A Henry Fielding Companion (review)

Reviewed by: A Henry Fielding Companion Robert Folkenflik (bio) Martin C. Battestin. A Henry Fielding Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000. xxviii+333pp. US$99.95;£56.99. ISBN 0-313-29707-X. If scholars of eighteenth-century British literature were polled to determine the best person to undertake A Henry Fielding Companion, Martin Battestin would be the overwhelmingly obvious choice. Battestin has written the most important biography of Fielding; he edited the standard editions of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, as well as the volume of letters by Henry and Sarah Fielding; he established the authorship of a series of essays by Fielding hitherto unknown; his dissertation and the first of his numerous books were on Fielding. Had he wished, instead of sending the reader of the individual entries to a range of scholars, he could have referred to a relevant passage in his own work at almost every point. He has even written the key essay on the adaptations of Fielding's fiction in films. This volume is an excellent addition to a series that already includes Pat Rogers's The Samuel Johnson Encyclopedia. The difference in the two titles conveys differences in organization. Battestin's decision to group the entries under headings has its advantages and drawbacks: there is not one range of entries, encyclopedia-style, but a number under different headings—Residences, Family and Household, Others in the Life, Works by Fielding, Works Probably by Fielding, Letters, Manuscripts, Themes and Topics, Characters in the Plays and Fictions—all preceded by a Chronology and followed by Works Cited and Bibliography. Some may question whether the letters of Fielding, who did not like to write letters and [End Page 136] whose correspondence is very unrepresentative (as opposed, say, to those of Pope, Johnson, or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), require this sort of individual docketing. On the other hand, with only seventy by Fielding surviving, it is possible (as opposed to those multi-volume correspondences of his contemporaries just mentioned) and useful. The category "Others in the Life" is not just biographical and includes those who influenced Fielding, those upon whom he commented. Aristotle, Bacon, and Cicero, to take examples from the early entries, are certainly part of Fielding's intellectual history, but their appearance in this section indicates how expansive a rubric it is. One could tweak a few of the entries: under "Hamilton, Mary" he might have noted that The Female Husband is to a large extent fictional. Under "Charke, Charlotte" he should have mentioned that she performed in Fielding's Modern Husband along with her father, Colley Cibber, and her brother Theophilus in 1732 (their participation also goes unmentioned in the account of the play in the Works section), and he might have mentioned that as a cross-dresser she has been advanced as a possible model for the Female Husband since Fielding did not know Mary Hamilton. Among the works cited on Charke, Fidelis Morgan's odd biography of Charke should be mentioned. (Robert Rehder's edition of Charke's autobiography appeared the same year as Battestin's book.) Under "Cooke, Thomas" Square might be mentioned (Tom Jones). Cooke was a "rule of right" man, and Battestin notes that "Chubb, Thomas" (q.v.) does not fit very well as Square's model. Perhaps a more serious question is whether the religious emphasis, which has been such an important part of Battestin's interpretation of Fielding from the outset, receives disproportionate attention. Although entries for Charity, Chastity, and Clergy appear successively, there is none for Law, though he does have a section in Works on Legal and Social Documents. Also, at times the discussion seems more to border on theology than history of religion, as when he quotes approvingly R.N. Stromberg complaining that Latitudinarian Arminianism was "the classic example of a Christianity stressing God too little and Man too much." Fellow religionists may think so, but the literary historian should no more be taking sides on such issues than on the oppositions of Big Endians and Little Endians. The entry on Deism avoids such invidiousness. On the topic of "Latitudinarians," whose rightful importance Battestin emphasized in his first book, he gives a succinct account and...

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