Fielding’s political pamphlets of the Jacobite uprising.

An accurate and comprehensive study of the political aspects of Fielding’s art has been sorely needed. As a result of decades of work by literary scholars and a series of great historians, such a study is finally possible. This volume addresses that need, and, in the light of a recent revival of interest in Fielding’s work, it arrives most opportunely. The author offers here a wide-ranging focus and a firm grip on the shifting complexities of Fielding’s political situations—the loyalties and enmities, factional alignments and fractious rhetoric—that allow a satisfactory understanding of Fielding’s political writing. Political writing in Fielding’s day, as in ours, was topical, concerned with evanescent problems and day-to-day needs that were familiar to contemporaries, but that are now recaptured only with greatest difficulty. This study constitutes a thorough reconstruction of Fielding’s political context and extricates from the context Fielding’s own political endeavours. Cleary’s work will make many of Felding’s previously unstudied work accessible to students and scholars of eighteenth-century English literature. A necessary point of reference to both literary specialists and historians concerned with eighteenth-century England.

First published in 1989, Henry Fielding is a biography presenting a fresh interpretation of Fielding’s life and thought. Using newly discovered information, including new facts, three hitherto unknown pictures of Fielding drawn from life, documents, manuscripts, and many crucially important and engrossing new letters, Martin C. Battestin – the foremost Fielding scholar – illuminates every aspect of Fielding’s life and work. Fielding and the life he led – in the West Country, at Eton, at the University of Leyden, and in the theatres and brothels, sponging houses and police courts of London – make for fascinating reading. This authoritative and timely biography will appeal to all those interested in the society and literature of eighteenth-century England.