Chapter III- About Amelia

When Fielding published Amelia, in December, this was the most important moment of
his life, the height of his literary fame and the climax of the energetic Bow Street
magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex, who also proved to be one of the most famous
novelists besides his rival, Samuel Richardson. His other novel, Tom Jones, published
two months later in February, after the final installment of Richardsons Clarissa, had
four authorized editions in a year which sold in more than 10.000 copies and people liked
this novel because the hostile criticism was very acclaimed. But in December 1751
Fieldings publisher, Andrew Millar, gave an advertisement for Amelia in The General
Advertiser because he thought that Fieldings novel satisfied the earnest Demand of the
public and his work was to be printed at four publishing houses. The four companies
were working very intensively as Millar had commanded the extraordinary and big
number of 5.000 copies for the printing of Amelia with 1.500 copies more than the first
and second editions of Tom Jones. The sales were very rapid and enough for Millar and
he ordered a second edition in 3.000 copies almost immediately. But his plan was
destroyed and the 5.000 copies of the first edition were more than Millar, for all his
interesting advertising, could sell. The novel had a good and powerful success abroad,
with two German translations, one Dutch translation, and the French edition which was
published in the same year in which the second English translation appeared. Richardson
managed to read only the first of the four volumes of the novel, announcing in February
that Amelia is the same thing with the novel that he published forty years before. But all
the other writers thought that Amelia was different in one obvious respect from
Fieldings previous novels: Joseph Andrews, Jonathan Wild and Tom Jones. Fielding was
moving in a territory associated with Richardsons writing, and his distressed heroines
Pamela and Clarissa captured the imagination of the reading public. He described the
history of women but only to take Richardson into derision, while creating a virtuous and
admirable heroine of his own.
More contemporaries noticed that Fielding modelled the heroine of Amelia
after his first wife Charlotte, who died in November and Captain Booth who devoted
himself to Amelia, was inspired by the author himself. Fieldings new critics didnt have

a new direction that his novel was taking, but they found a lot of excess of other
shortcomings.
As much as Joseph Andrews, Amelia is a book which dedicated a lot of
passages to the description of life in prison and abominable crimes and this is presented
by Captain Booth in Newgate prison when he told his companion Miss Mathews about
his wifes unfortunate and unlike carriage accident. A month after the accident, when
Amelia removed her protective mask that she had on her face and showed Booth her
injured face, he was very surprised. At the least in the first edition text she made some
chirurgical repairs to the nose and after this thing she became a little bit tired to make
other procedures. One of the most important and also the earliest reviews of Amelia
describe the story like an experimental quality and at the same time presents Fielding
very determined to prove rumor false by making his novel as different from its celebrated
predecessor.
John Cleland, an important author of innovative novel, the notorious Memoirs
of a Woman of Pleasure described Amelia in the Monthly Review in December, like
the most attempted novel in the species of writing. Other reviewers and readers thought
that Amelia was a phenomenon in which the pleasure gardens opened in 1742 and by
the aid of these, Fielding found his half-brother John just in February 1750. Other writers
such as John Hill in his Inspector mocked Fieldings heroine and he could change the
world without the help of a nose. Also Bonnell Thornton wrote a lot of satires of his
novel in the Drury Lane Journal and he started his first discussion about this on 16 th
January 1752. Two weeks later there happened an important event for Fielding because in
The Covent Garden Journal the first mock-trials of Amelia were published. This
novel was indeed to be Fieldings last writing, the non-fictional works of his final years,
and his Journal of Voyage to Lisbon completed before his death in October 1754.
Fielding developed a monomania with Amelias nose, just like Sternes play on noses and
their sexual connotations in Tristram Shandy.
A second edition of Amelia was published in 1762 as part of Millars collected
Works of Henry Fielding. The edition came very quickly with an ample prefatory essay
by the editor Arthur Murphy, declaring that Amelia was his special edition printed from
a copy corrected by the author himself. The most important and beautiful passages had

been thrown out, and the work was to be found closer to perfection than it was in its
original state. A logical reading of Murphys actions is that some of the second edition of
the novel steam from a copy corrected by Fielding. The results in any case had a dubious
value. Lance Bertelsen wrote a systematic removal of Amelia, in his second edition and
chronologically some passages sit on the fabric of the novel.
Other passages which include the deletion of an entire chapter with a big
discussion among doctors, the suppression of compliments to individuals, the discussion
about sexual and profanity were out of the question. All these changes designed to create
a more impressive text, more published and with a larger counter productivity. Fielding
took a big risk when he wrote Amelia because the experience of reading a brilliant
novel successfully transforms into a big failure in others parts. Sir Walter Scott declared
that Amelia was a continuation of Tom Jones even if it had more in common with
other contradictory works of his final years, for example An Enquiry into the Causes of
the Late Increase of Robbers or Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the
Detection and Punishment of Murder. Roland Paulson and others suggested that they
should dignify the novel elevating the domestic plot and connecting it with the public
issues of a degenerating society and nation. But reading Amelia we can discover a very
classical novel with an elevating experience. For Richardson, Fieldings novel was very
deplorable.
Charles Cottons or Virgil Travestie thought that the first and the fourth book of
Aeneid were inspired by the Virgile travesty the French poet, dramatist and the
novelist Paul Scarron could have provided Fielding with a useful model. Many of
Fieldings men and women disgusted Richardson because Amelia was a favorite
picture of many hostile critics. In Amelia we can find three dramatic histories very
different significantly rendered from their predecessors. Before Mrs. Bennet began her
history, Fielding said that she had a desirous of inculcating a good opinion of herself,
because she came to the more suspicious and dangerous part of her character. Everything
that she says in her defense is suspicious and many points she makes in her story seem to
deny her status. She has a remarkably violent history and makes her a very dangerous life
for example; her mother is killed by a bizarre fall into a well, her father throws her away

her from his house, her first husbands body gets in post-mortem and her friendship with
Mrs. Ellison turns into a bitter enmity.
Mrs. Bennets history of violent victimhood continues after her second marriage. In
one of the strange incidents that happened in this novel, she is attacked in her sleep by her
husband who has a most worried dream in which Amelia is being threatened by her
admirer, Colonel James. After reading the lines from Aeneid to analyzing Amelia,
which start with a strong emphasis, she comments on this great absurdity of excluding
women from learning.
A very important episode in this novel is that when the Doctors strictures on
masculine women and feminine men are undermined by a period in which a masculine
man is also feminine, just as Mrs. Atkinson hopes to be feminine while still possessing
learning. The conflict and the problems between Mrs. Atkinson and Dr. Harrison continue
until the final chapter of the novel. Here the Doctor has three lines from the Iliad and
Mrs. Atkinson admits that she lacks the Greek Ears to understand them. She also makes
a big error and a big mistake when she is referring to a Delphin Homer, but Fielding
informed his readers to know that the famous Delphin classics were editions of Latin
texts only. When Amelia understands that she has inherited her mothers large estate and
her familys future is very secure, Mrs. Atkinson finds the apt Virgilian line to celebrate
the occasion. Her male behavior is exactly with Parson Adams at the end of Joseph
Andrews, when Joseph discovers that he was the son of Mr. Wilson and he cant marry
with his beloved Fanny Andrews after all. In a mysterious letter to Richardson, Anne
Donnellan expressed her contempt for the characterization of Fieldings learned lady and
is very disappointed with him.
As he did in Tom Jones, Fielding gifted Amelia with a concluding chapter in
which the characters afterlives are very rapidly persistent. Another novel, very
interesting, is the Colonels novel which is very simple. Colonel Bath, prettier and more
sympathetic of the two, was made to pay for his obsession with dignity and honor, being
killed six years later in a duel by a Gentleman who told the Colonel he differed from him
in opinion. But his brother-in-law, Colonel James, lives on. That Colonel James should
pay for his crimes by laboring with a dictatorial mistress who seems reasonable enough.
Amelia is full of minor mysteries, and some of them are eventually solved, but the

novels largest mysteries remain unclear. Also the narrator said that was very difficult to
read Amelia as a proto-Dickensian novel of social protest. Mysterious in a different
way is a part of the novel, in which Fieldings fiction appears: as J. Paul Hunter
observes, a falsity of reader expectations that had been earned.
When Henry Fielding, his second wife Mary and Fieldings daughter Harriet set
off for Lisbon, they were accompanied by Margaret Collier. The voyage was not very
important because he did not come to terms with his relationship with this old family
friend. In the final weeks of life, Fielding was bustling by his wifes desire to return to
England, and Collier had an important role in this decision because she advanced her
Folly. More people were attributing to the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon to her on
the base that it was inferior to Fieldings other works and must have been written by his
female companion. Colliers capitations of Richardson were full of criticism of his rival,
possible not generous about womens intelligence and no friend to women in his writing.
From Richardsons point view this is already a familiar problem between the two
important and interesting novelists. Richardson had made his name, as a commercial
novelist and described the virtue of the militantly chaste servant Pamela, creating in
Clarissa the centurys great tragic heroine. But Fielding started his career as a novelist
enouncing the hypocrisy of virtue in characters like Shamela and Joseph Andrews.
The relative reputations of these gendered rivals have influenced the critical evolution of
masculinity and feminity in writing. The author of Clarissa as a writer of and about
women, the author of Tom Jones as a mans writer has continued the trend of observing
the inner life of his creations. The two men have seemed to provide the English novel
with a two-sex descent, without any need to take contribution of women themselves into
account. Fielding thought that in his novel masculinity was more congenial than
Richardsons feminism, and he also considered that Shamela or Pamela provided a fair
critical commentary. In 1950, Robert Etheridge Moore considered that Johnsons
puzzling preference for Richardson over Fielding must have some kind of mistake:
because of the affinity of their shared masculinity, Johnson liked Fielding more than he
thought. Johnson liked Fielding like a man, and Richardson may be called one of our
great women. In the early line of feminist literary criticism, Richardson as womens
painter was revalued. Katharine M. Rogers praised Richardson for an understanding of

womens social disadvantages and for a remarkable insight into their feelings that
amounted to sensitive feminism while Fielding was capable just for conventional
sympathy with women.
In 1980 the crude division of the two novelists on gender lines was challenged
in various ways. In the early twentieth century, Angela Smallwood thought that the ultramasculine Fielding was a creation of selective biographies, and also she described the
reversed polarity between Fielding and Richardson. Fieldings work in the context of
eighteenth century is a method in political and gender discourse, and shows the interest in
contemporary discussion of womens nature and role, and finds a lot of generally
supportive ideas of female moral equality and the ideal of marriage based on friendship
and husbands authority. In Tom Jones, she argued that the attraction on Jacobite
tyranny was made a criticism of Squire Westerns arbitrary government of his daughter.
Smallwood believed that Fielding attacked the double standard of sexual morality in his
novels and found human morality in which male and female qualities are not acidly
differentiated. Because Fielding had a lot of experience he demonstrated in his works the
sexual desire of women, even heroines and critics seemed to share his point of view. As a
result of his writings, he wrote favorably of women asking self-determination. Works like
Smallwoods and Potters tend to play the element of traditional misogyny in Fieldings
representations of aggression in women, making proof of every account for reestablishing the critical part of women-friendly aspects of the writer. Her own discussion
of the differences inside Fielding draws attention to his interest in the doubling of gender
distinctions, shown in the Eros-gender casting of his plays, describe in the The Female
Husband, Tom Thumb, or Amelia.
In this last novel Fielding moves the older codes of masculine honor and new
sentimental conceptions of manhood, and also he describe the ideal of domestic
femininity and the independent female authority that might take a new decision from it. A
mixture of responses to female authority is indeed one key to Fielding. He wrote during a
period when female cultural power was visible, and is especially associated with the
theatre, home of his work and the novel, the genre he did so much to develop. He began
his life as an author in the late 1720 during a period in which Emma Clery described a
resurgence of misogynist attitudes centered in an association of the new commercial

economy with a big demonization of culture. Another important novelist for this period
was Alexander Pope who recently published Dunciad in which he described the
dangers of feminization. One of Fieldings early pieces was attacked by Pope, but also he
shared a lot of literary attitudes with Pope and Scriblerian writers, and the classical
satirical tradition that influenced him and went into a direction that emphasises the period
of anti-feminism. With Richardsons creation of the virtuous heroine, Pamela, he began
his new career and started with a response to a particular deployment of the authority of
femininity. The rivalry between Richardson and Fielding soon vanished into thin air, and
Fieldings later heroines, Sophia and Amelia, were framed in complex dialogues with
Richardsons paragon, Clarissa.
All men writing in the mid eighteenth century period had to deal in some way with
the fact that the world of letters was very important and at the same time represented the
most interesting part of this period which dealt with a mixed-sex world. Two of the most
important novelists were Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson and they were
especially noticed for their good professional help and encouragement they offered to a
big number of women writers. Henry Fielding also gave a helping hand to women
writers, but his experience of working with women on the paper differed from theirs in
significant ways. His career was marked by a contribution from socially powerful
women, and also he worked in association with important actresses and women writers in
the theatre, including his own sister, the novelist Sarah Fielding. Some contemporaries
closely examined the relationships Fielding had with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
Catherine Clive, Eliza Haywood and Charlotte Charke and they will show us how he
responded to various kinds of womens public cultural activity. Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu was Fieldings second cousin and was a woman of noble rank, well known for
her learning and astute observation of characters throughout her writings. She helped her
cousin with his first play, Love in Several Masques and also he printed it with a
dedication to her. With the passing of time, Fieldings career was marked by a strong
association with one of the most important and powerful actresses in particular, Chaterine
Clive. Fielding also wrote about a similar case in The Female Husband, which is based
on the story of Mary Hamilton, who tried passing as a man and marrying a woman. In
this text Fielding describes with a lot of joy the attitude of the male impersonation that is

very clear and hostile. The cousin of Fielding began dressing in mens clothes at the age
of four when she borrowed her fathers coat and trousers. A long period she passed as a
man called, Charles Brown and had a long relationship with a woman who went by the
name of Mrs. Brown.
Another actress who worked at Fieldings Haymarket theatre was Eliza
Haywood, and she played in The Historical Register and also she was the muse in
Eurydice Hissd. When Fielding closed his theatre, the final performance of these plays
was a benefit and powerful performance for Haywood. Haywood was better known as an
author than as an actress. He in collaboration with William Hatchett had written The
Opera of Operas, which was also an adaptation of Fieldings Tragedy of Tragedies
with music and songs, as well as a successful period for Fielding. When I read some
Fieldings novels I found a lot forms of entertainment like tragedy, comedy, opera,
oratory and pantomime represented in the play by male figures. When Fielding created
Mrs. Novel he had no idea that he became a great novelist. While writing Joseph
Andrews, he was also very careful to distinguish his own fictional plan from the
Richardsons novel of heroine virtue and the tradition of womans romantic and
scandalous fiction that Richardson presented.
As its title announced, Amelia differs in one obvious respect from Fieldings
previous novels like Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. Fielding was taking a very big
risk, forcing Blear Eyed Moll and Amelia together in a disagreeable manner, also when
he wrote Amelia he referred to a long-suffering heroine and an indurate prostitute who
stands out the baldness of Newgate. Some important reviewers of the eighteenth century
and some readers went much further, with Amelias lost nose most frequent target of their
convict. Also an anonymous review in the London Magazine for December complained
that some ideas about this novel and about the anachronisms that appear here. One of the
most known reviews described some imperfections that Fielding made in his novel, for
example he should have taken care to have Amelias nose so completely protected, after
its being beaten all to pieces. Bonnell Thornton wrote a lot of interesting things about
Amelia, and he even wrote a series of satires of Amelia in the Drury Lane Journal
, beginning with the first issue, which contained a craft advertisement for a novel called
Shamela. At the end of this novel Fielding, like a bad man, thought that his novel was

not entirely free from faults, and he pointed that Amelia was a poor girl and was his
favorite child, and he would fill the world with children like her being his muses. Almost
all Fielding scholars, with the notable exception of Hugh Amory, took Murphy for
granted. But the next edition had a lot of alternations and deletions, and suggested that all
of these were necessary to show that Fieldings inadvertency was clearly absurd. The
Virgilian quotations and allusions about Amelia and Mrs. Bennet, the novels learned
lady, is especially found in Aeneid. Translations for the Latin and Greek are not very
assured and the readers knowledge of the classics is assumed. The Virgilian parallels in
Amelia, as Ronald Paulson and others suggest describe this novel like a domestic
marriage and they make a lot of murder things to dignify this novel, but some
commentators arent agree with this idea and they affirmed that Amelia is an elevating
experience full of beautiful moments.
Claude Rawson observes the detailed recording of precise amounts of food and
drink consumed in Amelia and he thinks the novel seems like precisely the kind of
Richardson. Booth and Miss Mathews, Mrs. Bennet is one of three characters in
Amelia who recount their own lives. Each of Fieldings novels uses the device of
changing authorial narrative with first person accounts. In this case we cannot speak
about digressions, as the dramatic histories in Fielding are other novels that are also
called: the histories here constitute a major part of the text. The social characters in
Amelia are also very hard, even if they appear a little demonstrative. In the end of the
story, Mrs. Atkinson longed for a drink and a Virgo thought that Amelia was the woman
with a lot of various duplicities and she was not a docile wife. Here Fielding tells us a
physical similarity between the two women which are exactly the same thing, with an
additional affinity between their voices. In some passages Fielding is described by some
writers like a reminiscent of novelettes imitators who has the most beautiful and
interesting novels. He offers his readers passions in the manner in which Richardson was
celebrated, yet they seem artificial and hard.
Amelia was the hot subject of the eighteenth century and of the many welldefined articles and chapters in books, and her qualities make her very attractive to the
critics of that periods novel ensuring the remarkable trajectory of Fieldings career. Some
modern readers have shown their enthusiasm for his work and for his interesting

endurance to write every novel very well. Even if Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones
were much published, Amelia might never become the favorite novel for Fieldings
readers, as it was of Fielding himself. The experience of some readers of reading
Amelia might have enriched their cultural perspectives, and they were very surprised
by the first edition text which represents Fieldings original conception of the novel and
which has been impervious for too long. After all, it was Amelia that provoked the
early readers, disgusting Richardson while winning the admiration of that beautiful
couple, Cleland and Johnson. And it was Amelia that deserves our attention, even if the
version prepared by Murphy for Millar collection of Fieldings works was a version that
offered a literary challenge. Fielding asserted that he aimed at writing a comic epic poem
in prose ensuring his fiction with a classical literary affluence, and at the same time an
imitation of Cervantes. Defending some fictional writers such as Cervantes and Le Sage
who made some mistakes but whose understanding of human nature is trust, Fielding was
specifically excluded from those people of surprising genius, being the author of
immense romances which, with the assistance of nature or history, recorded persons who
never were or will be.
Like a parallel between Amelia and Tom Jones I can affirm that, Tom Jones
was written after Haywood and described new experiments of its own, and it is a
playwrights attempt to sort good fiction from bad. Tom Jones, in Fieldings vision is
an imprudent but at the same time a good-hearted heroine, instead of a hero, and he is
always in the center of a series of comic adventures. Fieldings comments on modern
novels and romances is very good to distinguish a learned tradition of fictional history,
from which other writers would set the standard. He was also the best example of
fictional practice to the detriment of women novelists reputations and his
recommendation of the introductory chapter was a mark of a good fiction adopted by
Monthly reviewer. Some women novelists like Behn and Haywood, considered that in
Amelia, Fielding offered versions of feminocentric romance, and related the woman
who parodied romance and crossed the line to join a more knowing, learned, comic, and
implicitly masculine tradition. When he talked about a romance obsessed heroine, he
offered a critique of female that seemed all-knowing and that is coming from a female
authority. On the other hand , Cervantess male protagonist offers greater scope for

action and comic situations and at the same time is more plausible for young women than
an old man to have a head turned by romances, and also young women are more
attractive than old men. In Amelia we found a particular kind of female authority, an
erotic authority based on unrealistic plot and sensational treatment of character, but an
authority that came of the action male tradition and offering a big version on it. This type
of acceptable female authority was best exemplified for Fielding by the work of his own
sister, Sarah Fielding. Her first publication is about a letter from Leonora to Horatio
inserted in Joseph Andrew, and she also probably wrote the narrative of Anna Boleyns
life in Journey from this World to the Next . J.F. Burrows, which is using a stylometric
analysis, think that both brother and sister contributed a lot to this chapter, with Henry
supplying beginning and ending, and Sarah in the middle. In Amelia, Henry Fielding
explained this narrative, and he was very different is style between this and also he made
some observations in each volume, and he tried to relate the character of a woman. I can
affirm that I observe a womans writing is very complementary to a mans, but is
different in style and shows special understanding of female characters. There are two
very important aspects to Fieldings praise of womens writing. On the one hand, he has a
big respect for gentle part, specifically feminine viewpoint; only women can understand
women so their writing offers something a mans cannot understand very well. On the
other hand, this distinctive viewpoint is very used like a satirical thing upon women by
those who understand their follies. In Fieldings view, Lennoxs and Sarah Fieldings
works are very absorbed into a satiric masculine tradition, and he describes David
Simple as a comic and epic like Joseph Andrews. Henry Fieldings praise of these
women novelists serves, in a big part, to further his own rivalry with Richardson. He
worked a lot with women who were taking on cultural authority in Georgian England.
For Eliza Haywood he was a representative of the amatory fiction and with others midcentury authors had rendered decisively outmoded.
The kind of public female authority was exemplified by Kitty Clive, Sarah Fielding,
and Charlotte Lennox, and they present an authority based on the use of acting or writing
talents to reveal female character. Because Sarah Fielding and Lennox expose a lot of
narrative and admiration, in this was women as actresses or writers could be assimilated
into the prestigious and mysterious time, dominate over tradition of satire. This is a

limited role for women, and also can be recognized that Fielding was very influenced by
female authority, because he creates a lot of comics roles for women and also he used
ideas from his sisters fiction. The helpful women were very unusual in their creation of
female public authority and he supposed that they were shinning in a private life alone. In
a publication Fielding recollected his words on his wife Charlotte: I remember the most
excellent of Women, and tenders of Mothers, when, after a painful and dangerous delivery, she
was told she had a Daughter, answering: Good God! I have produced a Creature who is to
undergo what I have suffered! Some years afterwards, I heard the same Woman, on the Death of
that very Child, then one of the loveliest Creatures ever seen, comforting herself with reflecting,
that her Child could never know what it was to feel such a Loss as she then lamented. (Spencer,

1993:134). Charlotte is given a rare public voice not to expose and promote the
playfulness of her sex, but to lament womens vulnerability childbirth as mothers.
If we think at the period when the third great novel Amelia was published, we can
observe that this period was the subject of much more discordant decision than ever. In
this period we can find the greatest authority in the earliest and Scott, the greatest man of
letters speaks about a mixture of intellectual admiration and moral dislike. Fielding like a
prose writer, writing in London in the eighteenth century, was a poet writing in all time
and all space, so that the comparison is very luminous in more ways. The peer of the
eighteenth century writers is almost a type of goodness rancor dressed out with stars and
ribbons. Only Swift who has a combination of experience and genius, has given us live
lords in Lord Sparkish and Lord Smart. Mrs. Ellison and Mrs. Atkinson are very
womenlike, and Fielding put a big pressure on their sensibility, Dr. Harrisons country
friend and his chesty of a son are capital, Bondum and Robinson are the authors and all
the minor characters, are as good as they can be. Also we can detect a lack of vivacity in
the book and an evidence of declining health and years.
Henry Fielding had practiced the trade of a professional scribbler, and in several
occasions he found the line of ministerial fire. At the end of his social position, he
became more respectable, even though his finances remained on a precarious life and
brought him into the court-room as a defendant. Fielding had a lot to say about these
issues, and he did many subjects related to crime and punishment in London, and also

about prisons, and he described London like a state of poor charity, with a lot of problems
of gin abuse, the game laws and many more.