The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding – serie

A scholarly edition of works by Henry Fielding. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

A scholarly edition of works by Henry Fielding. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

A scholarly edition of a work by Henry Fielding. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Volume Three of Henry Fielding's Miscellanies, first published as a three-volume set in 1743, consists in its entirety of a major work of fiction, The history of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. Jonathan Wild takes its title from the `thief-taker' and gang-leader of that name who was hanged in 1725, but in Fielding's hands, the history of Wild is transformed into a mock-hostorical work of sustained irony aimed at all who would be `great men'. The general introduction to this edition sets the novel against its historical and biographical background and argues against the view, common since the mid-nineteenth century, that it is a personal satire directed at the figure of Sir Robert Walpole. In both the general and the textual introductions, the editors also offer a fresh view on questions about the date and history of the work's composition. Full explanatory notes and commentary place Fielding's allusions and details in their contemporary context. As in previous volumes of the Weslyan Edition, this provides critical, unmodernized text, based on the Greg-Bowers `Rationale of Copy-text'. The version is that of the first edition, with an appendix giving all variants in wording and presentation in the 1754 revision. In his introduction the textual editor lays out the rationale for his choice of version. This volume also includes, for the first time in modern edition, Fielding's list of subscribers to the Miscellanies, along with detailed biographical notes and an analysis of the subscription list by the textual editor.

As Henry Fielding's last effort at sustained journalism, the Covent-Garden Journal (1752) significantly reflects the literary, moral, and social ideas of a major novelist in the final years of his life. Freed from the burden of political propagandizing which had dominated his earlier journalism, Fielding here addressed himself directly to social satire, literary criticism, and moral instruction in essays that are strikingly rooted in the everyday life of mid-century London. The Journal is thus an essential text not only for students of Fielding but for anyone concerned with the social and literary history of the period.The general introduction explains the connection between the Journal and the brief pamphlet A Plan of the Universal Register-Office (1751) and places them in Fielding's career; it then describes the journalistic background, major themes, and immediate reception of the Covent-Garden Journal. Full explanatory notes are provided for all topical and historical allusions.The text of the Plan has not been reprinted since the eighteenth century. The present text of the Journal, incorporating a recent discovery of revisions in Fielding's hand, offers in an appendix a column about Fielding's magistracy not previously reprinted. Other appendices provide a complete record of all textual amendations.

This volume completes the edition's coverage of Henry Fielding's journalism, which occupied a far greater part of his time than has been traditionally acknowledged. His contributions to The Champion are not only among his most energetic and intriguing works in the genre; they also have a dense political background, of interest to historians studying the interface between journalism and politicians of the time, as well as the role of newspaper publishers. Walpole figures hugely, and the extent to which Fielding hints at the minister's life and activities is remarkable. Much of the volume's material has never been reprinted before. Explanatory annotations are full, as the characteristically allusive and topical nature of Fielding's writing requires. Appendices provide an analytical textual apparatus, and the editorial introductions emphasize matters such as genesis and composition, circumstances of publication, in addition to immediate biographical, literary, and historical backgrounds.

A substantial amount of the energy which Henry Fielding put into his writing was invested in political journalism and pamphleteering. Indeed, next to his prose fiction and his plays, his political journalism looms largest, and reveals significant aspects of Fielding the man.This volume contains three pamphlets - the Serious Address, the History of the Present Rebellion, and the Dialogue between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender - and one journal, the True Patriot of 1745-6. Coming from what may be called the second period of Fielding's intensive political journalism, they are all informed by the same political purpose: to deal with the crisis represented by the Jacobite uprising known as the 'Forty-Five' and with the implications this event was perceived to have for the Pelham administration in general, and for its new 'patriot' allies in particular.As with other volumes in the edition, there is a detailed introduction, textual introduction, full annotation throughout, and an index.

This is the second volume of Fielding's Miscellanies, first published as a three-volume set in 1743. Its major work is the fantasy A Journey from This World to the Next, Fielding's richest and most extensive piece of prose fiction outside his three novels and Jonathan Wild. Its theme, described by Gibbon as `the history of human nature', is the excoriation of false greatness and over-weening ambition, one of the great moral ideas of the age. The annotation and commentary to this edition present new evidence about Fielding's manipulation of historical sources in the Journey, which is shown to be both artistically complete and thematically consistent with the other material in the Miscellanies.The remaining two works in this volume are both plays which Fielding included at a late stage of planning for the book: the farce Eurydice, a burlesque of mythological figures who function as vehicles for topical satire, and The Wedding Day, a revision of an intrigue comedy written early in his career but staged for the first time in 1743, only a few months before the Miscellanies appeared.The introduction reviews this period of Fielding's career and describes the circumstances leading up to the original publication of Miscellanies by subscription, and the historical and biographical contexts of the works included in Volume Two. The text follows the significant features of the 1743 presentation, as far as possible; the Greg-Bowers `Rationale' hitherto observed in the Wesleyan Edition is refined and augmented by more recent textual theorizing. The full,uncensored text of The Wedding Day, from Larpent MS 39 in the Huntington Library, is given as an appendix to the censored form published in Miscellanies.

An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings provides critical unmodernized texts of Henry Fielding's legal and social pamphlets during the period 1749 to 1753, when Fielding served as magistrate for the City and Liberty of Westminster and County of Middlesex. The texts, for the first time, are fully annotated, and a lengthy introduction places them in their biographical and intellectual context, and provides a detailed account of their publication and reception. Five of the six pamphlets included in this volume clearly serve the interests of the Pelham Administration. There is, however, no evidence to show that Fielding wrote any of the pamphlets at the invitation or command of figures of power within the Pelham Administration; instead he appears simply to have seized those opportunities appropriate to his office to further government interests or, as with An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) and A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753), offered his own solutions to problems which Parliament was currently debating.

This is the first of three volumes representing the only modern edition of Fielding's dramatic works. Most of these plays have not appeared in print for a century, and never previously in edited form. Fielding came to the novel-writing for which he is best known after an important first career in professional theatre. He wrote twenty-eight plays, including comedies, satiric extravaganzas, and ballad operas. He was the leading playwright of his generation, an experimentalist and entrepreneur in a cheerfully mocking form of drama journalistically devoted to contemporary experience, culture, and politics. This volume presents the first seven of these plays in a critical unmodernized edition based on the original texts, with explanatory notes and commentary on sources, stage history, and critical reception, as well as appendices accounting for textual variation, bibliography, and musical sources.

This is the second of three volumes representing the only modern edition of Fielding's dramatic works. Most of these plays have not appeared in print for a century, and never previously in fully-edited form. Fielding is best known as a classic novelist and the author of Tom Jones, but like his great model Cervantes, he came to novel-writing from an important first career in professional theatre. He wrote twenty-eight plays, including comedies, satiric extravaganzas, and ballad operas. He was the leading playwright of his generation, an experimentalist and entrepreneur of dramatic form who sometimes also brought contemporary politics and public figures onto his stage with results even more dramatic off-stage.This volume presents nine plays from one of the most productive and successful periods of Fielding's theatre career. One of them, The Grub-Street Opera, is a ballad opera cheerfully mocking various public characters including the Prime Minister, Prince of Wales, and even King and Queen. Another, The Modern Husband, is a dark comedy attacking the cynical merchandising of sex, marriage, and influence among what passes for polite society in 1730s London. Most of the plays in this volume were major hits with long stage lives in repertory, including The Lottery, The Intriguing Chambermaid, and two of the great Molière adaptations of the century, The Mock Doctor and The Miser. Fielding wrote all four of those plays as star vehicles for the great Drury Lane musical actress Catherine Clive.The plays are given in critical unmodernized texts based on careful collation of the original editions, with explanatory notes and commentary on sources, stage history, and critical reception. All music is included, with appendices giving complete accounts of textual variation and bibliographic history for each play.

This is the third and final volume of plays representing the only modern edition of Fielding's dramatic works. Most have not appeared in print for a century, and never previously in fully-edited form. Fielding is best known as a novelist but, like his great model Cervantes, he came to novel-writing from an important first career in professional theatre. He wrote twenty-eight plays, including comedies, satiric extravaganzas, and ballad operas. He was the leading playwright of his generation, an experimentalist and entrepreneur of dramatic form who sometimes also brought contemporary politics and public figures onto his stage with results even more dramatic off stage.This volume presents nine plays from the final and most controversial years of his theatre career. The first, Don Quixote in England, is a ballad opera homage to Quixotic idealism played out against rustic English opportunism. Two other plays, including the long-running favourite The Virgin Unmask'd, were written as star vehicles for Fielding's brilliant colleague Catherine Clive. The Universal Gallant is another of Fielding's ventures in serious social comedy, but the heart of the volume, as of this concluding period of Fielding's dramatic career, is the group of audacious satirical plays he wrote when he was running his own makeshift company at the Little Haymarket Theatre, including Pasquin and The Historical Register. Audiences flocked to these productions to see the cultural and political life of the moment ridiculed in Aristophanic explicitness, notoriously in one case (Eurydice Hiss'd) including a mocking stage caricature of the prime minister himself. That unamused minister, Sir Robert Walpole, shortly after saw through the 1737 Licensing Act which put an end to unsanctioned playhouses and plays, and to Fielding's own career in theatre.The plays are given in critical unmodernized texts based on careful collation of the original editions, with explanatory notes and commentary on sources, stage history, and critical reception. All music is included, with appendices giving complete accounts of textual variation and bibliographic history for each play.