University of Virginia Library

II
The Textual Implications of the List

Fielding, famously, compared his writing to a banquet laid out for his readers, and we might consider the lower orders in his list as folk who have come for a power lunch at a posh restaurant, less concerned for what they eat and drink than for their visible association with Prince Frederick and the nobility, at the better tables. Everyone is looking at everyone else, and an informed observer may note many gradations of decorum in the number and quality of their orders. Royal-paper copies are about an inch taller, twice as thick, cost twice as much as the ordinary paper, and do not enjoy the normal trade discount of seven copies for the price of six.[29] The stiff paper and extra weight made for awkward reading, but that was not the point; the conspicuous size and expense advertised the subscriber's status. Even today, the visitor to Sir Robert Walpole's residence at Houghton Hall may readily see why he was known as the Great Man; some god, one feels, inserted a tube into an ordinary library and blew.

To avoid the taint of trade, multiple subscriptions are normally expressed in royal-paper units, and in the ordinary paper rarely rise above two or three copies. When a bookseller like Andrew Millar or Edward Easton subscribes for a single copy, he acts on his own account, as a friend, for he cannot hope to profit from the excessive advance price. Otherwise, like Robert Dodsley or James Leake, he will subscribe in multiples of six ordinary copies, pocketing the seventh as a reward for his solicitations. The bookseller like John Peele, who takes ten royal-paper copies, could expect neither commercial nor social advantage from his subscription; we may thus infer that he is acting for an armigerous client. Ralph Allen, indeed, subscribed in secret for the requisite sum,[30] and since only three other subscribers took so many royal-paper copies, it is likely enough that this is his subscription.

Conversely, subscriptions for multiple copies on ordinary paper, however

suitable for people in the trade, look mean or odd in a gentleman. Did Bubb Dodington gape after a free copy, when he subscribed for six? W. L. Cross supposed that Charles Fleetwood distributed his twenty copies among the players of Drury Lane,[31] but it seems improbable. Had he waited until after publication, he might have acquired one more copy for £7 10s. less, and in any case, he was bilking the actors of their wages, and could hardly have fobbed off their demands with free copies of the Miscellanies.[32] The likeliest explanation is that Dodington and Fleetwood's "copies" merely represent receipts on which they had paid the advance, but had failed to dispose of. Had they been acting on their own accounts, they might have enjoyed more social éclat for exactly the same outlay, after all, by taking half the number of copies, but in the royal paper.

Apart from Peele, no male subscriber below the rank of Esquire presumes to take the royal paper, but women wear their paper with a difference. "Esquire" and "Mister" have no feminine equivalents: Kitty Clive, the daughter of Irish gentry, has the same precedence as Peg Woffington, whose father was a bricklayer. Gender replaces birth: wives defer to their husbands' subscriptions, even when, like Lady Anne Strode, they are of nobler birth, or like the Duchess of Bedford, notorious viragos; Kitty may take a royal-paper copy, and yet Peg does not, because she would not make her ordinary-paper lover, Garrick, look cheap. When only the wife subscribes, her husband thus implicitly joins in her subscription. Fielding celebrates both the Richmonds, for example, one for his generosity, the other for the whiteness of her breasts, but only the Duchess subscribed, which Miller found "strange." Perhaps he would not have found it "strange" if only the Duke had subscribed, but in any case I cannot share his perplexity: surely her generous subscription (12 guineas) recognized both obligations.[33]

Such queries and conjectures were doubtless part of the pleasures and pains of subscribing and invest the list with the intense, narrow interest of a society column, but Fielding also introduces the subscribers into the Miscellanies itself. In the Introduction, he acclaims the professional recognition conferred by his numerous lawyer subscribers; in the text he compliments nineteen subscribers by name, and obliquely flatters many others. Celebrating the beautiful and modest "Seraphina" in a Journey from This World to the Next, for example, he noted that "A particular Lady of Quality is meant here; but every Lady of Quality, or no Quality, are welcome to apply the Character to themselves."[34] In a rather more restricted compliment, the portrait of the patriotic King Spirit, destined long to reign, is surely intended

for Prince Fred, as Thomas R. Cleary has pointed out.[35] Consider, too, Vicary Gibbs's amusing account of the politics of the subscriber Edward Seymour, later Duke of Somerset, who was "presumably a Whig, but his aversion to the risks of small-pox . . .—which became a mania in later life—prevented him from attending crucial divisions in the House of Lords." Is he a candidate for the gentle satire on the narrator's travelling companion in A Journey from This World to the Next, who still dreads smallpox, even after death?[36] And finally, when the narrator encounters a physician in the City of Diseases, "whose Countenance had in it something more pleasing than ordinary,"[37] how did Dr. Barker, Dr. Bedford, Dr. Baker, Dr. Bostock, Dr. Brewster, Dr. Hoadly, Dr. Harrington, Dr. Pile, Dr. Wasey and Dr. Wilmot, all of them subscribers, respond? Did they mentally compare countenances?

Fielding also seems to have dealt out compliments with his left hand, however. The prime example, of course, is the applicability of his portrait of Jonathan Wild to Sir Robert Walpole, first proposed by Thomas Keightley in 1858.[38] Yet if Walpole, with his exceptionally large subscription, is truly part of the text, is such a sustained attack credible? Could we suppose that Squire Allworthy, who, for all his too-obvious virtues, has numerous comic flaws, is a covert satire on George Lyttelton? If Jonathan Wild had not become detached from the Miscellanies and its subscribers, I question whether Keightley's theory would ever have seemed quite so pat. "In the panegyrical Part of this Work," Fielding cautiously notes, "some particular Person is always meant, but in the satirical no body,"[39] but few have quite believed him.

Despite this textualization of the list, its leading scholars have approached it as raw data, of primarily statistical significance. The names are reduced to an index of a single aspect of the subscriber's life, like politics; the "missing persons" may become more significant than those who subscribed; and the social presence, weight and weave of the entire list is ignored in favor of minorities who ought not to have subscribed, but did. That is what statistics is all about—synecdoche; but I propose to read the list mimetically, as metaphor. It is neither randomly generated nor complete. We are entirely ignorant of those who declined to subscribe; the data on those who did are ruinously defective; and the defects can only be filled in with unproven assumptions. Mathematics continues to work its magic on this unreliable data, however, with uncanny results.[40]

Thus, Fielding attracted few literary subscribers, as Miller has shown—indeed, fewer than Miller supposed. By my reckoning, Mallet, Garrick and Cooke, all of them personal friends, are the only professional authors, eked out by amateurs like Lyttelton, Charles Hanbury-Williams, Bubb Dodington, and Lord Chesterfield, whom Miller rather unfairly dismisses as a "scribbling peer." Pope, Thomson, Horace Walpole and Sterne, indeed, purchased copies, though they do not appear in the list; Richardson and Cibber had personal grievances against Fielding; and in 1743 Swift was deep in senile dementia, and Samuel Johnson in poverty.[41] Nevertheless, even with these allowances, we may note the absence of the Wartons, Akenside, Collins and Shenstone, of the Pre-Romantics; Edward Young, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Uptons and either Whitehead, of the Augustans; Lewis Theobald, James Ralph and a host of Grubs and Dunces. "It would appear," Miller concludes, "that the publication of the Miscellanies was not greeted as a literary event: the majority of subscribers seem rather to represent political or professional or merely personal connections."[42]

The evidence is curiously inconclusive, however: were any of this unlikely crew of absentees ever asked? and what influence did they actually wield? None of them subscribed for Conyers Middleton's Life of Cicero, yet it went through eight London editions between 1741 and 1764. The Dictionary of the English Language was a literary event, though Johnson dedicated it, however grudgingly, to a "scribbling peer." As the Dunciad might suggest, professional writers were not exactly at the center of the literary scene; political, social and "merely personal" connections had always mattered far more. By isolating the list from its text, and indeed from the values of its historical moment, Miller seriously mistakes its literary function. Fielding's opinion of the relative importance of his subscribers should be clear from their arrangement, and his editor may find a guilty satisfaction in the knowledge that the women and Misters whose identity so often eludes him didn't really count.

The political composition of the list would seem to offer a more realistic subject for analysis: subscribers were patrons, and one might expect authors to defer to their political views. There were other, equally powerful factors at work beside politics, however, like family and friendship (often at several removes), so that subscriptions were rarely a strictly party affair: Brooke's Gustavus Vasa was a notable exception. W. A. Speck's survey of 500 lists

published between 1710 and 1740 discloses only ten in which there seems to be any positive correlation between the party of the subscribers and that of the author.[43] The admixture of Administration lions with Opposition lambs among Fielding's subscribers, then, should have come as no surprise, but scholars, as usual, have sought for more interesting explanations. "How does one account for the name of the Duke of Devonshire, one of Walpole's most loyal supporters," wonders Miller, "or the Duke of St. Albans, or Earl Cholmondeley (Walpole's brother-in-law), the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Cornwallis, or General Churchill?" And he finds the solution in Martin Battestin's account of Fielding's "changing politics."[44]

Battestin proposed that the Walpolian subscriptions rewarded Fielding's withdrawal from his party in 1741, culminating in his sendup of their efforts in The Opposition: A Vision. The list may thus be broken down into archeologically distinct components, the Administration stratum presumably overlaying and folding alphabetically into the originally pure substratum of the Opposition. This conjecture parallels a textual theory that goes back to Aurélien Digeon's thesis of 1923, by which the Opposition rhetoric that repeatedly surfaces in the Miscellanies is explained as a "survival" from an earlier stage of composition.[45] In particular, Digeon posits an earlier version of Jonathan Wild (an Ur-Wild, as we may dub it), and Battestin conjectures that the suppression of this version in 1740 was another reason for Walpole's generosity. Both Battestin's and Digeon's theories have been criticized, though the critic, like Thomas R. Cleary, may accept one, while rejecting the other; and I believe that together, they still enjoy a scholarly consensus today.[46]

I shall confine my comments here to their implications for the subscriptions of Walpole and his party.

We do not need to go back to 1740 to explain Walpole's subscription. The far more substantial, timely and solidly attested service that Fielding had rendered in The Opposition: A Vision adequately "explains" the Prime Minister's generosity, if any explanation is needed. If the Prime Minister had actually hoped to silence the Ur-Wild, why did he finally forward its publication (unchanged, by Digeon's account, apart from the addition of Heartfree's story) with an exceptionally generous subscription? And if Fielding actually published satire on Walpole in 1743, he must have had his reasons; it seems excessively ingenious to suppose that it somehow "survived" unchanged from 1740, despite his "changing politics." Or if the satire is in fact conscious, how had his politics actually changed? The allegation that Fielding suppressed the Ur-Wild is not only unnecessary but also insufficient to explain the Prime Minister's subscription. Walpole, at least, the only person in any position to judge, evidently saw no connection between the work he allegedly silenced, and the one to which he subscribed.

The analysis of the political tendency of Fielding's list, moreover, is circular, because the vast majority of the subscriptions are hopelessly undatable. We can sort the Whigs from the Tories (in so far as this distinction was still meaningful in 1743), but apart from a few Jacobites, whose opposition was constitutional, which subscribers belonged to which Oppositions, and which to which Administrations, is simply beyond conjecture. Did the Prince of Wales subscribe before Walpole's fall or after it? before, of course, if his subscription expressed Opposition solidarity; Opposition, of course, if he subscribed before; but there is no proof of either premise. Miller and Battestin reckoned the subscribers' politics as of 1741, when the two sides were sharply polarized. Fielding was still garnering subscriptions in 1742-43, however, when the political gamut was broader. The problem of Fielding's "Walpolian" subscribers dissolves, once Walpole's Administration ceases to be the central issue. The passions that he raised did not immediately subside with the death of his Administration, of course, but they were diverted and overlaid by political maneuver.

Between 1742 and 1743, such leading subscribers as Walpole, Pulteney, the Prince of Wales and Chesterfield were engaged in a political dance, whose figures changed from moment to moment. Even those like Winnington or Newcastle, who maintained places in the Administration, had very different games to play before and after Walpole's fall. "We shall not all die," sighed

one old-timer as he tendered his resignation, "but be all changed."[47] Pulteney and Carteret, with the help of the Prince of Wales, triumphed over the Old Administration and the Old Opposition alike. The "Broad Bottom" coalition of 1744 was the natural product of the mutual disappointment of these two factions: four of the former Opposition—Chesterfield, Bedford, Lyttelton and Dodington—would ultimately join two "loyal" Walpolians and a Jacobite—Devonshire, Newcastle, and Sir John Hynde Cotton, whose enormous backside gave piquancy to the new group's nickname.[48] All of them subscribed to the Miscellanies, and if Fielding's politics changed, so did those of his subscribers. The list is not a poll on the ambivalence of Fielding's political loyalties, then; we may doubt that his subscribers ever expected the constancy of a hired pen from a gentleman who set his name to the title page; and we do not need textual crutches to explain their individualistic politics and supple principles, which were neither better nor worse than his.

If the Opposition and Administration Whig factions and the Tories are evenly represented in Fielding's list, then, one might conclude that it is ipso facto non-partisan; but whatever the politics of the list, its rhetorical appeal abides, transparent despite scholarly troubling. In all its order and variety, descending from Prince Frederick through the multiple orders of the nobility, ladies before gents, to a wide range of ever less distinguished commoners, Fielding's list projects a powerful impression of English society at large: mores hominum multorum vidit, et urbes, we may well exclaim. Society as it actually was was something else, of course: in 427 mostly masculine, armigerous names, any child can see that certain elements are over- or under-represented. Nevertheless, if one can only read the list mimetically, and not statistically, it amply satisfies neoclassical criteria of generality, and contemporary theories of virtual representation.

In a notable departure from bibliographic precedent, Fielding mustered his subscribers before the Introduction to the Miscellanies, in the same large type, thus assimilating them to dedicatees. Before this place, on the title page, he, "Henry Fielding, Esq;" now reassumes his proper name and rank after six years of professional anonymity; no longer the proletarian "Capt. Hercules Vinegar," he may now rise above the dust and toil of politics; and as parties to his undertaking, he impleads his 427 subscribers, in order of social precedence. The reality of this spectacular performance was perhaps suspect from the start, but that should not make us overlook its virtues. As his editor, I will correct the compositor's mistakes; I will conform the order of names to the social hierarchy that Fielding intended; I will upgrade Mr. John Fawkner to Esquire. The list of subscribers—or "Subscrebers", as the compositor would have it—is not a document, to be copied letter by letter,

but an integral part of Fielding's work. I cannot, alas, print it where it belongs, in proper dignity of type at the head of vol. 1. It will appear in nine-point type at the end of vol. 3 of the Wesleyan Edition of the Miscellanies, followed by my identifications in eight points. The virtual reality of Fielding's list pales before mine, which should be virtually invisible.