Henry Fielding: Lisbon, narrative forms, truth and death...

The legacy of the Eighteenth Century is a treasure-trove for casual readers and scholars of English Literature alike. There is, pretty much, something for everyone to be found there (except maybe Cyberpunk - sorry!) - and usually in some new, raw, ground-breaking form.

Genres were ill-defined back then – but then genres are a modern day creation, a system of ordering that we use ourselves and try to map on to older artistic works and ways of thinking. Authors commonly read today, like Daniel Defoe or Henry Fielding for example, would try their hand at many literary forms and cover wide-ranging subjects. This was the golden age of the political periodical, the satirical essay, and also the fledgling travel narrative.

Anyone interested in the early development of the travel or voyage narrative should check out the recent Oxford World’s Classics and Norton Critical editions of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, which cover this area fully. By the middle of the Eighteenth Century the genre had settled down somewhat from the tall tales of Captain Dampier and the like into a more earnest and respectable form where authors would endeavour to pass on genuine experiences, educated commentary and useful advice about foreign climes to their grateful readers. Unlikely adventures were still a possibility from time to time though!

One piece that stands out from this period is Henry Fielding’s posthumously published Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755). In some ways it straddles the Eighteenth Century travel narrative discourses, being partly an exaggerated tale with some larger-than-life characters but also containing a hefty dose of reality and a bucketload of pathos, courtesy of the suffering of the author in his final illness. It doesn't quite do what it says on the tin; more correctly it should be called The Journal of a Few Weeks Hanging Around at Anchor in the Thames Estuary and Then Just Off the Coast of Devon. But we must be thankful for all this delay, since once the wind picks up the journey to Lisbon is pretty short and Fielding finds little of interest to add to his journal - which then draws to a sudden close when they arrive at port.

I’ve not yet read Martin C. Battestin's authoritative Wesleyan Edition of the work, but Tom Keymer’s 1996 Penguin Classics edition is superb and it's a shame that it has been long out of print (as has the slightly limp 1997 Oxford Classics edition which pairs the Journal with A Journey From This World To The Next from Fielding's 1743 Miscellanies Vol. 2).
Keymer creates an excellent biographical and contextualising framework within which to best present the text, with in-depth explanatory notes and enlightening appendices, complimented by a confident and scholarly (yet still accessible) introductory essay. It's not surprising that this essay was reprinted in Albert J Rivero's 1998 selection Critical Essays on Henry Fielding (New York, G.K. Hall & Co.) as it stands up as a work indebted to, but independant from, the Journal text itself.

Fielding is an incorrigible humorist and loves to create monstrous characters as we know: Joseph Andrews (1741) and Tom Jones (1749) are littered with grotesque landladies and inn keepers. Keymer's editorial framework allows the reader (should they choose to use it) to see the comic exaggerations for what they are, but also the pain and discomfort, the personal embarrassment Fielding was at while he was creating these final moments of glory for posterity. For me this optional deconstruction of the text makes the experience of reading it all the more moving.

It’s one of the shortest prose works in the Fielding canon, and being an admirer I have read much of his work several times over. Yet this final piece is undoubtedly my favourite. It's brief, strong, brutally funny at times and equally moving at others. There's an underlying truth to the writing, and as a posthumous work you can't escape the tragedy of knowing how soon Fielding died after arriving at Lisbon and how unhappy he was there. But there's also the comedy with which he laces the journal entries cataloging the interminable delays and the bartering over costs with his landlady who's clearly out to milk him for every penny he's got as a person of 'quality'. It certainly feels like the closest we get to Fielding writing as himself, and not the character he created for himself in Tom Jones. There’s an honesty about it, despite the artifice; a humanity and a vulnerability – whereas Fielding the narrator is never anything other than rampant and omnipotent in his novels.

I’ve not read another work like it, in all truth. As a parting gesture from a talented writer it’s a gorgeous piece to have. Being only 49 when he died this book might be seen as evidence of a wasted talent, passing on too young. I’ve never felt that particularly. Fielding left a sizeable and varied literary legacy of plays, periodicals, essays, novels and miscellaneous pieces (if precious little personal correspondence, alas). The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon doesn’t necessarily make me wish he’d written more, or that he’d lived longer to write more, but it makes me value what he did write – bittersweet though the ending may be.