Sarah Fielding described David Simple as a “moral romance.” The episodic novel took a timely approach to the romance genre, moving away from the traditional chivalric tales to a story based on codes of middle-class ideology. Modern critics note that Fielding moved away from the Augustan objective approach to romance, which found meaning in political, social, and legal references. By Fielding’s time, readers desired stories based on sensibility, or emotion and ideals, and thus dependent upon subjective references—personal, spiritual, and emotional. They valued the emotional over the logical.

The change to some extent reflected the conflict between the bourgeois, or landed, class and the novel’s expanding working-class audience. When novels before the 1740s did focus on political ideology, it was one shared by individuals or small groups within the same political faction, that of the upper class. With the rise of the middle class, however, novels began to present political and social struggles between whole social classes. Thus, Fielding’s work took its place among novels of the 1740s that questioned the relationship of the novel to the reading public. With a middle-class set of readers expanding the consumer audience, novels had to undergo changes to satisfy their ideological, as well as intellectual, needs.

The title character’s position as a romantic hero whose most pronounced characteristic is that of sensibility, rather than physical prowess in combat and love, requires a new definition of the term hero. Attempts to define him as a traditional quest hero are undermined by his choice simply to avoid confrontation, rather than to face and conquer challenges. He lacks traits traditionally connected to masculinity, displaying a sensitivity that Augustan audiences would have considered effeminate.

Scene From The Adventures Of David Simple In Search Of A Faithful Friend By Sarah Fielding
Henry Singleton (English, 1766 – 1839)

David Simple is an unremarkable middle-class male cheated from his inheritance by his younger brother, Daniel. He finds Daniel’s actions so offensive that he launches into a quest, not with the traditional reward of wealth or romance in mind, but rather in search of friendship. His subsequent experiences with Mr. Orgueil, Mr. Splatter, and Mr. Varnish all confirm the presence of deceit and hypocrisy in the world. The characters are not meant to be well-rounded, but rather to represent aspects of human nature to which David may react. No two characters are alike in their actions, nor is any one completely bad. However, each is revealed as a hypocrite, disloyal and unfaithful, and thus incapable of friendship. For example, Mr. Splatter performs good deeds but also spreads evil gossip about others.

David’s quest is rewarded when he meets three other characters also cheated and mistreated by friends and family. They include Cynthia, swindled out of her father’s fortune, and a sister-brother pair, Valentine and Camilla, whose stepmother has alienated their father’s affections from them, partly by suggesting the two engage in incest. United by their like suffering and innocence, the friends form a happy community, with David eventually marrying Camilla, and Cynthia marrying Valentine. David regains his fortune and shares it with his friends. Valentine and Camilla also regain their relationship with their father. Fielding resists a happily-ever-after denouement, however: The plot concludes with David’s meeting late in his journey the one purely evil character of the novel, the Atheist.

David is surprised to discover that the Atheist is actually his estranged brother, Daniel, who followed his shabby treatment of his brother with a brief but vice-filled life, stealing money from everyone he meets and corrupting their morals. Ironically, Daniel better represents the traditional active masculine hero than does David. However, masculinity does not equal heroism in Fielding’s novel. Instead, Daniel fulfills his role in a cautionary tale by demonstrating the spiritual, mental, and physical destruction and debasement that awaits those who attempt to gain through the loss of others. Although still young, he dies the death of a decrepit old man, ravaged by alcoholism. As strong as David’s goodness may be, it cannot rescue another human who resists the call to benevolence and generosity.

While David finds a seeming solution to his isolation, the novel’s plot achieves no resolution. Instead of creating strategies to deal with the dilemma of human duplicity and treachery, David simply turns away from it to construct his own world, with the help of his friends. However, in the sequel, called the second volume, to the novel, Volume the Last (1753), Fielding sets a fatalistic tone as David’s carefully constructed supportive world unravels over time, due to age, death, and financial setbacks.

Some New Historicist critics have examined the novel in light of Fielding’s own troubled youth in which her family circumstances produced multiple examples of personal betrayal, echoed as a theme in David Simple. The novelist Henry Fielding, the author’s older brother, wrote in the 1782 edition of his sister’s novel that he tried to correct “some grammatical and other” mistakes in the first edition. He defends his earlier lack of involvement in his sister’s work by his “absence from town” during its production. The errors are “small,” and of such a nature that “no man of learning would think worth his censure in a romance; nor any gentleman in the writings of a young woman.”

One group of feminist critics argues that the novel’s heroine, Cynthia, represents gender stereotypes from which Fielding herself suffered, including the idea that women lack the imagination and intellect to pursue a traditionally male occupation and are suitable for little more than a sexual object/wife. Within the novel itself, Cynthia labels activities approved for a young lady, such as spending her day preparing her husband’s dinner and her own appearance to please him, as those “a degree above a natural fool.” Her experience on the road, following her dismissal from her father’s house, includes suffering undignified demands from three male fellow travelers, one the Atheist, later identified as Daniel Simple. All ask her for sexual favors, emphasizing the traditional fictional characterization of foolish, vulnerable women. Other feminist critics evaluate Cynthia and Camilla as a rare set of double heroines, each possessing recognizable faults but representing positive characters. Camilla could, like Cynthia, be seen as a victim, beaten by her father and turned out of her house. Yet she also takes charge of her life and goes in search of happiness with her brother. Because David presents such a passive hero, what little action the females can take in their patriarchal surroundings are magnified, making them appear to be the more active figures. When Cynthia laughs in the face of a suitor, responding to his marriage proposal by declaring she will not spend a life serving him, her move proves unwise, and yet the female readers who made Fielding’s novel so popular appreciated Cynthia’s unconventional behavior. Feminist critics also point out that David’s steadfast devotion to the fulfillment of duty through the practice of generosity, service, and benevolence, pursuits generally seen as feminine, marginalize him in the way that society marginalized women.

Samuel Richardson praised Fielding’s novel, as did the critic Arthur Murphy. Her book also pleased Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an arts-patron cousin of Fielding renowned for her epistles from Turkey and her promotion of smallpox vaccination in England. A July 1757 comment in The Monthly Review said, “It was superfluous to compliment the author of David Simple upon her merits as a writer.” Although Sarah Fielding’s works never received the attention that her brother’s work did in the centuries just following their publication, 20th-century feminist criticism and a resurgence of interest in early women writers brought her novels and correspondence long-deserved attention from a scholarly readership. The original text of David Simple was reproduced for the first time in 1998 by Blackwell North America, Inc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Battestin, Martin C., and Clive T. Probyn, eds. The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Bree, Linda. Sarah Fielding. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.
Gautier, Gary. “Henry and Sarah Fielding on Romance and Sensibility.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 31.2 (Spring 98): 195–215.
Spender, Dale. Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen. New York: Pandora, 1986.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 18th-century literature, 18th-century novels, Augustan era, David Simple, David Simple characters, early women writers, emotional vs intellectual appeal in literature, emotional vs logical literature, English romantic novels., female novelists of the 18th century, feminist criticism, Feminist literary criticism, feminist perspectives, Fielding’s influence, gender stereotypes, Henry Fielding, Historical Fiction, Literary Criticism, literary heroes, literary history, literature of sensibility, middle-class ideology, moral romance, Novel Analysis, romantic hero, romantic literature evolution, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, sensibility in literature, social class in literature, social struggles in literature, The adventures of David Simple, traditional quest hero