Amelia – Volume 3

Amelia, Volume 3 is the third volume of Henry Fielding’s last completed novel, originally published in 1751 in four volumes. The third volume continues the story of Captain William Booth and his wife Amelia through the increasingly desperate circumstances of their mid eighteenth century London life, and contains some of the most powerful set pieces of the novel.

By the third volume the various complications that have been building across the first two volumes are reaching their crisis. Booth has fallen further into debt, has been arrested for debt and imprisoned in the sponging house, and has been increasingly compromised by the various morally questionable London figures who have surrounded him. Amelia herself faces the practical challenge of trying to support her family and protect her children while her husband’s situation grows worse. The various plots that have been quietly developing in the background, including the schemes of certain wealthy figures who have designs on Amelia herself, begin to come to the surface.

The third volume contains some of the strongest material in the novel. The scenes set in the various London locales that Fielding knew well from his magistrate’s work have the documentary precision that the first two volumes had been building toward, and the moral conflict between Amelia’s quiet virtue and the various forms of corruption that surround her family reaches a particular intensity in these chapters. Fielding’s attack on the conditions of debt imprisonment in mid eighteenth century England is one of the most direct pieces of social criticism in the novel.

The volume also contains some of the most controversial passages in the book. Fielding’s treatment of the various social and legal issues raised by Booth’s situation has been read in very different ways by different readers, with some critics finding the novel deeply moving in its handling of these questions and others finding it overly schematic in its moral framework.

The volume runs about two hundred pages and should be read as part of the full four volume novel. For readers committed to working through Amelia, the third volume is where the novel’s various threads come together most powerfully. It pairs naturally with the other Fielding novels and with the contemporary work of Samuel Richardson on similar moral subjects.