



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team








AMELIA

Complete

By Henry Fielding


Edited By George Saintsbury

With Illustrations By Herbert Railton & E. J. Wheeler.

MDCCCXCIII


INTRODUCTION

DEDICATION TO RALPH ALLEN, ESQ


BOOK I.


CHAPTER I. Containing the exordium, &c.

CHAPTER II. The history sets out. Observations on the excellency of the
English constitution and curious examinations before a justice of peace

CHAPTER III. Containing the inside of a prison

CHAPTER IV. Disclosing further secrets of the prison-house

CHAPTER V. Containing certain adventures which befel Mr. Booth in the
prison

CHAPTER VI. Containing the extraordinary behaviour of Miss Matthews
on her meeting with Booth, and some endeavours to prove, by reason and
authority, that it is possible for a woman to appear to be what she
really is not

CHAPTER VII. In which Miss Matthews begins her history

CHAPTER VIII. The history of Miss Matthews continued

CHAPTER IX. In which Miss Matthews concludes her relation

CHAPTER X. Table-talk, consisting of a facetious discourse that passed
in the prison



BOOK II.


CHAPTER I. In which Captain Booth begins to relate his history

CHAPTER II. Mr. Booth continues his story. In this chapter there are
some passages that may serve as a kind of touchstone by which a young
lady may examine the heart of her lover. I would advise, therefore, that
every lover be obliged to read it over in the presence of his mistress,
and that she carefully watch his emotions while he is reading

CHAPTER III. The narrative continued. More of the touchstone

CHAPTER IV. The story of Mr. Booth continued. In this chapter the reader
will perceive a glimpse of the character of a very good divine, with
some matters of a very tender kind

CHAPTER V. Containing strange revolutions of fortune

CHAPTER VI. Containing many surprising adventures

CHAPTER VII. The story of Booth continued--More surprising adventures

CHAPTER VIII. In which our readers will probably be divided in their
opinion of Mr. Booth's conduct

CHAPTER IX. Containing a scene of a different kind from any of the
preceding



BOOK III.


CHAPTER I. In which Mr. Booth resumes his story

CHAPTER II. Containing a scene of the tender kind

CHAPTER III. In which Mr. Booth sets forward on his journey

CHAPTER IV A sea piece

CHAPTER V. The arrival of Booth at Gibraltar, with what there befel him

CHAPTER VI. Containing matters which will please some readers

CHAPTER VII. The captain, continuing his story, recounts some
particulars which, we doubt not, to many good people, will appear
unnatural

CHAPTER VIII. The story of Booth continued

CHAPTER IX. Containing very extraordinary matters

CHAPTER X. Containing a letter of a very curious kind

CHAPTER XI. In which Mr. Booth relates his return to England

CHAPTER XII. In which Mr. Booth concludes his story



BOOK IV.


CHAPTER I. Containing very mysterious matter

CHAPTER II. The latter part of which we expect will please our reader
better than the former

CHAPTER III. Containing wise observations of the author, and other
matters

CHAPTER IV. In which Amelia appears in no unamiable light

CHAPTER V. Containing an eulogium upon innocence, and other grave
matters

CHAPTER VI. In which may appear that violence is sometimes done to the
name of love

CHAPTER VII. Containing a very extraordinary and pleasant incident

CHAPTER VIII. Containing various matters

CHAPTER IX. In which Amelia, with her friend, goes to the oratorio



BOOK V.


CHAPTER I. In which the reader will meet with an old acquaintance

CHAPTER I. Containing a brace of doctors and much physical matter

CHAPTER II. In which Booth pays a visit to the noble lord

CHAPTER III. Relating principally to the affairs of serjeant Atkinson

CHAPTER IV. Containing matters that require no preface

CHAPTER V. Containing much heroic matter

CHAPTER VI. In which the reader will find matter worthy his
consideration

CHAPTER VII. Containing various matters

CHAPTER VIII. The heroic behaviour of Colonel Bath

CHAPTER IX. Being the last chapter of the fifth book



BOOK VI.


CHAPTER I. Panegyrics on beauty, with other grave matters

CHAPTER II. Which will not appear, we presume, unnatural to all married
readers

CHAPTER III. In which the history looks a little backwards

CHAPTER IV. Containing a very extraordinary incident

CHAPTER V. Containing some matters not very unnatural

CHAPTER VI. A scene in which some ladies will possibly think Amelia's
conduct exceptionable

CHAPTER VII. A chapter in which there is much learning

CHAPTER VIII. Containing some unaccountable behaviour in Mrs.. Ellison

CHAPTER IX. Containing a very strange incident



BOOK VII.


CHAPTER I. A very short chapter, and consequently requiring no preface

CHAPTER II. The beginning of Mrs. Bennet's history

CHAPTER III. Continuation of Mrs. Bennet's story

CHAPTER IV. Farther continuation

CHAPTER V. The story of Mrs. Bennet continued

CHAPTER VI. Farther continued

CHAPTER VII. The story farther continued

CHAPTER VIII. Farther continuation

CHAPTER IX. The conclusion of Mrs. Bennet's history

CHAPTER X. Being the last chapter of the seventh book



BOOK VIII.


CHAPTER I. Being the first chapter of the eighth book

CHAPTER II. Containing an account of Mr. Booth's fellow-sufferers

CHAPTER III. Containing some extraordinary behaviour in Mrs. Ellison

CHAPTER IV. Containing, among many matters, the exemplary behaviour of
Colonel James

CHAPTER V. Comments upon authors

CHAPTER VI. Which inclines rather to satire than panegyric

CHAPTER VII. Worthy a very serious perusal

CHAPTER VIII. Consisting of grave matters

CHAPTER IX. A curious chapter, from which a curious reader may draw
sundry observations

CHAPTER X. In which are many profound secrets of philosophy



BOOK IX.


CHAPTER I In which the history looks backwards

CHAPTER II. In which the history goes forward

CHAPTER III. A conversation between Dr Harrison and others

CHAPTER IV. A dialogue between Booth and Amelia

CHAPTER V. A conversation between Amelia and Dr Harrison, with the
result

CHAPTER VI. Containing as surprising an accident as is perhaps recorded
in history

CHAPTER VII. In which the author appears to be master of that profound
learning called the knowledge of the town

CHAPTER VIII. In which two strangers make their appearance

CHAPTER IX. A scene of modern wit and humour

CHAPTER X. A curious conversation between the doctor, the young
clergyman, and the young clergyman's father



BOOK X.


CHAPTER I. To which we will prefix no preface

CHAPTER II. What happened at the masquerade

CHAPTER III. Consequences of the masqtierade, not uncommon nor
surprizing

CHAPTER IV. Consequences of the masquerade

CHAPTER V. In which Colonel Bath appears in great glory

CHAPTER VI. Read, gamester, and observe

CHAPTER VII. In which Booth receives a visit from Captain Trent

CHAPTER VIII. Contains a letter and other matters

CHAPTER IX. Containing some things worthy observation



BOOK XI


CHAPTER I. Containing a very polite scene

CHAPTER II. Matters political

CHAPTER III. The history of Mr. Trent

CHAPTER IV. Containing some distress

CHAPTER V. Containing more wormwood and other ingredients

CHAPTER VI. A scene of the tragic kind

CHAPTER VII. In which Mr. Booth meets with more than one adventure

CHAPTER VIII. In which Amelia appears in a light more amiable than gay

CHAPTER IX. A very tragic scene



BOOK XII.


CHAPTER I. The book begins with polite history

CHAPTER II. In which Amelia visits her husband

CHAPTER III. Containing matter pertinent to the history

CHAPTER IV. In which Dr Harrison visits Colonel James

CHAPTER V. What passed at the bailiff's house

CHAPTER VI. What passed between the doctor and the sick man

CHAPTER VII. In which the history draws towards a conclusion

CHAPTER VIII. Thus this history draws nearer to a conclusion

CHAPTER IX. In which the history is concluded




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.


FIELDING'S BIRTHPLACE, SHARPHAM PARK

SHE THEN GAVE A LOOSE TO HER PASSION

THEY OPENED THE HAMPER

HE SEIZED HIM BY THE COLLAR

AMELIA AND HER CHILDREN

COLONEL BATH

LAWYER MURPHY

LEANING BOTH HIS ELBOWS ON THE TABLE, FIXED HIS EYES ON HER

BOOTH BETWEEN A BLUE DOMINO AND A SHEPHERDESS

DR HARRISON







INTRODUCTION.


Fielding's third great novel has been the subject of much more
discordant judgments than either of its forerunners. If we take the
period since its appearance as covering four generations, we find
the greatest authority in the earliest, Johnson, speaking of it with
something more nearly approaching to enthusiasm than he allowed himself
in reference to any other work of an author, to whom he was on the whole
so unjust. The greatest man of letters of the next generation, Scott
(whose attitude to Fielding was rather undecided, and seems to speak
a mixture of intellectual admiration and moral dislike, or at least
failure in sympathy), pronounces it "on the whole unpleasing," and
regards it chiefly as a sequel to _Tom Jones_, showing what is to
be expected of a libertine and thoughtless husband. But he too
is enthusiastic over the heroine. Thackeray (whom in this special
connection at any rate it is scarcely too much to call the greatest
man of the third generation) overflows with predilection for it, but
chiefly, as it would seem, because of his affection for Amelia herself,
in which he practically agrees with Scott and Johnson. It would be
invidious, and is noways needful, to single out any critic of our own
time to place beside these great men. But it cannot be denied that the
book, now as always, has incurred a considerable amount of hinted
fault and hesitated dislike. Even Mr. Dobson notes some things in it
as "unsatisfactory;" Mr. Gosse, with evident consciousness of temerity,
ventures to ask whether it is not "a little dull." The very absence
of episodes (on the ground that Miss Matthews's story is too closely
connected with the main action to be fairly called an episode) and of
introductory dissertations has been brought against it, as the presence
of these things was brought against its forerunners.

I have sometimes wondered whether _Amelia_ pays the penalty of an
audacity which, _a priori_, its most unfavourable critics would
indignantly deny to be a fault. It begins instead of ending with the
marriage-bells; and though critic after critic of novels has exhausted
his indignation and his satire over the folly of insisting on these as
a finale, I doubt whether the demand is not too deeply rooted in the
English, nay, in the human mind, to be safely neglected. The essence
of all romance is a quest; the quest most perennially and universally
interesting to man is the quest of a wife or a mistress; and the
chapters dealing with what comes later have an inevitable flavour of
tameness, and of the day after the feast. It is not common now-a-days to
meet anybody who thinks Tommy Moore a great poet; one has to encounter
either a suspicion of Philistinism or a suspicion of paradox if one
tries to vindicate for him even his due place in the poetical hierarchy.
Yet I suspect that no poet ever put into words a more universal
criticism of life than he did when he wrote "I saw from the beach," with
its moral of--

"Give me back, give me back, the wild freshness of morning--Her smiles
and her tears are worth evening's best light."

If we discard this fallacy boldly, and ask ourselves whether _Amelia_ is
or is not as good as _Joseph Andrews_ or _Tom Jones_, we shall I think
be inclined to answer rather in the affirmative than in the negative.
It is perhaps a little more easy to find fault with its characters
than with theirs; or rather, though no one of these characters has the
defects of Blifil or of Allworthy, it is easy to say that no one of them
has the charm of the best personages of the earlier books. The idolaters
of Amelia would of course exclaim at this sentence as it regards that
amiable lady; and I am myself by no means disposed to rank amiability
low in the scale of things excellent in woman. But though she is by no
means what her namesake and spiritual grand-daughter. Miss Sedley, must,
I fear, be pronounced to be, an amiable fool, there is really too
much of the milk of human kindness, unrefreshed and unrelieved of its
mawkishness by the rum or whisky of human frailty, in her. One could
have better pardoned her forgiveness of her husband if she had in the
first place been a little more conscious of what there was to forgive;
and in the second, a little more romantic in her attachment to him. As
it is, he was _son homme_; he was handsome; he had broad shoulders;
he had a sweet temper; he was the father of her children, and that was
enough. At least we are allowed to see in Mr. Booth no qualities other
than these, and in her no imagination even of any other qualities. To
put what I mean out of reach of cavil, compare Imogen and Amelia, and
the difference will be felt.

But Fielding was a prose writer, writing in London in the eighteenth
century, while Shakespeare was a poet writing in all time and all space,
so that the comparison is luminous in more ways than one. I do not think
that in the special scheme which the novelist set himself here he can be
accused of any failure. The life is as vivid as ever; the minor sketches
may be even called a little more vivid. Dr Harrison is not perfect. I do
not mean that he has ethical faults, for that is a merit, not a defect;
but he is not quite perfect in art. His alternate persecution and
patronage of Booth, though useful to the story, repeat the earlier fault
of Allworthy, and are something of a blot. But he is individually
much more natural than Allworthy, and indeed is something like what
Dr Johnson would have been if he had been rather better bred, less
crotchety, and blessed with more health. Miss Matthews in her earlier
scenes has touches of greatness which a thousand French novelists
lavishing "candour" and reckless of exaggeration have not equalled; and
I believe that Fielding kept her at a distance during the later scenes
of the story, because he could not trust himself not to make her more
interesting than Amelia. Of the peers, more wicked and less
wicked, there is indeed not much good to be said. The peer of the
eighteenth-century writers (even when, as in Fielding's case, there was
no reason why they should "mention him with _Kor_," as Policeman X. has
it) is almost always a faint type of goodness or wickedness dressed out
with stars and ribbons and coaches-and-six. Only Swift, by combination
of experience and genius, has given us live lords in Lord Sparkish and
Lord Smart. But Mrs. Ellison and Mrs. Atkinson are very women, and the
serjeant, though the touch of "sensibility" is on him, is excellent;
and Dr Harrison's country friend and his prig of a son are capital; and
Bondum, and "the author," and Robinson, and all the minor characters,
are as good as they can be.

It is, however, usual to detect a lack of vivacity in the book, an
evidence of declining health and years. It may be so; it is at least
certain that Fielding, during the composition of _Amelia,_ had much less
time to bestow upon elaborating his work than he had previously had,
and that his health was breaking. But are we perfectly sure that if the
chronological order had been different we should have pronounced the
same verdict? Had _Amelia_ come between _Joseph_ and _Tom,_ how many
of us might have committed ourselves to some such sentence as this: "In
_Amelia_ we see the youthful exuberances of _Joseph Andrews_ corrected
by a higher art; the adjustment of plot and character arranged with
a fuller craftsmanship; the genius which was to find its fullest
exemplification in _Tom Jones_ already displaying maturity"? And do
we not too often forget that a very short time--in fact, barely three
years--passed between the appearance of _Tom Jones_ and the appearance
of _Amelia?_ that although we do not know how long the earlier work had
been in preparation, it is extremely improbable that a man of Fielding's
temperament, of his wants, of his known habits and history, would have
kept it when once finished long in his desk? and that consequently
between some scenes of _Tom Jones_ and some scenes of _Amelia_ it is not
improbable that there was no more than a few months' interval? I do not
urge these things in mitigation of any unfavourable judgment against the
later novel. I only ask--How much of that unfavourable judgment ought
in justice to be set down to the fallacies connected with an imperfect
appreciation of facts?

To me it is not so much a question of deciding whether I like _Amelia_
less, and if so, how much less, than the others, as a question what part
of the general conception of this great writer it supplies? I do not
think that we could fully understand Fielding without it; I do not think
that we could derive the full quantity of pleasure from him without
it. The exuberant romantic faculty of Joseph Andrews and its pleasant
satire; the mighty craftsmanship and the vast science of life of _Tom
Jones;_ the ineffable irony and logical grasp of _Jonathan Wild_,
might have left us with a slight sense of hardness, a vague desire
for unction, if it had not been for this completion of the picture.
We should not have known (for in the other books, with the possible
exception of Mrs. Fitzpatrick, the characters are a little too
determinately goats and sheep) how Fielding could draw _nuances_, how
he could project a mixed personage on the screen, if we had not had Miss
Matthews and Mrs. Atkinson--the last especially a figure full of the
finest strokes, and, as a rule, insufficiently done justice to by
critics.

And I have purposely left to the last a group of personages about whom
indeed there has been little question, but who are among the triumphs of
Fielding's art--the two Colonels and their connecting-link, the wife of
the one and the sister of the other. Colonel Bath has necessarily united
all suffrages. He is of course a very little stagey; he reminds us that
his author had had a long theatrical apprenticeship: he is something too
much _d'une piece_. But as a study of the brave man who is almost more
braggart than brave, of the generous man who will sacrifice not only
generosity but bare justice to "a hogo of honour," he is admirable, and
up to his time almost unique. Ordinary writers and ordinary readers have
never been quite content to admit that bravery and braggadocio can go
together, that the man of honour may be a selfish pedant. People have
been unwilling to tell and to hear the whole truth even about Wolfe and
Nelson, who were both favourable specimens of the type; but Fielding the
infallible saw that type in its quiddity, and knew it, and registered it
for ever.

Less amusing but more delicately faithful and true are Colonel James and
his wife. They are both very good sort of people in a way, who live in
a lax and frivolous age, who have plenty of money, no particular
principle, no strong affection for each other, and little individual
character. They might have been--Mrs. James to some extent is--quite
estimable and harmless; but even as it is, they are not to be wholly
ill spoken of. Being what they are, Fielding has taken them, and, with a
relentlessness which Swift could hardly have exceeded, and a good-nature
which Swift rarely or never attained, has held them up to us as
dissected preparations of half-innocent meanness, scoundrelism, and
vanity, such as are hardly anywhere else to be found. I have used the
word "preparations," and it in part indicates Fielding's virtue, a
virtue shown, I think, in this book as much as anywhere. But it does not
fully indicate it; for the preparation, wet or dry, is a dead thing, and
a museum is but a mortuary. Fielding's men and women, once more let
it be said, are all alive. The palace of his work is the hall, not of
Eblis, but of a quite beneficent enchanter, who puts burning hearts into
his subjects, not to torture them, but only that they may light up for
us their whole organisation and being. They are not in the least the
worse for it, and we are infinitely the better.

[Illustration.]

[Illustration.]