Richardson and Fielding: The Dynamics of a Critical Rivalry

A great wit once said of the dichotomizing impulse: "The world is divided into two kinds of people, those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who do not." As the aphorism (not to mention the triumph of digital technology) reminds us, it is remarkably difficult to escape binary thinking. A "1" is not only a "1," it is also a "not 0," and so it is with Fielding and Richardson. Readers of the eighteenth-century novel in England not only prefer, often vehemently, one writer or the other, but they have also tended to state their preferences specifically in terms of a comparison between the two. We will never, it seems, see either Fielding or Richardson without the other writer hovering nearby, providing an indispensable contrastive frame. Like Barnum's Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, they are forever linked and forever at odds.

Some sort of rivalry between the two was probably inevitable. It is extraordinary to recollect that Clarissa and Tom Jones appeared at virtually the same moment. Have two comets of their magnitude ever again crossed the sky so close together? But what might have been a simple coincident appearance of talent was marked from the outset by real personal animosity. Fielding may have been initially mistaken about the authorship of Pamela, but that can hardly have been any comfort to Richardson, who knew very well who had written Shamela, certainly as devastating a parody as exists in English. Richardson, in turn, heaped terrible abuse on Fielding in his correspondence and, we can safely assume, his conversation.

Allen Michie's study aims to chart the history of this rivalry as it has played out in the responses of readers between the middle of the eighteenth century and 1957, his terminal point. The book is meant as reception history and reception history of a particular kind, one based on the model provided in the theoretical work of Hans Robert Jauss. For Jauss, as Michie carefully and clearly lays out in his first chapter, the best and most thorough reception study will categorize and analyze responses according to the kind of reader who is reacting to a literary work. There are, in fact, three such groups: other creative writers, professional critics, and general readers. What Michie proposes is to track how each of these very different kinds of audiences have used the Fielding-Richardson rivalry as a guiding principle in their responses over time. So, we have chapters devoted to eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century, and twentieth-century readers.

According to Jauss and Michie, such a process will give us a more "objective" literary history, and there is a kind of bracing empirical quality to this book. We can follow whose stock is up, whose down, and we can track those evaluations of merit over time. Better still, we see how the basic dichotomy produces a series of other critical dichotomies that persist and structure the debate. These dualities center on such issues as morality, realism, gender, and depth: readers of Richardson tend repeatedly to see him as moral, idealistic, feminine, and deep; with equal consistency, readers of Fielding view him as morally lax, realistic, masculine, and more superficial. Many of the responses that Michie tracks are familiar ones, but many are fresh and are clearly the product of long labor in the obscurest byways of literary ephemera--bad novels, forgotten periodicals, and the like. And even the best-known judgments--such as Coleridge's preference of Fielding as breezy May weather to Richardson as an overheated sickroom--look new when placed in such a full historical context.

Michie ends his history in 1957, the watershed year that saw the arrival of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel. To see Watt's book in the light cast by a knowledge of the full tradition of this critical rivalry is immensely instructive, allowing us, for instance, to see how revolutionary was Watt's insistence on Richardson's superior talents as a realist. A bit of partisanship does peep through here, however: Michie seems clearly unhappy that Watt's work tended to depress the stature of Fielding.

Perhaps Michie is a Fieldingite in his heart. He tells us at the outset that "the Fielding versus Richardson trial needs a court reporter, not another member of the jury" (15), but even court reporters inevitably develop opinions. He manages otherwise to maintain his neutrality with great scrupulosity, and that is only one of this book's virtues. Virtues, however, can also be limitations, and at times here the reader may find that the attention to the precise parameters of the Jaussian template is a little rigid. The desire to find evidence for every category of reader is perhaps too zealous, and the tracking of judgments can, at times, seem repetitious, even if we concede that the discovery of such repetitions is part of the book's point.

Fielding and Richardson: The Dynamics of a Critical Rivalry is an extremely useful meta-narrative; it allows us to step back from our own critical moment, and especially for those of us who work on the eighteenth-century novel, it forces us to think about how we are participants in a very long conversation, one whose terms were set well before we entered the room. If Fielding and Richardson were, on some level, inevitable rivals, Michie makes us think about whether it was inevitable that the history of their criticism would take that competition as its very grounding assumption. This book raises that extremely valuable question, and it provokes one to try to imagine a counterfactual narrative, an alternative history that would provide another, non-rivalrous critical tradition for these two artists.