Cruelty and Laughter by Simon Dickie;

Author:Simon Dickie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Verily I smell a great deal of A——bomination and Prophaness—a Smell of Brimstone offendeth my Nostrils, a Puppet-Show is the Devil’s-House, and I will burn it.86

On this matter, at least, Adams is only slightly less strident—horror of horrors—than Wesley and Whitefield, who were then riding around England fulminating against plays and other diversions. Adams repeats not just the sentiments but the precise idiom of early modern antitheatricality and of Fielding’s enemies at the Grub-Street Journal.

Indeed, by the standards that Fielding himself set forth in his Champion essays, Adams is far from an ideal clergyman. Consider the early series of questions he puts to Joseph: “[H]ow many Books there were in the New Testament? which were they? how many Chapters they contained? and such like” (23). This is standard Sunday school stuff, unimaginative rote learning and nothing to do with the Bible’s moral teachings. Stranger still, Adams’s superstitions are repeatedly emphasized. He twice declares his belief in ghosts and apparitions (192–96). “Sure the Devil must have taken it from me,” he insists on discovering the loss of his half guinea (254). The confusions of the night at Booby Hall could have resulted only from witchcraft. The suggestion that Mrs. Slipslop might be a witch makes its own wink at the reader, but the parson’s superstition is prominently repeated. Only sorcery, he persists, could have put him in bed with Fanny: “He is an infidel who doth not believe in Witchcraft. They as surely exist now as in the Days of Saul. My clothes are bewitched away too, and Fanny’s brought into their place” (332–34).

The other notably superstitious figure in Fielding’s oeuvre is Partridge, who repeatedly talks of ghosts and black magic and trembles in terror at a performance of Hamlet. The pious reading that Adams applauds in the young Joseph includes not just the Bible and The Whole Duty of Man but all the fanciful miracles from Baker’s Chronicle of the Kings of England (1643, etc.)—obvious rubbish about the devil carrying away the chancel in the middle of a sermon or “how a Field of Corn ran away down a Hill with all the Trees upon it” (24). An enormous folio of one thousand pages, Baker’s Chronicle was a byword for foolish superstition in this culture. Fielding would be openly scornful when he discussed the book in the Covent-Garden Journal. (A still clearer illustration of contemporary opinions appears in Coventry’s Pompey the Little, where the dog hero is thrown out by a pious spinster after accidentally shitting on her copy of Baker.)87 Fielding the former deist was obviously scoffing at such credulities, but by the mid-eighteenth century they had become risible to almost anyone who could pay 6s. for the two volumes of Joseph Andrews.

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