The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding

Claude Rawson, a distinguished scholar and critic of eighteenth century literature, edits a collection of 12 essays on Henry Fielding (1707‐1754). As Rawson points out in a very brief four paragraph Introduction (pp. 1‐2), “this Companion … appears in his tercentenary year”. Rawson reminds his readers that George Bernard Shaw considered Fielding “the ‘greatest practicing dramatist … between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century’ apart from Shakespeare”. Moreover Rawson writes that Fielding “is also one of the great inaugural figures of the history of the novel, admired and imitated by Stendhal, Dickens, Thackeray, and other masters of the particular...