Women, Money and Debt in the 18th
Century Novel, Part 4:
Amelia, Section 1
Looking at the
prevailing obsession with money, the getting and managing of it (and what
happens when you can’t pay your debts), in eighteenth century English
literature – with specific reference to female heroines in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724); Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751), and Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782).
We left Roxana for good last time – she had made a good deal
of money, and had lost even more. She
ended, as so many novels of the time, broke, shamed and virtually friendless – a
female casualty of trying to make it in a man’s world before those
opportunities were available, and before it was considered morally acceptable
for a woman to be ‘of business’. Like so
many pioneers, amoral and visionary in some respects, Roxana burned out.
But what happens when we examine a character that did all the right things, and only once breaks out of the confines of her strictly delineated role? Who is the perfect wife? What happens to the perfect wife when she has a (basically) loser husband? How can she hold everything together, financially, when he can’t and yet the world pays little attention to her? Let’s see how this was dealt with, back in the 1800s. It will tell us so much about the times: as all fiction does – it tells not only its direct story, but the implications, the connotations; the mores of society, its author…
But what happens when we examine a character that did all the right things, and only once breaks out of the confines of her strictly delineated role? Who is the perfect wife? What happens to the perfect wife when she has a (basically) loser husband? How can she hold everything together, financially, when he can’t and yet the world pays little attention to her? Let’s see how this was dealt with, back in the 1800s. It will tell us so much about the times: as all fiction does – it tells not only its direct story, but the implications, the connotations; the mores of society, its author…
***
And just in case you’re a trifle lost – here are the earlier
posts in this series:
=> that’s the Introduction and Abstract to this mammoth
undertaking!
=> that’s Roxana, Part 1…in a galaxy far far…etc…
=> that’s the last part of Roxana’s story and it’s
analysis.
Welcome to Amelia – the last novel written by
Henry Fielding (famous for Tom Jones), and published December 1751.
It’s part of what was referred to at the time as ‘domestic’ novels.
To cut along plot short – Amelia, a good and quiet girl, runs off with a
soldier to London after a blisteringly romantic attachment and marriage, where
he is then wrongly imprisoned.
Disaster. She is tempted on all
sides by offers of help from unscrupulous people, mainly men, and resists them;
meanwhile her husband is seduced by another woman in prison. Their difficulties worsen and worsen, in the
way of these novels, until Amelia saves the day by inheriting some money from
her mother – she pays off the debt her husband was imprisoned for, and they
make a run for it back to the respectable country, from the wicked and
dissolute city. The End. It’s a real eye opener to the attitudes of
the times.
***
Issues of independence, fear of dependency and a desire for
personal freedom are the themes of Roxana;
whereas in contrast, the results of dependence and a lack of personal freedom
are the basis of Amelia. Barbara
Benedict believes the main theme of Amelia, is to explore “kinds of freedom and
limitation”[1].
Amelia Booth is the wife of a soldier on half pay, whose troubled married life
is the subject of the novel. Andrew
Wright notes that for Fielding it was a bold stroke to begin Amelia where most
eighteenth-century books with a female heroine end: marriage[2].
However, Amelia’s marital problems are not love entanglements; Amelia is not a romance. Her problems
centre around the moral character of her husband, whose confusion over how to
live his life after his army position ends cause her and her children ever more
distress. Eventually, they are thrown
almost into beggary. Billy Booth is not
a bad person at all, but has a “blind spot where his financial common sense
should be”[3].
My aim in this part of the Women and Debt essay, is to look at the couple when they reach London, exploring Fielding’s presentation of London as a place of both financial corruption and moral danger. The debtor’s prison will be briefly examined, to highlight Fielding’s attitude to the financial and moral venality inherent in the practice of debt laws. I will explore the issue of Amelia as contained within the private sphere, and how this results in her financial dependency and lack of personal freedom. I will explain how she resets her own ‘value’ at a pivotal point in the novel, and how her husband finding his way out of the moral maze (and into contemporary approved Christian thinking) sets the stage for Fielding to allow Providence to save them from destitution near the end[4].
My aim in this part of the Women and Debt essay, is to look at the couple when they reach London, exploring Fielding’s presentation of London as a place of both financial corruption and moral danger. The debtor’s prison will be briefly examined, to highlight Fielding’s attitude to the financial and moral venality inherent in the practice of debt laws. I will explore the issue of Amelia as contained within the private sphere, and how this results in her financial dependency and lack of personal freedom. I will explain how she resets her own ‘value’ at a pivotal point in the novel, and how her husband finding his way out of the moral maze (and into contemporary approved Christian thinking) sets the stage for Fielding to allow Providence to save them from destitution near the end[4].
London 1750
At the start of their marriage, the Booths live comfortably
in the countryside. This, for Fielding,
is shorthand for his location of all things pleasant, traditional, trustworthy
and honest. It is where “all
eighteenth-century couples of Christian values and right-thinking should wish
to be”[5]. Almost immediately, the family are beset by
problems, centring around Booth’s inability to support his family. Despite his genuine worth as a soldier, he
cannot progress further without the purchase of a commission. Meanwhile, Amelia is swindled by her sister
out of the small family inheritance that could have maintained the family’s
financial stability. Booth, who is
deeply in love with Amelia throughout the book (despite his failings), is for
the first time seriously troubled about money, explaining later whilst in
debtor’s prison:
This was the first time I had
ever felt that distress which arises from the want of money; a distress very
dreadful indeed in a married state: for what can be more miserable than to see
anything necessary to the preservation of a beloved creature, and not be able
to supply it?[6]
Dr Harrison’s efforts to set them up in the country fail
when Booth succumbs to social pretensions and poses as a gentleman when he is a
farmer. Debt and social ostracism
follow, and the Booths are forced to flee to London to escape debts they cannot
pay[7]. Here, Booth is beset by failure after
failure, as he attempts by one means or other to extricate himself from debt
and regain a livelihood – with an increase in debt as the usual result of these
schemes. He is hoodwinked repeatedly by
those in power, who are more interested in the pursuit of Amelia than in aiding
Booth in any real way. Muriel Brittain Williams
observes: “the way of advancement is always open at the price of Amelia’s
honour. Thus, the financial problems of
the Booths merge with their moral problems”[8].
A typical image of London as dangerous, popularised by the King of This Sort of Thing: Hogarth. Here, a 1732 drawing of a harlot dying of venereal disease in an enclosed and overcrowded living space...
In the dangerous London painted by Fielding, extremes of
poverty and wealth abound, with social mobility possible but unstable in its
results due to economic fluctuation.
Fielding’s London is a very volatile environment. W. Austin Flanders suggests that the sort of
moral isolation faced by Booth in London life is a problem often dealt with in
eighteenth-century thought: “the city [is] the distillery of all the
corruptions of economic individualism”.
That is, over the age, many writers touch on the twin issues of the
growth of mercantile economics and the concomitant depersonalization of humans
before market forces[9]. The closeness to what James Thompson terms “the
cash nexus”, causes Amelia’s London characters
to have a grasping quality, where the mercenary connotations of a legal
contract bleed into all aspects of people’s relationships, leaving them “stripped
of obligation and become simple items of possession, negotiation or bribe”[10]. The prison scenes in particular, show
Fielding as reacting against the so-called ‘freedom’ of the market, where obligation
and corruption seem a necessity, and justice and freedom have to be bought.
John Richetti believes that the prison scenes, especially
those so close to the start of the book perform the function of “providing an […]
initial tone of confusion and contradiction, of aimless disaster and
hopelessness that is never fully dissipated in the rest of the book”[11]. Indeed, the early chapters are dominated by
the procession of iniquity that is the sentencing of Justice Thrasher’s court,
where plaintiffs are judged on appearance and race. Thus, barely allowing one man to speak,
Thrasher interrupts: “ ‘Sirrah, your tongue betrays your guilt. You are an Irishman, and that is always
sufficient evidence with me.’” (p.17). Fielding satirises Thrasher thus:
The magistrate had too great an
honour for truth to suspect that she ever appeared in sordid apparel; nor did
he ever sully his sublime notions of that virtue, by uniting them with the mean
ideas of poverty and distress. (p.19)
There are many examples of Thrasher’s prejudicial
judgements: perhaps the most notable being a maid on an errand for her mistress
to fetch a midwife for a birthing, judged a streetwalker (p.17). Booth himself is sentenced unfairly for his
part in trying to prevent a mugging, and duly finds himself in jail. There, unable to pay his way by means of
garnish and ‘civility’ money, he discovers the hierarchy of forms of
imprisonment: the poorer inmates have a much lower standard of life in terms of
food, space, clothing and accoutrements.
One man languishes in jail although his sentence has been long quashed:
he cannot afford to pay his legal fees (p.26).
Small financial crimes of necessity are punished harshly with excessive prison
sentences: for example, a daughter is incarcerated for stealing a loaf of bread
for her starving father; he is imprisoned with her, “for receiving it knowing
it to be stolen” (p.25). In prison, everything is clear, if bleak: a debt is to
be paid, by whatever means possible; not having the wherewithal is not the problem
of those working within the system, as Booth finds out in a later prison
experience, dealing with the bail bondsman, Bondum. Bondum has a pure economics market view of
debt (which Defoe would back as logical).
He expounds to Booth, when Booth explains he simply cannot pay the money
he owes:
To be sure men must be obliged to
pay for their debts, or else there would be an end of everything. […] Would not it be the hardest thing in the
world if a man could not arrest another man for a just and lawful debt? Is not liberty the constitution of England? (p.318)
Money is seen as the essence of a person: Bondum, by his
reasoning, is in this sense morally superior to Booth. He argues that to be debt free is to be a
more worthwhile person:
Newgate, to be sure, is the place
for all the debtors that can’t find bail. […]
I owe nobody a shilling. I am no beggar,
nor debtor. I am the King’s
Officer. As well as you, and I will
spend guinea for guinea, as long as you please. (p.357).
Rioters set fire to Newgate during the Gordon Riots of 1780
John Zomchick postulates that Bondum is: “part of a structure that legitimizes particular passions [in this case, the acquisition and possession of material goods] by bringing them into accord with the law”[12].
It is in prison that Booth meets an acquaintance, Miss
Mathews, whom he has not seen for many years.
She is a character with the moral scruples of Roxana; and her function in
the book is unclear: she does, however, show the reader that Booth has trouble
resisting temptation, and needs a moral guide to be with him constantly. She is also quite wealthy through her
liaisons and acting career, implicitly suggesting, by her presence, that it is
much easier to advance, or even to merely subsist, in the economic world, if
one is prepared to be pragmatic and amoral.
She pays his way in the prison for much of his stay. Booth has a spontaneous and ill-advised
affair with her, whilst they are in prison; he spends a portion of the rest of
the novel trying to break it off with her.
Ms Mathews is an interesting character, for in many ways she
is the dark double of Amelia, being anything but the adoring wife: instead she
moves from liaison to liaison, her emotions ebbing and flowing according to how
they suit her material needs and monetary whims. Richard J.Dircks feels her a
worthy foil to Amelia’s goodness, describing her as “a sprightly opportunist, […]
an attractive personality possessed of shifting standards of virtue”[13]. Wright goes one farther, describing her
aptly, as “a kind of waif: a Defoe character in a Fielding world”[14]. Richetti sees Amelia as about betrayal and adultery, for sexual favours and
power. Booth’s infidelity with Ms
Mathews is an unusual case in its spontaneity, and in his remorse afterwards,
as most of the other couples (and singles) in the book “are bent without shame
or scruple upon conspiracy and betrayal to serve their own pleasure” – and monetary
interest[15].
***
That’s where we’ll leave it today – a grim picture of life
in prison for Booth. Next instalment, we’ll
see what temptations and troubles befall Amelia outside of prison, and how she
reacts.
[1]
Barbara M. Benedict, Framing Feeling:
Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745-1800 (New York: AMS
Press, 1994), p.31.
[2]
Andrew Wright, Henry Fielding: Mask and
Feast (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), p.53.
[3]
Judith Frank, Common Ground:
Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor (Califormia:
Stanford University Press, 1997), p.52.
[4]
Twin obsessions of Amelia critics
seem to be: her incredible goodness and patience as a wife; and second, the
incredible mass of incident and incidental characters presented in the book as
a whole: the layering of one unfortunate circumstance after another. It would
be unprofitable to lay too much extra emphasis on ground already so well
covered, so this examination of Amelia will only touch on these two factors
contextually, and on the way to making other points.
[5]
Frank, pp.108-9. See also, ‘Introduction’ to The Rural Idyll, G.E. Mingay (ed.), (London: Routledge, 1989), for
a summary of the eighteenth-century town and country dichotomy.
[6]
Henry Fielding, Amelia (London:
Penguin, 1987), p.117. All further
references to this text are given in the main body of the chapter, without
parentheses.
[7]
Craig Muldrew comments that credit had a real transforming impact on
eighteenth-century society, with “no one able to avoid it: the poor as well as
the rich, rural people as well as urban”.
Craig Muldrew, The Economy of
Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England
(London: Macmillan Press, 1998), p.97.
[8]
Muriel Brittain Williams, Marriage:
Fielding’s Mirror of Morality (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1973),
p.101.
[9]
W. Austin Flanders, Structures of
Experience: History, Society and Personal Life in the Eighteenth Century
British Novel (Colombia, S. Carolina: University of South Carolina Press,
1984), p.277, 292.
[10]
James Thompson, Models of Value:
Eighteenth Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1996), p.1.44.
[11]
John Richetti, The English Novel in
History, 1700-1780 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p.151.
[12]
John P. Zomchick, Family and the Law in
Eighteenth Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.139.
[13]
Richard J. Dirks, Henry Fielding
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), p.116.
[14]
Wright, p110.
[15]
Richetti, p.157.
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