Chapter 6

where, from an epigram in the _Miscellanies_ "written _Extempore_ in the Pump Room," it is clear that Fielding was staying in 1742. But, whenever it was completed, we are inclined to think that it was planned and begun before _Joseph Andrews_ was published, as it is in the highest degree improbable that Fielding, always carefully watching the public taste, would have followed up that fortunate adventure in a new direction by a work so entirely different from it as _Jonathan Wild_.

A second edition of the _Miscellanies_ appeared in the same year as the first, namely in 1743. From this date until the publication of _Tom Jones_ in 1749, Fielding produced no work of signal importance, and his personal history for the next few years is exceedingly obscure. We are inclined to suspect that this must have been the most trying period of his career. His health was shattered, and he had become a martyr to gout, which seriously interfered with the active practice of his profession. Again, "about this time," says Murphy vaguely, after speaking of the _Wedding Day_, he lost his first wife. That she was alive in the winter of 1742-3 is clear, for, in the Preface to the _Miscellanies_, he describes himself as being then laid up, "with a favourite Child dying in one Bed, and my Wife in a Condition very little better, on another, attended with other Circumstances, which served as very proper Decorations to such a Scene,"--by which Mr. Keightley no doubt rightly supposes him to refer to writs and bailiffs. It must also be assumed that Mrs. Fielding was alive when the Preface was written, since, in apologising for an apparent delay in publishing the book, he says the "real Reason" was "the dangerous Illness of one from whom I _draw_ [the italics are ours] all the solid Comfort of my Life." There is another unmistakable reference to her in one of the minor papers in the first volume, viz. that _Of the Remedy of Affliction for the Loss of our Friends_. "I remember the most excellent of Women, and tenderest of Mothers, when, after a painful and dangerous Delivery, she was told she had a Daughter, answering; _Good God! have I produced a Creature who is to undergo what I have suffered!_ Some Years afterwards, I heard the same Woman, on the Death of that very Child, then one of the loveliest Creatures ever seen, comforting herself with reflecting, that _her Child could never know what it was to feel such a Loss as she then lamented_." Were it not for the passages already quoted from the Preface, it might almost be concluded from the tone of the foregoing quotation and the final words of the paper, which refer to our meeting with those we have lost in Heaven, that Mrs. Fielding was already dead. But the use of the word "draw" in the Preface affords distinct evidence to the contrary. It is therefore most probable that she died in the latter part of 1743, having been long in a declining state of health. For a time her husband was inconsolable. "The fortitude of mind," says Murphy, "with which he met all the other calamities of life, deserted him on this most trying occasion." His grief was so vehement "that his friends began to think him in danger of losing his reason."

That Fielding had depicted his first wife in Sophia Western has already been pointed out, and we have the authority of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Richardson for saying that she was afterwards reproduced in _Amelia_. "Amelia," says the latter, in a letter to Mrs. Donnellan, "even to her _noselessness_, is again his first wife." Some of her traits, too, are to be detected in the Mrs. Wilson of _Joseph Andrews_. But, beyond these indications, we hear little about her. Almost all that is definitely known is contained in a passage of the admirable _Introductory Anecdotes_ contributed by Lady Louisa Stuart in 1837 to Lord Wharncliffe's edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's _Letters and Works_. This account was based upon the recollections of Lady Bute, Lady Mary's daughter.

"Only those persons (says Lady Stuart) are mentioned here of whom Lady Bute could speak from her own recollection or her mother's report. Both had made her well informed of every particular that concerned her relation Henry Fielding; nor was she a stranger to that beloved first wife whose picture he drew in his Amelia, where, as she said, even the glowing language he knew how to employ did not do more than justice to the amiable qualities of the original, or to her beauty, although this had suffered a little from the accident related in the novel,--a frightful overturn, which destroyed the gristle of her nose. [Footnote: That any one could have remained lovely after such a catastrophe is difficult to believe. But probably Lady Bute (or Lady Stuart) exaggerated its effects; for--to say nothing of the fact that, throughout the novel, Amelia's beauty is continually commended--in the delightfully feminine description which is given of her by Mrs. James in