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Vincent Newey, 1 October 1987

The Origins of the English Novel, 1660-1740 
by Michael McKeon.
Johns Hopkins, 530 pp., £21.25, April 1987, 0 8018 3291 8
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... unresolved even at that point in the 1740s when, in the controversy between Richardson and Fielding, the new genre achieved the status of what Marx calls ‘a simple abstraction’, an identifiable category in its own right. McKeon’s terms are useful ones; and his theory argues attractively for the early novel’s significance as a crucial site of ...

Astral Projection

Alison Light: The Case of the Croydon Poltergeist, 17 December 2020

The Haunting of Alma FieldingA True Ghost Story 
by Kate Summerscale.
Bloomsbury, 345 pp., £18.99, October, 978 1 4088 9545 0
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... invited readers to share their supernatural experiences. Almost a thousand of them wrote in. Alma Fielding, a 34-year-old housewife from the South London suburb of Thornton Heath, rang the paper (a ghost didn’t seem a case for the police, she said). As she and her husband, Les, lay in bed, she told the journalist, there were strange happenings. A tumbler ...

How does he come to be mine?

Tim Parks: Dickens’s Children, 8 August 2013

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Farrar, Straus, 239 pp., £16.99, December 2012, 978 0 374 29880 7
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... Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens (after the famous wit and the philanthropist, both friends), Henry Fielding Dickens (‘in a kind of homage’, Forster was told, ‘to the style of the novel he was about to write’). An exception is the ninth child, Dora Annie Dickens, named after the brainless girl David Copperfield loves and whom Dickens, at the ...

A Life of Its Own

Jonathan Coe, 24 February 1994

The Kenneth Williams Diaries 
edited by Russell Davies.
HarperCollins, 827 pp., £20, June 1993, 0 00 255023 7
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... is a significant one in this context. In January 1960 Williams was playing with Fenella Fielding in the revue Pieces of Eight (largely written by Peter Cook) at the Apollo Theatre, and his diary entry for the 27th reads: ‘The show in evening went well, till Madam decided to ad lib one line before the tag in “Spies”. Of course it threw me ...

Paisley’s Progress

Tom Paulin, 1 April 1982

... to the barrier around the demesne. The Paisley of this period is partly modelled on the Rev. Henry Cooke, a reactionary and highly influential 19th-century preacher who did much to counter Presbyterian radicalism. This Paisley is an autochthonous bigot who once organised a mock-mass on the platform of the Ulster Hall. Patrick Marrinan, his ...

Philip Roth’s House of Fiction

Michael Mason, 6 December 1979

The Ghost Writer 
by Philip Roth.
Cape, 180 pp., £4.95
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... novel yet’ implies a future of prosperous activity which may be barmecidal. The novelist-hero of Henry James’s story ‘The Middle Years’ is amused by the view that his latest novel is ‘the best thing he has done yet’: it ‘made such a grand avenue of the future’. This story is alluded to in detail in The Ghost Writer and is structurally as well ...

Trollope’s Delight

Richard Altick, 3 May 1984

The Letters of Anthony Trollope 
edited by John Hall.
Stanford, 1082 pp., $87.50, July 1983, 0 8047 1076 7
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Anthony Trollope: Dream and Art 
by Andrew Wright.
Macmillan, 173 pp., £20, October 1983, 0 333 34593 2
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... aspiring novelists in the autobiography. He was the Arnold Bennett of his day, not a second Henry James; he was interested in the nuts and bolts of fiction-writing and how one might make a living by that occupation. Never in the faintest degree a theorist, he was concerned only with a story’s effect on the people who paid to read it. His sense of ...

Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly

James Davidson: Greek Names, 23 September 2010

A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. Vol. V.A Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia 
edited by T. Corsten.
Oxford, 496 pp., £125, March 2010, 978 0 19 956743 0
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... sister, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell. But the consequences of a name are not always negative. Henry Fielding Dickens did not live up to the literary aspirations intended by his father, but Michelangelo Caravaggio seems to have viewed the accident of his Christian name (bestowed simply because he was born on 29 September, the day of St Michael) as a ...

Nesting Time

P.N. Furbank, 26 January 1995

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa 
by Jan Potocki, translated by Ian MacLean.
Viking, 631 pp., £16, January 1995, 0 670 83428 9
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... and Jules Verne. The blurb to the present translation speaks of an affinity with ‘Stendhal or Fielding, with glances towards Verne or Borges’. My own strong feeling, though, is that the inspiration was most probably Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist. In his great novel, Diderot celebrated the revolt of the narrator against the reader. His narrator, from ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Hitler’s Last Day, 7 May 2015

... Aristotle wrote in the Poetics, ‘to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun.’ Fielding in Tom Jones argued that writers weren’t ‘obliged to keep even pace with time’, but would do well to steer clear of ‘monkish dullness’ and focus on ‘matters of consequence’ so as not to ‘resemble a newspaper, which consists of just the ...

Besieged by Female Writers

John Pemble: Trollope’s Late Style, 3 November 2016

Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form 
by Frederik Van Dam.
Edinburgh, 180 pp., £70, January 2016, 978 0 7486 9955 1
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... by female ones. The English novel, forged in the 18th century by men (Defoe, Richardson, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne), was, as he saw it, being taken over by women. There were now probably more women than men writing novels, and there was no doubt that more women than men were reading them. For most of the 1860s, Mrs ...

Unreasoning Vigour

Stefan Collini: Ian Watt, 9 May 2019

Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic 
by Marina MacKay.
Oxford, 228 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 0 19 882499 2
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... thoughtful study. In 1957 Watt published The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Few works of criticism from the second half of the 20th century have been more influential. The Rise of the Novel, MacKay reports, ‘continues to be amplified, supplemented or attacked – it must somehow be reckoned with – by every critic concerned ...

Who’s in charge?

Chalmers Johnson: The Addiction to Secrecy, 6 February 2003

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers 
by Daniel Ellsberg.
Viking, 498 pp., $29.95, October 2002, 0 670 03030 9
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... everyone who is granted unrestricted access to secrets beyond top secret. He remembers telling Henry Kissinger in a briefing after Kissinger had become Nixon’s National Security Adviser: After you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more ...

Doing the bores

Rosemary Ashton, 21 March 1991

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Duke–Edinburgh Edition. Vols XVI-XVIII: 1843-4 
edited by Clyde Ryals and Kenneth Fielding.
Duke, 331 pp., £35.65, July 1990, 9780822309192
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... Witch’ in his accounts of her social gatherings. Jane uses a Scottish phrase for the dandified Henry Fleming: he is ‘Jenkin’s hen’, one that – as the invaluable editorial notes explain – never knew a cock. The ingenious insult is all the more interesting coming from a woman who may not have enjoyed full marital relations with her husband. The ...

Phantom Jacks

John Bayley, 5 January 1989

Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times 
by George Sayer.
Macmillan, 278 pp., £14.95, November 1988, 0 333 43362 9
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J.B. Priestley 
by Vincent Brome.
Hamish Hamilton, 512 pp., £16.95, October 1988, 9780241125601
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Eddy: The Life of Edward Sackville-West 
by Michael De-la-Noy.
Bodley Head, 341 pp., £16, October 1988, 0 370 31164 7
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... even Eliot. But what irritated Priestley was his rejection of the 18th-century novelists – Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, Smollett – whom Priestley most admired, whom he had learnt from, before whom he ‘felt humble’. Leavis, Priestley said, ‘did mischief to the art he was boarded and lodged to serve’ – rather a revealing comment. ‘To be an ...

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