Fielding at the Bar Legal Characters and Legal Questions in His Novels (Up to 1749)

Résumé fourni par la source

Fielding joined the Western Circuit, and naturally expected his acquaintance with the district and his many friendships there to bring him work. Rapid success at the Bar was no more easy to obtain then than now. Among his colleagues on the circuit at that time were his cousin, Henry Gould, a future Judge, and two future Lord Chancellors, Robert Henley, afterwards Lord Northington, and Charles Pratt, afterwards Lord Camden. Even these men spent many years of comparative brieflessness, and Pratt, himself the son of a Lord Chief Justice and a man of outstanding ability and unremitting industry, actually decided to abandon the profession after spending eight or nine years on the circuit. 1 It is therefore not surprising that Fielding was not overloaded with briefs. He himself suggested another reason for the lack of work—at least, it is probable that he was thinking of his own experience when Mr. Wilson describes his troubles in Joseph Andrews . “I had an acquaintance with an attorney, who had formerly transacted affairs for me and to him I applied; but instead of furnishing me with business, he laughed at my undertaking, and told me he was afraid I should turn his deeds into plays, and he should expect to see them on the stage. Not to tire you with instances of this kind from others, I found that Plato himself did not hold poets in greater abhorrence than these men of business do.” 1 Like him, Fielding might have said that he had “scarce sufficient business to keep me from starving, the reputation of being a poet being my bane.” 2 The opinion was, at that time, generally held that, in Wycherley’s words, “Apollo and Littleton seldom meet in the same brain,” and even Blackstone, who entered the Middle Temple in 1741, thought it necessary to signalize his abandonment of literature by publishing The Lawyer’s Farewell to his Muse . 3 It may be noticed also that Fielding did not put his own name to the first edition of Joseph Andrews in 1742.

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