Amelia – Volume 1

Amelia, Volume 1 is the first volume of Henry Fielding’s last completed novel, originally published in 1751 in four volumes. The novel was Fielding’s final major work before his death in 1754 and was written during the period when he was also serving as a London magistrate, deeply involved in the practical realities of urban crime, poverty, and legal administration that the novel reflects throughout.

The novel opens with the central character Captain William Booth in a London prison, where he has been wrongly committed by a corrupt magistrate after intervening in a street altercation. The opening scenes establish the tone of the novel through their documentary realism about prison conditions and the casual corruption of the lower London legal system that Fielding knew well from his own work as a justice. Booth meets in prison a woman named Miss Matthews, who turns out to be an old acquaintance from his earlier life, and the two exchange the stories of how each has come to be in their present situation.

The first volume is largely devoted to these mutual histories. Booth recounts his courtship and marriage to Amelia Harris, the daughter of a wealthy widow whose initial opposition to the match was overcome through various complications, including a famous scene in which Amelia’s nose is injured in a coach accident and Booth’s devotion to her despite the disfigurement establishes the character of their relationship. Miss Matthews tells her own less reputable history, which involves the kind of social and moral collapse that Fielding repeatedly anatomized in his novels.

The two histories prepare the ground for the novel’s main action, which begins as Booth eventually secures his release and is reunited with Amelia in London. The various complications that will drive the rest of the novel begin to take shape in the closing chapters of the first volume, with the introduction of several minor characters who will play important roles in the difficulties to come.

The volume runs about two hundred pages and should be read as part of the full four volume novel. For readers approaching Amelia for the first time, this is the necessary starting point. The novel pairs naturally with Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews as the third of Fielding’s major works.