• 2 Bender, John, Imagining the Penitentiary. Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Centur (...)

3Fielding’s constant play with his own narrative voice in his novels has been analysed as a means to assert his control of narrative devices and processes, in accordance with his innovations as a London magistrate. According to John Bender, Fielding’s novels are perfect examples of what he calls ‘the juridical novel’, in which, as in judicial inquiries, ‘the issue is who will have final control over narrative construction; the difference is that fiction can realize the fantasy of omniscient authority.’2 In Bender’s perspective, Fielding pretends to reveal the trick of his trade to better control each and every possible reaction on the reader’s part. According to the American critic, one has to consider fiction and its development in the eighteenth century to really understand the changes in criminal law.

• 3 Bender, J., Imagining the Penitentiary, p. 37
• 4 See Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel [1957] (London, Pimlico, 2000)
• 5 See Watt, Ian, ‘The Reading Public and the Novel’, The Rise of the Novel, pp.35-92
• 6 See Watt, I., The Rise of the Novel, p. 254

4Just as novels are, according to him, based on what he calls ‘the fiction of personal identity’, which is always linked to ‘narrative sequence’,3 criminal procedure shifted in the eighteenth century and became much more preoccupied with the personality of the perpetrator and with the necessity of giving a coherent and documented narrative about each felony and crime. Bender’s main thesis, in his seminal monograph, is that there is a continuity between Bentham’s projects about the Panopticon as the ideal means of penitentiary reformation and the ‘Rise of the novel’.4 Whereas Ian Watt linked the development of ‘formal realism’ to the growing importance of the middle classes in the reading public,5 Bender interprets the formal innovations of eighteenth-century novels as instances of panopticism. Watt considered Tom Jones as only ‘part novel’,6 yet, in Imagining the Penitentiary, Fielding is presented as the epitome of the penitentiary novelist, due to his use of seemingly omniscient narrators and to his skill in devising coherent plots.

• 8 The best account of the ‘New Birth’ was given by John Wesley himself, in his Journals, when he wrot (...)

7However relevant these remarks on Fielding’s religion might be in Bender’s perspective, they cannot completely account for the religious and moral dilemmas the reader encounters throughout Tom Jones’s peregrination across England. Moreover, even if Fielding carefully organises his plot and wants his reader to believe in the protagonist’s evolution from young rake to well-established gentleman, he deliberately omits certain passages to manipulate his reader and wants to contrast Tom’s reformation with what he considered as the hypocrisy of the ‘New Birth’ preached by Methodists in the mid eighteenth-century. In other words, the evolution of Fielding’s protagonist in Tom Jones can assuredly be read as the creation of a juridical narrative in which every element in a life eventually finds a meaning, but it can also be envisaged as a counterpoint to Methodist spiritual autobiographies in which the new light of conversion gives a new and definitive meaning to every single sin committed.8 Tom Jones, with its ‘perfect plot’, according to Coleridge, can be analysed as an instance of the penitentiary discourse, yet it is also, like other novels and satires by Fielding, an exercise in narrative opacity and a plea for personal frailties and incoherences.

• 9 For more details about Fielding’s hostility towards Methodism, see Leduc, Guyonne, ‘Fielding et le (...)
• 10 ‘If Fielding’s satire carried serious ideological freight, indeed, it lay more in religion and ethi (...)

8Henry Fielding’s preoccupation with the links between the innovations brought about by Methodist theology and Methodist preaching and the formal innovations of novels is already discernible at the beginning of his novelistic career.9 As early as 1741, shortly after the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Henry Fielding parodied the epistolary novel in Shamela, and drew from Richardson once again in 1742 to produce Joseph Andrews. Even though the rivalry between the two writers has already been widely discussed by critics, notably in sociological and political perspectives, little attention has been paid to the religious roots of the controversy, and to its possible consequences in terms of narration and literary ethics, as noted by Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor.10

• 11 Fielding, Henry, An Apology for the Life of Shamela Andrews [1741], ed. Martin C. Battestin, in The (...)
• 12 For the hypothetical links that Richardson may have had with Methodists, and particularly John Wesl (...)

9In his parodies of Richardson’s novels, Fielding exaggerates Pamela’s piety to turn it into hypocrisy, and explicitly links Pamela’s constant appeals to divine Grace to Methodism. In Shamela, for instance, Shamela’s mother suggests that her daughter reads George Whitefield’s spiritual autobiography, which Booby thinks is a licentious book the first time he sees her reading it.11 Moreover, Fielding’s parodies do not only target the plot and the characters of Pamela, they are also aimed at its author, Samuel Richardson, who was suspected of nurturing some religious sympathies with Methodists.12

• 13 Fielding, H., Shamela, p.154
• 14 Fielding, H., Shamela, p.172
• 15 In early 1739, Joseph Trapp preached four sermons against Methodism and published them under the ti (...)

10Fielding has often played with mock critical apparatuses, and his preoccupation with this genre started in Shamela, in which he satirizes Richardson’s claims at presenting authentic letters to the reader. The critical letters preceding the actual letters in which the plot unfurls allow the novelist to highlight the links between religious hypocrisy and formal innovations. Indeed, Shamela’s letters are commended in the first pages of the book by a clergyman called Tickletext: ‘the useful and truly religious Doctrine of Grace is everywhere inculcated.’13 Moreover, within the plot of the novel itself, Shamela explains that Parson Williams managed to seduce her thanks to his particular conception of religious morality, expressed in a sermon on the text ‘Be not Righteous over-much’.14 The mention of the sermon is doubly ironical, as the sermon delivered by Williams, which is suggested as a means of justifying hypocrisy and vice, is reminiscent of a sermon that started a controversy involving George Whitefield in 1739.15 A complete reversal of all values, whether moral or religious, is therefore taking place.

• 16 ‘Ce sur quoi ironisent les auteurs de Pamela Censured et de Shamela n’est pas tant le mensonge de R (...)

11Paradoxically enough, Fielding attacks the genre of the epistolary novel inspired by spiritual autobiography, and yet he exploits the very devices offered by the narrative apparatus of Richardson’s novel to prove the true character of Pamela. In other words, and to get back to Bender’s conceptualisation of the juridical novel, Fielding’s parody revolves around the possibility of stating the truth about the self through different narratives in fictitious letters. On the one hand, the fiction that the reader is presented with the true and actual letters of Shamela, as opposed to the ones that were published in Pamela, seems to confirm the fact that it is possible to eventually pass a moral judgment on the character, and to condemn her hypocrisy and lechery. On the other hand, however, as Fielding’s parody also mimics the very paratext designed by Richardson, it also evidences its own fictitious nature, and suggests that Richardson’s whole editorial project is tainted by hypocrisy as well. Richardson’s repeated denials concerning his status of author, and not editor, of Pamela, so as to guarantee the authenticity of the letters and the moral lessons that could be learnt from them are lampooned in Fielding’s Shamela, as noted by Baudouin Millet.16

• 18 Warner, William B., ‘The Pamela media event’, Licensing Entertainment. The Elevation of Novel Readi (...)

13The ‘Pamela media event’, as William B. Warner called it,18 was therefore a controversy about the possibility of controlling readers’ reception of a given work and the delicate balance between seduction and instruction when writing fiction. Fielding’s main objective, in his satire, was to evidence both the efficient narrative strategies used by Richardson and to underline the complete impossibility of guiding readers’ reception. According to the novelist and magistrate, the accumulation of details about the sufferings of a character–whether it be an actual Methodist preacher accounting for his conversion or a fictional female servant whose constancy finally convinces her master to atone for his sins–is quite often a hypocritical means of playing on readers’ basic instincts to sell paper.

• 19 See for instance Watt, I., ‘Fielding and the Epic Theory of the Novel’, The Rise of the Novel, pp.2 (...)
• 20 On the subject of Scriblerian mock-arts, see Bullard, Paddy, “=’The Scriblerian Mock-Arts: Pseudo T (...)
• 21 ‘En 1742, Fielding proclame par un geste fondateur la fictionalité de son récit. Son entreprise acq (...)

14Even if Shamela is a parody that cannot be fully understood without knowing Richardson’s original text, Fielding’s next narrative enterprise, Joseph Andrews, though originally conceived as another variation on Pamela, can be read independently. Moreover, whereas the paratext of Shamela was nothing but a parody of that of Pamela, Fielding gave a proper preface to Joseph Andrews, though its status remains problematic and has been the subject of many critical discourses.19 It has been read as a serious attempt of legitimizing the novel as a literary genre worthy of critical attention, as suggested by the Aristotelian framework adopted by Fielding, but it has also been considered as another element in the global ironical and satirical poetics of Joseph Andrews. In other words, the preface would only be a parody of an ars poetica, in keeping with the Scriblerian tradition of ‘mock-arts’.20 Bender’s perspective on Fielding’s narrative practices would of course imply that the preface in Joseph Andrews should be taken seriously as a means to ensure an adequate reception thanks to a precise control over narrative resources. Yet the ambiguity, or, to be more precise, the undecidability of that canonical preface remains, as its major innovation is to openly declare that what follows is a fiction.21

• 22 ‘I declare here once for all, I describe not Men, but Manners; not an Individual, but a Species.’ F (...)
• 23 ‘There are certain Mysteries or Secrets in all Trades from the highest to the lowest, from that of (...)

15Similar questions arise when one is confronted to the liminal essays opening the first three books of Joseph Andrews, and, later on, each one of the eighteen books composing Tom Jones. The essays seem to give a legitimacy to the fiction they introduce, as the narrator explains that his work differs from that of the historian as it deals with types and species rather than with individual men and women.22 Moreover, one could think that Fielding tries to keep control over reader’s reception by proposing such a conceptual apparatus. Yet, there is a definite tongue-in-cheek tone in all those essays, as the trade of the novel writer is alternately compared to that of a butcher or to that of a scheming Prime Minister.23 Novel-writing, in other words, is described as a trade requiring craftsmanship, as a disreputable activity slightly similar to criminal life, as the writer has to accept the fictionality of his work to try and create something worth reading.

• 24 Bender, J., Imagining the Penitentiary, p.146
• 25 See Fielding, H., Joseph Andrews, p.48
• 26 ‘If one then rereads the earlier chapters with this information in mind [that is, that Joseph loves (...)

16Bender considers Joseph Andrews and its intrusive narrator as a “corrective to the lack of authorial presence in epistolary fiction”,24 yet he does not address the problem raised by the ironical perspective and the avowal of fictionality. It could be argued however that Fielding’s careful construction of the persona of an unassuming narrator is another means to guide readers’ reception and to come to a coherent and unequivocal narrative. The narrator in Joseph Andrews is nevertheless far from being absolutely omniscient, and plays at making things more confusing than they were at the beginning, as suggested by the delayed revelation concerning Joseph’s love for Fanny.25 Fielding, it seems, always suggests that he is aware of the unpredictability of readers’ reception, and implies that believing in the possibility of immediate efficiency and of perfect reception can only result in hypocrisy, just like in Richardson or in Methodists’ writings.26 The ambivalence of the essays in Fielding’s novel, which are digressions, critical recapitulations, and little satires at the same time, are part of the creation of the narrator as judge in Bender’s perspective, as the narrator asks questions and gives answers, just like a magistrate would lead an enquiry:

• 28 See Bender, J., Imagining the Penitentiary, p.155
• 29 ‘Their [The Methodists'] interest was less in celebrating the safety of their union in Christ or in (...)

18John Bender does not dismiss the importance of religion in Fielding’s works, yet he believes that religion is considered as a means and not as an end in the moral landscape of the novels.28 If one considers the journeys of Joseph Andrews, of Tom Jones or of William Booth in Amelia, it is hard to deny that these are stories of progressive reformation, in which the reader follows the trial and error process through which the main characters finally get to a settled and successful life. Fielding’s characters are meant to be counter-examples to Methodist narratives in which the worst of sinners experience sudden revelation and get assured of being justified in the eye of God. Those narratives can also be better understood in Bender’s frame of analysis, as their main aim was to create emulation in the community, as noted by Phyllis Mack.29

• 30 The controversy surrounding Pamela, however, was immense, as shown by the multiplicity of reviews, (...)
• 31 ‘A Letter from Fielding to Samuel Richardson, October 15, 1748’, in The Criticism of Henry Fielding(...)

20Fielding’s relationship with his works once they were published was quite paradoxical. Even if he had a taste for satire, whether as a playwright before the Licensing Act of 1737 or as a novelist delighting in parodies, he did not really care about potential controversies. Shamela and Joseph Andrews were not followed by any open letters or libels penned by Fielding,30 and Tom Jones, though it was openly criticized when it was published, did not start a controversy. Moreover, even though Fielding could be harsh when criticizing and satirizing other people’s works, he could also change his mind easily, as shown by his commendation of Richardson’s Clarissa in a personal letter he sent to the author.31 It seemed that Fielding’s persona of author-cum-narrator only existed within the frame of his novels and disappeared once the books were published.

• 33 ‘And the Editor of these Sheets will have his End, if it inspires a laudable Emulation in the Minds (...)

22Significantly enough, that passage was taken away from the novel in 1742, when Richardson published Pamela along with its sequel, Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, and wanted to make sure that the novel was read as a moral tale, but not as a Methodist parable. Yet, even in the 1742 edition of Pamela, the epilogue still makes things very explicit and highlights that Pamela’s life should be emulated by its readers.33

• 36 John Wesley preached a sermon entitled Christian Perfection in 1741, and he wrote about that topic (...)

27Tom acknowledges his errors, yet he suggests a hierarchy between sins, and hints at the fact that his taste for love outside the bounds of marriage is, in fact, respectful of other people and helps him realise his own frailty and imperfection, as opposed to the Methodist who might pretend to have reached Christian perfection after having experienced the ‘New Birth’ of conversion.36

• 37 On the use of Lockean epistemology in Wesley’s theology, see Anderson, Misty G., ‘Methodism and the (...)

28The reformation suggested in the plots of Fielding’s novels is therefore far from being unproblematic, as the evil characters, full of affectation and hypocrisy, remain the same, as is the case with Blifil or with Pamela, Joseph’s sister in Joseph Andrews. Moreover, the domestication of the excessive impulses is not really the product of a disciplinary apparatus, of a Christian morality that would be the ‘instrument’ of a broader will of moral reformation. It should be kept in mind, additionally, that Bender’s distinction between what should be the main object of religious attention, ‘the soul’, and what is supposed to be the focus of civil attention, ‘the mind’, as elaborated in the writings of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, over-simplifies the reappropriation of Lockean philosophy, for instance, by Methodist theology.37 If Fielding’s characters end up reformed, it is not only because they are subjected to a new form of civil government in which each and every detail of a life should be organised narratively to allow for an unequivocal interpretation, but it is also because religious morality could only be apprehended in terms of ‘mind’ and ‘character formation’. The imperfect reformations of Fielding’s characters should be seen as counter-narratives to the perfect redemptions evoked in the journals published by Methodist preachers and their followers. Fielding’s conclusions might be regarded as happy endings, as variations on the ‘they lived happily ever after’ of the fairy tales, yet there is only a promise of future and everlasting happiness, and the reader is finally left to ponder the moral and religious teachings to be drawn from the narrative sequence.

• 38 Widmayer, Anne F., Theatre and the Novel from Behn to Fielding (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 2015), (...)

29In other words, it seems that Fielding’s panoptic narrative architecture, to adopt Bender’s paradigm, is either too perfect to need addenda to further ensure the correct reception of novels or too imperfect to be improved in any way by public interventions. The careful attention with which Fielding exposes the fictionality of his endeavours, recalls at the beginning of each book that all that is told should be considered in an ironical light, and ties every loose end at the end of his novels while leaving the reader to decide on the meaning to give to the different narratives is therefore both a means to highlight authorial intentions and to blur them, to add light and darkness, as suggested by the liminal essay in Tom Jones. The very idea that Fielding’s narrators would be omniscient is questionable, as Anne F. Widmayer has suggested: ‘the idea that ʻrealityʼ can be found in a fictional work, narrated by an imperfectly omniscient and questionably authorized author-character, is similarly risible.’38 This hypothesis seems reinforced by the public disappearance of Fielding after the publication of his books.

• 39 ‘I say not this, however, to excuse that want of Decorum, which ye so justly censure, and for which (...)

30Even if Tom Jones was globally favourably reviewed when it was published, the novel was nonetheless criticized for its supposed immorality. Richardson, in his private correspondence, condemned the novel and explained that satire was no excuse for the absolute lack of decorum he saw in the peregrinations of Tom.39 These recriminations were not made public, however, and the most significant critiques of Tom Jones were published anonymously.

• 40 Aretine, ‘To Selim Slim’, Old England, 27 May 1749
• 41 Lyttelton, George, Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul, in a Letter to Gilbe (...)

31On 27^th May 1747, an anonymous critic, who used the pseudonym ‘Aretine’ to highlight his satirical intents, called Tom Jones a ‘motely [sic] History of Bastardism, Fornication, and Adultery’40 and said that it imperiled the very idea of religion by ridiculing hypocritical clergymen and would-be Methodists. The criticism is not very original, yet it is worth reading as it is meant to reach Fielding through his protector, George Lyttleton, who used the pseudonym ‘Selim Slim’ and who had recently published quite an orthodox analysis of Paul’s epistles.41 Fielding, however, did not give any answer to that review, as if the novel in itself, with all its liminal essays and its complex irony, was enough and did not need any further clarification for critics unable to grasp the complex persona of the narrator.

• 42 Orbilius, An Examen of the History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. In Two Letters to a Friend, Proper to (...)
• 43 Power, Henry, ‘Henry Fielding, Richard Bentley, and ʻthe Sagacious Readerʼ of Tom Jones’, The Revie (...)

32Another attack on Tom Jones evidences the fact that Fielding was a well-known figure that was challenged by his critics but who did not want to take up the glove. An Examen of the History of Tom Jones, published anonymously under the pseudonym of ‘Orbilius’, is a lengthy listing of all that might be considered offending and improbable in Fielding’s novel.42 ‘Orbilius’ has read all eighteen books of Tom Jones in detail and is very aware of Fielding’s literary career, yet his Examen falls almost always flat, as he seems to identify the problematic aspects of Fielding’s poetics without being able to understand them, ‘he has ʻa great gift for getting hold of the right thing – by the wrong end’’.43

• 45 Fielding, H., Tom Jones, pp.430-431
• 46 ‘Il [le narrateur dans Tom Jones] fait l'auteur (comme on dit ‘faire l'intéressant’), parle boutiqu (...)
• 47 ‘L'auteur réel, l'auteur en personne, est par rapport à son œuvre offerte à la lecture en position (...)

34The accusation of lying is particularly aimed at the passage in Tom Jones in which Tom and Partridge visit The Bell Inn, in Gloucester, which was really run by George Whitefield’s brother.45 However, it completely misses the point of the narrative of Tom Jones, as its narrator is nothing but a persona and as Fielding, as an author, does not warrant any correct understanding of his book.46 Consequently, Orbilius’s Examen, acrimonious though it may be, did not start any controversy with Fielding, who went on writing novels and having his career as a London magistrate. The fact that Orbilius wanted to involve Henry Fielding, the author, in a controversy about the novel Tom Jones evidences a complete misunderstanding of the narrative architecture of the book, in which the ‘author’ is nothing more than a character, another fictitious creation that cannot be held accountable.47 It seems, after all, that Fielding’s narrative architectures are somehow similar to the panopticon sketched by Bentham, but more because it is always impossible to decide whether or not the author in their centres watches carefully over the reception of his endeavours or not.

• 49 ‘Again and again Fielding’s writing of the 1750s sets forth projects and proposals for reform artic (...)

37Bender, in his seminal study on the relationship between innovations in literature and global changes in criminal law, elaborates on this duality of Fielding, even if he is sometimes led by his demonstration to be over-systematic. Fielding, to Bender, epitomises a pivotal moment in the history of both literature and penal reform as his writings articulate the new narrative paradigm in which every single biographic element can and should be traced back to its origin while being written in a language that constantly alludes to traditional morals and religion.49 Yet Bender gives too much credit to Fielding’s narrators, whose omniscience is only fictional.

• 50 ‘The authority of the modern bureaucratic state – lodged in detectives, bureaus of records, and cir (...)
• 51 ‘Faire que la surveillance soit permanente dans ses effets, même si elle est discontinue dans son a (...)

38Rereading Fielding’s novels and Bender’s interpretation of them in the perspective of Fielding’s abhorrence for Methodism and for what he deemed the acme of hypocrisy, that is, narratives of sudden conversion in which a new light is shed on each and every action of former sinners, has ultimately led us to reconsider the very status of the narrator’s voice in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. By relinquishing the possibility of controlling readers’ reception and by constantly underlining the limits and fictionality of his own narrative voice, Fielding makes sure that it can remain efficient, as the principle of omniscience presupposes that audiences, just like the general public, believe in this illusion of mastery.50 Fielding’s novels, in that perspective, may be regarded as characteristic of panopticism not only because they organise the narrative sequence of events, but mostly because they rely on readers’ participation and on the belief that the author, in spite of his fictionality, can nonetheless guarantee an unequivocal interpretation. The readers would in this hypothesis be like the inmates who can only assume that someone is watching over them in the central tower.51 Fielding writes penitentiary novels not only because he writes about reformed sinners and is careful of his plots, but because that narrative architecture allows him to organise his own disappearance.