Abstract
At this point I must pause to ask: Does it really matter what Hume thinks? Were novelists even paying attention? The answer for the second of these questions is that it seems unlikely. Fielding, who was Hume’s exact contemporary and even shared Hume’s publisher in London, makes no references to the philosopher in any of his writings. Even those novelists who mention Hume by name, such as Sterne or Austen, seem unfazed by his disparaging remarks on fiction.
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Notes
- 1.
The only available evidence that Fielding may have read Hume is the presence in his library of the Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Martin Battestin is exemplarily cautious when arguing for Hume’s influence on Fielding’s Amelia, presenting his claim as “a hypothesis only” which “cannot be finally proved.” See Martin Battestin, “The Problem of Amelia: Hume, Barrow, and the Conversion of Captain Booth,” ELH 41 (1974), 613–648.
- 2.
Nicholas Paige, Before Fiction. The Ancien Régime of the Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 32.
- 3.
James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), 57.
- 4.
Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study, for a Gentleman,” in The Works of John Locke, ed. J. A. St. John (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), Vol. II, 503. Emphasis added.
- 5.
Sir William Jones, “Letters from a Tutor to his Pupils (1780),” in Novel Definitions. An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688–1815, ed. Cheryl L. Nixon (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2009), 241.
- 6.
Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, ed. Eleanor Ty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Here, too, Hays differs widely from Hume. While Hume found that novels exaggerate the influence of love, Hays finds that love—especially unrequited love—plays a determinant role in human affairs. “Is it possible,” her protagonist writes, “that you can be insensible of all the mighty mischiefs which have been caused by this passion—of the great events and changes of society, to which it has operated as a powerful, though secret, spring?” (143).
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Maioli, R. (2016). Interlude. In: Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39859-4_3
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