Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 19.pdf/490

 HENRY FIELDING AS A LAW REFORMER

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Gin Lane, resulted in the "Act for Restrict The Court of Chancery as drawn by him ing the sale of Spirituous Liquors" being in Bleak House might bear a fair passed in 175 1. So it may fairly be said resemblance to that court as it existed at that Fielding discharged his public duties the beginning of the nineteenth century; with credit to himself and with correspond but it simply travesties the conduct of ing benefit to the interests of law reform business there after the Act 53 Geo. Ill, and the efficient administration of justice. c. 24 — and Bleak House was published But it was reserved for his last essay in 1852-3. Then, when we turn to Little in fiction, Amelia, to embody his greatest Dorrit, although the author admits in his brief for the betterment of the legal order preface that the Marshalsea prison had existing in his day and generation. That been demolished long before his fine creation the book does not contain the intellectual of the " Father of the Marshalsea," yet the nine hundred and odd pages in the book affluence, the pure literary art and fasci nation of Tom Jones is undoubtedly true; are vibrant with indignation against an but that there is much of the atmosphere apparently existing vile and unreformed of the earlier work about it, that there prison system. Dickens' Fleet and his are occasions when the author (to use Marshalsea belong to the eighteenth cen George Eliot's observation upon the earlier tury, and not to the Victorian era. Not so work) "seems to bring his arm-chair to with Fielding, however. He flogs no dead the proscenium and chat with us in all horse of reformed public order. The New the lusty ease of his fine English" is equally gate that he describes in Amelia, with all true. Professor Cross has very well said: its hideous atmosphere, is the prison that "It is not precisely the Fielding who wrote a royal commission must have reported Tom Jones that is speaking; it is Fielding, had one been authorized to investigate it the Bow Street Justice, who had delivered at the time. The author's purpose is best an impressive charge to the Westminster explained by himself in the Dedication: Grand Jury. The younger Fielding had "The following book is sincerely designed seen one side of vice, its gayety and its to promote the cause of virtue, and to flaunts; he now sees the other side, the expose some of the most glaring evils, as lo thsomeness and its enervation. As in well public and private, which at present Tom Jones, he brings before the imagination infest the country." the masquerade, with its glaring lights and its rich and fantastic costumes, but Before we are introduced to the manners for a new purpose — to place his finger on and methods prevailing in this institution for the suppression of crime and indigent debtors, the libertinage beneath." It has been said that each one of Dickens' we are enlightened as to the character and novels after Pickwick is a lawyer's brief attainments of some of the author's judicial for the downtrodden and the oppressed; brethren as disclosed in the person of Mr. and, indeed, there is a good deal of the Thrasher, J. P. After very properly same sort of thing in Pickwick if we recall observing that the office of justice of the the death of the "Chancery Prisoner" peace requires some knowledge of the law, and other happenings in the Fleet, recorded and that this knowledge cannot be gained in the second volume. But as we have except by reading, the author says: "Yet before intimated, while Dickens' satires certain it is, that Mr. Thrasher never read seem to deal with contemporary conditions one syllable of the matter. This, perhaps, of society, with the exception of Oliver was a defect; but this was not all. ... If he was ignorant of the laws of England, Twist, they for the most part depict con ditions which had largely passed away. he was yet well versed in the laws of nature.