The Works of Henry Fielding, Volume 11

The Works of Henry Fielding, Volume 11 is one volume of a multi volume collected edition of the writings of Henry Fielding. Various such collected editions appeared in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries to gather together the substantial body of writing Fielding produced across his roughly thirty year literary career.

Volume 11 in a typical collected edition contains some of the later or more miscellaneous material from Fielding’s career. The exact contents vary by edition, but the eleventh volume might include some of the political and legal pamphlets from Fielding’s magistrate years, selections from his journalism in The Champion and The Covent Garden Journal, the Voyage to Lisbon written in the months before his death, or various of the shorter miscellaneous pieces that the major novels and plays sometimes overshadow.

The Voyage to Lisbon is in many ways the most moving piece of writing Fielding produced. It was written in 1754, during the few months of his life remaining after a long illness had made it clear that his health would not allow him to continue working in London. He travelled to Lisbon in the hope that the warmer climate would extend his life and wrote during the voyage the daily journal that became the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. The voyage was difficult and Fielding’s health was already too far gone to be helped by the climate change. He died in Lisbon in October 1754. The journal was published posthumously in 1755.

The magistrate’s pamphlets are valuable documents of mid eighteenth century English social policy. Fielding had been deeply involved in the practical administration of justice in his last years and had produced substantial works on the reform of the criminal law, the prevention of robberies, and the provision for the urban poor that his magistrate’s work had shown him at first hand. These pamphlets reflect his developing understanding of the practical problems that the eighteenth century English legal system was failing to address.

The volume runs to several hundred pages in the typical printing and is best read by selecting particular items of interest. For readers who have worked through the major novels and want to see the full range of Fielding’s writing, this kind of collected works volume is essential. It pairs naturally with the other volumes of any collected edition and with the modern critical biographies of Fielding.