Joseph Andrews was published in February 1742, and, although friends of Richardson, like George Cheyne, declared it ‘a wretched Performance’ which ‘will entertain none but Porters or Watermen’, praise far outweighed criticism.

That spring, however, Fielding could not rejoice. Three weeks after the novel appeared his 5-year-old daughter died in a raging flu epidemic. After a severe winter, his wife was also ill and he himself was beginning to suffer from gout. To augment his legal fees, he made brief forays back to play-writing in collaboration with David Garrick, and translated Plautus with Andrew Young. Neither scheme proved lucrative, but his proposal for a three volume Miscellanies gained an impressive list of subscribers. Published in April 1743, Volume I included uncollected essays and poems such as the love lyrics to ‘Celia’ (Charlotte), and the verse essays ‘Of True Greatness’, ‘Of Good-Nature’ and ‘On Liberty’. Volume II held A Journey from This World to the Next and two unpublished plays, while Volume III contained Jonathan Wild. (The form in which we usually read Jonathan Wild today, however, and the one quoted here, is the 1754 version, as revised by Fielding just before his death.)

Two of the essays in the Miscellanies I are of special interest. ‘On Conversation’ treats the typical Augustan theme of ‘Man as a Social Animal’, in which conversation, in the double sense of talk and acts, binds society together. As a guiding principle, Fielding chooses ‘good-breeding’, the practical expression of the rule ‘Do unto all Men as you would they should do unto you’ (M. 124). Through a series of illustrations he carefully steers the notion of breeding away from class towards the following conclusion: