in which he wrote this letter, scholars have confidently placed it in 1730; for The Craftsman of 19 September 1730 announced that the play was then ready for staging and that it "is said to bear a great Reputation." The Modern Husband, which was not in fact staged until the following season, appears to have circulated in manuscript in September 1730, and Lady Mary would have been among the first to receive a copy. Twice in his published works Fielding hints that she cordially approved the play.[2]

Scholars have been less successful, however, in dating and identifying the subject of Fielding's other letter to Lady Mary. Fielding begins this letter, dated vaguely "Wednesday Evening," as follows:

Fielding's biographers and the editor of Lady Mary's correspondence surmise that he is here also referring to The Modern Husband, which was first performed at Drury Lane on 14 February 1731/2, and that he wrote the letter in that same month when sending her a complimentary copy of the work,[3] which was published on 21 February, a Monday.[4] But this conjecture must be mistaken: if Lady Mary read The Modern Husband in its entirety in the copy Fielding sent her on 4 September 1730, then the play he here states she has read only "three Acts of last spring" must be some other work—"last spring" being, from the point of reference of the publication date of The Modern Husband, the spring of 1731. Furthermore, Fielding's phrasing suggests that what he "presum'd" to send her was not merely the published book of a play which had already been staged, but rather a manuscript "Copy" of a play he had recently completed and was now submitting to her for her "Judgment."

To which of Fielding's other plays, then, does the letter of "Wednesday Evening" refer? Since it was only partly finished after he had written three Acts, it must have been, like The Modern Husband, one of his regular five-act comedies. Of these, the only other one we know that Lady Mary read, criticized and approved—we know because Fielding tells us so in dedicating the play to her—is Love in Several Masques, the earliest of his plays, produced at Drury Lane on Friday, 16 February 1727/8. Indeed, considering the well-known reluctance of the managers at Drury Lane to risk staging any new play, let alone one by a tyro twenty years old, most students of Fielding plausibly suppose that his début as a playwright was owing in large part to Lady Mary's influence.

We may remark, furthermore, that the substance and even the phrasing of the letter agree very well with the particular compliments Fielding pays Lady Mary in his Dedication, which opens as follows:

In the letter Fielding similarly apologizes for his presumption and the unworthiness of his work while he praises Lady Mary's "Goodness" and her "Judgment" and expresses relief that, although his play received her "Censure," that censure was "light" enough to encourage him to finish it. This, according to the letter, had been her response when she read the first three Acts of the play in question, just as here, in the Dedication, Fielding attributes his vanity in turning playwright to her "Indulgence, on the first Perusal of" Love in Several Masques.

If we assume that Love in Several Masques is the play in question, the "Wednesday Evening" would not be that of 28 February 1727/28; for by the time the comedy was published on Friday, 23 February, Fielding was aware that Lady Mary had not only read and approved the manuscript, but had attended two of the four performances—loyal gestures which he gratefully acknowledged in the Dedication. The letter accompanied the manuscript, not the book of the play.[5]

Unfortunately, though we can safely eliminate The Modern Husband as a possibility, we cannot state with perfect certainty that Love in Several Masques is the play in question. It is possible, if less likely, that Fielding was referring to The Temple Beau, the second of his regular comedies to be staged; The Temple Beau was first performed on 26 January 1729/30 at the

newly established theatre in Goodman's Fields, presumably after it had been rejected at Drury Lane. In this case, however, "last spring," the spring of 1729, would be a time when Fielding was abroad in Leyden until 30 April (N.S.), after which he may have traveled for a month or two on the Continent before returning home with his fortunes decidedly under a cloud.[6] He was unable to pay his debts and he was still smarting from the less than enthusiastic reception accorded Love in Several Masques. These circumstances might explain the tone of the letter, which, besides being appropriately deferential, is curiously morose—Fielding declaring that Lady Mary's "Goodness" in consenting to criticize his "unworthy Performances" constitutes not only "the greatest," but "indeed only Happiness of my Life." But there is no evidence that Lady Mary read The Temple Beau; she was very ill in September 1729, as the new theatrical season opened. And Fielding's fortunes were even more uncertain in 1727; without more to go on, it is pointless to speculate on the causes of the vague discontent he expresses in the letter.

Two other, still less likely possibilities are Rape upon Rape and The Wedding Day. Rape upon Rape was staged at the Little Haymarket Theatre on 23 June 1730, the culmination of a season in which Fielding had at last tasted success with his irregular plays, The Author's Farce and Tom Thumb. The Wedding Day, which Fielding declared to be "the third Dramatic Performance [he] ever attempted" (the second being the irregular comedy Don Quixote in England, which he sketched out at Leyden in 1728), was not "finished" until the season of 1730-31,[7] when he again had less reason to be as glum and anxious as the tone of the letter suggests.

On balance, then, we may tentatively conclude that the "Copy" Fielding sent his clever cousin on that "Wednesday Evening" was a manuscript draft of Love in Several Masques, and the Wednesday in question a day in, say, early September 1727, shortly before the comedy was accepted for performance at Drury Lane.[8] This letter would in any case be the earliest of Fielding's extant correspondence.

Notes