Abstract
The Adventures of David Simple (1744; Volume the Last, 1753), Tom Jones (1749) and Sarah Fielding’s later and less well-known novel The Countess of Dellwyn (1759) all explore the compatibility (or otherwise) of the commercial world and more idealistic principles: in this case, those of the feeling or good-natured commu-nity. But where Sarah Fielding’s novels foreground the problem, and suggest in different ways that it is one with which their female characters can most readily engage, Tom Jones, in its confident assumption of universality, is more inclined to sup-press it. What follows in the first part of this chapter is a reading of David Simple and Tom Jones that sees them not, as has so often been the case, as exemplifying two entirely distinct genres, the sentimental and the comic, but rather as using the same vocabulary and terms of reference in dealing with similar concerns, although coming ultimately to very different conclusions. The Countess of Dellwyn then takes forward the insights achieved in David Simple, and proceeds on the strength of these to introduce an unexpected figure into English fiction: the middle-class working wife and mother.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For an assessment of Henry Fielding which sees him as having rather more in common with Richardson, and thus with sentimentalism, than is often allowed, see April London, ‘Controlling the Text: Women in Tom Jones’, Studies in the Novel, 19 (Fall, 1987), pp. 323–3. See also Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: the Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 6–7, where links (and differences) between sentimen-talism in Fielding and Sterne are discussed.
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), Book IV, Chapter xiv, p. 208. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.
Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (1744; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Book VII, Chapter v, p. 412. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.
Jina Politi, The Novel and its Presuppositions: Changes in the Conceptual Structure of Novels in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert N.V., 1976), p. 63.
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 80.
The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (1963; London: Methuen, 1965), p. 567, 1. 216. This association of excess with the aristocracy is of course in keeping with the anti-aristocratic views discussed in Chapter 1, p. 5–6.
Janet Todd, Sensibility: an Introduction (London and New York: Methuen 1986), p. 97.
Henry Fielding, ‘Of too frequent and expensive Diversions among the Lower Kind of People’, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers (1751), in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers and Related Writings, ed. Malvin R. Zirker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 80.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (1976; Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1984), p. 92.
Of course, Henry Fielding’s work also offers a famous example of such an unpicking of the class system in Joseph Andrews (1742; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) in which, having described ‘the picture of dependence like a kind of ladder’, the narrator suggests that ‘to a philosopher the question might only seem whether you would chuse to be a great man at six in the morning, or at two in the afternoon’ (II, xiii, pp. 157–8). Such radical scepticism, however, is never allowed to infect the novel’s final conclusion, and it is the willingness of Volume the Last to do just this in the case of David Simple, I would areue, that makes Sarah’s use of the trone the more biting.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Adventures of Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1950; rpt 1968), p. 33.
See John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), pp. 32–6, 52.
Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1980), p. 137.
On the decline of women’s employment, see also Bridget Hill, Eighteenth-Century Women: An Anthology (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984; rpt 1987), pp. 197–201 and mv Chapter 3, pp. 38–9.
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: in which the Words are deduced from their Originals, and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the best Writers (2 vols, London: J. and P. Knapton et al., 1755).
Malcolm Kelsall, Introduction to David Simple (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1987). p. xv.
Bernard Mandeville, ‘Remark Y’, The Fable of the Bees (1714–28; 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), vol. I, p. 249.
Mary Collyer, Letters from Felicia to Charlotte (1744–9; rpt 2 vols, London: R. Baldwin, 1755), vol. II, p. 21.
Sarah Fielding, The History of the Countess of Dellwyn (2 vols, London: A. Millar, 1759), vol. I, p. 36. Subsequent references in the text are to this edition.
Wetenhall Wilkes, A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady (1740; 8th edn, London: L. Hawes et al., 1766), p. 202.
Priscilla Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex: with Suggestions for its Improvement (1798; 2nd edn, London: Darton, Harvey, and Darton, 1817), pp. 78–9.
Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall (London: J. Newbery, 1762), p. 203.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; 11th edn, 2 vols, Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfoute, et al., 1808), vol. I, p. 253.
Many charities were founded during the eighteenth century — the SPCK in 1699, the Royal Maternity Charity in 1757, the Magdalen Hospital in 1758, the Royal Humane Society in 1774, and the Royal Literary Fund in 1790, to name a few. See David Owen, English Philanthropy 1660–1960 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press and Oxford University Press, 1965).
Copyright information
© 1999 Gillian Skinner
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Skinner, G. (1999). Economic Sense and Sensibility in David Simple, Tom Jones and The Countess of Dellwyn. In: Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372566_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372566_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39574-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37256-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)