Gentility and Class in Fielding's Joseph Andrews

Fielding's Social Position and the Shifting Meaning of Gentility

The protagonists of Henry Fielding's novels would appear to be marked by their extreme social mobility: Shamela manages to marry her master, Booby, and the "foundling" Tom Jones is revealed as the illegitimate child of a serving-maid and Squire Allworthy himself, just as surely as Joseph Andrews is revealed to be the kidnapped son of Wilson, who himself was "born a gentleman" (Fielding 157). Wilson's digression in Book III, Chapter 3 of Joseph Andrews has frequently been taken as a self-portrait: "I am descended from a good family," Wilson tells Joseph and Parson Adams, "my Education was liberal, and at a public School" (Fielding 157). Goldberg helpfully notes of this passage that such an education was defined in Johnson's Dictionary as an education "becoming a gentleman," although he fails to note that Fielding himself was educated at the most prestigious of all English public schools, Eton. Like Wilson, Fielding would turn playwright and "hackney-writer to the Lawyers" to pay his debts (Fielding 169). Yet when Wilson describes the contempt shown to him as a writer by "men of Business," he manages to indict as meaningless the claims to "good breeding" on the part of his own social class:

There is a malignity in the Nature of Man, which when not weeded out, or at least covered by a good Education and Politeness, delights in making another uneasy or dissatisfied with himself. This abundantly appears in all Assemblies, except those which are filled by People of Fashion, and especially among the younger people of both Sexes, whose Birth and Fortunes place them just without the polite circles; I mean the lower Class of the Gentry, and the higher of the mercantile World, who are in reality the worst bred part of Mankind. (Fielding 170)

If the reader is informed enough to identify in Wilson's story echoes of Fielding's autobiography, what then are we to make of this astonishing indictment of the "worst bred part of Mankind" as the class from which Wilson and Fielding both emerged? It is worth noting that Wilson's comments occur within the context of a story about the social status of a working writer in an era of transition — from the aristocratic patronage of "subscriptions" to the emergent capitalist marketplace and the corresponding development of mass culture. In his social history of England in the mid-eighteenth century, Paul Langford offers a view about the shifting class dynamics of this period, to which Fielding was reacting:

A feudal society and an agrarian economy were associated with an elaborate code of honor designed to govern relations among the privileged few.... But a society in which the most vigorous and growing element was a commercial middle class, involved in both production and consumption, required a more sophisticated means of regulating manners. Politeness conveyed upper-class gentility, enlightenment, and sociability to a much wider elite whose only qualification was money, but who were glad to spend it on acquiring the status of a gentleman. (Langford 4)

Fielding intended Joseph Andrews to give a revised or updated definition of gentility, one that reflected this shift from an aristocratic to a capitalist paradigm. The most significant way that Joseph Andrews marks this shift, however, is in its attitude toward the capitalist marketplace of fiction. The origins of Joseph Andrews and Shamela as parodies of Samuel Richardson's immensely popular Pamela encapsulate the way in which matters of literary taste — considered according to the theories of Pierre Bourdieu — invariably encapsulate issues of social class as well.

Although Wilson's digression has been taken as autobiographical, Fielding's actual biography was more complex. The historian Edward Gibbon, a slightly younger contemporary of the novelist, recorded in his Memoirs an astonishing genealogical claim on Fielding's part — that he was closely related to the ruling family of the Holy Roman Empire — and was willing to vouch for its veracity:

Our immortal Fielding was of the younger branch of the Earls of Denbigh, who draw their origin from the Counts of Habsburg, the lineal descendants of Eltrico, in the seventh century Duke of Alsace. Far different have been the fortunes of the English and German divisions of the family of Habsburg: the former, the knights and sheriffs of Leicestershire, have slowly risen to the dignity of a peerage; the latter, the emperors of Germany and kings of Spain, have threatened the liberty of the Old and invaded the treasures of the New World. The successors of Charles the Fifth may disdain their brethren of England, but the romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of the house of Austria. (Gibbon 46)

The peerage belonged to Fielding's grandfather, Sir Henry Gould. Although Fielding himself hardly counted as a titled aristocrat within the English class system, he was nonetheless comfortably a member of England's ruling class, educated at Eton alongside Pitt the Elder. It is worth noting, however, that the tremendous social upheaval and class mobility of the latter half of the eighteenth century — including the French, American, and Industrial Revolutions — was already beginning in the earlier decades and would not spare Fielding's distant cousins: the last male heir of Gibbon's "Escurial" had died in 1700, seven years before Fielding was born, prompting the War of the Spanish Succession; the last of the "house of Austria" would die two years before Fielding published Joseph Andrews in 1742, prompting the War of the Austrian Succession.

Sir William Empson sees Fielding's aristocratic connection as the source of his "repeated claim, admitted to be rather comic but a major source of his nerve, that he was capable of making a broad survey because he was an aristocrat and had known high life from within" (Empson 817). Yet Claude Rawson notes that in deriving his satiric style in Joseph Andrews and Shamela from the likes of Pope — who had enjoyed aristocratic patronage but was hardly an aristocrat himself — "the patrician Fielding picked up his lordly accents, to some extent at least, from authors who were themselves non-patrician" (Rawson 1990). This disjunction between Fielding's own social status and the social status of those writers whose tone he sought to emulate further suggests that some kind of shift in the meaning of gentility was taking place as Fielding wrote those novels.

Parody, Class, and the Attack on Richardson's Pamela

That shift is just as surely betokened by the fact that Fielding, in Rawson's account, had to learn and imitate his "lordly accents" from previous literature. This brings us to the larger issue of satiric animus in Shamela and Joseph Andrews. Can reading a novel help someone to climb the class ladder? This question seems to be at the heart of Fielding's novels, which — though different in many respects — are alike in their status as parodies of Samuel Richardson's immensely popular Pamela. McCrea thinks that the class element is paramount in Richardson's imagination, and that "the phenomenal popularity of Pamela may reflect its social schism. The story that, in its first part, provided wish fulfillment for every humble servant, in its second flattered aristocrats" (McCrea 487).

It is important to understand that Fielding's parody should be read not merely as frivolous joke — although it can be that — but also as a sophisticated critique of popular taste. In his study of parody, Simon Dentith argues that Fielding's centrality in the history of literary parody derives directly from Cervantes, as Fielding indicates in his preface. But where Cervantes was mocking the chivalric romances of questing knights, Dentith sees Fielding as mocking a new and particularly modern — and déclassé — form of "bourgeois romance":

Shamela is a specific parody, which is expanded into the more general parody of Joseph Andrews... The novel is more distantly parodic of Pamela than Shamela, yet is nevertheless close enough for us to recognise that there is a strong polemical impetus, which means that Joseph Andrews can be understood as taking its starting-point from the need to differentiate itself from Richardson's novel. Fielding's activity as a novelist, then, is founded upon his parodic distance from the work of Richardson, which, as far as Pamela is concerned, we can describe as providing a kind of bourgeois romance, an eighteenth-century Cinderella story in which the heroine gets to marry her class superior thanks to her aggressive defence of her virtue. Fielding's parodic assault on this tendentious narrative defines his point of departure as a novelist; it can itself be subjected to diverse evaluations. On the one hand, it can be seen as a healthy rejoinder to the narrowness and prurience of Richardson's puritanical ideas of sexual virtue. On the other hand, it is not difficult to see some conservative and normative judgements operating in Fielding's parodies, which mock Pamela's class presumption, and derive their humour from the inherently risible spectacle of a sexually aggressive older woman making advances to an innocent young man. Either way, the presence of parody, in defining the distance of Fielding's novel from the bourgeois romance of Richardson, is sufficiently clear; equally evident is the use of parody in the cultural clashes of the mid-eighteenth century over ethics, class, and sexuality. (Dentith 61–2)

Dentith identifies a contradiction in the way Fielding's response to Richardson views him from a lofty aristocratic height by stigmatizing him as "bourgeois," while simultaneously revealing "conservative" class politics by mocking the "class presumption" of Pamela. To some extent, the unveiling of Joseph Andrews as having been a gentleman all along can be read as Fielding's response to Pamela's need to attain respectability and marry into a higher class — Fielding in response wants to define gentility as something possessed almost by nature, or by heredity.

Fielding uses the actual word "gentility" only once in the text of Joseph Andrews, in his description of Fanny in Book II, Chapter 12. Yet the way he uses the word is extremely revealing. It appears as the culmination of his set-piece character description introducing Fanny to the reader, preceded by a warning: "Reader, if thou art of an amorous Hue, I advise thee to skip over the next Paragraph; which, to render our History perfect, we are obliged to set down, humbly hoping, that we may escape the fate of Pygmalion" (Fielding 120). Fielding then offers a résumé of Fanny's facial features that seems deliberately anti-romantic, concluding: "she had a natural Gentility, superior to the Acquisition of Art, and which surprized all who beheld her" (Fielding 119–20).

The suggestion here is that a "Gentility" which does come as an "Acquisition of Art" exists alongside Fanny's "natural Gentility," to which it is inferior. The various versions of false gentility given in the novel seem to be defined against Fanny's virtues as enumerated in Book II, Chapter 12. We can see this in Fielding's formal character sketch of Beau Didapper, precisely parallel in structure to his description of Fanny. According to Fielding, Beau Didapper had:

lived too much in the world to be bashful, and too much at court to be proud: he seemed not much inclined to avarice, for he was profuse in his expenses; nor had he all the features of prodigality, for he never gave a shilling: no hater of women, for he always dangled after them; yet so little subject to lust, that he had, among those who knew him best, the character of great moderation in his pleasures; no drinker of wine; nor so addicted to passion but that a hot word or two from an adversary made him immediately cool. (Fielding 245)

The beaux of Fielding's day were a species of male fashion-victim obsessed with their appearance to the exclusion of all else; the hint of narcissism may be the reason why Didapper is "so little subject to lust." Didapper's fashionability recalls the social critique in Fielding's "dissertation concerning high and low people," in which questions of innate aristocracy are translated into questions of fashion:

False Gentility: Fashion, Conduct Literature, and the Epistolary Mode

High People signify no other than people of Fashion, and low People those of no Fashion. Now this word Fashion, hath by long use lost its original Meaning, from which at present it gives us a very different Idea: for I am deceived, if by Persons of Fashion, we do not generally include a Conception of Birth and Accomplishments superior to the Herd of Mankind; whereas in reality nothing was more originally meant by a Person of Fashion than a Person who dressed himself in the Fashion of the Times; and the Word really and truly signifies no more at this day. (Fielding 122)

This of course obscures to a certain extent the class gulf that still existed in the eighteenth century. Fielding perceived himself to be on the upper end of the class divide, and his critique of the world of "Fashion" is meant to sting: to reassure the reader that fashionability does not make anyone "superior to the Herd of Mankind" is to suggest a critique made from one who knows. A hint as to the origin of this critique appears in Fielding's interpolated tale of Leonora — the "unfortunate jilt" who is led by her obsession with fashion to desert the decent Horatio for the superficial fashionability of Bellarmine. Crucially, Leonora's superficial fashionability involves letter-writing. Fielding's narrator draws attention to the letters that Leonora and Horatio exchange, even including a footnote upon quoting Leonora's letter: "This letter was written by a young Lady" (Fielding 83).

When fashion invades even reading and writing in this way, Fielding's literary parody of Richardson in Shamela and Joseph Andrews becomes a direct critique of social standards. Leonora knows how to write a "polite" letter, as does Richardson's Pamela Andrews. Fielding's parody of that style in Shamela is deliberately less than polite:

O what News, since I writ my last! the young Squire hath been here, and as sure as a Gun he hath taken a Fancy to me; Pamela, says he, (for so I am called here) you was a great Favourite of your late Mistress's; yes, an't please your Honour, says I; and I believe you deserved it, says he; thank your Honour for your good Opinion, says I; and then he took me by the Hand, and I pretended to be shy... (Fielding 283)

Jenny Davidson singles out the way in this passage whereby "Shamela's use of contractions and the proverb 'as sure as a Gun,' in addition to making a phallic joke, shows up Pamela's essential lack of gentility (and that of her author)" — her author being Richardson (Davidson 134). Richardson's Pamela is written in epistolary format, and Richardson had worked as a printer's apprentice and studied the "fashionable" letters of the likes of Lord Chesterfield, which in their literary propriety also aimed to present a model of conduct. Bartolomeo outlines how Fielding takes on this epistolary practice in Shamela, "replacing the commendatory letters with which Richardson had prefixed the novel with ones from 'John Puff' and from the 'editor' to himself, and mocking the practice of writing to the moment by having Shamela self-consciously write in the present tense as she describes her master climbing into bed with her" (Bartolomeo 261). The implication is that Richardson himself is climbing in social class by writing the novel.

William Empson offers a useful summary of the class politics involved in Fielding's dislike of Richardson:

What people found so entertaining at the time, when Fielding attacked Richardson in a rather explosive class situation (the eager readers of Richardson in French were presumably heading for the French Revolution) was that the classes seemed to have swapped over. The printer's apprentice was the gentlemanly expert on manners, indeed the first English writer to be accepted as one by the polite French; whereas if you went to see Fielding, they liked to say at the time, you would find him drunk in bed with his cook and still boasting he was related to the Habsburgs. His answer to Richardson was thus: "But I know what a gentleman is; I am one." The real difference was about the meaning of the term; Fielding thought it should mean a man fit to belong to the class which actually rules in his society, especially by being a just judge.... He provided a new idea of the aristocrat, with the added claim that it was an older tradition. (Empson 891–2)

Fielding, in other words, believes in hierarchy — as the "Ladder of Dependence" in his "Dissertation concerning High and Low People" would indicate — as surely as he believes in a form of noblesse oblige. Yet what is the noblesse oblige entailed when Lord Chesterfield's letters of advice to his son become a best-seller, providing conduct models for the likes of Pamela Andrews? That was, of course, Richardson's great motivation, and his desire to write a "moral" conduct book is where Pamela comes from.

Davidson's invocation of Bourdieu's Distinction — which anatomizes the differences in status bolstered by judgments of taste — reminds us of the way that a Marxist-inspired analysis of class can be turned toward cultural artifacts. Fielding's implication is that Richardson's models for conduct in Pamela provide "minutiae...not the principles of good manners," and offer no suitable model for class-climbing, since the climber is always recognizable from the style of instruction. Davidson further notes that "in an atmosphere that encourages self-improvement, publishers are quick to capitalize on the demand for increasingly specific books to instruct readers in the particulars of gentility... They are designed for middle- and working-class audiences who will not otherwise have access to the array of detail that has to be mastered by anyone who hopes to pass for an aristocrat" (Davidson 72). Fielding detests Richardson as a spurious model for gentility, based on "minutiae" and sold to social climbers.

To some extent, this distinction between "minutiae" and "principles" is the criticism that lurks behind the depiction of fashionable figures in the novel: Leonora's gentility is sufficient to write purple prose, but not to prevent her from jilting the honest man in favor of the fashionable cad. The ways in which literature was used as a model for conduct are signposted in the very first chapter of Joseph Andrews, which outlines Fielding's relationship to Richardson's prior fiction:

What the female readers are taught by the memoirs of Mrs Andrews is so well set forth in the excellent essays or letters prefixed to the second and subsequent editions of that work, that it would be here a needless repetition.... I shall only add that this character of male chastity, though doubtless as desirable and becoming in one part of the human species as in the other, is almost the only virtue which the great apologist hath not given himself for the sake of giving the example to his readers. (Fielding 15–6)

Conclusion: Gentility as Grace

In conclusion, it is worth noting how Fielding seems to define gentility. It seems to take the place almost of a Christian conception of grace within his own moral code — it cannot be attained or strained after, by the "Acquisition of Art." Yet the very word art here — which straddles definitions to include both a stratagem and the sort of craftsmanship required to write a novel — suggests that there was a moral disapprobation in this period of fiction's potential to raise issues of social mobility. As Langford says of England in this period, the social mobility caused by early capitalism was in a sense responsible for the desire to codify manners and behavior: "In a sense politeness was a logical consequence of commerce" (Langford 4). Fielding's fiction was intended to assault bad commercial fiction that sold a sham version of politeness and gentility. The real social virtues, he implies, cannot be learned from a book — and indeed, the word "gentility" is applied in Joseph Andrews only to a character who is illiterate, and who therefore can never read Richardson's Pamela.