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April 15, 2009. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that, in the first issue of
The Covent-Garden Journal,
Henry Fielding declared literary war on the "armies of
Grub Street" and thereby triggered the
Paper War of 1752-1753? |
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The more I read of Claude Rawson on Fielding, the less I like. He wants to say that people responding to Fielding's defense of Amelia prevented HF from writing another novel? Is he aware that HF only had 3 more years to live, that he was in horrible health? Has he read Battestin's biography? Battestin has a very different view. Painting Fielding as a blushing flower (when he had been in a huge battle with Samuel Foote at the same time) is peculiar. Utgard Loki ( talk) 14:20, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
The spelling ("humor" and not "humour") is per Battestin and Battestin p. 492. I haven't found the quote in any other source. Ottava Rima ( talk) 17:29, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
30 James Harris (1709-1780) - "Harris and Fielding were close for the rest of Fielding's life. He contributed to Fielding's Covent-Garden Journal and True Patriot [...]"
45 "The years between 1750 and his voyage to Lisbon in June 1754 were full. Despite increasing problems of health, Fielding was intensely busy with the magistracy; a business venture with his half-brother John [...] the publication of The Covent-Garden Journal, a twice-weekly paper which, although intended to solicit customers for the brokerage business, took on a life of its own; the completion of his last novel, Amelia; and other matters."
189 Discussion on the Universal Register Office - "a commercial go-between by listing, for a fee, buyers and sellers, servants in need of work and prospective employers, tutors and pupils, and numerous others in need of information that would enable business transactions." By-product of it was the Journal - "a periodical that had a run of 72 issues from 4 January until 25 November 1752, being published on Tuesdays and Saturdays until 4 July, and from that time on Saturday only until the end of the run." - used to advertise the Universal Register Office. Allowed Fielding "to speak in a moral voice on social and moral issues [...] The voice is typically witty and learned, and though it generally steers clear of politics, is highly topical, 'strikingly rooted in the everyday life of mid-century London and unusually reflective of the most circumstantial details of the contemporary scene'." (internal quote from pp. xxxii-xxxiii B. A. Goldgar (ed.) The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register Office. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1988)
189-190 1/4 of the issues "include a section entitled 'Proceedings at the Court of Censorial Enquiry' - Fielding uses this in his 9th issue to defend Amelia and "promises to write no more novels" (189). The section and events are "comically treated" (190).
190 The journal "registers the deep sense of something profoundly wrong with the taste of the age, which for Fielding signified that something was profoundly wrong with the morality of the age, with its faulted perception of the human condition, and its wasteful use of life. Despite its Scriblerian manner - its irony and humour - the Journal, like his late work generally, reveals Fielding's deep concern with the ways of the world."
Will add more from other sources soon. Ottava Rima ( talk) 18:00, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
215-215 "His works are full of examples of characters making euphemistic use of such terms to convert them from moral absolutes to social conveniences. In his Covent Garden Journal he provided a "Modern Glossary" of the new meanings that such words had acquired in fashionable society: 'honour' = duelling; 'learning' = pedantry; 'a patriot' = 'a candidate for a place at court,' and 'politics' = 'the art of getting such a place,' 'worth' amounts to no more than 'power, rank, wealth,' and 'wisdom,' correspondingly, 'the art of acquiring all three.' The irony here follows the Scriblerian axioms of The Art of Sinking in Poetry, which it is stated that 'every man is honourable, who is so by law, custom or title.' In other words, members of the House of Commons [...] are most honourable."
25 "Henry Fielding, for example, in The Covent-Garden Journal, mocks the attempts of the fashionable 'to preserve their circle safe and inviolate ... against any intrusion of those who they are pleased to call the vulgar.' He suggests that they are obliged to continue to favor the hoop petticoat because it has been 'found impossible ... to slide with it behind a counter.' But the point of his satire is to emphasize the permeability of distinctions of station within the middle classes, and between them and a nobility distinguished by no more than the absurdities of fashionable excess."
43 "In the Covent-Garden Journal he also gave English renditions of virtually all the mottoes and frequently translated the lengthy anecdotes from historians that he used in his periodicals. Merely by their number, these translations suggest that Fielding was actively involved in making classical authors available to English audiences, thus demonstrating his skill in ancient languages, his reading in classics, and his efforts to be numbered among the more learned of his fellow authors."
"he variously classifies his English translations of the mottoes in the Covent-Garden Journal as 'paraphrases' or 'modernizations.' For example, Tom Telltruth quotes a passage from Horace, which, he tells Drawncansir, he will render in English 'after your paraphrastical Manner.' These 'paraphrases' reveal how well Fielding understood his originals, because they require a more thorough understanding of the author's essential meaning than is necessitated by a more literal translation."
45 "While discussing the origins of slander, he says, 'This is that malignant Temper which Horace attributes to the Vulgar, when he says he despises them (Covent-Garden Journal, no. 14 [18 February 1752]: 101). In no. 33 he renders the phrase 'I hate profane Rascals,' in introducing a description of a young tradesman in the country who acts like a buffoon. Finally, in n. 49 the phrase, now become 'I hate the Mob,' leads off an essay on the power of crowds in London. In each instance Fielding has changed the emphasis to suit his purpose but has remained partly faithful to the Latin original, thereby demonstrating that he knew his Latin well enough to exploit it skillfully."
47 "'The Covent-Garden Journal casts the widest net of the group but still insists on its own structural integrity, repeatedly allowing the personal of 'Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great Britain' to demonstrate the breadth of his interest as well as the force of his wit. More aggressively than he had done in his earlier periodicals, Fielding here makes wit (or liveliness, or urbanity) a distinguishing, thus unfifying, aspect of the publication. He declares his hostility to 'dullness' - wit-pummeling miscellaneousness as well as dry-as-dust pendantry?- in the inagural number. 'I do promise, as far as in me lies,' he writes, 'to avoid with the utmost Care all Kind of Encroachment on that spacious Fielding, in which my ... Contemporaries have such large and undoubted Possessions; and which, from Time immemorial, hath been called the Land of DULLNESS.' Fielding doesn't catalog the inhabitants of 'the Land of DULLNESS,' but it would not be strange to find Philo-Naturae and his caterpillars among them."
I got the Kensington Press reprint (no apparatus, just PD reprints) and have been typing it into WikiSource. Issue #1 is up now: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Covent-Garden_Journal
Utgard Loki ( talk) 13:43, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
It's important, I think, especially in light of the above, to see how consciously Fielding is echoing Pope's Dunciad and calling to mind Swift's Tale (the Mountebank at Leicester Fields) with what has to be only the second or third usage of "lucubrations" in the century. It's a very Scriblerian performance, and it's superbly rhetorical rather than specifically political. I'm not sure how the critics above read specific barbs into it except by having fevers. Utgard Loki ( talk) 13:56, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
Anyone know how to do interwiki links smoothly? For example, over at WikiSource, I've done #6. Well, in #6, he mentions a very, very little discussed individual, Anne Dodd. Wikipedia has an article on her (I checked) that says she's mentioned in CGJ #6. Wouldn't it be groovy to have a link, in the Wikipedia article, to the WikiSource issue where she's mentioned, but only if it doesn't mean doing one of those [ big long web address here ] things. Utgard Loki ( talk) 13:36, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
About a month ago Anonymous Dissident asked me to find an image of the journal. I have (finally) uploaded it here. Use as you will. Awadewit ( talk) 01:02, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
Proposal section (cutting "Content" at "For instanc" and inserting this as the above title):
The journal ran multiple reviews and advertised many works. Among these is an advertisement and a favourable review of The Female Quixote, a novel by Fielding's friend Charlotte Lennox. He also promoted his friend Charles Macklin's two-act comic play The Covent Garden Theatre, or Paquin Turn'd Drawcansir, a work based on Fielding. The journal was devoted to promoting Fielding's views on morality through wit, and Fielding made his opinion known on many works, including an attack on the works of Rabelais and Aristophanes while praising Jonathan Swift, Cervantes, and Lucian as a "great Triumvirate". He viewed himself as the censor of public taste and sought to attack "Dullness", which resulted in a paper war started between various writers. Of other works that he praised and promoted including paintings by Hogarth, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, poetry by Edward Young, and others. In theatre, Fielding promoted plays involving the actors David Garrick, James Lacy, and others. [1]
Within the journal, Fielding would sometimes criticize political figures while avoiding politics. In the 7 March 1752 issue, Fielding recalled an incident that occurred back on 20 April 1731 where he witnessed the last showing of The Highland-Fair, a comical opera created by Joseph Mitchell. To Fielding, Mitchell was a fawning follower of Walpole and writer in support of the British government, and his opera: [2] "intended to display the comical Humours of the Highlanders; the Audience, who had for three Nights together sat staring at each other, scarce knowing what to make of their Entertainment, on the fourth joined in an unanimous exploding Laugh. This they had continued through an Act, whent he Author, who unhappily mistook the Peels of Laughter which he heard for Applause, went up to Mr. Wils, and, with an Air of Triumph, said — Deel o' my Sal, Sare, they begin to tauk the Humour at last". [3]
Fielding also used the criticism in the journal for personal reasons. In the ninth number of The Journal for 25 January 1752, Fielding used a section entitled "Proceedings at the Court of Censorial Enquiry" to respond criticism lodged against his novel Amelia. The article is used to place the critics on trial and Fielding argued against complaints about the novel being too moral, a lack of spirit within Amelia's character, and Amelia's lack of a nose, along with some other complaints. [4] The character Counsellor Town, summed up the criticism as: "the whole Book is a Heap of sad Stuff, Dulness, and Nonsense; that it contains no Wit, Humour, Knowledge of human Nature, or of the World; indeed, that the Fable, moral Character, Manners, Sentiments, and Diction, are all alike bad and contemptible." [5]
The trial continued until the next issue, 28 January 1752, with Fielding's defense of the work. [6] "If you, Mr. Censor, are yourself a Parent, you will view me with Compassion when I declare I am the Father of this poor Girl the Prisoner at the Bar; nay, when I go father, and avow, that of all my Offspring she is my favourite Child. I can truly say that I bestowed a more than ordinary Pains in her Education [...] I do not think my Child is entirely free from Faults. I know nothing human that is so; but surely she doth not deserve the Rancour with which she hath been treated by the Public." [7] Eventually, he promised "to write no more novels". [8] Fielding biographer Harold Pagliaro claims that sections such as these are to be "comically treated". [9] However, Amelia was his last novel. [10]
AD - The quote could stand by removing the first section and stating that Fielding claimed the work as his child. Then, this could be followed with the quote minus the "If you, Mr. Censor, are yourself a Parent, you will view me with Compassion when I declare I am the Father of this poor Girl the Prisoner at the Bar". Also, why was Richardson's Clarissa removed from the praise? The journal does praise it. :) Ottava Rima ( talk) 17:59, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
References
The Covent-Garden Journal is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so. | ||||||||||
This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on January 6, 2013. | ||||||||||
| ||||||||||
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the "
Did you know?" column on
April 15, 2009. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that, in the first issue of
The Covent-Garden Journal,
Henry Fielding declared literary war on the "armies of
Grub Street" and thereby triggered the
Paper War of 1752-1753? |
This article is rated FA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
{{WikiProjectBannerShell|1=
The more I read of Claude Rawson on Fielding, the less I like. He wants to say that people responding to Fielding's defense of Amelia prevented HF from writing another novel? Is he aware that HF only had 3 more years to live, that he was in horrible health? Has he read Battestin's biography? Battestin has a very different view. Painting Fielding as a blushing flower (when he had been in a huge battle with Samuel Foote at the same time) is peculiar. Utgard Loki ( talk) 14:20, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
The spelling ("humor" and not "humour") is per Battestin and Battestin p. 492. I haven't found the quote in any other source. Ottava Rima ( talk) 17:29, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
30 James Harris (1709-1780) - "Harris and Fielding were close for the rest of Fielding's life. He contributed to Fielding's Covent-Garden Journal and True Patriot [...]"
45 "The years between 1750 and his voyage to Lisbon in June 1754 were full. Despite increasing problems of health, Fielding was intensely busy with the magistracy; a business venture with his half-brother John [...] the publication of The Covent-Garden Journal, a twice-weekly paper which, although intended to solicit customers for the brokerage business, took on a life of its own; the completion of his last novel, Amelia; and other matters."
189 Discussion on the Universal Register Office - "a commercial go-between by listing, for a fee, buyers and sellers, servants in need of work and prospective employers, tutors and pupils, and numerous others in need of information that would enable business transactions." By-product of it was the Journal - "a periodical that had a run of 72 issues from 4 January until 25 November 1752, being published on Tuesdays and Saturdays until 4 July, and from that time on Saturday only until the end of the run." - used to advertise the Universal Register Office. Allowed Fielding "to speak in a moral voice on social and moral issues [...] The voice is typically witty and learned, and though it generally steers clear of politics, is highly topical, 'strikingly rooted in the everyday life of mid-century London and unusually reflective of the most circumstantial details of the contemporary scene'." (internal quote from pp. xxxii-xxxiii B. A. Goldgar (ed.) The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register Office. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1988)
189-190 1/4 of the issues "include a section entitled 'Proceedings at the Court of Censorial Enquiry' - Fielding uses this in his 9th issue to defend Amelia and "promises to write no more novels" (189). The section and events are "comically treated" (190).
190 The journal "registers the deep sense of something profoundly wrong with the taste of the age, which for Fielding signified that something was profoundly wrong with the morality of the age, with its faulted perception of the human condition, and its wasteful use of life. Despite its Scriblerian manner - its irony and humour - the Journal, like his late work generally, reveals Fielding's deep concern with the ways of the world."
Will add more from other sources soon. Ottava Rima ( talk) 18:00, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
215-215 "His works are full of examples of characters making euphemistic use of such terms to convert them from moral absolutes to social conveniences. In his Covent Garden Journal he provided a "Modern Glossary" of the new meanings that such words had acquired in fashionable society: 'honour' = duelling; 'learning' = pedantry; 'a patriot' = 'a candidate for a place at court,' and 'politics' = 'the art of getting such a place,' 'worth' amounts to no more than 'power, rank, wealth,' and 'wisdom,' correspondingly, 'the art of acquiring all three.' The irony here follows the Scriblerian axioms of The Art of Sinking in Poetry, which it is stated that 'every man is honourable, who is so by law, custom or title.' In other words, members of the House of Commons [...] are most honourable."
25 "Henry Fielding, for example, in The Covent-Garden Journal, mocks the attempts of the fashionable 'to preserve their circle safe and inviolate ... against any intrusion of those who they are pleased to call the vulgar.' He suggests that they are obliged to continue to favor the hoop petticoat because it has been 'found impossible ... to slide with it behind a counter.' But the point of his satire is to emphasize the permeability of distinctions of station within the middle classes, and between them and a nobility distinguished by no more than the absurdities of fashionable excess."
43 "In the Covent-Garden Journal he also gave English renditions of virtually all the mottoes and frequently translated the lengthy anecdotes from historians that he used in his periodicals. Merely by their number, these translations suggest that Fielding was actively involved in making classical authors available to English audiences, thus demonstrating his skill in ancient languages, his reading in classics, and his efforts to be numbered among the more learned of his fellow authors."
"he variously classifies his English translations of the mottoes in the Covent-Garden Journal as 'paraphrases' or 'modernizations.' For example, Tom Telltruth quotes a passage from Horace, which, he tells Drawncansir, he will render in English 'after your paraphrastical Manner.' These 'paraphrases' reveal how well Fielding understood his originals, because they require a more thorough understanding of the author's essential meaning than is necessitated by a more literal translation."
45 "While discussing the origins of slander, he says, 'This is that malignant Temper which Horace attributes to the Vulgar, when he says he despises them (Covent-Garden Journal, no. 14 [18 February 1752]: 101). In no. 33 he renders the phrase 'I hate profane Rascals,' in introducing a description of a young tradesman in the country who acts like a buffoon. Finally, in n. 49 the phrase, now become 'I hate the Mob,' leads off an essay on the power of crowds in London. In each instance Fielding has changed the emphasis to suit his purpose but has remained partly faithful to the Latin original, thereby demonstrating that he knew his Latin well enough to exploit it skillfully."
47 "'The Covent-Garden Journal casts the widest net of the group but still insists on its own structural integrity, repeatedly allowing the personal of 'Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great Britain' to demonstrate the breadth of his interest as well as the force of his wit. More aggressively than he had done in his earlier periodicals, Fielding here makes wit (or liveliness, or urbanity) a distinguishing, thus unfifying, aspect of the publication. He declares his hostility to 'dullness' - wit-pummeling miscellaneousness as well as dry-as-dust pendantry?- in the inagural number. 'I do promise, as far as in me lies,' he writes, 'to avoid with the utmost Care all Kind of Encroachment on that spacious Fielding, in which my ... Contemporaries have such large and undoubted Possessions; and which, from Time immemorial, hath been called the Land of DULLNESS.' Fielding doesn't catalog the inhabitants of 'the Land of DULLNESS,' but it would not be strange to find Philo-Naturae and his caterpillars among them."
I got the Kensington Press reprint (no apparatus, just PD reprints) and have been typing it into WikiSource. Issue #1 is up now: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Covent-Garden_Journal
Utgard Loki ( talk) 13:43, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
It's important, I think, especially in light of the above, to see how consciously Fielding is echoing Pope's Dunciad and calling to mind Swift's Tale (the Mountebank at Leicester Fields) with what has to be only the second or third usage of "lucubrations" in the century. It's a very Scriblerian performance, and it's superbly rhetorical rather than specifically political. I'm not sure how the critics above read specific barbs into it except by having fevers. Utgard Loki ( talk) 13:56, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
Anyone know how to do interwiki links smoothly? For example, over at WikiSource, I've done #6. Well, in #6, he mentions a very, very little discussed individual, Anne Dodd. Wikipedia has an article on her (I checked) that says she's mentioned in CGJ #6. Wouldn't it be groovy to have a link, in the Wikipedia article, to the WikiSource issue where she's mentioned, but only if it doesn't mean doing one of those [ big long web address here ] things. Utgard Loki ( talk) 13:36, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
About a month ago Anonymous Dissident asked me to find an image of the journal. I have (finally) uploaded it here. Use as you will. Awadewit ( talk) 01:02, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
Proposal section (cutting "Content" at "For instanc" and inserting this as the above title):
The journal ran multiple reviews and advertised many works. Among these is an advertisement and a favourable review of The Female Quixote, a novel by Fielding's friend Charlotte Lennox. He also promoted his friend Charles Macklin's two-act comic play The Covent Garden Theatre, or Paquin Turn'd Drawcansir, a work based on Fielding. The journal was devoted to promoting Fielding's views on morality through wit, and Fielding made his opinion known on many works, including an attack on the works of Rabelais and Aristophanes while praising Jonathan Swift, Cervantes, and Lucian as a "great Triumvirate". He viewed himself as the censor of public taste and sought to attack "Dullness", which resulted in a paper war started between various writers. Of other works that he praised and promoted including paintings by Hogarth, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, poetry by Edward Young, and others. In theatre, Fielding promoted plays involving the actors David Garrick, James Lacy, and others. [1]
Within the journal, Fielding would sometimes criticize political figures while avoiding politics. In the 7 March 1752 issue, Fielding recalled an incident that occurred back on 20 April 1731 where he witnessed the last showing of The Highland-Fair, a comical opera created by Joseph Mitchell. To Fielding, Mitchell was a fawning follower of Walpole and writer in support of the British government, and his opera: [2] "intended to display the comical Humours of the Highlanders; the Audience, who had for three Nights together sat staring at each other, scarce knowing what to make of their Entertainment, on the fourth joined in an unanimous exploding Laugh. This they had continued through an Act, whent he Author, who unhappily mistook the Peels of Laughter which he heard for Applause, went up to Mr. Wils, and, with an Air of Triumph, said — Deel o' my Sal, Sare, they begin to tauk the Humour at last". [3]
Fielding also used the criticism in the journal for personal reasons. In the ninth number of The Journal for 25 January 1752, Fielding used a section entitled "Proceedings at the Court of Censorial Enquiry" to respond criticism lodged against his novel Amelia. The article is used to place the critics on trial and Fielding argued against complaints about the novel being too moral, a lack of spirit within Amelia's character, and Amelia's lack of a nose, along with some other complaints. [4] The character Counsellor Town, summed up the criticism as: "the whole Book is a Heap of sad Stuff, Dulness, and Nonsense; that it contains no Wit, Humour, Knowledge of human Nature, or of the World; indeed, that the Fable, moral Character, Manners, Sentiments, and Diction, are all alike bad and contemptible." [5]
The trial continued until the next issue, 28 January 1752, with Fielding's defense of the work. [6] "If you, Mr. Censor, are yourself a Parent, you will view me with Compassion when I declare I am the Father of this poor Girl the Prisoner at the Bar; nay, when I go father, and avow, that of all my Offspring she is my favourite Child. I can truly say that I bestowed a more than ordinary Pains in her Education [...] I do not think my Child is entirely free from Faults. I know nothing human that is so; but surely she doth not deserve the Rancour with which she hath been treated by the Public." [7] Eventually, he promised "to write no more novels". [8] Fielding biographer Harold Pagliaro claims that sections such as these are to be "comically treated". [9] However, Amelia was his last novel. [10]
AD - The quote could stand by removing the first section and stating that Fielding claimed the work as his child. Then, this could be followed with the quote minus the "If you, Mr. Censor, are yourself a Parent, you will view me with Compassion when I declare I am the Father of this poor Girl the Prisoner at the Bar". Also, why was Richardson's Clarissa removed from the praise? The journal does praise it. :) Ottava Rima ( talk) 17:59, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
References