"However vain or romantic the Attempt may seem I am sanguine enough to aim at serving the noble Interests of Religion, Virtue, and good Sense, by these my lucubrations."
The Covent Garden Journal. No. 5.

Nothing could be more characteristic of Fielding's active spirit than were the early months of 1752. For, no sooner had he deposited the four volumes of Amelia in the hands of the public, essaying to win his readers over to a love of virtue and a hatred of vice, by placing before their eyes that true "model of human life," than we find him launching a direct attack on the follies and evils of the age, by means of his old weapon, the press.

The first number of the Covent Garden Journal appeared on the 4th of January, and its pages, produced under Fielding's own management and apparently largely written by his own pen, provided satires on folly, invectives against vice, and incitements to goodness and sense, delivered in the name of one Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great Britain. 1 The new paper ran but for seventy-two numbers; perhaps for all the wit and learning, the fire and zest of its columns, the public were reluctant to buy their own lashings. But it may be doubted whether, except in the pages of his three great novels, Henry Fielding ever revealed himself more completely than in these his last informal 'lucubrations.' Here, the active Justice, the accomplished scholar, the lawyer, and man of the world, the first wit of his day, talks to us of a hundred topics, chosen indeed on the spur of the moment, but discussed in his own incomparable words, and with the now mature authority of one, who had "dived into the inmost Recesses of Human Nature." No subject is too abstruse, none too trifling, for Mr Censor to illumine. Freed from the political bands of the earlier newspapers, this last Journal, produced be it remembered by a man in shattered health, and distracted by the squalid business of a Bow Street Court-room, ranges over an amazing compass of life and manners.

Thus, one January morning, Sir Alexander's readers would open their paper to find him deploring the decline of "a Religion sometime ago professed in this Country, and which, if my Memory fails me not was called Christian." The following Saturday they are presented with a learned and pleasant argument to prove that every male critic should be eighteen years of age, and "BE ABLE TO READ." A few days later the pages of writers purveying the prevalent "Infidelity, Scurrility, and Indecency" are ingeniously allotted to various uses. In February the Journal accords a noble tribute "to that great Triumvirate Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift"; not indeed "for that Wit and Humour alone, which they all so eminently possesst, but because they all endeavoured with the utmost Force of their Wit and Humour, to expose and extirpate those Follies and Vices which chiefly prevailed in their several Countries." The design of Aristophanes and Rabelais on the other hand, appears to Mr Censor, if he may speak his opinion freely, "very plainly to have been to ridicule all Sobriety, Modesty, Decency, Virtue, and Religion out of the world." From such considerations it is an easy passage to a definition of 'real Taste' as derived from a "nice Harmony between the Imagination and the Judgment"; and to these final censorial warnings:--"Evil Communications corrupt good Manners is a quotation of St Paul from Menander. EVIL BOOKS CORRUPT AT ONCE BOTH OUR MANNERS AND OUR TASTE." Four days after this learned 'lucubration' the voice of the warm-hearted magistrate speaks in a reminder of the prevailing abject misery of the London poor who "in the most miserable lingering Manner do daily perish for Want in this Metropolis." And in almost the next number his Honour gives his readers letters from the fair Cordelia, from Sarah Scandal, and from other correspondents, of a wit pleasant enough to drive London's poverty far from their minds. Two days after attending to these ladies, the Censor takes up his keenest weapons in an attack on that "detestable vice of slander" by which is taken away the "immediate Jewel of a Man's Soul," his good name; a crime comparable to that of murder. Here we have Sir Alexander speaking with the same voice as did the playwright and journalist of ten years previously, when he declared, in his Miscellanies, that to stab a man's character 'in the dark' is no less an offence than to stab his flesh in the same treacherous manner. Indeed, throughout these last columns of weekly satire, wit, and learning, Fielding remains true to the constant tenor of his genius. He exposes the miser, the seducer of innocence, the self-seeker, the place-hunter, the degraded vendor of moral poison, the 'charitable' hypocrite, with the same fierce moral energy as that with which, when but a lad of one and twenty, he first assailed the vices of the society in which his own lot was cast. His unconquerable energy, an energy that neither sickness nor distress could abate, still assaults that "cursed Maxim ... that Everybody's business is Nobody's." And his wit has lost none of its point when thrusting at the lesser follies of the day; at the fair Clara's devotion to her pet monkey; at the insolence of the Town Beau at the playhouse; at the arrogance of carters in the streets; at the vagaries of fashion according to which Belinda graces the theatre with yards of ruff one day, and on the next discards that covering so entirely that the snowy scene in the boxes "becomes extremely delightful to the eyes of every Beholder."

It is quite impossible to convey, within the limits of a few pages, all that Sir Alexander tells us of what he sees and hears, as the tragi-comedy of life passes before his Bow Street windows. For Fielding possessed in the highest degree the art of hearing, to use his own analysis, not with the ear only (an organ shared by man with "other Animals") but also with the head, and with the heart; just as his eye could penetrate beneath the velvet coat of the prosperous scoundrel, the reputation of the illiterate author, or the sorry rags of some honest hero of the gutter. And his Covent Garden Journal is, in truth, his journal of eleven months of a life into the forty odd years of which were compressed both the insight of genius, and the activities of twenty average men. Such a record cannot be sifted into a summary. The acknowledged motive of this last of Fielding's newspapers is, however, concise enough; and does equal honour to his patriotism and his humanity. The age, as it seemed to him, was an age of public degradation. Religion was vanishing from the life of the people; politics were a petty question of party jealousy; literary taste was falling to the level of alehouse wit and backstairs scandal; the youth of the nation were completing their education, when fifteen or sixteen years old, by a course of the Town, and then qualifying for a graduate's degree in like knowledge, by a foreign tour; the 'mob' was gaining a dangerous excess of power; the leaders of society were past masters and mistresses of vice and folly; the poor in the streets were sunk in misery, or brutalised into reckless crime. This was the England that Mr Censor saw from his house in Bow Street; this was the England which he set out to purify; and the means which he chose were his own familiar weapons of satire and ridicule. Of these, ridicule, he declares, when his Journal was but four weeks old, "is commonly a stronger and better method of attacking Vice than the severer kind of Satire." In accordance with which view, General Sir Alexander is represented, in a mock historic forecast, as having, in the space of twelve months, entirely cleansed his country from the evils afflicting it, by means of a "certain Weapon called a Ridicule." These evils moreover Fielding held to be most readily combated by assailing "those base and scandalous Writings which the Press hath lately poured in such a torrent upon us that the Name of an Author is in the ears of all good Men become almost an infamous appelation"; and, accordingly, the first number of his new paper discloses Sir Alexander in full crusade against these Grub-Street writers. But that he soon perceived the quixotic impolicy of such a campaign, appears very clearly, as early as the fifth number of the Journal:--"when Hercules undertook to cleanse the Stables of Augeas (a Work not much unlike my present Undertaking) should any little clod of Dirt more filthy perhaps than all the rest have chanced to bedawb him, how unworthy his Spirit would it have been to have polluted his Hands, by seizing the dirty clod, and crumbling it to Pieces. He should have known that such Accidents were incident to such an Undertaking: which though both a useful and heroic office, was yet none of the cleanliest; since no Man, I believe, ever removed great quantities of Dirt from any Place without finding some of it sticking to his skirts." Such dirty clods were undoubtedly thrown by nameless antagonists, as unworthy of Fielding's steel as was one whose name has come down to us, the despicable Dr John Hill, who once suffered a public caning at Ranelagh; and one clod, "more filthy perhaps than all the rest," soiled the hands of Smollett. 2 But the dirt which was very freely flung on to our eighteenth-century Hercules has, by now, fallen back, with great justice, on to the heads of his abusers. Fielding has placed on record, in the Journal, his conviction that the man who reads the works of the five heroic satirists, Lucian, Cervantes, Swift, Moliere and Shakespeare, "must either have a very bad Head, or a very bad Heart, if he doth not become both a Wiser and a better Man." To-day, 'party and prejudice' having subsided, we are ready to say the same of the readers of the Covent Garden Journal; perceiving that, if Mr Censor, like his five great forerunners, chose to send his satire "laughing into the World," it was that he might better effect the 'glorious Purpose' announced in the fifth number of his paper: "However vain or romantic the Attempt may seem, I am sanguine enough to aim at serving the noble Interests of Religion, Virtue, and good Sense, by these my Lucubrations."

To most men the production, twice a week, of a newspaper so wide in scope as the Covent Garden Journal (for its columns included the news of the day, as well as the manifold 'censorial' energies of Sir Alexander) would have been occupation enough; especially with a "constitution now greatly impaired and enfeebled," and when "labouring under attacks of the gout, which were, of course, severer than ever."

But there is no hint of either editorial or valetudinarian seclusion in the fragmentary glimpses obtainable of Mr Justice Fielding during these eleven months of 1752. Thus, by an advertisement recurring throughout the Journal, he expressly invites to his house in Bow Street, "All Persons, who shall for the Future suffer by Robbers Burglars &c.," that they may bring him "the best Description they can of such Robbers, &c., with the Time, and Place, and Circumstances of the Fact"; and that this invitation was likely to bring half London within his doors appears from Fielding's own description of the condition of the capital at the time. "There is not a street," he declares, speaking of Westminster, "which doth not swarm all day with beggars, and all night with thieves. Stop your coach at what shop you will, however expeditious the tradesman is to attend you, a beggar is commonly beforehand with him; and if you should directly face his door the tradesman must often turn his head while you are talking to him, or the same beggar, or some other thief at hand will pay a visit to his shop!" And nothing could prove more conclusively the arduousness of Fielding's work as a magistrate than the record of the last ten days of January, 1752. On the night of the 17th a peculiarly brutal murder had been perpetrated on a poor higgler in Essex; and the Journal for January 28, tells us how Fielding "spent near eight hours," examining, separately, suspected persons, "at the desire of several gentlemen of Fortune in the County of Essex"; having on the previous Friday and Saturday, been engaged "above Twenty hours in taking Depositions concerning this Fact." Then, on the day after the arrival of the murder suspects, we find two of the Shoreditch constables bringing no fewer than ten "idle lewd and disorderly" men and women before the Justice; a woman was charged by a diamond seller on suspicion of feloniously receiving "three Brilliant Diamonds"; Mr Welch, the notable High Constable of Holborn, brought seventeen "idle and lewd Persons" whom he had apprehended the night before; and, to complete this single day's work, an Italian was brought in, "all over covered with [the] Blood" of a brother Italian, whose head he had almost cut off. Twenty-nine cases on one day, and these in the midst of eight hour examinations concerning a murder, were surely work enough to satisfy even Fielding's energies. And, as another entry in his Journal mentions the examination of a suspected thief "very late at Night," there seems to have been no hour out of the twenty-four in which the great novelist did not hold himself at the service of the public.

Meanwhile, the criminal licence of the streets was now receiving Ministerial attention. The King's Speech, delivered at the opening of Parliament in the previous November, had contained a passage which might have been inspired by Fielding himself: "I cannot conclude," said His Majesty, "without recommending to you in the most earnest manner, to consider seriously of some effectual provisions to suppress those audacious crimes of Robbery and Violence which are now become so frequent...and which have proceeded in great Measure from that profligate Spirit of Irreligion, Idleness, Gaming, and Extravagance, which has of late extended itself in an uncommon degree, to the Dishonour of the Nation, and to the great Offence and Prejudice of the sober and industrious Part of the People." Six weeks later the first number of the Journal, makes comment on the need of fresh legislation to suppress drunkenness; and on the twenty first of the month Sir Alexander announces, with something of special information in his tone, that the immediate suppression of crimes of violence "we can with Pleasure assure the Public is at present the chief attention of Parliament."

It must have been with something of the pleasure which he so earnestly desires in one of the last utterances of his pen--"the pleasure of thinking that, in the decline of my health and life, I have conferred a great and lasting Benefit on my Country,"--that Fielding saw the royal assent given, in the following March, to an Act for the "better preventing Thefts and Robberies and for regulating Places of Public Entertainment, and punishing Persons keeping disorderly Houses." 3 For this Act is directed to the suppression of four of the abuses so strongly denounced, twelve months previously, in his own Enquiry; and when we recall the fact that he had already submitted, to the Lord Chancellor, draft legislation for the suppression of robberies, it is at least a plausible surmise that here we have a memorial of Henry Fielding's patriotic energy, preserved on the pages of the Statute Book itself. 4 The four points so specially urged in the Enquiry, and here made law, are the suppression of the "multitude of places of Entertainment" for the working classes; the better suppression of Gaming Houses; the punishment of the scandalous advertisements offering rewards 'and no questions asked' for stolen goods; and the payment of certain prosecutors for their expenses in time and trouble, when a conviction had been obtained.

In this same month of March another Act, which closely concerned Fielding's official work, received the royal assent. This was an Act "for better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder." 5 The pressing need of such a measure had been already urged in the Covent Garden journal. In February the Journal declares that "More shocking Murders have been committed within the last Year, than for many Years before. To what can this be so justly imputed as to the manifest decline of Religion among the lower People. A matter, which even, in a Civil Sense, demands the attention of the Government." And Mr Censor returns to the subject on March 3: "More Murders and horrid Barbarities have been committed within the last twelvemonth, than during many preceding years. This as we have before observed, is principally to be attributed to the Declension of Religion among the Common People." By the end of the month the above-named Act had received the royal assent; and the first clause thereof again yielded Fielding the satisfaction of seeing a measure which he had warmly recommended in his Enquiry now placed on the Statute Book, namely the clause that the execution of the criminal be made immediate on his conviction. This Act, moreover, provides for the abatement of another scandal exposed by Fielding many years previously, in the pages of Jonathan Wild, that of the excessive supply of drink allowed to condemned prisoners.

In the following month Fielding carried out a scheme, conceived he tells us "some time since," for combating this prevalence of murder. This was his shilling pamphlet, published about April 14, entitled "Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of MURDER. Containing above thirty cases, in which this dreadful crime hath been brought to light in the most extraordinary and miraculous manner." The advertisement describes the Examples as "very proper to be given to all the inferior Kind of People; and particularly to the Youth of both sexes, whose natural Love of Stories will lead them to read with Attention what cannot fail of Infusing in to their tender Minds an early Dread and Abhorrence of staining their Hands with the Blood of their Fellow-creatures" Low as was the price, a "large allowance" was made by Andrew Millar to those who bought any quantity; and Fielding distributed the little volume freely in Court.

The thirty-three Examples are introduced and concluded by Fielding's own denunciation of this, "the blackest sin, which can contaminate the hands, or pollute the soul of man." And from these pages we may learn his own solemnly declared belief in a peculiarly "immediate interposition of the Divine providence" in the detection of this crime; and also his faith in "the fearful and tremendous sentence of eternal punishment" as that divinely allotted to the murderer. He warns the murderer, moreover, that by hurrying a fellow-creature to a sudden and unprepared death he may be guilty of destroying not only his victim's body, but also his soul. And it may be questioned whether Fielding ever put his unrivalled mastery of style to a nobler intention than in the closing words of this pamphlet, words designed to be read by the lowest of the people: "Great courage may, perhaps, bear up a bad mind (for it is sometimes the property of such) against the most severe sentence which can be pronounced by the mouth of a human judge; but where is the fortitude which can look an offended Almighty in the face? Who can bear the dreadful thought of being confronted with the spirit of one whom we have murdered, in the presence of all the Host of Heaven, and to have justice demanded against our guilty soul, before that most awful judgement-seat, where there is infinite justice as well as infinite power?"

The dedication of this pamphlet, dated Bow Street, April 8, 1752, is addressed to Dr Madox, Bishop of Worcester, and in it Fielding recalls a conversation he had some time previously had with that prelate, in which he had mentioned the plan of such a book, and received immediate encouragement from his lordship. A further appreciation of the Examples appears in a paragraph in the Journal for May 5: "Last week a certain Colonel of the Army bought a large number of the book called Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder, in Order to distribute them amongst the private soldiers of his Regiment. An Example well worthy of Imitation!"

Fielding never allows us to forget for any length of time one or another of his contrasting activities, however absorbed he may seem to be in some one field of action. Now, when he is plunged in a hand-to-hand struggle with the criminal conditions of London, when he is admonishing the gayer end of the Town with his weekly censorial satire and ridicule, and while he is watching the enactment of new legislation for which he had so strenously pleaded,--he suddenly reappears in his earlier rÔle of classical scholar. On June 17, the columns of the Journal advertise proposals for "A New Translation into English of the Works of LUCIAN. From the original Greek. With Notes, Historical, Critical and Explanatory. By Henry Fielding Esquire; and the Rev. Mr William Young." To which notice there is added, a few days later, the assurance that "Everything which hath the least Tendency to the Indecent will be omitted in this Translation." The most delightful, perhaps, of all the leading articles in the Covent Garden Journal is that in which the merits of this "Father of True Humour" are delineated. The facetious wit, the "attic Elegance of Diction," the poignant satire, the virtues and abilities of Lucian are here so persuasively presented that scarce a reader but surely would hasten, as he laid his paper down, to Mr Fielding's or Mr Young's house, or to Millar in the Strand or Dodsley in Pall Mall, where orders (with a guinea to be paid on booking the same) were received. And this essay is also memorable for the express declaration therein contained that Fielding had "formed his stile" upon that of Lucian; and, again, as betraying a note of disappointment, an acknowledgment that worldly fortune had indeed treated him somewhat harshly, such as Fielding's sanguine courage very seldom permits him to utter. The concluding words, written on his own behalf and on that of Mr Young, are words of gentle protest to the public for their lack of support to "two gentlemen who have hitherto in their several capacities endeavoured to be serviceable to them without deriving any great Emolument to themselves from their Labours." And when he tells us how that 'glory of human Nature, Marcus Aurelius' employed Lucian "in a very considerable Post in the Government," since that great emperor "did not, it seems, think, that a Man of Humour was below his Notice or unfit for Business of the gravest Kind," we cannot but remember that the business on which the Government of George II. thought fit to employ the inimitable genius of Henry Fielding was that of a Bow Street magistrate.

The onerous drudgery of that business, or else lack of response from a public deaf to its own interests, seems to have brought to nothing the project of this translation; and so English literature is the poorer for the loss of the works of the 'Father of Humour' translated by the incomparable pen of the 'Father of the English Novel.' 6

Four months after the publication of the proposals for Lucian, Fielding took formal leave of the readers of his Covent Garden Journal, telling them that he no longer had "Inclination or Leisure," to carry on the paper. His brief farewell words contain an assurance very like that solemnly made, we may remember, five years before the publication of Tom Jones. At present, he declares, he has "No intention to hold any further correspondence with the gayer Muses"; just as eight years before he had announced that henceforth the 'infamous' Nine should have none of his company. To this declaration is added a protest against the injustice of attributing abuse to a writer who "never yet was, nor ever shall be the author of any, unless to Persons who are or ought to be infamous." From the tenor of this parting speech it is clear that Fielding was, at the time, feeling keenly the imputation, flung by some of his contemporaries, of producing 'scandalous Writings'; unmindful for the moment of his own calmer and wiser utterance, when he declared that men who engage in an heroic attempt to cleanse their age will undoubtedly find some of the dirt thereof sticking to their coats. "As he disdained all littleness of spirit, where ever he met with it in his dealings with the world, his indignation was apt to rise," says his contemporary Murphy; and we know from earlier protests how cruelly Fielding suffered from the attribution to his pen of writings utterly alien to his character. "...really," he cries, in the last words of the Journal, "it is hard to hear that scandalous Writings have been charged on me for that very Reason which ought to have proved the Contrary namely because they have been Scandalous."

The year 1752 closes with the birth of another daughter, born presumably in the house in Bow Street, as her baptism under the name of Louisa is entered in the registers of St Paul's, Covent Garden.

The curtain that, in Fielding's case, hangs so closely over all the pleasant intimate details of life, lifts once or twice during this year of incessant activity, and discloses just those warmhearted acts of kindness that help us to think of Harry Fielding with an affection almost as warm and personal as that we keep for Dick Steele or Oliver Goldsmith. Fielding, we know, had "no other use for money" than to help those even less fortunate than himself; and several incidents of this year show how he turned his opportunities, both as journalist and magistrate, to like generous uses. Thus there is the story of how, one day in March, "A poor girl who had come from Wapping to see the new entertainment at Covent Garden Theatre had her pocket cut off in the crowd before the doors were opened. Tho' she knew not the Pickpocket she came immediately to lay her complaint before the Justice and with many tears lamented not the loss of her Money, but of her Entertainment. At last, having obtained a sufficient Passport to the Gallery she departed with great satisfaction, and contented with the loss of fourteen shillings, though she declared she had not much more in the world." 7 Another day, or night rather, it is a poor troup of amateur players who had good reason to be grateful to the kindly Justice:--"last Monday night an Information was given to Henry Fielding Esquire: that a set of Barber's apprentices, Journeymen Staymakers, Maidservants &c. had taken a large room at the Black House in the Strand, to act the Tragedy of the Orphan; the Price of Admittance One shilling. About eight o'clock the said Justice issued his Warrant, directed to Mr Welch, High Constable, who apprehended the said Actors and brought them before the said Justice, who out of compassion to their Youth only bound them over to their good behaviour. They were all conducted through the streets in their Tragedy Dresses, to the no small diversion of the Populace." 8 And in May both the ample energies and scanty purse of Justice Fielding were occupied in collecting a subscription for a young baker and his wife and child, who, by a disastrous fire, were suddenly plunged into destitution. For these poor people Fielding obtained no less a sum than £57, within a fortnight of his announcement of their distress in the columns of the Journal. The list of subscribers, published on May 16, shows a guinea against his own name, and a like sum, it may be noted, from the wealthy Lyttelton.

Henry Fielding

The splendour of Fielding's genius has shone, as Gibbon foretold, throughout the world. His indefatigable labours in cleansing England from some of the evils that then oppressed her deserve to be remembered, if not by all the world, at least by the citizens of that country which, in the decline of 'health and life,' he yet strove so eagerly to benefit.